The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(41)

“Is that story true?” I asked him quietly. He smiled again and shrugged.

He’s retarded, one of the performers told me later, when Ben wasn’t around. He’s just slow, another corrected. He’s had some head injuries, Tommy said. An accident. And an aneurysm. He’s the sweetest guy in the world, they all agreed.

“Wait till you see him with a sledgehammer,” Spif said.

*

After the burly guy on the motorcycle leaves our new spot in Ohio, I ask Tommy about whether he’s going to hire him. “Probably,” Tommy says. “We need someone who can hack it. I knew the last one wasn’t gonna work out.”

“Snickers?” I ask, surprised. He nods like he’s answering the most obvious question in the world.

This alarms me—that Tommy can know something like this ahead of time with such certainty. I ask him about it again a few days later, trying to sound as casual as possible.

“There’s a test I know,” Tommy tells me. We’re out on the bally stage one midweek afternoon. “The test predicts whether a person will stick around through the season or bail.”

This fair is slow and hot. July in Ohio. People are fanning themselves with 4-H programs and their faces are pink, coated in sweat and seeping grease from funnel cake. They glisten like appetizers.

“I knew Snickers wasn’t going to make it. Knew it right away.”

“What’s the test?”

“I can’t tell you,” he says.

I sigh, readjust the snake.

“Fine, but you have to keep it a secret. I don’t want this getting out and giving people insider knowledge,” Tommy says. “There are two things. First, during setup, if someone covers their ears while we’re pounding in stakes, they’re not gonna be able to hack it.”

I think of the piercing ring of the metal sledgehammers pounding the long, steel tent stakes into the ground, how it first hits your ears as a ting, but before you can even register the whole ting it has shot inside your brain and covered it in metal and each of the individual notes carries its own heavy symphony and even when the sound is over and the men are moving on to the next stake after pounding the first fifteen or twenty times, the ing still dominates the inside of your skull and you have to hope nobody tries talking to you.

“So if someone covers their ears, they’re too sensitive to hack it?” I ask.

He nods.

I turn my face quickly, so he can’t see the blush that’s formed on my cheeks. Did I cover my ears? Was I too sensitive to be out there? I remember on the very first day of setup that I wanted to cover my ears. I wanted to because Pipscy was, and she seemed to fit in so well with the crew—knew some of them already—so I thought I should mimic her much of the time. But I also remember how deeply I had wanted to seem tough, able to withstand whatever was going on. Had I covered my ears?

“What’s the second?” I ask.

“The big talkers. If someone comes in talking about how much experience they already have, how tough they are, how working here has always been their dream, whatever. The ones who make it sound like they already know what they’re doing? They’ll never make it.”

I think back to Snickers on that first day, rattling off shows he’d done and how much he deserved to be here.

“The work we do isn’t easy. It takes a lot of guts and resilience. Humility. Flexibility. I’m just saying I’ve seen this to be true many times in my nine years here,” he says.

“Did I cover my ears that first setup?” I ask, trying to make it sound like a joke.

“I dunno, Tess,” Tommy says with a smirk. “Did you?”

*

The new working man’s pale, wet biceps are bigger around than the giant poles he’s hauling across the grass. He shows up each day on that motorcycle. His name is Steve. He responds to people calling his name by jutting out his chin at them. But he’s sweating and working hard and only occasionally wincing and reaching down to grip his side, and I want him to stick around. More hands on deck.

“You from Ohio?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“Seems nice.”

“It’s shit. Only reason I stay is because of my daughters.”

“Oh—how many daughters?”

“Two. They’re a pain in the ass. Child support and all. But I like to get to see them. Saw them just a couple weeks ago.”

“What did you do before this?” I ask him a little later, when we’re on break. He wipes a mustache of red Gatorade from his lips.

“I’ve been on disability for a while,” he says. “I got into a real bad accident last Fourth of July.”

“Fireworks?” I ask.

“Worse,” he says, lifting his shirt up. The skin across the side of his waist is puckered and crisscrossed, knotted almost. “Cannon fire.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. My friends bought a small cannon. Civil War kind, I think. And we loaded it up with gunpowder, but for some reason it wouldn’t shoot. I leaned over to fix it, and, yeah…,” he says, trailing off.

“So you shot yourself with a cannon?”

“We all loaded it,” he says.

“Did it make a big hole?”

“More like a lot of small holes. My daughters thought it was really cool. It was, in a way. My ex-wife helped take care of me for a while. But she was a bitch. I’m so glad she’s gone,” he says, unable to contain the grin across his face. “We got divorced after she walked in on me with two other girls,” he says.