The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(48)

My wrists throb. I’ve escaped these handcuffs thirteen times today, but that’s the job here, a little pain, a little delight, always a calculation—what will it take to woo the two teenage girls yawning as they watch our bally. Look at my danger, I urge through a squint in my eyes. Imagine yourself locked up. One of the girls starts texting.

Red pounds the flat steel face of a gearhead tent stake farther into the dirt with a sledgehammer, the ting ting ting and occasional spark just over my right shoulder as I wink to the teenagers. I’m learning the art of distraction. Thunder cracks. Red prepares for the deluge.

“Now watch Ms. Mimi L’Amour escape from these chains. Her world record is five seconds. Can she break it?” Tommy says, and begins the countdown. I plant my feet hip distance apart and take a deep breath. “Five!” he shouts, and I spin fast to face the tent behind me, my back to the audience, “Four!” throwing my arms down hard in front of me to loosen the chains, Red pounding the steel, “Three!” one and then the other wrist is out and lightning flashes and I have the chains in one hand, start my spin back to face the audience, “T—” but the loudspeaker interrupts: “Attention fairgoers. This is a tornado warning. All attendees of the Lucas County Fair must evacuate the fairgrounds immediately,” and the thunder cracks again right on cue and everyone across the fairgrounds is suddenly moving very quickly.

“Banners!” Tommy screams back into our massive tent. I clamber down the bally stage, already drenched, as the seven other performers meet me at the front banner line. The banner bearing the two-headed Egyptian princess billows and snaps like a ship’s sail, cracking and giving in to the storm.

I imagine the tornado splitting all the banners down the line, the boom of toppling poles like cannon fire, and the ship below suddenly tipping and sloshing as the waves crash farther onto the deck, the ship four days out to sea and unrescuable while deckhands are tossed into the waves, and then it’s not deckhands flailing as they sink below the churning sea, it’s my mom, her paralyzed body sinking like stone.

“Banners! Go! Go! Go!” Spif screams. Hands are flying, sequins throwing off the rain. We yank the slip-tie off the metal pole, unwind the rope holding the top of the banners taut, its tail splashing to the mud below. Breathing hard, we wrap and wrench the ropes around each of the canvas rolls, muscles shaking, looping slipknots and cinching, squeezing each banner tight, squinting against the onslaught. “Tighter!” Tommy is screaming, each of these banners a few hundred bucks we can’t afford to replace.

Ropes slap the mud puddles and spray. Mascara and eye shadow smear our faces. My fishnets are splattered and as I’m running to the next banner my heel sinks into a puddle and I stagger, my shin hitting a rusted tent stake, which grabs and rips my fishnets, cuts my leg open. Blood. “Go! Go! Go!” Tommy screams, pointing to the next banner, and I go.

The rain falls harder and harder, sheets and buckets and daggers of it hitting me from every direction as the wind makes it impossible to hear nearly anything but the high-pitched cry of emergency coming from somewhere I can’t see. Carnies run toward the cinder-block bathrooms. On the other side of the fence, one or two fairgoers linger, a few cars speed away, but mostly they’re gone. Just as they do each night, carnival bosses shut the gates around the fairgrounds, locking our performers and hundreds of carnies inside.

“Seek immediate shelter!” a policeman calls through a megaphone. But Big, Big Ben has the nine-foot boa constrictor across his arms and is slowly coiling her back into her box. He is in no hurry. There’s work to be done. He purses his full pink lips at the snake, kissing her on the mouth as hard rain devours him and the thunder cracks.

The sirens bounce off the cow barn. Rain pounds. Red screams for us to untie the tent’s sidewalls, thick vinyl seventy feet across by forty feet deep. A huge gust of wind could find any opening and pick the tent up from the inside, ripping it open or carrying it into the sky. This will not happen today. We will not be afraid.

“Are you crazy? Get to the bathrooms!” a carnie with a snarl of blond curls hollers as he runs. It’s time to go. The wind plasters our hair to our faces and then all of a sudden stops dead. A second. Two. And then it picks up again, the tree branches whipping one another as they’re stripped of their leaves, the flags on top of our tent snapping and cracking. Gold glitter smears across Pipscy’s face beside me. I catch her eye for a moment, and it’s wide and spooked but goes right back to the ropes she’s tying. It’s time to go. We live in the back of a semitruck and we won’t leave. We make less than forty bucks a day and we won’t leave. Inside the tent, we dart and dodge one another, locking the mummy cases, tying up curtains, gathering knives. We tie and twist. The wind sounds like a train. We lock and pin. The Feejee Mermaid is safe in her coffin. The headless woman’s mirrored chair is well wrapped in wet pillows. Though Queen Kong isn’t the last taxidermied gorilla in the world, her presence here, alongside her freak family, makes the extraordinary individuals a collective of ordinary love, and that, that, is reason to tie her blankets tighter despite the opening sky.

In the end, Tommy finally yells for us to get the hell out of there, though it’s almost impossible to hear. The rest of the fairground is emptied of people and the wind is throwing hair across our faces like whips and the sky is mauve. Sunshine, Spif, Pipscy, and I all run, no longer able to dodge puddles, past small tree branches that have come down, past food tents leaning sharply away from the wind, and finally make it to the cinder-block bathroom already stuffed with carnies. We’re breathing hard, can barely see for the makeup smeared across our faces, the membrane of storm water covering our bodies. We take paper towels to wipe our eyes and laugh with the hysteria of danger, unsure what else to do. Sunshine inspects my cuts. I inspect hers.