Near-blackness fell. (Hints of midway activity flickered in the tent’s warp and woof.) King Kong and the Eiffel Tower ascended. A second backdrop slammed down, and the lights came up to disclose an immense human figure facing it, a kind of Sumo wrestler in soft silver slippers, pearl-gray pantaloons and tunic. The new backdrop featured three cartoonish strong men. The first held aloft an automobile, the second an entire family of acrobats, and the third the Earth itself.
“Performer Number One,” said Sereno’s disembodied voice. “The Strongest Woman in the World.”
Immediately, Stynchcomb bent forward, full-mooning us, and gripped her slippered feet just under their arches. Then, grunting, she lifted herself from the stage and continued to hoist herself upward until she hung suspended about a yard off the stage like—well, like the moon.
Everyone gasped. If Evelyn Stynchcomb could lift her own formidable bulk—a bulk greater than even mine—how could any of us at the Carnaval Milagrosa let the petty trials of our workaday lives oppress us? Meanwhile, her labored breathing told us that keeping herself aloft had a heavy price, that to accomplish this feat she paid in joules of agony. Although I ached for the pain of her energy expenditure, I felt lighter myself—as if in escaping gravity in this way she had lifted a burden from my spirit. Others seemed to experience a like freedom. We all burst spontaneously into applause. Stynchcomb let go of her right slipper, extended her leg until her foot touched down, then balanced shakily on it until she could lower her other leg and redistribute her weight. Our applause intensified.
Then she turned to face us, enormous in harem pants and tunic, her bosom a pillowy shelf, her features hidden behind an apronlike veil from her eyes down.
“Performer Number Two,” said Sereno with no intervening blackout. “La Dama Gorda: The Fat Lady.”
We gawped. What else could we do? The World’s Strongest Woman had become nothing more nor less than the phenomenon of her own person. Beside her, even I resembled a marsh wren. So we gawped, amazed that we’d already seen what we’d seen.
In a whiskey-edged contralto Evelyn Stynchcomb spoke through her veil: “You may ask me questions.”
No one did. Stunned and self-conscious, we simply stared. “As the Fat Lady, I have no act per se. I stand before you as model or admonition. You may ask me questions.”
“What do you eat?” said a little girl up front.
“Anything and everything. Whatever I want. Who would be so crazy as to try to dictate my menu?”
This reply chastened even the little girl who had dared to speak. We gazed up in browbeaten adoration, shuffling our feet and imagining private interviews in which we formulated such insightful questions that Performer Number Two told us even her most shameful secrets.
“You disappoint me,” she said. “Don’t you want fair value for the cost of your tickets?”
This time the impetuous little girl piped, “How much do you get paid?”
“Not nearly enough. Did this crowd pay you to speak for it, child? No? Then let me say that in addition to my monthly salary, my contract guarantees that I need never pay a food bill, at any grocery store or restaurant I visit on the road.”
Nice work if you can get it, I thought.
“Someone else ask a question,” Stynchcomb said. “Don’t let this kid wind up your spokesperson by default.”
“Are you married?” asked a farmer to my left.
“Are you proposing?”
Everyone guffawed, relieved that someone besides the child had spoken, grateful for the Fat Lady’s table-turning reply.
When we stopped laughing, the farmer popped his suspenders and said, “That depends, lady. I don’t mind a little flesh on a woman, but if she’s got a kisser like King Kong, well, that’s different. Any chance of seeing your face?”
Immediately, Sereno said, “Performer Number Three. La Dama con Barba.” Stynchcomb unveiled. “The Bearded Lady.”
A curly chestnut beard clung like a chinchilla muffler to Stynchcomb’s jaw. It made her look like a lumberjack with severe gynecomastia. For the first time—in my eyes, anyway—she appeared freakish. Her levitation and her bulk I had seen as talent and self-definition. The beard, though, scared me.
“Jesus,” said the farmer who had wanted to see her face.
This time we had questions aplenty. Did she take male sex hormones? No. Had she always had a beard? Only since the age of thirteen. Had anyone ever mistaken her for a youthful Santa Claus? Only a drunk in Altoona. Did she sleep with the beard inside or outside the covers?
“That question sabotages the old saw that the only stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask,” said Stynchcomb.
Everyone laughed, even the asker, and I gradually began to regard her as an extraordinary woman with a beard rather than an aberration of nature. In fact, the beard lent her a dignity and an authority—even if of a masculine stamp—in addition to those attendant upon her obesity. She looked handsome too. Why would anyone fixate on me and my subversive bulk with this woman present? So I felt safely a part of the crowd even as I hoped for a private interview with this prodigy.
Outside, the Carnaval Milagrosa squealed and oom-pahed its way toward midnight, but, inside, time lapsed at a slower rate, as if summer had stalled and Evelyn Stynchcomb’s tenure as an attraction had acquired permanence. But I must tell the rest of this story quickly:
After a blackout, doing Performer Number Four, Stynchcomb swallowed swords. She guided first one, then two, and finally three épées down her gullet, glowing like a gargantuan firefly when their tips touched the floor of her stomach. Then she whipped the foils up through her mouth, so that briefly they fenced above her head before she recaptured them—one to each hand, the third beneath her arm—and bowed with a grand smirking flourish.
As Performer Number Five, Stynchcomb devoured fire. She ate it from silver torches as I would have eaten marshmallows from the tips of straightened coat hangers. She also set her beard afire, deliberately, so that it was consumed in curls of blue flame as delicate as the beard’s own chestnut curls. Her cheeks then shone as smooth and rosy as a child’s.
The farmer who’d asked her to unveil cried, “Marry me!”
Another blackout. The crowd shuffled in darkness, and then the lights flooded up again. On the rear wall hung a scrim of Mount Fuji, with cherry blossoms in its foreground. Evelyn Stynchcomb, naked from the waist up, faced this scrim. On her back roiled an elaborate tapestry of tattoos.
“Performer Number Six,” said Cesar Sereno from the wings. “The Human Cyclorama.”
We gawked as Stynchcomb flexed and twisted without once facing us, working not to become meaningful to us as a person but only to inspirit the mauve and yellow, emerald and purple, scarlet and indigo subjects inked into her back. Devotees of the storytelling tattoo, we watched in awe as gods, beasts, warriors, maidens, sorcerers, trees, temples, and machines in her illustrated flesh played out their parts in a mesmerizing pageant from which each one of us chose the sequence answering to our deepest need.
I, for instance, focused on a reenactment of that part of Plato’s Symposium in which the god-split halves of primordial human beings seek to reunite. This drama—the origins of Love—unraveled in the small of Stynchcomb’s back when a pair of upright creatures, each a cutting of the original orblike manwoman that Zeus sliced in two, found each other, embraced, and became whole again. This sequence occurred in the midst of a myriad unrelated episodes, but I had eyes only for it. When it ended triumphantly, I, too, felt an orgasmic release and burst into applause.
Everyone else in the pit, from kids to oldsters, clapped along with me. They had witnessed satisfying passion plays of their own, whether a successful dragon hunt, a flying-carpet ride over a green archipelago, or the execution of their most dreaded enemy. Evelyn Stynchcomb, as the Human Cyclorama, had delivered.
After another blackout, she reappeared, clad once again in her pearl-gray tunic, nodding in acknowledgment of yet another swell of applause.
She picked me seventh. “Callula Ward Carnahan, your real first name means ‘Little Beautiful One,’ but you have come a thousand miles to escape the contempt of sex-obsessed men and the cancer of your own self-hatred. True?”
“I don’t know,” I said weakly.
“Ah, but you do. And your fondest wish—which you didn’t discover until you entered this tent—is to assume my powers and change places with me.”
“No,” I said, horror-stricken. “No it isn’t.”
“Correct,” Stynchcomb said. “It isn’t. I won’t identify your fondest wish, Lula, because I don’t wish to embarrass you or anybody else—not even those among you, whom I refrained from choosing, who deserve embarrassment or punishment because they’ve borne false witness, committed adultery, stolen from a family member, abused a child, or even taken another person’s life and successfully concealed the crime.”
“You bear false witness!” a man behind me cried. “You do!”
A woman in khaki slacks and a white blouse pushed forward. “I’ve seen enough to understand that you scoff at decency, Ms. Stynchcomb. You defile your body through gluttony and immodest display. You may even consort with demons.” She appealed to the crowd. “We must close down this tent—the whole Carnaval Milagrosa! The devil himself couldn’t do more than this circus of sin to corrupt the people of Festivity!”
“Close ’em down!” shouted a man behind me.
“Close ’em down! Close ’em down!” A mob of others gladly took up the chant.
Ms. Stynchcomb lifted her hand. “Stop it!” The chanting stopped. “Everyone eighteen or under must leave the tent! To make up for your early departure, you’ll get tickets for free food or rides at our exit. We encourage you to go, by the way, to avoid corrupting you.”
When the young people had left, the woman up front said, “Removing the children doesn’t remove the problem. Your act—this entire carnival—stands as an affront to our community, Ms. Stynchcomb. I had to see it myself before I could make that judgment, but now I recognize this whole enterprise as a deceit and an abomination.”
Stynchcomb’s eyes flashed like torches as she swung herself to the edge of the stage. “‘Alas for you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and rue and every garden herb, but still neglect justice and the love of God!’”
This oration paralyzed the crowd. We all peered up like well-scolded kids, scarcely hearing the calliope music or the rides rumbling on the midway.
Then the woman said, “‘The love of God’? How can a person of your ilk, a lackey of Mammon, utter such words?”
“Because the love of God surrounds us too,” Stynchcomb said mildly. Then she roared, “‘Alas for you Pharisees! You clean the outside of cup and plate, but inside seethe with greed and wickedness, judgment and injustice!’”
“For crying out loud,” the woman said. “Even the devil can quote scripture to support his positions.”
“The Merchant of Venice, act one, scene three,” Stynchcomb said. “Dueling quotations. Shoot me another.”
The woman said, “No more prattle. We’ll send the sheriff out here to close you people down. We’ll do it legally and make it stick.”
“Close ’em down! Close ’em down!”
Cesar Sereno’s amplified voice intoned, “Performer Number Eight. Stynchcomb the Magician, Sorceress of Grievous Spells.”
Stynchcomb lifted one hand. “Begone, ye hard of heart! Begone, all doubters and despisers!”
The canvas tent panels and the backdrops on stage bellied inward, then flapped back out. The pressure in my head seemed out of phase with that in the pit, as if it had risen without warning to Ferris-wheel height. I stood alone below the stage, the only patron to have escaped banishment.
“Callula,” said Stynchcomb. “My soulmate in the flesh.”
“Performer Number Nine,” said Cesar Sereno before I could regather my wits. “The Fabulous Geek.”
Stynchcomb turned toward the voice. “I just can’t do that anymore. Children don’t need to witness geekery, of course, but watching it degrades adults too—not to mention the poor performer. So count me out, Cesar.”
After an extended pause, Sereno said, “Okay. I don’t mind rebilling you ‘Nine Performers in One.’ Nine has cachet. The nine Muses. Dressed to the nines. Et cetera.”
“Thank you.”
“Performer Number Nine has bowed out,” said Sereno. “So I present to you now Performer Number Nine, formerly Number Ten. The Discreet Epicene.”
A last backdrop slammed into place. It showed a smiling Buddha-like figure, with pendulous breasts and earlobes, sitting naked amid pale-purple orchids.
“Where’d everybody else go?” I asked.
Evelyn Stynchcomb extended her hand. “Help me down.” I took her hand and walked beside the stage as she crossed it to a set of stairs. She descended into the pit, still holding my hand, and faced me smelling faintly of sweat and a mild eau de cologne. “I spelled them out, kid, with no memory of any of my various performances. Some may sit in front of television sets in Festivity, some may vie for prizes at booths on our midway, but none has come to harm—not even my most zealous opponent, that dreadful woman.”
“Good,” I said. “But please, Ms. Stynchcomb, what’s an epicene?”
“A two-in-one, friend. A hermaphrodite. As Aristophanes says in Plato’s Symposium, ‘Once there existed a manwoman sex and a moniker to go with it, but today nothing remains but the reproachful title.’ Obviously, despite his great learning and wit, Aristophanes didn’t know everything. He erred in thinking the title lacked a contemporary object, either then or now.”
Uneasily I said, “What do you do in this portion of your act?”
“At most typical performances, once the children have left, we divide my audience by sex, men to one side and women to the other, and draw a curtain straight across the pit. Then I move between the sides talking to each group so that all can hear me, but only half the crowd—the men to begin with, the women later—can see what I have to show them.”
“And what do you have to show them?”
“Only the imperfect temple of my body, which God made as it is. Would you care to see it? You, Callula, I can give a private audience.”
Lula Carnahan and Evelyn Stynchcomb left the sideshow tent, picking up Lula’s suitcase on their way out, and trudged side by side through the sawdust and the concession-stand litter to an encampment of trailers and recreational vehicles behind the Barrel Spin, a ride whose dimpled metal floor dropped away so that centrifugal force pinned its riders to its wall until the floor rose into place again and the groaning cylinder ceased to whirl. Lula felt as if she had spent an entire evening in this cylinder.
As they traipsed, a baroque Ferris wheel emerged from the hazy lights on the fair side of the fairgrounds, turning under the lopsided moon. Lula could not remember having seen the big wheel on her way out from Festivity. All its cars but one held passengers, all the cars shadowy in the cloud-strained moonlight, while between its struts hung figures that from this distance looked somewhat more or less than human. Eerie music accompanied the wheel’s turning, but you could scarcely hear it over the carnival’s dying hubbub. Oddly, Lula understood that unless Evelyn intervened, before morning she would have to take a seat in the device’s only empty car.
“Come into my den,” said Evelyn Stynchcomb. “I’ll show you my hanging file folders.”
Lula preceded the carny into the trailer, which featured built-in bookcases, framed posters, filing cabinets, and a cozy dining booth. Stynchcomb gave Lula a cup of instant coffee with dollops of cream and sugar, then converted the booth in
to a bed.
On this bed, much to Lula’s astonishment, she beheld in private what audiences of the Discreet Epicene beheld in public in groups segregated by sex and divided by a curtain. She also ministered to Evelyn in ways that, a few hours ago, she would not have imagined possible, much less acceptable to her as a woman of Christian upbringing. Evelyn, in turn, ministered to and accommodated Lula.
In the morning, Lula awoke alone. Alert to the silence of the cornfields and of the trailer in which she had debauched herself, she rolled over and slid open a porthole panel. The Carnaval Milagrosa had gone, even the disturbing Ferris wheel. The trampled midway remained, as did tent-stake divots, tire treads, animal dung, ticket stubs, cigarette butts, and blowing trash. Otherwise, the carnival had decamped.
Shame crept over Lula like a sunburn. What had she done? Only with Chance, her eventual husband, had she ever had sex outside wedlock.
Across the room, a slip of paper hung from a bookshelf. A note, Lula thought. She wallowed through the sweaty linen and launched herself toward the bookcase. On the shelf above the taped note lay a silver object. Lula recognized it, after a shake of the head, as the spoon brooch that Cheatam had filched from her in Memphis.
The note said, “I thought you might want this. I have run away from the carnival. Should you want to join it, I leave you my vehicle and everything in it, including my hanging file folders. Senor Sereno next plans to set up outside Blue Earth, Minnesota. Continue to pay tithes of mint and rue, but do not neglect justice and the love of God. Last night, you showed me both. Thank you.”
It was signed “E. S.”
Lula read the note again. Looking around, she felt sure that the RV contained miraculous secrets. She folded the bed linens, dressed in fresh clothes, pinned the spoon brooch over her heart, and moved forward to the roomy cab. How long would it take to drive to Blue Earth, Minnesota? How long to return to Abnegation, Alabama? What other destinations might beckon if she let them?
The key turned easily in the ignition. The engine rumbled in its mounts like a wind freshening over water.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 25