The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(105)

The country-rap remix of the summer blares from the bumper car’s speakers. A toothless, bone-skinny woman charges me from head on, then apologizes profusely and walks off. Take me with you, I want to say. Instead, I see Dale.

Dale’s silver hoops jiggle as he laughs and slaps the back of the carnie he’s talking to. I begin to walk over, a snarky joke readied, but he joins another group and they all turn to walk off into the fairgrounds.

“Dale!” I call, and he spins back to me.

“What about horses on the ranch?” I ask him.

“Sure,” he says. “Hell yeah.”

“When the season’s over?”

“Yeah,” he says. Then, “Well, if I can save up enough. If not, then next year. Definitely next year.”

“Next year,” I echo.

“Night, Hollywood,” he says, walking toward the low moon.

*

The two honky-tonk bars down the road are closed and, despite Fort Smith being the town where Elvis received his first military haircut, no rock ’n’ roll music blares from anywhere off the fairground. A few carnies form a semicircle around Short E and ask him how he shits and if he can fuck. Same questions he gets everywhere. I want to say here that a fire starts or a massive fight breaks out, something to commemorate the end of the night, but the jamboree just trails off into a tray of leftover ribs being scraped into a garbage bag for someone to take back to their bunkhouse.

Two people remain. Despite a booming dubstep remix, the couple sways slowly, gently, a hint of vanilla mist as I pass.

The whoops and hollers continue in the distance, the night’s electricity, true to the second law, neither created nor destroyed but still glowing somewhere farther away than I know how to reach. The couple wraps their arms around each other’s shoulders and walks into the darkness.

*

After months of negotiation, Tommy agrees to let me leave for three days. This, I was reminded, was unprecedented. People don’t leave. Or, people don’t leave and then come back.

“My grandfather died two seasons ago,” Tommy says in the van to Walmart. We’re in Georgia. Honey Boo Boo saw the show earlier that day. “I didn’t go home for the funeral.”

“I didn’t leave when one of my best friends died,” Sunshine says.

“I wouldn’t leave for anything,” Spif says. “When you’re here, you’re here. The rest of the world is dead.”

I watch Tommy in front of me, one hand loosely on the steering wheel. He has a metal bar as thick as a finger pierced through the back of his neck and a puzzle-piece tattoo on the inside of his wrist that I can see when he turns the wheel. The silence in the van is just as full of meaning as the words had been. There are the kinds of people for whom the rest of the world is dead while they are here, and there are the other kinds. The kinds who probably can’t hack it.

The puzzle piece is just an outline of a puzzle piece, connected to nothing.

*

Truth is, I was nervous about leaving. Very, very nervous. I’d been around this crew for four months, day and night, and I couldn’t imagine being away. But there was my other life, dangling just past the edge of my vision. A good friend of mine was getting married out in California, an old friend, and she’d asked me to be in the wedding, and I’d accepted, thrilled, months before I’d decided to join the show. It was at a fancy vineyard south of San Francisco, and fancy college friends of mine who had jobs in things like finance and PR and veterinary medicine would be there, and they’d have that bland skin smell of living indoors with plumbing, the smell of whatever nice perfume they’d wear and not this deep dirt stink from so many months in the truck.

I couldn’t sleep the night before I left, I was so buzzed with excitement. And when I caught the bus to the airport, my legs wouldn’t stop jiggling and my heart was racing. I was thrilled. I was thrilled and something else. Something hard to place.

I took a plane all the way back west. It was the first time I was in California when my parents weren’t. But there wasn’t much time to think about that. There was time only to drive down to the wedding rehearsal, to pull up to a giant chateau on top of a hillside, I mean straight up fairy-tale castle, and lather myself in deodorant. I thought about wiping it on my neck and the backs of my knees, but the bride pulled up. I gave her hugs. And the bridesmaids piled out of the car and I gave them hugs, too, and I thought, See? I’m just like them, and we’re all here and we have nice enough hair and I can laugh just like everybody else can.

We practiced walking the aisle, and then we moved on to drinking. And eating, too, a little later. That’s when the trouble began.

“So what are you doing these days?” one of my college friends asked.

“Well, I know this sounds a little weird, but I’m performing with a traveling sideshow.”

“Ha ha ha,” he said.

“I know. But, actually, I am.”

“Wait, what? Doing what?”

“Depends on the day. Fire eating, snake charming. Talking a contortion act.”

“Holy shit. Why?”

We were eating shrimp and drinking some nice white, I mean, we had little pink tails in our hands, and while I didn’t have an immediate answer ready, the long-winded story I’d use to talk around the question was one I was sure he didn’t want to hear.