The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(29)
This day inside a day is a drug test, and the man right in front of me is leaning back against the wall, giving his armpits a rest from the crutches he holds in his hands. Up ahead, a carnie comes out of the bedroom, nods to the rest of the men in line, and leaves.
The man right beside me has his foot all wrapped up in a big white bandage. On his other foot he has a regular sneaker. I keep glancing down at the big bandaged foot as he is telling me about the gator one-off where he works. One-offs, he tells me, and single-o’s are sideshow offshoots, and as opposed to the ten-in-one, where one price gives you admission to ten or more acts, single-o’s cost fifty cents or a dollar and let you see one thing: the world’s largest rat, smallest horse, fattest pig, or, in the case of the carnie with the bandaged foot, hugest gator. He likes the work, he says, because he can sit in the shade all day.
These men in line don’t seem nervous, unlike my fellow performers, who have spent the last seventy-two hours taking midday jogs in all their clothes to try to sweat everything out. A few family-owned carnival companies had recently started drug testing all their employees, the bandage-footed man explains, in an attempt to make customers feel safer about the carnies operating the rides and to decrease the employee drama. Plus, it might help to break the stereotype that all carnies are meth heads.
“Are they?” I asked.
“Depends which shows you’re talking about,” he explains. “Depends which carnies.”
The previous year at this fair, local drug dealers had lost all business for the two weeks the carnival was in town because of how hard and cheap the carnies had been pushing their own goods. In an act of retaliation, the townie dealers had called the cops on carnietown with some specific information to share. In the middle of the night, search-lights and sirens broke into each trailer as helicopters and SWAT teams rolled in from all sides. The carnie bunkhouses are inside long trailers—sixty feet or longer—filled with tiny rooms, two or three beds in each, and from the outside many of them look like portable bathrooms. In the bunkhouses, the SWAT team found a meth lab and an enormous drug supply.
So here we are, one year later on the same fairgrounds, and more than half of the folks I’ve talked to have a Ziploc baggie of someone else’s pee tucked into their pants.
“You get caught in a ride?” one of the carnies in line asks the man in front of me, nodding toward his bandaged foot.
“Or your gator do that?” another asks.
A few people snicker.
“No, no, none of that,” the bandaged man says. “Happened before the season.”
They all nod.
“That girlfriend of yours?” another asks, and he laughs again.
“Shit,” the man says. “Nah, she’s trouble, but not that much trouble.”
They are all quiet for a moment. I think the conversation is over.
“Y’all know I got diabetes real bad,” he continues. They nod. “Diabetes makes it so you can’t feel your hands or feet too well anymore,” he says. “One night my girlfriend was working a night shift and I was at home with the dogs. We got this big husky and this little Chihuahua of hers. Anyway, I went to sleep and the little dog had all this energy and was kinda just running in circles like he did a lot. But I fell asleep.
“Next thing I know I wake up to screaming. My girlfriend is standing at the end of the bed and looking down, and I sit up and look down, too, and I see all this blood. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I ask her, but she’s still just screaming and she starts to lean down to pick up that little Chihuahua, but then she stops and backs away. He’s covered in blood, too.”
The boss coughs in the next room and a child screams just outside the trailer door, but we’re all leaning toward the man, silent.
“Anyway, I kind of sit up straighter and look down at what my girlfriend’s looking at and I start to realize. All the blood that’s everywhere is also all over my foot, and the little dog is there just gnawing and gnawing, and I look again at my foot and realize it looks real weird and I look at the dog again and that’s when I see it. In his mouth, the dog has my big toe. He’s chewed it off my foot.”
We are all silent, staring at the man’s face to see if this can be true, staring at his bandaged foot to imagine what’s underneath, what’s not, if there are little leaks of blood on the gauze for proof if we look carefully enough.
“Holy shit,” one of the guys says.
“Couldn’t feel a thing, ’cause the diabetes has gotten so bad,” he says.
“Did you shoot that dog in the face?” another asks.
“Oh no,” the man says. “He didn’t mean it. I love that guy. Still let him sleep with me at night.”
*
The morning after Walmart, I wake up sore all over, achy, and scoot out of my bunk. I’m getting used to the soreness now, ten days into being on the road with the show. It is 8:00 a.m., work call not for another hour, and the morning air is cool. The silence at this time of day isn’t anything I can hear in the carnival at any other time. I’ve found, already, that getting up just a little bit early, if I can muster it, gives me time to walk the grounds or sit outside with a book, a slice of calm and solitude before the day’s work begins.
I step into the trailer’s main area, our dirty, wooden backstage home, but immediately stop, a few inches short of kicking a foot. A body lies facedown on the floor. My breath catches for a second, imagining a body lying in ambush ready to turn and attack, or a murder scene. Quietly, quickly, I step over the body’s legs, my back pressing against the semi’s wall, and tiptoe around toward the face. A hat covers most of it, but just below the brim I see those dimples: Snickers.