The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(30)

My panic drains and I stare down dumbly, wondering how comfortable those dirty, splintery boards are. I hear footsteps come up beside me. “Is that Snickers?” Spif asks.

“Yep,” I say.

“Why is he here?” he asks. I look at Spif’s face. His eyebrows are raised, hard wrinkles on his forehead like he’s just had to ask the most ridiculous question he could imagine.

“No idea,” I say. I bend down to shake him, but Spif grabs my shoulder and shakes his head no.

“This is one for the boss,” he whispers, and carefully steps over Snickers’s sleeping body as he climbs down the steps to Tommy’s trailer.

Tommy emerges a few moments later, disarmingly uncool with messy hair plastered to one side and basketball shorts, very unlike the punk rock hero I’d come to expect, and stands beside Snickers. He says his name a few times, then reaches down and shakes his leg. Snickers stirs, blinks open one eye so slowly it looks glued shut, painful.

“What’re you doing, man?” Tommy asks, no humor in his voice.

“Hey, Tommy,” Snickers says, a genuine smile beginning on the side of his mouth. His face hovers an inch off the ground.

“Why are you sleeping here?” Tommy asks.

Snickers makes no move to peel himself off the floor, but keeps blinking up at Tommy with that smile. I notice, then, two bottles against the wall not far from his head. One bottle of beer, the other, water.

“I didn’t want to be late for work call again,” Snickers says, still smiling, a little defiantly this time, like a child who believes he’s outsmarted his parents. “So I thought I’d sleep right where I needed to be when I woke up.”

“Strike two,” Tommy says, turning to walk back into his trailer.

I follow Spif back to his room.

“Is this a baseball kind of situation? With three strikes?” I ask.

“If you’re lucky.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You’ll be fine, Goody Two-Shoes.”

“Tommy said strike two—when was strike one?”

“Oh, it was nonyo.”

“Nonyo?”

“Nonyo business.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t be late for banners,” he says, crawling back into his bunk.

*

I wander outside, feeling the morning sun on my face, smelling the dirt. There’s a peace I feel from the sun and the earth smell, something that harkens back to camping trips and hikes, a one-with-nature kind of solitude. Even though it seems like the carnival is a place where there is no nature, in some ways, it’s really nature presented at its most extreme. Beside our show, for example, is the world’s smallest pony. A sign hanging over the pen says so. The fair has a few of these. World’s largest rat. Heaviest horse. Littlest pig. The biggest and smallest always attract.

Instead of paying for a bally talker like Tommy or Cassie to stand out front and work people in, a grind tape plays over loudspeakers while the carnival is open: “The only living horse smaller than a cat, inside, alive, today.” As freak shows became less popular in the second half of the twentieth century and show budgets decreased, the grind tape became a necessity.

Each of the grind tapes for the single-o’s here sounds old, both the voice and the tape, like an invitation to an earlier world, before those enthusiastic inflections were used as jokes, back when stranger things were on display.

There was a famous grind-tape recorder named Peter Hennen, one of the best in the business. Story goes: Hennen called a friend in the middle of the night and said, “I’ve got a good one! Listen: ‘See the little girl born to live her entire life underwater. She can’t come out or she will die. She’s in there now. She goes to school in there. You can come in and see her. You can ask her questions. She may not answer you.’” Was it a real mermaid? his friend wondered. Could it be?

Hennen was giddy, and explained that when you walked into the single-o, there would be a giant fishbowl with a few goldfish swimming in it and a sign with this disclaimer:

GOLDFISH DO SPEND THEIR ENTIRE LIFE UNDERWATER.

THESE ARE GIRL GOLDFISH AND THEY GO TO SCHOOL.

THEY LIVE IN SCHOOLS.

ASK THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT.

It’s amazing that the single-o’s work. But they’re always cheap, and what’s inside is never an explicit lie according to what has been advertised. The world’s fattest pig is pretty big. And the Giant Battalion horse is a Clydesdale, which is large. Why don’t people warn each other? Maybe they feel foolish after wanting to believe they were going to see something truly exceptional for fifty cents, or maybe they want others to fall for it, too.

The world’s smallest horse bally tape runs in a loop while Leo, the joint’s operator, leans back in his camp chair with a newspaper. He reads each page meticulously. Our PA system blares the same acts we’re talking every seven to ten minutes. I can’t imagine how dreadful it is for Leo. And yet, every time I walk on-or offstage, passing close to the mysterious trailer allegedly holding the smallest horse, he waves and smiles.

After work one day, as we’re rolling banners—an activity we do each night to preserve the thirty-foot-high hand-painted canvas that advertises all the acts we have inside—he catches my eye and points at his horse’s trailer. Did I want to see it? I trot over when we’re finished, climb the few steps, and there, in the recessed center of the platform, see a very small pony. It’s about the size of a golden retriever. I make some clicking sounds and hold out my hand, but the pony does not look up.