“It’s true,” he admitted, “we got a couple new fairs. A Legion next week, a dunkers’ church Friday a week.”
“And they’re fresh dates, not any kadotas?” This means that the farmers were unscarred by the countstore trap and the larceny in their hearts would be nice and fresh and palpitating.
“It’s true.” And he figured, leaning back on the red plastic seat of a chromium kitchen chair. All the furniture of his trailer was of this sort, chromium, plastic, the flash of display window at a 52-pay appliance store off the main avenue where the greedy poor pay and pay and pay. The two front paws of the chair screeched forward as he made his decision, a decision squeezed out by the wink of cupidity instead of the fearful boredom of his yawn over Grack and Joy. He needed me. He would keep me. I would help him clean the marks and wipe their bones. “True, all so true,” he said.
“I’ll set up right away.”
“When can you be ready?”
“Two days, Stan, I already told you.”
“Just don’t fool around with that Joy, Bud. And don’t go the way Grack went.”
“What does Joy have to do with it? You get your percentage.”
His head shook as if trying to rattle loose a bad idea. “Okay, okay, Bud.” He worked himself up to a smile, putting forward his hand, the other paw sweeping his neat little piles of cash toward his bosom. “Shake on it.”
“That’s right, shake—” But I left his hand hanging in air. “Fifty-fifty then, that right?”
He kept the hand forward, saying, “Whaddyah mean? It’s my setup, my show, my space. I handle the fuzz and everything. You’re just a greenie in the business. It’s a natural forty-sixty deal.”
“Unh,” I tried to say. I wanted to be an ox. “No, Bossman.” I wasn’t for giving him sixty per cent of my take, no sir, when all he supplied was a little cardboard and a sign and a couple of light bulbs and a board and marbles and an extra grin for the sheriff and some slum that would rarely leave us. No, no.
“Which means what?”
“Which means no.”
“Then that’s the answer,” he said.
“The nice answer is yes, Stan, and fifty-fifty. That’s plenty and you know it.”
“Bud, be smart—”
“If I were smart, Bossman—”
“—Be smart, think smart, kid.” His voice rose to a treble whine. “Look, you can gaff it for the extra per cent. You’re in charge. You can even cheat me for the extra per cent. I got no check on you.”
This made me smile; it made him wink and yawn at me, his palate cracking. “I don’t want to cheat you, Stan, I want to play you straight fifty-fifty, not gaff you for fifty-fifty.”
“What diff it make to you, Bud? What’ll the folks say if they hear you talked old Stan into a fifty-fifty deal on a countstore when you’re just a kid and it’s all my marbles?” He appealed to me to rob him for the sake of his reputation for rough dealing. “Remember, kid, I got to spend the winter with them in Orlando.”
“I don’t care what you flash to the people, Stan, I just want to play you straight and ungaffed at fifty for fifty. That’s all.”
“Joy will think I’m losing the touch, please—”
“What diff about Joy, Bossman? Listen”—and I leaned to him with my confidential grin on my face—“you say she’s just a sweet kid, don’t you? Okay, what diff? If you tell her forty-sixty and I tell her I’m gaffing against you, then what diff? You ought to brush your teeth, Stan.” He had yawned in my face.
Greed won in this bright chromium, bright red plastic trailer. He needed me; I knew that he needed me. He also knew that I would really give him his fifty-fifty, not say fifty-fifty and then go on gaffing against him until he booted me out. He finally said, “Yes, what toothpaste you recommend?” And then: “Okay, Bud, I give that you’re a good man for a kid. Stay out of trouble now. Come in and let’s cut up that jackpot someday.”
Now I took the hand as it lifted once more across his money, the revolver, and the pink plastic skin stretched across a trailer-size kitchen table. Stan was not yawning, but winking and winking me out of his home. He half-stood for farewell. “You’re a bargain, Bud.”
I was on the show.
16. Pleasant is as pleasant pleases
THE next day was twenty-seven miles further on and already I was hot at calling. The marks who diddled their balls in my game were used-up marks, brother, as used up as only Georgia crackers get with their long bony red faces and wrists and their sly ways at holding their pants. My own pockets pulled at the seams with a hard little roll without even gaffing Stan a teeny bit, not that I had anything against it; my luck came so good that the idea hardly occurred to me. I spent freely on a wide-brimmed hat and felt fine when the popcorn man said, “Right chere, Tex!” With a strap. With a sharp narrow band. With a feather. When I say I had luck, I mean my talk, my way with the crowd and the larcenous slickers who shuffled forward to my cackle. I was the cock of this meager barnyard, and when I went kokoreeko the marks fluffed their rearends and stepped up to get stung and then to drop their eggs. That ain’t just luck: I was good.
Of course 1 was thinking ahead. The man who figures ahead makes himself some good luck. Yes, and Grack was no longer mine to do my thinking for me. I was ready to get myself money and a place to breathe in—although the money is only money in a penny-one traveling show and the place to breathe in is only cheap scorched Georgia air where even the truckers bound for Jacksonville keep their noses high, the better to peep with, my dears, and their pants buttoned if they can.
Once or twice, maybe tired as sometimes you get, I talked too hard and high, “Lookee here, lookee here, lookee here!” and my index finger flew to my eye with Grack’s old come-on, a shadow of habit which I didn’t mean. My talk and way with the people were really all mine, whatever you might have seen on that one purple-shadowed late afternoon, or maybe twice. Tired was all. For the rest, Grack would have been proud of me, and pleased that I was proud of myself. He knew hurry-in skill when he met it. He would have grinned to see how I had learned from him but got to do more and more like my very own Bud.
I had trouble with the setup that Stan let me, of course. It wasn’t a fifty-fifty worth. It was two bits of slum. It had bad need of paint and nails and glue and soap and water. Joy carried a bucket and wore jeans and helped me sop it down. She painted green paint on the board and got her flushed face streaked with it and handprints of green on her hips when she stood off to wipe them: “Well, well, this store is an opener, Bud. Smells the sweat-money already.”
“How do you know I want to stick with a countstore?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t see it exactly, but no, not all my life long. But first I need me a stake.”
“Wipe off your marbles, Bud, they’re getting sticky from hands.” She wiped each one in an oily rag. She even patched the holes in the canvas with canvas-colored chewing gum—that’s the womanly touch. I’d never have thought of it. Her elbows jabbed me. “Don’t you laugh, Bud.”
I stood back and hawed.
“I’ll empty this bucket of Japalac on you if you laugh.”
I hawed and grabbed her wrists when she made as if to heave the bucket at my head. “Oh! Ouch! Ooh!”—the game was to wrestle and sway and hold the wrists of this slender, short-black-curly-haired creature in green-marked jeans and a Sears white shirt. That morning, while the carnie was still sleeping it off, Stan passed with his eyes all crudded and gave us his yawn. We were squirming, puffing, knees bumping, with paint splashing in the sawdust. A tongue of it hit the dartgame next door.
“Watch out for the property,” he said. “This business ain’t no playtoy for kids.”
“Stan’s mad at you,” I whispered to Joy.
She shook her hands loose, scowling, and watched him down to the latrine shack. “Old nanny goat.”
The rocking in the pit of my stomach I recognized for jealousy, a sick turning without reason, unsteady and crowding me, but
I said only, “That a way to talk about the boss carnie?”
“Dirty old goat,” she said, and took up a tin can of silver glow-in-the-dark paint, a surprise gift from Pauline to me. Her tongue between her teeth, solemn, composing, she wrote on the band above our chewing-gummed canvas, below the old Ballo Game, Tri-Yr-Luck, these excellent words: Bud Williams, Prop.
It was a fine thought. It gave me an idea of what I wanted, to be the proprietor of myself and of something, and to like those things. Those things would like me, too. I stood behind Joy and watched the motion of one green hand on her hip as she twisted and reached. She had the longest, the slenderest neck and the collar of her shirt fell floppily about it. She studied me gravely when she had finished writing my name.
It wasn’t many weeks before I picked up a prewar Dodge, borrowing the gas money from Pauline but paying for the rest out of my chatter and gleam and the balls’ jiggle and roll and the mathematical tricks they made, first counting them to win on the tryout for free, then counting them straight to lose. One night I let a mark pick off an Indian blanket: “A happy moment for the management, sir! We just love to please the client. Now will you have the genuine Gruen watch, the baby dollie that weeps and pees, the—”
“Gimme the blanket, damn you. Cost me enough.”
“Pleasure, friend.”
Sentimentality is good for the hardness, although the carnie most honest with himself is the one who gives nothing but a clack of the tongue to the mark’s misery. If I was honest, it was another way. I wanted to give pleasure, to take it, and to clear a place where Bud Williams could move around. I needed a car for pleasure, for joyriding with Joy, and I didn’t want always to be a bum on Pauline’s half-truck, even if I did double-clutch her out of the mud and change the tires and file down the generator points. A man needs his own. Well, that jalopy started to cost me right away, oil it drank, gas it leaked, grafting cops who squinted and grinned and gummed their tobacco because they thought (“maybe, young feller”) the Dodge should receive a thorough inspection for brakes and wiring. The body was shot with rust, well-chewed by use and weather, but the motor could always be fixed. I had to borrow again from Pauline when we rained out for a few dates running. I had also spent on a couple of dinners in town for Pauline and Joy. “Credit running short?” I asked her.
“Gosh almighty, no, boy.”
“When’s that?”
She poked me in the ribs with a damp bluish roll of hand, shapeless from many readings. “When I pawn my jewels, that’s when. They’re all paste, glue, and glass.” Her own false jewelry amused Pauline, so I gave her my laughter, too. Heee, I said. I appreciated Pauline, and even more as I paid back the loans.
I also appreciated Joy. One day she asked me, “Going into town?”
“I was just getting ready to ask you, why?” It was a breathless middle-of-the-morning on the fairgrounds where we were doing good for the VFW, the popcorn slush and the cotton candy gray in drifts on the battened-down earth and our gaunt ten-cent Ferris wheel very small in the sky. The carnies have a sense for enemy weather, working against it even in their sleep. When the sun came up high over a lot like this one, they managed to groan and sleep again hard on into the morning. Joy and I had awakened early, a full working day ahead of the kiddies’ matinee, alert with each other, teasing and taunting. We drank hot coffee to break the sweat. The sky moved closer with the sun, enveloping the world in the catch-tongue heat of homes we had evaded; we had the jitters, I think; the day would be a scorcher.
“Maybe I need to buy some toothpaste in town. Maybe I want a Coke. Maybe just for the ride,” she said.
“Toothpowder is supposed to be healthier for the teeth. Dentists use it.”
I had trouble getting the jalopy started, but then it heaved and jerked as if it really wanted to go to town itself. Maybe the way Joy had become a lady pleased my Dodge, too. Joy sat up straight without spreading her legs across the seat, lips pursed and level eyes watching, a touch of vain hand at the cropped ends of hair. I asked her to bring her swimming clothes, and she returned a quick wry grin because we were not to swim in our skins today. It was only for the others that I said it, of course. To take a chance like that in Georgia was next thing to walking right up to the sheriff and asking for Indecent Exposure and Disturbing the Peace. We rolled through town and out the other end of a one-minute Georgia main street (J. C. Penny, Rexall, Smiley’s Eats, Shine Here—you know), probably named for Robert E. Lee or the galluses of Gene Talmadge. “You aren’t buying me anything?” she asked. “A Coke’s only a dime. Here, I’ll lend it to you.”
The other side of town was greener, which meant water. Since our time of swimming, water meant Joy and Bud to us—the rich blackness of a dive which ended against her wriggling legs and then her laughter when I came spurting foam to the surface. But probably no swimming today. We passed another thin pine clump of the sort which freckle Georgia, but I kept on moving, putting miles between the carnival and us. The wracked and panting Dodge helped make a few miles seem like years. We stopped at a roadhouse and ordered rootbeer at the counter, heavy fake steins of foaming brown sweetness, Old Pappy’s very own brew. I watched Joy dip her red lips into this sugared stuff and asked her, “Don’t you ever want to leave the carnie?”
“What about you? You came back, Bud.”
“Yes, but I came from markville. I thought about it and changed my mind. Don’t you ever wonder if it’s the right place?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t you ever think about leaving?”
“Pauline doesn’t. We have a taste of markville every year in Florida. I have reasons for staying with it.”
A swift bitterness came to my mouth, a rootbeer hiccup, but it was also because Pauline would grieve if we left. My father was sad. Grack was sad someplace. “What reasons?” I asked.
She smiled at me like the little girl I remembered when I had said, Go away, you bother me. She explained now: “Pauline needs me, you need someone to help you sometimes, chew the gum for patching for you, I need myself here.”
“That’s nice, Joy.”
She wanted me to repeat it: “Nice of you, Joy.” Little more than a child with electric hair and skinny tanned legs, she nevertheless knew what needed to be repeated: “It’s good that people need you here and you need yourself here at the Tuscaloosa Too Show and—”
“Maybe I’ll decide to clean out someday. When I do, maybe I’ll let you know. Listen now, Bud, I’ll say—” She laughed and got off the stool and carried her stein to a booth, making me follow her, but it was willing and knowing of what I wanted to tell her. A tip-hungry waiter stood wiping his hands in a towel: “Sandwich, folks? Cookies? Nice hotdog with relish?”
We sat opposite each other at a front booth, looking out at my creaking heap of Dodge, our fingers linked in the handles of the rootbeer mugs. I was waiting to say it. She spoke first. “Talking of clean,” she said lazily, “we might try painting the limousine. Put your name on it, put the name of your store on it.”
“Paint your name on it, too,” I said.
“Oh. Why, Bud?”
It’s funny how almost any woman is twenty years older than almost any man, and at the same time what a man seeks is the spit and quick of girlishness. Joy here, ignorant of the world except of the carnie, too smart, too wide-eyed and level, having seen too much, puzzled out and knew the desire to be with it which I asked the whole world, Tuscaloosa, and the show to gratify. There lies a riddle: What gave her solution sense was that she liked me and liked me and liked me. And let me know it.
“It’s heading for rain. We ought to be getting back.”
She made no move. “Yes,” she said.
“Joy?”
“Yes.”
“I want you, Joy.”
She let me play with her hand and push away the rootbeer, but she answered, “What do you need me for?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I want you.”
“What does that say to me?”
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“That I want you? I love you, Joy.”
She grinned stubbornly. “What do you want me for?” She stopped smiling and turned to the gathering weather out the window. “Remember when I was a girl?” she asked. “I used to bother you. You told me to go away and you meant it. It was only a few months ago. Grack used to pinch me when he caught me hanging around.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Joy.”
“Seems like I didn’t know you then, Bud. That you would say things to me now just because you went away and Grack went away and you came back. I don’t get all these fast changes. Maybe it’s too soon.”
“You’ve changed, Joy. You’re a woman. Look at yourself.”
Proudly, high and strong, she commanded me. “You look, that’s enough.” I could almost sniff the pride of her flesh. Her level arch of eyebrows raised to receive my devotion.
“Don’t laugh,” I said.
“Do I look laughing? What do you want from the carnie, Bud? You’re not born with it.”
“To get with you.”
“With me and for me?”
I took her hand and looked at her to say, Yes, that’s it, Joy. Was this love—to give everything to her and for her? I could think it, yes, but not yet know it. We got up together and she stood at the door while I paid and left the change in the waiter’s hand. My lady waited for me at the door. She linked her arm with mine and we went out together.
17. Love is with Joy only
IT seemed as if the rain were due again, but it made no difference. We had purposes together. I drove off the road while the sky sulked with clouds and a strange cool breeze flickered up and died, but still it made no difference. There were no repairs. We had decided, and Joy slipped over the seat by my side as the lurching Dodge took us into a lip of woods. I felt her knees near mine. This made a difference.
The first drops fell like petals on the roof of the car. “What if someone sees us?”
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