Reinhart in Love (61 page)

“Wha you find, B.J.?” crassly asked Grace, who on the precedent of Homer seemed to think Reinhart was drunker than he actually was.

“Only his dummy,” answered Billie-Jo, giving Reinhart a push as she came out of his pocket with the other hand. “Hey, Goody,” she shouted in his ear as if he were passing out, “wha you give me and Grace to let you do wha you want? C'mon, hoss.” She kicked his ankle. “You want a party?”

Now Reinhart, the valve-lifters of whose mind were clattering so loudly he could barely hear her—and besides, Grace's presence stirred something infantile in him—thought she had asked him if he wanted a potty, and he declined: no, thank you.

“Tole you he sounded fruit to me,” Grace averred. “All thet talk.”

Her evil look pierced Reinhart's oysterish consciousness. “Yeah?” he rejoined. “That's what so negative about your world-outlook, my good woman. You're always opting for dead ends. Ignore the pun and reflect that lust is ever temporary, like the appetite for food. Neither the steak nor the sex you had yesterday have any bearing on that for which you hunger today. That is why eating and screwing—I beg your pardon—coitus, are crafts rather than fine arts like epic poetry and portraiture. Not to mention that gluttony is finally paralyzing: when you satisfy such a taste, all movement stops. And one of the ways a person can turn into a thing is by going into a condition of absolute stasis—a characteristic of an inanimate object being that it cannot move of its own volition…. And you are only parading your ignorance if you state your belief in some kind of equation in which silence is a necessary condition of potency in the man. The male Zulu [Reinhart made this up] chatters incessantly during the sexual act, that is to say, gives everything while his mate accepts anything, and I don't have to tell you what a stallion he is.”

Reinhart sank his glowering face in the beer glass. He felt the girls signaling above him, but failed to take alarm, for he could handle anything in the fields of sex, pocket-picking, roadhouses, or carnival tarts, and they had better believe it.

He must have muttered the last phrase aloud because Billie-Jo ran a lock of hair over his nose and said: “We don' believe you, Goody. Show us you are a man. Come over inna tent and show us, Goody. I don' think you kin.” She edged him out of the booth. “But you better pay the man fore we go, hon. Where's your roll?”

Grace slipped out before they did, hard and mobile as a greased bearing. She wore spikelike bangs, among the black of which there were threads of gray, and the same kind of sailor-slacks as B. J., but hers were stuffed into low cowboy boots with spiked heels. She grinned knowingly at Reinhart as he registered how she was shod.

She said: “Mebbe we
can
do business with this stiff, B.J.”

Meanwhile, deprived of his support, Homer melted all over the booth-bench and dripped onto the floor.

Reinhart shrugged at that, but sounded a deep, testicle-laugh at Billie-Jo's obsession with his wad. “Ignorant people like yourself always assume that they are craftier than the person of culture. Of course, sometimes they are, like the rotten little chippie that made a fool of poor John Keats. But I don't have consumption,” he gloated with his chin in the air. “I paid the bartender as we went along.”

“O.K.,” B.J. answered good-naturedly, and took his right arm as Grace clamped onto his left. “I won't fight you, Goody. I do
anything you want
. Don't be shy to ast me.”

They were strong, though of course Reinhart could have overpowered them; the drinking had altered his sense of balance, but hadn't touched his strength. However, he staggered along quietly between, only rarely using the girls' arms for actual support, and swallowing a lot, for a strange sensation, which resembles nothing so much as thirst, follows on an afternoon of beer.

‘I'll come back for him,” he shouted to the bartender, indicating Homer's putative corpse. “He'll be all right. Don't worry about him.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” answered that person, who had changed identities since Reinhart last noticed. No, nothing nightmarish: the other's shift had probably ended. Reinhart was not of the persuasion of drunks seen in movies, for whom the world spins around like a pin-wheel, and who are always encountering weird, masklike visages, voodoo-looking types—these usually in murder films. No, he was high but reasonable, and took an epiphany of his father-in-law, sitting at the bar, as not the real thing but rather an apparition created by his conscience. He knew that what he should have done, he had not: jettison these trollops, reclaim Homer, and set off down to the river. But he simply couldn't resist seeing what concluded from the premises established; and surely, in Western civilization, curiosity is a good.

Other customers were extant, and as his little party left the establishment he discovered that day had become night. In the lot next door there were indeed a congeries of tents, linked by garlands of illuminated lightbulbs. Ah then, time for the show; no orgy was planned; the girls were simply capturing someone for the audience, which from the looks of things would be spare enough, though the big mouth of a loudspeaker mounted above the ticket booth was blaring bizarre promises to one and all:
Strange and Exotic Rites Hitherto Forbidden, Weird Pleasures of Alien Peoples
, etc. Inside the booth, when they reached it, Reinhart saw a square-jawed man with gray hair and the complexion of a slice of ham. He looked at Reinhart, likewise, and said with the timbre of loose plumbing:
“Come on Joe see the girlies ya can't lose.”

“He's with us, AI,” announced Billie-Jo.

“
On da house
,” Al said mechanically and struck a little bell.

Reinhart made some effort to pull himself together as they trudged up the dusty midway towards a large tent at the far end—though hardly far: it was obviously a crappy little show, and between here and there the route was flanked only by several small canvas lean-tos covering plank counters and wheels of chance, each administered by an individual saturnine, nay, downright sullen of mien.

These persons exchanged greetings with Reinhart's guides, who made certain smirks and gestures that they assumed he did not notice, Grace all the while with her nails in his arm. It amused him and still fitted his needs to be thought a patsy: victims make the best investigators, having no positive principles to clash with those of the subject under study; they want only to survive, and with such a negative obsession the vision stays unclouded.

Heroic girlie posters rose before the large tent, three of them side by side, a big triptych to the left of the entrance flap; to the right stood a platform from which a barker would harangue the crowd when one assembled—if that ever happened, which seemed unlikely at this point, Reinhart being, so far as he could see, the only non-employe at large. The posters were worthy of note, representing a trio of long-stemmed American Beauties, limned, as the saying goes, by some unsung master, and on a base of tin, for they had here and there been dented by rock-throwers—and it was interesting to speculate on the identity of the latter: homosexuals, kids below the age of desire, or an enraged citizenry banning the show from their town? Whatever, the one on the left showed a rusty nipple through her bathing suit.

Yes, bathing suit, and a conservative model at that, for when an amusement is really dirty, the illustrations are modest; and vice versa, as everyone knows who has scanned the stills outside a movie house. Reinhart had actually never attended this type of entertainment before, but when in high school he had talked to others who had, and this was the setup: a center curtain divided the interior of the tent into two equal parts and also bisected the stage, which lay in the middle. For the first act, the audience was admitted to that compartment nearer the midway; the girls paraded briefly in G-strings and fringed brassieres, then slipped behind the curtain onto the back stage, and the audience, upon payment of another fee, filed into the rear. Here, the reports had it, promises were fulfilled and compromise was unknown: the girls stripped to the buff and performed in little tableaux that robustly acknowledged the interests of ardent virility. As in burlesque, there were classic routines: e.g., a flowing festoon of femininity, each girl with her hands on the breasts of the next, called the “Milkmaids' Delight.” In another, half the performers became human wheelbarrows with outspread legs as handles and hands representing the forward wheel, and were trundled about the stage by the remainder of the company. There was also a simple whorehouse scene, for which one of the male roustabouts was enlisted: the girls formed a naked rank, he selected one, led her to a canvas cot, and the lights went out as he unzipped his fly. For it was a general rule that not even such a show displayed a man in the altogether, this type of diversion being smutty but not perverse.

The tent was empty as Reinhart entered on the arms of his friends, though the lights were lit. Plain dirt lay underfoot, and seating arrangements were never provided. The whole plant could be struck and folded away in an hour, and the troupe on the road towards their next location, which, like this, would be on county ground where jurisdiction was lax, outside some city limits.

“When's show start?” Reinhart mumbled; he hadn't spoken for a time and his lips were thick.

“Ain't going to be none,” said Billie-Jo as Grace left them and went through the curtain to the rear. “We can't get no audence. I think all of the fellows in this locality have turned queer.”

He shook his head. “It's really terrible if even your kind of woman has the wrong slant. … I don't mean to insult you, I mean simply with all your experience in the field. … If the men aren't here, they're probably out having direct contact with girls, which if you ask me is a lot better than if they came to this show just to look and then go practice self-abuse.”

“Yeah, turned queer, I figure,” repeated Billie-Jo, in that half-witted oblivion that takes anything for assent. “That's why we uz so glad to run onto you, Goody. Can tell you're a real bull, and I'm sure glad you prefer me over that Grace, who is thirty years old and got gray hair all the way down.” She suddenly undid two buttons at the neck and pulled the blouse over her head, coming into view in her show-bra, a loose, faded hammock of greenish-gray tulle with flaking sequins.

Mind you, they were standing beneath a sagging light bulb, on the dirt floor, before the bare stage, of this empty tent. Reinhart fought against an impulse to reach into his shoe and buy his way out untouched and untouching. He was capable of great sympathy for an entertainer without someone to play to, not to mention a member of the passive sex forced by circumstances to become active. On the other hand, if he had not already lost all desire on the walk along the midway and the entrance into this canvas desolation, the brassiere alone, which was both washed out and dirty, would have been enough to do it.

B.J. had turned her back to him and was smiling garishly over her left shoulder while her hips rolled up one side and down the other: the standard parody of the female tempter.

“Will you listen a minute?” he said. Damn that beer; it seemed to have coagulated in his esophagus. “Stop shaking it for a moment, will you? I don't find your behavior exciting, see. You know what makes a woman attractive?” He knew he was raving, and lowered the volume. “Well, it isn't anything blatant, I can tell you. It is an air of receptivity to change, with at the same time a hint of defiance to it…. For Christ's sake, put your slacks back on.” For Billie-Jo had, with the always startling rapidity of a woman undressing, divested herself of the garments in question. Her upper thighs, of which he had the posterior view, were already, at twenty years of age, rather lumpy, and the back thread of G-string emerged from the division of a bottom that hung conspicuously low. The ensemble was exceedingly melancholy.

Reinhart backed away as she turned and vibrated towards him.

“C'mon, Goody,” stated she, livid tip of tongue showing, “everybody deserves a good time once inna while.”

“It's a sort of radical conservatism,” said Reinhart, desperately returning to his characterization of the female temperament, for, as someone has said, ideas are weapons. “Or vice versa, but the point is, a tension between contradictories. Armed pacifism!” In retreat, he found his heels at the base of the little stairs rising to the stage, and went up one, B.J. pressing him hard. “Pacific warmongering!” Three steps more, and he strode the boards as if in some old melodrama turned inside out, heroine pursuing villain. “You see, the peculiarity of women is that they are all born wishing to be men, and their big problem all through life is to get over the resentment engendered by that seemingly dirty deal. Therefore they must first be assured that being a girl is good—” he continued moving backwards, B.J. having by now undulated to his level—“and secondly they must be disabused, by force if necessary, of the misconception that one can be a man without having the appropriate organs. I'm not saying it's the best of all worlds, believe me, but you see it's the only one we have.” He smiled apologetically, as a man does in righteous expectation of forgiveness for a situation which, though he never made, he profits by; and threw out his hands in that gesture designed to look like supplication but really signifying
it's no skin off my ass
.

A
specialist in the spreading of limbs, Billie-Joe made her own interpretation of his open arms, and rushed into them, hurling him against the curtain, into it, and finally through it to the back stage, when an old friend struck him with a carriage whip. It was indeed Grace, who aside from a great deal of hair wore nought but her cowboy boots.

Reinhart asked: “Say, what's the big idea?”

“Down, boy!” ordered Grace, lashing him again about the shoulders, and from the audience sounded several snickers, two chuckles, and that one outright guffaw that can always be expected.