Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “The rain will keep them inside.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Everyone but us, Joy.”

  She smiled at my way of turning trouble into good. Since returning to the carnie and finding Joy, I had learned the way of being good—seeing properly, looking properly, and knowing how to regard even the troubles. The first drops steamed off the hood. The rain just opened the black oven of the Georgia noon. Flecked by petals, the Dodge creaked in its dusty heat. “For sure they’ll leave us alone,” I said. The new rain tamped the dust and softened the morning for us, while far away a rooster, which lived by heat, cried as if for dawn. The dustdrops spattered on the hood. Being with Joy was a way of teaching me to be with myself, because while with her, I cared only for her. And I was with myself in my black corduroy pants with the ribs worn pale by hipwork.

  For both of us now I busied myself with a carnie setup. I opened the doors at my side of the car. I spread my raincoat over them like a circus top. Joy smiled and knew what I was about and tucked the corners of the coat so that it would not fall down upon us at a strange time, as circus tops sometimes do when the trick riders are still galloping in their act. The flurry of rain had passed for the moment, leaving only a steaming freshness of washed leaves and calmed dust. On the grass between the open doors and beneath the circus top I spread two Army blankets which were my bunk since I had returned to the show. Joy flapped them smooth.

  When I pulled her down to me, her eyes, those level studies of the world, made one frightened turn for what they could see. “Nobody here but us trees,” I said hoarsely, shocking myself.

  “I’m afraid. A little bit.”

  “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “I’m not, I’m not even afraid of the others,” she said, “but I want us to be alone here.”

  “We are, Joy. We will be.”

  And as if to reassure her the rain came pelting down. No one would come out to peek in this rain; a man caught in it would slog along home. We kicked partway under the high chassis of the Dodge and lay holding each other, clinging against the thunder and the clap of lightning, watching the warm flash shower open up the sky. Then the sun-laden mud stirred and tiny rivulets of water streamed about our bodies, steaming and pale on the drawing wool. We were still dry; the thickness of blanket took it. Joy’s tawniness, fading at the edges of clothes, whitened in the changing light against the great dusty body of the world; my flesh turned heavy and muscled in her sight—this came with male pleasure, I knew, but it came for her, too. The smell of grass and sweetness, like freshly washed or green things, rose with her arms’ rise and fall and her willing struggle. She smiled again, saying, “I like the rain.”

  “I know, I fixed it.”

  “Thank you, Bud.”

  I busied myself with her clothes. She turned equally to me, and I was all hands at her while she was the eager tugging and pulling at my flesh and then all within as if my entrails were turning with a force to burst my body. The warm rain swam through the blankets and we sank in it. I love you! … Love you! The holding and grasping and twisting went on amidst swimming words until one moment when Joy suddenly cried out and went soft in my arms, all collapsed and spread under the chassis of a Dodge, destroyed. I felt her pain myself. A moment later I came to wakefulness and heard my own voice; it said, “She was a child—you were.”

  The warm rain puddled and diminished about us. Her hair was streaming and there were flecks of mud on her cheeks. She listened to the rain before she answered, “You’re talking to me, I hope, Bud.”

  “You were!”

  “Sh! Don’t say anything.”

  We let the dark rain off a mud road in Georgia wash about us, and we lay without clothes and took pain and pleasure in each other. We rested and rested. We talked. I leaned on one elbow. She pulled me down, hard as apples, and said that she did not hurt, no. I swam in the tide, hotly bathed, breathing you and me, Joy! We laughed with our mouths open together because love is pleasant. No, no, she did not hurt. We were tender with each other, knowing that we would return to give life again and again, and that to get with it meant to be forever and ever with me, for Joy, and with her for me.

  Later that evening, sitting through the off-and- on rain which had killed the carnival day but did not destroy ours (these no longer the same), we huddled about Pauline’s kerosene hotplate, drinking tea, while Pauline herself went out to see Casanopopolous in his trailer and gossip about old times. Cas, never a talker, sometimes let himself be lubricated by rain and enticed away from the care and counting of his dollars. At those times Pauline went to court him.

  Joy and I, lightened creatures, spry and calm on our stools, sipped from glasses and munched from a box of soda crackers. She put jam on them for me and stacked them by my glass. She herself reached into the box as if they were peanuts. We sat amid the mystic symbols of Pauline’s mittcamp, the zigzag painting and carving and filigree with which Pauline tickled or teased the marks. “What’s so funny?” Joy asked.

  I was smiling at a pair of torn stockings hung over a chart which showed the lifeline in a copyrighted palm. She followed my eyes but did not smile. Pauline was home to her; the astrological tools and the mitt books were kitchen matters to Joy. “What does Pauline really think about things?” I asked. “She answers the big questions for everyone, she tells them the future and the past, she tickles their palms and makes them promise to be good. But what does she really think about this business? Here and now.”

  “It’s her business, so?”

  I looked at Joy to see, just when she had become a woman for me, how she was suddenly a little girl again. I tried to explain. “All business is business, Joy. It’s a racket at first: you need money for a house, a car, go on vacations maybe. My pop wanted things like that—also send your kids to school. But it gets to be more than reasons for the future. You work for it while it works for you. You start to believe in it. You dream about yesterday and tomorrow. You have to, and you’re right to. You believe in something that you give your life to, otherwise you’re only Stan—”

  “Is Grack like that?”

  “Never mind Grack. Otherwise you’re only Stan, I was saying.”

  She pouted. Grack seemed a rival to her because our time now was Grack’s lost time, but maybe she would be able to understand soon that I had been a kid then, needing a papa, and now I was a man and needed her. Maybe if Grack had stayed around she might have understood, but she could not have seen all that had happened since the days of Grack at the carnie. She could not have seen what I had made happen to myself—Pittsburgh and Pa and Grack’s letter, touch football and Phyllis and Andy, kicking so many bad habits and working up the habit of kicking. It was happening to her, too—once only Pauline’s pretty brat.

  “Listen, you think Pauline doesn’t believe in her business?” I demanded. “You don’t know your mama, Joy. She believes, even if she knows the cards and mitts don’t give it. She likes advice. She wants to take care of things. She plans and plans, that’s fortunetelling, Joy. She’s very hopeful about people if they only take good advice.”

  “That’s only you, Bud—she likes you.” Joy smiled and put a crumb of graham cracker into her mouth. “It’s your future she believes in. You got the wrong idea about her. She likes to give you advice because she believes in you.”

  “And what about me? How I’ll be a bossman like Stan someday?”

  Joy ducked her head, scowling. She herself, knowing only the carnie well, surely knew that Owner was not the top of the world of men. In her confusion she turned girlish and coy, but inexperienced in teasing a man, she told the truth about what came to her mind. It was not what I would become that she told. She bit her lip, she worried, she frowned. She finished a story: “Stan used to. It was before you even came to the carnie. It was before you left. Stan used to try to hold me on his knees and kiss me. I didn’t like it—”

  “What? Neither did I.”

  “You didn’t even know anything then, Bud. Once Gr
ack stopped him, but people didn’t always see when he did it. He used to come around at funny times and peek. I was only a kid—but I knew Stan was important. I didn’t know what—”

  “Didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “What could I tell? Anyway, nothing happened, but I knew wrong because of the way he watched out for Pauline.…” She shook her head, wrong, wrong. “His ears had points from listening for Pauline.”

  I imagined Stan with little Joy on his knees, his head cocked and eyes rapidly blinking, a yellow grin on his face, waiting for the groan and pad of Pauline’s varicosed feet. His fingers were touching Joy; his shriveled little belly was pressing against her as she struggled to climb down. My face was stiff as I saw it—no, no, I thought; and I fought to keep from seizing her with hatred. “Listen, Joy,” I said, “how long ago was that?”

  “I was a baby, but Pauline was just as old as she is now. No, it kept on happening, but I was a baby until you came back, Bud. Remember? Once Pauline—”

  “Why do you call her Pauline now? Why not Mama? Stop jumping around, answer me.” I struggled with this mood of asking every question, rummaging in her past which now seemed mysterious and threatening to me, trying to smile at myself because this baby Joy, this child Joy, this woman I loved, Joy, had become a person to me and I had a full bag of questions to ask her. I could not smile the doubts back into the bag. She was strange to me still, but the desire to ask questions made me realize that she was the woman Phyllis could never have become, the one I loved and not just the carnie brat named Joy. “Pauline is your mama, isn’t she?”

  She frowned. “So listen, Bud. When Pauline caught him at it, he said he was just playing with the kid, hon. That’s what he said. He dropped me so fast I bounced. Probably scared Pauline’d take a knife or the stars to him. Funny thing, Bud, I don’t remember as he did anything wrong or very funny. Just thinking he must have done. A lot of ideas he must have done, smoke in the head. Pauline never said anything. Maybe she had him figured out.”

  Relieved, I closed my eyes against the image Joy prattled about. These were girlish confidences, I guess, of the sort that most women finally work through with the men they trust. If they do it right, they don’t need women in this way anymore, they don’t need telephoning in the morning and shopping trips and shrill lunches with the girls. It gave me a sharp pride—if I was right about this. I said, “Does a lot of wrong thinking for one guy, that Stan.”

  She relaxed and folded her hands in her lap. Each day she seemed to learn new gestures and lose those of a tomboy. Even in my irritability I must have passed the test for her. Her smile said, Bud, Bud, and was not ashamed to say it. “Probably has no fun in life,” she remarked after a while. “We have fun, Bud.” And this girl’s eyes fluttered in the steady valuing of me and of herself which meant that we had found some secret and general good together—secret because ours alone, general because it enabled us to join the common world of mark and carnie. It was a good which drained and then returned to her the color of her face and changed the size of her eyes as it had changed them in her pain and ecstasy with her legs partway under the chassis of our automobile.

  Later I asked Pauline about Stan. “What does he do for fun, Pauline?”

  She rocked in her seat, malicious and fun-loving herself, figuring what I meant without looking at my palms or at the bumps under my crewcut. “All right, Mr. Bud, you are desiring to pry, but every soul on the lot already knows. So what about this owner? Poor Bossman Stan, his only girl friend is his left hand.”

  Joy was rinsing some cups in a corner of the trailer. She stamped her foot and complained, “The tank is dry again”.

  “That’s what I meant about Stan,” Pauline teeheed at me.

  “Bud!” Joy said. “I thought you were going to tend to the water.”

  Contritely: “I forgot.”

  “I can do my own forgetting,” she said sternly. “Lately that’s what you’ve been doing for me.” But then she ran and flung her arms and legs about me, so that we made a many-legged critter as I staggered roaring about the narrow space of the outdoors between our trailer and that of Casanopopolous. “See how I can nag?” she asked. “I’m just as good as any of those Pittsburgh twist-and-twirls.”

  Pauline watched us, purple lips spread wide, and then, still smiling, she stood up when she saw Stan’s face peering through the window in Casanopopolous’s trailer. She stared him down. She told Joy to go away, don’t bother her; then she asked me to come to talk with her inside. I followed meekly with the respect due the woman who knows all, tells all, and was all Joy’s mother.

  She groaned and settled among her cards, her charts, her powders, and her waters. She waited for silence, put her hands over her great middle, and said, “You don’t have the Grack to take care of you no more.”

  “I don’t need Grack. I’m making my own stand. I’m doing all right.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “but you’re not used to Stan. Grack could get away with things, he could help you get away, but Bossman is mean.”

  “So?”

  “He had his eye on Joy. She’s no girl anymore, and he’s been just waiting.”

  I shrugged. “That’s up to Joy.” I had been through my turn of jealousy. “I’m not scared.”

  “Stan is poison, boy. He’s deadly nightshade and milky dogsbane, he’s goat’s rue and thorn-apple, that man is hog-meat and snake-nut. Trobble! He’s all thorns. He’s bad for you if he wants to be.”

  I fondled the new glass ball she had ordered out of the magician’s catalogue. “I can cook his vegetables,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I can take care of Joy. I can take care of you, too, Pauline, if you need it. So don’t worry.”

  She put her hand over mine, and the two hands slipped down the greasy and glassy surface of the fortuneteller’s ball. It was the world’s caress on this globe, a caress from beneath covered by Pauline’s hot flesh which wished me only the best. It’s nice to have friends. Grack had not been enough.

  “Okay,” she said, “but hold on tight to what you got that’s good.”

  The next night I had a dream. I dreamt I was with it. I was no longer a fish, a nut, or a goose in the world of men. I belonged. It was a good dream, comfortable, thigh-turning a dream without tiredness. The rich darkness of the Georgia countryside was a spacious thing in my dream. I woke up slowly, gratefully, finding Joy’s small head beside mine on the pillow, Joy breathing warmly on my shoulder and her body soft and growing familiar when I reached for her. The dream awakened me to become true.

  The dream gave me this thought: Joy!

  The dream gave me this thought: We can be mother and father!

  I woke her, and as she stretched and yawned and touched my eyelids, I said, “Marry me, Joy.”

  “Okay, when?” she asked, and fell back asleep.

  18. Southern days and nights, with popcorn and crackers

  WE said nothing straight out to anyone, but the word about Joy and me got around as fast as a hey-rube call. I guess she lounged by my side. I guess I leaned and gawked into her level eyes like a mark who all of a sudden really does win at the weight-guesser’s. Once I sat wearing nothing but a pair of shiny starched new khakis I had just picked up in an Army-Navy, no shoes or socks, no shirt, nothing but the pants, while Joy squeezed a blackhead on my chest. That really meant love and forever to me. She kept her fingernails from biting by wrapping a handkerchief about them; she pursed her lips and squinted and, by God, tears came to her eyes when I said: “Ouch!”

  “Oh! Did I hurt you?”

  “You’re killing me.”

  “Then I’ll stop, Bud.”

  “No, you might as well get it out now. Grow up, kid, things got to hurt in this life.”

  She continued squeezing and paining me, saying, “Yes, Bud, it’s part of things, but I hate to hurt you.”

  She hated to hurt me and did for my own good and we dearly were fond of each other. I never knew it could be like that. Of course, loving even Joy
didn’t make me think only pure thoughts of love. Her small parts, her noises from the middle, her demands and complaints kept me busy. A woman is not just soul and hickie-squeezing, nor just body, nor even a simple mixture of both—she’s a hook, besides. Imagine Bud the worm happy on his hook, wriggling up against it, snuggling and warming the hard barb.

  And see me, like any worm that has turned, doubting, quarreling, inflamed by novelty. Dare I risk so much of myself in the mystery and illusion of love? That intimacy begins by illusion, the mysteries of body making sense resonate like a lovely bell—and false, false, because no permanent earthly knowledge can stay forever in a clang of music.

  Therefore we quarreled, too. I was unsure. We made it up. We quarreled over nothing but my doubts, and then loved again. “All right, all right, that’s all,” Joy would say, touching my hand and making me sure once more. What difference about the excuse for fighting? It was always the same reason—doubt and need, fear and need, testing and dreading.

  “I’ll never talk like that again,” I said, “never. I promise you, Joy.”

  “Probably you will,” she said. “But you should try not to.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I will, too. We shouldn’t worry every little thing like that.”

  Pauline even let Joy stop selling the tickets at her mittcamp so that she could join me at my store. She put on lipstick and rouge (I made her take off the rouge) and spent hours painting her fingernails and toes. She invited the customers, she smiled and chattered, she merely stood and her health and her pleasure gave the marks confidence. Funny that true love could help a talent for cheating! But this was only business, of course, and she was not being dishonest; she was only, like me, sincere about business and wanting to make out. “O sir!” she would whisper to some long cracker with straw between his lips. “O sir! You almost won that time.” He blushed and scratched his belly and wondered who was tickling him and put down his quarter again.