The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(103)
His questions continue, a whole list, a translation of an inner monologue I almost never saw anymore, this kind of focus on something other than my mom, or emergency, pills, wounds, pain.
But they were in a different kind of life right now. The life that was dictated by emergencies, pills, wounds, and pain was there, but it was the internal architecture of their day instead of the external. Their eyes were directed outside.
There they were, far away, wandering some old, forgotten road and finding a place that was entirely theirs, something that felt like a secret, a place that allowed them to invent stories about other lives and the marks other people left on the world. And what might theirs be?
Even with the story Davy writes about finding this special place years later, and wondering about the history, and remembering his teenage trip, and seeing the photos, even with all that, the pictures and the descriptions are glimpses into a world my mom and Davy have found that my brother and I are not a part of. For the first time, I imagine what it would be like to have a child going off into the world, making her own life with her own experiences, and how I would feel happy for her, and excited, and also quite sad that I was no longer a necessary part of it.
BLOODLUST
Day 97 of 150
World of Wonders
September 2013
“His eyeball was sinking,” Dale says, “so the socket’s probably smashed. Both his cheekbones are shattered, that’s for sure.” Dale is a massive game jock with thick hoops sagging from his ears.
I wrap my mouth around a giant turkey leg and peel off a chunk of meat. Nod.
“Fucker,” he says. “I mean, I stay out of it.”
“What happened?” I ask, wiping grease from my lips with the back of my hand. The midway’s asphalt is growing hot beneath our feet. Dale unfurls his game’s canvas awning, pins a few stuffed bulldogs, whose brown cigars sag limp from their felt teeth, to the corners. The fair will open in forty minutes, and by then Dale will be calling marks into his game, I will be in fishnets with no head, and the high school band now rehearsing the national anthem in the rodeo ring will figure out how to hit those high notes.
“You know, same dumb shit,” he says, and I nod, but I do not know, not much. It’s what I’m hoping I’ll learn tonight. Tonight there’s a carnie jamboree.
What I know so far is that the carnie with the sinking eyeball was a game jock, and after some minor conflict exploded, the ongoing ride vs. game jock rivalry unfolded in a brutal beatdown. This was the way of the carnival. A manic buzz always broiling that could be neither created nor destroyed, but spun on in little hurricanes of violence and excess. I’d finally seen it erupt in me, and was ready to witness it elsewhere.
“I’m gonna buy a ranch after this season,” Dale says. “Get some sheep, steer. Nothing too big.” The September sun shines off his bald head, heat as consistent as the always-humming milk factory across the street.
“Maybe Wyoming,” he says, rubbing the cuts across his knuckles.
The stereotype of the American carnie as rough and lawless, toothless and tweaking, had proved both true and untrue, as stereotypes go. We were showpeople, a category I was often reminded was separate from carnies, but I’d heard people on all sides call themselves freaks. The carnival is a kingdom of self-identified outsiders. But what beat on everywhere, unwavering, was the threat of violence, a heavy breath on the back of the neck. Teeth ready to clamp. Which is why events like what would be taking place tonight were scheduled—an opportunity to blow off steam, or, as I’d heard someone joke, a chance for a contained explosion. It had just been our bad luck, Sunshine had told me, that none of the carnivals we’d been performing with had held a jamboree while we were with them. Well, bad luck and good luck, she explained. They could be fun, and wild, but it’s also often where things got out of hand, where the hundreds of carnies with a collective excuse to get drunk and high inside the fairgrounds boiled over into violence. Where women should walk with not one but two men back to their bunks, where drinks were cheap and expectations high.
And here, tonight, our luck, good or bad, is about to change: a jamboree looms.
*
The party begins once the front gates are locked.
Rides across the midway that usually hold a few workers repairing a bucket seat or scrubbing barf are empty, though the bunkhouses behind our tent are full of carnies laughing and whooping, draping one another in togas. Usually this manic energy pulsed through the kids with mouthfuls of cotton candy, wisps hardening in little red crystals around their mouths as they flailed off the scrambler, but not tonight. Tonight, that buzz broils everywhere. I will be on the front lines of unbridled wildness.
The good attitude I’d arrived with, my smiley willingness to help, was fading over time. Or toughening. Adapting. Dale yells, “Marry me, Ms. Hollywood,” every time I pass by.
“I would, but I think your wife would be mad,” I say, pointing to John, the wiry carnie in the balloon dart game beside him whose hand, I’d just heard, had been rebroken the night before.
This, our ninth fair in the three months we’ve been on the road, is a combined state fair for both Oklahoma and Arkansas, and the corn dogs and funnel cakes and frozen bananas are now all too familiar, but because this is the season’s first carnie jamboree, I’m primed for chaos. Imagining an orgy with face splintering, circling meth pipes, destruction. Now that I’m an insider, I’m ready to come face-to-face with the blood and bones.