The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(91)

I plug the fan back in, but it is too late. We sleep in an enclosed metal box in the middle of an asphalt parking lot in Kansas. It is early September; none of fall’s coolness has arrived. Each of us bought a fan on one of our 1:00 a.m. Walmart trips when the nights started heating up; they help a great deal, but there is only so much they can do. It’s just past sunrise, but I give up, gather my things, and head to the showers.

“Holy shit,” Short E says later that afternoon. He walks past my chair and climbs down the metal stairs toward the hose outside. He swears with each stair he dismounts, the heat of the metal, and then I hear the water turn on. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he says. “This water is scalding hot.”

My head is dizzy with heat, my vision a little blurry, and I lean back against the wall to steady myself between acts but immediately shoot straight back up, having forgotten that the metal walls, too, have been collecting heat all day. My shoulder, upper arm, and back where I touched the wall pulse with heat, and I wonder if they are red or will blister; at this moment I want them to blister and get infected and threaten my life, anything to force me out of this box.

*

We’ve just closed the show for the night. We’ve untied the slipknots at the base of the support beams, lowered the banners to their halfway point and rolled them up. We’ve closed the mummies’ doors, counted out the cash we made that day, marked envelopes, made change, recounted, and sealed the money away.

I peel off the polka-dot tank top and sequined shorts, fishnets beneath those, note how horrible everything smells, how damp it all is with sweat, note the good idea to wash these things sometime soon, next time I go to the showers, which I am considering doing tonight, but now I hear Spif rustling around in his bunk beside mine, changing clothes, smoking. He’s got more pep in his step than he should for midnight.

“Whatcha doing?” I call as he passes by.

“Heading into carnietown. Gonna play poker with the boys.”

“Can I come?” I ask. Despite all the warnings against carnies, I’ve been disappointed by how separate our show has been from carnietown during the meat-grinders—and how I was too busy to even consider the kind of trouble I wanted.

“No,” Spif says. “Not this time.”

“Why?”

“Not this time.”

“Next time?”

He sighs, exhales his smoke. “Fine. Next time. But you have to be cool.”

“I’ll be cool,” I say coolly, being unsure what that might mean in carnietown.

*

The next night after the show closes at eleven, I ask Spif if it’s carnietown night and he shakes his head no, sits down on the stage beside Lola.

“Soon,” he says, “but not tonight.”

“Why the fuck would you go hang out with a bunch of bigoted assholes who will try to feel you up every moment when you can stay right here with these much cooler cats?” Rash the Clown says, coming out of the shadows. “I can’t think of a single reason you wouldn’t just want to hang out here with these folks.”

“I already know what you assholes are like,” I say. “I want to see what those assholes are like, too.”

Rash sits down beside me and begins drawing his fingernails across my bare thigh.

“Besides,” I say, “they can’t be so bad. I’m sure I get felt up over here a lot more than I’d get felt up over there.”

“Probably true,” Sunshine says, parting the curtains and coming out onto the stage. She has two big, stiff ropes draped in loose coils around her shoulder.

“Whips,” she says very quietly as she walks past, down the stage’s steps, and out the tent’s front flap. We all stand up and follow her, a row of ducklings.

Outside, the bright moon casts shadows behind the stilled, sleeping rides, like time has stopped and all the machines are just waiting to be woken up. Sunshine drops the whips onto the ground, though they look mostly like lassos.

“Move,” she says, shooing us all far to the side as she picks up one of the whips. She brings her arm back, then throws it high in the air in front of her and cracks it. The sound is a gunshot, and the other folks on our crew are soon outside, too.

Tommy grabs the other whip and begins cracking. In front of him, behind him, to the sides. Sunshine wraps her body in the whip’s coil, then undoes herself.

I’m overly eager. When Sunshine takes a short break to puff on her cigarette, I sidle up to her and casually say that this act, a Wild West whip act, is an act I’d sure like to learn.

“I’ll teach you,” Sunshine says. “Hold the handle firmly in your fist, like this.” She picks up the whip and grips the long tape-wrapped handle. Standing with one foot in front of the other, she brings the whip handle in front of her, then behind, and then finally up and over her head before it cracks down in front of her. She demonstrates a few more times, popping the cracker each time with a snap that breaks the sound barrier.

“Stand behind me,” she says, “and put your hands on my hips. I know this is weird, but it’s how I was taught, too. Feel how my body moves beneath the whip.”

I do, holding my hands around her hips as the rope of the whip makes a cage around us. It’s hard to believe the whip doesn’t cut into us in our center sanctuary, but it doesn’t. I try to move with her as she is moving, to get a feel for the swings and speeds and flicks and twists.