Bill’s days and nights rolled one into another, same into same, driving from town to town, helping set the carnival up, then hanging out until it was time to do it all over again.
He hated it. Work had never agreed with him, but at his most down-and-out moment he had never considered working with a dog-man, a bearded lady, assorted ruined heads, damaged bodies, and a pleasant man with a hand growing out of his tit. He had never thought of himself as way up on the food chain, but had felt he was above such as this, and now he was more than slightly troubled to discover he was wrong.
Mama was right again. He was not only stupid, he was a loser. Everywhere he turned he was socked with the mallet of stupidity, kicked in the balls by fate, given a dunce hat and the finger.
He considered leaving, then he’d run his hand over his face and dismiss the idea. Where would he go? He was a freak himself. He no longer found himself able to look in the mirror and had finally quit touching his face, even when it itched, and it had really begun to itch.
Sometimes at night when the carnival was in swing, he loitered outside the Ice Man’s trailer, like a boy whose former lover was dating someone else, so he parks his car near her house, watching, mooning, not knowing what to do. He had not been back in to see the Ice Man, but the image of those eyes was burned into the back of his head as deep as a radiation wound.
Sometimes when he lay down at night he felt as if the Ice Man’s eyes were falling out of the blackness toward him, then he would feel it was he who was falling. Diving down toward those two dark pools, then, just before he was drowned by them, he would wake up.
When he wasn’t thinking about that, he was thinking about Gidget and about what was behind the zipper of those shorts she wore. He thought about that more than the Ice Man, especially every night at bedtime.
He had been moved out of Frost’s bed and into the kitchen where Frost and Gidget had been sleeping. Now he could really hear their bed squeak at night, lots of grunts and groans. He thought old guys weren’t supposed to get it up as much, but Frost was certainly doing something in there with Gidget, and he doubted he was teaching her wrestling holds.
When he was not asleep he thought less about Gidget and less about the Ice Man. Then he would lie awake on his cot and think about his mother, the house, his dead friends, and the cop in the creek. He wondered if Officer Cocksucker had been discovered yet. He wondered if the car he and his friends had stolen had been found at the bottom of the swamp, and if Fat Boy’s car had been located.
Most likely. Skid marks would trace the car’s demise as sure as railroad tracks would show the direction a train would take, and Fat Boy’s own car would eventually be stumbled upon. He wondered if he had left some kind of DNA in the cars that would lead the cops to him. Sonofabitches were always finding DNA somewhere. Spit on your gum. Cum or shit stains in your shorts. Boogers in Kleenex.
That DNA crap always hung you unless you were a famous nigger football player.
One morning Frost knocked on the kitchen door and slid it back and came in carrying a flat black bag with a zipper. He sat on the bed next to Bill and said, “I got this for you.”
Bill sat up and watched Frost unzip the bag. Inside were some pill bottles and some little bottles with liquid in them and two hypodermic needles.
“Hey,” Bill said. “I don’t do that shit.”
“No, no,” Frost said. “This isn’t drugs. Well, it isn’t illegal drugs. It’s medicine.”
“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.