“How you doing, cutie?” Davy says in the recording, in a kind of soft voice that is not meant for outside listeners. Maybe they’re sitting in the shade, beneath a tree, and maybe it is very hot and they’ve already had a long day. Maybe she’s just up from a nap and still in the wet-eyed stare that usually follows. From what I can hear in the recording, she doesn’t make any sound, and for a moment this worries me, listening as I am spatially and temporally removed from a moment that already took place, changed, and is something entirely else now. How was she? Why didn’t she make a sound?
I love those sounds she makes. The hums. The little songs she sings into the phone, into my ear when I lean in close to hug her.
The human brain is bilateral in structure. While the left hemisphere has zones connected with language, analytical processing, time sequencing, and so on, the right hemisphere has regions governing musical ability, humor, visuospatial skills, and so forth. The left hemisphere of her brain was severely damaged in the strokes, but the right side, the music, lives on.
And what of the recording’s silence in response to Davy’s question? In her chair, she smiles, sometimes nods, yawns. She cocks her head to attention, or flicks it to the side when something is funny, or when she is making a joke. She slowly closes one eye and raises the other eyebrow when she jokes, too. She touches people she is near on the arm. A friend. A stranger. She cleans any hair or lint or stray artifact from their clothes.
This does not occur to me until the moment I get off the phone with them—they have to go, because they’re due to stop by their afternoon musicians and hear a few songs and wouldn’t want them to worry if they didn’t show up—that all these years, Davy has been understanding the world through its sounds. Things make sense to him not through narrative, not through the stories people tell one another in direct conversation, but rather through what the sound of someone swaying beside a microphone as it records a folksinger might mean. What story that might tell. For the nearly three years that he has been telling me that he knows what my mom is saying, what she means, that even though she can no longer use any words he can translate her thoughts, I thought he was delusional, or, worse, lying. But maybe he’s not. Maybe, just maybe, she is understood. And he is understood. And they’re just somewhere else, outside language.
BEHIND THE NIGHT’S DRESS
Day 77 of 150
World of Wonders
September 2013
There had been fried flecks of potato suspended in their hair. Salt spread across their faces like the starry night sky. And I’d sat there, unmoving, brimming with inaction, and let their fight happen.
Right?
Or was it none of my goddamned business?
I thought about all the other times I’d taken this approach, sitting on the sidelines, lamenting the crisis but too afraid to actually do anything about it. The wilting ghost in the corner of the hospital room whose only action is to fade into white walls.
It was time to step a little closer. Get dirtier. I needed to learn a goddamned thing. Why the hell else was I there? Why would I stay?
* * *
Neither Cassie nor Short E speaks to the other for the rest of the night or the next day as we finish the drive or this morning as we begin setup. No one is actually talking much to anyone else until we hear this:
“What’s up, fucks?” It’s an unfamiliar voice, high and screechy, loud, calling from across our lot. We’ve just begun setup in Hutchinson, Kansas, where we’re getting two new performers. I don’t quite understand how staffing works, but there must be some careful trade-offs the bosses work out behind the scenes, weighing, for example, seasoned performers and the kinds of acts they can do and when they can arrive, et cetera.
One of the newbies arrived the night before, a greenhorn bally girl named Lola Ambrosia. She is a burlesque dancer, wants to become a fire eater, and will stay with us for the rest of the season.
“It’s really rare, unfortunately rare,” Tommy says before he picks Lola up, “to have a nonwhite bally girl. A lot of the performers doing this kind of work look kind of the same—white, tattoos, piercings, kind of a fuck-you mentality.”
“Well, for so many years, nonwhite folks were exploited in freak shows, right? All those ridiculous displays with Mexicans being dressed as cannibals from Polynesia, stuff like that,” I say.
“Yeah, some were, and that was terrible. But many of them—most, even—made great livings. They got to see the country or the world, made a lot of money.”
“Some of them were taken advantage of.”
“Sure. But you tell me any business anywhere where that’s not true,” he says.
I try to find an answer but come up blank.
“It’s weird,” I say. “The freak show was supposedly about people who were different from you. About people who didn’t fit in. But in reality, it was kind of a place where everyone fit in.”
“Still is,” Tommy says. “We have quite a mix here. And each season it’s a new mix. Anyway, Lola’s one of the only black bally girls I’ve come across in a long time. And she’s good. And smoking hot.”
“Well, don’t leave her waiting too long or she might change her mind,” I say, a little afraid that a new, skilled, hotter, fresher performer is already the favorite.
* * *
The other new performer, the yeller, is pale and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and a perfectly circular goatee on the very bottom of his chin as if he had been dipped in paint. He is moving very quickly between assembling rides with one big duffel bag slung across his shoulder. He’s not coming from the direction of the fairground’s entrance. He seems to have appeared out of the dry brush lining the chain-link fence that surrounds the carnival grounds.
“Rash!” Tommy calls.
“Tommy!” He drops his bag and gives Tommy a hug. “Feels so good to be back,” Rash says, hugging the other folks he knows. “This is where all the magic happens.” He spreads his arms wide like he could hug the whole carnival lot. “FUCK YEAH!”
He talks quickly, in a torrent, and has freshly painted black fingernails and a thick headband that covers the top of his head and ponytail.
“How’d you get here?” Tommy asks. “I thought you were gonna call when you got in?”
“Missed my flight,” Rash says. “Spent too long this morning imparting final wisdom to the offspring, so I had to hop another one. Took the bus after that. Then this hot chick offered to give me a ride to the fairgrounds, and I wasn’t going to say no to that,” he says, nudging Tommy in the ribs. Rash gives a quick laugh—an ear-splittingly loud, high-pitched cackle, the closest human sound to a hyena laugh I can imagine, with a hiccup between expulsions of air.
* * *
“Do you know why it’s so good here?” Rash asks me a little while later.
I shake my head no.
“Anything can happen out here, and it does. The last season I was on the road with these fuckers, I had a threesome with two monkey trainers. I mean, come on. It can’t get better than that.”
He’s getting into his clown costume as he tells me this, an outfit he has perfected over many years, he tells me, and prefers to wear all day every day. He likes to stay in it after we close the show if we are heading to Walmart, for example. The only thing that keeps him from wearing it 100 percent of the time is that his face needs to breathe at night, so wiping away the white face paint is good. He wears yellow plaid pants, a collared shirt, a tie, a vest, and a dog collar around his neck. He has a red curly clown’s wig that he’s been working on for years, he explains, to dirty and give dreadlocks. His teeth seem especially yellow in contrast to his white face and neck. His eyes and mouth are lined with black thorny paint. Many people already think clowns are terrifying. Rash is, by all accounts, doing his best to be the most terrifying.
* * *
It is 101 muggy, stagnant degrees outside in the shade, 107 inside the metal truck. Hutchinson, Kansas, is full of salt mines. During World War II it housed German and Ita
lian soldiers in POW labor camps to make up for the American labor force sent overseas. Think of them, all those men locked inside fences far from home and made to work incredibly difficult, physical jobs. Can a temporary carnival be haunted? Are there POW ghosts swinging hammers inside these carnies swinging hammers? The parallels are not parallel, of course. As a prisoner of war, you have not chosen to do the work you are doing. You may not leave. But, for the carnies from South Africa, if they break contract and leave before the season is over, for whatever reason, the company they have signed with will go after their families back home for money. For the American carnies, if you’re a person with a criminal record, for instance, there are few other places you can find work. For migrant carnies—Mexicans, in particular—there are hundreds of others in line behind you to fill your spot should you complain about the seventy-, eighty-hour workweek, about the three hundred dollars for those hours.
The Kansas State Fair is the state’s largest event of the year, according to the Kansas State Fair advertising. Three hundred and fifty thousand people from all 105 Kansas counties attend. There is the pedal pull state championship, which is a competition where little children pedal a toy tractor that has had heavy weights hooked up to the back, their small muscled legs straining and knobby like some farm animal learning to walk. There’s mutton busting, where small kids clasp their bodies around an angry sheep whose torso is a bullet of dirty curled hair ten times as wide as the children’s bodies. They clutch, are thrown, then trampled. There are obvious ties to the bull riding and wrangling that happens in the older crowds, but regardless of age, the task is epic: an ordinary human attempting to wrestle the beast.
* * *
I wake because I am drowning. I wake and will myself back to sleep and wake again until my sheets are so wet they stick to the mattress’s plastic cover, which crinkles like disposable diapers with each movement, and sleep is no longer possible as a way to stave off reality. I have a fever, I’m in a hot tub, I’ve been propelled into the center of the sun. I open my eyes. The box fan is off. I must’ve kicked the cord that keeps it motoring, its square wedged perfectly into the foot of the bed, nearly the exact height and width of each bunk space. The only place to put the fan is on the bed itself, which then necessitates a bend in the sleeper’s knees to give up foot space to the fan, a further bend if the sleeper wants real air to propel from the blades by collecting the air behind the fan and not propping it up against the plywood board at the foot of the bed that makes a half wall every six feet. The price of a breeze is bent knees all night. A special dampness at the bend in the leg where skin is forced to meet skin.
I plug the fan back in, but it is too late. We sleep in an enclosed metal box in the middle of an asphalt parking lot in Kansas. It is early September; none of fall’s coolness has arrived. Each of us bought a fan on one of our 1:00 a.m. Walmart trips when the nights started heating up; they help a great deal, but there is only so much they can do. It’s just past sunrise, but I give up, gather my things, and head to the showers.
“Holy shit,” Short E says later that afternoon. He walks past my chair and climbs down the metal stairs toward the hose outside. He swears with each stair he dismounts, the heat of the metal, and then I hear the water turn on. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he says. “This water is scalding hot.”
My head is dizzy with heat, my vision a little blurry, and I lean back against the wall to steady myself between acts but immediately shoot straight back up, having forgotten that the metal walls, too, have been collecting heat all day. My shoulder, upper arm, and back where I touched the wall pulse with heat, and I wonder if they are red or will blister; at this moment I want them to blister and get infected and threaten my life, anything to force me out of this box.
* * *
We’ve just closed the show for the night. We’ve untied the slipknots at the base of the support beams, lowered the banners to their halfway point and rolled them up. We’ve closed the mummies’ doors, counted out the cash we made that day, marked envelopes, made change, recounted, and sealed the money away.
I peel off the polka-dot tank top and sequined shorts, fishnets beneath those, note how horrible everything smells, how damp it all is with sweat, note the good idea to wash these things sometime soon, next time I go to the showers, which I am considering doing tonight, but now I hear Spif rustling around in his bunk beside mine, changing clothes, smoking. He’s got more pep in his step than he should for midnight.
“Whatcha doing?” I call as he passes by.
“Heading into carnietown. Gonna play poker with the boys.”
“Can I come?” I ask. Despite all the warnings against carnies, I’ve been disappointed by how separate our show has been from carnietown during the meat-grinders—and how I was too busy to even consider the kind of trouble I wanted.
“No,” Spif says. “Not this time.”
“Why?”
“Not this time.”
“Next time?”
He sighs, exhales his smoke. “Fine. Next time. But you have to be cool.”
“I’ll be cool,” I say coolly, being unsure what that might mean in carnietown.
* * *
The next night after the show closes at eleven, I ask Spif if it’s carnietown night and he shakes his head no, sits down on the stage beside Lola.
“Soon,” he says, “but not tonight.”
“Why the fuck would you go hang out with a bunch of bigoted assholes who will try to feel you up every moment when you can stay right here with these much cooler cats?” Rash the Clown says, coming out of the shadows. “I can’t think of a single reason you wouldn’t just want to hang out here with these folks.”
“I already know what you assholes are like,” I say. “I want to see what those assholes are like, too.”
Rash sits down beside me and begins drawing his fingernails across my bare thigh.
“Besides,” I say, “they can’t be so bad. I’m sure I get felt up over here a lot more than I’d get felt up over there.”
“Probably true,” Sunshine says, parting the curtains and coming out onto the stage. She has two big, stiff ropes draped in loose coils around her shoulder.
“Whips,” she says very quietly as she walks past, down the stage’s steps, and out the tent’s front flap. We all stand up and follow her, a row of ducklings.
Outside, the bright moon casts shadows behind the stilled, sleeping rides, like time has stopped and all the machines are just waiting to be woken up. Sunshine drops the whips onto the ground, though they look mostly like lassos.
“Move,” she says, shooing us all far to the side as she picks up one of the whips. She brings her arm back, then throws it high in the air in front of her and cracks it. The sound is a gunshot, and the other folks on our crew are soon outside, too.
Tommy grabs the other whip and begins cracking. In front of him, behind him, to the sides. Sunshine wraps her body in the whip’s coil, then undoes herself.
I’m overly eager. When Sunshine takes a short break to puff on her cigarette, I sidle up to her and casually say that this act, a Wild West whip act, is an act I’d sure like to learn.
“I’ll teach you,” Sunshine says. “Hold the handle firmly in your fist, like this.” She picks up the whip and grips the long tape-wrapped handle. Standing with one foot in front of the other, she brings the whip handle in front of her, then behind, and then finally up and over her head before it cracks down in front of her. She demonstrates a few more times, popping the cracker each time with a snap that breaks the sound barrier.
“Stand behind me,” she says, “and put your hands on my hips. I know this is weird, but it’s how I was taught, too. Feel how my body moves beneath the whip.”
I do, holding my hands around her hips as the rope of the whip makes a cage around us. It’s hard to believe the whip doesn’t cut into us in our center sanctuary, but it doesn’t. I try to move with her as she is moving, to get a feel for the swings and speeds and flicks and twists.
<
br /> “Give it a try,” she says, handing me the whip. She keeps her hand on it, though, and presses herself against me from behind, guiding my body with hers as she connects the fluid motions of the stance to the arm’s swing.
“Don’t lean into it,” Rash says. “Keep your body upright, let the whip do the work.”
The noise has attracted some carnies from down the way, who lean against a ride beside our tent and, sipping their beers, watch us whip. Tommy has brought out a third whip and is practicing a ringmaster’s move, and Sunshine is learning from Rash how to wrap the whip around a pole, and I have the third, a little ways away from the others, since the movement of my cracker, the end piece that makes the sound, is still relatively unpredictable. It can hurt. The carnival is powered off, no lights glowing from the rides themselves, but some streetlights behind the big wheel are on, and they cast long strange shadows onto our outdoor nighttime circus.
Whip acts in a sideshow come in a few forms. There’s a solo act, where the performer will come onstage with the whip and perform a bunch of fancy cracks in rapid succession, wrapping herself up in the whip between sets, doing the whole thing in time with music so it looks like a dangerous dance. There’s also a tandem whip act, where one performer will hold a newspaper or flower in his hands, between his legs as he bends over, in his teeth. The other performer will crack the whip and knock the item down. It’s better to master the solo act before attempting the tandem, since an imprecise crack can be painful for your partner.
I do not improve immediately. It’s not something like escaping from the handcuffs or turning the one-dollar bill into a five that you master as soon as you learn the mechanisms involved. There is progress to be made. There are techniques to learn. But I can tell already it’s a much more likely prospect than getting a sword all the way down my throat. I feel powerful with the whip, like this could be an act that would actually amaze the audience. Within fifteen minutes, though, I’ve given myself a small cut on the cheek. It stings, is red and swollen, but doesn’t bleed. I don’t slow down.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 28