One of the side show tents had a sign on it that said THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD in red and gold letters. An old woman stood out in front with a loudspeaker, telling what they had inside.
“See the two-headed baby,” she said. “See the big jungle rat. It ain’t like the rats you got around here—ain’t got no tail—all spotted and striped like a tiger.”
Another show had a fire-eating cannibal and a woman who weighed eight hundred pounds and a turtle with two tails. We didn’t go into either tent. It was bad enough to know such things as eight-hundred-pound women and two-headed babies could be in the world without paying a quarter for it.
In the middle of the carnival was a tent with pictures of half-naked women on the front, and a sign that said BUBBLES: BEWITCHING ENCHANTRESS OF THE FAR EAST. A crowd of men and boys had gathered around a ticket stand where a big-nosed man in a derby hat was making a speech.
“Starting right now with one of them old bloodboilers,” he said. “Hottest—fastest—meanest little burlesque show you ever saw. The show starts in ten seconds, gentlemen. Only a few seats left.”
He stood there a minute, looking over the crowd, then started again. “Gentlemen, it’s as hot as a billy goat in a pepper patch. It shakes—it bumps—it bounces like a Model T Ford on plowed ground. Only fifty cents to see Bubbles unveil the secrets of the East. Gentlemen, if you suffer from heart trouble, high blood pressure or dizzy spells I beg you not to come in here. You won’t be able to stand it.”
He wound up again and told how Bubbles was the Crown Princess of Mesopotamia, and had been kidnapped and carried on a camel through the enchanted deserts of the Far East, and how she had spent six years in the harem of the Sheik of Araby.
While he was in the middle of this somebody piped up in the crowd and asked him if she’d take it all off.
He said, “Gentlemen, you will see Bubbles as fully clothed as she came into this world. That is, you will see her in the garment which the good Lord give her—her naked hide. Come in, gentlemen. We only got a few seats left. It’ll cost you only fifty cents, one half of one dollar, to see what you can’t afford to miss for any price.”
A few of the men crowded up to buy tickets.
“Let’s go in,” Brother said. He looked at me and grinned. “Come on.”
I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, but I let him go in front and we got into the line at the ticket stand. When we bought our tickets the man said, “Now here are two young men seeking to further their education. Go right in, gentlemen. You’ll never be the same again.” That got him a big laugh from the crowd. I felt silly then with everybody looking at us and laughing, but we’d already paid our money and there was nothing to do but keep going.
It was so dark inside the tent after we’d been out in the sun that we could hardly see. But our eyes got used to it, and we stood around waiting for the show to start. There weren’t any seats. About a third of the tent was roped off to give Bubbles room to put on her show. In a corner of the roped off part was a kind of booth made of old carpets, and beneath the front flap we could see a woman’s bare feet with red polish on the toenails.
We waited a good while, hearing the man making his speech again in front of the tent, and now and then another bunch of men and boys came in. The tent filled up. Mushmouth and Chicken Little Montgomery came in with one of the last bunches, but they were the only ones we knew. I’d seen most of the others before, but I didn’t know their names.
Mushmouth and Chicken Little were ashamed to be seen in such a place. While we waited they stood together on the edge of the crowd, pretending they were the only ones there. They were both a little drunk, and when somebody happened to look at them they’d grin and back up.
Finally the man in the derby hat quit talking and followed the last bunch through the door. Everybody crowded up to the rope, thinking the show was about to start. But he went into the booth where Bubbles was and came out with a little table and a deck of cards. He set the table up on our side of the rope.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we still have a few minutes before show time.” He shuffled the cards and made them rattle down in a pile on the table. “There’s nothing to ease the body, clear the mind, and settle the soul like a friendly card game.” He shuffled the cards again, but that time he made a mislick and they fell out of his hands. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’ve had a little too much of your good Kentucky whiskey, I’m afraid.” He picked up the cards and shuffled them again, then thumbed three cards off the top of the deck and held them up. “I have here the queen of spades, the nine of diamonds and the four of clubs.” He laid the three cards face down on the table and switched them around.
Then he looked at Mushmouth and Chicken Little, who were standing on the other side of the table. “Now, can one of you gentlemen pick the queen?”
The queen card had a bent corner and it was easy to pick out. Chicken Little looked around the tent and grinned, then he turned the card. It was the queen.
“You have a fine eye, sir,” the man in the derby hat said. “A wonderful eye.”
He turned the card over and began switching them again. “And now for a dollar, sir, can you tell me the queen?”
Chicken Little laid a dollar on the table and turned the card with the bent corner. He had it right again, and the man in the derby hat paid off. It seemed he’d had too much whiskey to keep straight on what he was doing.
Mushmouth and two or three others laid down dollar bills and the man lost again. On the next round about a dozen of the men laid down dollar bills, and Brother and I laid down a dollar apiece. He asked which was the queen. Somebody turned the card with the bent corner, but it was the nine of diamonds. The next time it was the nine of diamonds. And the next time it was the four of clubs. Before we realized what had happened the man had crossed the rope and was in the booth. Everybody was awfully quiet, feeling too foolish even to be mad.
The man in the derby came out again and said that Bubbles would now dance for us. Some thumpy music began playing, and he pulled back the flap and let Bubbles out. We crowded up to the rope.
She was a tall black-haired woman who looked hardmouthed and tired until she faced us and began to smile and sway back and forth to the music. Her eyebrows were painted black and curled around on the ends; where she’d sweated the paint had run down the sides of her face. Her clothes were made of a gauzy red material that you could see through, except for a skimpy brassiere and pants. She was decked out in feathers and jewels, and a silky tassle was fastened to each of her breasts. Mushmouth and Chicken Little were standing next to me. I kept my head turned away from them so they wouldn’t recognize me.
Bubbles danced back and forth across the tent a time or two, and then she stopped midway of the rope and stood there smiling, looking at us under her eyebrows. She started the tassle on her right breast twirling around. She stopped that tassle and twirled the other one. After that she twirled both of them at the same time. Everybody whistled and cheered.
“I’m going to teach my old lady to do that,” somebody said.
When Bubbles got both tassles going she began to wiggle her hips. Mushmouth looked as if somebody had hit him in the face with a big grin and it had stuck there. He leaned over the rope and started grabbing at Bubbles, and the man in the derby had to come and tell him to behave himself. Chicken Little looked the other way, trying to act like somebody else’s twin brother.
Bubbles sashayed across the tent again and went back into her booth. The man in the derby walked out and told us that for fifty cents more we could see Bubbles reveal other secrets of the mysterious East. Nobody liked that, and there was a good deal of cursing and grumbling. But they all shelled out. Brother and I did too. It seemed a shame to leave after we’d all stared at Bubbles and let her begin her show, even if it was wrong to make us pay a dollar for what they’d told us was worth fifty cents.
The music started and Bubbles came back. She wiggled and danced and took off her clothes until she was as naked as a jaybi
rd. With all the jewels and feathers gone she looked the way any ordinary person would look naked, except for the eyebrow paint streaked down the sides of her face. She wasn’t as pretty as I’d thought she’d be. It was hard to think of her as the Princess of Mesopotamia, or even somebody named Bubbles. I felt sorry for her then, standing there without her clothes in front of a crowd of men who’d paid a dollar to look at her. It was a cheap thing, and she couldn’t grin enough to change it.
Then before anybody could catch him Mushmouth had climbed over the rope and was trying to catch Bubbles. She never did quit dancing. She just skipped from one place to another as nimble as a cat, keeping out of his way, with Mushmouth slobbering and floundering after her, smacking his mouth like a blind dog in a meathouse.
“You come out of there, Mushmouth,” Chicken Little said.
Half of the men were whooping for him to get away and leave her alone, and the other half were whooping for him to catch her.
“Go to it, Mushmouth,” somebody said.
Chicken Little said, “Mushmouth, you quit that now.”
Then the man in the derby caught him and threw him out over the rope. He and Chicken Little went out the door together, hanging their heads. They seemed to get the worst of everything.
The show was over then, and we were happy to get out. It was dinnertime by then and we were hungry. We found a tent where they were selling hamburgers and ate three apiece. Then we went to another tent where a man was selling watermelons and ate four slices apiece for dessert. After that we decided to go and ride the Ferris wheel.
But on the way to the Ferris wheel we passed a tent where some gypsy women were telling fortunes. Three of them were standing in front of the tent, calling to the crowd. One pointed to Brother and me. “You boys are brothers. You let us tell your fortune.”
Brother said he didn’t want his fortune told and kept walking toward the Ferris wheel. But the youngest of the women ran out and caught my hand.
“You got nice things in your future, handsome boy. Let me tell you about it. For a quarter I will tell you all that will happen to you.”
She was pretty, and she sounded like she really needed the money. I gave her a quarter and followed her into the tent. The inside was divided into rooms and we went into one of them. She took my hand and looked into the palm. There was a mole under her left eye and she was wearing a scarf and bright gold earrings.
“I see you will have happiness,” she said, “and sorrow, but not as much sorrow as happiness. I see you will have a beautiful wife. I see you will have a lot of money before you are old.”
She looked down into my hand again. “I see you will travel. You will see strange parts of the world.”
I didn’t believe in fortunetelling, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable, as if she saw how I looked without my clothes on.
She traced her finger across my hand and said, “From this line I see that you will have a very long life.”
That line was a scar from a barbed-wire cut, but I didn’t tell her that.
“You are a nice boy,” she said. “If you will let me I will bless your money for you. For free. Because I like you.” She held out her hand and smiled at me.
I never had heard of that, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I got out my pocketbook and handed it to her.
“Now,” she said. “You must put your hand on my heart.”
She took my hand and put it down inside her dress. She didn’t have on any underwear at all. The feeling of her went all through me. I couldn’t look at her. She spoke some sort of conjure over my pocketbook and handed it back to me.
After I got away from the tent I looked to see what she’d done to my money when she blessed it. It was gone. Two dollars. She’d stolen it all. And there wasn’t a thing to do about it.
I started looking for Brother, edging through the carnival and watching in front of the tents. The crowd was thick. The afternoon was hot and close, and the carnival had begun to have the smell of sweat and cotton candy. Everybody had been there long enough to be tired and bad-tempered. It was miserable. I wished I was at home, a long way from that crowd and the gypsies and the two-headed babies and the Sheik of Araby’s wife.
I found Brother playing some sort of game with a mean-looking little man in a checkered shirt. There was a circle of nails driven into the counter of the man’s booth, and in the center a wooden arm set on an axle. You bought a red washer for a quarter and put it on one of the nails. The man spun the arm, and if it stopped on your nail you won a dollar. If you bought two washers you stood to win two dollars. When I came up Brother had just laid down a quarter.
“Have you got any money?” I asked him.
“I will have just as soon as he spins this thing again,” Brother said. He had eight washers stuck around on the nails.
The man spun the arm and it stopped on a nail that Brother didn’t have a washer on.
“That was my last quarter,” Brother said.
I had two quarters left and I gave him those. He bought two more washers and tried it again. If he’d won he’d have had eighteen dollars. But he lost. He had a nickel left, but that wasn’t enough to buy any more chances, and I was glad of it. We never did get to the Ferris wheel, and I didn’t mind that either. I guessed that if we’d paid the dime or quarter or whatever it cost to get on, somebody would have made us pay a dollar to get off.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see how Uncle Burley’s doing.”
We went back through the crowd to where Uncle Burley had his tank of ducks. People were still waiting to try their luck with the embroidery hoops. Uncle Burley winked at us. His pockets were crammed with the dimes he’d taken in.
We went off to the side and sat under a tree to watch the people try to ring a duck and wait for Uncle Burley to be ready to go home.
It wasn’t long until the ducks began to get tired. They’d had a hard day of it, and one after another they quit ducking when the hoops came at them. They just sat there, looking fretful and disgusted and let the people win Uncle Burley’s profit. He’d made the throwing line only a few feet from the tank, and everybody began ringing ducks. The people who’d lost in the morning heard what was going on and came back. Uncle Burley’s pockets were flattening out fast. He looked more fretful and disgusted than the ducks.
Finally he called Brother and me. He was down to six or seven dollars, and he gave us all but one of them. “Take care of things until I get back,” he said. “I won’t be a minute.”
After Uncle Burley left, Brother stood by the tank to pick the hoops up, and I handled the money. Our first customer was the man in the brown suit who’d lost the bet to Uncle Burley that morning. I could see that he’d come back to get even, and I was afraid he’d make trouble, but he won five dollars on his second throw; that seemed to satisfy him, and he left. But then I was really in a mess; Uncle Burley hadn’t come back and I only had eighty cents.
I was wondering what in the world I’d do if somebody else won and found out that I didn’t have money enough to pay him, when I saw the head fly off one of the ducks. It couldn’t have been done any neater with a butcher knife, but nobody was even close to the tank. I looked over at the shooting gallery, and there was Uncle Burley popping away at the target and ringing the bell every time. Then I saw him lead off toward the ducks as if he were making a wing shot; and another duck flopped in the tank.
When he’d killed all the ducks Uncle Burley walked off toward the other end of the carnival without looking back. He was carrying a big red plaster frog that he’d won at the shooting gallery. Everybody stood around, looking at us and looking at the ducks and looking at Uncle Burley going off through the crowd, with their mouths open. Then they all laughed a little and began to straggle back into the carnival.
I put Uncle Burley’s eighty cents in my pocket, and Brother and I started after him.
We caught up with him in front of Bubbles’ tent. He and Big Ellis were listening to the man in the derby hat make
his speech. We stood with them, listening a while, then Uncle Burley said, “Let’s go.”
We elbowed our way out of the crowd and Big Ellis went with us.
“I’d like to have a little something to drink,” he said to Uncle Burley.
Uncle Burley just carried his red frog and didn’t say anything.
Big Ellis said, “I got a little something.” He looked at Brother and me and then at Uncle Burley. “It’s all right, ain’t it?”
“I imagine,” Uncle Burley said.
He let Big Ellis take the lead, and we followed him across the grounds to where he’d parked his car. When we got there Big Ellis opened the door and rammed his hand into a hole in the driver’s seat and pulled out a pint of whiskey. He said that was the first Fourth of July he’d ever been able to hide it where Annie May couldn’t find it.
“She can smell it before it’s even uncorked,” he said.
He opened the bottle and passed it to Uncle Burley. Uncle Burley set the frog on the seat of the car and drank.
“She couldn’t track it inside that seat,” Big Ellis said. He giggled and drank out of the bottle when Uncle Burley passed it back to him.
They sat down and leaned against the side of the car, handing the bottle back and forth. Every time Big Ellis took a drink he’d giggle and say something about Annie May’s nose not being as good as it used to be.
And the happier Big Ellis got the sadder Uncle Burley got. Those ducks had hurt his feelings and he couldn’t get over it.
“God Almighty, women are awful,” Big Ellis said, and giggled and wiped the whiskey off his chin.
He hadn’t any more than said it before Annie May came around the car, mad as a sow and screeching like a catamount. She told Big Ellis to get himself in that car and take her home. They left with Uncle Burley’s red frog sitting bug-eyed on the seat between them.
Uncle Burley stood there with the bottle in his hand and watched them go. Then he drank the rest of the whiskey and threw the bottle down. He swayed back and forth, looking down at it.
“Well,” he said, “around and around she goes.”
Nathan Coulter Page 6