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Carnival food was wonderful and amazing in its density. The intoxicating combination of fat, sugar, and salt was more satisfying than most of what I used to cook at home, especially since my father died, and Mrs. Schendel stopped working as our housekeeper. I devoured the thick-cut French fries splashed with malt vinegar, a dripping cheeseburger, a fatty sausage buried in peppers and onions, and even a bag of blue cotton candy that Jim had brought me. I ate with my back to him, embarrassed that he might be repulsed by my rapt pleasure, at my ability to consume so much food at once.
The completeness of my satiety, hard to achieve and short-lived, as it tended to be, brought me a sense of peace, which Jim apparently did not share as he walked the trailer from one end to the other. He stopped directly in front of me.
“Sarah.” The abrupt seriousness of his voice made me cringe. “You can’t ever, and I mean never, tell anyone that you offed someone.” Jim held up his hand to shut off my protests and denials before I could even voice them. “And don’t tell me nothing either. What you need to do now is lie low, and what we damn sure have to do is make certain you don’t get back up on stage here where somebody might recognize you.”
“But it’s not like how you think,” I said. Jim had snagged a plastic ketchup bottle, probably from the grab joint where he’d gotten the food. I squirted a red hieroglyph over the top of the fries. “It doesn’t matter. That’s the funny part. People wouldn’t imagine I was capable of something like that because they think I’m too fat to think or feel anything. So they just...” I paused to suck grease and salt from my fingertips, hearing the truth or at least a rising conviction in my theory, as I spoke.
“There’s no way to be sure of something that like, Sarah. Secrets don’t stay buried forever. Something always happens. Someone always figures it out.”
No one would find me, I reassured myself. What if Jim were right, though? It would only take one person, someone whose life was tied up with Jared’s continued existence, someone accustomed to getting her own way. She would need to be determined and to hate me.
“Missy,” I said, my voice too soft for Jim to hear over his footfalls.
At night when Missy would visit Jared at the house, I often heard her talking about their proposed wedding, sometimes waxing about the most original color for bridesmaid dresses, other times voicing breathless options for proposed honeymoon locations, like Chicago, a particularly coveted spot of urban allure for a hog farmer’s daughter. I got to listen to every word she said while I stayed hidden behind my bedroom door, with all of us, it seemed, hoping to forget that I existed.
The problem with Missy’s designs and plans had been that, regardless of her fashion choices or where she spent her vacation, she and Jared would have no place to live after they got married. They couldn’t actually make me leave the house because I had owned half of it since our father died. Missy often ranted about wanting to live a normal life with a husband and children without having to step around what she referred to at alternate intervals as a fat cow, a smelly slob, or my personal favorite, a disgusting waste of life. The house was small, with no basement or second story and only two bedrooms. My father had had it built from some sort of kit, pasted together at low cost, and hung with cheap pine interior doors that did nothing to block out sound.
Nothing had worked out in any way that Missy, Jared, or I would have ever imagined. I pulled a long billow of cotton candy from its plastic bag, letting the sugar cloud melt in my mouth. Jim still appeared agitated, but there was nothing I could do about that either. It was a relief when he finally left me alone to go do whatever it was he did. I was happy to obey his edict to stay out of sight for the time being, glad to be alone to eat in privacy and wash my body and hair with no one to see me do it.
The long-handled scrub brush was one of the items I had brought from home, impossible to forget really, because there was no way for me to clean myself without it. The warm, sudsy water on my skin revived me. Much like dinner the night before and sleeping in Jim’s bed, washing myself was one more ordinary activity accomplished outside my home, serving as a place marker, another step moving me farther from my point of origin.
Jim called out my name as he entered the trailer. Given how strange it would have been for him to knock on the door of his own home, I supposed that was his way of not wanting to startle me.
“Hello,” I answered from my spot on the couch. At intervals, I would hold up one section of my damp hair to the window fan and then another, trying to dry it.
Jim sat next to me and patted my thigh. “All cleaned up then? What do you say we go get something to eat at the cook trailer? You can meet some of the other performers there.”
The hour or two that Jim had been absent had provided enough time for me to view and review my situation in detail. No matter how I looked at it, being secluded in Jim’s trailer was the best alternative. No one would find or even know to search for me there. “You don’t think maybe it would be better for me to hide out here some more?”
“Nah. Hinkle is probably already pissed that you haven’t been to see him. It will only look more suspicious if you don’t show up now.” He squeezed the ends of my hair, wetting his fingertips. “This is nice. You should talk to Gigi. She can do a pretty good haircut if you want.”
He continued to stroke my hair from scalp to tips—a strange, gentle gesture—and then nudged his hand under my elbow to help me up from the couch. “Listen, you’re going do fine,” Jim said. “Just don’t tell anybody where you’re from exactly or your last name or anything like that. Fuck, there are so many of these little shit-box towns around here, you could just make up some Indian-sounding name, and no one would ever know the difference.”
“Pat-a-lot-of-me Falls,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“A tribe only slightly less known than the Potawatomi.”
Jim laughed but only a bit, making me wonder if he knew that the Potawatomi were the actual tribe who had once lived in that part of Wisconsin.
“See, it’s funny because—”
“Stop it, Sarah.” He had been about to the open the door, but now he turned back to me with such suddenness that I had to put my hand on the arm of the couch to steady myself. “You need to pay attention and remember what I told you.”
“Okay.”
Jim grabbed my chin, swiveling my head so that our faces were almost close enough to touch. “You can never, and I mean ever, ever, tell anyone what you did or that the fuzz might be looking for you. Look, I’ll take care of you, but you better know that if Hinkle finds out about this or if he knows that I knew and let you stay here, then we’ll both be screwed.”
“Okay. I mean, yes.” Would Hinkle call the police? The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. “But why would he call the police? I mean, wouldn’t that just be trouble for him?”
Jim lowered his voice. “That’s not the problem. Hinkle isn’t the kind of man you want knowing something about you. He would have this thing he could hold over you. I’ve worked with Hinkle for a lot of years, and he cut me in when I needed a break, but he’s not the kind of guy you want to turn your back on.”
“Right.” When Jim and Hinkle had visited my house, Hinkle had clearly been the one in charge, the one who had knocked on the door. He had looked to be about ten years older than Jim, wearing gabardine dress pants and a short-sleeve collared shirt, a packet of reading glasses and a pen in the chest pocket. His hair had been pomaded and full, a dark sheen slicked straight back from his shiny forehead. The literal brilliance of his grooming had suggested time in front of a mirror, his gold jewelry an indicator of his status.
“Don’t get taken in just because he’s nice and friendly to you.” Jim’s voice went up a notch.
I looked at his face. There was so much skin to it, an unbroken sheet from the top of his head to the vee of his shirt buttons where a few tufts of brown and white chest hair were visible. “All right, I hear you.”
“Well, good then. And I’ll stick with you when you go see Hinkle to make sure he don’t talk you into getting on stage here where someone might recognize you.” Jim opened the trailer door. The early-evening air, though not much cooler, felt refreshing compared to the trailer. “Just so you know, Hinkle will probably want to meet with you alone because he likes to give people whatever deal he can get them to take.”
“So how do you know who got a good deal?”
Jim laughed. “The ones who take the shitty deals don’t stick around that long. You see somebody that’s been here for a while, and they have half a fucking brain, then they must have gotten a pretty good deal.”
I thought of Gigi, of her story of the different jobs she had done with the sideshow, of the number of years she had been on her own, taking care of herself. “So Gigi must have a pretty good deal then, I guess.”
Jim kissed my cheek. The unexpected gesture made me draw back a little bit. “Don’t worry about Gigi,” he said. “She can take care of herself.”
***
Five or six picnic tables were arranged next to a propane stove wedged alongside a prep table in an L shape. The cook trailer was on the far side of the back lot, not far from a converted semitrailer, which Jim explained was the bunkhouse where the grunt workers paid to sleep in a three-by-five confinement. These were the men who broke down the structures and packed them up or who went on ahead as the lead team, traveling to the next town in the dark of night.
According to Jim, they had to stay cranked up on amphetamines pretty much all the time to keep the carnival moving. Some only managed to last for one season, but others returned year after year, driven back by a steady stream of domestic outrages. Jim warned me against walking near the bunkhouse after dark, where these stinking workers loitered around, shirtless, smoking cigarettes, and peeing freely in the open air. Some of the ride jockeys stayed in the bunkhouse, too, but a lot of them camped out under their rides to save money. A carnival in the early morning, I learned, was an eerie sight, with men rising like unholy corpses to sit up straight in the mist and curse the dew soaking their clothes.
One of the setup men whistled as we approached. “Goddamn, Jim, man, you be careful that woman doesn’t eat you.” His shirt was unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing a wild mat of black chest and dangling armpit hair. He stood up to take a closer look, stroking the sides of his thick mustache.
“Finish your fucking supper, Weedy,” said Jim with easy nonchalance.
“All right, all right,” Weedy said, sitting down. “I’m just saying she looks like she could gobble you up and suck your bones.” Weedy scratched the side of his face, grinding his other elbow into the man sitting next to him.
“You can suck my bone, if you want.” His companion laughed.
Jim put up his middle finger and stuck his arm straight out, pointing at Weedy and the friend. There was more laughter, like an ice rain of slicing knives from which there was no shelter, no help, no umbrella. Gigi appeared by my side and latched on to my forearm. Her hands were small and cool even in the dense heat.
“Just ignore those assholes,” she said loudly enough for them to hear. “They give everyone a hard time.”
I turned toward Gigi, smiling in relief at seeing someone familiar. She looked much better than she had that morning. She must have washed her face and then applied a fresh coat of makeup. Her long hair, a mess of multicolored tangles before, had been brushed and sprayed and stacked up in a mysterious swirl rising above her head like tawdry pie topping. She had somehow flattened her bangs into a seamless sheet that ended just above the ridge of her plucked brows. Her eyelashes were thick and black with the barest shimmer of visible adhesive holding them in place. The ghostly white of her face was offset by her vibrant-red bow mouth and pink-circle cheeks. She reminded me of a doll I had once held—one that closed her eyes when placed on her back and that opened them wide when she was put on her feet. So strong was the impression that I had to resist the urge to stroke the silky sheen of hair along her forehead and kiss the sides of her face.
“Hey,” she said, “they don’t mean anything by it, really.” Gigi grazed the skin near my eye with the knuckle of her forefinger, almost touching the bruise that had darkened in color since the day before. “You could use some makeup there.”
Unable to meet her gaze, I remained still, unsure whether to sit or stand or what permission or payment was needed to get a plate of food.
Jim steered me over to the cook table to get some dinner. “A meal will cost you a dollar,” he explained. “A lot of people eat from the food stands, but that can take up a big piece of your money. Some of these guys, especially the rookies, get pretty hungry by the end of the week.”
Hot tears pricked my eyes. “I didn’t bring any money. I...” My voice petered off, weighed down by the exhaustion of getting everything wrong and having to have everything explained to me, never knowing how to maneuver myself, where to put my hands, or how to talk to these people, many of whom looked too dirty—filthy in the way of long-unwashed people who slept in their clothes—to eat dinner at a table with other people.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get us something.” Jim flattened his hand against my back to steer me toward the food. “Now that I think of it,” he said with amusement in his voice, “Fat Fanny used to complain all the time about how she spent half her pay getting enough to eat so she could keep earning money.”
“This is Marva.” Jim gestured toward the thickset woman at the cook table.
The woman glanced in my direction as she pulled a plate from the top of the stack. Her broad red face had a flat, almost beaten-in look, as if she had been smacked with a shovel. Her hair was pulled back into a single braid with a halo of escaped strands stuck to her skin or floating in the humid air. She wore blue polyester shorts, inexpertly-hemmed, and a flowered tank top.
“Marva, this is Sarah. She’s going to be doing the sideshow with us.”
Marva crossed her arms and rested them below her breasts, heaving them higher. “You must be the fat lady act.” She shifted around so that her chest rested on one arm. With her free hand she reached up her tank top and scratched the underside of her breasts.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am.”
“Ma’am. How do you like that? Like this is the goddamn tea room. Kid, you can just call me Marva,” she said, sniffing her fingers.
“Marva, sweetheart,” Jim said. “Give us two plates, and double it up for my pretty friend here.” Jim winked at me. “We’ve got to keep her in shape.”
“If you say so, Jim.” Marva filled up a heaping plate with hamburger meat and gravy and rice and string beans, with a piece of white bread slathered in orange margarine on the side. The food looked good if not as delicious as what I could have made at home.
Jim and I walked over to the table where Gigi was sitting next to a man with a child-sized body and another man plastered with tattoos in every bright color imaginable. I lowered myself in the center of the empty bench to distribute my weight evenly. Jim sat on the end, one long leg on each side, and shoveled rice and meat into his mouth. I started eating, too, keeping my eyes down on my plate, forcing myself not to stare at the tattooed man and the dwarf sitting at the table, at the freaky oddness of their bodies.
“I’m Ike,” the tattooed man said.
I raised my eyes, taking his introduction as permission to stare at him. I had never seen anything like him, hadn’t even known that such a person could exist in the world. The drawings on Ike’s skin were so complex and intertwined I wondered how long it would take to see and understand each image. “Hello.”
“See this one here? The long red heart with the teardrop on the end? That’s the heart that bends but never breaks.” When Ike traced the contour of the design with his dirty fingernail, I could feel the tattoo heartbeat in my throat.
“It’s pretty,” I said and noticed Jim watching me.
The dwarf stood up on the bench to lean across the table and shake my hand. “I’m Freddy,” he said. He had the body of a misshapen doll with the bullish head of a full-grown man—a shrunken minotaur that I feared seeing in my dreams that night. “Daisy and Spanky was here before.”
Gigi rolled her eyes while Ike, Freddy, and Jim all laughed. “You ain’t missing much there. I used to dance the cootch show with them, and they been pissed off ever since I left,” Gigi said as she pulled a dark-red lipstick from the beaded drawstring bag at her side, using the back of the spoon as a mirror to apply a fresh coat. She kissed the palm of her hand to blot the color. “Mwah.” Gigi made a kissing motion at Freddy, who had been watching her gestures in open fascination.
“You and me can get a drink over at the G-top later tonight, and I’ll introduce you to the fortune teller, Ora Ann,” Gigi said. “Only she likes it when you call her Oracle.”
“So long as you don’t believe anything she tells you,” Freddy said.
Gigi stood up to slap Freddy’s arm. “You’d be amazed,” Gigi said to me, “at the things she can predict.”
“Bullshit,” Ike said.
Jim laughed again, leaving me to wonder if I could indeed go out later with Gigi. And after that? Would I make my way back to Jim’s trailer alone? Was that even where I was going to sleep? And would we do the same thing we had done last night? I picked up my fork and ate faster, wanting the feel of the food in my mouth, inside me, filling me, more than I cared about how I looked. I didn’t hear the footsteps behind my back, didn’t notice anyone approaching until I felt a hand fall on my shoulder. My body started in surprise, making me drop my fork in the meat and gravy.
“Well, hello there,” Hinkle said.
“Oh,” I said. I started licking the handle of my fork to clean it then stopped.
Freddy took a toothpick from behind his ear and cleaned his teeth with it. “Hinkle’s a sneaky one, for sure.” Freddy sucked his tongue along his gums then slid the toothpick back behind his ear. “I’ll see you all later.” I couldn’t help but stare as he hoisted himself down from the picnic bench, mesmerized by the impossible size of his form, his hitching gait and swinging hips.
“Well, well.” Hinkle sat down next to me, straddling the bench. “Are you enjoying your dinner,—Sarah, isn’t it?”
“It’s very good.” I should have been looking Hinkle in the face, but Jim’s warnings had made me wary of him, afraid that he might be able to read my thoughts.
Hinkle smiled, the sunlight glinting off the shiny gold chain and medallion he wore around his neck. “I thought you would have come to see me by now to talk about your flop onstage last night and to see if we could still come up with a contract instead of having Jim drive you all over creation and socializing with people.”
Jim slapped the wooden tabletop to draw Hinkle’s attention away from me. “I took Sarah for a little ride so she could use the telephone.”
“Is that right?” Hinkle asked. “Were you calling your family, then? You have a brother, if I’m not mistaken.”
His oblique mention of Jared startled me. For the sake of my own well-being, I had taken for granted that no one in the carnival knew anything about me or my life and that I could make up whatever story I wanted. I had ignored the fact that Hinkle and Jim could only have learned of my existence when Jared visited the carnival a few days earlier with Missy. They must have asked Jared about his very fat sister who might be interested in joining the carnival. Missy, glued to Jared’s side, would have turned her face from Hinkle, from his shellacked toilette and unctuous charm, annoyed at the embarrassment she had to suffer because of me.
“His name was Jeremy? No, no, it was Jared. Is that right?” Hinkle’s eyes scanned my face, calculating my reaction, probing, as if he had an apple, to find the soft spot, the center of the bruise to insert a finger.
“Yes, Jared.” I paused to consider the best way to answer. All around me, people were talking and eating. Weedy and his companion were moving the dial on a transistor radio over at their table before settling on a Rex Farish song. “But no, I wasn’t calling my brother.” Believable stories contained as much truth as possible. “Honestly, he and I were never very close. I called my stepmother to... to tell her goodbye because... I didn’t really get the chance because... I didn’t have time, I guess.”
“Yep.” Hinkle nodded. “You were pretty anxious to get here last night. Couldn’t even wait until morning.”
I turned back to my plate and shoveled up some rice and meat, forcing my mind to picture an endless blank white space so that there was nothing to read in my face or gestures.
By my side, Gigi sang along with the radio, her voice soft and quiet, words I could barely discern. “Let it roll, let it roll. Now she’s seen the bright lights, bless her soul...”
“So, you wanted to get here right away then,” Hinkle said.
I wiped the corners of my mouth with my thumb and index finger and took a sip of water. “That’s right.” I had to treat this as a casual conversation, to roll along with whatever was being said, as if Hinkle and I were simply two people getting to know each other. “To tell the truth,” I paused, “and no offense, but my stepmother wouldn’t really approve of my coming here. In fact, she probably would have talked me out of it, so I figured I would just leave and then call and explain it to her later.”
Hinkle had his back to Jim, so he didn’t see Jim’s slight nod, his tacit approval of my tone, of how I let a single kernel of truth expand to fill an entire story. “Maybe she’ll come around,” Hinkle said, patting my hand. He reached across the table to latch on to Gigi’s wrist. “How are you doing tonight? Ready to give them a good show?”
“Yes,” she answered, looking away from him.
Hinkle turned back to me. “It looks like you’re just about finished here. Why don’t we go now and straighten out the details, Sarah?” Hinkle stood and dusted off the back of his pants. “We’ll have to see about getting some makeup to put on that eye.”
“I’ll come with you,” Jim said while I shoved the last forkfuls of food into my mouth.
“I’m sure you have better things to do, Jim. Sarah here can take care of herself.” Hinkle smiled down at me as I struggled to get my leg over the bench to stand.
“It’s no problem,” Jim said.
“All right, then,” Hinkle said. “Jim, if I didn’t know better, I’d say this big girl was making a little pet of you.” Hinkle laughed, his mouth so wide the silver fillings in his molars were visible.
Jim pulled his lips in tight, a fault line on his face. I started to say something to defend Jim, to ease his displeasure at being called a “pet,” but then I changed my mind, feeling and liking the warmth of my face, the blush of wondering that maybe I did have some control over Jim.
***
Hinkle’s space was two single-wide trailers hitched together, one of which he lived in and the other he used as an office. The office area was neater than I’d expected, with a series of wooden boxes lining the side of the desk with precisely stacked papers in each one.
“Marva helps keep me organized here,” Hinkle said with a sweep of this hand. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk while I took a seat in the good, solid wooden chair across from him. Jim pulled the metal chair out from under the small typing desk against the wall and turned it around backward to sit down.
Hinkle picked up a stack of typewritten papers and tapped them on the desk. “So then, Sarah, like I mentioned when we came to your house, I’m the proprietor of Midstate Traveling Amusements Carnival. Jim here runs the sideshow, but I’ve got a financial stake there too. Now, assuming you can get it together to provide folks with some decent entertainment, I’d be willing to pay you seventy dollars a week cash every Friday.”
For a moment, my imagination was flooded with the idea of having money all my own that had never passed through my brother’s or my father’s hands, but then I started running the figures in my head. “But... if the minimum wage is $2.30 an hour, I should be getting at least around 90 dollars a week.” Hinkle and Jim both watched me, saying nothing. “I mean, assuming you calculate it at a forty-hour week.”
“Sarah, now, there’s a lot there you’re not taking into account,” Hinkle said. “For one thing, the tax man would take a big bite out of that money, and you’d be paying social security besides. Here I’m offering you cash money free and clear.”
“Even so, I’d say we can do a little bit better than seventy,” Jim said.
Hinkle looked annoyed at the interruption. “This offer is more than fair, Jim.”
The two of them were discussing my future as if I weren’t even there. “Jim just wants to help me,” I interjected. They both turned to me at once, seeming surprised at the sound of my voice.
Hinkle coughed. “Sarah dear, what Jim here knows and you likely don’t understand, is that fat ladies aren’t worth quite as much as other performers. So they get paid less.”
I swallowed hard and pictured Little Freddy and Ike and Gigi. There was a magic to their bodies and movements, a straight-up visual enticement that I lacked.
“That’s only the half of it,” Hinkle continued. “We’re a small business here, Sarah. We don’t have money to spread around like some of the big operations. I have to decide all the time what’s a good investment and what’s not. The fact of the matter is that the sideshow doesn’t bring in money like it used to. It seems that a bunch of upstanding citizens have decided that there’s something bad or wrong about displaying freaks for money. Now, what these shit-for-brains do-gooders think freaks should do instead or where they should work is a complete mystery. We try to stay on the good side of public opinion by having our freaks put on a show because there ain’t nothing illegal about hiring a handicapped entertainer. In fact, that’s the sort of thing that would get you a civic award. Then I see you with no finesse or ability to give a good performance, and you want more money for that?”
Hinkle had relied on flattery and unspecified monetary promises when he had come to my house to try to entice me to join the sideshow. Now, he was using disdain to achieve his ends, giving me my first inkling of what Little Freddy had meant when he said Hinkle was sneaky. Hinkle thought I was easy pickings, and worse still, he was probably right.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Jim talked over me. “Come on, man. Sarah here just had a little stage fright. Besides which, she isn’t your average fat lady. She’s a dressmaker and a... What do you call it? A seamstress. God knows we could use that kind of help around here.”
“Is that right?” Hinkle asked. He stood up from his chair and began unbuttoning his shirt, pulling the tails from his pants. “The second button is loose.” He took off the shirt and tossed it to me overhand. “You can go ahead, then, and fix it for me.”
I caught the shirt before it hit my face, hating the smell of it, the fruity sweetness of his cologne, and the tacky feel of dried perspiration. Jim shook his head at me in warning. I drew a long, slow breath, resisting the urge to throw the shirt back at Hinkle. “I could do it for about one hundred,” I said. “And I want my food free from the cook trailer. Being this fat doesn’t come cheap, you know.”
The air in the room stagnated in an instant. All movement and sound were suspended except for Jim’s very quiet appreciative laugh, which maybe I only imagined. Hinkle hunched forward over the desk, ready now, it seemed, to negotiate in earnest.
In the end, we settled on eighty-five and free food and extra cash for materials and ribbons and sewing tools. I had already managed to stand up from my chair, with the full intention of going back to Jim’s trailer to eat the rest of the food he had brought me earlier that afternoon, when Hinkle, still shirtless, said, “You’d better give us a good show on stage tonight. Don’t make me think I put my money down on a bad bet.”
Jim and I both stopped moving. “Sarah here needs some time to put her act together and get her costume done,” Jim said. “She can get started again when we get to Beloit.”
“Is that right?” Hinkle asked. “I can’t remember anyone else taking time like that. Sarah, honey, if you think I’m about to pay you for doing nothing, you’re sore mistaken.”
“Well, the thing is...” I began, bracing myself against the back of the folding chair, but Jim answered for me. His intercession should have been welcome, since I didn’t actually know how to finish that sentence, but instead I found myself irritated that he was speaking for me again.
“It’ll all get done, Hinkle. Don’t worry about it,” Jim said.
“Sarah, sweetheart,” Hinkle said to me, leaning in close, like a good friend, a trusted confidante. “One thing you should know about me is that I don’t abide freeloaders. You need to earn money for us. It looks to me like you’ve settled in, being chummy and eating dinner with the others. So, now that you’ve made yourself at home, I expect to see you on stage tonight. You’re either with it, or you’re not.” Hinkle rubbed his nose back and forth with his hand, leaving behind an unpleasant dampness, a just-perceptible ugly sheen. I assumed that being “with it” meant you were a part of the carnival but figured now wasn’t the time to ask for clarification.
“Time enough for that when we move on,” Jim said.
I held my breath, waiting for Hinkle to insist again. Instead, he straightened and adjusted the hem of his sleeveless undershirt. “No work, no money. It’s that simple. Until you start performing, you buy all your food and all your supplies.”
I didn’t want to dip into my stash of money from home, didn’t even want Jim to know of its existence—and who knew how long it would last? “But—” I stopped myself there at the edge of saying that I couldn’t do that, that Hinkle couldn’t take such a hard line when I very clearly needed a break.
“Fair enough,” Jim said. “Take it out of her first pay.”
I turned my head to look at him, shocked that he would take Hinkle’s side now.
“With interest,” Hinkle said, and Jim nodded while I stared down at the floor, afraid my outrage at their dealing with me, as if I were somehow invisible, could be too easily read.
“Well, Sarah,” Hinkle said. “That’s a hard hit right out of the gate, especially for a girl with no money of her own. Maybe there’s more than meets the eye here. Is there something I should know about?”
Jim stood up from his chair and turned it back around. “Jesus Christ, Sam Spade, don’t be so goddamn suspicious all the time.” Jim laughed, easy and smooth. “Sarah just doesn’t know jack about how anything works. She’s used to the quiet life, staying inside, reading books, and sewing dresses. She needs to learn and get used to things. No big mystery.” My God, but Jim sounded just like Jared.
“Is that right, Sarah?” Hinkle smiled.
“Call me Lola,” I said as I placed Hinkle’s shirt back on the desk. “Lola Rolls. That’s what I want to be called from here on out.”
The name had occurred to me while eating dinner with the other performers. The vowels were wide, a full-sounding combination of sounds that bounced on the tongue. “Rolls” were my soft shelves of fat, but the word was a verb as well as a noun, containing a new truth about me. I was on the move, hiding, part fugitive like Jim said, but with a bounding resilience too.
“It has a certain ring to it,” Hinkle conceded.