Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  “You know your business?” I asked him.

  “Married many a couple,” he pronounced over me. “Tom Hurly’s the name, Doctor of Divinity and Divine Science. You didn’t even ask me.”

  Joy looked at him with her nose wrinkled up to ask what we were doing with an inferiority complex for a preacher. I knew her thought. You get that way when you’re in love; that is, you both know your girl’s thoughts and you don’t like people who feel inferior. But nothing could stop our feeling fine, even about this snake-baptist, water-episcopalian, flagellant methodist, fulltime undertaker and parttime anti-evolutionist, whatever he was, Tom Hurly, D.D. and D.S.

  And Joy looked fine, too. She wore a long white skirt to make her look older, tight around the hips, which made her look more different than older. She was getting a hippy and breasty look fast, and I take some of the credit: me and the pleasure she found in me. And she was wearing a longsleeved nylon blouse with her tanned arms visible through the cloth and the cleft between her breasts sliding to the rhythm of the Rev Tom’s words, “Be ye all gathered, brethren?”

  Sweet and holy as could be, I coughed into my best pitchman’s voice, half ready to flash Grack’s finger to his eye, and said, “Methinks the brethren are gathered, Reverend. They’re in a hurry for their beer, too.”

  “Then we may proceed, commence, begin,” he announced. “Tad blame it, these shoes make me nervous.”

  “That’s all right, Reverend,” I said soothingly, “the feet aren’t the important thing about a marriage.”

  “The important thing,” Joy sang sweetly, “is that we love, honor, and obey. Righto, Reverend?”

  Consoled, he patted her head. “Sweet child,” he said, “how did you ever get mixed up with riffraff?”

  Pauline, who had drawn close to hear the holy man’s words, answered very quickly, “Her father held me down, that’s how, Your Honor.”

  “I’m no judge.”

  “You said it.” Pauline had the jitters; her chins shook. “Let’s hitch them before the ice all melts.” She opened the door of the refrigerator in her trailer and stood next to the wedding cake, fanning the chill air over herself while the motor labored and heavily throbbed. In honor of this occasion Pauline had robed herself in black taffeta, the slippery stuff flopping over her bosom and shoulders and in vast folds over all the mountainous regions of her body, giving her the look of someone’s widowed aunt except for the charcoal smear of mascara over her eyes and the thick paving of rouge on her cheeks.

  The Rev Tom strode ahead of us in his black suit and his tennis shoes, stretching the pants at the shiny seat; Pauline and Stan hurried after him; Joy followed on my arm, staggering and laughing on her high heels. There was a burst of applause from the carnies gathered on wooden benches as we entered the tent. Rev Tom looked about disapprovingly, the undertaker in him aroused by the presence of so many living bodies, then padded to the stand where so many bottles of Indian Hair Tonic with Vitamin E had been sold, not to speak of fortifiers for the virility, celery concentrate for good health and good sense, and little conscience pills to drive away the demon rum.

  “How mucha you paying him?” Casanopopolous whispered to me as I walked by. “Was not a proper shoesa inna his contract?”

  “Ha! ha! ha!” said Deprived Al, barking with his automatic laughter.

  Jean from the cookhouse (or Gene) stood at the door, wiping his or her hands on his or her apron, scowling at so much stew just to eat a supper and join the sexes that were already joined in Jean-Gene. Jean-Gene rubbed his or her hips and grunted disapprovingly, although Joy and I were perhaps the only carnies on the lot who didn’t kick out with a joke as he or she waddled by. But I suppose morphodykes are likely to take it personally when people get married; I forgive it.

  A quartet at the back of the tent began to chant, “Da dah dedum, da dah dedum,”—Wagner’s lovely wedding music, here comes the bride, all dressed in wide. Joy gripped my arm, touched because they went to this effort rather than merely calling upon a portable phono with its scratch of soprano and electric buzz. We were touched also because no one but the flies had snitched from the sandwiches and cookies stacked according to color on the table at the rear. Deprived Al kept looking at the green-bread cucumber sandwiches, it’s true; but this was just a habit worked up from watching for small boys trying to creep under the flaps into the freak or girl show. Now Al protected our cucumbers.

  “Ain’t she lovely!” someone shrieked. I jerked angrily, twisting Joy’s arm as I turned, ready in my awful weak-kneed nervousness to slam out at the smallest teasing, but then, between the rows of carnies scrubbed and solemn, watching us, Al, Cas, Sam the Popcorn Man, Red Rosalie, Roly and Poly Hayworth, Jean-Gene, and all the rest of them, my heart leapt in my throat and the here-comes-the-bride singing in my ears almost deafened me and my knees fairly buckled with love for everyone. “Ain’t she lovely!” I still didn’t know who had said it—a falsetto cry by one of these spoiled actors: “Ain’t she lovely!”

  They meant it. Joy, that little girl they had all known snub-nosed and a pest, a tomboy scavenger, a busybody with her school books, forever trying to catch up with the class she attended each winter in the Jacksonville or Orlando browsing grounds, this Joy was ankling down a sawdust aisle in a long white skirt. They suddenly saw a woman given to a man. They loved her for it. They were proud that it could happen even on the carnie, even married to the life, with it and for it. The physical and moral freaks, the patient artisans of con who were our buddies, sprawled stiffly in Sunday array on their benches and watched. They were silent and their eyes were veiled.

  Rev Tom, squeaking on the platform in his sneakers, raised gnarled hands for silence and had it even to the cutting of their breath.

  “Brethren! Gathered here as who can doubt it and we surely are—”

  He had a few words to pronounce about the condition of holy matrimony, it seemed. To everyone’s surprise, he was a pretty fair talker. By the calculating glare on Stan’s flat face I could see an offer of a place on the show, selling snake oil at fifty per cent for the Rev, fifty per cent for Bossman. “Bundles of happiness are to come drop-dropping from heaven onto these two young folks, friends,”—and many of us looked to the roof of the tent, expecting to find the stiff canvas shattered by a rain of babies pelting through. “Is the state of wedlock the wages paid to horrible lust or is it a gift from the Lord to man in order to de-mon-strate how he was never descended from mere monkeys, apes, and chimpanzees? Yes, it was. And are the—” We received a dose of anti-evolutionary philosophy free for the price of the wedding; the Rev Tom had been a good choice after all. “And are the poisons of earth, friends, really poisons after all?” If only I hadn’t to stand on my two feet, supporting Joy as she turned dizzy and swayed on her heels, I would have taken greater pleasure in hearing how the devil came down to our land in the body of Clarence Darrow, all filth and New York cleverness, with a body rotted by hard likker, so that when he died the gases in his head exploded and blew what remained of his brains straight out the window. Surprised his wife, it did. Lovely sermon for a wedding in Georgia.

  “And in conclusion, dear friends …” With this phrase I knew that he was good for another gasping and spitting half hour. Joy pinched me, trusting to me to hurry him along, but I had decided to wait things out. I had been in a hurry enough in my life. Grack, helping to break my habit, had taught me that you can’t hurry to happiness; I remembered the lesson. And you had to take from people what they can give you, not just what you think you want. All right. “Remember so well, yes, friends,” Rev Tom was saying, “the day I took my own dear first wife to the altar, may she rest in peace. She was all in beauty, a healthy specimen. She had eyes like stars, but she insisted on eating canned peaches with cane sugar added. Died soon after.”

  It was a fine gaudy sermon, full of fire and death and the vanity of fancy feeding. Finally, when Pauline inched a leg forward and came down hard on his toes in the tennis shoes, he returned to the
first business of this meeting.

  “Will Mr. Bud Williams and Miss Joy DeLand please step forward?”

  We pleased to step forward.

  He raised his hands over us again. I dodged, in case his knuckles fell off. The rest is rather smoky in my memory; I’m not sure as I recall exactly; he groaned and pronounced too fast for me to follow: “Mumbledy-jumbledy-higgledy-peg.”

  Pauline was talking to herself behind us: “Fruits and vegetables, coffee and tea.”

  “Sickness and death, trouble and clover!

  Rover, Red Rover, let Rover come over!

  Joining in wedlock for better come worst!

  Health is important and loving is first!

  Honor-obey, death-do-you-part!

  Linen and kettles and string beans to start!”

  I rubbed my eyes. Pauline and the Rev were swaying and chanting. I stood silently with Joy, feeling her arms at rest next to mine, loving her, deep in our dream of the future to which we had pledged ourselves. Suddenly Pauline stopped her murmuring and the silence from our carnie buddies turned deafening, and Rev Tom’s finger leapt toward us: “Do you, Bud Williams?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you, Joy DeLand?”

  “I do.”

  For the moment he did not quite recall what came next, so he asked me again, “Do you, Bud Williams?”

  “I really do, sir.”

  And Joy did not wait for the repeated question, crying out with a high peal of laughter, “Yes, I do!” I slid my arm about the long skirt and lifted her high toward me to kiss her. Her thigh-warmth rewarded my arms; her lips promised me many things, such as yes and dizzily yes again. The hullaballoo of cheers from the benches broke into our sealing moment. The thought came through to both Joy and me, standing there still before Rev Tom: Yes, we are married. It was done. Our present duty to the world of our friends was to let them eat and drink.

  Pauline minced forward to take the Reverend Tom’s arm. “It was a bee-yootiful ceremony, never seen one like it,” she said. “Really most deep and profound, such philosophy. Have you read Doc Connor’s book on how to tell a criminal by his ears? Come with me and have a cracker with patty on it, Reverend, before all those louts finish off the eats.”

  20. Last space on the guest list

  LIKE hungry cockroaches they galloped about us for the food and drink, lifting their feelers, scampering happily. Their muzzles jumped with heavy spices. “Ha!” cried Deprived Al, and washed down the butt of a pickle with beer. Even Stan tried to feel good, firmly gripping a corner of the board and wooden horses that served as table and pouring himself one shot after another of the good legal stuff which wet-eyed Pauline, my mother-in-law, had provided.

  “Drink! No more trobbles! Drink up!”

  It wasn’t really that they were so hungry or so thirsty, but the carnie folk have a sense for celebrations and did honor to legal wedlock by taking communion with it in the form of Ritz crackers, jelly beans, and maybe a hundred dollars’ worth of free liquor. Some of it was moonshine, of course, and delicate as carnies know how to be, our friends drank it with the same ceremonial gestures of pleasure with which they drank the bottled and bonded. To you, up yours, with it and for it, friends! You ever see such sweet kids before in your lives?

  They let me stand alone with Joy at a rope-strung edge of the tent and played no tricks on us. Somehow this girl, Joy, remembered as a smudge-nosed child, had become a creature aloof and distant and chilling to their tricks, a bareback rider queen, someone as strange to them as Hungary or Bucks County, a princess because she knew her own mind. I tried to explain things to her as we stood amid the eating of our guests.

  “I used to have a habit,” I said, “because I expected too much of people.” This was not reminiscence. It had to do with the job of life ahead of us.

  “I remember, Bud.”

  “Grack helped me get rid of the habit.”

  She smiled and touched me. “Never happens that way. You did it yourself.”

  “I still expect a great deal. Grack helped me,” I repeated, “and don’t you forget it.” In that steam and hurly-burly of celebration, I suddenly saw the cabin where Grack had led me out, holding my forehead when I was sick. “And don’t let me forget it.”

  “You won’t. But you had to kick it yourself.”

  I did not go all the way with her, but her assurance made me say, all the same: “Maybe so,”—still not quite believing that I had done this deed before Joy and myself and that my demands on others were matched with their need for me. “Maybe so.”

  Sam the Popcorn Man came swaying toward us with a paper cup full of gin. “You buying, Bud?” he asked. “Give you couwage for the long pull. Heah! Heah!” He still smelled saltily of his trade. It was strange to see him without his machinery, his frier, the flying bits of snow, and the little pots of melted oleo. “Dwink up!” he cried, his r’s deserting him in his face-splitting pleasure. “Dwink to mawidge!”

  I took the cup to make him go.

  “Then I went home,” I told Joy. “You know about my mama. There was nothing there. I hung around the house, but I almost killed my pa. We’ll have to go to see him. He’ll cry all over you.”

  “That’s all right, he’s not a bad man,” she said.

  “I was good for nothing. There was no reason. I had to come back. I looked for Grack.”

  She smiled and pulled me to a corner and we sat whispering and huddling on a bench before the little pile of wedding gifts which we were too discreet to open now: Oh a set of percale! Oh a matching towels! Oh a gift certificate! Joy said: “You didn’t find Grack, but you found something better, Bud. You went into business for yourself and you did well.”

  “I was John Peel. I was running, then walking, then strolling. I found you, Joy.”

  “I found you!”

  “I got a long way strolling, and I’m not for a habit here or for monkey-business with my father anymore, and I did it now without Grack. Yes, I did.”

  “You found me, Bud. I’m so glad you did.”

  The party went on with songs and scuffling in the sawdust and old jokes relaxed at, and we talk-talk-talked on a back bench of the tent, sometimes interrupted but never troubling, content to stay amid the light and warmth of our friends under the high bare bulb which someone snapped on at dusk, realizing that we had come out well when even Stan came to wish us good luck. He yawned. He did not try to kiss the bride. We watched him return to the place near a bottle where his pawing feet had shredded the wood peelings to dust.

  “You must have had all sorts of troubles, too,” I said to Joy. “I know about some of them, but you don’t tell me much.”

  “You knew me when I was a baby.”

  “I was just a child then, too.”

  “All right, Bud.… But trouble isn’t over. This isn’t the end of trouble. Never. Trouble is what we’re bound to have, too, only maybe we’ll know what to do about it.” She leaned forward, touching my two cheeks with her two hands, suddenly older and grave, solid with flesh, the tomboy finished for good by Rev Tom’s words, saying: “The bad thing about trouble is not being able to meet it. Now we’ll do that thing.”

  “And you were practically playing with dolls a year ago—”

  “A month ago, Bud. Maybe just yesterday.”

  And together until the earth fills our mouths.

  I would like to say that Deprived Al came up to us through the party exactly then with his message, but it happened another way. We lounged and watched and had a little indigestion from eating and watching, our sweaty palms touching, without work to do, faces hurting from smiling, just waiting. Stan, supersaturated, returned to ask if thish wash the way for young loversh to live it up. Pauline, swaying, a queen in heavy seas, pinched his ear and dragged him off, winking like a topmast signal. Out of liquid and the dizzy laughter, Sam came to throw popcorn balls like confetti, Jean-Gene sniffled and said it was only hayfever, not emotion; many friends gave advice and told us how sorry a thing it is ne
ver to be happy. “But when you’re with it—” Shrugs and shrugs. Seeing us together made them wonder why they had never tried that gaff, love and constancy. We talked about the little trip we were making to the seashore, where we would rent a cabin. We were leaving the show tomorrow for a week, planning to spend a good part of our nut, doing what a carnie never does unless he breaks his back: taking a vacation mid-season. Almost as much as our marriage, this decision set us off from the others. They saw that business was not first with us. They saw that business was a way to something for us, not the end of human affairs on earth.

  “You’ll never be a boss carnie thataway,” Bossman had told me.

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s not the way to get with it and stay with it, boy.”

  “I know,” I repeated, looking at him in the eyes until they rolled over like bugs playing dead. “I’m with it and for it, Stan, but that ain’t all. I’m for Joy. I’m with myself, too.”

  With the generosity of carnies they accepted our taking the week off. They could not understand it, but they grinned, shrugged, shot their hands into their palms. Someone brought us two bottles of beer and, lounging amid a tangle of rope at the back of the tent, we watched and waited out this first married evening.

  Deprived Al came in from out-of-doors, shivering as if freezing in this warm Georgia evening, headed for Stan, who was now too drunk to do more than sprawl and mumble in his childhood’s Polish, shook him, gave it up, was shouted at by Casanopopolous, turned to Cas, shook his head again, decided on me and ran in his foot-dragging shuffle. “What’s up, Al?” I asked.

  He stuttered.

  “Seen a ghost?”

  “Yes, that’s the truth.”

  “Did you get sick outside?”

  “I did, fact.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, fact.”

  “Can’t hold yours, eh?”

  He stopped stammering and looked at me dead sober and said, “I got something to show you, Bud. You better hurry. Fact.”

  Outside the tent, the carnie was drawn up to do battle with the Indians. Machinery and housing had been pulled down and stowed. The trailers were set in the traditional crescent, ready for motion when we sobered up. Tomorrow, groaning and complaining, heads and axles heavy, crankcases dripping and eyes gluey, Wide World and Tuscaloosa Too would move on to the next date. Now with the brave skeleton of the Ferris wheel down, the show huddled timidly on its bit of Georgia earth. Only from inside the medicine tent, where the party went on, there came the noises of stomping and eating, the banner of laughter and the shake of pleasure. The trailers were dark. The night was black. Crickets twittered by the millions, fiddling to keep warm against the black night damp seeping up from the swamps some miles away. It was one of those moonless nights when nothing is seen clearly; a faint bluish haze, starlit but not lighted, made the most familiar fender strange; guideropes came reaching for our legs no matter how we walked.