MalContents (6 page)

When I heard that in my head, I rose up and hustled my young lover out of that jungle buggy before I had a change of heart and tried to kill him. I was very short and even rude to him. He left, confused and hurt. I stalked off to confront the damned thing in the jar.

I was in a dark enough temper to cut loose with some real Wolf Girl fury. I was ready to smash that jar and stomp its ugly head. To rip those hideous squid feelers off its face.

The big wheel was taking rubes for lazy spins in the sky against a full moon. The other rides were going full-tilt too. The carnival was humming, having a good night. I wasn’t. Not anymore. I was used to taking ribbing when the full moon rolled around, folks joshing me about howling at the moon and such wolfish nonsense. But tonight I did feel the moon. Felt it pulling me in wild directions. I was feeling a lot like I felt when I ice picked Melvin Locust to death. The rage that blinds you to everything but the object of the raw wrath settles over you like a shroud you have to fight your way out of, ripping and shredding anything in your way. And now it was focused on the fucking thing in the jar that wouldn’t leave me be.

I stormed into the narrow canvas-walled maze of the off-limits sideshow and stomped straight to the little wooden pedestal where the ugly culprit always sat smug and horrible. Only now it was not there. The painted pedestal was bare. The son of a bitch was gone.

I roared. I howled. If any rubes were walking nearby they probably shit their britches when they heard me caterwauling. That was what Mama Rose called it back when I was a dumb pup in the whorehouse. I could caterwaul with the best brassiest howlers anywhere. I caterwauled my ass off right there in the side walls. I dropped to my knees and did it up right.

Somewhere that tentacle-faced nightmare was laughing at me. Mocking me. I could feel it feeding on my fury.

I found Theo a little later, taking a pull off his flask of hooch behind the funhouse. When I asked with my chalk where Squid Face was, he said he’d got half drunk and dumped it out of the jar into a drainage ditch about a mile from the fairgrounds. “Why you wanna know?” he asked me. I didn’t bother to write him an answer. Instead, I wrote: “Show me.”

We looked a sight, him with his straw boater and walking cane and me in a cheap dress, pointy toed cowboy boots and flop hat to help hide my face fur from the rubes. I wasn’t supposed to be out where they could see me at all but you know what they say about rules.

The moon was so bright we didn’t need a flashlight. Theo was a good enough egg but he was an old carnie who’d been with a brokedown mud outfit too many years and so had a touch of the jelly-bean in him (thank you, Mister F. Scot Fitzgerald). Other words, he didn’t like a lick of work he didn’t have to do and walking a mile to a damn drainage ditch to find the sideshow oddity he’d dumped there was too much like a lick of wasted work. Only reason he did it was ’cause he was scared of me. He’d seen this talking picture about a werewolf with a taste for human blood,
Werewolf of London
, where a man turned into a wolfman every full moon, and I must’ve made him think of that picture on account of old Theo couldn’t help but bring it back up most every time he saw my hairy face. Well, now the moon was as full as it could get, and he kept throwing me nervous looks. I could tell he thought he had made a big mistake coming out here alone under a fat moon with Wolf Girl, but he was afraid to refuse me for fear I might go wolf wild on him and eat him alive. The fact that I never talked spooked him that much more. He needn’t have worried. My rage was reserved for Squid Face. Or so I thought.

Inside my right cowboy boot I wore a knife strapped to my ankle. I took to wearing it a few months after signing on with the Americana. It seemed like a good idea at the time (and now thirty years later, it still does and I still wear it sometimes). The boot knife was a gift from Kali the knife-thrower, a dark-skinned lady who disappeared outside a dusty Texas town our last night there. Word was, she took up with a cattle rancher who liked her exotic looks and her wicked way with blades. Me, I had other ideas. I didn’t think she would’ve left without saying goodbye. I feared she had come to a bad end. Anyway, I had the knife in my boot and I drew it out of the sheath when Theo stopped along the drainage ditch and said, “Here the sumbitch is. Ain’t much to look at now.”

Lying in the ditch in the moonlight, it didn’t look like much. But I knew its evil for what it was. And I knew the thing wasn’t dead, may never have been alive in the natural sense. But it was still teasing the edges of my mind, letting me know it hadn’t forgot me. Intimating that it had big plans for me. Bloody ones. The bloodiest.

It looked black in the moonlight. With a glaze of scrub dust. I figured it must be plenty juicy inside to keep it from drying out in this punishing summer heat. And that could account for glazing the otherwise parched dust.

Then the thing started taunting me, daring me to get close enough to use my pathetic little pig-sticker. Those were the words and pictures it put in my head. I almost talked back to it then and there. I limbered my tongue, opened my mouth and formed the first word I had spoken since I was a hairy-assed little kid of five or six. But I did-n’t speak it. My mouth had made up its mind way back then not to talk, that since animals didn’t talk and I looked liked a damned wolf cub, I didn’t deserve to talk either, that I couldn’t possibly have anything worthy of saying out loud. You might say it was a childish pout that lasted years or a silent fit of temper that slithered along slow and poisonous like a snake over rocks and scrub on a journey that would take much of a lifetime. Lately though, I’d been having the feeling that, like that snake, I would soon be shedding old skin and sporting a new manner of getting along, maybe a manner of speaking too. (Well now I see that my snake skin metaphor doesn’t mix well with somebody whose hair hides her skin. What I get for writing above my station.)

Still and all, I didn’t say a word. Instead I dropped down into that ditch on my haunches and drew back the knife to stab the damned thing. Those tentacles all of a sudden started squiggling, like they were shaking and dancing in fear. Or in—and I know this sounds crazy— erotic excitement, like those tentacles were all atremble and sexed up for some Wolf Girl cooze. As you can imagine, I’ve had some vulgar acts done on me and all manner of things stuck in me but what that thing did to me then was the worst of all.

First, one of those tentacles whipped out and cracked me between the eyes. I never knew what a tender spot it was until that snakelike thing hit me there. It stunned me. Surprised me. Froze me. Then the vile thing assaulted me everywhere I had a hole. One went into my mouth, one went in each ear, up each nostril. They tried my eyes too but couldn’t get in there, thank God.

They all pulled me down on top of it so that its ugly mouth hole and fanglike teeth were inches from my face. I felt one of the snaky whips slip under my panties and past my pussy’s lips while another forced its way up my bum. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking on the long one worming down my throat. The stink and taste of the things were awful enough to kill me on their own. Then they all started swelling up, thickening horribly, so that I would suffocate in short order if I didn’t do something. I did. Do something. I worked up close. I stabbed the monster with underhanded thrusts. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Wet stuff came out of its wounds. Wet but not wet, like the mercury from a broken thermometer. It felt wet but it didn’t really wet you. Cold and wet. If I was going to die I was taking Squid Face with me.

I stabbed and stabbed until the tentacles slid out of me and I could breathe again. Stinking air.

Then Theo said, “What in hell’s wrong with you, girl?” and I was snatched up by the scruff and set down rudely on the edge of the ditch where the thing lay down in it dying.

I looked at him like he was six kinds of crazy. Hadn’t he seen what the thing had done to me? That it had raped my every hole with those horrible feelers? I looked down in the ditch at it. It was a lifeless mess. I’d done good damage with my boot knife.

I’d lost my little chalkboard somewhere in my excitement. I opened my mouth to speak, to ask Theo hadn’t he seen what the thing did to me but my mouth didn’t remember how to make words and I said nothing.

I thought then that Squid Face had once again fucked my mind and made me
think
it was tentacle-raping me. Either that or I was bughouse crazy to begin with. Not to even mention dangerous to anything with a dick.

Right about then I saw myself jabbing my blade into Theo’s soft belly and then working the blade into his privates to deprive him of his cock and balls, the family fruit.

I saw it in my mind. I didn’t actually do it. But the urge was there and it scared hell out of me. I’m not sure now if the thing was even alive when I first saw it. But I’m convinced that it was haunted, that it haunted me.

In the long years since, I’ve had the counsel of mentalists, fortunetellers and whore-hopping headshrinkers and the general consensus is that Squid Face was where I projected my rage and killing instincts. That it was nothing more than a dummied up sideshow thing in a jar. I never believed ’em. That thing was in my head, I was never in his. Even after Theo and me burned it to ashes and bone, the thing haunted me. It’s with me still, all these years after. But I’m the boss. I don’t do its bidding. It works for me.

Moses the German midget and his brother the golem joined Americana in the summer of 1937. His real name wasn’t Moses. It was Max Munk but he didn’t go by Max. (I suppose he didn’t want to hear dumb jibes about a maximum midget.) He and his brother slipped out of Berlin to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Being a dwarf, he figured he was doubly cursed in his homeland. I didn’t know it then but the Munk brothers would help me find my voice. It’s funny that a couple of Krouts were the ones that helped me learn to talk again but that’s what happened. Actually, it was a real golem that got me talking again, which is pretty amazing when you stop to consider that a golem is a mute monster made of clay.

It turned out that I had a lot in common with the golem. We both cut our teeth on vengeance and we were both unnatural creatures.

After they got off the boat in America, the Munk brothers started out with another mud outfit, Biddle and Baxley Carnival of Wonders. They did their golem routine with them until a fire of suspicious origin gutted the whole shooting match and shebang. Biddle and Baxley bit the dust and Moses Munk and his six-foot brother Yaakov signed on with the Americana Carnival. Moses spoke better English than the average American and his accent made him sound like an educated man. He surprised everybody when he struck up a hot romance with Viola the armless midget who played a mean violin with her feet. Some of the freaks used to joke about what else she could do with those little monkey toes to keep a man like Moses Munk in her bunk. I thought she was pretty sexy for a girl with no arms. And I loved to hear her play her instrument. The way she held the bow with her toes and bent the strings with her other toes truly was marvelous.

Yaakov played the part of the golem. The monster made of clay had been sculpted to resemble Yaakov. In fact, he had modeled for it. The Munk brothers’ act was simple. And effective. Moses was the talker, a little man in the round Jewish cap and with a big silver-handled walking stick which he used as a pointer to direct the rubes’ attention to the lifeless clay man in an upright pine cabinet meant to call to mind a coffin. Then Moses told the legend of the golem.

“In the European city of Prague hundreds of years ago, enemies of the Jews spread the blood lie that Jews were stealing Christian children to kill them and use their blood to mix with water and flour to make Passover bread. The whole city turned against the Jews and the threat of bloodshed was great. An angel of the Lord came to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and told him to make a giant man out of clay to protect the Jews. The rabbi knew the legend of the golem, he knew that only a righteous man, a tzaddik steeped in the mystical secrets of the Cabala, could bring the golem to life. And so he did. He wrote a magic word on the clay man’s forehead, whispered a secret incantation and brought the monster to life. He commanded the golem to protect the Jews of Prague. The golem obeyed. But eventually the clay giant became too fond of life and the rabbi lost control of the creature and the golem went on a rampage, destroying much of the city and killing innocents. Finally the rabbi got control again and erased the first letter of the word on the golem’s forehead, changing ‘emet’ which means truth to ‘met’ which means death. The golem once again became a lifeless statue of clay and the rabbi locked it up in a secret room of the synagogue.”

At this point in his spiel, Moses Munk would open the big pine cabinet to reveal a scary-looking seven-foot man of clay. It was the spitting image of Yaakov, who hid beneath a trapdoor in the small stage. Moses would then carve the special word the statue’s clay forehead, mumble something or other in Yiddish and then shut the coffin lid. Then Moses rapped his cane against the box and shook it violently as if to wake the thing inside, but what he was really doing was allowing Yaakov time to slip the statue out of the box and to hoist himself into it. Then Moses opened the door to reveal the golem come to life. Yaakov was quite the makeup artist and he always looked almost exactly like the clay version of himself. Yaakov’s golem would come stomping out of his box on elevated shoes like a zombie made of stone. Then he would smash small stone columns with his bare hands. The rubes didn’t know that the columns had already been broken into several puzzle-like pieces and designed to fall apart with a sharp blow. Next the golem would grab a woman out of the small crowd and make as if to carry her away. The woman was of course a plant, a carnie dressed like a typical townie. In the nick of time, Moses would erase the first letter of the mystical word from the golem’s forehead with the tip of his walking stick (which had a tip like a pool cue).