The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(104)

What does not occur to me at the moment of this bloodlust, will not occur to me until later, is that I am actively seeking the violence. I want to witness the worst. Why? For the story I’ll tell about it later, sure, but there’s something else. Something uglier.

*

Earlier in the evening, a few of the lot men closed one of the bumper car rides early and carried the cars one by one out of the pen. The detached cars formed a long row behind the ride, glittering red and green and gold ovals ringed with rubber. The bumper pen was filled instead with tables holding huge trays of ribs, chicken, potato salad, green beans, and macaroni. Up front were auction items: leather work gloves, tool sets, an electric kettle, and ten or fifteen different kinds of liquor in decorative bottles with attached shot glasses. Red donated one of the swords he frequently deep-throats.

In the bathroom, women spritz cotton-candy body spray across their chests, vanilla surprise into their hair. About 20 percent of the carnies are women. “Want some?” one asks as I pass.

“Yes, please,” I say, grateful, and hoping to cover some of what sweating through the Arkansas heat in full costume smells like.

*

Our sideshow crew rolls into the jamboree, and immediately Short E returns from some dark corner with a baggie of Jell-O shots dangling from his teeth.

“It’s time,” he says, passing me a plastic cup. I start to squeeze it, but he grabs the shot out of my hand.

“Not like that,” he sighs. “Watch this.” He wedges the tip of his tongue between the Jell-O and the plastic, then wriggles the tip and twists the cup in a full circle.

“Did the strippers teach you that?” I ask.

He raises his eyebrows, gives me a thin smile, and begins tonguing another. “They taught me a whole lot more than that,” he says, swallowing and then twerking against my leg before heading off in search of more.

I sit down and wait for something to happen. Something nasty. All around, people are talking and laughing and sipping, but I stay put. I have an idea that if I can get my face right up against one of the tent-pole beatdowns I’ve heard about, or directly beside John’s rebroken hand—now full of sores and boils from wrapping it in dirty pieces of cloth for so many months—then maybe I will have some way of measuring the vague darkness of this place.

Here’s the worst thing that happened, I’ll be able to report. This is how close I was to it.

Of course, what I actually see are carnies sipping Budweisers and grinding and occasionally disappearing past the reach of the lights.

A man with clean clothes and a tucked-in shirt sits beside me. He has a full set of teeth and not much of a tan. Clearly a boss. Without looking up from his plate of food, he asks if I know why Red used to be called Lizard Red.

I do not.

“For years, Lizard Red ran our reptile show,” he says. “One night, I woke up to a pounding on my door at three a.m. The rain was pouring and thunder was booming. ‘Get up,’ Lizard Red yelled. ‘The storm broke our sixteen-foot python’s cage and she’s somewhere down the midway.’” The boss chuckles as he bites into his BBQ sandwich, a lightness in his voice like he’s telling his favorite joke. “I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” he says, “and my first thought was—what do you put on to chase a giant python in the middle of a huge storm? I panicked and put on all the clothes I could find. By the time I waddled out of my trailer, Lizard Red was walking down the center of the midway in the pouring rain with the giant snake wrapped around his body.”

“What did you do?” I ask the boss.

“Nothing,” he says. “We put the snake in its cage and opened for business the next morning.”

“I thought that story was going to end with something terrible happening,” I say.

“That’s our business. Steering clear of disaster.”

*

All week, the thick smell of BBQ smoke has wafted over the Mirror Maze and Alpine Bob’s from carnietown, where Merlin, whose job it is to dispose of all the carnival tickets at the end of each day, lit them on fire and cooked ribs.

“Had to find something to do with the tickets,” he said, holding a plate of ribs inside our big red-and-blue circus tent earlier that day, grease pooling in small orange rivulets across the Styrofoam. With more than 135,000 visitors to this fair each year, thousands of tickets pass from tellers to riders each day and make their way into the sweaty palms of kids in line for the Crazy Mouse roller coaster they’re finally tall enough to ride. And then they make meat. Merlin keeps coming to our tent because he likes Cassie, and he brings her plates of ticket meat.

He stands across the bumper car ring and I smile, wave. He glares back.

*

The auction, which funds some carnie charity, is jovial, so I duck out toward the bathrooms on the far side of the fairground to see if teeth are snarling elsewhere. The carnival is empty, dark. The boats bob silently in their pool, a half-moon reflected on the water. Carousel horses stall midprance. Though I can still hear shouts from the jamboree, there is also now the soft chirp of cicadas in the low trees around the fair, the factory whirring and motoring on through the night, and a baby inside a trailer, crying.

I avoid the upturned pile of funnel cake beside the pickle on a stick. The carnival buzzes on elsewhere, somewhere. Here I am in the center of it, but somehow always outside of it, too.

You’ll never believe what I saw, I start composing in my head, my eyes searching wildly across the grounds. They land on a mirror outside the Mirror Maze that shrinks my head, doubles my feet. Too obvious. And yet, I feel like a distorted version of myself, the kind of person who bites a friend. A vulnerable friend. And likes it.