Kaleidoscope (10 page)

Jack didn’t need a calendar to realize that if Goodman bit the dog Monday he wasn’t in Cincinnati on Tuesday.

But somebody had been.

“Who’s this Ambassador?” he stalled for time.

“Our elephant,” Luna answered, watching him closely. “Big bull, you’ve seen him?”

“Heard him, anyway,” Jack replied but his mind was racing on different tracks.

He only had Luna’s word that Goodman was dead. On the other hand he knew that
someone
claiming that identity had sure as hell been in Ohio at the Hotel Milner late Tuesday. If it wasn’t Goodman, it had to be somebody standing in for him.

Maybe the same Johnny who was supposed to meet Sally at the station?

“How’d it happen? With the elephant?” he tried to buy time.

Luna shrugged. “Alex must have spooked him.”

Half Track cackled. “Time he was through there wasn’t enough left of that drunk’s bony ass to bait a mouse trap.”

Jack felt the color draining from his face.

“Concerned, Mr. Romaine?” Luna was close to him now. That bruised skin. Uncomfortably close.

“Just shook is all,” Jack wished he had a drink.

“Odd reaction, don’t you think, Half Track? From a man says he barely knew Alex.”

“It’s the way he got it, that’s all,” Jack tried to cover himself. “Stomped to death by an elephant? I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Not on my worst enemy.”

Luna folder her knife into her pocket. “Toss me a mug, would you, Track?”

Half Track tossed her boss a chipped coffee cup. Luna caught it and reached past Jack for a fill. Leaning all the way across. Her breasts hanging in his face. Her hair. That hyacinth smell.

But that skin. Thick as mustard.

She poured her coffee leisurely, withdrew. Then she placed her cup next to Jack’s. Pulled her stool even closer.

“Accidents happen, Jack. All the time. Could happen to anybody. Could happen to you. Hard work, Jack. You’ll be sucking hind tit. Swinging mallets and shoveling shit from dawn ’til dark. You still wanta stay?”

Jack lifted his own mug. Nothing but dregs left.

“…I got no choice,” he said, finally.

Luna leaned away.

“I think that may be the only truthful thing you’ve said since you got here.”

She slid from her stool.

“We’re starting a one-nighter, Saturdays only. Nothing fancy, just once a week. Under the stars. You’ll need some work clothes. And brogans, you ain’t gonna last a day in those shoes.”

“When do I start?”

“Tomorrow. Five sharp. That’s in the morning, Jack. I’ll know by noon if you can brodie a freak show.”

It was barely light the next morning when Jack dragged himself to the cookhouse for grits and coffee. It was already hot. Not a breath to stir the flag mounted on the café’s roof.

Tommy Speck was talking a mile a minute. Cleary taking great pleasure in having Jack on his leash.

“So I’m a, what—a brodie?”

“Close enough. A gopher, a working man. Bottom of the heap. The lingo’s meant for the road. Like this ain’t really a cookhouse—a real cookhouse’d be in a tent or maybe a wagon. But what the hey. We’re carnies, even when we’re bedding.”

“Bed sounds pretty good, about now.”

“Forget it, pretty boy. You got to earn your keep.”

“So are we like a circus?”

The word ‘circus’ got the attention of a pinhead nearby.

Tommy leaned forward. “Not the circus, awright? We ain’t the fucking circus.”

“Sorry.”

“This thing we’re doin’ is strictly midway. No Big Tent. No Liberty Ride. Nothing fleabag, but not no Sunday school, neither. What we are is hully-gully and hootchy-kootch. Freaks and performers and candy butchers.”

“So I’ll be working a carnival?”

“You’ll be building the carnival. Lot’s already laid out. Got most of the sawdust down. Once the stalls are up and everybody’s got his act up, we’ll be ready to go.”

“Expecting a crowd?”

Speck shrugged. “Who knows? But if we fold we don’t have to hit the road. No tear down, no gas or traincars or wagons. ’Course by spring we’ll have itchy feet, but till then—it’s step up and smile, gents. And keep yer hands in yer pockets!”

It was not yet six in the morning as Jack lugged a sledge hammer and a coil of rope through the midst of a midway in the making. He spotted a familiar figure just ahead, lumbering behind a wheelbarrow.

“Hey, Freddie,” Jack spoke up as he pulled alongside and was snubbed without comment.

“What’s Freddie’s beef?” Jack asked when he caught up with Tommy Speck.

“Freddie? You mean Friederich?”

“I mean the carney hauling his balls in a wheelbarrow.”

Tommy glanced back. “You don’t chitchat with Friederich,” Tommy informed him coldly. “You don’t gab with anybody’s a performer. You ain’t earned that right.”

Jack blanched, “I was just being polite.”

“Not your place,” Tommy snapped. “Especially when he’s on his way to his pit, right over there.”

Jack followed Tommy’s finger to a life-sized linotype stretched over a newly-built stage. It was a shocking photograph; if Jack hadn’t seen the man with his own two eyes he’d swear the lino was faked. A man perched naked on a pair of cajones larger than an ottoman! A banner above making the unnecessarily exaggerated claim:

—SEE FRIEDERICH THE UNPARALLELED—

THE MAN WITH SIXTY POUND TESTICLES

“Goddamn class act,” Tommy declared. “The real thing, front-row. Brings in the marks like tits and beer.”

It was not a big carnival, not much more than a forty-miler, as Tommy described it, which made no sense at all to Jack as the grounds were definitely not forty miles across. Barely forty goddamn yards across. Not that size made all that much difference, at least not for a brodie. Carnivals were all laid out in similar fashion, Jack learned, a wide, straight artery interrupted along the sides at intervals with pits or stalls or tents offering cheap temptations.

It all began with staking out the lot. Tommy Speck was Luna’s designated pro which meant among other things that it was Tommy’s prerogative to assign and measure out the positions of the various games, shows and concessions along the midway’s front and back end.

“The ‘Front End’ starts right inside the gate,” Tommy instructed his brodie on the run. “Front end’s for family, hotdogs, cotton candy. The talkers hit ’em once they get their goodies, work ’em to the stalls or shows. But this morning I got you brodying the Back End.”

The back end was reserved for more exotic entertainment, the strippers, torture shows and such. Most prominent among the back-enders were the geeks, glommers and freaks who were the stars of Kaleidoscope. There were stalls going up all over the place. Brightly painted banners stretched between poles hung with kerosene lanterns. Bunting and banners erotically illustrated with promises of forbidden fruit.

“Hi, Jack.”

The Penguin Lady in a costume of seagreen and sequins smiling behind a barricade of oilcloth and timber.

“’Lo, Pencil Dick.”

This from Cassandra. A banner overhead gave hints of her blarney: “
SEE CASSANDRA, THREE-BREASTED PRIESTESS OF THE DELPHIC ISLES
.”

The back end, clearly, was a place to lose innocence, or find it. A place where rubes found themselves both attracted and repulsed by aberrations of flesh which they had not thought possible. There were no gimmicks here, Tommy insisted. No flimflam. It was here that a giddy young girl might write her beau a valentine on The Human Slate’s permeable chest. It was here that crowds shrieked as Pinhead drove nails up his nose. Here was where you’d find The Snake Lady and The Wild Men of Borneo, Circassian Princesses and Cannibals.

Here was where, once a week, Half Track The Severed Torso and The Penguin Lady resurrected their roadshow acts. And it was here, too, in canvas tents, that young men crowded to experience their first hootchy-kootchy. Jack saw the enticing banner:
LUNA THE MOON MAIDEN
.

“One thin diiiiime,” Tommy barked. “One tenth of a dollaaaah…. ’S’matter, Jack?”

“Nothing,” Jack dragged his attention away. He should be thinking about Sally Price and Alex Goodman and Oliver Bladehorn.

And Martin and Mamere.

“Grab a bucket of nails,” Tommy directed him. “And a shovel, too. Looks like we need to spread some more sawdust.”

Every performer was jealous of his position on the midway, everybody cursing or cajoling to put his pit in the choicest location. On the road those negotiations could get nasty, but here, in this beddy, the performers seemed content with, or resigned to, Tommy Speck’s high-pitched verdicts.

Jack began his apprenticeship as a brodie shoveling sawdust in the blistering sun. By noon he was hammering nails and stretching canvas for the pits and booths designed to part marks from their money. A whistle from a calliope brought sandwiches and ice water for a twenty minute reprieve. Then it was back to work, this time nearer the front end and in the construction of what was euphemistically described as “
GAMES OF SKILL
!!”

“Oh, there’s skill, all right,” Speck chuckled going on to demonstrate how easy it was to dull a dart so that it would not lodge on its target board. Other games of skill were rigged from the get-go. Take the old bottle-throw, for instance. What could be simpler than knocking a milk bottle off a crate with a baseball?

“Can I try?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” Tommy smiled and let him waste a dozen pitches and a half-dozen strikes before he told Jack that the bottles were weighted at their bases with lead or cement.

Assembling the barrel toss gave Jack a chance to see a variation on the pitch-and-toss. All the rube had to do was throw a baseball into a barrel and get a prize. How hard could that be? But the barrel was rigged with a false bottom as resilient as a trampoline so that a ball thrown from the specified distance invariably bounced out.

Not everything was a flattie. “This here ‘Fish the Bottle’ is hanky-pank,” Tommy noted, which in the carney’s twisted lingo meant it was honest. “Gotta let the schmucks win something.”

“Looks like you’d lose money.”

Tommy shook his head. “Way you come out on a hanky-pank is you only give away brummagem for prizes. But there’s more money stackin’ the deck. Like I say, Luna ain’t got us runnin’ no Sunday School.”

She sure as hell wasn’t. Jack saw more varieties of cheating along that fifty yards of sawdust than he’d seen in a lifetime of poker. Foot-pedals stopped the Wheel of Fortune anywhere the carney wanted. The skilos’ arrow never stopped on a winning color. The rifles at the shooting gallery shot blanks. You could swing the mallet as hard as you wanted on the High Striker, but its iron weight wouldn’t travel two feet skyward to gong the bell, win you a Teddy and get you laid by the gal who always thought you were something special unless Half Track released the tension on the knob that adjusted the friction along the traveling wire.

The carney who worked the gaff on one flattie would play the stick on the one next door, winning some rigged game of skill or chance as a come-on to rubes eager to part with their money. Even brodies were allowed to look down on rubes, a breed of person universally courted and yet held in contempt.

There were other things to learn, besides, expectations of behavior related to propriety and decorum that had the force of law. Some of these
obiter dicta
Jack had already learned. The rest Tommy Speck supplied rapid-fire.

Rule Number One: A brodie never, for any reason, talks to a mark.

If a yokel got riled it was generally Luna’s job to patch him, though of course The Giant was always available if muscle was required. But most rubes were easy to smooth. Amazing what a free ticket to the torture pit did to mollify some outraged cowboy or what a teddy bear could do to squawk the occasionally mortified Sunday schooler.

Rule Number Two was easy: Never forget Rule Number One.

There was a pecking order in this world that was ignored only at one’s peril. Top dog was the owner and operator. That was Luna Chevreaux. Jack learned that Luna didn’t actually own a thing on the property, but every concession, sideshow, game and ride on the midway paid her fifty percent of its profit.

In return for that consideration Luna bankrolled most of the acts. She handled the books, the drunks, and the local John Q. Luna was operator, lot man, patch and ride superintendent rolled into one. She did everything from inspect the Tilt-A-Wheel to bribe the Hillsborough sheriff not to bother looking for liquor in the hootchy-kootchies that offered strippers to single men driving all the way from Tampa for a walk on the wild side. Everything was a fix, Jack learned. A con. A scam.

Except for the geeks.

The lepers of polite society were the aristocrats in Kaleidoscope and there were no fakes. Pinhead actually did hammer real nails up his nose. Penguin’s limbs were webbed from birth and Half Track had no fake bottom within which to hide a healthy pair of legs. The Half Woman and The Dog Man and The Svengali Siamese Violinists and The Alligator Man and Freddie Bronkowski with his wheelbarrowed balls—these along with giants, midgets, and other misfits were the royalty of Kaleidoscope. And first among these peers was the carney’s most enduring and profitable attraction, the Matron of the Midway, the Colossus of Sex…The Amazing—! The Inimitable——!

Princess Peewee.

More widely known as, simply, The Fat Lady.

Her banner advertised a weight of six hundred and forty-seven pounds

“Jesus Christ, is that possible?”

“That ain’t even the heaviest,” Tommy confirmed. “But Peewee’s special. She’s got class.”

The word “class” did not come to mind when Jack recalled the wallowing mound of flesh that he had seen wagoned off a freight car, but even a rookie knew there were times you kept your trap shut.

Romaine finished his first day as a brodie with a sunburn, blistered hands and an overarching preoccupation—in the course of that long day he had gleaned not a smidgeon of information regarding Alex Goodman, much less any surrogate. Jack dreaded his first report back to Cincinnati; Oliver Bladehorn would not be happy to learn that a pachyderm had stomped his only solid lead to pulp.