Pages Torn From a Travel Journal

by Edward Lee

  A shock-reflex shot my hand back, where my billfold nearly hung halfway out of said pocket. “Poke-swipers” must be parlance for pick-pockets. How incognizant of me! I immediately enacted her counsel. “I cannot convey enough gratitude, Miss. The purity of your honestness could not be more axiomatic.”

  She giggled again. “My name’s Bliss,” she announced what I secretly already knew; with only a minimal difficulty, she extended a gracile, white hand whilst the pad of one crutch remained crooked into the joist of her arm & shoulder.

  When I shook it I could’ve melted at its softness. My throat quivered. “I’m Howard.”

  She sighed as if in relief. “Howard–it’s so good to meet someone smart and nice for a change! My goodness!”

  “I’m flattered, Bliss,” I replied, suspecting I’d blushed. “And what a delight it is to meet you,” but then a strange despair fell over me, for I knew that once I departed for the candied-apple stand . . .

  I would no longer be in her propinquity.

  “I wish I could go with you, but . . . like I said”–and then she slumped on her wooden props.

  “Of course, your employment here as a ‘poke-swiper,’” I said, “demands your presence.”

  She nodded, losing half the smile.

  I almost yelped when a massive hand landed softly on my shoulder. At once, I recognized the eloquent giant who spoke in fascinating antiquation: the poster-hanger.

  “Fine esquire, be sartain of ye delight by my witness of thy coming into acquaintanceship with our loyal sarvant, Bliss.”

  “The delight is exclusively mine, Sir,” I assured him.

  “It is with a heart most complimented that I behold thee now, for trusting mine assurance of ye credulity of O’Slaughnassey’s Travelling Show.”

  “My expectations are exceeded multitudinously, for your endeavor here is far more complete than any I’ve seen or imagined”–shrieks in the wake of a soaring roller-coaster shot my glance upward. “It’s an astonishingly commendable show, indeed–and I’m most in debt to you for your generosity.”

  The titan man bowed hugely.

  “And,” I continued on a shocking impulse, “I am now twice-fold in debt, for my being here at your gracious invitation has bestowed upon me this opportunity”–I paused & looked directly into Bliss’s deep-sea eyes–“to meet Bliss.”

  Now it was Bliss who blushed. The compliment seemed to have taken her aback, after which she seemed to blunder a response, “My friend here, Howard, was asking how to get to the candy apple stand.”

  Akin to magic, several 5-cent tickets appeared at the tips of the smiling giant’s fingers; they were offered, then, to me. “Of this small token, excellent Sar, I beg thee to accept with all my gratefulness”–for the second time today, the generosity of this virtual goliath left me in an ebullient shock; however that shock would strike thrice when he supplied, “And it is Bliss who shalt accompany thee to ye sweet fruit which calls thy desire.”

  Bliss rose on her crutches. “Oh, thank you, Septimus!” she squealed.

  Septimus! I thought. A great name from the earliest Colonial days! I’d have to use it.

  The giant–Septimus–took Bliss’s place as sentinel. Nothing could’ve made me more ecstatic, & in diction nearly as articulate as his, I rained more thanks, & Bliss & I were on our course–into the peopled turmoil of the “midway.”

  This woman-child struck me as one of the most graceful bearing, even on her regrettable crutches. Crippled angel, I thought in foggy muse. Suddenly my misgivings of the surly–indeed, the red-neck—throng dissolved as thin frost against morning sun. The soap-scent off Bliss’s hair left me absolutely drunk with fascination & attraction; thus far, I hadn’t even let my gaze stray past her shoulders, yet our crowd-wending now allowed me the ungentlemanly chance to pursue cursory examination. A fluffy white-cotton gown adhered with perfection against her the feminine curvatures; & it would be understatement to declare that her bosom thrust forward in abundance & an absolute lack of defect. This woman’s presence left me in a thrall I could only describe as libidinally unrelenting; it is a fact, too, that I’d never been so densely taken by a woman, so psychically arrested.

  The midway, as it’s called, struck me as a dual-flowing river of chatty, malodorous humanity: a churning, bustling domdaniel leading to recesses unknown. We moved along with its course, myself nearly unaware of the closeness of so sullied a crowd. Prefatorial conversation commenced without delay: first my own provenance, then hers, though of myself I mentioned only that I was an antiquary & one having an interest in genealogy, the cosmological sciences, & a “devotee” of weird fiction. I did not reveal my entire name (not that any familiarity would likely strike her), nor that I had accrued a professional publishing history. Of herself, I learned that she’d been born but 19 years afore in the state of Maryland & a military town called Parole, “Where the Army prison used to be,” she’d said. Her father had been in the Army, & had even been deployed to the mystery-shrouded province of Shannxi in exotic China.

  “What,” I asked, “prompted you into carnival life?”

  She glided so effortlessly along on her crutches that scarcely a hitch was noticeable. “My husband owns the carnival. He has for years, and he’s been really successful, even with the bad things in the economy.”

  “I may presume, then, that your surname is O’Slaughnassey?”

  “That’s right. I’d introduce you to my husband, but . . . ” Whatever remained of her sentence dissipated like vapor, & her ever-present smile did as well.

  The delay of cognizance shocked me. Wait! came my self-exclamation. Her husband is the travelling show’s possessor and presumably its topmost hierarch . . .

  I stared into the shifting crowd.

  And Bliss is a prostitute . . .

  At least that was the implication of the mechanic, Nate, based on testimony of a confidante. The deduction’s implication gored me: O’Slaughnassey engages his own wife as a lady of the evening!

  I quelled my outrage & continued to bear as if undistractedly enjoying our amble through the carnival’s nerve-centre. Above us, like great, clanging, metallic beasts, the carnival rides spun, twisted, & soared while their driving motors beat a gusting staccato into the air. Passing on either side were stalls featuring a miscellany of either spectacles or gaming ventures–ring toss, shellgames, sledgehammers meant to be swung in an effort to raise a clanger to a bell & prove one’s physical strength; soothsayers, “unnatural” medical specimens, contortionists, etc., etc.—which might otherwise have flagged my interest. Today, they did not, however. The entirety of my interest remained on Bliss.

  Yet as she pursued more sundry talk, that beaconlike cast of her visage remained declined. I prepared to inquire of her sudden rupture of mood & aura, but—curse Pagana!–I lost my nerve as I so often had in the past. Meanwhile, as we made our way, various functionaries—“roustabouts” & “ride-jocks,” factotums, stocky toughs who served as guards, roving custodians bearing brooms & mops like halberds–all of them grinned too brightly at her, & offered snippets of greetings that seemed to possess some connotation between the words. When one–a ticket-taker with an eye-patch & a shining bolus on his forehead–cracked, “Hey, Blissy? What say later, me’n you, huh?”

  She replied with no more than a silent frown, & continued down the lane on her crutches.

  “Oh, Howard . . . ” She sighed in a way that slumped her gentle shoulders. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You needn’t say anything unless it suits you. I’m very contented simply being in your company,” & after I’d said that, I could hardly believe my bravado.

  “You do know why Septimus let me leave, don’t you? You must.”

  The question left me confused. “Why . . . I suppose to give you a break, and direct a customer to his destination, in this case, the candied apple vendor.”

  Several more strides on the crutches. Only then did I glance at her feet, which did not extend as they should but i
nstead appeared rolled up.

  Like fists.

  Stretched over them were white socks. Hands down there, I realised. Not feet . . . Eventually she went on, “But you’ve obviously met him before, so . . . you must know . . . ”

  A pause on my part. “Oh, yes, your friend Septimus appeared earlier at the repair garage, to post an advert.”

  She seemed startled, snapping a glance at me. “That’s all?”

  “Well . . . yes. It was the simplest matter, really. He affixed the poster, provided some tickets at no cost–a grateful excess of generosity, I must say—then was off in his motor.”

  “Did you . . . ,” but she gulped as if disconcerted. “Did you see the drawing of me on the poster?”

  “Why, no,” I prevaricated with an immediacy that darkened my spirit.

  “And Septimus told you nothing about me?”

  “He mentioned you not at all.”

  “In here,” she said hastily, & turned me through a narrow gap between a stall selling funnel cakes & that of a Negro woman whose forte was apparently the bending of spoons & other elongated metal objects, all by force of mind alone.

  The compressed gap led us to a surprisingly silent nook created by several transport trailers squared off. Bliss struck flint to ignite several lamps whose odor told me they’d been filled with candlefish oil. Wan light exposed several tin cans of cigarette butts & crates serving as seats. “How convenient and comfortably secluded from the crowd,” said I. “An area where workers–carnies, I’m sorry—may partake in respite.”

  Her face turned blank at my remark. More & more a cast of sullenness seemed to weigh her down on the wooden props. “It’s what we call a ‘possum belly,’ Howard–”

  “A what?”

  “A possum belly. Don’t know where that came from but that’s what they’re called.”

  I chuckled at the queer designation. “I’m sure I don’t understand, Bliss.”

  Her expression remained blank. “A possum belly is a secret place at a carnival, an area between trailers, an out-of-the-way tent, or even the storage compartments under the trailers themselves.” She pointed to a bare mattress, befouled by stains, which was half-visible in the shifting dark. “It’s a place where carny girls . . . can bring men to–you know. For money.”

  I tried to act unfazed. “Ah, I see.”

  “Do you really, Howard?” She sat on a crate, leaning the crutches aside. When I chose a farther crate, she reached up & snatched my wrist, a sub-verbal insistence that I sit, instead, next to her. Then she went on in the same agitation. “Girls come here to hook, Howard! And I’m one of them!”

  The silence oscillated in the wavering oil light.

  “That’s why Septimus let me leave, to work you,” & now a tear glimmered in her eye.

  Work me, I let the words drool down some slope in my gut. “Bliss, I–”

  Now that lovely, sun-bright face turned to stone. “I can’t lie to you, Howard. I lie all the time, I have to! But I can’t to you!” She began to cry openly. “I’m a prostitute! I sell myself!”

  It was without conscious forethought that I took her hand. “Bliss. I don’t care about such things–”

  “Did you know?”

  “Of course not,” came my next lie, but what choice did this cringing circumstance leave me? “I don’t care, and I don’t engage in the assigning of judgments. I’m quite taken by you.”

  She collapsed in my arms, sobbing. “Oh, thank God, thank God! I knew He’d answer my prayer.” Her svelte arms tightened about me. “You’re so different. You remind me of the part of the world I can never have. To everyone else, I’m just a freak to fuck. I’m like-I’m like a spittoon–”

  “Don’t speak of yourself like that; it is an untenable circumstance which has effected your burdens.” My own arm tightened about her as she continued to sob into my chest. The hair-scent dizzied me most pleasantly, & in spite of my determination not to regard her sexually, my chest constricted from an all-pervading rouse.

  “I feel so good now–that you didn’t know,” her whisper slipped against my ear. “I thought–I thought you were just another john who’d . . . heard about me,” & then she kissed me ever-so-daintily on my lips.

  “Set your mind at ease, Bliss,” I tried to console. “I could never in eons think of you in such terms; and, truly, I understand that in calamitous economic times, we must all engage in activities we otherwise wouldn’t.”

  Her whisper continued to flow against my ear. “Many men come to me because, well, I have no teeth. It makes me . . . do certain things better. I was . . . born without them.” I sensed that my being here for her to talk to gave her a much-needed comfort. “And then . . . my feet, too. I’d show you, but you’d be repulsed.”

  “Nothing relative to you, Bliss, could ever leave me repulsed.”

  She moved away in hesitation, stared off a moment, then lifted an attractive leg, displaying the white sock that seemed to sheath a fist. All I could say was, “Congenital anomalies, such as an absence of dentation, and developmental maladaptations of extremities are more common than you may think.”

  She looked at the fisted foot, began to reach forward. “They bill me at my show as having hands instead of feet but that’s really not true.” Then she removed the sock.

  It was not a “fist” at the end of her svelte leg; in fact, it didn’t appear to be a hand at all, but instead an aberrantly developed foot, smaller as if proper growth had been subverted, & rolled inward. “My father saw to it,” she said dismally. “He’d been sent to fight the Boxers, in China, a long time ago, & he learned about ‘foot-binding–’”

  Immediately I winced at the outrage. I knew too well of this savage, subjugating procedure by which the feet of infant females were bound up to thwart proper growth; I’d seen sketches in several texts. It was a way to keep the female immobile & hence ultimately subservient. “In other words, your father inflicted you with this, after having seen evidence of its technique during his dispatch with the Army to rescue American diplomats and missionaries held by the Quing Dynasty in the first years of the century.”

  In utter dejection, Bliss nodded.

  My rage rose. A father who would deliberately bind her feet, & a husband who would sexually exploit her via her abnormalities? What kind of a world was this to allow such devilish things?

  She put the sock back on, having apparently vented all she needed. At once, she was calm again, & continued to hold my hand. In phantasy, though, I pictured the most excruciating tortures for both her wretched father & beastly husband. “Oh, but we were going to the candy apple stand!” she remembered, & up she went, effortlessly on her crutches. Unable now to hold her hand, I kept it instead opened over the small of her back, an unconscious initiative for I felt desperate to sustain some modicum of physical contact. The effort seemed to please her as we plunged again into the beating human flux called the midway.

  The apple vendor was soon discovered; subconsciously, I was about to order 2 but then winced when I remembered Bliss’s absence of teeth. Next, we continued on our way, chatting innocuously; all the while, I forced myself to not contemplate the ordeal she would face later, via her “johns” & her “show.” Toward the end of the midway’s course there came a make-shift manner of cul-de-sac, featuring a trio of strongmen hoisting barbells of staggering size; & a “dunk-the-fool” game. But betwixt the last pair of stands, I glimpsed a personal trailer more exotic than any other & sitting higher. For a moment, a fancily carven door opened from which the trailer’s occupant peered into the crowd. It was a gaunt, sallow-skinned older man in coattails, string tie, & blazing white vest. The thin, whiskery face looked incised, with heavily hooded eyes, & an overall mirthless countenance whose cast bespoke contented greed & measured callousness. I would guess the man to be in vicinity of 60.

  “Oh, no,” Bliss murmured. “Let’s turn here, quick—”

  I followed her lead, dismayed, noticing then that the coattailed man’s subtly hateful ga
ze had fallen on us. “Bliss,” I began, “that man in the exorbitant trailer seems to be–”

  “Shhh! It’s my husband. He’ll thrash me if he thinks I’m lollygagging!”

  “Thrash–”

  “Howard, put your arm around me. If he thinks you’re a john then he won’t beat me.”

  I hardly had time to decipher her meaning, but did as asked. “This is crude,” she said next, “but . . . you’ll understand . . . ,” & as we slowly made the turn, in full view of this wretched overseer O’Slaughnassey, Bliss stopped on her crutches a moment, kissed me quite lewdly, & also caressed my crotch for the briefest moment.

  I tensed, my member reared like a teased beast. I could’ve fallen over at the sweet shock.

  “Let’s keep going now, quick!”

  Dazed, I did as instructed. In the corner of my eye, I saw O’Slaughnassey disappear back into his trailer.

  “I’m sorry, Howard,” Bliss explained, strangely winded. “You don’t understand the situation with my husband, but I had to do that because–”

  “To project to your husband the pretense of going about the business that he forces you to engage in, yes–I understand.” To the Pit of the Shoggoths, I wished O’Slaughnassy. To be sodomized by para-dimensional monstrosities forever would suit him just fine.

  She sighed, but in relief this time. “I’m so happy you understand, Howard. I would never do such things if I wasn’t stuck in this awful carnival.”

  “Of course, you wouldn’t.”

  “If only I could hide enough of my earnings to get away, or . . . ”

  Get away, her words rolled in my head. A dream was already forming: that she get away . . . with me . . .

  It was short work I made of the ambrosial candied apple, & lascivious thoughts indeed that occupied a recess in my mind, namely the image of myself giving oral ministrations to a panting & arch-backed Bliss while her strange compacted feet held the back of my head. Certainly, her climax would be all-encompassing, & just as certainly her delectable sex would taste sweeter than the apple. Ah, but what a ludicrous if not wholly uncharacteristic phantasy, eh? Following the throng’s clockwise current, Bliss pointed out more of the show’s prominent features; we hadn’t yet traversed this side of the midway, & I found the pickings here more interesting &, I dare say, more outre. Better still, with Bliss as my escort, I was admitted to each specialty tent for free!