“Max owns half of that place,” Mitch could not help saying. Ponzi stared across the busy street as if fascinated. “He told us we could stay there if we wanted—me too. We decided not to, it was too fancy.”
“Too fancy for me too,” Marian agreed.
They went on. The day was hot and bright and windy. At times Shar could smell the ocean, past the odors of hot dogs and beer and tobacco. They passed taverns with crowded doorways and restaurants blaring with music; someone sang to a guitar, sitting out on the boardwalk with his back against a wall, a young man with pale, curly hair:
“I know I ain’t the only one of yours
But I’ll be a man just as long as I can,
’Cause that’s the way love is.”
They bought beer in one of the little taverns, standing noisily at the bar. The bartender put it into paper cups for them and they trooped out. At the doorway they had to wait for a woman with a baby carriage who was coming in—slowly and with dignity. She met all eyes with a fierce, calm stare.
When Shar was outside again, squinting against the dusty wind, he felt enlivened; he felt almost excited. Ahead of him and Marian the other three walked quickly, looking around; Ponzi pointed and exclaimed at things. He had spilled some of his beer onto his shirt but did not seem to notice. They idled at a small shop. “Look here,” Ponzi cried with pleasure, turning immediately to Shar. He pointed at some of the souvenirs on the counter. “What would you like but a plastic baby, a black baby like this? Hanging on a gold chain, with some feathers around its bottom! To put keys on.” The young girl turned it about in her fingers. “It’s a key chain,” she said softly.
“All kinds of things here,” Ponzi said. There were little felt hats in bright colors, red and blue and yellow, and giant pencils with feathers on them, and spiders with yellow eyes on little springs, and sunglasses with dark green lenses and frames of white plastic with great plume-like red feathers on the sides. There were neckties with naked women painted in coarse detail on them, and a dozen sets of false teeth, bright and pink, waiting to be rattled; there were pennants that said CHERRY RIVER with pictures of the ocean and of Ferris wheels and of auto racing on them; there were beads of gold and silver, and friendship rings, and wigs of all colors, and postcards with cartoons. Ponzi bought one of the little felt hats, a yellow one with a long black feather, put it on his round head, and pulled the rubber strap under his chin. The young girl was given the little black baby, which she seemed to have become attached to.
Passing by an alleyway they were surprised by a gang of small boys who ran out onto the boardwalk waving sticks. The boys wore bathing trunks and had thin, insect-bitten chests. Ponzi made a drunken lunge at one of them, frightening him away, and as the boys ducked past, one of them—a boy with a large black head and a dirty neck—yelled to Marian, “Don’t you bring no nigger home! Dirty bastard!”
Marian stood staring after him. Her big broad face showed a look of sorrow for an instant; then she said to Shar, “My kid Harry. Did I tell you about Harry?”
Shar finished the beer and threw away his paper cup. “He’s a smart kid, he thinks up all kinds of things,” Marian said. She took Shar’s arm and pressed against him. He could smell her hot breath against his neck. “His father was a no-good son of a bitch. I mean, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. He was sweet as anything when we met. And took me out and treated me real nice, like they do. I wouldn’t of married him if he didn’t. I had a lot of them to choose from. I was only seventeen then—a while ago—” She thought of something and giggled suddenly. “I never wanted anybody like my old man, I made sure of that. He paraded around in his underwear and went to the bathroom—you know—right outside, where people could see him, and made noises when we had supper. He was the one got us to come down here, moved us down himself, and then never got used to it. He worked in a steel mill up north and couldn’t get settled here—he said he missed where we used to live. A real sty, that was! And he said he missed it!”
Children sat at an outdoor counter, their flushed legs curled around the stools. They watched Shar and the others pass sulkily, sucking on straws. Shar thought it odd that there were no adults with them. Marian went on, pleased with what she felt to be Shar’s interest. “You see that kid there? On the motorcycle?” A young man balanced himself on a motorcycle on the street below, talking to a group of teen-agers who hung down from the boardwalk. He had black sideburns and smoked a cigar. “He lives upstairs from us. And a sick bastard he is, too, only you wouldn’t know it to look at him. They used to have battles up there you wouldn’t believe—chairs throwing around, and things out the window, and things knocked rattling down the stairs. He started fights all the time. Only I heard the other day from a friend of mine—it was Veronica! Yes—Veronica—ain’t that a surprise now, and Veronica dead like she is—Well, she told me he had this stomachache all the time and wouldn’t do nothing about it, and finally went to a doctor or something—I don’t know where—and found out it was real bad; something bad.” They had passed the boy and Marian looked around, pursing her lips at him. “A kid like that! A kid his age! And all the while he’s got that thing growing down there, down there in his gut! The little bastard!”
They stopped for a while at another tavern, then went down to the beach. Ponzi ran ahead, kicking up sand, waving his arms. He ran all the way down to the water, leaving Marian and the girl helpless with laughter. “He sure is funny, ain’t he?” the girl said to Marian. “I don’t know when I met anybody so funny before.”
Late afternoon on the beach—bodies lay outstretched on blankets, offering themselves to the sun, beneath a din of music and voices. There was an air of merriment that Shar could not ignore. “I wisht I had my bathing suit on,” Marian said, gripping his arm. “You never seen me in a bathing suit, did you?”
Someone shouted behind them. A fat man in bathing trunks stood with his legs apart, shouting to someone in the crowded area behind Shar and the woman. His voice was bellowing and seemed to jerk and electrify his body—he shouted with rage in a foreign language. “Those bastards don’t know how to speak English,” Marian said. “I don’t like to hear that, do you?”
“No,” said Shar. The yelling in another language did disturb him somewhat.
They waited for Ponzi to return. He was cavorting in the surf, flapping his arms up and down. Though Marian and Kathie and even Mitch had to laugh at him, Shar stared at him with interest and did not smile. Suddenly Ponzi fell, sitting down in the water. He bellowed with surprise.
Shar looked around, shading his eyes. The sun and the constant hot wind, lifting dust up into his face, made him dizzy and uncertain. The heat made him feel excited, as if something were going to happen that he did not yet know about but his body sensed: a violence it craved and strained for. Nearby on a frayed olive-green blanket a woman in a flowered bathing suit sat plumply, rubbing lotion on her pinkened shoulders. She was perhaps thirty—young-looking, made-up, with red lips—and Shar thought about her. He wondered what it would be like to tear at her clothes, to attack her. . . . In the next instant his thoughts puzzled him; he felt nothing for the woman, he did not consider her attractive—not as attractive as Marian. Then he saw at the edge of her blanket two children, boys of six or seven, fighting viciously—sometimes with their fists, sometimes shifting their balances rapidly and somehow expertly, sitting down and slashing out with their feet at each other. They threw fistfuls of sand at each other’s faces with terrible hatred. The woman looked around and began shouting at them. Her body was stiff and inert and cords in her neck stood out as she yelled.
Shar said suddenly to Marian: “I wonder if I have any children anywhere.”
She thought this was funny and repeated it to Kathie, who pretended to be embarrassed, and to Mitchie—who looked at Shar with alarm. Then Ponzi came back, sputtering and kicking sand over people who glared up at him; he presented himself to Shar and the others as if he had accomplished something. “Sat down in the water,”
he said. “Got my pants wet. How the hell do I look?” He turned around for them. “I can’t get the pants off to change them. I told you how stiff they got with dirt. Filthy, dirty things—I couldn’t go home with them on. I had to telephone them at home. How could I go home? What if they looked at my face and saw something there? My mother has heart attacks, minor ones, all the time. She can’t go upstairs. She stays downstairs—my father goes upstairs. I think they found me in a woodpile one morning. My father scratches himself—you know—but he’s a good man, a goddam good man, and I—” He stared flatly at them. “I love him,” he said. He adjusted the yellow felt hat on his head and made the girls giggle.
Shar saw, here and there on the beach, police squatting and looking around. “That’s on account of the trouble last night,” Marian said. “Those cops there.” When the young girl asked what had happened Marian told her, swaying with excitement. Ponzi listened intently; Mitchie cracked his knuckles, glancing around nervously. “But they wouldn’t be anywhere around here. Not now. Not after what they did,” Marian said. She was satisfied by the look of fascination and horror she had evoked in the girl’s face. Both looked to Mitchie as if waiting for a confirmation of what Marian had said.
After leaving the beach they stopped at another bar for a while where Ponzi greedily ate a hot dog and the rest had beer. They then went over to the amusement park. They passed a roller rink and a number of squat, dingy hot-dog stands inside tents. There were rides for children—merry-go-rounds, boat rides, something called a caterpillar, a small roller coaster. Children screamed in ecstasy, lifted and hurled through the air. There was a bingo tent at which fat women sat, weary, with flabby arms, listening to the bright announcements of numbers. An array of prizes wrapped in cellophane had lured them in.
The air was filled with the harsh, urgent clash of music and voices and screams and the metallic clash of machinery—it enlivened people, even tired adults, who shared some of their children’s excitement, allowing themselves to be pulled along. At a pony ride Shetland ponies trod miserably around a small track, their long, matted hair dirty; they looked down at their hoofs. Shar, dizzy with sunlight, found himself staring at one of the ponies—a skinny white and brown thing with a limp tail. Seeing the animal, Shar felt a wave of strong emotion course through him—but what it was, whether anger or excitement or joy, he could not tell.
Farther down the midway there were shows advertised. Dancing girls from exotic lands: the posters promised women with veils, with fans, with an array of feathers, with long cascading hair. Marian and the girl giggled as they passed. “You don’t want to go in here,” Marian said, tugging at Shar’s arm. Shar ignored her.
They passed a wild man show and live animal shows that were crowded mostly with children; they passed a show of Negro dancers, men and women, who could be heard screaming and cavorting inside the tent. Strips of red, white, and blue crepe paper decorated this tent. “There’s the new one. Just got in this week, to be in for the Fourth of July,” Marian said, pointing to a tent. It was decorated gaily with many posters, some of them brand new—the freak show. “The freak show!” Ponzi cried. “A goddam good thing to go to! Why didn’t I know about this before? I ought to of come here first off.”
Advertised on the outside of the tent were mighty midgets, and a half-woman-half-gorilla, and crocodile people, and a vampire-like woman who was seen to be tearing flesh out of a man with her bare teeth. There was a great fat man and a fat woman, with several fat children dressed in baby clothes—blue and pink. There was a fire-eater, dressed conventionally with a Turkish hat and purple trousers, and armless and legless people, and people that were eating chickens alive. “I don’t know if I much want to go in here,” Mitch said as they started up the ramp. The girl pouted and looked significantly at Marian, who forced Mitch into going. “Why, she ain’t seen this before,” she said confidentially to Mitch. “She ain’t been down here since it came.”
The show was fairly crowded. At one end a man talked loudly through a megaphone; Shar heard a string of medical terms. The man was holding aloft a jar with something dark in it—embryos, probably. Ponzi and Marian went down to look, the girl followed hesitantly after. “Christ, it smells in here,” Mitchie said. He glanced around at the stalls. “This is a hell of a place to go to.”
Marian and the others came back, raving about the embryos. “It was Siamese twins, going to be,” Marian said. “The man showed how they were joined. You could see the backbone there—it was white. Think if that happened to you!” She laughed and took Shar’s arm.
Half the stalls were closed. “Where the hell is the fire-eater?” Ponzi said. “All my life I been wanting to see a fire-eater.”
For an audience of small children the midgets went through a dance routine, then a sword-fighting routine. The fat man, who looked as if his gigantic flesh had begun to melt in the heat, sat on a creaking stool and watched them, clapping his hands. If he had a wife or children they were nowhere in sight.
The midgets had coarse, wrinkled faces, and seemed to be winking and leering down at the children and at Kathie. They raised and kicked their legs suggestively, arching their eyebrows. There was one woman with a white, painted face, elaborate eyes, and a frilly pink dress, and three men dressed in bright satin—green, blue, red—with high-buttoned shoes. An odor of stale unwashed flesh hung about them. Ponzi went up as close as he could get, cheering the midgets, stumbling and apologizing profusely to the children he stepped on.
“Aren’t they cute?” Marian said. “They’re so little. Why are they so little? That one of them—there—looks like an old man, his face is so wrinkled!”
They strolled past. Shar had begun to feel nauseous, but the sensation did not weaken him—it excited him, strangely; he was itching for violence. He gripped Marian’s arm. They glanced at each other and a shock of understanding passed through each of them. Ponzi and the others stood gaping at the crocodile people, who were protected from their audience by thick wire. They had rough, greenish skin and odd Oriental eyes, and stared back sorrowfully at the spectators. “Holy Christ,” Ponzi cried, “are those things real?” Mitchie dragged him on to the rest of the stalls. There was no vampire woman out just now—she must have been temperamental, for her stall was empty. But there was a creature of gigantic size that looked like an ape but was dressed like a woman and seemed to have, beneath its fur, a woman’s face and body. Shar laughed aloud. The creature sat back in a corner, looking out, with its paws folded politely on its lap. “What a lot of crap this is,” Mitchie said. “Do they think anybody believes this?”
They had neared the entrance again. The man up on the platform had put aside his embryos now and was announcing something else: a race. He had attracted a large crowd, and Shar and the others could not get very close. The smell of flesh was in the air, and food, and filth. The man shouted sensationally the names of the contestants in the race—“Bo-Bo, Terry, and Little Jo—here they are, just as they were born. They don’t want your sympathy, folks, aren’t interested in it, they take their fate as it is, they accept their condition. They don’t question the ways of our Maker and so why should we? Look at them, folks, and let’s have a little hand.”
The contestants were without arms or legs, and lay on their sides, professionally, to show their faces. They were to race one another through sawdust to a red, white, and blue decorated finish line. The master of ceremonies was about to shoot his cap-gun pistol when the flare of excitement reached its peak in Shar and he pulled Marian toward the exit. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.
“But the race! The race!” Marian cried. They struggled at the doorway; the cap gun went off. “Let me watch it, Shar. Shar—”
He waited outside until the race was over, smoking a cigarette. The desire for violence had grown so strong in him that tears of rage and lust had forced their way into his eyes.
When the others came out they looked a little subdued; even Ponzi looked quiet, and his wet lips were moving
. But Marian laughed sharply and took hold of Shar’s arm. “I knew you’d wait,” she said. “I knew it!”
“We’re going over to my room,” Shar said to Mitch. “You come along.”
As the afternoon had waned, the crowd had grown larger. Down on the street two automobiles had crashed, without much fuss, and a ring of spectators stood around. Horns blared. The smell of food was strong now, and the wind, rising at sundown, picked up dust and scraps of paper and flung it against faces. Shar looked at the young girl, Kathie, whom he had hardly noticed until now. She walked beside Ponzi as before and kept glancing back to him—she looked feverish. He saw her pale, smooth throat and the anxious movements of her jaw.
At Shar’s room they had an argument with Ponzi. “You can go down by the beach,” Mitch said. “Hell. What do you want? We been listening to you all day.”
“What are you going to do?” Ponzi demanded. “You filthy bastards! Filthy! Four of you!”
“Get him out of here,” said Shar.
“Now, you go on down,” Mitch said, standing face to face with Ponzi and tapping his chest. “Why, ain’t you said you was chaperoning for us? Ain’t you? Now, why you want to go and spoil everything? You go on down now, and leave us be. Shar’s been nice to you all day.”
“You filthy bastards!” Ponzi cried in dismay.
There was a scuffle inside the room. Marian cried out; the girl answered her. “You go on! You go on! He likes me!” she said.
Ponzi pushed his way in to see Shar on his knees before the girl, moaning and rubbing his face against her loins. His fingers were outstretched on her back, closing into fists in her clothing. “He likes me! He does!” the girl cried, hiccuping in her proud hysteria. “He liked me best all along!”
Shar, his eyes wet, his face distorted, pulled the girl over to his unmade bed. “She was up in that son of a bitchen barn,” he said, “but I had to go back after her. She was bleeding—she was ugly, dirt on her face, on her mouth—she was ugly, ugly, but I—I said, ‘Am I too big for you? Am I?’ and she didn’t feel it—she was unconscious—Why didn’t I leave her there?” He gave up on his tearing of the girl’s clothes and collapsed onto her suddenly, burying his face against her throat. They could hear him sob. “A bitch—a filthy bitch, a whore—If I see her again I’ll kill her—”