The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(90)
“Well, don’t leave her waiting too long or she might change her mind,” I say, a little afraid that a new, skilled, hotter, fresher performer is already the favorite.
*
The other new performer, the yeller, is pale and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and a perfectly circular goatee on the very bottom of his chin as if he had been dipped in paint. He is moving very quickly between assembling rides with one big duffel bag slung across his shoulder. He’s not coming from the direction of the fairground’s entrance. He seems to have appeared out of the dry brush lining the chain-link fence that surrounds the carnival grounds.
“Rash!” Tommy calls.
“Tommy!” He drops his bag and gives Tommy a hug. “Feels so good to be back,” Rash says, hugging the other folks he knows. “This is where all the magic happens.” He spreads his arms wide like he could hug the whole carnival lot. “FUCK YEAH!”
He talks quickly, in a torrent, and has freshly painted black fingernails and a thick headband that covers the top of his head and ponytail.
“How’d you get here?” Tommy asks. “I thought you were gonna call when you got in?”
“Missed my flight,” Rash says. “Spent too long this morning imparting final wisdom to the offspring, so I had to hop another one. Took the bus after that. Then this hot chick offered to give me a ride to the fairgrounds, and I wasn’t going to say no to that,” he says, nudging Tommy in the ribs. Rash gives a quick laugh—an ear-splittingly loud, high-pitched cackle, the closest human sound to a hyena laugh I can imagine, with a hiccup between expulsions of air.
*
“Do you know why it’s so good here?” Rash asks me a little while later.
I shake my head no.
“Anything can happen out here, and it does. The last season I was on the road with these fuckers, I had a threesome with two monkey trainers. I mean, come on. It can’t get better than that.”
He’s getting into his clown costume as he tells me this, an outfit he has perfected over many years, he tells me, and prefers to wear all day every day. He likes to stay in it after we close the show if we are heading to Walmart, for example. The only thing that keeps him from wearing it 100 percent of the time is that his face needs to breathe at night, so wiping away the white face paint is good. He wears yellow plaid pants, a collared shirt, a tie, a vest, and a dog collar around his neck. He has a red curly clown’s wig that he’s been working on for years, he explains, to dirty and give dreadlocks. His teeth seem especially yellow in contrast to his white face and neck. His eyes and mouth are lined with black thorny paint. Many people already think clowns are terrifying. Rash is, by all accounts, doing his best to be the most terrifying.
*
It is 101 muggy, stagnant degrees outside in the shade, 107 inside the metal truck. Hutchinson, Kansas, is full of salt mines. During World War II it housed German and Italian soldiers in POW labor camps to make up for the American labor force sent overseas. Think of them, all those men locked inside fences far from home and made to work incredibly difficult, physical jobs. Can a temporary carnival be haunted? Are there POW ghosts swinging hammers inside these carnies swinging hammers? The parallels are not parallel, of course. As a prisoner of war, you have not chosen to do the work you are doing. You may not leave. But, for the carnies from South Africa, if they break contract and leave before the season is over, for whatever reason, the company they have signed with will go after their families back home for money. For the American carnies, if you’re a person with a criminal record, for instance, there are few other places you can find work. For migrant carnies—Mexicans, in particular—there are hundreds of others in line behind you to fill your spot should you complain about the seventy-, eighty-hour workweek, about the three hundred dollars for those hours.
The Kansas State Fair is the state’s largest event of the year, according to the Kansas State Fair advertising. Three hundred and fifty thousand people from all 105 Kansas counties attend. There is the pedal pull state championship, which is a competition where little children pedal a toy tractor that has had heavy weights hooked up to the back, their small muscled legs straining and knobby like some farm animal learning to walk. There’s mutton busting, where small kids clasp their bodies around an angry sheep whose torso is a bullet of dirty curled hair ten times as wide as the children’s bodies. They clutch, are thrown, then trampled. There are obvious ties to the bull riding and wrangling that happens in the older crowds, but regardless of age, the task is epic: an ordinary human attempting to wrestle the beast.
*
I wake because I am drowning. I wake and will myself back to sleep and wake again until my sheets are so wet they stick to the mattress’s plastic cover, which crinkles like disposable diapers with each movement, and sleep is no longer possible as a way to stave off reality. I have a fever, I’m in a hot tub, I’ve been propelled into the center of the sun. I open my eyes. The box fan is off. I must’ve kicked the cord that keeps it motoring, its square wedged perfectly into the foot of the bed, nearly the exact height and width of each bunk space. The only place to put the fan is on the bed itself, which then necessitates a bend in the sleeper’s knees to give up foot space to the fan, a further bend if the sleeper wants real air to propel from the blades by collecting the air behind the fan and not propping it up against the plywood board at the foot of the bed that makes a half wall every six feet. The price of a breeze is bent knees all night. A special dampness at the bend in the leg where skin is forced to meet skin.