The Beet Fields Page 8

  EIGHT

  IN THE FIRST WEEK WITH THE CARNIVAL THE boy learned more than he had in his whole life before that, and in some ways more than he would learn in all the time he lived afterward. He learned carny rules, carny thoughts, carny lives.

  He learned that everybody who wasn't with the carnival and some who were with the carnival were suckers. Bobby taught him that. Along with how to know how much money a man was carrying by the way he stood when he thought he was going to have to spend it, and whether or not a woman would put out. That was how Bobby said it—put out.

  “See that one?” he said as they were setting up the ride and two young women were walking by, heading for the stock barns. “The one on the left? She'll put out. The other one won't but that one will. She'll put out like a machine.”

  “Put out what?” The boy had honestly never heard the phrase and while it was true that he thought almost literally of nothing but sex by this time—the condition had worsened as he stopped worrying about the law and being a fugitive and felt more secure—he did not put it together with what Bobby was saying.

  “Poon,” Bobby said. “Poontang, pussy—you know. Screwing. She'll do it, the other won't.”

  So the boy looked at the two women. They were both wearing tight jeans and light sweaters and both walked with their hips moving in the way the boy had come to have difficulty watching. He could see no difference between them, no indication of what Bobby meant. “How can you tell?”

  Bobby stared at the women until they were out of sight. “You get to where you can. It's experience. You just know.”

  “I couldn't tell at all.”

  “I could. That's all that counts.”

  For you, maybe, the boy thought, but he said no more and even later when he saw that it wasn't so and that Bobby didn't really know how to tell and that he never did anything with any women it didn't matter. It was still something the boy learned and besides there were other things that Bobby had to teach him.

  That all people wanted to lose. Bobby taught him that as well.

  “They say they want to win, they say they want to be right, but it's just a bunch of hooey. All they want to do is bitch, and getting shafted gives them something to bitch about. Watch them on the rip games—“

  “Rip games?”

  “The nickel toss, ring a looie, the sucker ball. They keep coming back even when they know they can't win. They keep trying when it's a dead toss just so they can bitch about it later. They walk awa/ shaking their heads and whining but they always come back. Suckers.”

  And while the boy knew that what Bobby said wasn't always true and that all people weren't suckers—he thought of Hazel and of the man who died when the pheasant hit him—he came to see what Bobby meant as he worked at the carnival and became more a carny and less a boy.

  And it did not take long. By the end of the first day of full work he had learned much and in a week he was pretty sure he knew it all.

  When they arrived in Harken Bobby drove out to the fairgrounds, stopped the truck, got out and looked at the area set aside for the rides and smiled up at the boy. “Same as last year—let's get to work.”

  • • •

  The boy jumped down and they started to unload the panels from the truck. The boy looked for Taylor's pickup but soon they were working so hard he didn't have time to look. They horsed the panels around, locked them together, rigged the seats and locked them in, the two of them working all afternoon and into the evening and when there was nothing left to do Bobby punched him in the shoulder. “You hungry?”

  The boy stood, weaving. He was past tired. Covered with grime that made him look dark, old, creased around his eyes. And he was beyond hunger as well. Nothing to eat all day except for a handful of prunes, and nothing much the day before except peanuts and Coke and sardines and crackers. He was afraid to move, to try walking, sure that he would fall over. “Eat? Food?”

  “Hell, yes—did you think you could live on prunes forever? Let's hit the gedunk stand.”

  Other rides had come to set up while they'd worked—although the boy hadn't time to stop and look at them—rides and booths, and off to the side was a food trailer with the panels up on the sides showing pictures of hot dogs and hamburgers and Cokes painted in faded colors.

  The boy followed Bobby to the stand and stood, dazed with exhaustion, while Bobby talked to the man working the stand.

  “You got money?” Bobby turned.

  The boy dug into his pocket and pulled out some bills, handed them to Bobby without looking, staring ahead, and within two minutes he was handed two greasy hamburgers dripping with catsup and mustard.

  “Eat 'em quick,” Bobby said. “Before they spoil on you.”

  It was a joke but the boy didn't hear it. He ate the burger in his left hand in three enormous bites, took the one in his right in four—not tasting them—and stood, his hands greasy, not moving, waiting. It was dark and he thought he was supposed to do something, be somewhere, but he couldn't think.

  “Go to the truck,” Bobby said. “Crawl up on the seat and sleep. The carnival doesn't start until tomorrow.”

  The boy turned and walked zombielike to the truck parked in back of the ride as he was told, climbed up into the cab to lie down and was asleep before his head hit the seat.

  The boy slept hard—in a kind of un-consciousness—and did not awaken until the late-morning sun and a roaring prune-and-greasy-burger-induced need to take a dump drove him out of the truck and into the concrete bathrooms by the stock barns at a dead run. He barely made it and came out of the bathroom to see a different world than he'd seen when he'd gone to sleep the night before.

  The barn was full of livestock, there were many more booths laid out in a row to make a street between them, and more rides were set up. He was amazed that he had slept through it all, amazed and suddenly very hungry.

  The same food trailer was more established now, with a tarp set up over two long tables and folding metal chairs to make a place to sit and eat. The boy went up to the counter and studied the painted menu, fingering the money in his pocket. “What do you have for breakfast?”

  The man in the booth turned and the boy saw that he had no fingers on either hand. “I have hamburgers or hot dogs. All the time. Which do you want?”

  “A hamburger.” The boy tried not to stare at the man's hands. Using his thumbs against his palms like pincers, the man held the spatula and slid the burned-cooked meat onto a bun he'd had cooking on the grease on the back of the grill. He wrapped the burger in a piece of waxed paper. “Fifty cents.”

  The boy paid and turned away to eat. At fifty cents a small burger, he thought, I'll be broke by tomorrow unless Taylor gives me more money.

  He ate the burger in four bites, bought another, ate it and walked over to the Tilt-A-Whirl where Bobby was starting up the drive motor and doing a test run.

  “You work the clutch to make the seats spin hard,” he said over the sound of the engine as the boy walked up. “There won't be much for the rides to do until dark. But you practice now, and after a bit you know how to work the clutch and can make certain seats spin more than others.”

  “Why bother?”

  “You look for men with loose pants and spin them hard. The change will come back out of their pockets and fall into the crack in the seat. Sometimes you'll get a wallet, but mostly change. Taylor, he'll split it with you if he's in a good mood.”

  “Split what?”

  Taylor chose this moment to arrive. He looked clean, his hair well combed, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  “I was telling the kid how to work the clutch to get change.”

  Taylor looked at the boy. One look, quick, up and down. “You look better. Dirty, but better. Got rid of that goddamn farmer look.” He inhaled, exhaled, without taking the cigarette from his mouth. “You help Bobby set up the geek show and shill for him. I'll run the ride tonight.”

  The boy did not fully understand what Taylor meant but he didn't ask q
uestions because he didn't want to appear stupid and, in any event, in moments he was busy helping Bobby set up the geek tent—little more than four tarp walls with a zigzag entrance and no roof. In front they put up a wooden platform eight feet square and three feet off the ground. Inside was a small cage set on a wooden platform also three feet high, the cage not over four feet on a side with a thin mesh over the top, held on with pieces of wire, the sides bolted together. As the boy finished tying the tarp off to stakes they hand-pounded into the ground, Bobby hooked up a grubby-looking public-addrfcss speaker and microphone and set them all on a raised wooden platform they dragged from the trade. He also had a rubber dog turd, which he put in the cage, and some yellow liquid in ajar he poured on the floor. “Kool-Aid—but they think it's piss. They think I crap and pee in the cage.” He disappeared again for a few minutes and came back holding a live chicken.

  “From the stock barn,” he said. “They sell 'em for fifty cents.”

  He put the chicken in the cage and went off again, came back in a long coat, carrying a can of some dark paste. “Here, help me make up. Just wipe it on and smear it around—the greasier-looking the better.” He took off the coat and the boy saw he was wearing only an old tattered pair of briefs, ragged and stained by makeup and revealing. The boy wiped the grease onto Bobby's back, gingerly at first and then harder until the man was completely dark. In the meantime Bobby had been doing the front of his body and his face, looking in a small mirror now and then to touch up. It was hot inside the open tarp cubicle and his sweat shone through the makeup.

  “Go tell Taylor it's time to start barking,” he said, working on his legs and feet. “Quick, before all this crap runs off me.”

  The boy ran to the Tilt-A-Whirl—which wasn't in operation yet—and found Taylor smoking a cigarette and looking at some women walking past. They were older women, not wearing tight clothing and not wiggling like some of the young onesi did, but it didn't seem to matter to Taylor.

  “Bobby says it's time to start barking" whatever that is.…”

  Taylor took a drag on his cigarette and flicked it away in an arc, “It means getting the farmers in. Yeah, I'll start calling. You go out in a kind of circle, over that way to the left, and when I start talking fast you sort of stop and then hurry over and stand in front of the geek tent. Got that?”

  “Is that shilling?”

  “Just do it; Then when I give you a sign, you go off in a different direction, over to the right, and come to the geek tent again. They'll follow you like the dumb little sheep they are.”

  The boy moved off. He hadn't gone thirty paces when there was a squawk and a hiss and Taylor's voice boomed over the fairgrounds.

  “Wild man from Borneo! Untamed and naked and savage! Four men killed capturing him just so you can see him for one thin half-dollar! Come now and watch him feed on live flesh! It's all happening now, right now, on the midway!“

  The fair wasn't packed yet—as theboy would find it the next day when all the rides were going and the weekend had truly started—but there were groups of people here and there and the sudden booming public-address system stopped them and caught their interest.

  The boy went to a spot where ten or fifteen people seemed to be gathered and trotted through the middle of them, heading for the geek show.

  And they followed him. Just like Taylor had said. Followed him until he was standing in front of Taylor, who was up on the platform. The boy stood for a moment, mesmerized. Taylor had taken command of all of them, held them with his voice, his look.

  “There, inside that tent, is a man who has never seen civilization. He's as wild as a wolf….“

  He looked right at the boy and made a motion with his chin and the boy understood, moved back through the crowd and found another group of people and led them back.

  Soon there were thirty of them, all standing watching Taylor.

  “Just a half-dollar to see him, one thin half-dollar, two tiny quarters in the box to see a sight never seen by civilized man before!“

  He worked them, stroked them, and when they were right on the edge the boy caught it, understood without being told what he should do next and moved forward and put a half-dollar in die cigar box on the platform and went into the enclosure. His timing was perfect and he heard change hitting the box in back of him.

  When the crowd was in the tent—over twenty of them jammed in the tiny enclosure—-Bobby started slamming around in the mesh cage, shaking it so the people would jump back and the women gasp. It was more education for the boy watching Bobby work. He had worked up an act that made the boy think of a minstrel show he'd once seen mixed with the movie gorilla King Kong trying to escape from captivity. Bobby leapt from one end of the cage to the other, nude except for the tattered pair of briefs his shaved head glistening with the black makeup.

  “Arrghr

  He lunged at the mesh, startling the crowd and even the boy, who was not ready for it and jumped away from the cage. One older woman had to leave the tent. A younger man, probably her son, went with her but came back in a moment.

  The boy was not sure how Bobby decided the time was right—he said later it was when the “farmers are wet-lipped and whip-ready“—but until now he had ignored the other occupant of the cage.

  The chicken.

  All this time in the small cage there had been the victim chicken. Everybody saw it, everybody knew why it was there, knew that the wild man from Borneo was going to do something with the chicken, something awful, and now, glaring at the crowd, the wild man's white eyes flashing out from the dark makeup, he suddenly jumped and snatched the chicken, which squawked and flapped its wings.

  Still he did not hurt it.

  “Timing is everything when it's farmers,” he told the boy later. “You have to time everything perfectly.”

  Taylor came into the tent then, with the cigar box. “It's time to feed now. Many of you know how expensive it can be to keep a wild animal. Please put something in the box to help us support this scientific discovery.…”

  His voice was soft now, not barking but soft, and the boy was amazed to see people put more money in the box, change and some bills.

  Even though they paid, the boy could see they still did not believe it—not all of it. Did not believe in Bobby, did not believe he really was a geek—a wild man from Borneo—and most certainly did not believe he would do anything to the chicken.

  They paid their money to get in, and they jumped back when Bobby jumped at them and thfey were disgusted by the turd in the cage and the puddles of yellow pee in the corners and some of them—young women— kept peeking at his shorts and what they almost concealed and everyone was clearly horrified and sickened by the thought of Bobby doing something to the chicken but they did not truly believe he was real or that he would doit.

  “Ah, it's all fake,” the young man who had taken his mother outside said, squaring his shoulders. Td get in that cage and kick his butt if they'd let me.”

  “It's all bull.” Another young man. Some young women were there, and one of them looked at the second young man and smiled a tight litde grin but said nothing. Her face was pale.

  And then Bobby did it. With perfect timing he put the chicken's head up to his lips, took it in his mouth and with a tearing motion bit off the head. 'There's cords in 'em,” he told the boy later. “In the neck, stringy cords. You got to rip kind of sideways.”

  The chicken flapped and spewed blood from the stump of its neck and Bobby made sure the blood sprayed on the crowd, swinging the carcass around and growling until all the people were gone.

  “Never more than one chicken per day,” he said, standing out of the cage and spitting. “It softens the act too much, you start killing chickens all the time.”

  The boy helped wipe some makeup off and then went to the food booth while Bobby went off wearing the coat. The boy wasn't hungry so much as he had a taste in his mouth—he thought he could taste the chicken head and could not stop thinking of what it would
be like, the beak, the eyes with the lids opening and closing inside his mouth. Even if you bit quick, he thought, you were going to feel some of that, know that the beak and eyes were there, and he wanted a Coke in his mouth to get out the taste left by thinking of the beak and eyes on his tongue and it was then that he first met Ruby.

  He had just taken a Coke from the man with no fingers and was going to head back for the Tilt-A-Whirl when Ruby walked up beside him.

  In some way because she was real she was the inost beautiful thing the boy had ever seen.

  This was before he had seen much television, so the boy's knowledge of beauty was limited largely to movie stars with enormous breasts-Marilyn Monroe" Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell were popular in those days-—and at first glance Ruby very definitely qualified.

  She had long blond hair and was wearing ä T-shirt that revealed her “full-figured bust development, “as they put it in the lingerie sections of the mail-order catalogs that the boy and several million other boys frequently read alone, and long legs below an impossibly tight pair of short-shorts.

  Her eyes swept over the boy as if he didn't exist. She had been sleeping—her eyes showed it and her tousled hair—and she clearly did not know that the boy knew Taylor or that he worked for him, just as the boy did not know who she was; he just knew she was beautiful, blond and glamorous and he froze with the Coke halfway to his mouth and stared at her.

  As befitting royalty she continued to ignore the boy.

  “Give me some coffee,” she said to the man behind the counter. “I can't get my damn eyes open.”

  She swore professionally, cleanly, the way a gunfighter draws and shoots, and the boy loved her from that instant. Her looks made her alluring, her swearing made her worldly; he was gone. He would have killed for her.

  She took the paper cup and drank half the steaming coffee as if it had been iced. She paused to take a breath, drank the rest of the coffee, threw the cup in a barrel near the counter and walked past the boy, artfully brushing her breast against his arm on the way by.