The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(13)
“We don’t know already?”
“How would we know?” he asks, shrugging at me. I shrug back. I don’t know anything about anything. Spif relents, explains that the boss canvasman will have created a map of the fairgrounds designating where each ride, game, food truck, vendor, show, and so forth will go. This map is both practical and political, taking into consideration, for example, rides that have a lot of motion with spindly arms—these go in the middle aisle so customers can see through them to more rides they’d like to buy tickets for. A carnival’s central walkway where the rides and fast-food joints cluster is called the midway, and you want the biggest attractions, the roller coasters and drop zones, spread on either end of the midway’s oval so that fairgoers must walk the full midway and see all the other possibilities as they go. Placement is also dependent on the length and depth of the relationship between the individual joint owner or carnival company and the boss canvasman. Canvasman likes you, you get a money spot. Hates you, you’re on the edge of kiddieland.
Near us are a smattering of other vehicles and a trailer surrounded by a small metal fence, inside of which are eight or ten ponies, each bridled and tied to one long metal arm of an octopus, which spins as they tread behind one another in a circular march, bobbing their heads as they step.
“Ponies!” I say, pointing to the little ring of animals and then clapping my hands.
“Greenhorn,” Spif snorts.
“Are we allowed to go pet them?” I ask.
“There will be ponies everywhere we go,” Spif says. “And cooler animals. Tigers and shit,” he says, so I give it up and watch the ponies from afar. Pipscy climbs out of the van and motions for Spif to give her a neck rub.
Inside the fairgrounds, trucks are slowly unfolding. Since America’s highways became numerous and reliable, the circus stopped moving by train; the rides in any traveling carnival have to disassemble and fold up within the space of a truck bed. I’m witnessing a secret ritual here, viewing a carnival’s insides. A man is bolting the extended legs of the Octopus out wide.
A pickup truck full of young pink-skinned men honks as it drives by. Every few minutes, another truck passes us as it heads into the carnival entryway, hauling in its bed a load of stuffed animals bundled together in giant plastic bags or a half dozen carnies, and each time all the heads in the truck turn toward us for as long as the truck is in sight.
“Not many women around,” Spif says, digging into Pipscy’s neck. “They’re gonna be real interested in you two,” he says. “Watch out.”
It sounds like an invitation to trouble and I like it. I crawl over Spif and Pipscy and sprawl on the grass. Let them look. I’m three days in, and though it has been obvious at points that I am not a part of this troop yet, don’t get the inside jokes or know the metal band they’re playing loud in the van, I am here and part of something spectacular. I’m happy—elated, really, to be here. There was no reason to believe the carnival would be anything less for me than the wonderland it is for most attendees, with the lights and sweets and deep-fried delight. I feel all that—some collective nostalgia—as I watch truck after truck enter the grounds, as the occasional blast of music is tested from a ride’s speakers. There is pleasure in the idea of the carnival. It has been a long time since I’ve been overwhelmed with the kind of excitement these first few days have brought, where the future isn’t filled with hospital equipment or the terror of loss.
I think about how much she’d love it. How funny she’d think it is. There are goddamned ponies.
*
An hour after we arrive at the Big Butler Fairgrounds, we unhitch the trailer in our spot. We are at the center of the midway’s farthest U-curve. Good to be at a pinnacle point, like the tip of the U, though less good to be at the farthest point from the main entrance.
“Let’s get that possum belly unloaded,” Tommy says to Sunshine, Pipscy, and me. “Boys, set the stake line,” he tells Spif and Big, Big Ben, our show’s working man.
I follow Sunshine to the compartments below the trailer’s main storage area. We unlock them, then pull the heavy metal covers off these giant versions of the luggage storage beneath a bus. The possum belly is an old circus term for the storage box built beneath a work wagon that doubles as a napping spot.
“The possum belly is a special, special place,” Spif says, grabbing a steel tent stake. “It’s a place for lots of fun,” he says, humping the metal.
“It’s where truckers bang hookers at rest stops,” Sunshine adds, crouching into the possum belly and looking over the massive stacks of metal tent poles strapped together. “They’re called possum belly queens, those truck-stop hookers, so that’s what we call whoever is in charge of our possum belly. The possum belly queen. I’ve been it for years, and it’s scary and dangerous and disgusting, so I’m done. Now it’s you,” she says, turning to look at me. She smiles. “Congratulations.”
I feel a little gush of pride. Could they tell what a hard worker I was?
In the possum belly, there are about forty tent poles stacked on top of one another in a precarious pile. Sunshine unlatches the massive straps holding them together, loosening the ratchets slowly. “Come sit here,” she says to me, patting the lip of the possum belly. I do. The smell is wet and metallic and mossy, like the inside of a mine, I imagine, or a tunnel through the earth. The stack of steel poles is five feet high and twenty-five feet long.