Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  The carnie had some good days coming: hot and dry for soft drinks, dark and crowded for shoving into line after wheels and girls, busy and lots of change for all of us to count. The coffee from our jug eased our throats. I did well. We were playing some unspoiled dates, fresh and sweet, where they had never learned how fast the quarters slip away in a countstore. Joy raked them for me, barely touching the coins with her fingers. It was a pleasure for everyone. I was getting a nut of cash, and it felt good: Joy was a responsibility which made the joys of money more than an indulgence. She would need things. We would need things together.

  Afterwards, during the tense sleepless hours of early in the morning, when we had just stowed away our gear and turned off the generators and the Christmas tree glitter of the carnival twittered into blackness and only the braked Ferris wheel gave a quaver or two in the breeze, we would sit outside Pauline’s trailer in the chirruping night and talk things over. In the nights I told her about Grack and retold it because I could not stop owing him: how he ended the habit which had been mama to me, how he sent me away from the childhood in which I had been revolving without moving, how he made me set myself straight toward being present in the world.

  Then, mornings, still sitting, Joy with her knees pulled up against her breast, shivering but not wanting to go, leaning for warmth while I leaned to her for warmth, I would tell her about Pittsburgh and Pop and the old neighborhood and how I had decided that this too could not be mama to me and my future had to be ahead of me, not behind.

  At first she just listened. Later, as the days and nights went by, and I kept the cash in a box upon which I wrote Bud and Joy, she began to tell me, too. She had practically fallen out of Pauline under the palmistry table, between an ace of diamonds and a trey of spades. Her father was some enterprising mark, a clever absentee from the world of men. “But Pauline always had lots of friends,” Joy said, not to be complaining. “They were nice to me.” Once in a while she went to school, and Pauline insisted on her book-learning. Life-learning she picked up in the carnival, that absolute future, that American place which, descended from Rome and the gypsies, was the footloose moving image of the get-rich-quick, get-love-quick, get-ahead-quick of America. It was a world where everyone was his own mama and papa, and cash money the only promised land, and signifying (bragging, wearing Texas hats, flashing the roll) the only way station before heaven. It was a land of friends bound like good brothers and bad brothers, good sisters and bad sisters, all in one loyal family which joined against the world of markdom when there came a hey-rube or a hailstorm or some ugly dealing with the sheriff.

  Funny that only Stan, the Bossman, was not a brother to this family. Even old Cas, crazy for folding money, counting and ironing it, had a smile and didn’t wish bad for anyone. Stan wished the bad for all. He got to be boss, but not by loving. He had only his left hand for girlfriend, as Pauline said, and his right for dealing and false friendship. One night Joy left my stand for coffee, then didn’t come back and didn’t come back. The marks were piled as thick as Junebugs, but she didn’t come back. Well, maybe her stomach is upset, I thought.

  Later I pulled down the canvas and closed up and went to Pauline’s to look for her.

  “Joy? I thought she was with you,” Pauline said.

  Funny.

  I peeked in at Casanopopolous. He was asleep. I strolled about, chatting with all the carnie folk, droop-eyed or falsely alert after the busy evening. I didn’t like to hurry. There would be talk if I looked worried or jealous. But I had bit a hole in my lip. I was kicking through the sawdust down the empty midway in the dark when I heard a faint shuffle behind me. I whirled and cried out, “Joy!”

  It was Honest Al, the Retarded Kid. That was a long title for Al; he only assisted at the Ferris wheel, helping the ladies in and buckling the rod. “Hiya Bud,” he said, “looking for someone?”

  “No one in particular.”

  “Okay, then why don’t you go over to Stan?”

  I snapped my fingers. That’s it! I was running and remembering the terrible disease which Stan had once told me about. It came from sex and there was no cure, partly because there were no symptoms or effects and you did not ever know you had it. You could live with it for fifty years and never know. Miserable. I remembered the thrill of dirt, like a shadow over his eyes, when he made this joke. As I trotted down the midway, kicking up sawdust like snow, scared for Joy, I felt proud even then that there was not an instant of waiting and no one had to con me with a finger to an eye. Stan, that bastard, was all I thought. He couldn’t hurt Joy. He couldn’t hurt us.

  There was a hard yellow light burning within Stan’s trailer. Somehow this relieved me. Once I would have peeked through the slats to see what was what, but now I just grabbed the screen door and ripped it open, tearing the catch clean out of the plywood. “Bud!” Joy cried out. She was smiling. This surprised me. She greeted me but, still smiling, she looked at Stan.

  He was drunker than any other man I had ever seen who could still stand up. His nose and mouth had been shoved to one side to make room for alcohol. His arms and legs looked soft enough to dissolve in the next drop. His voice was sick and slow and distant, saying, “Ah-ah, Buddy, too late to find us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His eyes turned to his pants, gaping open, and his sex sick as an overhandled rattler gaping through. I spun Joy around and yelled, “What’s been going on here?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you yell? I been going crazy looking for you.”

  “Listen, Bud, the poor dope is dead drunk. I was just listening to his talk.”

  I jerked my head toward the open pants while Stan rocked stupidly against a table and grinned through his square yellow teeth. “That what you call talking?” I said.

  “Buddy-Bud,” she said like a tolerant mother. “The poor man is all upset. He has to show to ease his nerves. He was just telling me—”

  “And you have to listen?” I was frantic with anger and relief, and bewildered that she took this from him. I didn’t know this Joy. I couldn’t see what she was after.

  “Poor pervert, the exhibit-himself,” she whispered. She held my elbows lightly and drew me aside when he went into the bushes. “Listen, Bud, if I’d have made him really mad he’d have kicked you off the lot. What good would that be to us? Now all I had to do was hear his life story—”

  “I don’t need that to stay in business!”

  Wobbling back to us, Stan said, “Lishen to the boy.”

  “Sh, sh, Bud,” Joy said, “everything is all right now. Don’t spoil it for us. He won’t remember unless you make it rough for him. Easy, easy.”

  And so I held on. I looked at this pretty, dark, high-colored little girl who was the creature I loved in the world and tried to speak calmly. “Listen, Joy, I don’t like that monkey-business. I like you, but I don’t like it. Grack got in trouble with monkey-business, too. Don’t do me any favors if that’s what you have to do to keep Stan from tossing me off the lot. He makes a good cut on my store already without cutting in on you.”

  She pouted. “He doesn’t have me,” she said, blushing at such strong language. She blushed while Stan’s sex, thick, veiny, and limp, hung near the table at which he leaned, standing half-asleep. “He only showed me himself. I seen before. I’ve seen men before. That has nothing to do with us.”

  I stared and blinked at her. Joy was far from me all at once, though I loved her as I had learned to do. But the carnie was not Pittsburgh, and although I was with it and for it, Joy was with it without knowing anything else. She smiled and touched my chest.

  “Breathe easy now,” she said. “You’ll get dizzy, Bud. Why should I hurt the Bossman’s feelings? It wouldn’t be good business.”

  “Whore!” Bossman was swaying and knocking his ringed finger against the table. The thick words came from a cavern, tormented and miserable, dripping out like mucus. Stan swayed there and muttered, “Whore! Babywhore! She been la
ying for you,”—and then there was a rush, an avalanche of loose flesh, and Bossman Stan fell like a heap of rags to the floor.

  Joy seemed delighted. “Just in time! We were needing that,” she said. “You looked like you were ready to hit him.”

  I pushed her violently toward the door. Then I bent down to shout into his ear, although he did not quiver with a sign of hearing me: “I won’t kill you, Stan, because you’re lushed. But I want you to know it isn’t because of the store. I don’t have to stay. But—” And I stood up and pushed my counting finger hard against Joy, who had returned to tug me away: “But you try anything like that again and I’ll mash you down to soup.”

  “Good thing he’s drunk,” Joy said, taking my arm and leading me out as if I were the sick one. “Otherwise you’d sure hurt his feelings with talk like that. Somebody should have buttoned him up before he left, he’ll be embarrassed.” She pressed my hand. “I didn’t want to do it, Bud.”

  Furious with exasperation, high in loving anger, I said, “Goddammit, Joy, we’re getting married Saturday a week.”

  “Sure, how about some tea? I’ll make it for you now. Just take a minute to boil up the water. You need to sweat some, Bud. Sweat it out, you’ll have a headache if you don’t. Saturday a week doesn’t give us much time.” She cooed and murmured, trying to calm me, saying nice cool soothing things, such as: “Too bad, I’m really sorry, kiss me, Bud. There’s really no way we can invite your friend Grack.”

  Maybe I’m getting it over that the carnie is a funny place for love.

  19. Trobble, absent trobble

  WHEN you try to get married on a carnie, Pauline warned me, her eyelashes peeling mascara like black sweat in the afternoon sunlight, you’re asking for it: “Trobble! Trobble!” Legal business like marrying is that way when you’re with a traveling show. “It’s like this and like that,” she said with a weary gesture of her fat open palms, “ziggetyzaggety. My, I ain’t slept for thinking since you told me. That’s how life is, Bud.”

  “Pauline,” I demanded, “you’re not trying to tell me Joy is too young?”

  Her eyes crinkled up with a smile. “Boy, if I wanted to tell you that, I would say it this-away: Git! My dotter’s too green for screwing! But I don’t because you already know her shape anyway and she knows her mind. You’re a good boy for her, Bud. I’m just sleepless, that’s all, rememorating all my trobbles.”

  “You’ve had a hard life, Pauline.”

  “The details would destroy you, boy. Once I lived on nothing but peanuts and chitlings. Another time there was that famous subverted stomach. But trobble is woman’s estate, and I got the mostest estate known in any truck show.…”

  The odd way she had of pronouncing trouble somehow made it something special, more sad, more lonely for Pauline. I could sympathize with a friend’s plain trouble, but her trobbles made me smile and chew a straw fast. Looking at her the way I measured a mark, I was ashamed of my single and everlasting thought: Joy wants me! And a worrying thought in the smile despite myself: that she would back out at the last minute, laughing and teasing, saying, Well, Bud, it’s like this—I figure it’s sort of early for me and you’re not really a settled fellow yet.… I tried to say no to the idea that there’s a Phyllis in every girl.

  Each morning Joy’s soap-scoured face, gleaming darkly, turned to me that asking way I loved, saying, “Good morning, Bud. Are you weary of me yet?”

  I took a glass of tea in Pauline’s mittcamp while Joy was in town at Sears buying her trousseau: dress, shoes, two plates, two spoons, two forks, knives, and the rest of the gear. The thought of Joy in shoes with heels made me whistle. The thought of the ceremony made the whistle come out dry. We had trouble getting a preacher, as Pauline had predicted.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind deep down inside any place at all?” I asked her. “No sugar, please. That’s right.” I sipped the boiling green liquid and felt with pleasure the stinging sweat break out along my collar. “You’re ready for a son-in-law, Pauline?”

  “Boy, don’t worry about me, you got other things. Take two lumps for strength.”

  “Don’t be a mother-in-law, Pauline.”

  Her chins and the loose bellyflesh shook. She giggled hoarsely. “Listen, if I had jewels to pawn so you two kids could have everything—percale to sleep on, a white bedside radio with a clock built in—I’d do it, Bud. As it is the jewels is mostly paste, it’s the fault of the life I led. I went to bed for love always, and made my cash on the mittcamp. When the men asked me how I was, I never told them.”

  “I bet you spent plenty on men, Pauline.”

  “It wasn’t my fault, I was always old and ugly. Joy is heir to all the looks I had in storage. Course, there were them as admired my knockers.…”

  I heard the truck pulling up with Cas and Joy and ran out to see what she had bought. It was the sign of a queer stubbornness in Joy that she had insisted on going to Sears to get her things without Pauline or me. She was in a hurry to have private business after all the trailer life of the carnie. Seeing each other all day, not even closing the door tight when they take a leak, the carnies guard their secrets and are jealous of the smallest lonely thoughts which come to them sometimes in the midst of their buzzing, busy, overyearning days. She refused to let Pauline or me accompany her while she put a pencil and a knowing look to her lips for the city, and bought fake alligator shoes with heels high enough for hammering, can openers and vegetable shredders, black underthings because some cracker salesgirl said, “Gee, girlie, you got a terrific figger,” the way the New York buyer said to say it. Bright and young as she was, Joy remained a carnie girl, hard and frightened under praise, guarding herself, generous when sure of love and never quite sure of it, living on a knife-edge of risk and divided by it. She had been picked at too often on midways, and no father to tell it to. Having returned now from town, she kissed and clung to my hello, but would not yet show me the dress.

  As I said, the wedding was troublesome. They expected it; it had to be done. I swaggered about the lot, scowling, stretching myself big, getting across the idea that they shouldn’t drink enough for a hey-rube. When they shushed at looking at me, I thought they understood. Since Stan’s Tuscaloosa Too carried no circus tent, we had no circus tent for the ceremony. Logic. Joy and I both had a feeling about the sideshow tent and didn’t want it. Also logic. That left the medicine store, where pickup talkers and sometimes Stan himself sold herb tea and lanolin for the hair and a preparation that re-stores the fun in life for men & wimmen alike. The last time we had carried the medicine store it had been for the hair, and the talker used an Indian sitting and combing his long black silk to show what happens when you do to your hair like the Injuns do. This broke up when the Indian got unclear ideas, thinking that the marks were flicking lice at him, and went back to the reservation.

  Anyway, we could use the medicine setup.

  “But no kidding about it,” I grumbled to everyone in sight. I wanted this to be a solemn, quiet, hard-working wedding, not a time for an on-season drunk and a free show. I even wished that I could bring my father from that other star on which he lived.

  There were the witnesses. Joy decided on Pauline and Cas. With half a mind I suggested Stan, but that would be making for bad fun. “No,” Joy said firmly, “leave well enough alone. Listen, would you be marrying me so quick if it wasn’t for Bossman?”

  Finally there was the hard nut, the minister. Holy joes and petes are usually trouble; they don’t like the carnies, especially when they know us, as in the South. I refused to look for some suave city preacher with a little pot under his black coat and a story to tell his favorite sheep, just doing it for the lesson and the emolument. I wanted someone to believe that we were people, or almost. Because everyone was busy with one thing or another, it turned out to be Deprived Al who found the preacher, dragged him from his gritty mission house somewhere or from behind the wall of a bible college or from within the barn of a revival sect. He came all in black, like
an undertaker, with a three-inch celluloid collar and an umbrella and a shiny new black leather bible, just to look over the happy couple. I took one look and laid down the law: “No snakes at this wedding.”

  “Not even a little rattler?” he asked plaintively in a hollow voice. “A nice little defanged one, just for appearances? I’ll stupefy it on sweet wine and no kola.”

  “Nix, Your Honor,” Joy said. She touched me fondly at the belt, hooking her fingers at the loop and then putting her arm about my middle, patting me for calmness. “Bud likes ’em with poison if he likes ’em at all,” she added proudly. She corrected her pronunciation for Georgia: “Pie-zun.”

  “Ha! ha! ha!” screamed Deprived Al with military precision.

  I was strict with our man of God: “No boas either, you. Nothing—and nothing—along that line at all.”

  Our preacher, the Reverend Hurly, skinny and black-clothed, miserable with his lack of fidelity to reptiles and his desire to make ten dollars, risked antagonizing me by speaking to his invisible devil. “A materialistic unbelieving atheist,” he grieved for the record. “Don’t care for snake poison, he don’t.”

  He glanced at his feet and pawed the dirt, scowling at his shoes. He had been tricked. Instead of the black leather which both he and I expected, he was wearing high tennis shoes, laced with string. Maybe it was his wife’s fault, who thought that sneakers went with a carnie wedding, but it sorrowed him deeply. He shook his head and shuffled in a circle to hide his shoes within his pants cuffs. With ridged, hammered-in eyes, high-bridged jutting nose, hair slicked down by water, and only the throb of his immense veiny Adam’s apple giving a steady sign of life, he resembled the principal silent actor at a wake. The beast in his throat leapt with his thoughts, and if you put your ear to it you might have heard such mumblings as those of which Pauline was fond: Misery and death, die and save, oh prepare for the day, brothers in sin. Free booklets at the rear. Offer as the spirit moves you, but remember, brother, Preacher has to eat, too.