“I didn’t know I was sick.”
Frost laughed. “You’re infected with mosquito bites, my boy. I have a friend who supplied me with this stuff. A doctor. Did I tell you I was an RN for a time?”
Bill shook his head.
Frost took out one of the bottles and unscrewed the lid. Underneath there was a soft rubber cap stretched over the top of the bottle. Frost took one of the hypos and stuck the needle right through the rubber cap and drew some of the liquid into the hypo.
“I was lots of things before I was an owner of this carnival. But this is the only place I’ve ever really felt at home. With this hand on my chest I’ve always felt like an impostor to the outside world. This should help clear up some of the swelling, the low-grade infection. I have a couple of pills here I want you to take. We’d have done this sooner, my boy, but the truth be told, I had to wait until I came to the town where I had a doctor friend I used to know. He helped me out. I guess that does make them illegal drugs, doesn’t it?”
Bill presented his arm to Frost, but Frost said, “No, has to be in the hip.”
Reluctantly, Bill pulled down his underwear and rolled over and lay on his stomach, halfway expecting Frost’s hands to clamp down on his shoulders and for Frost to enter him from behind. He had never known anyone like Frost, and no one had ever been as nice to him. Therefore, it occurred to Bill that Frost might be queer, looking for brown ring and deep penetration. Then it occurred to him if he was queer he was certainly banging one hell of a nice poontang about ten times a night. Did queers do that? Could they learn a trade like that and maybe even enjoy it?
The shot was over before Bill could consider much else, and Frost had not tried to impose himself. He merely cleaned his equipment with a little bottle of alcohol and put the hypo and the medicine away and zipped it up in the bag.
“I know you’ve done something you shouldn’t, Bill,” Frost said, “and I’m not asking what. I can read a man. I know men. I don’t know women, but I know men. And you’ve done something. I know too you’re a good man and it wasn’t anything bad, just something stupid. Am I right?”
Bill hiked up his underwear and rolled over. “Yeah, I did some stuff. I told you already I did.”
“All I want to know is what you’ve done isn’t anything terrible. Just stupid. And you know better now.”
“Yeah, I did plenty of stupid things. Stupid is kinda my trademark.”
“Nothing like murder?”
Bill considered. He hadn’t murdered his mother, she had died, and he hadn’t murdered the idiot firecracker stand man, Chaplin had, and he hadn’t killed Fat Boy, Fat Boy had gotten his from snakes, and he hadn’t killed Chaplin, a Roman candle had, and he hadn’t killed the cop. The cop managed that all by himself. For a man that hadn’t killed anyone, he had certainly been around a lot of death, but he didn’t even feel close to lying when he said: “Naw, nothing like murder. Just a little trouble. I reckon it’ll blow over afore long. And yeah, I know better.”
“Good,” Frost said. “I’ve been watching you, and I think you’re the man to do what I first asked you about.”
“Managing?”
“Sort of. I need a man who can go into town and do some of the things I’m doing. I’m sick of it. I’ll make a lot of the arrangements still, but I need someone to go in and pay some money here and there and pick up a few things and make sure permits are in order and advertising is taken care of. Got me?”
“I don’t know anything about permits and that kind of stuff.”
“Frankly, you don’t have to. It’s all arranged. Look, Bill, it isn’t really a managing job. It’s just donkey work, but it isn’t difficult donkey work and I’d rather not do it. It’s a way for you to start picking up a little money, and being a little more useful around here. Some of the others are starting to think you’re some kind of pet of mine because you don’t have oddities.”
“Reckon I look odd enough.”
“Everyone knows now it isn’t a permanent oddity, and that you aren’t trying to work up an oddity. I got to tell you straight, Bill, you have to do this, you want to stay on. We don’t really need anyone else to just set things up.”
“Am I gonna have to keep doing that too?”
“Yes. I said we don’t need you, but you’re here, you help.”
“But this town stuff . . . With this face?”
“Another week, you’ll be good as new.”
“Yeah?”
“A little puffy, maybe, but lots better. Surely you’ve noticed it’s better.”
Bill, who had avoided examining his face for some time, went into the bathroom. Normally he just glanced into the sink and ran the water and washed his face and hands without looking in the mirror, but now he raised his head slowly and saw his reflection.
The Blowed Up Man was gone. He was puffy and red, even blue in a couple of spots. Knotty over the eyes, on the cheeks, at the corners of his lips, and right under the nose. Not pretty, but no one would mistake him for a freak now, just a guy who couldn’t keep his hands up in a barroom brawl.
Bill washed and toweled his face dry, happy about the improvement. He came back in and sat down on the bed. “You’re right, I’m gettin’ better.”
“These shots will make it cure up all the faster.”
“This job going to actually pay me something besides room and board, huh?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How much?”
“It depends what we haul in. I take the money for entrance and for looking at the Ice Man, everyone else runs their own show. They take what they get for people looking at them, any tips they can finagle. I get a little slice of their pie so they can stay in the carnival. Way I’d do you is give you a percentage of what I get, plus room and board. You’ll be in another trailer.”
“What trailer?”
“The Ice Man’s trailer. It’s the only one with enough extra space. It’s got facilities. I’ve even bought you some clothes. A few pairs of pants and T-shirts. A light jacket. Tennis shoes, socks, and underwear.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Feeling better, Bill became a shrewd businessman. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “I still don’t know what kind of money we’re talkin’.”
“You’ll find when I have a really good week I’ll be generous. We usually do all right.”
“Yeah, I’m surprised the jack this racket brings in. I always thought carnivals were by the skin of their teeth.”
“It might seem like a lot to you, but by the time I deal with expenses and such it’s no great shakes. The Ice Man, believe it or not, draws more people than anything.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“It’s a full third of my income. There may come a time when I semiretire, and just put the Ice Man up somewhere for exhibit. I wouldn’t have the expenses I have now, and it’d be a good living, I think. You see, people are getting so they don’t like to look at freaks. Political correctness, I guess, but my children, the ones everyone else calls the Pickled Punks, and the Ice Man, people don’t feel guilty because they’re already dead. They’ll pay to look, because what they’re looking at can’t look back.”
“That Ice Man, he what you said he was, a Neanderthal?”
“I said he might be. He looks a little too good to be a Neanderthal, don’t you think?”
Bill wasn’t really sure what a Neanderthal looked like, so he held back judgment. “You ever had the electricity go off on that thing? I mean, it did, wouldn’t the Ice Man come to pieces pretty quick?”
“I’m prepared. What do you say? Is it a deal?”
They shook hands on it.
Seventeen
Bill awoke mornings atwist in his blankets, his cot squeaking as he rolled over and looked at the Ice Man’s refrigerated tomb.
It was the same each day. He found living in the trailer with the Ice Man bothersome. At night, so he could sleep, he lay a blanket over the top of the free
zer glass. He was uncertain what this accomplished, but it made him feel better.
Sometimes in a deep sleep he dreamed the Ice Man was breathing and he could hear it as certain as he could hear his own breath. In and out. And beyond the breathing was the thumping of a heart.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Most certainly the beating of an ancient bloodless heart. And there was the tapping at the glass. The tapping would grow more desperate, work in rhythm to the breathing and the pounding of the dead heart, and he would try to awake to make the dream end, but he feared if he awoke it would all be real. At least in the dream, he could call it a dream.
Other times he thought he heard the glass splintering, or thought he heard footsteps gliding up behind him, but when he broke the spell of sleep, turned with a start and an explosion of breath, there was only the freezer with the blanket stretched over it, its motor humming, and the beating of the little fan stirring hot air. He knew then the noise was the freezer and the fan and the outside wind rocking the trailer, working in tandem to scare the shit out of him.
If he turned the fan off, it grew hot and sticky and he couldn’t sleep at all. So he ran the fan and it and the wind and the humming freezer gave him the Ice Man to deal with.
Except for bedtime the trailer wasn’t so bad. During the day he drove Frost’s motor home. The Ice Man’s trailer was pulled by a semi-cab driven by Conrad. Conrad wore a black cowboy hat pulled low on his head. He was mounted on a leather cushion. He used a crutchlike device fastened to his leg to work the pedals. When he drove he assumed the appearance of a fella waiting for his last meal to pass.
When the caravan stopped it was soon show time. After the last customer left, the trailer was his again. He enjoyed it then, before there was the sound of the wind, the fan, and the freezer. He was even brave enough to place his dinner on the freezer glass and eat while looking at the Ice Man’s face, clearing the glass from time to time with the hair dryer. Later, if they were near where he could pick up a channel, he would grapple with his aluminum-foil-covered rabbit ears, trying to bring in a TV station, or he would listen to the radio, listen to anything playing or talking, as long as it was noise.
Conrad loaned him books, and he was amazed at how much company they were. He had never read much before, just some little Reader’s Digest things, but he found the Westerns soothing. Most of them were by someone called Louis L’Amour, and there were older ones that he liked even better by someone called Luke Short, and sometimes the books were not Westerns, but were about men with blazing machine guns who killed lots of other men, then got lots of pussy and flew off in planes on their way to other adventures. He wondered if you could really get a job like those guys had, and what the requirements for hiring were.
But, TV or not, radio or not, books or not, as night moved on toward sleep, he would begin to feel ill at ease. He began to think of the Ice Man all over again.
On nights when he couldn’t sleep for thinking about it, he’d go outside. Outside usually being some pasture or park area Frost had arranged for them to stay in, and he’d look at the sky and all about, trying to make some sort of plan, but never making one, and being confused on what he should make a plan about anyway. His last plan had certainly been a doozy. A plan like that made you hold back on future arrangements.
It was on his first late night of doing this that he discovered Conrad lying on top of Frost’s trailer. He was a fair distance away, his back to Bill, and he lay still, his ear to the roof. At first Bill thought he was up there eavesdropping, trying to catch the sound of lustful breathing inside, or listen to the mousesqueak rhythm of bed springs.
But, as he became accustomed to the dark, Bill saw that Conrad lay with his head on a pillow, and there was a blanket stretched over him. He was sleeping there, like a pet near its master, waiting for tidbits, soon to be called, tucked in for the night with a dream and a razor.
Bill’s first thought was: What if it rains? Where does he sleep then? Underneath? Does he have a basket there? A bowl?
But it never seemed to rain anymore, not since that day it had cooled his mosquito-wounded face. It was hot with a constant savage wind blowing, the air so brittle a wave of your hand might knock a crack in it.
Every night when Bill came out of his trailer unable to sleep, there was Conrad. On occasion the trailer would be rocking to the lovemaking of the two inside, and above them, on the rooftop, Conrad would be sleeping, as content as a baby in a wind-up swing.
It got so watching Conrad was a kind of diversion. Late nights, Bill would sneak out and around the side and get in a place where he could see Frost’s trailer.
On occasion Conrad would not be there, but more often than not he was. One night Conrad was there, and so was the bearded lady. She had her hefty self on all fours and her dress pushed up over her ample ass and her panties around one ankle. Conrad, naked except for his hind leg shoes, was mounting her, proving that he did indeed do it doggie style.
The bearded woman’s head was tossed back, and the way her beard stuck out she looked like those pictures Bill had seen of the Sphinx. Conrad was so eager with his work on the bearded lady’s white round ass, he looked not unlike a child wrestling a beach ball about to roll out from under him. In time Conrad settled down, got his bearings, and the motor home began to rock with a tidelike motion. Bill figured the bearded lady and Conrad were working to the rhythm of the humping of the Frost couple inside; a foursome sharing the same sexual cadence if not the same space.
Bill watched this with a kind of amazement. Eventually the bearded lady lifted her head even more and pointed her beard at the moon and gave out a grunt he could hear, and Conrad, shaking like a convict taking his voltage in the electric chair, came to a finish. They lay down together, and Conrad pulled a blanket over them. But the motor home rocked on, Frost either taking long to finish or striving for a double.
The whole thing made Bill lonely as the last pig in a slaughterhouse line.
Bill resented Conrad got to drive the Ice Man’s trailer. This was obviously an important assignment. He, instead, had been given Frost’s motor home to drive. At first he thought this was an honor, but in time he realized the Ice Man was, at least to Frost, the most important member of the carnival, and he trusted it only to Conrad, his number one man. Dog. Whatever. Trusted it to him even if he had to pull the trailer while sitting on a cushion, working the pedals with a stick.
Bill soon lost his resentment, however, and learned to take pride in his responsibility. Gidget had taken to staying in bed while he drove instead of riding with Frost or driving the car. She liked to sleep until they came to the next town and set up. At that point she would abandon the camper for air and cigarettes, always dressed in shorts and T-shirts too small to hold her.
She never did any work that Bill could see, outside of what she did at night with Frost in their bed. Perhaps she saw this as work enough. Bill knew, had he been Gidget, he’d have certainly counted it as a fulltime job with overtime. Maybe a little hazard pay for having to deal with that extra hand.
Bill enjoyed having Gidget in the motor home while he drove. He could smell her, even when he was behind the wheel and she slept behind the closed bedroom door. It was a smell rich and wet, like a lathered horse.
One morning he liked it even more. They were driving to a small town called Gladewater, planning to set up just outside near what Frost called “a row of honkeytonks.”
On the dash of the motor home was a mirror Gidget used to apply makeup to her eyes and lips and brush her hair. He looked at it to examine his face, and liked what he saw. A face clear of swelling and strangeness. Not a bad-looking face, a good-looking face actually, the one thing about himself of which he could be proud, yet had nothing to do with. Nature had given it to him, not out of design he figured, but in the manner a blackjack dealer might turn over a card and find a King.
Still, accident or heavenly design, it was his face, and it was almost back to normal, just tired and a little splotched.
&n
bsp; But what interested Bill even more than his face was that the mirror showed him the reflection of the now open bedroom door behind him. In the doorway, sleepyheaded, hair tangled, was Gidget. She was naked as the day she was born, but certainly a lot better looking than at that earlier moment, and she was struggling into a pair of blue jean shorts, wrestling the denim with the fervor of a rodeo rider trying to bulldog a steer, throwing her soft butt back and forth like a pendulum, giving him a wiggling peek at other charms, wobbling boobs, legs long and soft and brown and popped with muscle, a dark V of fuzz coating what Eve used to destroy Adam. Apple, hell. Everyone knew what it was Adam wanted and why he did what he did. A woman like that, like Eve, like Gidget, she could make you set fire to an old folks home and beat the survivors over the head with a shovel as they ran out. A woman like that damn sure wouldn’t have to do much to get some guy to steal an apple.
Much to Bill’s disappointment, Gidget eventually slid into the shorts and straightened up. She turned and looked toward the front of the motor home where he manned the wheel. He could tell from the set of her face that she knew he was looking at her in the mirror. The shorts were unzipped all the way down, and he could see the crease of the beast itself. Her breasts were revealed, and she made no effort to cover herself. Slowly, she leaned forward and took hold of the sliding bedroom door. Her breasts fell forward, as if about to dive-bomb from her chest and bounce his way. Then she pulled the door closed.
Bill caught his breath and brought the motor home back between the lines.
About fifteen minutes later, for the first time in over a month, it began to rain. Gently at first, then a real gully-washer.
Eighteen
Couple days later, one night after the suckers had left, Bill, unable to sleep, as usual, was outside the Ice Man’s trailer pissing in the dirt. He could have pissed inside in the toilet, but here he was out in the night with an urge to go. It was a cool night, still damp from all the rain they had been getting, and there was a low fog over everything. Bill felt as if he were in a bottle with a cotton stopper, like those killing bottles they used for bugs, where you put the bug in and soaked the cotton in alcohol or something and stuck it in the bottle top and the bug died from the fumes.