The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(80)

It’s brilliant.

Short E walks out onstage and tells the crowd that he wants to share a special story with them.

“My mom was a preacher,” he says. “And I grew up going to church and listening to her preach. A couple of years ago, she died of cancer. It was the hardest time in my life, but right before she died, she said she wanted to give me a gift. I want to share with all of you what she said, and what she gave me. It’s this,” he says, pulling a small gold object out of his pocket. “The world’s smallest Bible, for the world’s smallest daredevil.”

The Bible is about two inches by two inches, a teensy paper book with print so small it requires a magnifying glass. It slides into a gold plastic case bedazzled with red or blue sequins. The whole thing is very ornate and gaudy, and an exact replica could be purchased by the audience for just one dollar.

Or two dollars.

Or three dollars.

Depending on how God-loving the audience seems. How willing to part with their money for a little reminder of the Lord’s words and the story they’ll be able to tell their other good Christian friends about the no-legged man they’d helped by purchasing the Bible from him in his dead mother’s honor.

“I’m going to bring my assistant out now,” Short E says, and I come through the curtain with a sweet smile on my face and Bibles dangling from my fingers. Did I mention that the Bibles were also keychains? So that the Good Word can come with you wherever you go?

I walk across the stage and down the steps into the crowd, swinging the little dazzlers from my fingers as I weave through the audience, smiling my best sincere close-lipped smile, which I hope erases the memory of me from just a few moments earlier, when I was asking them for another dollar to see a girl bent like a pretzel.

“You don’t look like a freak to me,” one Christian in a lime-green collared polo shirt whispers to me after I sell him the world’s smallest Bible. I can tell he is a Christian by the tenderness with which he clasps the gold book I trade him for two dollars. Also by his haircut. “In fact, I think you’re beautiful,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, and consider marrying him and moving to a condo, but the music cue for the guillotine act starts, so instead I walk up the steps and part the curtain and sit in my backstage chair for four minutes until I become a four-legged woman.

Another night, a man in wraparound sunglasses and a sleeveless orange T-shirt asks if I like being an entertainer.

“Yes, it’s pretty great,” I tell him, trying to let the sheen of my blond hair blind him into purchasing five Bibles.

“Well, baby,” he says, “I’m an entertainer, too. I’ll entertain you all night long.” Each of my fingers has a Bible dangling from it, like a mobile of holiness. I look over at the woman standing beside him. I’d assumed she was his wife. She smiles a wide grin at me. Her cheeks are shiny and hot, hot pink. My Bibles clink. They buy seven.

*

When the act is over one night, and Short E and I count out the money we’ve made him—he gets a percentage of this ding, like I do for the blade box—the Big Boss sits between us.

“Who sells more, Short E, you or Tess?”

“Tess, usually,” he says.

“That’s what it looked like to me, too,” Chris says. “It’s too bad. Back in the day, the crowd would only buy whatever ding we were selling from the freak. Wanted to support him directly, give him business. Wanted to be up close and shake his hand and look. Nowadays, people are too scared.”

“Sometimes they come up to me to buy one, take a picture with me,” Short E says. “It makes sense. I’m the biggest star in the show.”

“People are mostly chickens, now,” Chris says, ignoring Short E’s last comment. “Want to sit on their fat asses and see freaks on TV and not have to actually be face-to-face with them. Too scared to see them as people. Easier to only consider them from afar. Chickenshit.”

“Chickenshit,” Short E says, and we tear into another plastic bag of Bibles, ready them for the next act.





WILDEWOMAN

Two years and ten months after the stroke





25 days into The Trip


August 2013


I get a photograph of a towel folded into a swan.

There’s another, folded into a dog.

The towels are crisp, white, stiff. They are perched on the end of a finely made bed. These, I learn, were waiting for my mom and Davy each day, after their small cabin on the cruise ship was made up, and wasn’t it pretty funny?

It was pretty funny.

There was another one, two legs out to the side, some kind of tail, maybe, and an oversize head, but nobody could figure out what animal that was supposed to be.

*

Then there’s another photograph.

The background is black night sky. There is the faint hint of a recent sunset from a deep red stripe across the horizon.

Davy posts a photograph of my mom from the ship on the blog he’s keeping. The caption beneath the image reads: “On the deck, singing.”

If this were a painting by one of the masters and not a quickly captured cell-phone snapshot, we’d discuss the brilliant use of light to illuminate the face, a bright wash across all the skin so it seems to glow. Not the kind of light that has been still, like an ever-glowing constellation, but instead a kind of light in motion and a face that has just moved through darkness into the light.