“You just stuck?”
“I think so. Wind shoved me off the road.”
“I don’t think I can pull it out, even if I had a chain.”
“Nope. It’s a wrecker job. A big wrecker.”
“What about the Ice Man?”
“He’s all right. I checked on him first thing. Neither he nor the freezer moved an inch. That’s why I’m all wet, going back there to check. I’m built low to the ground, you know.” Conrad opened the door of the truck cab. “I hate to ask you this, but think you could lift me up? Otherwise, I’m going to have to walk through ditch water again. You go through it, it ain’t gonna wash up and lick your belly.”
“All right.”
Bill let Conrad climb on his back. The dog-man was heavier than he expected. The idea of touching Conrad just a couple weeks ago would have made him feel queasy, but now it was nothing. They climbed up the side of the ditch and Bill sat Conrad down in front of the motor home.
“Looks like you clipped the front a bit.”
“Yeah. I hit a historical marker in a roadside park. Damn near got hit by a falling high-line wire.”
“And how’s the Princess?”
“She’s all right.”
“Yeah, well anyone’s all right, you can bet it’ll be her.”
Bill and Conrad went inside the motor home and Conrad got up in the passenger chair. Bill noted that Conrad was sniffing the air. He wondered if he could smell what he and Gidget had been doing. He’d had his face in it for so long he couldn’t smell anything but that, so he didn’t know how the trailer smelled.
Bill started up the motor home, pulled onto the highway. As he drove along he tried to think of some kind of small talk to hand out to Conrad, but nothing came. If Conrad figured he’d been throwing the meat to the Princess, as he called her, and Bill sat silent, this was sure to feed the suspicion, but still, nothing came to him to say.
He thought: What if she comes out of there stark naked?
No, she wouldn’t do that. She was bound to have looked out a window and seen what he was doing out there with Conrad, so she wouldn’t come out.
But what if she hadn’t seen, and she did come out? How was he going to explain that? He thought maybe he should talk loud to Conrad so she could hear, but he still couldn’t think of anything to say.
He looked at Conrad and Conrad was reaching Gidget’s smokes off the dash and shaking one out. He used her lighter to light up. He sucked in the smoke and let some of it come out his nose and he opened his mouth and rolled his tongue in a funny way and smoke came out of there in the shape of a funnel and wreathed over his head and spread about in the motor home cabin.
“I don’t hear nothing back there. You sure she’s all right?”
“Sure. I talked to her earlier. She was all right then. She’s maybe takin’ a nap.”
“A nap.”
“Sure.”
“You look a little ill, buddy.”
“I’m tired. This storm and shit. It rattles the nerves.”
“Yeah. Mine are rattled. I went off in that ditch so fast I didn’t even know it till I was there. Sometimes, things like that happen. You’re just going along, mindin’ your own business, not expecting anything, then suddenly you’re caught in a slide and you’re off in a ditch.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You get out of the ditch, you got to have enough sense not to get back in it.”
“Wasn’t your fault in the first place.”
“Maybe I wasn’t alert enough. Wasn’t like I didn’t have a little warning. Thunderheads. Rain.”
“It come pretty fast, that storm.”
“Yeah. But I had some warning. I could sense it. You can sense a thing like that. The atmosphere is different. It’s got a kind of electricity. A kind of smell. It’s got an after-smell too.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know anything. Just one minute I’m driving along, next minute I hit a post.”
“Best thing to do in that case is back away from the post and drive off and keep on driving and stay away from posts in general.”
Bill turned and looked at Conrad. “Yeah. I reckon you’re right. That’s what I’m doing, drivin’ on.”
Conrad nodded and smoked Gidget’s cigarette. “That’s a good idea, man. Me and U.S. Grant, we’re tryin’ to do the same. Drive on, you know? Stay out of ditches. Away from posts.”
“And how are you doin’?”
“Well, it ain’t easy. I think about it. What was goin’ on and all with Phil, but we’re doin’ it. We got to do it. You got to look at the big picture. You look at it small, well, you’re off in that ditch again, and maybe this next time the ditch is deeper and you can’t climb out, not even with help. Savvy?”
“Sure.”
A few miles farther they came upon U.S. Grant parked along the road on the opposite side, the cab turned in the opposite direction, trailer disconnected and sitting beside the road facing toward its original destination.
U.S. Grant had brought out a lawn chair and was seated in it next to her truck and trailer. The pin- and pumpkin heads had been riding with her and they were outside now, playing, running about and splashing in ditch water. Passing traffic slowed to look at this and wonder.
Bill looped around and went back and parked and he and Conrad got out. As soon as U.S. Grant saw Conrad she started crying and came out of her chair in a leap and grabbed him as if to pick him up like a pet. Instead she bent down and dropped a big hairy knee out from under her shift and rested it in the mud and hugged him.
“We spun around and the trailer snapped loose,” she said. “I kept thinking I was gonna die and things weren’t like they ought to be between us.”
Conrad stroked her with his weird little hand. “It’s all right.”
“I didn’t want to die with us not reconciled.”
“We are. We’re fine.”
“What I done was wrong.”
“I’ve already forgiven you. It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t blame you for nothing.”
The pinheads and the pumpkin heads were throwing dirt clods at one another.
“Bill,” Conrad said, “I’m going to stay here with U.S. Grant. You go on to the next town and call in some wrecker service.”
Conrad popped a snap on a back pocket and took out his razor and then his wallet. He removed a card. “This here is our road service. You use most anyone, we get a little discount. We can always use a discount. You call and tell them where we are, and they’ll come. Tell them where my trailer is too. Any others you might see on the way in.”
Bill took the card and Conrad replaced his wallet and razor and sat back on his haunches and shook Bill’s hand. “You watch out for ditches now. There still might be some slick spots.”
PART FOUR
A Feast of Possibilities
Twenty-two
Before Frost returned, wreckers did their work. Pinheads, pumpkin heads, a bearded lady, a dog-man, and the trailers were recovered. They were all brought to the designated place for the night. This place was near a hill overlooking a clutch of willows fastened precariously by thin roots to red mud. The rain had swollen the river and turned it brown as a turd. There was a light wind, and the air tasted damp and smelled of fish.
Frost was cranky when he returned. He came into camp driving fast. He slammed the Chevy to a stop, throwing up mud and bogging the station wagon about halfway to the hubcaps. That made him even madder. He got out and kicked a tire, stomped about camp bellowing orders. When he heard about all that had happened, about the bang in his motor home, he put one hand on his hip and looked at the ground for a long time. Bill was standing nearby, Frost looked at him and frowned. “Wasn’t anything you could do to keep this from happening?”
“It was the storm. I didn’t start it.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have drove careful.”
“It wasn
’t about driving. It was about a storm. It washed me off the road.”
“Me too, Boss.” It was Conrad. He suddenly appeared, waddling forward on all fours. He was wearing a pair of cuffed blue jeans and a red jersey, his odd shoes and hand protectors. “The Ice Man trailer was blown off the road, and me in it.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s all right, Boss. It didn’t do nothing to it. U.S. Grant and some of the folks had a little adventure too. Everybody is okay. We’re gonna have a wrecker bill, but that’s all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. No one was hurt.”
“Of course. Good. But I mean the Ice Man.”
“He’s fine. His hairs are all in place. I don’t even think his dick swung to the other side.”
“He’s petrified. Nothing is going to swing.”
“No shit?” Bill said.
Frost didn’t answer. He went past Conrad, heading quickly for the Ice Man’s trailer.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Bill said.
“Well, he gets like that when it comes to the carnival, and especially when it comes to the Ice Man. Normally he’s all right, but now and then he’ll go into a snit. This stuff with Phil didn’t do him any good neither. I always hated Phil. He was more full of shit than a compost pile.”
“Petrified? He said the Ice Man was petrified.”
“That’s what the man said.”
“He don’t look petrified.”
“First I’ve heard of it, and I’ve known Frost for a long time now, and he’s always had the Ice Man exhibit. Then again, I’m not that inquisitive about the Ice Man. Personally, I don’t fuck around with it. I don’t care if he’s petrified or putrefied. Hauling a dead body around seems crazy to me. It ought to be buried. It gives me the willies.”
“Try sleeping with him.”
“Does he give good head?”
Bill turned and looked at Conrad, and slowly he smiled, and they both laughed.
Late in the day, Frost gathered everyone in the center of the camp and made a talk. A single cloud overhead darkened and the dipping sun fell westward into the Sabine, struggling as if about to drown, throwing out color like yells for help.
“First off, I want to apologize for the way I came in here today.”
Mostly no one had noticed, but everyone nodded, more out of respect that this was important to Frost, if not to them.
“I was angry. I had to deal with the police. They found Phil. He was drunk and parked in a truck stop, sleeping it off in the cab of his trailer with a woman he had hired who turned out to be man in a skirt, wig, and pantyhose.”
“What color wig?” someone asked. Some snickers followed.
“In place of pressing charges we worked some things out, me and Phil. He gave me the papers on his trailer, and the trailer of course. And the whirligig, which I’ve hired some men to load this very night. All of it will arrive here tomorrow morning—along with my children—courtesy of Phil. We’ll set up, stay here until the weekend, and make a couple nights of it then.
“One of the children was destroyed. Phil turned a corner too fast and he hadn’t made any attempt at proper packing. Celeste’s jar fell over and her head came off.”
Bill remembered that Celeste had been a female baby with a vagina, a pecker, and a swollen head.
“I ended up burying her beside the road. Ever since her birth, and simultaneous death, she has been in that jar. And not long after, on the road. All these years, on the road. I thought it appropriate she was buried by the highway.”
Bill thought probably about a half hour later some dog had dug her up and was making a meal of her in a thicket somewhere.
“Anyway, the whirligig is ours, it’ll be here tomorrow. Phil is shipping it in.”
There wasn’t exactly a murmur of enthusiasm. Setting up that whirligig was a pain in the ass. Even Conrad, who could be easygoing about most things, had said one day he’d rather drink a bucket of runny rat shit than help put that bolt-rattling sonofabitch up.
Usually, it came time for putting together the whirligig, Phil got drunk to do it and called for volunteers to help. It was then that the carnivalites began to suffer minor ailments. Anything from a paper cut to a bad back surfaced. But somehow, every time they camped, the damn thing got put up so unsuspecting folks could risk their lives.
Bill wished Phil had just gone off with his whirligig and not stolen anything. Everyone would have been a lot happier. Now, with that damn whirligig coming back, Bill thought he’d like to hunt Phil down with a pack of dogs, a rifle, and a few angry peasants with torches.
“Who says he’ll show?” asked Conrad.
“Well, I had him write out what he’d done on a piece of paper, and I said he didn’t show in the morning, I’d give the paper to the cops. Now, I understand a number of you had some trouble yesterday. I’m glad no one was hurt. I was rude earlier today, and I hope Bill and Conrad can forgive me for my loss of temper, and my seeming lack of interest in the living. I assure you, I care about all of you, very much.”
“We gonna eat now?” Double Buckwheat asked.
Frost smiled. “I suppose so.”
Night settled in, gray at first with strands of the sun ripped up and strewn through it, like orange confetti. Bill, who had been interested in the dark cloud that had settled over them, looked up. It was no longer distinguishable, it was just part of the starless night, like a sack had been pulled over everything.
Everyone went off to their spot to eat. Bill wished it were breakfast, when they ate together at the picnic tables. He felt lonely going back to the Ice Man’s trailer. Lonely and confused. He hadn’t had such an unsettling day since his mother died. Well, since the firecracker stand robbery. Well, since Deputy Cocksucker and the discovery of the freak show and carnival.
Come to think of it, lately most of his days were unsettling. But today was unsettling in a different way. He wasn’t sure if it had been a good day or a bad one. He felt he had truly become friends with Conrad, and he liked the feeling. He had never had a real friend before, just people he could do small crimes with.
And Gidget. Jesus, she was something. And there was that stuff about James Dean. He had to see one of his movies sometime. He had to find out more about him, now that he knew he and the Sausage Man weren’t one and the same.
And there were other feelings. Guilt feelings. He had betrayed Frost, one of the first people in his life to truly do something for him out of the goodness of his heart. Before, he had seen Frost as a sucker, now he wasn’t so sure. Things inside him were being stirred he didn’t even know he had.
Twenty-three
Serious rain was thumping down and the river outside sounded as if it were running through the Ice Man’s trailer.
Bill was eating a mustard-dipped corn dog he’d warmed in the trailer’s little microwave. He was eating it and pondering about the Ice Man being not only frozen, but petrified. Was he petrified because he was frozen, or was he petrified and then frozen, and what was the point of freezing him if he was petrified?
Bill was working these mysteries about in the great room of his head when there was a scratching at the door, like a cat wanting in. At first he thought it might be coming from inside the freezer itself, made by the nails of a petrified hand. He jerked when he heard it and dropped the corn dog. It rolled across the glass and stopped, smearing mustard so that it looked like a great bug collision on a windshield.
Glancing at the Ice Man, he discovered the old boy hadn’t moved a smidgen. The scratching was coming from the door and it made the hairs on his upper back and neck salute. He was suddenly brought to mind of all those cats of his mother’s he had bagged and drowned. He had a vision of the raging river having washed them free and brought them back to seek him out.
Bill went over to the door, put his ear to it, heard Gidget’s voice say, “Bill?”
When he opened the door she was dressed in a yellow rain slicker with a hood. She looked like a plas
tic monk. He let her in and she took off the raincoat immediately and tossed it on the floor. Water ran out from under it. She said, “I thought you weren’t ever going to open the door.”
“I didn’t hear you out there at first. Or I didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m soaked to the bone. Damn water ran inside the slicker. It’s blowing ass over tea kettle.”
Gidget was wearing blue jean shorts and a man’s white T-shirt. Her shirt was wet and her breasts were visible through it.
“I don’t know you should be here.”
“Hell, Frost is out. I slipped him a Mickey. He won’t wake up until tomorrow morning. I said I was going to fix us drinks, and I did, but mine didn’t have a Mickey in it.”
“Someone could have seen you come over here.”
“In this rain, not likely. I couldn’t see myself out there. I damn near wandered off the edge into the river. It’s really perfect for me coming here.”
“Why are you here?”
Gidget looked at Bill as if she had just discovered his head had been hollowed out with a spoon. “Didn’t today mean anything to you?”
“I wasn’t sure it meant much to you. Way you disappeared.”
“I guess I was thinking, Bill. I was kind of overwhelmed. I was thinking about us. I was thinking about lots of things. For Christ sakes, offer me a towel. You got any liquor?”
Bill shook his head and got a towel. By the time he handed it to her she was out of her shorts, shirt, and shoes, and was wiping off. She wore only black panties with frilly black lace on the edges. When she spread her legs to wipe the insides of her thighs, he discovered the panties were split in the middle; the split rolled on either side of her pubic mound.