Freezer Burn

Fourteen

The night arrived and Frost came back. He called out this and he called out that. He pointed and nodded, shook his head and stood with hands on his hips. Things began to happen.

Trailers and cars were pulled in a tight circle. Battery trailers powered up the lights and made them bright. The lights were white and yellow, red and blue, a tossing of green and gold. The whirligig in the glow of the lights became fresh and new, an alien craft waiting to take on passengers.

The crude paintings on the sides of the trailers changed as well. They became sexual, alluring. There was cheap carnival music playing, and barkers, or talkers as they called themselves, stood in front of tents and trailers and called out as cars parked and people entered the carnival through the gap in the wall of trailers where the tickets were sold.

Bill didn’t have his own place as a freak, as Frost had suggested, and he didn’t want one. The idea disgusted him. He was ashamed enough to walk about with his face messed up the way it was, so he pushed himself back into the shadows by the Ice Man’s trailer and waited there and watched.

It was strange to see what the trailers and tents had become. How it all seemed so fine and rare. Children laughed and ate cotton candy from the stands, and young women in short-shorts and tight-fitting shirts walked about and laughed and seemed impressed and amused by everything. Boys with acne and greasy hair poked each other with elbows, looked at girls and grinned, then laughed one to the other.

The freak tents and trailers were busy, but the Ice Man’s business was slow. However, as people came and left the Ice Man’s trailer, the word spread, and the same people who had been came back, and new ones came, and as the night went on the line grew and stayed long.

Two middle-aged policemen, one slim and one fat, came strolling through. On duty, probably, sent to see that all was well and the freaks weren’t planning a hostile takeover of the town. The cops seemed to be enjoying the women in shorts as much as the acne-faced boys. They had the same grins and elbow motions.

From time to time men and women stopped and watched Bill in the shadows, his face looking all the more strange there, holding darkness behind knots and grooves of mosquito injury. But no one spoke to him, until the cops.

One of the cops, the slim one, saw him in the shadows and said, “What’re you supposed to be?”

Bill wondered if his photograph was on bulletins. He wondered if his face could be recognized beneath the mosquito bites. He stepped out of the shadows, into the light.

“I’m the Blowed Up Man,” he said.

“What?” said the skinny cop.

“The Blowed Up Man. My face blowed up.”

The thin cop laughed. “Well, that ain’t any kind of name. You need to come up with something better for a name.”

“Yeah,” said the fat cop. “That sucks. You could call yourself Mr. Ugly or Knot Head or something like that. That’d work better… You fucked up like that at birth?”

“Industrial accident.”

“What kind of industrial accident?”

“Chicken plant blowed up and I was in it.”

“What the hell blows up in a chicken plant?”

“Chickens.”

The slim cop studied on that, then burst out laughing. “You’re pulling my leg, ain’t you?”

“I was hit in the face by flyin’ chickens. They ate too much and one of ’em farted, and there was a foreman lighting a cigarette, and the rest of it’s history. It’s called the Great Owentown Chicken Disaster. Look it up, it’s in the records.”

“Now I know you’re pullin’ my leg,” said the slim cop, and he laughed some more, just like this was the best thing he’d ever heard.

“Come on now,” said the fat cop. “It wasn’t at birth, how’d it happen?”

“A fire.”

“Well, you look it,” said the fat cop. “I got a question. It’s somethin’ I’d like to know. Somethin’ I’ve always wondered about people like you.”

“All right.”

“A face like that, you get much pussy?”

Bill found himself irritated by this, but realized it was the same question he had asked Frost about Conrad.

“I do all right.”

“You get any good pussy – I mean, anyone ain’t messed up or got a disease? I can see you gettin’ the bearded lady, or the one says she’s got a dick and a hole, ’cause, I mean, what are their prospects? But what about good pussy?”

The cops looked up as Gidget appeared, butting her way through the crowd, her face sullen, her lips puffed out as if they had just been punched. She had on her open front shorts and the same tight top. A couple of boys stood nearby in all their pus-pocked grandeur, watching Gidget float by, showing her all the open-mouthed reverence of two monks approaching a religious shrine.

“Like that?” said the fat cop.

“Not that,” Bill said. “Not yet anyway.”

The cops laughed. The fat one said, “Yeah, right, brother, not yet. Somethin’ like that, and somethin’ like you, well, you ain’t even got money she’d want if she was sellin’ it.”

“A fire, huh?” said the skinny one.

Bill nodded.

“Yeah,” said the skinny one. “I can see that, like your face caught on fire and someone put it out with a back hoe.”

Both cops laughed.

“One thing’s for sure,” said the fat one, “whatever happened it happened bad, and you are one ugly dude. Come to think of it, I don’t know that bearded woman would want you after all.”

“Well, now,” the skinny one said, “you have a good night, Blowed Up Man or Burned Up Man, or Chicken Hit Man, whatever you are, and don’t bring that face into town. You might make a pregnant nigger woman throw a child, you hear?”

The cops laughed themselves away from him and pushed ahead in the line to the Ice Man’s trailer. When they came out of the trailer a few minutes later they were quiet.

They walked on through the carnival and out of sight behind the whirligig, probably on their way to demanding free hot dogs and drinks and cotton candy, ready to peek at adolescent girl asses bending over counters as the girls tossed coins or baseballs.

Bill said softly: “Dumb shits.”