Loon Lake

22

The nights seemed to race by. The weather got colder. The freaks got nastier. We came one day to a town less promising than any I’d seen. It was shut down and boarded. One tavern and one store were open. I don’t remember the name of this town, it was like a tree with just a branch or two still alive.

In a lot beside the boarded-up railroad depot Sim Hearn gave the signal and the carney put up for business. In the evening we turned on the lights and a few mountain people straggled in but most of the time the freaks talked to each other because nothing else was doing. The rides went around empty. I thought Sim Hearn had lost his marbles.

The next night the same thing, the wind blew through the booths and rattled the tent flaps, they sounded like over the mountains somewhere there was some gang war of Tommy guns going on.

I thought Sim Hearn was telling us the season was over by enacting the news. The cook built a fire on the ground and heated an ash can of water. He scrubbed his pots and pans with brown soap. Other people were packing. Mrs. Hearn grabbed my arm and we stepped behind a wagon.

“Hearn goes no farther,” she said. “Look, a sweater I have for you so you wouldn’t be cold.”

She was a pain in the ass with her presents. She brought me cigarettes, oranges, she washed my clothes, all in secret of course. Nobody knew about it except the whole carney.

It chilled me to think Sim Hearn might know it. But his distance from me was unchanged and his peculiar authority maintained itself in my mind. It was as if no matter what I did to his wife I could never break through that supreme indifference. I decided no man was that godlike. I decided he didn’t know. I wished he did know. Then I wouldn’t be some nameless creature so low as to be beneath his line of vision.

The next morning we struck everything but the show tent. We raised the wood shutters on the wagons and nailed them shut. We pushed the wagons into an old car barn across the tracks from the depot. After lunch a few people left with their bags or bundles. Nobody said so long or even looked at anyone else. I think I was shocked. Despite all my other feelings about the carney, I could believe it was a privilege to be attached to it. It angered me that people would walk away as if Hearn Bros. had no more distinction than a mission flop.

On the other hand, why should it be different? Sim Hearn couldn’t care less if any one of them lived or died and they knew that. He was going to take the trucks down to Florida for the winter and let them get down there on their own. If they showed up, he’d hire them; if they didn’t, that was all right too.

Fanny the Fat Lady’s wagon was in place and hadn’t been moved. I saw Mrs. Hearn coming out of her trailer. “Fanny wheezes like calliope,” she said.

“Well, why doesn’t someone get a doctor?”

She put her hand on my cheek and looked in my eyes. “I worry to think someday if we are not together what will happen to you.”

Several of the freaks were leaving in a group. I was told to take a truck and drive them about fifteen miles to a town called Chester, where there was a spur line to Albany. It was the afternoon, already getting dark. In the cab with me sat the woman who took care of Fanny. The whole ride she wept and blew her nose. She spoke to herself in Spanish as if her running stream of thoughts and sorrows came up over the banks every now and then. She thought I wasn’t looking when she lifted her skirt and fingered the metal clip of her garter to make sure it was fastened properly. I saw tucked in the top of her stocking a wad of bills that looked like a lot of money.

I let off the truckload of freaks and their keepers in Chester, New York, and they hopped, climbed or were lowered from the tailgate. They went limping and scuttling into the waiting room carrying their bags like anyone. Why not? They were mostly immigrants, after all — the same people but with a twist who worked for pennies in the sawmills or stood on the bread lines. But I imagined the Stationmaster seeing through his grill this company of freaks in ordinary streetclothes approaching him with questions of schedule and tickets.

Why didn’t I get on the train with them? Did I really want to drive a truck to Florida? Did I want to bang Mrs. Magda Hearn in more states of the Union?

I thought of the freaks as pilgrims or revolutionaries of some angry religion nobody knew anything about yet.

When I got back it was already dark. I could tell something was wrong, there were lots of cars there and wagon teams. I cut the engine and stood on the running board. Beyond the lot was a hill that rose steeply, blacker than the sky, I could see its outline against the blue-black space of sky behind it. I thought I heard a scream. I listened — it was something else, a drumming of the earth or the sound of a rug being beaten. I walked toward the show tent, there was the dimmest light in there. A man stepped out of the shadow and put his hand on my arm. A flashlight shone in my eyes. “Who’s this?” a voice said.

And then I heard Magda Hearn. “It’s all right. He’s with the show.”

My arm was still held and I could feel the consideration of this intelligence in the mind behind the light. The flashlight went off. I made out the figure of a state trooper, blocked hat and gun and Sam Browne belt. Then my arm was released, the marks of the fingers still on me, like the afterimage on the eye.

Magda Hearn was walking me toward the show tent. “Joe,” she said, “I want you to see, to understand. And I wait for you in the car. Do you hear me?”

“What’s going on?” I said. “What are the police doing here?”

“Joe, please to listen.” She was whispering in my ear and in each cycle of her crippled gait, the sibilance rose and fell in waves of urgency.

Then I passed through the flaps.

The show tent had a few rows of wooden bleachers and a small ring where the ponies could run around and the bareback sisters, if they were so inclined, could do their turns. A cat act had been featured here for a while.

The bleachers were empty. One bulb burned from the tent pole. Eighty, maybe a hundred men stood in a circle in the dirt of the ring. I couldn’t see over their backs but I heard the not unfamiliar night music, the grunts and gurgling moans and squeals of Fanny the Fat Lady. As the rhythm got faster the crowd shouted encouragement. Then I heard that peculiar basso thumping as if the earth itself was being drummed. Then an abrupt silence and the hoarse male roar of expiration. Whistles and cheers came from the crowd, men turned outward, I saw them drinking from bottles, exchanging money. Staggering through the ring, buttoning his pants, was a grifter I recognized. He sank down on his knees beside me, removed a flask from his back pocket and took a long pull.

Some sort of hot shame rose from the roots of my sex into my stomach and chest: it felt like illness. I pushed forward and saw Fanny on her back, arms and legs flung outward. She was naked. She lay twitching, each spasm jerking her flesh into ripples. She wheezed and fought for breath. The sweated slathered flesh was caked in dirt, but with white crevasses in the folds of her and a red blotch in the middle. I was pushed aside and spun around. A moment later another lover had fallen on her. The crowd yelled and jammed up around me. She was quickly brought to pitch, her great back rising and thumping into the earth, but this one didn’t last long, and to great merry raucous hoots and jeers he stumbled out of the ring.

Almost immediately another rube was moving forward for his turn. I jumped him just as he unbuckled his belt. I knocked him down and kicked him in the groin. He yowled, doubling up and clutching himself and I took his place crouching beside Fanny, facing them all, my fists clenched. I was screaming something, I don’t remember what, it stunned them for a second, and then they were laughing and taunting me and shouting at me to wait my turn.

Fanny lay there trembling in her agony and her eyes were rolled into her head. Her mouth was open and giving off gasping animal wheezes. Maniacally, I felt betrayed by her, as by life itself, the human pretense. I became enraged with her! In my nostrils, mixed with the sharp fume of booze, was an organic stench, a bitter foul smell of burning nerves, and shit and scum.

Then something flew out at me, a pint bottle, or a rock, and caught me low on the forehead. I went down, dazed, clutching my eyes, bright lights in my brain. I had fallen on Fanny, she was like some soft rotten animal carcass. Her arms helplessly went around me. I was panicked and tried to get free. My struggles were mistaken — I was pulled out of her grasp by my feet and dragged through the dirt and kicked and rolled and yanked to my feet and given a clout on the side of the head.

I found myself on my knees, behind the crowd. I was wet. Blood streamed in my eye. But the ceremony continued. There were men drooling there. There were onanists. There were gamblers betting on the moment of death. Later there were men leaping on her, on each other, squatting on her head, crawling over her, falling on her, shoving bottles in her. There were gallants calling for order, for some law of decency if all pleasure was not to be lost. And Fanny giving up a human appearance by degrees, trumpeting her ecstasies to the killing passion of the rubes.

From one only was there absolute quiet in this mayhem. I looked at him. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat brim. You wouldn’t know his connection with these spermy rites except for the indolence of his stance as he leaned against the bleacher supports with his bony arms folded and his ankles crossed. And I could swear I heard, through the hoarse cries and shouts and shrieking and orgiastic death, the thoughtful and preoccupied sucking of Sim Hearn’s tongue on his teeth.

Riding over the mountain in the Model A, Joe became aware of where he was. She accelerated, the headlights brightened; she braked, the headlights dimmed. The bones of his legs sounded the ground pitch of the engine. Mrs. Hearn’s face luminous in the night, she urged the car forward with her chin, her furrowed brow, her shoulders putting english on the turns. At the bottom of a hill she gunned it, halfway up plunged with her left leg, shifted to second, she came over the tops of the hills with her horn blowing, headlights making a quick stab at the night sky.

“Of course they never live long, such creatures — the heart won’t beat for them … All summer Sim Hearn watches — he watches and then he sees the signs — she doesn’t take breath as she should — from the bed she cannot lift herself … The people know Hearn — he gives something special at end of summer, a grand finale … The word goes through the mountains… Look where we are — we make time better than I hoped.”

In the early hours of the morning she judged us safely away and turned into a motor court and paid for a cabin in the pines farthest from the road. Wedged into the rumble seat was my broken-down valise with everything I possessed in the world. She had packed it for me. I carried it and her frayed black Gladstone into the room. She locked the car and locked the cabin door behind us and pulled the shades and then pulled the light cord.

The bed had a khaki blanket but no sheets. Two lumpy gray pillows. Magda Hearn rummaged in her bag for a white cotton face towel. She spread the towel on top of the bureau. The room had the shit smell of old untreated wood. She removed from her purse a manila envelope and from the envelope removed a stack of greenbacks which she placed on the cotton towel.

“Sim knows to get the money out before the fun starts,” she said. “To Albany to the bank he thinks I am going.”

She wet her thumb on her lower lip and stood at the bureau counting the money. I sat down on the bed and took off my shoes and socks. She wet her thumb on the inside of her lower lip, pulling it down so that for a moment her teeth showed her expression went slack. She was a while counting.

“Fifteen hundred and eighty-four dollars!”

She dug in her purse and extracted a wallet and from this withdrew another wad of bills.

“And plus salary which he never paid!” she said in a tone of vengeful triumph. The thumb applied to the red inside of her lip. She counted aloud this time. “Two hundred I squeeze from you, you bastard!”

She opened her Gladstone, interrupting herself to press her lips strongly on my mouth.

She pulled the string tie of a small canvas coin sack and spilled a stream of coins on the bed.

She lay on the bed making separate piles of nickels and dimes and quarters and halves, the little piles collapsed and came together because she was shaking the bed with her guttural glee. She started over, she was keen on pennies, too — if there had been coins of smaller denominations, she would have counted them, too. She was ready to count coins forever and to bitterly calculate the suffering she had done for each one.

“Joe Joe Joe! Tomorrow we trade his car and its license and buy new. We drive to California you and me. We are in our new car on way to California before even he thinks is something wrong!”

She gave up the count and lay on her back in the coins. She lifted her arms. “Come to me, come to Magda. You know what?” Kissing me, running hands on me, opening one by one the buttons on my fly. “To Hollywood we are going. I have read the magazines, I understand the movie business. I sell my life story. A film of my life! Everyone will know who Magda is.” She unbuckled my belt, she opened the buttons of my shirt. She kissed my chest and pulled the shirt down off my shoulders. “And who knows who knows, with your looks, my Joseph, with your body, why you cannot be movie star? And we will love each other and have great sooccess. Shall we?” Laughing, going down on me. “Shall we?”

She had no idea I had actually caught evil as one catches a fever, she didn’t understand this, she thought my passion matched hers. I wanted to do to her what had been done to the Fat Lady, I wanted the force of a hundred men in unholy fellowship, I went at her like a murderous drunkard.

I fucked past her joy into her first alarm, I saw on her face under the weak glare of the hanging bulb the dilated eye. I was enraged by the flaws of her, the unnatural cleft of her left hip, one buttock was actually atrophied, the raised veins behind the knees, the hanging breasts like deflated balloons, the yellowed face with loosened folds of skin at the neck rising in parallel rows as she turned her head from me this stinking Hungarian hag this thieving crone bitch with the gall to think she had me for her toy boy her lover chuffing now like a fucking steam engine I brought the tears to her eyes she would acknowledge nothing she resisted and then the voice did come, and then the voice louder and more insistent, and finally she seemed to be urging me along as if we were together, the lying cunt in the Pine Grove Motor Court, our music mingling with the night wind in the pines the tree trunks creaking the million crickets. I ended and began again. We wrestled. She begged me to stop. Tears of mourning came from my eyes. I let her fall asleep. I woke her, made her moan. At one point the coins sticking to the wet ass, the wet belly, I invented a use of Magda Hearn so unendurable to her that with the same cry that must have come from her the day she fell twisting from the trapeze, she flung herself off the bed — a moment’s silence, then the sickening shaming sound of bone and flesh slamming into the floor, a grunt. I lay on my back on the bed not daring to look, I heard a small soprano cry, a deeper moan, a whispered curse. I lay still. After a while I realized I was listening to the snores of an exhausted human being.

I thought I saw the first crack of light under the window shade. I got off the bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the stack of bills from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the windshield of the Model A. The wind blew.

With all my might I reared back and threw the bills into the wind. I thought of them as the Fat Lady’s ashes.

I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower. I stood in the shower of cold springwater and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and watched the sky lighten and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first birds waking.

I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes in a tremble of stippled skin and turned my back on the cabins and struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t particularly matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.