“But higher and faster also brings in bigger dough and gets you booked on better circuits,” he said. “I don’t want to end up as a forty-miler.”
“What’s that?”
“A carny who never travels farther than forty miles from home,” he said with disdain. “I want to see the world and I want the world to see me.”
They talked for a little while longer, then Toni looked at the time—was it really almost midnight?—and said her goodbyes. “It’s been really nice meeting you,” she said, “but I better be turning in.”
“Yeah, me too,” Cliff said. “Nice meeting you too, Toni.”
Toni watched him go. Cliff had big ambitions—and he was also kind of delish. But after Slim she wasn’t about to jump into anything.
After Wellington the Central show jumped to Great Bend, then to Dodge City for its annual Boot Hill Celebration. The carnival was torn down and resurrected every five to six days in a succession of small towns, and Toni continued collecting press clippings from newspapers like the Emporia Gazette, the Belleville Telescope, the Iola Register, and the Arkansas Valley Home. She mailed these to her father along with her letters from the road, partly out of pride and partly to reassure him she was alive and unhurt.
She was having the time of her life.
Also pleasant was the continued attention she received from the quietly persistent Cliff. She’d finish a show and he’d be there, talking shop with Ella for a while before he and Toni would go grab some hot dogs, burgers, or coffee, talking about what they loved to do and dreaming about the time when they would make it big.
About the only drawback to carny life was the occasional after-closing party, which could get boisterous—Cliff dragged her to one, but Toni was not a party person and left after half an hour. Even Arlan, a quiet man most of the time, got a little boisterous when he brought company “home” to his corner mattress in the truck. It was always late at night, after Toni and Ella had gone to bed, and Toni never saw or heard any of the women, just Arlan’s grunts and groans; but the vibrations from the bucking mattress were prodigious and traveled through the trailer hitch and into the motor home, causing the aluminum flooring to oscillate with desire.
First Toni and then Ella—lying in their bunks, trying to get some sleep—broke into a fit of the giggles. Ella chuckled and said softly, “I’m glad the Lord made him such a strong, healthy man, but—if that floor doesn’t stop tremblin’ like this, I may have to go to confession tomorrow.” Toni whooped; this was the first remotely dirty thing she had ever heard Ella say. “Hush up, you. First thing tomorrow I’m unhooking that towbar.”
That seemed to solve the problem, and the act moved on to county fairs in Scott City and Goodland, Kansas.
In mid-June, on a cloudy, drizzly morning in Goodland, Toni was making a practice dive from ninety feet when a spray of rain blew in on a gust of wind just as Toni was launching herself off the platform. She didn’t notice anything dire at first, but as she came out of her somersault she saw that the tank below was moving away from her: the wind had rattled the tower and sent her off at the wrong angle.
Fighting panic, Toni twisted her body to the left, trying to reverse her trajectory. It was only this that saved her from an even worse fate: she straightened her body as best she could, entering the water mere inches from the tank wall. She missed colliding with it, but entered the water at an eighty-degree angle—it felt as though her entire left side had been slammed against a concrete wall, she heard very clearly the sound of her ribs cracking, a fiery lancet of pain stabbing from her waist to her armpit. Between the pain and the crash into the water she had no breath left in her as she sank like a brick to the bottom, bruising her right hip in the bargain.
She thought of Anne Booker Ringens, and then she blacked out.
When she came to, she was being carried out of the water by Arlan, who had her slung over his shoulder as he climbed the ladder. On the catwalk he set her down on her back as she began coughing up water and Ella squatted down to examine her.
“I—I’m okay,” Toni stammered, but when she tried to sit up the fire in her side flared up and she fell back down.
“Hell you are,” Ella said. “Can you breathe all right?”
Toni took a breath. “My side hurts when I breathe.”
“Try it again.” This time Ella put her ear to Toni’s chest, listening, then brought her head up. “No rattle, I think you managed to avoid puncturing a lung. But you’ve broken at least a couple of ribs.” She turned to Arlan. “Find out if there’s a hospital in this little burg, she’ll need X-rays.”
“Oh God,” Toni whispered, “I’m sorry…”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Ella said, “it was the wind. Wind’s the only thing I’m scared of, and this is why. Lord, I hate wind.”
Cliff quickly got word of what had happened and rushed to the scene, offering to take Toni and Ella to the hospital in one of the Chevy sedans he used in his act. Toni readily agreed, only to find herself hurtling across the Great Plains at ninety miles an hour. Cliff liked speed, all right. “For God’s sake, Cliff,” Ella told him, “she’s just got a couple of cracked ribs! If we spin out in this hot rod of yours she’ll crack her skull open too!”
“Sorry, sorry.” Cliff eased off the accelerator and they arrived safely at Boothroy Memorial Hospital, a two-story, redbrick building that looked more like a school than a hospital. But everyone there knew their business, X-rays were taken, and a doctor confirmed to Toni that she had fractured two ribs and severely bruised the cartilage surrounding three more. The doctor iced the ribs to get the swelling down as best he could, then taped the ribs with surgical gauze. “When you get home, ice the ribs, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, for the next few hours,” he told her, “and take two aspirin every six hours. If the pain becomes too severe, call me, I can prescribe you something stronger.”
“How long will it take to heal, Doctor?” Toni asked hopefully.
“Usually? About six weeks.”
“Six weeks!” Toni said in horror.
“Sorry. Get as much rest as you can, no exertion, no jumping off ninety-foot ladders, and you should be fine in about a month and a half.”
Toni didn’t know whether she should be depressed at being sidelined again, or just grateful to be alive. Though she grumbled when Ella told her, back at the carnival, to lay down in the trailer and get some rest, she fell almost instantly asleep and didn’t wake up until that evening, well after Ella’s fire dive. Arlan helped her outside and they sat at a card table eating grab-stand hamburgers, French fries, and root beer. Then, to Toni’s surprise, Ella came out of the trailer holding a cupcake with a single lit candle in it, and placed it in front of Toni.
“What’s this for?” Toni asked.
“Congratulations, you’ve just passed your baptism of fire as a high diver: your first broken bones. I’ve cracked ribs, broken legs, gotten second- and third-degree burns on my hands, and can’t count the number of times I’ve had to wear beefsteak on my eyes to take out black-and-blue marks before I could perform. I lived to dive again, and so will you.”
Toni felt a bit better hearing this, and the cupcake wasn’t bad either.
But it was frustrating to sit on the sidelines as Ella performed alone. Toni got the rest her doctor ordered, but the time she spent napping in the trailer was equal to the tense hours she spent inside listening, on the radio, to the unfolding crisis in Korea. On June 25, Communist North Korea had, without warning, invaded its neighbor to the south, the democratic Republic of Korea. Within four days the South Korean capital, Seoul, had fallen. A day later, under the auspices of a United Nations mandate to repel the invaders, President Truman announced he was sending American troops to aid South Korea in driving the North Koreans back above the 38th Parallel. Toni grew fearful that her father, a member of the Naval Reserves, might be ordered back to duty in this latest war, and placed a long-distance telephone call one morning to find out whether he was all right.
> But Eddie just laughed and said, “They’re not reactivating old farts like me pushing forty, especially not when we have children to support. Don’t worry about it. Hey, those clippings you sent are mighty impressive. I’m glad to see you’re doing so well, and all in one piece, too.”
Toni laughed nervously, which only made her ribs hurt more, a literal stab of irony. “Yeah, everything’s going great,” she lied.
“Been a few weeks since I got the last one, you too busy to write Dad?”
“Yeah, busy,” she said, then, making a quick verbal U-turn, “So, are you back at Palisades this season?”
“Yeah, one more season and I figure I’ll have enough in the bank to open that—thing we discussed.”
“How’s Jack?”
“He’s right here, want to talk to him?”
Jack came on the phone, breathless: “Holy cow, Sis, have you seen what’s going on in Korea? These dirty Reds launched a sneak attack, just like the Japs did at Pearl Harbor!”
“Yeah, sounds awful.”
Then, with the same breathless excitement: “Toni, guess what? I’ve been accepted at the Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn! All the big-name artists have gone there, even cartoonists like Jack Kirby and Gus Edson—”
“That’s terrific, Jack, congratulations!”
They talked awhile longer and Toni hung up, vastly relieved that her father would not be going off to war.
Now she was able to relax, at least. Cliff visited at least once a day, sometimes spiriting her off—always at something approaching the speed of sound—in his Chevy for lunch at one of the town restaurants. After lunch he would kiss her goodbye, the kisses becoming ever more ardent; either I’m going stir-crazy, Toni thought, or I’m starting to fall for this guy. Luckily her fractured ribs prevented things from getting out of hand—but they didn’t prevent her from thinking about things getting out of hand.
At other times Toni would just sit outside Ella’s trailer with her or Arlan, who had played Coney Island’s Luna Park in its heyday and was a sideshow star with Barnum & Bailey for years. It seemed to Toni like quite a comedown from Barnum and Luna Park, and she asked him delicately, “Do you ever miss being a performer?”
“I still am performer,” he declared without batting an eye. “I perform so you can perform, you and Miss Ella. Everyone is performer in a carny.”
Toni smiled. “I guess they are, at that.”
“I like working shows. Show people don’t care where you come from. Don’t care what your real name is, what you did before, who you take to bed with you. They only care you do your job.”
All at once, it clicked—the bucking mattress, the grunts and groans: there were two men in bed.
And like a true carny, Toni didn’t care.
She smiled and said, “And sometimes more than your job—like rescuing waterlogged high divers.”
“Ah,” he said, waving a hand, “you do the same for me.”
Yes, Toni thought again, this was very much like Palisades.
* * *
By August Toni’s pain was gone and the show doctor pronounced her ribs healed. Gingerly, she began practicing her routines in the morning from a cautious forty-foot height, and when after a few days she felt no ill effects, she climbed up to the full ninety feet. She had a moment’s fear standing on the platform, the panic of the botched dive still raw in her memory, but reminded herself that that had been the fault of an errant wind and not anything she had done wrong—and there wasn’t a breath of wind, at the moment, on the great plains surrounding Phillipsburg, Kansas. She looked down, gauged her distance, then leapt into the air, tucking herself into a ball and tumbling end-over-end before straightening her legs. As she plummeted toward the tank she felt a calm exhilaration, the spinning Ferris wheel a garish blur of color and motion that thrilled and comforted her with its presence; she hit the water and entered her safe, quiet place of triumph.
She dove that afternoon during Ella’s first performance, repeating her routine flawlessly, surfacing to the cheers of the crowd. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed that sound until now.
Perhaps it was her exhilaration at performing again, or simply the growing sexual tension between them, but when, after dinner in town that night, Cliff asked Toni, “Would you like to come back to my trailer?”—she looked at him, at his sparkling eyes, and found herself saying, nervously, “I’d like to, but—first—you should know, I’ve … never done this before.”
“There’s a first time for everybody, hon,” he said gently. “If you can dive into a Dixie cup, you can do this.”
“And second, the last thing this show needs is a pregnant high diver.”
Cliff slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out—discreetly, so that only she could see—a paper-wrapped Deer Skin brand prophylactic.
“I always wear a helmet,” he said, “before I take a flying jump.”
She laughed, kissed him hard, then went with him to the trailer.
There she discovered that Ella was wrong about those “best damn three seconds of your life.” This lasted considerably more than three seconds, and diving was at best a close second.
After five days at Phillipsburg the show moved on to the Nebraska State Rodeo in Burwell, Nebraska, for five days; a fair in Norton, Kansas, for another five days; and then Abilene, Kansas, for an eight-day engagement ending August 29. There were seven more major fairs on the schedule in Texas and Oklahoma, but Ella had promised to appear at the St. Petersburg Lions Club’s Labor Day Festival on September 6 as she had the past two years, and she was not about to disappoint the hometown crowd. So as Central States Shows made the jump to its own Labor Day commitment in Holzington, Kansas, Toni kissed Cliff goodbye and she, Ella, and Arlan headed south to Florida. Ella would play the St. Pete Festival on the sixth, then hit the road and head west, meeting up with the Central show in time for the Cimarron Territory Celebration and Fair in Beaver, Oklahoma.
They arrived in St. Petersburg on September 2 and began erecting the tower and tank amidst the carnival-like rides and concessions the Lions Club had set up on Sunset Beach. The next day, word came in that a “baby hurricane,” as some in the press were calling it, was entering the Gulf of Mexico. Storm warnings for Hurricane Easy—soon to belie its name—were issued from Key West to Pensacola. Ella gazed nervously at the ocean as the tide in Tampa Bay rose six and a half feet, a thirty-year high.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered to herself. But it was too late to do anything about it.
Hurricane Easy blew haphazardly up the coast, causing among other disasters a dam rupture that flooded the north Tampa community of Sulphur Springs with two feet of water, destroying some forty homes. Tides of between six and eight feet, fed by raging winds, immersed beachfront property from St. Petersburg to Clearwater to Sarasota, turning roads into rivers, smashing beach homes to splinters, and sinking boats.
Ella, Toni, and Arlan drove the truck and trailer inland and rode out the storm in a public shelter. By September 8, the hurricane departed Florida as a tropical storm, dying out over Georgia, and Ella returned to Sunset Beach to find that Hurricane Easy had been anything but on her equipment. The diving tower had been blown off its feet, the winds snapping it apart section by section, mangling and twisting them like licorice sticks. The tank had rolled on its side some distance before it, too, burst apart, some pieces vaguely identifiable while others had simply vanished, washed into the sea.
“Oh my God,” Toni said softly.
“Jesus Kristus,” Arlan murmured under his breath.
Ella stared at the wreckage with a mixture of shock, grief, and anger.
“Didn’t I tell you?” She shook her head disgustedly. “I hate wind.”
* * *
The hurricane had destroyed three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, and Ella wasn’t sure how much, if anything, her insurance would cover. The Lions Club announced it would hold a benefit on November 9 to raise funds for Ella to replace her equipment, but
even if enough money was raised, it would take her months, maybe a year, to put her act back together.
“You’re welcome to come back and join me when I do,” she told Toni, “but you’re a damn good diver. You’ll find work.” She promised to recommend her to her agent in Miami.
Toni hugged Ella and thanked her for everything she had done for her, then went to the nearest Western Union office and sent off two telegrams: the first one went to Cliff, c/o the Central States Shows, saying:
ELLAS EQUIPMENT DESTROYED BY HURRICANE. WONT BE RETURNING TO SHOW THIS SEASON. WILL WRITE MORE LATER. TONI
The second telegram went to her father, telling him she was returning home. The next morning she boarded the Florida Special, this time as a paying passenger all the way to Newark.
Eddie met her at the train station on Monday. If Toni had any doubts that her ribs were fully healed, Eddie’s bear hug dispelled them. “It’s good to see you, Dad.”
“Good to see you too, honey. Look at you, a veteran carny now! I’m proud of you, Toni. I haven’t stopped worrying, but I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She hugged him again, then Eddie picked up her bags and they started outside. “Jack’s in Brooklyn, we found him a nice room in a boardinghouse on DeKalb Avenue. He starts classes next week.”
“That’s great,” Toni said with a smile, “I’m happy for him.”
“By the way,” Eddie said as they went to his parked car on the street, “you mind if we make a stop? There’s something I’d like to show you.”
* * *
When they reached Fort Lee, instead of turning right on Route 5 toward Edgewater, Eddie continued down Palisade Avenue until they pulled into the parking lot of a small, one-story structure—a boarded-up roadstand, with a marquee sign stripped of its name—squatting on a tiny parcel of land about two miles north of the amusement park.
They got out of the car, Eddie pulled out a key from his hip pocket and inserted it in the door lock. “It’s just about the perfect size for what I need,” he said. He walked in, Toni following. “So what do you think?”