Ragged Company (16 page)

“Anybody wanna work?” he goes.

“What kinda work?” I go.

“I need somebody to help me put my wheel up.”

“Wheel?”

“Ferris wheel.”

“Ferris wheel? I don’t know nothin’ about no Ferris wheel.”

“You don’t gotta know nothin’. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Long as you listen to what I tell ya, you’ll learn and you’ll be safe. Figure you can do that?”

“Sure,” I go. “How much?”

“Give ya ten.”

“Ten? Mister, ya bought yerself a hand.”

“Good. I like the short guys. Easier to pull the spokes for the short guys. Name’s Dutch,” he goes, and sticks out the biggest fucking hand I ever saw.

Ferris wheels were the big draw back then. Every show had a wheel and every wheel had a wheelman, someone whose only job was running that wheel: running it, moving it, setting it up, and tearing it down. Dutch was a wheelman and one of the best. He was carny blood. Sawdust in his shoes, he said that night as we worked. Sawdust from the truckloads they laid down to sop up the wet on the carny grounds in the old days. He had sawdust in his shoes and it kept him on the road year-round taking that wheel from Louisiana to Manitoba, Washington State to Nova Scotia. He was carny blood and all he knew and all he wanted to know was the Ferris wheel and the next stop on the road.

We put up that wheel that night from the ground up. I’ll never forget it. There was a huge steel plate that was the base and we had to find a level patch of ground, or as close to level as we could get. Then we evened it with shims. Next came the bottom half of the two towers, and they were bolted onto the plate. Then Dutch and I carried the support beams from the flatbed trailer the wheel was carried on. Everything was forged steel and heavier than a motherfucker. We slid those ground supports into place, bolted them, and then secured the angle irons that held the towers in place from the side. He was gruff, and when he told you to do something he didn’t mean right now, he always meant right fucking now, and with a guy that size you did what you were told. When he directed me in the assembly of the A-frame we would use to block and tackle the top half of the towers into place, he smiled at my quickness.

“You’re a friggin’ natural,” he goes.

“Giving you ten bucks worth, that’s all,” I go.

“I’da give fifteen,” he goes and grins.

“I’da worked for five,” I go, and we lifted the A-frame into place.

The towers went up without a hitch and Dutch went to find a couple more hands to help us with the spokes. I was all grease and sweat by then and I loved it. The hammering of bolts, the twisting of cables to tighten them, the pulling of the spokes into the hub while standing forty feet off the ground was joy. Pure fucking joy.
The lining up of the wheel was work enough for two, and Dutch pieced off the others and sent them away. We worked on each side of the wheel securing it, him talking loud and pointing what was needed, me concentrating as hard as I could and fighting to keep up. Finally, it was up.

“Get this into ya,” Dutch goes and hands me a beer and a smoke.

“We done?” I go.

“There’s the seats still, but I do that in the morning. You can come back and help if you like. Don’t take long once I get the motor goin’.”

“Sure. It always this much fun?”

“Fun? This is ball breakin’, boy. You think it’s fun?”

“More fun than I had in a long time.”

“Damn, son. You might make a wheelman if you chose to stick around.”

“Figure?”

“Sure,” he goes, taking a big gulp of beer. “Anybody figures this is fun got wheelman in ’em somewhere.”

So I went back the next day. I went back the day after that and Dutch showed me how to work the motor, how to run the wheel. I’d been around tractors for a while already and he was using a McCormack tractor motor, so learning was a snap. Finally I just went there in the mornings instead of showing up for the farmer, and spent the day hanging out with Dutch and talking about wheels.

He told me about this guy who made the first one. George Ferris. He talked about how high into the sky that first wheel went. Almost three hundred feet. Dutch’s wheel was eighty and I looked up and tried to imagine how fucking high three hundred feet was and how much fun it musta been to put a big son of a bitch like that into the air. He talked about the road and places with names like Wenatchee, Muskegon, and Tupelo. He talked about the carny life and the “white line fever” that kept him on the road. He talked about booze and gambling and the taste of a grab joint breakfast after a boozy night with the town girls. It was
the first time in my friggin’ life I ever heard anybody speak with fucking passion about something and I wanted to hear more. When he asked me to come on the road with him and be his apprentice wheelman I just walked away. I just walked away without word one to nobody. I climbed up into that semi that hauled the wheel and watched fifteen years of bullshit drop off over the horizon. No one looked for me. If they did I never heard of it, and I never bothered to write back or call or any of that wimpy, pussy, cry-in-your-beer bullshit. Me, I was glad to be gone.

Dutch and I went year-round. We hooked up with Royal American Shows to tour the south in winter and then hooked up with Conklin to do Canada all summer. God. I friggin’ loved it. Town to town, show to show, we followed the white line of highway wherever it called us. I was young and strong and cocky and I fit into the carny life like I never fit anywhere again. Jesus. What a fucking life. Camped out behind the trailers, a big circle of us, playing guitars, drinking, smoking a little weed, the stars above us burning holes in my eyes whenever I looked up, and the feel of freedom. You learn that when you spend enough time on the road: that freedom has a feel. Like there’s nothing beyond your skin. Like you could vanish like a fucking ghost, lickety-fucking-split up the set of gears and down the fucking road. On the carny was all I wanted. It was all I needed. It was all I knew.

I became the second-best wheelman anywhere. Dutch taught me everything he knew about the wheel and it got so I could feel it just like he could. I’d be putting riders on and off and the wind would get to blow and I’d put my hand on a flange, feel the tremor and just know, just fucking know where a cable had to be tightened or a cotter pin replaced. Just fucking know it. I fell in love with the stuff of it. The smell of the thick purple-black grease, the weight of the pins and bolts sitting like decisions in my hands, the thrum of a taut cable when you plucked it, the thrill of a spoke snapped smartly into the hub, and the anxious feel of the empty seats when you rubbed them down the morning before opening like horses eager for the race. God. I fucking loved it.

But the best part was walking the wheel. Once we got it all set, once there was nothing left but the seats, I’d hop up onto the outside flange and walk from spoke to spoke checking for anything that I mighta missed. Once I got up to about the third spoke I’d tell Dutch to slip the brake and I’d walk the wheel. Slowly, measuring my pace, I’d walk, and as each spoke came around and down I’d look it over until I’d made the whole circle. Then I’d step into the frame of a spoke, put my feet in the corners of the crossbars and lay across the big X the cables made with my arms stretched out and hands holding on to the other crossbrace and tell Dutch to take her up. He’d run me right up to the top that way and stop it. There I was, standing in the crossbrace in the spoke of a wheel eighty feet above the ground, looking out over Kansas, Ontario, Alberta, Wy-fucking-oming, or wherever. Me. Mark Haskett, Wheelman. And I’d stand there and smoke and look across the land imagining what kind of lives the people led out there and what was over the horizon. I’d stand there and look, feel that wheel trembling beneath me and know that I was a part of it. As much as the cables, bolts, nuts, and bars, I was a fucking part of it. I knew that as long as I could do that, as long as I could go up there at the start of every show, I could deal with it, I could handle it, I was home. It was my place. It was the only place in my entire fucking life that was just for me. When I reached the point where I felt filled up with air and space and time I yelled down and Dutch would ease me back to earth.

“I never seen nobody do that before,” Dutch goes the first time I pulled it off. “You’re a fucking wheelman, son. You’re a fucking wheelman.”

But Dutch died. He fell off the wheel when some rube’s kid got her long hair caught in the joint where the seat fits on. He heard her scream and stopped the wheel in a heartbeat. He knew that he couldn’t move it again or her hair would be ripped right off her friggin’ scalp, and while the fucking rube is yelling and crying Dutch climbs along the flange and up the wheel like he seen me do, holding a knife in his teeth like friggin’ Tarzan. Then, he holds on with one hand while he cuts the kid’s hair. He’s up
there about twenty feet. The rube is so excited his kid is free that he starts to hugging and rocking her in his arms and the seat bashes Dutch hard enough to make him lose his grip. He fell and broke his back.

I never cried for him. He wouldn’ta wanted to know that I bawled like a baby, but I sure felt like it. He was the only one other than that farmer who ever did me good. Dutch put the sawdust in my shoes. He put the road in my blood. He put the wheel in my heart. I took his ashes up to the top of the wheel and scattered them to the wind.

The show hired me as their wheelman after that. I was nineteen. I inherited the rig from Dutch and drove it from show to show. I never found nobody to apprentice with me but I hired help whenever I needed it. My name got known. People talked about the speed of my set-ups and teardowns, about my ability to feel a change in my engine and add or do whatever it needed. They talked about my wheel-walking and how any show I was on was never really ready to open until “Haskett walked the wheel.” I got hired in as a specialist for big exhibitions that put up permanent wheels, the gigantic ones like Ferris’s original, and once, for a little while, I lived in a city one whole summer running one of them wheels until the road called me so hard I had to sign up with the show again and hit the white line. I was the best fucking wheelman anywhere.

I signed on with an outfit called Woodland Family Shows as their permanent wheelman. It was a big fucking deal because no one ever got signed forever by nobody. But I was the best, and Peter Wood wanted to run an old-time carnival the old-time way. He wanted the wheel to be the centre of the midway and he wanted a wheelman to keep it there. That carny was a good one. Pete had the old sideshows with the barkers pulling people in, clowns roaming the midway, and a big ring right next to the wheel where his daddy showed off the trained ponies he ran. While the world around us was switching to bigger ’n faster ’n more expensive, Pete kept that show original, and I guess we kinda all got to be feeling like a family. A road family, and I fit
right in there. We all helped each other with set-up and teardown. We ate together. We sat out under the stars and partied and drank and sang together. We waited on the side of the road for the stragglers to catch up so we could all pull into the next town together like a big fucking parade. Just like it used to be in the good old carny days. Pete made it special. He made us special. He made me special. The money was good. People loved that old-time feel and came to our shows in friggin’ herds. The route we travelled took us to all kinds of farm towns and small places where the carny was always an event. Only trouble was they didn’t do winter shows and Pete didn’t want me signing with the southern circuit in the winter. He didn’t want to risk losing me to a bigger show. So he paid me my regular wage all through the winter but it meant I had to get digs somewhere. For anybody else it was a plum fucking deal but for me, an old-time carny with sawdust in his shoes, it was like death. We’d pack it up after Halloween and start doing parking lot shows again in March or April. Five months of sitting around with no road beneath me, no wheel spinning over my head, no world like I knew. It was like dying every fucking year.

Pete got me a room in a rooming house, which he paid for. Every Friday a cheque would come for me and I was supposed to rest and relax and wait out the winter until we could hit the road again. Well, fuck. I was still young enough to get friggin’ bored sitting around and I started to look for the bars where other snowbound carnies hung out. I found them. I found the biker bars, too, the cowboy bars, the fistfight bars and the old-man bars where you just sit and nurse your drink and bide your fucking time. Got so I just spent the winters in those bars waiting for the spring that always came but took its own sweet fucking time.

I don’t know what happened but something broke inside me. Nothing that you could see, nothing that a guy could point out to someone and say, “Hey, don’t this look fucking weird.” Nothing like that. Just a break somewhere that made lifting anything a fucking agony. I covered it up for a long time. Just said “fuck it” and worked through it anyhow. But it got so some mornings it
was all I could do to get standing up again. People started to notice when the wheel got slower going up and coming down. People started to notice when my face’d be all twisted lifting something I’da thrown around a few years earlier. People started to notice when I started using booze to fight the pain.

But I was still the fucking best and Pete kept me on. I never told nobody how much hurt I was carrying. Never told nobody how the reason I let Pete get me a permanent helper was so I didn’t have to get up from my chair more’n a couple times a day. Never told nobody how fucking angry I was getting at my body for letting me down like that. I just stone-faced it. I just gritted my fucking teeth, took a belt of hooch, and let ’er ride just like any good carny would do.

Wasn’t long before Pete was keeping me off the shows. Not all of them. Not all at once. Just sometimes when the broke part would be all fucked up and I couldn’t do the work, couldn’t walk the wheel, couldn’t get the set-up or the teardown done. Those times I’d be so pissed I’d get mad and he’d have to send me home in the middle of a show. But I was the best, and when I was fine I was still the best and he kept me on longer’n maybe he meant to. But the broke part inside me was getting worse and it took more to fix it. Took more hooch. One spring he couldn’t find me. I hadn’t been to the rooming house in about a week, I guess, and the old lady had no idea where I was. It took him a few days but he found me holed up with a few hooch hounds in an old-man bar fighting over a card game. He got me to the show but I was no good. I couldn’t fix the broke part and it was hollering like a motherfucker by then. Any kind of lifting at all burned like a flare all down my back and shoulders. I had to drink to handle it. He let me go. Pieced me off with a big bonus and let me go. I tried to sign on with other shows but the word was out that Haskett couldn’t walk the wheel no more. Haskett couldn’t get the job done, and for a carny that’s as low as you can go.