You can always count on Floyd to land on his feet. When I got back to the wagon that evening, he had already painted over the old dancing-bear box, blotted out the swamp picture, and started fresh with new words:
THE UGLIEST BOY IN THE WORLD!
YOU NEVER SEEN ANYBODY THIS UGLY!
BUZZARDS CAN’T STAND TO LOOK AT HIM!
MAKES A POSSUM FEEL GORGEOUS!
I give Floyd a squint, and he give me a wink, and just like that, we was in a new trade.
Next day we fixed the wagon, and the day after that I was back in the box and we was in a village called Elrod, where we hadn’t ever done the feechie act.
Floyd launched into a patter about how he had the ugliest boy in the world, and for the small price of one copper coin, the fine-looking people of Elrod could have a look at him.
Somebody sung out, “Pay a copper to look at a ugly boy? This village is full of ugly boys we can look at for free!”
Floyd looked the crowd over with that appraising eye of his—like he was tallying up the ugliness on display before him. He give a look like he wasn’t impressed, and peeking through the knothole, I could see the hackles rising on some of the villagers.
“I don’t mean no disrespect,” Floyd said, “and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—but you folks don’t know the first thing about ugly boys.”
There was a grumble or two. Nobody likes to be told they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Floyd plowed ahead. “That last village we visited—now you talk about ugly boys …”
He was touching on their civic pride, and they felt it.
“Now wait a minute,” the blacksmith hollered out. “These aint even our ugliest boys. These are mostly shop boys. You should see the farm boys. Compared to them, these boys here are the village beauties.”
Floyd didn’t say a word, but he gave a little shrug and raised his eyebrows in a way that said he didn’t believe a word of it. And didn’t that send them?
“Somebody go get Hiram’s boy,” hollered a shopkeeper.
“And Tilley’s boy too!”
“You can fetch a hundred farm boys,” Floyd said, “but aint a one of them going to be uglier than my boy.”
“How much you want to bet?” somebody hollered.
“Any amount of money you feel like putting up,” Floyd said. He had a real smug look on his face; things was going his way. In this new trade, the game wasn’t charging admission; it was taking bets.
The villagers sent the shop boys to fetch the ugliest farm boys, and folks started putting up their bets. Floyd kept the crowd going. There was something about his coolness that made people act crazy. He give off a confidence so complete that people thought it had to be false—and they couldn’t wait to see him get taken down a peg or two. Folks fairly threw money at him, they wanted so bad to beat him in a bet.
Before long, the shop boys got back to the village square with the ugly farm boys. When Floyd got a look at them, his eyes widened just the tiniest bit, like he was surprised or a little scared. He got aholt of hisself after a split of a second, but it was too late: the villagers was watching close, and they seen that look in his eyes. They went to digging around in their pockets for more money to bet.
Floyd raised his hands. “No more bets,” he said. “No more bets.”
“Not a bit of it,” hollered one of the villagers. “You said you’d bet as much money as we could put up.”
Floyd bowed his head. They had him all right. A deal’s a deal. He took their bets.
When the betting was done, the villagers lined up the challengers in front of the wagon. They was all slapping one another on the back and whooping and hollering and speculating about how they was going to spend the money they was about to win. And let me say, those truly were some ugly boys they had rounded up.
They just wasn’t ugly enough.
When Floyd opened the box and I climbed out, the back-slapping stopped and folks got real quiet.
Floyd never gloated, but sometimes he come right up to the edge of it. “Ladies and gentermen,” he said, “it is my pleasure to introduce you to the ugliest boy in the world.”
Folks shook their heads and kind of wandered off. What could they say? One look at me, and they knew they’d been beat fair and square.
It didn’t take Floyd long to realize he had something better than the feechie trade. With the feechie act, we couldn’t make more than one copper for every person in a village. With the Ugliest Boy in the World routine, it looked like we could make however many coppers happened to be in the villagers’ pockets when our wagon rolled up.
We cleaned out eight or nine villages, I reckon, and had a pile of money like I hadn’t ever seen. Appeared to me we had more than enough to go straight—buy a farm or two. But on Floyd’s list of hopes and dreams, going straight ranked pretty low.
Being the Ugliest Boy in the World hurt my feelings a little. On the one hand, it feels good to know you’re the best in the world at something, whether it’s rassling or skipping stones or shooting a bow and arrow or being ugly. But on the other hand, it made me feel bad knowing I had an unfair advantage. I tried to talk to Floyd about it one night.
“Floyd,” I said, “I don’t exactly feel right about what we’re doing.”
Floyd was counting his money and seemed aggravated at me for interrupting. “How’s that?” he said. “You don’t feel right about having plenty of decent food and staying in decent public houses for once?” He started back with his counting.
“It aint that, Floyd. It’s just that I aint sure it’s fair to put my kind of ugly up against them village boys’ kind of ugly.”
Floyd grunted, but he kept up his counting.
“They’re just civilizer boys,” I said. “How they ever going to be as ugly as a genuine he-feechie?”
Floyd stopped counting and gave me a funny, narrow-eyed look. Then he started laughing. “Aint you scrupulous,” he said. “For such a fussy feller, you sure picked a peculiar line of work!”
I started to tell him I never picked my line of work, but I figured it was best just to let him get back to his counting.
Every time we done the ugly boy routine, it give me a knot in my stomach. And it got worse as we went along, not better. I just couldn’t get used to it. I loved the feechie show. It felt like honest work to me. Folks paid a copper to see a feechie, and I showed them one. Floyd could lie as much as he wanted about poling a flatboat into the Feechiefen Swamp, or about the feechiefolkses nature and habits. For my part, I give the folks an honest show.
Floyd was used to pretending to be somebody he wasn’t. It didn’t bother him none. But it hurt my feelings to have to pretend I was the ugliest boy in the world when I was really something a whole lot more exciting. It was like a wildcat pretending to be a possum. A possum is interesting in its way, but it aint half as fascinating as a wildcat.
We done the Ugliest Boy in the World routine in a few more villages, and it looked to me like we had enough money to buy us a village if we wanted one, but Floyd still wanted to keep it up.
“We can’t quit now,” he told me. “We just got a big enough grubstake to make some real money. You don’t want to spend your whole life skinning podunk villagers, do you?”
“Well, no, Floyd, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you—”
“A talent like you ought to be skinning townspeople, whole cities.”
“But Floyd, I aint—”
He put his hand on my shoulder the way I’d seen village daddies do to their boys—the way he did when he was about to tell me to trust him.
“Trust me on this one,” he said. “They gonna love you in Greasy Cave.”
“Greasy Cave?” I hollered. “Greasy Cave is the size of ten of these villages we been skinning!”
“I know it,” said Floyd. “I wish it was the size of a hundred.”
“With that many folks, Floyd, there’s bound to be somebody uglier than me.” I was getting scared. “And besides, Greasy Cave is a mining town.”
“What is that supposed to matter?” Floyd asked.
“You’ve seen miners. Miners is a heap uglier than farmers. I got a bad feeling, Floyd.”
“Well, I don’t. Do you know what I see when I look at you?”
“What?”
“The ugliest boy in the world.”
“You just saying that.”
“No, I aint.” Floyd hoisted his money bag, groaning with the weight of it. “I’m willing to bet this much money on it.”
That made me feel better. Floyd had told me a hundred times that the most important thing in the show business is to believe in yourself—believe that you are the part you’re playing. And if you want to know the truth, Ugliest Boy in the World wasn’t a hard part for me to believe in.
When we got to Greasy Cave the next day, Floyd took enough bets to double our stake if we won—or ruin us if we lost. I give the Greasy Cavers every bit of ugly I had.
It just wasn’t enough.
When Floyd let me out of the box, I was face to face with the ugliest boy I ever seen in my life. How can I describe how ugly this boy was? I might as well try to describe how wet water is.
His ears was like plates glommed onto the sides of his head, and his teeth stuck out in every direction except straight. His nose must have been six inches long, but it curled up at the end like a pig snout. His eyes was two or three different colors, and his eyebrows met up with the hair on his head, which had so many cowlicks that no two hairs pointed in the same direction. On top of that, he was covered in coal dust. It made your eyes water to look at him.
Me and Floyd just stared at the boy for a good quarter minute. Then Floyd went to waving his arms and pointing at the ugly boy.
“It aint fair!” he hollered. “You can’t enter a boy in a ugly contest if he’s covered in coal dust!”
The innkeeper pulled out a rag and swiped it across the boy’s grinning face a few times, but it only let more of the ugly show through.
We was beat. There was no two ways about it.
Floyd made a lunge for the money pile, and three or four miners made a lunge for him, so I grabbed his coat collar and fairly pulled him into the wagon seat.
“Let’s go, Floyd!” I hollered. “I aint ready for another village whipping, and I don’t think you are either.”
I whapped the reins down on Buttermilk’s haunches, and he hoofed it out of there a heap faster than usual.
That night, Floyd still wanted to fight somebody. Since he couldn’t whip all of Greasy Cave, he soothed his feelings by wading into me.
“You can’t do anything right, can you, boy? I already knew you wasn’t smart enough or talented enough or good enough. Turns out you aint even ugly enough! I don’t ask much of you, boy. I just ask you to stand there and be ugly. And you can’t even do that right!”
That hurt. I always took pride in my work, and I already felt bad about losing all that money without Floyd grinding on me.
“Floyd,” I said, “I was as ugly as I knew how to be. That other boy was just uglier.”
“I don’t want your excuses,” Floyd hollered. “You’re a loser, and I never should have let myself get mixed up with you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Floyd. I aint lost but once.”
Floyd snorted. “Aint lost but once! But it was a tom-doozler, wasn’t it? Didn’t take you but one loss to lose every copper I own.”
“You the one bet every copper you owned, Floyd, not me.”
Floyd reached back as if to hit me, and I hunkered down to take it. But then he got this ugly smile on his face—a smile that looked even meaner than his frown. He worked his mouth around like he was sucking on some sugar candy, like he was getting all the goodie out of the words he was about to say.
I stayed hunkered down. I figured some kind of hurt was still coming.
“Remember how you said it wasn’t fair to put a feechie boy like you up against a civilizer boy in a ugly contest?”
“I remember.”
“Civilizer boy couldn’t be uglier than a feechie boy, could he?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“So how you reckon you lost today?”
My belly felt like there was a king snake wrapped around it and squeezing down. Somehow I knew what was coming. “What are you saying, Floyd?”
“I’m saying you obviously didn’t have no unfair advantage.”
The snake squoze down another notch. “I just meant me being a feechie and them being civilizer boys …”
“That’s what I’m talking about, boy. You aint no feechie.”
There it was. There was the wallop I been waiting for.
Floyd’s face was twisted up, and them mustaches of his waggled as if they was making fun of me separate from the rest of him. “Sorry, boy. I know you liked pretending you was a feechie. But it turns out you’re just a ugly boy—so ugly your own mama didn’t want to keep you.”
What hurt so bad, I knew he was right.