There were still some lights left on from the carnival and there were a couple porch lights burning on trailers, and everything looked hot out there, even if it wasn’t. The whirligig had not been dismantled, and wouldn’t be until tomorrow. It looked like a wheel that had come off one of God’s toys and been forgotten.
Bill could hear the two-headed nigger playing juke and soul music tapes in their trailer. They did that a lot and sometimes turned it up too loud and had to be gotten on to, but tonight he could hear it and it was just loud enough and he liked the song. “Soul Man.”
He listened while he drained his lizard, then packed up and was about to step inside and crack open a J.D. Hardin Western book with fucking in it, when the tune changed and the music cranked up with the Isley Brothers singing “Shout.” He listened to that a few seconds, then the two-headed nigger’s trailer door burst open and the two-headed nigger danced out.
Or sort of danced. Bill couldn’t rightly decide if it was dancing. He, or they, were falling all over the pasture, dipping here, jerking there. Two pea brains caught up in rhythms that a single body couldn’t define.
They tried to go different ways and the heads were singing and weren’t very good at it. Eventually they fell down in the pasture and ended up doing what they did at meals, writhing in the wet grass, screaming and yelling, slapping at each other with their hands, causing as much damage to themselves by striking as by getting hit. They sounded drunk.
The yelling and the music popped heads out of trailers, and Bill saw one of the heads was U.S. Grant. She was in a short nightie, and she was standing in a crack in the door, looking out to see what was going on. Bill could see a face behind her, lit up by the little porch light on her trailer. It was Phil of the Constant Half-Hard Dick. His head seemed to be floating just behind her shoulder, like a helium-filled balloon on a string. Phil’s arm was visible too, around U.S. Grant’s ample waist. He probably thought he couldn’t be seen, but Bill could see him.
And so could Conrad.
Due to the rain, Conrad had not been at his post on top of Frost’s trailer. Where he had been Bill was uncertain, but Conrad suddenly crossed the gap between the Pickled Punk trailer and U.S. Grant’s trailer; the music and the yelling had stirred him the way it had everyone else.
Conrad loped on all fours up the steps to U.S. Grant’s trailer and between her legs, knocking her backwards inside. In the next instant there was a bloodcurdling scream and Phil came leaping out of the trailer butt naked, a gash in his buttock, his greasy hair rolling all over his head. Blood flew out of the wound as he hopped and the drops seemed to rise up in slow motion and hang in place and become like jewels in the odd cotton-covered night and the carnival lights, then the drops fell and exploded in the damp grass.
Bill couldn’t help but note Phil’s pecker wasn’t half hard. He could tell that even from a distance. You couldn’t even see it, it was such a peanut. The cool air, the fact that a dog with a razor was flying out of an open trailer door after him wasn’t something to give it much size either.
“You sonofabitch,” Conrad said, “I’m gonna make you look like a highway map.”
Phil nimbly leaped and hopped and avoided the slashing razor. “We weren’t doin’ nothin’! Jest watchin’ TV.”
“Naked!”
Conrad flashed the razor again and Phil screamed and jumped back and Conrad jumped with him and the razor went out and then Phil was trying to fight back by kicking. Next thing they were both down in the dirt and Conrad was on top with the razor raised.
Bill thought it was just as good Phil hadn’t gone into the money collection racket. He wasn’t worth a shit at intimidation. In a moment they’d have to get someone fresh to run the whirligig and Conrad would be on his way to doing about three hundred years in prison, or maybe, like a dog nobody wanted, he might get put to sleep by law enforcement.
Out of nowhere Frost appeared. He was in his white silk shorts, and his skin was white in the light and his head was whiter yet. Bill could see the hand on his chest, flopping about as Frost moved, as if it were signaling directions. It was a dark hand now, like it had been dipped in black paint.
Frost had hold of Conrad’s neck. To Bill’s amazement, he picked Conrad up, jerked him up so hard the razor flew from his hand. Conrad flailed about. Phil jumped up, and seeing an opening, he kicked Conrad in one of his dangling legs.
Frost’s free hand shot out and caught Phil by the back of the neck as well. He pulled him forward, slammed Phil and Conrad together and dropped them unconscious to the ground. Frost took a deep breath, stood over them like a stern god. Bill, who had eased forward, saw the hand on Frost’s chest was dark because it wore a thin black glove.
U.S. Grant was out of her trailer in a flash. She sat down on the wet grass, took hold of Conrad’s head, put it in her lap, and stroked his snout. Phil moaned a little. Bill, and most everyone else in the carnival, stood over him and looked at his nakedness. Even Double Buckwheat was there, their music still playing in the background. “A Lover’s Question” now.
Yep, a peanut, Bill thought. Everyone from the pinheads to the pumpkin heads to the assorted freaks were nodding and mumbling about the same thing. They had all heard the story.
Frost bent down and looked at Conrad. Conrad’s eyes blinked. Frost said, “Sorry, boy. I can’t let you kill someone.” Then to Phil: “Phil, get something around you and come to my trailer. I’ll patch up those cuts. If it’s bad, we’ll take you to the emergency room.”
“Cuts ain’t bad,” Phil said, pushing his hair back with his hand, flicking his wrist to remove grease from his fingers. “Not that fuckin’ Butch the Show Dog here didn’t try.”
Conrad jerked as if to get up, but Frost pushed a palm in his chest and Conrad fell back into U.S. Grant’s lap. She stroked his head and said, “Sorry, Conrad. I’m so, so, so sorry.”
“Were y’all . . . fuckin’?”
“Yes. But it wasn’t any good. He wasn’t any good. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You wasn’t no good neither,” Phil said. “It didn’t matter which beard I was pokin’. It was the same bad.”
“You took him in your mouth?” Conrad said.
“It didn’t go in far,” she said. “There wasn’t enough of it to reach the back of my throat.”
Conrad groaned. Phil cussed and said, “It’s just cold is all. It wasn’t cold you’d see some dick, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you.”
One of Double Buckwheat’s heads said, “That ain’t no half-hard dick.” The other said, “We got dicks bigger’n that.”
“Go to hell,” Phil said, getting up.
“It didn’t mean nothing,” U.S. Grant said to Conrad, stroking his head. “It didn’t mean a thing.”
Conrad made a sound in his throat like someone trying to swallow a golf ball. U.S. Grant tried to help him to his feet, but couldn’t quite do it, and Conrad didn’t have the will to manage.
Bill went over and got Conrad onto all fours. Conrad nodded at him, then without a word he and U.S. Grant made for her trailer. She had a big patch of mud and grass on the back of her nightgown, and Bill was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for her. He had never really thought he could be concerned with a bearded lady’s problems.
Conrad looked like he’d just been in the dogfight to end all dogfights, but his head was up, and he looked proud enough to drop his pants, lift a leg, and piss on a trailer tire. Instead he went up and inside and U.S. Grant closed the door.
Frost put a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “Good man,” he said.
Bill felt a warmth rise inside him. It was a feeling he didn’t entirely understand.
“You boys,” Frost said to Double Buckwheat, “turn off that music and go to bed. And you’ve been drinkin’, I can tell. Tomorrow, we get rid of all your booze. You two can’t drink. You know that.”
“We can we want to,” said one head.
Frost gave him a look. The other head replied promptly, “But we don’t want to
.”
“Better,” Frost said.
The music playing now was “Blue Moon,” and “the boys” followed its notes into their trailer, closed the door, and just as the Temptations began to sing “Can’t Get Next to You,” the music went off.
Bill watched Frost head back to his trailer, the hand flapping, his huge white body floating across the wet night grass. He saw Gidget standing in the doorway of the motor home, framed by a light from inside. She had on a pair of panties so brief they might have been made out of strip of black Christmas ribbon. You could see the dark outline of blond hair trimming the edges of the cloth. She wore a matching top that only went over the tops of her breasts. The smooth bottoms of her breasts were like two beautiful moons dipping out of cloud cover. She stared at Bill, then went inside.
Frost went up the steps and into the trailer. A moment later, Phil, with a towel around his waist and bleeding from his superficial wounds, went after him, looking for all the world like a boy on his way to the principal’s office. As he passed, Bill said, “Reckon when you jumped out of that trailer something rejogged your brain.”
“What?”
“Knocked something loose in there so you don’t have to suffer from a half-hard dick all the time.”
“Fuck you.”
“What with?”
Phil was defeated now, his head dropped another degree toward his chest. It was obvious he wouldn’t be able to collect money from deadbeats and no one was wondering about the size of his half-hard dick anymore. He couldn’t even control U.S. Grant the bearded lady, didn’t have enough dick to fill her mouth, so how was he going to run a string of whores? It was the whirligig and hair grease for him, and that was it.
Nineteen
Next morning it was discovered the whirligig was still in place, but the whirligig owner was not. Phil had departed in his truck and trailer without bothering to take the ride with him.
Before decamping Phil had decided on a change of career after all. He had broken into the Pickled Punk trailer, causing the fold-out wall to collapse, exposing the interior to the light of day and the population of the carnival.
Phil had departed with all the Punks, forty-eight dollars and fifty-two cents of bread and egg money, a canned ham, and two bags of M&Ms. With the exception of the Punks, all this belonged to Conrad, who Bill discovered lived in the Pickled Punk trailer with a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a pallet on the floor, a greasy pillow, and a wrinkled magazine picture of Jesus’s face taped to the wall.
The picture was one of those where Jesus was on the cross, but you couldn’t see the cross or his body, just the face. The face looked swollen. There was a crown of thorns on his head, tears on his cheeks, blood leaking down from his forehead. The picture looked to have been wadded up at one time and straightened out, maybe with an iron. In the harsh sunlight all the little creases made the Savior look not only in pain, but old and tired and disappointed, as well as in need of a good sunlamp. On the floor next to Conrad’s pallet were scattered playing cards. One of them, a Joker, was turned face up and had a heel print on it, presumably Phil’s.
“It ain’t much, but I call it home,” Conrad said. He sat by Bill’s side smoking a cigarette. The pinheads and Double Buckwheat were behind them, peeking into the ravaged room that had been home to Conrad and assorted fucked-up babies in alcohol.
“You ought to not have to sleep on the floor,” Bill said.
“I don’t have to,” Conrad said. “It’s what I like. Some reason, messed up like I am, a bed doesn’t work as well. I get some serious backaches, and a chiropractor doesn’t know what to do with me. I think they figure I ought to go to a vet. I sleep on the floor or on the roof of Frost’s motor home. It’s the most comfortable of the trailers and such.”
The pinheads and Double Buckwheat grew bored looking at the pallet, the picture, and the empty space where the Punks had been, so they wandered off.
“Hey, thanks for helping me last night.”
“That wasn’t anything. I just helped you up.”
“It was enough . . . Hell, I don’t blame her.”
“Beg pardon?”
“She couldn’t help herself. She wanted something normal. I reckon I had a normal woman would go to bed with me, I’d go. Even if she was ugly enough to have to sneak up on a glass of water. It’d make me feel like I wasn’t on the outside lookin’ in. Like I was just another fella out there doin’ what other fellas did. I was mad last night, but I forgive her. I don’t take it personal. You can’t take something like that personal.”
Bill felt he could, but he changed the subject, nodded at the picture on the wall. “I see you’re religious.”
“Just liked the picture. Kid wadded it up and tossed it at me one night. Out of curiosity, I unwadded it and it was that guy. It being up there on the wall makes me feel I got company. Play myself a game of cards now and then, I try to imagine he’s playin’ against me and the Pickled Punks are watchin’. You know, bunch of interested bystanders watching two card sharpies work. I have to take it off the wall when the Punks are on display . . . Were on display . . . Damn, I’m gonna miss them M&Ms. And that forty dollars or so is all I’ve been able to save. I spend too much money on those damn M&Ms. They’re kind of like catnip to me. And U.S. Grant likes ’em.”
Out of the corner of his eye Bill could see Conrad’s eyes had watered up. Without really knowing he was going to do it, he reached out and patted Conrad on the shoulder.
Conrad coughed and looked at the ground. To give him a semblance of privacy, Bill looked out at the whirligig. The cottony fog was rapidly being burned off by the heat of the morning sun and already deep shadows were forming around it. Wasn’t long, though, before black clouds, like skin cancers, began to appear on the face of the sky, and off in the distance was a rumbling sound like a hungry belly wanting to be filled.
Frost had to go into the nearest town to talk to the police and try and get something done about Phil. In the meantime, it became necessary to move on to the next location. The whirligig was left where it was and other things were loaded up. Bill got behind the wheel of the motor home, Gidget in the back, sleeping as usual.
Bill was the last in the caravan line. The stretch of highway the caravan took was littered with clapboard houses, black kids in yards that were mostly made of gravel, sun-burned grass, and nasty-looking chickens. Bill drove past at least six burned-out filling stations, half of them with the pumps pulled up, leaving only the concrete structures they had stood on and the steel rods they had been fastened to.
They hit a wide four-lane stretch of highway, and Bill was thinking maybe things weren’t working out so bad after all. He was sort of getting used to the carnival. All the freaks were starting to look regular to him, and he fit in here good as he fit in anywhere. Better maybe. He had discovered he could talk to Conrad in a way that was different from the way he had talked to Fat Boy and Chaplin.
The bedroom door slid open and Gidget, wearing green silk shorts and a matching pajama top that had only one button near the center, came barefoot up to the front and sat in the passenger’s seat. The seat swiveled and she turned it toward Bill and crossed her legs way over and looked at him with that pouty look of hers that made Bill want to slap her one moment and fuck her the next.
“They find Phil?”
“Not yet. Frost went to town to see about it.”
“What town?”
“One near where we was.”
“You mean the other direction?”
“Yeah.”
“He ain’t in the caravan?”
“No.”
Gidget took a quiet moment to consider this. She looked at herself in the mirror on the dash, seemed to like what she was looking at. She flicked her hair and turned her attention back to Bill.
“You know, you look like James Dean some. Only with darker hair.”
“The sausage guy?”
“Who?”
“Sells sausage. He used to be a country singer.?
??
“I don’t know who that is . . . James Dean, the movie star.”
“Never heard of him.”
“East of Eden. Giant. He got killed in a car wreck.”
“Jimmy Dean is who I know of. He sells sausage. They ain’t bad. I don’t know if he got killed in a car wreck or not.”
“I don’t care about any sausages.”
“You brought it up.”
“I said you looked like James Dean the movie star, I didn’t say anything about any sausages. I can’t believe you don’t know who James Dean is.”
“Yeah, well I can’t believe you don’t know who Jimmy Dean is. He’s on TV all the time and he sells sausage.”
“James Dean’s on the TV too. In old movies.”
“I don’t watch movies much.”
“Well, you’re missin’ out. I grew up on the TV set. I might as well, wasn’t nothing else to do. My Mama and I used to watch it together, late at night. She’d come stay in my room and we’d watch TV. That was when my stepdaddy was drunk and wanted to hit her. She said I was named after a movie she liked about a girl named Gidget. You know it?”
Bill shook his head.
“Reckon you don’t know who James Dean is, there’s a damn good chance you aren’t gonna know about a movie called Gidget. Anyway, she said she and my Daddy saw it on TV once, and she said something about it made her feel romantic, and they made love and I was conceived. They had to get married on account of me. Daddy said my Mama was a bitch from hell and I was her little bitch. He always said that, like we weren’t human.”
“What happened to him? Your Daddy?”
“He stuck his head out a car window and got hit by a signpost. Mama was drivin’. She said she didn’t even know he’d gotten hit. He rolled down his window and stuck his head out and she said she heard a whack, and he just sat back down in the car with his head turned, and she didn’t think nothing of it. Talked to him for five miles she said, before she realized he wasn’t answering any of her questions and he smelled like shit. See, when he got hit he crapped himself. It wasn’t his fault, it’s just your muscles and your bowels let go when you get killed sudden like.”