by Thomas Tryon
Bang! Whoosh!
Somewhere a rocket exploded; now and then a Roman candle showered gorgeous rain-light on a lawn; a child sliced crazy zigzags out of the night with a Fourth of July sparkler. The wheel creaking, Niles put his head back and took in the expanse of black sky.
“That’s Gemini,” he said, picking out a constellation.
“You’re crazy,” Holland told him.
“Sure it is—see? That’s Taurus there, and that’s Cancer over there, and right there, between those two bright little stars, that’s Castor, the yellowish one, and Pollux. The Twins.”
Holland slanted a look at him, then, impatient for the wheel to move again, began rocking the car and while Niles continued his survey of the sky—over there was Ursa Major, and see that seedlike cluster? Cassiopeia’s Chair—the thrum of the harmonica made a pleasant accompaniment to the moment.
“Holland?” Niles said, when the music stopped.
“Mmm?”
“What did you call Mrs. Rowe?”
“Hm?”
“What did you call Mrs. Rowe that day—when she found you in her garage?”
Holland chuckled; repeated some words that shocked even Niles. “Did you, honest? What’d she do?”
“I told you, she chased me home.” This time his chuckle was a little more than wry, a little less than savage. “But just wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait till Old Lady Rowe gets it.” And Niles noted how, as Holland made the remark, the flushed exuberance of his face evened out, leaving him with a placid, introspective expression, his narrowed eyes thoughtfully examining some private phantom. Niles considered his profile against the dark sky: Holland, he thought; Holland. He needed him—they needed each other. That was the thing. He was—what?—dependent on him. Without Holland, he felt some unidentifiable part of him had been lost.
“Look! There’s Arnie La Fever.” Niles pointed down at the ground. “And look—that’s Torrie!”
Arms about each other’s waists, Torrie and Rider stood at the Win-a-Doll booth, beguiled by the spinning wheel. Torrie was not really a Perry at all. After three childless years, Alexandra and Vining had found a four-year-old to adopt; twelve months later the twins arrived. Everyone liked Torrie. Her pixyish features were in direct contrast to the Perrys’, who had always managed somehow to look regal. (Grandmother Perry was given to Queen Maryish toques and carried a walking stick before they took her away.) More petite, with thinner, less fleshed-out bones, Torrie had reddish hair and brown eyes and lots of freckles. Gamine, as the French would say, charming and gay and lighthearted, with both spirit and humor, determined to make Rider Gannon a good wife. Eight months pregnant, she was showing rather full, though Dr. Brainard expected her to go full term.
Rider laid two coins on numbered squares, and the operator spun the wheel again. The leather flap, clacking in and out of the wheel’s perimeter, gradually slowed. Niles, perched on high, could see that Torrie hadn’t won. She stood for a long moment, yearning at the row of prizes ranged behind the counter while Rider generously dug again in his pocket. She shook her head and drew him away from the booth—and temptation—and back into the crowd.
“Too bad,” Niles said glumly, thinking how, with her awkward flat-footed gait, Torrie walked like a penguin carrying a watermelon. “But she’s going to have a pretty baby.”
Holland tossed a scornful look down at the departing couple. “Is she?” he said mysteriously, and the Ferris wheel began to turn.
When at last it had completed its prescribed number of revolutions, ending the ride, Niles ran down the ramp and pressed through the throng behind Holland. Someone jostled him: Arnie La Fever, whose fat and limp features evoked a picture of Russell Perry, his face shoved into a bobbin of spun candy; bits of the stuff came away on Niles’s arm, looking like some unnatural fungus growth. He touched his arm, felt the sticky confection dissolve, leaving an uncomfortable residue glistening like snail tracks on his bare skin. He sucked his fingers and wiped them on a handkerchief. “Hi, Arnie,” he called, but Arnie had disappeared in the crowd. You didn’t see him much; mostly he was sick and his mother kept him out of school.
“Try yer luck?” the man at the Win-a-Doll booth was calling, “tin cints is all it takes folks just a thin dime win and you get a dollie fer yer girlie.” Niles inspected the dolls: funny-looking things, they had round brown kewpie-doll faces garishly painted with idiotic, implike expressions—more leer than smile, a row of cheap duplicate countenances attesting to the inept workmanship of some would-be artisan. Below the waist was a full skirt of peach-colored fabric, forming a lampshade, with an electric cord running underneath. To demonstrate, the man stuck the plug in a socket and the doll lit up, the skirt glowing a warm orange.
“Here we go folks here we go,” he cried, banging on the counter of numbered squares, “ev-ree-body try yer luck.” He zipped the wheel and as several onlookers chanced their money, Niles laid a dime on number 10. His eyeballs spiraling in their sockets, he tried to follow the blurred path of the numbers on the revolving wheel. Eventually he could make out his numeral; it slowed and stopped on the opposite side; again he tried; and yet again, with no success. On his fourth attempt, when the wheel had almost stopped, the pointer crawled into the 5 sprocket, then, at the very last, as if by magic, pushed its way into number 4.
“There y’are, kiddo,” the man said, handing him his prize. Niles carried the lamp over to Holland, who stood eyeing the proceedings from the shadow of a dilapidated tent. Cripes—the Look.
“Jeeze, what d’you want that for?” he said.
“I won it for Torrie.” Niles held it up, arranged the skirt.
“Took you forty cents to get it.” Holland reached and turned the doll upside down. “Nothing,” he said, looking up under the dress. “Who wants a sissy doll, anyways.” Niles took the lamp and watched his twin as he walked over to the entrance of the tent where a poster displayed the picture of a yellow-faced, mustachioed Chinese, his hands hidden in his sleeves, his body resting vertically in an open mummy case.
“Laze ’n gennamin,” a voice bawled, “las’ chance t’night t’see Chan Yu, the Disappearing Marvel. Twenny fi’ cents t’see the Disappearing Marvel Chan Yu, hurryhurryhurry, show’s just beginning—”
In the darkness of the tent people had gathered in front of a small stage hung with velvet curtains; from somewhere at the rear issued the scratchy sounds of a phonograph record: an Oriental dissonance of cymbal, bell, and flute. On stage, a spotlight fell upon a large, highly lacquered red cabinet, and on Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel, standing beside it. Slant-eyed and trying hard to look exotic, wearing long black mustaches and a little cap with a pigtail, he was grandly bowing to thin applause. Producing an ivory-tipped wand, he rapped with it against the cabinet, simultaneously slipping a concealed latch and opening the front panel. Inside was a duplicate cabinet, slightly smaller and lacquered green, which he displayed with flashy magician’s gestures. He turned the box, rapping again to reveal a third, blue, a fourth, black, and finally a fifth, gold.
Hands folded across his chest, the magician stepped back into the cabinet. After a short pause, during which the needle was raked across the record as an invisible hand restarted the music, a girl glided onstage in kimono and stiff black wig. Chan Yu, his eyes closed, a red light making a weird mask of his impassive features, his makeup and mustaches obvious fakes, appeared to be dead. The assistant closed the panel; there was a click and she rotated the cabinet; next, the black panel shut, the box turned again—blue, green, red.
The music increased in volume and in the dim light the audience waited, hushed and expectant.
Niles looked at Holland for a moment, then whispered, “Let’s try it.”
“What?”
“The game. Let’s do it—see if we can figure the secret.” Satisfied that Holland was concentrating, Niles began mentally examining the nest of boxes. What does it feel like? What is the mystery of it, the truth? The
magician seems to be in the cabinet—that’s the appearance of it, but he isn’t, at least not for long, that’s the reality. Boxes; shiny, smooth, lacquered surfaces, brass-banded, escutcheoned. Incense, some exotic fragrance. A box within a box within a box. Another and another. Gold, black, blue, green, red. A nest. A riddle. A trap? Let’s see. Hold your breath inside the box, in the dark; wait for the moment. Cymbals and bells and flutes flourishing to mask the noise of a wire being tripped, while below a trap is sprung. Now drop flat in the dirt beneath, roll from under the stage, behind the tent, strip off the mustaches and pigtail, fling away the cap and robe. In their place a suit of black paper, shoes, hat, everything paper: a Chinese funeral suit. Out at the back of the tent, in at the front, mingling in the audience. Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel.
Again the light, the music doused, the girl assistant clicking the latches, smiling as she opens the panels, each in turn, all the boxes empty, one after another; cries of astonishment and applause as Chan Yu is discovered lounging casually among the onlookers: he lifts his hat and bows. Hurray, Chan Yu!
Lights up to full signaled the end of the show and the audience chattered their way from the tent. Outside, Niles took a deep breath and, nodding with a professional air, said, “So that’s how he does it.”
Holland was silent and looked at the ground.
“Right?” Niles prodded.
After a while, a grudging “Yes,” but Niles could see the way it was—Holland turned away, his expression hostile, eyes sullen. They exchanged a long look, then Holland stepped out of the bright swarm of papery moths and walked away, leaving a solitary Niles, alone with the tinkle of bells and cymbals, the whisper of a flute floating in his ears.
A light wind chased a flurry of soiled rubbish end over end along the patchy ground, flapping tent canvas as it went. The hum of the crowd seemed far removed. In the darkened space between two tents, like the deserted alley off a main thoroughfare, two figures huddled: Rose Halligan, the piano player from the Ten Cent Store, and a man Niles recognized as the operator of the Ferris wheel, both lolling against a guy rope, his neck hunched, his hands working at her, fumbling at the buttons of her red blouse, running across her front, eagerly meeting her own frantic fingers.
Niles could hear her low amused laugh as he moved away. He overtook Holland at the freak show tent, where, under faded, gaudy posters shrieking of meretricious and unbelievable sights to be discovered inside—“Sexational—Shocking—Seductive”—a muffin-faced man, cigar butt plugging the corner of his mouth like a cork, leered while he barked his spiel.
“Laze ’n gennamin, stip right up! See the Wonder Pig, Bobo the Wonder Pig, five feet, not four but five, the fifth foot right where it does the most good, see the great colossal-headed baby, before your very eyes, Nature’s mistake, the hideous horrible hydrocephalic monster! Watch Mister and Missus Katz, the Arkansas Little Folk, lovers even as you and I! Marvel at Zuleika, the Maltese morphadite, she has somethin’ for everyone, laze ’n gennamin, a gen-u-wine morphadite, half-man half-lady, shows you the works, real sexy!” Swiveling his cigar to the other side of his mouth, he poked a cane and said, “Beat it, pretty boy, you ain’t old enough fer this here show. You Boy Scouts keep yer minds above yer belts and none of this here sort of stuff.” After a brief and obscene pantomime, he commenced his spiel again. “Stip right up, laze and gennamin—”
Holland glared and put his tongue out at the man’s back. With a grin, Niles followed him as he ducked out of the moth-infested light. Through an alley between two tents. At the rear, the chrome gleam of a pocket knife; a slit in the canvas panel. Down on all fours. Inside, the air was smoky and stale; on the trampled sod gobbets of hawked spit glistened.
Several feet directly ahead was the back of a platform, hung with grommeted canvas curtains on a wire forming a three-sided cubicle with one wall open. From within came the sound of a child speaking. Holding his breath, Niles moved cautiously in the direction of the voice.
“Stomach settled any, Stanley?” it was inquiring solicitously.
“Eh,” came the disgusted reply.
“All that drugstore stuff’s no good, for Chrise sakes, Exlax, Feenamint, Milka Magnesia. I’m tellin’ ya, Stan—what yew need’s a good enema.”
Peering over Holland’s shoulder around the side of the cubicle, Niles saw a prim pair of midgets, Mr. and Mrs. Katz, the Arkansas Little Folk. They sat in dolls’ chairs with dolls’ china laid out on a doll’s table. Oblivious of their surroundings, they behaved as though enjoying their own privacy, he plainly bored, staring straight ahead, blinking and sighing, she daintily applying a tomato shade of polish to her baby nails, pausing now and then to blow.
“Hot water and soap suds enema, that’s what ya really need,” Mrs. Katz prescribed in an ocarina voice.
“Shoot a mile, Tennessee,” Mr. Katz said. Niles pictured him “assuming the position” with the rubber hose stuck up his rear and Mrs. Katz holding the red rubber bag in one hand while with the other she whipped the soapsuds to a froth.
“Ya shoulda come to the pitchers this afternoon, Stanley,” she said enthusiastically. “I tole ya yew’d of liked it.”
“Whadja see?” he cheeped, bird-like.
“Gold Diggers of 1935. It was somethin’, lemme tell ya. There was this one number, musta been a hunnert girls, all in white dresses and they’s all playing on fiddles, ever’ one of ’em. “
“Christ; a hundred girls dressed in white playing fiddles and there’s people starving in Tuleopa.”
“Yeah, Stan, but that’s what folks want. It’s pure excapism, that’s all. Who wants t’see people starving in the movies—you can see that on the street any day. That’s why folks want to excape, see?”
“Shoot a mile, Tennessee,” Stanley replied dolefully.
Close by Holland’s side, Niles mingled with the spectators, feeling safe from discovery as the sweating, shirt-sleeved forms of the adults hemmed them in. Bored with the midgets, the group shortly passed along to gawk at a man whose face, grotesque and seamed with livid scar tissue, had no nose, and who rasped pathetically as he puffed a cigarette through a metal lens-like aperture inserted at the base of his throat, releasing the smoke in a cloud through the hole where his nose should have been.
Next there was Bobo, the five-legged pig, an anomaly which failed to produce much interest from Holland, who merely eyed it, coldly, as if he thought it should perform tricks as well. As for Niles, the animal’s freakish anatomy caused him to think of Arnie’s father, Mr. La Fever, who was with the circus, and something of an anomaly himself, for if he didn’t have five limbs he was at least tri-legged.
At the end of the tent the group stopped to stare at a sagging platform where, seated beneath a fringed and beaded lampshade, another attraction presented itself: Zulelka, the Maltese Hermaphrodite—a bizarre and epicene creature whose eyes, dark and wet and slightly popped, were penciled around in some black substance, with a pile of carefully dressed hair curled in black ringlets glossy with brilliantine. The hairless, flaccid body was draped in a sleazy kimono whose coppery sheen glinted like a snake’s skin. Gold rings were squashed onto plump fingers which toyed seductively with moist, rouged lips. The half-parted robe revealed one hand closing and opening rhythmically upon a quasi-developed breast, the nipple of which was startlingly large and scarlet-colored. On tiptoe beside Holland, gaping, Niles watched while the creature, with a pleased smile, covered the breast, closed the robe and fastidiously re-tied the sash. He—or was it a she?—changed position slightly and opened the skirt of the robe, teasingly, a little at a time, playing with the onlookers, rolling the eyes heavenwards, displaying finally a dark V of wiry hair wedged between plump, womanish thighs.
It must be a lady, then. Niles looked for confirmation from Holland, and was struck by his scornful expression, the eyebrows fractionally raised, the corners of the mouth lifted in scant contempt.
Thighs spread, and with an arch smile, the creature reached with exquisite fingers t
o extract from the patch of hair a small white fleshy growth which, like an elastic band, was stretched several times to its utmost length. Then, a supercilious smirk marking her superiority over the curious spectators, she tucked the nub of flesh from sight and, disdainfully closing the robe, crossed her knees, signaling, apparently, an end of the exhibition. When she had arranged her features into a bored mask and reached to extinguish the light, Niles got the impression it was a man—or boy, anyway—but certainly not a woman; in the dark he?—she? lit a cigarette, the flame illuminating for an instant the black eyes which glittered jewel-like, the languidly lowered lids heavy with a greasy film. Inexplicably, Niles felt a sudden wave of pity melting through him; poor, poor freak. He glanced at Holland, whose eyes, narrow, flat, opaque, stared back at the creature in disdain.
Another surge: the crowd swept along close to the entrance, stopping before a rickety oilcloth-covered table. On it sat a large glass laboratory jar, filled with a clear, viscous-looking liquid; in it, hideously floating, its skin white like the underbelly of a frog, limbs, organs, features all formed in detailed miniature, was a male human infant. Strands of hair waving gently in the preservative grew from a skull swollen to more than twice its normal size, the shiny skin stretching taut across it, the astonished eyes wide and milk-glazed like those of a dead fish, rubbery lips gaping as if the thing had drowned or been strangled in the middle of a scream.
The crowd, thrilled by the grisly horror, rubbernecked for a while, pushing and jostling for a closer look. Then, laughing or shivering according to their natures, they gradually filed from the tent. Turning from the repulsive sight, feeling his stomach rise and drop, Niles unconsciously fingered his shirt for the tobacco tin. “Holland—” he began, then blinked, appalled by the look of fascination on the other’s face.