I dodged away, laughing, which was what she wanted. “Better to give me something to sweat out my troubles,” I said.
“Trobbles! If you think I’ll give you hard drink, you’re wrong about your fortune, Buddy boy. How about some nice tea? You have trobbles at home, boy? You not like Pittsburgh when you get there?”
“Listen, Pauline, there’s no moneyback guarantee about anybody’s fortune.”
“You disappointed in family at home in Pittsburgh, boy? You didn’t get with it there?”
I nodded my head stubbornly. Grack’s trouble was enough for me to think about now without messing with my father’s and mine. “I’m with and for a cup of tea,” I said.
She shook her hips and went to light the alcohol burner. She set out three cups, three spoons, and a box of cookies. The water boiled fast. She caught my eye on the third cup and said, “We’re closing up for a few minutes, why not?” And she poked her head through the curtain: “Joy! Come on in here, brat.” Before Joy could close the cage, Pauline waddled back to kiss me on the forehead.
13. Joy came in
JOY lifted the curtain and waited, smiling as if she didn’t know which way to go but hoped to be invited. She knew, and she was going fast toward womanliness. The hair of this fierce, swart, berry-dark girl was cut short and grew like electricity low down her neck and curled about her ears. She may have come from a gypsy father. She wore a man’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and a skirt cut from cheap rough blue cloth, the stuff the Southern mills make for the crackers still further South. Her legs were rounding. Her feet, tiny and without socks, padded in tennis shoes. I could stand up and peek at the little-girl breasts: but they weren’t a little girl’s anymore, as they had been a few months before when she had tried to tease and run from me. She wasn’t running now; she was standing and using her teeth to grin, biting her lips. She had a lovely taunting mug of a face, drawn forward to the mouth. Oh yes, her father was a gypsy. Her lips were filled with blood; she was all filled with blood, sweet and hot, and the blood whirled dizzily through the new curves of her.
What was it she had said to me once? Soda paste good for my broken nose? Playing-at-Pauline words.
“Sit down to your tea, honeys.” I had stood up. “Sit down, Joy darling. I’m putting cream in your tea, Joy.”
“Put down that can of condensed milk, Mama.”
“You need the strength for the years ahead of you.”
Joy grinned, but leaned like a cat spitting: “No, Mama, I like it without.”
Pauline turned to me, proud in defeat. “She wants to get her own way these days. I was like that, too. It only brought me trobble and trobble and trobble telling the good fortune of others when I had nothing but bad luck for myself.”
“And I’ll put my own sugar in, too,” Joy said.
“But one thing about her and me,” Pauline said, “I took care of her like my own child all by myself. A man helped me to her, true, but she was only mine, for I did give him the boot and heave-ho a couple months later. Trobble? Trobble! Later he came back to look at Joy and wanted to make her his daughter, but I would never let him take advantage of us.”
“Mama, is there any of that marmalade left?” Joy was hungry, snatching at the cookies and looking for more.
“No more marmalade, honey. I’ll have to send into town. Then one yellow carnie oddball after the other tried to be man to me and poppa to Joy. I said no. Sometimes they used to come and peek down into the box where the baby was sleeping and I’d catch them feeling her cheeks, I’d catch them thinking, figuring a kootchie dance or a sideshow come-on or some other wormy fig carnieness in their noodles. No sir. Joy gave me nothing but trouble—pardon, trobble—but it wasn’t her fault. She was always sweet, loved and appreciated her mother from the very start, and I catch how rare that is from my clients. A delight to me.”
“Mama,” Joy said, “just let me have the jar and I bet I can scrape out enough for one little heel of bread.”
“Shut up, honey, we eat at eight o’clock.”
“Hungry, Mama!”
“Then have a cookie. Eat. No one else wants them, they’re soggy and stale.”
“Not my fault if they’re stale. You went and hid them so I wouldn’t finish the box.”
Pauline turned heavily to me, asking approval, as she said, “Just wanted you to eat your veggy-tables, honey. Listen to her, Bud. Listen to me, Joy is the finest little filly ever got with it, plus the hungriest. But that ain’t my fault, it’s her age. And ain’t been deflowered yet, either, have you, honey? No sir ee. I give you my guarantee, Bud.”
I pursed my lips judiciously into my cup and finished the tea, warmed now by friendly gossip and a hot infusion. I huffed out the tea steam and cracked the sugar between my teeth. Joy was looking at my nose to see how it had healed. Pauline must have understood that my anger and teasing when Joy tried to take care of the nose were a warning to a mother. Teasing and anger in children are a sign of good things to come. She was saying:
“I left my first husband, her father, for how he looked at other girls. Then I left any one of my other men if they took a look at Joy the wrong way. That way. It wasn’t mean jealousy, it was my mental picture of this daughter of mine. Having mental pictures, by the way, is how I always ran a reliable mittcamp, read your hand good. Yes, Bud, she’s as pure as her heart, she’s as pure as my conscience, she’s a fine young thing and that’s the truth. Bud, you maybe won’t believe me what I’m here to tell you, but this here daughter Joy of mine is a goddamn virgin if she been telling the truth, and she wouldn’t lie to Momma Pauline, would you, honey? I see all, know all.”
Joy was choking with laughter, her black eyes squeezed up tight but not daring to open her mouth. It was full of cookie.
“Here, have some cream,” Pauline said. “She calls it condensed milk, the stubborn critter.”
I showed her my empty cup.
“Drink up anyway. Give you strength. You want maybe another cup of tea? I got sugar to spare, kids, plenty of sweetening. Joy! Manners! Eat the cookie before you swallow it.”
At last she fell back to look upon Joy and me in silence, smiling all over, adjusting the fortuneteller’s skirt of mystic blue, tilting the turban which had fallen over her cockeyes in the effort of drinking tea, scratching her swollen ankles, and caressing the varicose veins which came of too much sitting and holding of her own troubles while she predicted the never-never happiness of others. She returned from her commentaries with a dreamy look, like that of a very high flier, and she said, “I bet you’re not hungry, you two, after all this eating? I bet. I bet you want to know each other better after so much absence? I bet. I bet you need a walk in Georgia, since there’s nothing more improving, before you can have any appetite at all for dinner? I bet.”
“I can pick up my supper in a diner someplace,” I said.
“I bet,” said Pauline angrily. “You eat in Pauline’s mittcamp and noplace else, boy. Now go for your little stroll and don’t worry about me. This is no afternoon”—and she sniffed the tent-hot air—“this is no evening for business. Even the mosquitoes smell like no business, but we’ll pay ourselves to have you back.”
“Thanks, Pauline,” I said.
“Give me a kiss.” I did touch my lips to that vast prairie of a cheek, pock-marked and scuttled, badly hurt by face powder and conflict all alone with men; and then, when she turned the cavern up to me, I kissed her creviced expanse of mouth. “Thanks, Pauline,” I said, meaning the talk and the dinner and the finding of a friend.
She rocked with laughter, slapping her loose thighs, which must have been how she knocked over and lost the crystal ball, crying out, “When I was a girl, Buddy, a man never thanked me for a kiss. Not Pauline, boy! He just took it and howled for pain.”
Joy and I lifted the flap and walked out. She waited for me—not like Phyllis!—and we slid through sideways together. We bumped and said, “Oh, sorry.” She was shy and lovely and fierce as an animal with her tawny ski
n and its light down pink in the last slanting columns of daylight. She could make me forget Grack and Pittsburgh, and then perhaps even remember me enough to unforget them again. It was the good part of a suburb to take a walk in the evening, although this was the suburb of a midway in deep Georgia, with a Negro wilderness outside and a white wilderness surrounding it and my next decision up to me.
And up to Joy.
14. Calliope and coffee, with sounds of counting
AT evening, together with the dark flash of calliope music and the whir of the Ferris wheel, turning to lure the lovers with strings of colored bulbs against the sky, comes the carnie’s second morning. It is the time of dinner and a further awakening to the pitch and burn of the carnival night. Camp stoves smoke; steam of frying and tomato sauce rises from trailers and tents; men in riding breeches and women in chenille bathrobes yawn, stretch, sigh, and complain. Someone kisses someone: Wake up! Accustomed to each other, there is privacy despite the elbowing and tripping against friend and enemy on the narrow path to the latrine. Stroll slowly through this tight knot of working men and women, drawn together to do battle against the Indians, and find its familiar housekeeping: a pretty blonde shaving her legs with the trailer door open, a freak deepening his tattoo with wash ink, Lucy being hit over the head by Frank with a rolled copy of Billboard because this made three nights in a row for spaghetti. A couple of tenthands are taking their flannel shirts off a line; they tell the news: Still damp at the collar! Wake up, wake up! Another button gone, Harry! Beyond the second morning of the carnie, purple and dusty, lay the Georgia countryside at evening, hostile, murmurous, and mark-laden.
I remembered Joy’s long tomboy step because once I had watched her carry a box of pink babydolls for prizes, running down a path in Indiana with her narrow feet bare and her arches so high she left a print like feathers tipped with toes in the Hoosier loam. Her step now shortened by the weight of woman she carried, she was still slender and easy under the shirt with its rolled sleeves, and she worked her knees without great care against the denim skirt. Her mouth was small, sweet, and heavy to look at. It pouted when I looked. “Wait up!” I said, making talk. “Maybe this lot is a pretty good place for the setup.”
“There’s water okay,” she said, knotting a handkerchief about her throat, “but the town doesn’t know the color of money.”
“They want to have fun?”
“Every day is Good Friday,” she said. “They have to get liquored up before they laugh at anything more than a Yankee falling off a ladder or a broad getting tickled. Where you going?”
“There’s a stand of pine over there. It must mean water.” There really was a thick knot of pine, and I had a sudden fiery desire to put the Georgia countryside and the carnival buzz behind us for a time before I began work in it. Nothing was settled yet; I had not even seen Bossman Stan; but I had felt the way Joy knotted the handkerchief about her throat and the pine looked cool and I wanted to ask her a few things. “Pauline looked like she didn’t mind my bothering her,” I said.
“Mama always liked you.”
“Nice Pauline.” I walked faster, embarrassed because she had to say it and it was true and I knew it was true and yet I had managed to make her say it. “You think Stan will let me have a go at the countstore again?” His habit of looking at me was for lushes and first-of-Mayers, not the finest way for an owner to look at a talker.
“Maybe not,” she said. “You ran out once.”
“That’s not reason. Every man who ever got with it tried to chuck it once. Why not?”
“Maybe not,” she repeated.
“What’s reason then?”
“He talked against you.”
“So? I was gone, wasn’t I? Now I’m back.”
She paused before saying: “Grack turned bad after you left.…”
“That’s not reason, Joy.”
“No,” she said, “no, you’re right. That’s not reason. But Stan—you know Stan.”
“What? Why? He’s a smart boss, how else would he get his own show? Why would he want to do more’n complain? I’m a good talker.”
She shrugged. “He’s been jabbering at me.” And then there was the coy, flirting, childish hitch of her shoulders, her hands in imaginary pockets. “You ever hear how we got with it with Bossman Stan?”
And she told me from the beginning the story of Pauline’s looking for a steady place for raising her kid. We walked in Georgia and I saw it happening six years back when I was a pimply high school kid only thinking about college:
—Want clean American mittcamp? Pauline had asked Owner Stan.—Use Pauline, me here. I sell and foretell. I go peacefully. I only score on Saturday.
Joy had wrinkled her nose at Stan, trying to flirt at age twelve.—She has to score on Saturday to buy me a dress. I grow out so fast. I do, Mr. Bossman.
Stan had not smiled, but he yawned, crunched down hard on his cigar, and said yes.—Okay, you’re on. Listen. Rules of the show: no junkies, lushes, signifiers, or agitators. No bad habits. No gypsies but one.… He had cocked an eye at little Joy.—Don’t solicit for your kid, she’s too young, but you can let her help you turn the tip.
And finally the lids and flaps of his thin face had lifted in a smile for Joy:—And how does your mommy score on Saturday, carnie brat? Treasure maps? Mexican prisoner? Syph cure? Or does she just pick a boozer’s pocket while she feels for his fortune?
For all Pauline’s years on the show now, Stan had been after Joy with his teasing.—And when do we score on Saturday, girlie?
And Joy always answered with the carnie command to ease up or get slapped down:—Go peacefully, Bossman, you’re not ready to score.…
When she finished her tale I kept my peace. You don’t often hear ancient history on a lot. I walked with her and considered this beginning against my own, all that wife of Pauline without a husband, all that husband of my pa without a wife. And the kids always making out someway. We moved together across the burnt-over Georgia field to the clump of woods. Joy was sighing and gradually coming back to the present season. “I don’t know why Bossman would want to talk against you to me. He shouldn’t have picked me, Bud. Wait up!” Now it was my turn to be speeding from her on my own nervous feet, as if she were suddenly Phyllis, but she stopped me with a sober straight-on question: “Bud, listen, are you sure you want with it now? You really need a countstore now, Bud, for picking the pockets of the marks? You want to work like Mama?”
“What’s the matter with Pauline? Your mother’s a lady, Joy.”
“Honestly you want to get with it and for it, Bud? That what you learned in Pittsburgh?” I was moving fast, not caring if she followed, wanting her to follow without her questions. She touched my elbow. “Wait up, Bud.”
Yes!
“Did you say something to me, Bud?”
“Yes, Joy, that’s what I want right now.”
She shook her lovely mug and the shorn black curls shook. “Well, that’s all right then, Bud. I’m with it, too.” She walked with stretching steps, dodging imaginary rocks in the dirt, winning bets with herself. She had retreated and would not say any further for now. The last dark stain of sun was finished in the sky.
We walked in the deepening silence until I decided to chance another question. “Did you see much of Grack? What made him make trouble all at once, Joy?”
“It wasn’t all at once.”
“What made him start so much trouble? He was a friend to everybody. He was the straightest guy on the lot—hard to be a friend to, okay, but straight.”
She shrugged her shoulders and took a deep breath of pine as we turned into the patch of woods. We both stopped, blinked, and waited to see in the dark.
“Answer my question, Joy.”
“You’re just going to answer it yourself.”
“How do you know? You a mitt reader like your mother.”
She took my hand, stared at it, puzzled over it, laughed, dropped it. She laughed again because she knew this made me
jump when her fingers explored my palm.
“You think I had something to do with it? Grack liked me, sure, but he wanted me to get out and that’s no reason for picking up Casanapopolous’s boodle. You think he wanted me to stay around with him? Listen, Joy, you don’t know how he worked to get me free of the show.”
“I remember something about it,” she insisted softly.
“All right, then how was it my fault? How then?”
She stopped in the shadow of the rapid night, falling swiftly under these pine branches, and her feet slipped on the mat of brown pine needles, and she said, “It wasn’t your fault. If he had known you’d be back he’d have been just as bad about it. He wanted you to stay away. It would have been worse if he knew you were coming back.”
These words were no longer those of the child of a few months ago. Joy was telling me. She was learning something in Pauline’s mittcamp, but she was learning more from the rub of years against her mouth and the slanting black gypsy eyes. “You think he’d have minded if he knew why I came back?”—and my voice was hoarse.
She let me move against her, then moved away. “Why was that?” she asked. “Why’d you come back, Bud?”
“For you.”
She stood swaying next to me, stilled by this, astonished, dizzy (I knew) because I was dizzied by her, and then suddenly burst into an agonized clatter of laughter: “Liar! liar! liar!” she pealed out like bells at the hour. “Liar, when did you ever think of me?”
She ran down the path deeper into the woods while I ran after her, trying to explain, “Yes, it’s true I’m a liar, but I’m thinking about you now, Joy. You like to hear me lie like that, don’t you? Don’t you like lies?”
“You never thought of me, never!”—and her laughter grew more and more breathless and light as she fled slithering and bounding on the pine needles. I had seen her run before; she no longer ran like a lanky boy. Her arms were held high and her elbows away and, nimble though she was, fleet though she was, she ran with a woman’s high ripe weight at her throat in the darkening woods. Suddenly she stopped. We were at the edge of the pool. It was covered with moss and the greenness was silver in the precocious night. There might still have been a trace of day in the sky, there always is, but here under the pine it was midnight and only a wisping of dampness that rose from secret warmth and coolness. Out of breath, exasperated by her laughter, I caught up and stood beside her, not touching her once, as she looked into the pond. She was bending and looking and pondering sweetly on things that matter to girls. “What do you see?” she asked me.
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