The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Then they cut it down to one horse and rider; made it like steer wrestling. Ran the man beside the grandstand wall and leapt on him from the horse. The hard thing was to land on target, instead of, when they’d do it with a steer, landing in the right position, heels braced out to plow the sand. One guy who missed Zino wrecked his knee; another struck the wall and was unconscious. And sometimes Zino had a couple of moments to fight them on the ground before the posse broke it up. “Don’t spoil him,” the posse’d tell the cowboy. Zino couldn’t do much, with his breath knocked out; or else the cowboy would have hit the ground and been behind him. He slugged, ran, fell, was hit with those flying tackles off the horses, was bumped by the horses—once got hit with a horse’s head; it tossed its head—socked like a club! His eyes were blind with tears of hatred and with sand. He gasped too hard to cry. The grunts of the horses pounding into turns and stops seemed to come from him. Knocked him down; knocked him down again; he gave up fighting, just tried to dodge and let the cowboys bust themselves against the ground. If, as he’d heard, the crucial qualities in battle were the wind and legs to run, he proved as well as Spike and Airborne that he could run.

  Finally came a contest at roping and hogtieing. The cowboys who were last won because by then the captives simply waited for the rope exhausted. Even so, the cowboys fascinatedly compared their times for roping calves with these for roping people, and tried to rest them up to make it fair. If a cowboy missed two throws the man might run right out the other end of the arena and be free. Didn’t happen, but it gave the roping purpose. And as much as catching the man, the cowboy had to put the loop to bind his arms or else he’d lose out to the stopwatch, busy in a fight before the feet were tied, because no posse would help him now. Spike and Airborne got some good licks in. Zino was too tired. A cowboy hung under a horse’s belly while it galloped and roped Airborne from there. Zino didn’t see. He reeled in circles. Always a goddam horse pulling taut the rope around his chest until the cowboy had him down and tied. Or else a goddamned horse’s nose goosing at his kiester.

  The three of them finished up as crippled as the cowboys, without the broken bones. Lay on their backs. The cowboys looked enormous from the ground, and the horses had tremendous chests and necks and wispy little heads; and tall—they reared and stamped—bodies huge and long like walls. The cowboys’ hats blocked out the sky. Black sideburns spread down their cheeks and there was hair between their eyes; expressions on their yipping mouths to dream about. The chaps, the spurs, the boots, jean jackets, hats—each item never would need boasting. Zino didn’t hope to kill the cowboys. He wanted God to have them die. One made a horse cross over him, kick near his head. He didn’t pray. He shut his mind.

  Kwan’s Coney Island

  THERE WAS A SAINT IN THE STREETS, a bland silver man about one-fourth-sized who was rolling along on a rubber-wheeled cart while a priest in lace walked in front reading the blessing. Two lines of men gently pulled the lead ropes and behind the saint’s cart a large number of women in black carried candles. A uniformed band of fifteen played a salute to anybody who came up with a dollar bill to be pinned to the saint’s vestments. “Wait a minute! Wait a minute. Not so fast,” said a butcher coming out of his store after the crowd had gone by. He wore a black band on his arm and, holding his dollar, he kept at a sensible step to catch up with them. The band turned, like everyone else, to wait and, when he’d delivered it, did the salute, all the cheeks puffed, the instruments facing him. He got a saint’s card from the priest, which his wife kissed.

  Kwan nodded familiarly to the marchers. These parades happened almost every month. He followed until the fireworks stage, when a string of firecrackers were laid down for a block and the head man waved his breast-pocket handkerchief a long time, swearing because his assistants at the opposite end couldn’t figure out what he meant. Then a shocking great war cannonade went off, filling the air with its smell and smoke. The kids ran the length of the fuse just ahead of the blasts, and yellow and blue and red stains were left in the street which would last till the next occasion. The saint was rolled into a storefront to stay.

  Kwan had been downtown for Saturday night and had come back late on the bus. This morning, delightfully logy, he’d lain in bed past eleven o’clock, although he was never a sound sleeper. He lived in the back of his laundry, not to save money so much as because he had gotten to be rather crusty and could do without constant company. He liked company only in short doses. After a get-together he took at least a couple of days to digest whatever he’d heard and several more days to finish enjoying it. He had lived in Pittsburgh for many years, so to live here in New York a few dozen blocks from the central neighborhood of his own people was a luxury. In his block were black men and Puerto Ricans and Sons of Adam, as he called the Hasidic Jews, and Italians, as he called the Germans, Poles, Greeks, and Italians, and miscellaneous bums and bearded young scholars. He had a Russian church and a Spanish church alongside his business and, all in all, he could pass in and out with a fine anonymity. Sundays in August now he went to the beach, thinking over the gossip of Saturday night and the fixes his friends had gotten themselves into. Even on a cool day he would go because of the sweltering week he’d put in, as well as the sweltering week to come. He was middle-aged, dressed in his next-to best suit and a clovered sport shirt, with the mild roundish face of a member of the amphibian family, except for his humorous mouth and firm chin.

  The hydrants were going but nobody soaked him as he went past; the Puerto Ricans were after their own. It was a day in the eighties with a marvelous high sky the blue of an organdy robe. He took the subway, reading a Chinese newspaper until the tracks emerged above ground. Having chosen his seat especially, he sat back, his hands clasped in his lap, blinking in the sun, and fanned by a dry city breeze. Although his appearance was staid, he was just as pleased at the holiday as the children who chased back and forth in the car. They were more than pleased—they jumped on the seats, they shoved each other against other passengers and partway out of the window. The train made a great many lackadaisical stops, while Kwan mused down at the street below. At Coney Island the pour of humankind off the platform and the festival babble and crush got him energetic. There were mynah birds telling fortunes, merry-go-rounds making music, coin-slotted player pianos. On the hurtling rollercoaster, people screamed and screamed. From the pots at Korn’s Korn came a scarifying smell like flesh burning, and the teenagers, running in front of the traffic, plunged for the beach. It was all too much, of course, and reminded him of scenes from his boyhood in China, but he was detached and quick on his feet, inconspicuous, knew what he liked, and liked this contrast with the rest of the week.

  He went to his bathhouse establishment. STEAM, the signs said. A lot of the men spent the whole day reading the newspaper in their cubicles. They sunned for a bit on the roof, steamed in the steam room, and never went out on the beach. Kwan sampled the services, getting his money’s worth. The fat stomachs on the Italians amused him. Though he was certainly no muscle-man, they were so laughably fat that as soon as they took off their belts they had to hold onto their bellies. Their testicles bulged like bunches of onions. To squeeze in for a shower was like having to push through a herd of beach balls. It was always quarrelsome, because most of them weren’t alone through the week like he was but were standing up for their rights in some busy business establishment, and they couldn’t lay off on Sunday. And the black-white business was tense. Only a handful of blacks came in to change, but today one of them attached on to Kwan to try to get into the showers. He was in the next cubicle and he offered Kwan part of a sandwich, struck up a conversation until Kwan left with his towel, and then hurried to swallow and stand up too, more and more nervous about it.

  “It’s pretty packed, huh?”

  “Plenty room,” Kwan assured him.

  The trouble was that his fear was contagious; for a moment Kwan was afraid to go into that bald gleaming mass of bodies himself, forgetting that nobody ever ob
jected to him. The black man hardly looked at him, he was so busy being nonchalant and looking ahead to the white men’s faces.

  “Any space?”

  Kwan paused beside the Negro, but there were so many people talking that nobody answered. He pushed through to find a spot, the man tagging after, putting a shoulder in Kwan’s stream of water and sloshing his front with one hand. It was a crazy room, with shapes such as you never saw on the street, and much genital-fussing and belly-rubbing.

  The exit to the beach went under the boardwalk, where the whites were the jittery ones. The shade was dazzlingly striped with thin lines of sun and a good crowd of people had sprawled in the cool twilit sand. Mothers held kids. The passive families with their spraddled-out postures and scraps of food reminded Kwan of a refugee crowd, and the stripes across everything were doubly weird, but the sea glittered peacefully blue. He had on a new bathing suit and his toes had not grown as old or as crooked as some of these fellows’ toes. Adding it up, he cut not a bad figure, he thought. Nobody took exception to him.

  A bunch of colored children tore by, throwing handfuls of sand. There were drunks with beer cans, tough policemen, and propped, melancholy souls alone on the part of the beach where everyone else was in transit. They lay on one elbow with their lonely detective novel and their plaid thermos bottle and their brown fleabag blanket from home. It was stop-go. A pair of whites would find themselves on a collision course with three blacks and suddenly stop. By the water the hot sand got cold. Jammed family groups whooped it up; screwballs were yelling. The continual verging on violence was tiresome but didn’t directly affect Kwan, who picked his way out beside one of the breakwaters until his body was lapped by the waves. Facing the sun, he braced his back against a large rock and dug his heels in, loving the suctioning. This was his favorite time of the week, right now. He wiggled around for the perfect position, worried that soon the day would be gone, that he wasn’t happy enough, but he was. The light, multiplied on the water, was a week’s worth of sun. He had seaweed to scrub with and salt on his lips. He smiled so much that he wasn’t aware he was smiling, and was all the time closing his eyes to enjoy them closed and then opening them to watch the shimmer and action. Probably five thousand kids were being taught how to swim just in the area in front of him, which made for a steady myriad blare, the yeows and shrieks yiping out of it. Jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping—there was scarcely space for the waves to roll in. When the wind cut the hooting, it blew back again. Old-man-in-the-moon faces bobbed up to blow out the water and suck in some air. Horses chased horses. Mothers were teaching by every method, including the drown-’em-and-laugh-at-’em cry, if only because they themselves were scared. The lifeguards paddled on little rafts which the fishy kids tried to catch up with, and once they had a shark scare, when the police helicopter started to swoop. A guy clambered out covered with black steamship oil, having swum through a slick. He’d been the shark. In the distance the regular sky ride screams were like crying dolls squeezed.

  Five children crept past after crabs, although the rocks had been hunted clean. Kwan tried to converse with them with avuncular dignity, pretending to peer round his feet in case a crab might be hiding there. He liked their shouts and the teeming water and teeming beach, the women in bouncing bathing suits. While he regretted not having had children, this was not a gnawing or painful feeling because it had never seemed possible. Marriage had never been much of a hope. He’d paid court to several ladies but always as one of so many suitors that the family and daughter had toyed with him, letting him know how privileged he was. Even so, he had various dear memories of the onanist kind—vigils outdoors, or missing a meal to send flowers he knew that the girl would ignore. Sometimes he’d encountered a colored woman who would come in the back and allow him to tickle her a little instead of charging her for her laundry, and then he had hoped that a permanent amicability might grow up between them. But each time afterwards when he mulled it over, he realized it would only amount to a lot of tickling—no work. If he wanted to share his life with someone, he needed a helper. The flight to Hong Kong to bring back a wife required an enormous sum. To be sure, he had saved toward it, but he was an occasional gambler and he loved his other few pleasures too much.

  The mobs were a piece of his childhood, the kids smeared with black sand. He strolled way down to the fishing pier and sat against a green piling. He saw an eel caught and a beer-bottle fight between the men on the pier and the men in the motor boats which were putting about, tangling some of the lines. There was a fight on the beach as well. The white lifeguards in the towers close by had to jump down and help one of their bunch against ten or twelve Puerto Ricans. The police got into it with roaring and clubs and the kids on the sidelines grabbed several girls by the heels and dragged them around, scaring them into hysterics. It was serious for an instant; then it fragmented. The unearthly hordes of people, picnicking, petting, quietly wading, swallowed everything up.

  With sharp interest, Kwan watched the ocean-going ships rendezvous with the pilot boat at the mouth of the Narrows. As a boy he had wanted to go to sea and still thought of himself as half seaman, especially because of his one long sea journey. At night in his shop he listened for toots from the harbor, sniffing the salt smells. He liked to walk, so he walked some more, keeping a count of the ships he saw and prolonging the afternoon’s activity. When people spat near his feet on the sand he spat back, if not near enough to set off a brawl. The beach was extremely hot. He got up on his toes and trotted under the boardwalk again with the shade-loving crew. The Seashell Bar was there, a whole line of bars, and this was his day for American food. He leaned on the counter as sauerkraut was forked onto his sausage. “Very good stuff. More, man.” With big mouthfuls he ate a whole lot. A raving white man kept pulling his trousers off, while the cops attempted to tie them on during the wait for the ambulance. Finally they needed to handcuff him in order to keep them on. He shrieked like a factory whistle and collected a crowd. Kwan scraped with his teeth at a candied apple and winced at the smell of the cooking corn.

  The sea was a sizzling, glistening blue. He watched the Parachute Jump, the kids doing stunts. He watched the Diving Bell sink down in its tank where it was nosed by the Porpoise Herd. Couples being jolted out of the funhouse doors at the end of their ride were bloated by mirrors to squeal a last squeal. At the Torture House an elephant was mashing a canvas man underfoot. Santa Claus laughs came up from him. The sign “Chinese Water Torture” intrigued Kwan, since he couldn’t guess what that might be. Finally he paid the twenty-five cents. The House was a tent behind a board facade, and the Water Torture was not featured prominently. Both victim and tormentor were yellow as bile, the latter chuckling, apparently. The victim looked up with the face of a calf about to feed, head twisted around to catch hold of the teat. He was papier-maché, and a make-believe faucet dripped on him. Quite accurate characters in a pencilled balloon said, “Let me go.” Kwan grinned at all this, but some of the other exhibits made him squint; he had squint lines engraved almost like a sun-squint.

  There was a live show. A fat man climbed slowly onto the stage. “Folks can come right down close to me where you can see everything and hear everything. No need to be afraid of me . . .” His face was tattooed as if he’d wished to obliterate it, not simply to become a rarer freak. He had a display case of hatpins and needles and two rows of drinking glasses.

  “All you good people want to see everything, want to hear everything. That’s what you have here, all the odd people,” he said, filling the glasses to different levels, and continued in a mesmerizing, biting voice, “My name is Musical Tons.” He laughed to get his body shaking, groaning at the discomfort. “I’m fat, but since I’m not as fat as some I’m also musical.” He licked his finger and began to rub the glasses’ rims. He did “Dixie” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.” But the audience grew sarcastic and whistled along. “Mary, to my right, is one of our features. She’s going to talk to you about herself in her ow
n words and will be glad to answer any of your questions. Please listen carefully.”

  “Now you were told outside on the paper that I would show you underneath my dress, and that’s what you are seeing,” said Mary, who was unbuttoning her dress in mannish haste. The people giggled with whispers. Faint howls drifted from the rollercoaster. She wore a bathing suit. “I am a Christian woman and I do not show you underneath my bathing suit. It is the same. The ladies may feel of anywhere they wish to be convinced that it is real. The gentlemen may feel of anywhere where they would feel their sisters or their mothers. Now I have cards for ten cents which show myself and I will write on them my name Mary in my own handwriting, which is very good.”

  She spoke fast and she wrapped the dress around her like a towel.

  “Now I am called the Crocodile Woman, which is because my skin is like the thick skin or the hide of a crocodile. It is because of a disease, and which is not infectious, do not worry. I am a Christian woman the same as your wife or your mother. Now I have a message for you, which is that God loves you. Enjoy the life which God has given to you, enjoy your skin, be thankful.”

  “Thank you, Mary,” Musical Tons said into the microphone. “May I direct our friends back to myself? I am going to perform what has been called in the newsprint a remarkable demonstration of hardihood. Pay close attention, if you please.”

  He took his shirt off. There were hooks through his nipples, and he picked up two five-pound weights from the floor with them. “I’d do the heavier ones if we had a bigger crowd.” He smiled around. He had separate smiles for the whites and the blacks but in both cases bitter with scorn. As he swung into doing his stuff, what politeness he’d had before peeled away; he was intense.

  “What I do mostly is stick these pins through myself. Want me to?”