The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Allowing oneself to sleep in rain is the mark of a soldier, an animal, and the consummate hitchhiker. It was a skill I never fully acquired. Water weight trebled the mass of my pack. Rain gathered in my brows and ran into my eyes at the slightest movement. There is a private understanding, even appreciation, of misery when one is cold and wet at four in the morning. Dawn never seemed so precious. Birdsong meant that soon you could watch the rising steam drawn from your clothes by sun. In this fashion, I began a summer in Alabama.

The sun hung low on the horizon when the leader of a convoy came traveling my way. Emblazoned along the truck in red curlicued letters were the words “Hendley Circus, Greatest Show on Earth.” Truck after truck passed, each garishly advertising various sideshows. Horse droppings spilled from a trailer. A variety of campers and RVs followed, but none stopped and no one waved. The last vehicle trundled from sight and I felt as though I’d seen a mirage, a phantom wagon train that taunted hermits of the road.

From the west came the sound of another truck straining in low gear. The driver flung open the passenger door without stopping.

“Hurry,” he said. “I can’t stop or Peaches will get mad.”

I used the mirror to vault onto the running board, and scrambled into the seat.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem. I’ve been on the run plenty.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It never is,” he said. “You got five bucks to loan me?”

“I’m broke.”

He slid a hand into his shirt pocket and handed me a five-dollar bill. He spat tobacco juice out the window.

“Little treat for Peaches,” he said. “She loves ’backer.”

“Who’s Peaches?”

“My best friend of fifteen years. The circus is my mistress but Peaches is my wife.”

The way the truck swayed at low speed, I figured he was married to the sideshow Fat Lady, who wouldn’t fit up front. If he wanted to haul his wife in the back, it was his business.

Barney had been in the circus all his life, a case of “sawdust up my nose when I was a little pecker.” He offered me a job, saying that I owed him a Lincoln already. Room and board were included in the wage. Four hours later we passed through a tiny town and joined the rest of the caravan, circled like a pioneer wagon train in a broad grassy vale. Barney hopped from the cab and handed me a rake.

“Clear the rocks from behind the truck, then make a path to the big top.”

Barney climbed on the rear bumper and unhooked chains bigger than those used by professional loggers. He cranked down the gate, revealing the great gray flanks of an elephant. Barney spoke to Peaches in a soothing tone, apologizing for the long trip, offering her water and hay if she’d come out of the truck. A foot extended backwards. I scurried away so fast I fell. Raucous laughter erupted behind me.

“What a fall, what a fall! Sign him up!”

“Move over, Rover, he’s mashing clover!”

A pair of dwarfs leered from giant heads on neckless bodies. One performed a handspring, then clambered onto the shoulders of his buddy. They advanced on me, my size now, flicking their tongues like snakes. I held the rake across my body.

“Rover’s got a rake,” said one.

“Let’s throw him in the lake.”

“There ain’t no lake.”

“How about a well?”

“That sounds good.”

The top dwarf kicked the lower one in the head.

“Swell,” the top one said. “You should have said swell for the rhyme.”

“Don’t kick me.”

The lower dwarf bit his partner’s ankle and they tumbled across the ground. Peaches aimed her trunk high, bellowing relief at standing on earth. Barney stepped around her with a long pole that ended in a hook.

“Hey, you fricking runts,” he yelled. “Peaches favors tidbits like you.”

The dwarfs scrambled away, hopping onto the metal steps of a camper.

“I’ll make a suitcase out of her,” one said.

“Planters from her feet.”

“A dildo of her trunk.”

Peaches regarded me from an eye the size of my fist. Thick stalks of hair poked from her body like weed clumps. Her back leg held a heavy manacle that chained her to the truck.

“Stay away from them shrimps,” Barney said. “Watch out for the clowns, too. And don’t even look at the Parrot Lady. Even from behind. She can tell.”

I nodded, receiving information without the ability to process it.

“Go to the trucks and ask for Flathead. Tell him you’re my First of May.”

I moved across the field, listening to yelling and cursing everywhere. No one talked in normal tones. People were setting up sideshow games, running electric wires, unloading animals. A vast crew of men worked four trucks loaded with folded tents. Flathead’s curly hair was very short, as if to display the fact that his head was indeed flat on top. He told me to dig a donicker.

“What?”

“The donicker hole. What’s the matter, you no piss? Everybody piss. Dig two hole, you.”

He handed me a shovel and sent me to an area at the edge of the campers. Everyone ignored me. I finished my work and walked away. A man strode past me and calmly urinated into the hole.

I returned to Flathead, who sent me to a canvas crew that was short a pair of hands. Trucks circled the field, stopping at precise points aligned with iron stakes driven into the ground. Several men dragged the folded sections of tent from the back of the truck. I was a runner. When pulled fast, canvas becomes slightly airborne, not so heavy, and easier to handle. Another man and I held a corner of the canvas and ran as hard as we could to the extent of the fold, went back, grabbed the next corner and ran again. The canvas sandpapered my hands to blood.

When the sections were laid out, we laced them together while the more experienced men fastened the canvas to bail rings. Walking on the tent risked tearing it, so everyone crawled like bugs, even Flathead. Next came the complicated process of raising the top, one section at a time, to keep them even. My chore was to hold a guy line until Flathead yelled to tie it off. It reminded me of water-skiing — incredible exertion while standing still.

After nine hours, Peaches hoisted the final pole with ropes tied to her harness. The entire tent strained upward while everyone watched, feeling the increased tension in the lines. Flathead tied off the main pole. In the dim interior, we set up three tiers of collapsible bleachers, cursed by electricians and sound people. Flathead announced we were finished and everyone began asking if the flag was up. We staggered into an afternoon sunlight so brilliant we bumped against each other. The entire mass of exhausted men hurried away and I trailed behind, following the herd. Since I hadn’t understood that an upright flag meant dinner was served, I was late. The only thing worse than the dregs of the stew was knowing that everyone else’s sweat had fallen into the pot.

A cook sent me to the sleeper truck for canvas boys. Four levels of bunk beds lined each wall, with a thin corridor running the length of the truck. Our collective bedroom was a mobile lightless hall, extremely hot, that reeked of unwashed bodies. Snoring echoed is back and forth between the metal walls. I found an empty bunk and lay on a mattress the width of a bookshelf.

We stayed three days in town, long enough for me to prove myself a fierce liability as a taffy seller. The candy was cut into tiny plugs that could pull fillings from a molar. I was unable to hawk it aggressively enough to please the head of concessions, a bitter man who limped. He’d been an aerialist until a fall ruined his ankle. His performing monicker had been Colonel Kite but everyone called him. Colonel Corn. After my dismal failure as a candy seller, he decided he liked me since I was less suited to employment than he was. The Colonel rather graciously gave me the lowest job of folding waxed paper around the candy.

The circus possessed a hierarchy with the complex simplicity of the military. Those who rode horses in a standing position were on top of the heap, followed by aerialists, live animal performers, clowns, and the ringmaster. Sideshow freaks made up the middle level. Everyone else drifted at the bottom, producing their own pecking order based on convincing their peers of personal prowess. Canvas boys were the lowest. We had no one to despise but minorities and homosexuals. Since circus people hated them already, the canvas boys were left with honing bigotry to a fine edge.

The technicians seemed to have the simplest job, and I approached Krain, the light man, about work. He led me up a precarious ladder to the booth. Protruding from slots in a metal board were several levers that controlled the intensity of the lights. Krain pulled an electrical wire from beneath the board, separated the two strands, and tucked each one in his jaws, clamped between his teeth. He gradually pushed the lever forward. His eyes got very wide and his lips pulled back in a macabre grin. At quarter power, his head and shoulders began quivering. He brought it back to the zero mark, calmly pulled the wires from his mouth, and offered them to me. I climbed down the ladder.

The aerialists and horse performers never deigned to speak with anyone. As Europeans, they considered themselves superior to the rest of us. The two clowns were hilarious in performance, making me laugh long after I knew their gags. On the occasional free day, they went fishing. I followed them once, hoping for some intangible insight into the private world of professional clowns. I watched from the bushes. They carried tackle boxes and baited their hooks like normal men. They cast and reeled and did not converse. When one caught a fish, the other nodded. The only shift from standard behavior was their method of removing a fish from the line. With a ferocious motion, they ripped the hook free, usually trailing bits of the fish’s interior. Often it was bleeding from the gills.

No one liked the dwarfs because they made more money than anyone else, and in violation of circus tradition, they didn’t squander the loot. At each new town they inquired after the stock market.

In addition to Peaches, the circus boasted three bedraggled tigers that reared on their hind legs as if begging, perched on stools, and crowded together on a large box. A man dressed as a woman snapped the whip over their striped flanks. I was leery of him until the Colonel explained his clothing — an audience was more awed by a female tamer than a male. The tiger man’s great enemy, due to her withering disdain, was the Parrot Lady. The dwarfs called her “an upper crustacean.”

She was part of a sideshow that included a perpetually drunk magician, a trained walrus, and a skinny man, double-jointed at every junction, who could fold himself into knots. There was a strong man who was dying from steroid intake. His brother was a fire eater who told me the hardest part was controlling a sneeze.

The most popular act was the Parrot Lady. She’d begun as a common sword swallower, but like everyone, had wanted to increase her earnings by diversifying her act. Five years later she was the biggest sideshow draw. Women and children were not allowed in her tent. The huge MEN ONLY sign fostered quite a crowd, and on slow nights, teenage boys were admitted for double the price. I watched her performance every night. The tent was always packed, hot, and hazed by cigarette smoke.

She entered from stage left wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, white formal gown, looking like an aristocrat. The audience gradually hushed beneath her unwavering stare. After a long spell of silence, she began speaking in a voice so low that everyone strained to hear. Each night she told the dirtiest joke imaginable, speaking of cocks, cunts, and fucking as casually as the men’s wives might discuss children and meals. A palpable sense of guilt congealed with lust in the tent, and the men refused to look at one another.

The Parrot Lady stood very still. Her eyes fluttered to stage right and she lifted a hand to her ear. Faint chamber music drifted through the tent. With the grace of a fashion model, she rose from her stool and began an excruciatingly slow strip — from the inside out. She removed a slip first, a petticoat, her shoes, stockings, and two more petticoats, each frillier than the last. She took off her bra and panties last. No one moved. Everyone knew she was naked beneath the dress, a fact more arresting than if she’d actually been nude.

She faced the audience and began to unbutton her dress, beginning at the top of the chin-high collar and working down. Holding the front closed, she continued to her lower belly. The men were leaning forward without awareness of their posture. When her arms could no longer reach the buttons, she turned her back. The long train concealed her legs. Nothing was visible except her slightly bowed head and the long dress that everyone knew was open in front. She remained standing this way a long time. Instead of building to a crescendo, the music faded to silence. The spotlight narrowed its focus. She let the dress fall from her shoulders. Breath came pouring from the men as if each had received a powerful blow in the guts.

Tattoos of brilliant tropical birds covered every inch of her body. Two parrots faced each other on her buttocks, beaks curving into the cleft, tail feathers running down the back of her legs. A swirling flock of bright plumage fluttered up her back and across her shoulders. Parakeets perched among toucans and birds of paradise. Lush jungle foliage peeped around the birds.

Slowly she turned, revealing a shaven yoni from which a pair of golden wings fanned along her hips. On top of each breast sat two enormous and lovely parrots. She rotated again, moving at a slow pace until she faced the men once more. She now held a long fluorescent light tube. An electric cord ran behind the black curtain. She spread her legs for balance and tipped her head back. Only her neck and the point of her chin were visible. She lifted the light tube above her head and very slowly slid it down her throat. She took her hands away, and pressed a switch on the cord that turned on the fluorescent tube. The spotlight went black. Her body glowed from within, illuminating the birds in an ethereal, ghostly light, like a jungle dawn. She flicked the switch off and the tent was dark save for sunlight leaking beneath the canvas flaps. The houselights came on very bright. The stage was empty. She was gone.

The dazed men stumbled outside, blinking against the sun. I never missed her act and always tried to maneuver myself near the front. After ten or twelve shows, I was sufficiently familiar with the birds to begin watching her eyes. I expected a blank look but she gazed at the men with a blend of fury and desire. Eventually she saw me watching. I was embarrassed, as if caught peeping, a curious reverse of logic. The following day I stayed in the back but she found me. Her vision locked on me during the entire act. I left with the crowd, feeling devastated.

My tear-down job was pulling stakes, a chore relegated to the most useless worker. The stakes were car axles driven very deep into the earth. To pull them, I first had to loosen the dirt by pounding the ground with a sledgehammer. At times I worked in a rhythmic blur, grateful for the simple repetition. Other times I wore myself down in rage at my occupation.

I abandoned my bunk after a wave of lice spread among the workers, making us scratch like junkies. If our hands were full, we wiggled and shifted in vain attempts to relieve the itch. I boiled my clothes and the sight of swollen nits in the seams made me sick. Since I was being fed and housed, my pay was not enough to buy new clothes. When my toothbrush snapped at the handle, I decided to quit.

I told Barney, who said he’d speak to Flathead about my working as an all-purpose animal helper. For the next two weeks we traveled across the Deep South. In many of the smaller towns attendance at the circus included a black night and a white night. The Sunday matinees were the only integrated time, but the groups didn’t mix. I swept manure, hauled feed and water, and hosed down Peaches twice a day, Barney lent me money against my raise. I bought clothes and a toothbrush. Luckily, I’d been keeping my journal in the glove box of Barney’s pickup. Everything else had been stolen from the sleeper truck.

The new job gave me greater privacy. I slept under the truck and had time to write in my journal. I never reread an entry. They represented the past, and my journal was proof that I existed in the present. As an event unfolded around me, I was already anticipating how I’d write about it later. A new entry began where the last one ended, continuing to the immediate, to the current act of writing. Each mark on the page was a gesture toward the future, a codification of the now. Through this, I learned to trust language.

The animal trainers were an odd lot who argued constantly, smoked hand-roiled cigarettes, and possessed only one friend apiece — their animal. Soon I began to roll my own cigarettes. During off-hours we sat in a circle debating the merits and dangers of various animals. Everyone teased Arnie, the gorilla trainer, about the simplicity of his job. Gabe the Gorilla was ancient and nearly blind.

One night the show was canceled due to a fire in town that destroyed four blocks. The entire circus left except the trainers who stayed to guard their animals. We passed a pint of whisky and began our usual bickering.

“Don’t go getting the big head, Barney,” the tiger man said. “Elephant ain’t the worst to work.”

“More of mine kill folks than yours ever did,” Barney said.

“Killing ain’t the mark,” the man said. “Go a season with zebras and you’ll wish you had a rogue. Zebras is the meanest there is.”

“Bull smoke,” said Arnie.

“Fact before God. Over in Africa the zebra’s worst enemy is a lion. That makes them a mean fighter.”

The others pushed a lower lip out and raised their eyebrows in the animal trainer’s sign of acknowledgment.

“My opinion,” the horse man said, “the all-time worstest is a camel. I purely loathe a camel. There ain’t no safe place to work them from because they kick sideways. I never seen a sideways kick that didn’t bust a leg to a compound. Humpy bastards are stubborn as a mule.”

Barney drank from the bottle as it went past him.

“The elephant is the closest animal to a man there is,” he said.

“Bull smoke,” said Arnie.

“Telling it true,” Barney said. “Its back legs bends forward like a human. They got tits up front, not in the back. They go off on their own to mate.”

“Gorilla’s ten times closer to human,” Arnie said.

“Well, a cat ain’t,” said the tiger man. “I’m put right out of this talk. The only thing a cat’s like is a damn cat.”

“Horse is gabbier,” the horse man said.

“Bull smoke,” Arnie said. “Me and Gabe talk plenty.”

“I heard something on a gorilla maybe you can clear up,” Barney said. “But I ain’t advising you to ask Gabe on it.”

“What?”

“A gorilla’s got a harem, don’t it?”

Arnie nodded. “In the wild.”

“Then it don’t have to work too hard for company, if you know what I mean.” Barney tipped his head to me. “I’m trying to talk nice in front of the squirt.”

Everyone laughed and the tiger man handed me the bottle. “That boy knows what’s what,” he said. “He ain’t missed the Parrot Lady since he joined on.” The men chuckled again.

“Way I hear it,” Barney said, “the gorilla’s got the littlest balls of any creature on earth. They shrink up from not having to hunt no nookie.”

“Bull smoke,” Arnie said. “They’re big as a man’s.”

“Damn cat’s got his snuggled up to his butt-hole,” the tiger man said. “I got to find me another animal to work if I want to keep up with this outfit.”

“Is that true?” the horse man said. “About the gorilla?”

“No,” Arnie said. “Gabe’s balls are big as mine.”

“That ain’t saying much.” Barney grinned at the men. “We might just have to get some proof on that.”

“We got eighty proof right here,” the tiger man said.

He opened another pint of local rotgut, took a hard drink, and sent it on its rounds.

“Might be tough to see Gabe’s balls,” Barney said. “Little as they are.”

“All you got to do is get him to stand,” Arnie said. “We can squat low and put a flashlight on him. They’re a good size, you can take my word for it.”

“Chris, there’s a flashlight behind the truck seat. Get the elephant prod, too.”

I walked through the warm summer darkness, rummaged for the light, and returned. The men were swaying on their feet.

“Gabe ain’t going to like this much,” Arnie said.

“He won’t know,” the horse man said.

“He will. He’s smarter than any nag you run.”

“All right,” Barney said. “We’ll make it so Gabe don’t know what we’re up to.”

“Nobody better say nothing,” Arnie said. “Promise?”

“Deal,” Barney said.

The men nodded. We walked to the gorilla cage, which was bolted to a flatbed truck. Arnie fastened a banana to the end of the elephant prod.

“Gabe,” he whispered. “You awake in there.”

Gabe’s tiny close-set eyes showed red in the flashlight’s beam. Arnie waved the banana. “You hungry? I sneaked you a snack.” He lifted the elephant prod until the banana was above the cage, just outside of the bars. “Come and get it, big boy.”

Gabe moved to the front of the cage. We squatted for an up-angle view while Barney played the flashlight on Gabe’s crotch. The gorilla used the bars to pull himself erect on legs that seemed permanently crooked. His big thighs were matted with fur.

“Up, Gabe,” Arnie said. “You almost got it.”

The gorilla stretched higher. He shifted his weight to one leg and reached his hand through the top of the cage, inches from the banana. He thrust his other leg out for balance. Clearly illuminated was a pair of testicles the size of chestnuts. The men collapsed on their haunches, laughing and hooting. Gabe quickly dropped to a crouch and backed into the shadows. The men laughed harder.

“Goddamn it!” Arnie yelled. “You promised to be quiet.”

“You win,” the horse man said. “By default.”

He handed the bottle to Arnie, who knocked it aside. He snatched the flashlight and aimed the light through the bars. Gabe sat hunched in a corner, head bowed. He glanced at us with an expression of terrible humiliation, then hid his head. The men hushed and slowly moved away.

“You sons of bitches,” Arnie said. “You promised!”

He continued cursing into the night until his voice broke and we heard a sob. He started talking to Gabe in low tones. I crawled under the elephant truck to sleep, remembering my former roommates’ preoccupation with the heft of Marduk’s lingam. Men’s tendency to take an interest in one another’s genitals is not so much sexual as simply wondering how they stack up against everybody else. Most men need confirmation that someone’s equipment is smaller than theirs, even if it belongs to a gorilla.

After lunch, Flathead always strolled the grounds to ensure that everyone was ready for the afternoon show. Sometimes the clowns or the magician were so hung over they needed an injection of sucrose and Dexedrine. Flathead carried a small case of prepared syringes. That morning Gabe refused to eat breakfast, keeping his back turned in the cage. Flathead wanted to give him an injection but Arnie refused, promising to have his gorilla ready for the matinee. Gabe missed both performances and Flathead was furious. If Gabe didn’t perk up, Flathead warned, they’d sell him to a Mexican zoo.

The animal trainers avoided each other all day. They took care of the animals and went to sleep without talking. Sometime late in the night, Barney woke me by rapping on my feet. The trainers stood in an awkward circle. The horse man pushed his shoes against the earth while the tiger man paced back and forth. Barney was very still and Arnie stood by himself, facing away.

Barney handed each of us a banana. He stepped to the gorilla cage and held the flashlight so that it shone on his face.

“I’m sorry, Gabe,” he said. “I was a little drunk. When I was married, I cheated on my wife. Now you know something on me.”

He peeled the banana and gently slid it into the cage. One by one, each of us took our turn apologizing to Gabe, who sat motionless in the shadows. Everyone told him something personal and gave him a banana. On my turn I faced the darkness and muttered my greatest secret — the transvestite in New York. Gabe didn’t answer.

Arnie went last. He was crying. He opened his pants and said, “See, they ain’t that much to mine either,” Arnie stuffed four bananas through the cage and claimed credit for bringing all the men to apologize.

We slipped away, leaving them to talk in private. The next day, Gabe performed exceedingly well. After the show, the trainers sat in their customary circle, arguing the fine points of manure, each defending his animal.

The circus roamed deeper into the South and I was rewarded for my diligence with a promotion that, like most advances I’ve received, proved my undoing. Someone had quit and Flathead offered me the job because of my size — the circus diet and strenuous labor had cost me several pounds. I was practically a wraith. Flathead introduced me to Mr. Kaybach, a dirty-haired man whose odor was a point of personal honor. As long as I stayed upwind, we got along well.

He showed me how to wriggle into my costume, an oilskin sheath with a hidden zipper. He warned that it was hot and I should wear only underwear. Tattered quilting padded the interior to swell my torso. Two flippers hung from my chest which I could operate by careful insertion of my hands. The back of the costume tapered to a pair of rubber flippers set close together. A surprisingly realistic mask completed my transformation into a walrus. I peeked through tiny slits between two tusks. Kaybach explained our routine and I waited eagerly inside the dark tent for my debut.

The audience encircled a pool of water containing fake ice floes and false rocks. The dark hump they saw was Louie the Great Trained Walrus, direct from the Bering Straits, the Smartest Walrus in Captivity. To further the illusion, Kaybach dumped a wheelbarrow load of ice cubes into the fetid water. He explained that Louie communicated with standard head shakes, and could clap his flippers in mathematical tally.

He called my name and I plunged off the rocks and through the shallow water. By squatting inside the oilskin bag, I could make Louie appear to rear on his haunches.

“Are you a girl walrus?”

I vigorously shook my head no.

“He’s a male, folks! Take a look at those tusks. We lost three Eskimos capturing him. Very sad.” A pause for the audience to consider their own danger. “Are you married, Louie?”

Again I shook my head.

“You got a girlfriend, Louie?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want one?”

This was my cue to launch myself across the pool toward the nearest woman in the audience. She usually screamed and people backed away. Kaybach yelled at me to settle down. I appeared to defy him momentarily before slinking back to the center of the pool. By this time, enough water had leaked in to make my skin slimy.

“You know how bachelors are, folks,” Kaybach continued with a broad wink. “And everyone knows what seafood does to a fellow.”

He asked a few more questions — what state we were in, who the local mayor was — arranging a multiple choice for me to answer yes or no. When I was correct, he threw a dead fish which I forced through the mouth flap to lie cold and smelly against my chest. Kaybach told the audience that I could only count to ten and invited them to stump me with problems of arithmetic. Someone asked the sum of five plus two. Kaybach yelled the question to me and I clapped my front flippers seven times. After a few more tests, a circus plant bullied his way to the front and shouted that he’d seen this on TV and it was a fake. He said the walrus was trained to respond only to the voice of its master, who spoke in code. Kaybach assured everyone that this was not true. He suggested that the man ask his own question, providing the answer didn’t go past ten.

“Square roots,” the plant said.

“What’s that?” Kaybach asked.

“A number times itself.” The plant turned to the crowd. “You know, from high school. The square root of a hundred is ten because ten times ten is a hundred.”

The audience nodded and the plant faced me. “Okay, Louie, what’s the square root of nine?”

He turned his back again and showed three fingers so that the audience could see, but not me. Kaybach began to stutter a protest. The plant shut him up and asked me again. To build suspense, I waited thirty seconds before clapping my flippers three times.

The audience always applauded, as much to see a bully get shutdown by a walrus as for the answer. The plant shook his head in disbelief. Kaybach tossed a fish and asked the final question.

“Are you a walrus, Louie?”

I shook my head no.

“Oh, I guess you think you’re human, then.”

I nodded very fast.

“I’m sorry, Louie. You’re nothing but a walrus. You’ll never be a man.”

I sank into the water, performed an awkward circling manuever, and scuttled behind a rock. Kaybach thanked everyone and asked for a big hand for a walrus so smart that he knew genuine sadness — he’d never be a human.

I had a half-hour break before beginning again with a new plant and a different fake question. I had become a circus performer, or in Barney’s parlance, a kinker. The name came from the effects of the nightlong wagon rides in the old days, after which the performers spent a couple of hours stretching kinks from their bodies.

The various sideshows were tucked into a midway of carny games as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Even the benign ring toss and dart throw were rigged. The con operators allowed a few people to win large, highly visible prizes. They picked the winners carefully. The best investments were young couples, or a family that moved as a group. Forced to carry the prize the rest of their visit, the winners served as advertising. Many people won at the start of the day; none toward the end.

As a full-fledged kinker, I had access to the forbidden zone of performer alley. Here the clowns played chess, the aerialists disdained anyone confined to earth, and the dwarfs spent most of their time baiting the Parrot Lady. They constantly threatened to pluck her, and commented quite openly on her presumed skill at fellatio.

One Sunday, in a community so religious the circus wasn’t allowed to admit the public until well past noon, the heat rose to ninety-eight. Only the aerialists and the Parrot Lady had trailers with air-conditioning. The rest of us sat semiclothed in available shade. The dwarfs began crooning a love song on the Parrot Lady’s aluminum steps. She opened her door with enough force to smack it against the trailer. The dwarfs retreated like tumbleweed.

“A bird in hand,” one said.

“Is worth a hand in the bush,” said the other.

“I got a sword she can’t swallow.”

“Get lost, you little pissants,” the Parrot Lady said. She leaned against the doorjamb in the shimmering heat. “Hey, Walrus Man,” she called. “Come here.”

All the kinkers blinked from a doze, staring at me, then at her. I stumbled to her trailer as if moving through fog. My clothes clung to me.

“Save me a sandwich,” said one of the dwarfs.

The air-conditioned trailer made the sweat cold on my body. She motioned me to a couch. Gingham curtains hung from each window, and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley sat on a tiny TV. The room was very small, very neat.

“Thirsty?” she said. “Like a drink?”

I nodded and she poured clear liquid from a pitcher into a glass, added ice and an olive.

“Nothing better in summer than a martini,” she said.

Not wanting her to know that I’d never sampled such an exotic drink, I drank it in one chug and asked for another. She lifted her eyebrows and poured me one. I drank half for the sake of civility.

“The one thing I hate more than dwarfs,” she said, “is the circus.”

She wore a long white dress with a high collar and sleeves that ran to her wrists. No tattoos were visible. A rowing machine occupied a third of the trailer’s space. She topped my drink and filled her own glass.

“This is my fourth circus,” she said. “I’ve worked with fat ladies, bearded women, Siamese twins, rubber-skinned people, and midgets. The three-legged man. A giant. Freaks by nature, all freaks but me.”

“Not you.”

She offered her glass for a toast and I drained mine. She filled it again. We sat across from each other. The room was so narrow our knees touched.

“They hate me because they can’t understand why someone would choose to be a freak. It took me five years to get tattooed. You can’t do it all at once. I had the best artists in the country tattoo me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“That’s the main part of it. Freaks have to hurt and I wanted mine real. Everyone can see that I’m a freak now. I finally suffered for real to get there.”

I nodded, confused. A row of dolls stood on a shelf bracketed to the wall. She poured more drinks and settled into the chair. Her ankles were primly crossed, exposing only her toes. She wore no jewelry.

“I hate them because they’re what I was in secret, before the tattoos. I was a freak too. You just couldn’t tell. I was tired of hurting on the inside, like them. I hate my tattoos and I hate the men who pay to see them. Nobody knows about my inside. The rest of the freaks are the opposite. They’re normal inside but stuck in a freak’s body. Not me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s why I’m telling you.”

“What?”

“I can’t have children.”

I sipped my drink. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t see an ashtray. I didn’t know what to say.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“You could adopt.”

“Shut up!” she said. “I’ve seen ads in the paper for adoption. ‘Call collect,’ they say. ‘All expenses paid.’ I won’t buy a baby. You better go. Don’t tell anyone anything. Let them believe we fucked like minks.”

I stood and fell sideways on the couch. Moving slowly, I got to the door and turned to say goodbye. Her pale hands covered her face. She was crying.

“I love those dwarfs,” she said. “They’re my kids.”

I opened the door and made it to the bottom step before falling. The difference in temperature was swift and hard as a roundhouse blow. Someone helped me stand. The dust on my skin turned to mud from my abrupt sweating. An aerialist walked me to a truck and lay me in the shade.

An hour later Kaybach kicked me awake, berating me for being late, though he’d heard the reason. I staggered after him. Con men and kinkers wiggled their eyebrows, winked and grinned. A female equestrian caressed me with her gaze as if I were the last wild mustang out of the Bighorns. I barely had time to wriggle into my costume before Kaybach began herding the suckers in.

Our tent had no ventilation and was ten degrees hotter than outside. The water in the pool had a skin on the surface. When I lay down on the fake rocks, the world began spinning. Closing my eyes made me twice as dizzy. From a great distance Kaybach called his cue and I realized that he had been yelling for some time. I slid into the nasty water.

I managed to get through the preliminary routines with Kaybach’s patient repetition of cue. He threw a fish as reward, which I dutifully tucked inside the mouth flap. Its body was swollen from heat. Mixed with fish stink was the heavy odor of gin oozing from my pores. I clenched my teeth to quell nausea. While Kaybach spieled about my intelligence, I shoved the dead fish back into the water. The smell clung to my chin and face. Water had seeped through the eye slits, encasing me in an amnion of scum. My head throbbed. As long as I didn’t move, my belly remained under control.

Kaybach asked the yes-or-no questions. I squatted to make the walrus rear on his haunches, each movement an effort. The mask felt welded to my head. Kaybach threw a fish that bounced off my torso. The thought of retrieving it ruined me. My belly folded in on itself, and I knew that the spew would suffocate me. Kaybach was yelling. My face poured sweat.

I pulled my hands from the flipper compartments, worked my arms into position, and treated the crowd to the rare sight of a walrus decapitating itself. The mask splashed into the water. I retched a stream that arced from Louie’s neck. Kaybach stepped into the pool and yelled for everyone to leave. People were screaming and demanding refunds.

I swam to the safety of my fake ice floe. Water had gushed into the oilskin suit, and briefly I feared drowning. I left the costume in the water, crawled to the edge of the tent, lifted the canvas and inhaled. The hundred-degree air tasted sweet and glorious. Sideshow tents were butted against the big top with a small space in between for stakes and ropes. I fled down the alley in my underwear. Peaches and Barney were gone from the truck. I rinsed my body in a tub of her drinking water and dressed in my extra clothes. The parking lot was a rolling field with beat-down grass. Locals worked it for a few bucks and a free pass. The third car picked me up. Twenty minutes later I stood in a town, the name of which I didn’t know.

I oriented myself so the setting sun lay on my left, and began walking north. The Drinking Gourd emerged at dusk. Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Like Kentuckians of the Civil War, I was loyal to no direction. I was neither kinker nor freak, yankee nor reb, boss nor bum. I wasn’t much of a playwright either.