Chapter Thirteen
ZANE ASKED FOR my hand in marriage in Johnson City. We were on the chaise volonte, just the two of us, after the show. Earlier, Zane had scored a bag of cocaine, and we’d been doing lines for hours. On the flying chairs, we ditched the razor blade and snorted it through a straw straight from the bag. The painted lady above my head smiled as Tic Toc washed her in green and purple lights. Tic Toc, bribed with his own small bag of toot, played “Fly Me to the Moon,” spinning us around and around the sky. The stars were so bright that my eyes ached. Zane could not stop talking.
“I told you about my friend Herman, right? Herman Lamont. Everybody called him Skip except his dad. Paul Lamont, chief of police, president of Little League. Mr. Lamont came around when my parents died; I was seven. All the sudden, he takes an interest in me. Shows me how to choke a pat. Cuts the meat on my plate. Takes me frog gigging with Skip. Crab boils in his backyard. Every Saturday afternoon, in his basement, he gives me a glass of bourbon and fucks me. Tells me if I tell anybody, he’ll tell Aunt Mary Esther that I’ve been drinking. On Sunday morning, he picks me up and takes me to mass. He lights one candle for my mom, and one for my dad.” Zane began to cry.
“You were seven?”
“Seven, eight, and nine. Then he stopped coming to the house. Maybe I got too old, or maybe he found somebody else.”
“He doesn’t deserve a dick!”
“I don’t think they’re issued out for good behavior.”
The chaise volonte turned around the starry sky. Suddenly, it all seemed sinister: the purple and green lights, the painted ladies, Sinatra. I wanted to get in a car and find Paul Lamont and kill him.
“Have a cocktail,” said Zane, handing me the bag and straw. “I’ve upset you.”
“How did your parents die?”
“Car wreck. Drunk probably. Good Catholics at Mardi Gras. Aunt Mary Esther moved in to take care of all five of us. She’d never had any children, and she had no idea what to do, so she just played the piano all day. Played “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “Ain’t Misbehaving.”
“Inspirational stuff.”
“Yeah. Whenever she went to the bar, she brought home an accompanist. ‘Children,’ she would announce, ‘this is my accompanist.’ He might actually sit down beside her on the piano bench for a few minutes; then they’d go to the bedroom to fuck or fight. She beat up several guys.”
“Didn’t the neighbors help?”
“I told you about the neighbors. Here, you take the straw. My nose is going to bleed. I can always feel it.” I took the straw and snorted a long cold line. The sky was gorgeous. “The Catholics in Villa Platte let us slide for a while because Aunt Mary Esther was a good Catholic. Whenever they forgot this, she dropped a load in the collection plate. But the Baptists got her.”
“You have to watch out for them.”
“They snuck right up on the old girl. Sent her to a rest home. All the way there, she yelled, ‘I am not tired!’ So they put her in a straitjacket. Can’t play the piano in a straitjacket. When they took her bourbon away, she died. Want to hear the sad part?”
“No. I want to laugh some more. Let’s laugh.”
“The piano went to the Baptist church.”
“Where did you go?”
He shrugged. “Here and there. A roundabout way to you. And who might you be?”
“Same as you.”
“But with breasts.” He pushed his hands under my shirt.
“Warm, round, wonderful breasts. What happened to your Aunt Mary Esther?”
“Didn’t have one.”
“Mom, Pop, a closet full of ex-husbands?”
“I had a brother, but I killed him.”
“Shit.”
“It was an accident.”
“Fuck.”
“You would have liked him.” I kissed him slow and deep, past the cool frost of cocaine to the hot flames he licked, the broken glass, the red wine, the warm wet flesh. I stroked his thigh, hard beneath his worn jeans. Tic Toc turned off the music, and I could hear Zane’s breath as I touched the zipper, in and out, between the rapid beating of his heart. The chair lifted; I pushed my hand into his pocket and through the lining felt the stiff rise of his cock.
“Go down,” he said, unbuckling his belt.
“Not here.”
“Here.” When he pressed my mouth against the metal zipper, I felt my nipples tighten into points. As I took his penis into my mouth, I imagined that it was a sword, and I was him, that I could die any minute.
When we came, the car jerked on the rail, and Tic Toc shouted, “I’m turning this thing off! You want me to leave you up there?”
“Marry me,” said Zane. He was crying. “Please be married to me.”
It seemed like a good idea.
ALL EVENTS FALL short of their anticipation; my wedding was no exception. The preparations went on longer than expected because on Sunday night, at the scheduled hour for the carousel ride, we were all too drunk to stay on a horse. Arthur bitched and moaned about renting the lot for an extra day, but he’d been the one to open the case of champagne on Sunday morning, and he was secretly pleased to extend the celebration. Beside the fact that Arthur loved a carnie wedding, he considered his odd assortment of employees a family, himself the father. “How many more of these girls do I have to marry off?” he’d groan as he proudly counted us on his fingers: Eva, Madge, Sunny. He spared no expense.
It was Arthur who designed my wedding gown. “That is a marvelous ensemble for a kootch show,” he told Eva when he saw her design. “File it.” He drew up something elegant and chaste, and then barked directions over Eva’s shoulder as she stitched it up on her treadle sewing machine.
“Put it in reverse!” he cried like a backseat driver. “Go left! Not there! There’s a ruffle over there! Stop!”
Eva ignored him. With her dark head bent close to the cream silk, she treadled with one foot, held the train on the floor with the other, and kicked Faith away with her third foot. “Felix!” she cried. “Take this cat away before I make a guitar!”
Felix was photographing the scene. He insisted on being the photographer even though he cut off heads in all of his pictures. We all tried to help him tilt the camera, but he was an impossible student; he cursed our mothers, then stomped off in tears. Finally, Arthur declared that headless was the artist’s style, and we let him be.
Lollibells and Madge created a cake in the shape of a man and a woman copulating. You couldn’t really tell that was what they were doing after the frosting went on, but the thought was there.
Tic Toc repainted all the horses on the merry-go-round. Jungle Jim, who felt guilty about saddling me with the Gorilla Girl suit, tried to throw a bridal shower, but no one would go into his trailer because of the smell. We ate cashews and pillow mints outside, and he brought me my presents, one by one, whenever he felt inclined. There was a big bag of leftover pillow mints, and a smaller one of cocaine. Wrapped in newspaper, tied with a piece of dirty string, was a gold-plated Tiffany alarm clock with someone else’s initials engraved on the back.
“I tole ‘em your name, but they must of got it wrong,” he said bashfully.
“I love it,” I said. ‘I’ll change my name.”
“I got more stuff for ya,” he said, “but I got to go work with the kids.” Daisy and Spencer were in training to become flower children. They were to ride on the roof of the car—a souped-up Oldsmobile with huge speakers and a new paint job—which Zane had gone to purchase. Arthur had decided to buy the car from one of his nephews and give it to us for a wedding present.
Sunny had disappeared. Rumor had it that she planned to quit the show and go to culinary school.
“Now you tell me who’s gonna pay good money to eat that girl’s food,” said Madge as she added the final touches to our cake. “She don’t know how to boil an egg.”
“Someone can teach her,” I said, feeling magnanimous. Madge pushed a raisin into the spot where Zane’s
belly button was supposed be and said nothing.
Zane had gone to get my wedding present and didn’t get back in time for the wedding supper, but we all crowded into Madge’s trailer and ate anyway: filet mignon wrapped in bacon, twice-baked potatoes topped with melted cheddar cheese and sprinkled with dried parsley, and two spears apiece of canned asparagus. On the side of each plate was a wedge of lemon, which most of us squeezed into our tequila. I ate in Lollibells’s smoking jacket so I wouldn’t get my dress dirty.
“Now,” he said, when we had finished eating, “come into my trailer and let me do you.”
“No, me,” said Tic Toc, who was drunker than usual and had lost his shyness with women. “Let me do you.”
“Hush y’all dirty minds.” Lollibells brushed a crumb from the collar of my dressing gown. “I am going to dress her hair, apply her cosmetics, and help her into her gown.”
“Then you come right over here and do me,” said Madge, snorting helplessly.
“Do me right . . .” someone began to sing, but we were out the door.
When he wanted to be, Lollibells was an excellent girlfriend. He was frank: “I am not even going to try to curl that stringy hair. We’re going up.” He was lavishly supportive: “To die. Look at you. Turn around one more time. Gorgeous. You are it.” And he was practical: “Hush. I am putting this bib on you. Don’t sass me. I’ve worked too hard on you to see you wearing that margarita.”
When I was dressed, with a towel clipped to my dress and a fresh drink in my hand, he put on Diana Ross and the Supremes and asked me to dance. I declined. He demonstrated. In the small trailer, he rocked on his heels, twisted his hips, waved his hands. Rhythm coiled through his body. It was as if he couldn’t stop moving. “Come on,” he said, pulling me to my feet, swinging his lean hip against mine. “Dance, little sister, dance!” My face burned to the tips of my ears. How could he know what it was to be a Peppers on the dance floor? We were like frogs in danger: dead still. There was no dignity in it, and no escape. You had to try not to try. I began to rock on my heels, like a child who has to go to the bathroom, and to clap my hands shortly after determining a beat in the music. I didn’t know what to do with my face, so I closed my eyes. Lollibells turned off the music.
“Stop laughing.”
“No, it’s cute.”
“I can’t help if I can’t dance. It’s not genetically coded. I’m sure there’s something you can’t do.”
“Don’t pout. If you can screw, you can dance, and y’alls trailer be rattling every night. Come here.”
He pulled me close to him and held me tight against his chest and hips as he swayed back and forth.
“One, two,” he was saying as he turned us around the room. “One two, relax goddamnit, one two . . .” I stepped on his foot. I backed us into the bookshelf. I missed the beat, every time.
When Eva walked in, I was standing alone on the floor, trying to clap when he clapped.
“Stop!” she cried, “Stop! In the name of love . . .” and began to swing me around as she danced. When I could get free, I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her shimmy and twirl. She lacked the athletic grace of Lollibells but had her own three-legged rhythm, and her face was ecstatic. That was the worst part of not being able to dance, you saw how much fun people had doing it, how they forgot themselves. I fixed myself another drink and left to find more philosophical company. It would be nice to find the groom.
“Louise!” called Eva, running after me. She was breathing hard and still breaking into shakes and twists from the dance, humming “Love Child” under her breath. Fucking cheerleaders. “What’s the matter, darling? You feel sad?” She adjusted my dress. “Don’t be sad when you are so pretty on your wedding night.”
“You can’t have a wedding without a groom.”
“Oh him!” She waved her hand as if Zane were a fly.
“That boy always late. He think of this, then he think of that, then he go here, then there, and vroom! The time. You know? I bet right now he is buying something very nice for you.”
“I bet he is at a bar.”
“That, too.”
“Funny that Sunny isn’t around either.”
“We are not interested in Miss Sunny. She bores us, no? Tonight, we find interest in Louise and Zane, bride and groom.” She smiled brightly and did a half-step turn. “You want to dance with Eva?” I watched her.
I had reached the point of intoxication where I knew the truth. Each time I got drunk, I reached this point, and each time it was the same, but each time I thought it was different. The truth! It hit me like a rock. I had to share it.
“Eva,” I said quietly as I staggered toward her. “Zane is an alcoholic. Everyone in the Arthur Reese Traveling Show is an alcoholic.”
“As we say in Italy, you have discovered water.”
AT TEN O’CLOCK that night, I opened a fifth of bourbon, and by midnight, I was drinking straight from the bottle, alone in Zane’s trailer. Outside, fireworks lit up the sky. Someone was playing “Here Comes the Bride” on a harmonica, and someone else was singing a Zappa tune. Every once in a while, Felix would climb up on a stool and try to take my picture through the window.
To carnies, a wedding was a wedding, groom or not. They brought the cake to my door, shouting for me to cut it, but I told them to go away. Once I heard Eva at the door, calling out to me in drunken sympathy, “He’s the son of a pig!” I wondered if anyone else would take this opportunity to get married, since the carousel had been painted and all. I passed out on the bed with my nose buried in Zane’s smoky shirt.
When I came to, the party had quieted down; I heard only a faint strain of “Le Sabre” through the thin walls. Somewhere Sunny was arguing in a high-pitched, drunken voice.
I heard Lollibells laughing and then Zane. I was out the door like a nail flying to a magnet.
I ran barefoot across the gravel, to the sound of Zane’s laugher. The bastard! But Madge caught me in her thick arms.
“Listen,” she said, shaking me. “Listen to me. Percy is gone.” I tried to focus on her face, a white blur of tears.
“Who?”
“I have looked everywhere. He ain’t in the drain. Or on the fence. Or under the bed. He ain’t at yous guys place?” I told her that I hadn’t seen a python in our trailer, but she had to come over and look for herself. We checked the box where Zane kept his torches, and our suitcase, already packed for Gibson. The posters on the walls mocked me: THE ARTHUR REESE TRAVELING SHOW! THE MAN WITH ELASTIC EYEBALLS, FIFI THE HEADLESS WOMAN, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TEENAGER IN AMERICA, ZANE WILDER, THE HUMAN DRAGON! I was Louise Peppers, the groomless bride. Percy wasn’t in the shower or beneath the refrigerator, where he sometimes went to get warm. He wasn’t on the windowsill. We called the police, but they hung up on us.
“You and me kid,” said Madge, throwing her arm over my shoulder. “We lost ‘em. Losing Larry was just like this. Awful.” She picked up one of Zane’s socks and mopped her eyes with it. “I called and called. Dreamed about him every night. Still do, but it was easier with Percy wrapped around me. Took my mind off things. But I ain’t never forgot ole Larry. You don’t forget a cat like that. Him with his tail on fire, going on with the show.” When she moaned, I stepped back, thinking she might puke on me, but she only cried, “Oh God! Oh Jesus fucking Christ I loved that little snake!”
To get rid of her, I suggested that Percy might be on one of the rides.
“He gets carsick,” she said hesitantly, but her eyes grew bright, and she began walking rapidly toward the carousel calling out in a thin, raspy voice, “Percy! Percy, come to Mama!” Staggering behind her, I kept a lookout for Zane. What do you say to the man who has just stood you up at your wedding? It needed to be memorable. Maybe he’d ask me again. Then I could say no. With painful clarity I saw that the engagement ring was a down payment. Sunny didn’t have one either. In my mind, I heard Henry saying, “Why, he’s no good. Shiftless, lazy, irresponsible—you’re better off without hi
m.” Behind him, Florida said succinctly, “Trash.” But then I heard his voice, ringing out clear over “Le Sabre”—a smoky tenor touched with a fading drawl, and I was ready to negotiate. Maybe Sunny had kidnapped him. Maybe his car had broken down. Possibly he had the dates mixed up. I strode forward.
In the faint light of a broken Japanese lantern, the carousel spun brief, grotesque shadows in the dirt. Around and around, grinding out that mad gypsy tune, horses with flashing white teeth shot into the light and dipped away. Zane was on a gray mare with a broken tail and a red mouth stretched into a silent scream. He was with Lollibells. They were spooned in the saddle.
“Go Blixen, go Vixen!” cried Lollibells, kicking the wooden horse. “Giddy up, reindeer!”
Rocking in his arms, Zane tossed his head and sang, “Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you—” then he saw me standing there in my dirty wedding dress. “Aagh!” he cried, holding his hands over his eyes as the horse pumped out of sight. “The gorilla is here! Watch out!” When the horse circled back around, the men covered their eyes with their hands, screaming, “Go away, gorilla! Go away!”
Madge jogged beside them yelling, “Stop it! Get off that merry-go-round. Get off right now!”
“Oh lady, we are getting off!” said Lollibells.
“Can’t stop,” slurred Zane. “Lost the stopper.”
When she came back to me, her face was red. “Don’t cry over those fools,” she said with one hand on her hip, looking back at the carousel with an evil eye. “Goddamned children. Where’s Tic Toc? Somebody needs to turn that thing off. Stop that crying now. Come on back to my place. I’ll make us some coffee. Goddamned idiots. I ought to spank both of them. They sure do know how to spoil a party.”
When she put her arm around me, I sobbed into her chest, “I thought it was Sunny.”
“Aw baby, that was over a long time ago, him and Sunny. That damn Warren has been chasing his tail for—well, it don’t matter. I’m sorry you had to see it this way, dressed up and all. But we’re carnies, see? Around here, the saying goes, I love you baby, but the season’s over.”
The School of Beauty and Charm Page 24