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Midstate Traveling Amusements Carnival arrived in Red River Falls the first weekend of August. The preceding days, weeks, and months had dragged and had included two instances of missed pay that no one, regardless of how outraged they might be, had any real expectation of recovering. Jim had begun to lose weight again, worn down to bone and skin from the uppers he took, the crises he handled. Given Jim’s apparent stress and paranoia, I simply told him that I didn’t want to do the pickled punk display for inside money anymore rather than recount my meeting with Hinkle. I comforted myself by eating more and more often, becoming fuller and softer, as if to compensate for Jim’s diminished figure.
Gigi knocked on the trailer door our first morning there, intent on convincing me to go for a ride around town with her, Ora Ann, and Daisy to have something to do while the carnival setup was being completed. Being out in public like that among normal people, so like the very ones from my childhood, usually wore me down, but the day was already hot and boring. Besides which, the other girls would have badgered me until I said yes. Worse still, maybe they would have gone without me.
Red River Falls was ordinary in every way, with the usual town center surrounded by miles and miles of flat farmland. The height and breadth of Red River Falls emblazoned on the water tower seemed an outlandish exaggeration given the town’s size and unremarkable nature. We got lost in the network of county roads and tried, without success, to return to the town center or to circle back to the carnival.
Ora Ann rubbed her arms with her hands. Her teeth chattered as if she was standing in a cold wind.
“What’s up with you?” Gigi asked in the rearview mirror. The temperature must have been in the nineties. We had rolled down all the windows on Gigi’s old, beat-up station wagon.
“I just got a chill, girls. There’s something wrong about this place. I’m telling you that.” Ora Ann blew on her fingertips to warm them.
“Jesus Christ, Ora Ann,” Daisy said, “I told you not to do that voodoo witchcraft when I’m around.”
“I can’t help it when I get a feeling.”
Gigi stopped the car at a crossroads. Every direction looked the same. A dirt road stretching for miles, bisecting deep green fields of corn and soy. “Well, how about you get a feeling about which way it is back to the setup?” Gigi snapped.
We had to stop at three houses where Gigi and Daisy took turns asking for directions because, even though they didn’t blend in precisely, they were the most ordinary looking of the four of us. My fat would have certainly startled them, while Ora Ann always managed to look like a gypsy fortune teller with her knotted headscarf and clinking stack of bracelets. A full two hours later, we made it back to the lot, all of us in bad moods. My body ached from being stuffed into Gigi’s car. I wanted time to eat by myself and bathe before Jim came home. With a perfunctory “See you all later,” I started limping back to the trailer.
“Wait up, Lola,” Gigi called. She came up behind me. We both waved to Ora Ann and Daisy.
“I have to get inside and rest, Geeg,” I said. “Being in the car for so long kills me.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well...” Gigi hesitated. I wondered if she really believed me about the pain. “So, do you think there’s something to what Ora Ann was saying? Sometimes she just creeps me the fuck out.”
“Ignore her, then.” I put my hand on the trailer door in what I hoped was a meaningful way. “Look, I don’t know how it works with her, but she gets a lot of stuff wrong. She told me I’d be reunited with my mother, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her my mother has been dead for twenty years.”
“Yeah, yeah, right,” Gigi replied. She slapped the trailer door, gazing after Ora Ann, who had already disappeared from sight. “You go on and get some rest,” she said, walking away without a backward glance.
A chill slid down my own back. I hated this spooky, otherworldly feeling that Ora Ann managed to instill, possibly as much as Daisy did. “Superstitious stupidity,” I muttered. That was what my father would have said too.
***
Without the distraction of the pickled punks, either to earn me money or to make demands on my creative impulse, I had devised a new act, a belly-dance number, complete with bare midriff and gauzy scarves rimmed with reflective sequins. I even had a set of finger cymbals and, with some practice, had gotten quite good at playing them—another regular show, an ordinary town. The crowd was a bit smaller than normal, but then again, the carnival itself was shrinking as unpaid workers left without warning. The scream came after my first set, so loud and piercing that it was able to cut through the usual carnival din as a distinct sound. Only a scream fueled by raw terror and shock could travel like that from the Ferris wheel to the sideshow tent—the scream of a mother for her child.
I dropped the washcloth I had been using to wipe my hot face and went out the back flap of the tent in search of the source of that terrible noise, breaking the tough, iron-clad rule of not letting the public see for free what they should be shelling out money to view. They weren’t paying attention to me anyway. A crowd was expanding and thickening at the base of the Ferris wheel. Men craned their heads upward, some holding their hats fast to their heads to keep them from falling off. A boy, maybe only six or seven—it was difficult to tell from my vantage point— was dangling by his shirt from the open door of his Ferris wheel car at the eight o’clock position.
Some people were yelling for Chicky, the ride jockey, to turn the Ferris wheel back on to lower the boy closer to the ground. Someone else said not to do that because starting it up would jar the boy and make him fall. There were suggestions to get a ladder and to call the fire department. Yet no one moved or took any action.
I stood glued to the spot, staring at that helpless child and at the mother underneath him with arms upstretched. The boy cried, “Mommy, Mommy,” and flailed his arms in a desperate attempt to get back into the Ferris wheel car.
The whole crowd gasped in a single voice.
“Stay still, Mike! You listen to Mommy right now, and stop moving.”
A smaller knot of men moved in closer to try to climb up the Ferris wheel, but that asshole Chicky, having acquired some unshakable authority as the ride operator, told them to stay back when he should have already been doing what those men were suggesting. I grabbed the shoulders of the people in front of me, pulling them to the side as I made my way forward. I certainly couldn’t climb the Ferris wheel, but I could slap Chicky’s face and tell him to get out of the way if he wasn’t going to do anything to help. Jim rushed past me with a nylon rope coiled over his chest and back, not pausing or even recognizing me as he barreled through the crowd, knocking people out of the way.
Chicky at least made room when Jim appeared. Maybe in Chicky’s mind, as messed up as it surely was by the booze or pills or whatever else he may have ingested, the situation could be handed over to Jim because Jim was a person of authority at the carnival. Chicky clearly thought he had done the right thing by doing nothing and by not allowing anyone else to take action.
Jim began climbing up the wheel support tower, the stabilizing structure that ran from the ground to the wheel’s center. My heart—but not just my heart, my entire internal self—heaved upward into my throat, giving me the crazy thought that I would turn myself inside out if I released my breath with too much force. In that moment, I saw with frank clarity that Jim was going to die trying to save that boy. Tears leaked from my eyes. My mind’s voice, the one that tried without success to scream during nightmares, yelled for him to come back without making a sound.
The spokes of the Ferris wheel ran out from the center hub, each of them being two parallel aluminum beams with a tight row of light bulbs along the outer faces. There were mechanical cables in an X pattern between the two beams and cross members at the ends where the drive rim was placed. Once Jim reached the wheel’s hub at the top of the support tower, he bear walked out the spoke nearest to where the boy dangled. The woman in the Ferris wheel car above the boy called to Jim to hurry, but Jim ignored her, focused only on getting closer to the boy. I had finally made my way to the front of the crowd and stared up at the dizzying spectacle.
“Don’t move, kid,” I heard Jim say.
Meanwhile, the boy’s mother had positioned herself directly under her son with her arms up in the air as if she meant to catch him when he fell, as if her sheer desire to save him would somehow enable her to do so.
When he reached the end of the spoke, Jim braced himself against the drive rim and tied one end of the nylon rope around the cross member and secured the other around his waist. Controlling the slack with great care, he braced his feet on the bottom side of the girder and pushed away. He was so close to the boy that I saw, with complete certainty, that my earlier fear had been idiotic. Jim wasn’t going to die, after all. He was going to save the boy and give the crowd the most spectacular, believable performance they had ever seen.
He only needed a bit of momentum to swing over and grab the boy. Everyone on the ground watched in profound silence and held their collective breath. I had experienced this moment many times in books—the suspenseful, heart-drumming interlude right before the hero saves the day.
The boy had the instant recognition that Jim would rescue him, and he lunged toward Jim. The force of that movement tore the flimsy scrap of shirt that had kept him suspended. He fell toward the ground just beyond Jim’s reach.
The crowd gasped in one voice, unable to believe the improbability of the worst outcome when only moments before, a happy ending had seemed inevitable. We all stayed frozen with shock and disbelief, except for the boy’s mother. She moved under her falling son, and as unlikely as it was, she caught him. It wasn’t a clean catch, and she didn’t get a good grip on him and wasn’t strong enough anyway to keep them both from hitting the ground.
“I got you, baby! I got you!” the mother screamed and squeezed her unconscious son to her chest. A small thread of blood trickled out of the corner of the boy’s mouth. “I caught him. I did it. I can’t believe I did it.”
Then everything happened at once. A man raced forward and said he was a doctor. He peeled the mother away from her son, saying that the boy’s back and neck had to be kept immobile. Hinkle appeared on the scene, or maybe he had been there all along. He told Jim to hang tight and restarted the ride. Once Jim was back on the ground, Hinkle got everyone else off as well, while Weedy and Roscoe, who had made their way through the sea of people, moved back the onlookers, more of them who seemed to want to see the damaged boy.
Sirens approached. Jim knelt down by the boy, across from the boy’s mother and the doctor.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ, I thought for sure I had him.” He covered his eyes with his hands. Jim was crying, something I had never thought I would see.
“Give the boy room to breathe,” the doctor said to no one in particular. I stepped forward anyway to touch Jim’s shoulder.
He squeezed my fingers, pressing the back of my hand against his eyes. “I thought I had him,” he repeated.
The sound of the sirens grew louder. Soon the police would be swarming all over the carnival.
“You better go lie low,” he whispered. “The fuzz is going to be here any second, and they’re going to ask a lot of questions.”
I shook my head.
“Please,” he said.
On my way back to the trailer, I noticed that other people were clearing out too. Game and food joints were closing in anticipation of an order from the police to shut down the entire carnival and to avoid questions about what they might have seen or known beforehand about the status of the Ferris wheel or its operator.
I spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch with only the dim stove light to cut up the darkness. Getting up to change out of my belly-dance costume seemed like too much effort. That boy kept falling to the ground. It was worse when I closed my eyes. Meaty was sitting on the counter in his jar. One of his arms looked like it was disintegrating in the pickling solution. His small meat hand appeared to be waving, beckoning me. A tickling sensation in the pit of my stomach, like the movement of small fingers, unnerved me, made me heave myself up from the couch to vomit in the toilet. As I washed my face and rinsed my mouth in the bathroom sink, the knowledge that deep within my formidable bulk, a small baby was growing and wanting to be born into this unsafe world, shrank the confined space to claustrophobic proportions.
“Dear God,” I whispered. “Please let my baby live. If I can have this one thing, I’ll do whatever you want.”
Someone knocked on the door in the predawn hours. Probably Gigi, I thought, because she hated to be alone. I was surprised then to find Little Freddy waiting for me, wearing the baggy chinos I had hemmed and tailored for him last season and a white T-shirt. He smelled good, as if he had just showered. His hair still looked wet, and I noticed a damp patch on the back of his shirt.
“I thought you’d be Gigi.” I glanced over Little Freddy’s head but didn’t see anyone else around. “Jim’s not here.”
“Don’t worry about that. He’s not going to be back for a good long while.” Little Freddy put his foot on the first step. “I just need to talk to you. It’s important, okay?”
“Sure, sure. Come on in,” I said, even though the only thing that could make the situation worse would be for Jim to find me and Little Freddy alone together.
Little Freddy and I sat next to each other on the couch. He touched the tail of the chiffon scarf hanging from my waist, threading it through his fingers. “You’re still wearing your costume.” He stared at the soft material in his hands. “It looks good, you know. Real good.”
“So, you know anything about what’s going on out there?” I asked to distract him.
Little Freddy shook his head. “Nah. Not too much. Just that the ambulance finally took the kid away. Nobody knows how bad the fall messed him up. The thing is this never should have happened, you know? If this place was working right, you wouldn’t have a kid getting hurt like that or a shithead like Chicky as a ride boy. We’re going to get run out of town for sure, and who knows if that bastard Hinkle will land on his feet this time.” Little Freddy stopped fiddling with my scarf to look me full in the face, the first time he had done so since he had entered the trailer. “I’m not going to stick around for it. That’s what I came to tell you.”
I clutched Little Freddy’s arm in disbelief. “What do you mean? You’re leaving? Is that what you’re saying? You can’t do that.”
Little Freddy placed his hand on mine. “It’s time for me to move on. I got family in Kingston, New York. I could get some work there in dwarf tossing. It’s murder on your back, but it’s money.”
Little Freddy deserved far better than being tossed like an inhuman object for money and laughs. His back and knees troubled him already. What would his body be and feel like after even a month of tossing? A tear streaked down my cheek. Then I cried in earnest at the thought of losing my friend but also for the hurt and damaged boy who had fallen through the sky and for the grasping mother who had managed, against all likely odds, to catch him.
“Come on, don’t cry now. Goodbyes are already hard enough.” Little Freddy pressed the scarf he had been holding into my hand. “Wipe your eyes.”
I swiped my fingers across my cheeks, not wanting to dirty my costume with melted eye makeup. “I’m going to miss you, Fred. This place won’t be the same without you.”
Little Freddy stood up on the couch, facing me with one foot planted between my legs. He placed a hand on each cheek and tipped my face upward to kiss me with the hard, sweet pressure of a man desperate to have his lips on me. He put his tongue in my mouth. We kissed like that for a moment. I knew Little Freddy wanted this goodbye to end with the two of us in bed, but my terror of Jim coming home and finding us together outshone my desire to have that experience. I pushed back on Little Freddy’s chest until he pulled his face away from mine.
“You stay beautiful, Lo-Lo,” he whispered. Then he stepped down and went out the door with a small parting wave.
In the kitchen, I pulled the dish towel from its hook on the wall and draped it over Meaty’s jar with great care. “Go to sleep,” I said.
***
The sun glimmered on the horizon, the world lit with the spooky gloom of dawn, when Jim returned to the trailer. He sat on the bed, bent forward, holding his face in his hands. His skin looked slack and gray. I pressed my fingertips against the small of his back.
Jim pulled off his boots to lie down next to me, shuffling his body against mine to nuzzle his head into my chest and to stretch his arm across my expansive softness. “I really thought I was going to save him,” he whispered. “The kid’s back is broken. The mother’s a war widow. The father was killed outside of Saigon.”
I stroked the top of Jim’s bald head in a featherlight, swirling pattern. “What’s going to happen now?”
Jim held me in such a close embrace that when he shrugged, it felt like my gesture too. “The crowd just about mauled Chicky. The police said they were going to take him for questioning. Hinkle almost shit himself when he heard that because Chicky was drunk and high and would look for somebody else to blame. The fuzz really just wanted to get some time alone with Chicky to beat on him, since they couldn’t come up with a crime to charge him with. I’ve never seen it as bad as this. We got to get the carnival out of here, but I’ve been passing around so much money to try to smooth things over I can’t see how we’re going to have enough left to do it. You know, people smell blood. They start leaving. They figure they’ll just cut their losses and try again next season with someplace better maybe.”
“Little Fred left for good,” I said. “He says he’s going to live with his brother in New York State.”
“Ah shit.” Jim rolled away from me and stood up. “You got to get out of here too. There’s a campsite about sixty miles east. A couple other people are already there. I know for sure Ora Ann is on her way. I’m gonna take a quick shower and get a little pick-me-up, then we’ll hitch up the trailer and drive over. That way I can come back in the truck.”
I didn’t like the idea of being stranded at some campsite, but I wanted even less to stay where I was. I could become a target for the fallout, visible to the police, a possible sticking point for the blame that would need to be assigned. “I’ll go wake up Gigi,” I said.
Gigi took such a long time answering the door that I had nearly made up my mind to try again later. She finally appeared, clutching her housecoat closed as if there hadn’t been time even to snap it as she had stumbled toward the door. “Shit, Lola, what are you doing here at this hour?”
“Oh,” I said. She smelled like alcohol, and I wondered if it was from the night before or if her night had never really ended. “Jim is going to move the trailer to a campground near here, and I’m going to stay there until this whole mess blows over.”
Gigi’s face didn’t change expression or register any reaction to my words.
“You need to come too,” I clarified.
“Yeah, well, Jim’s not my old man, so I don’t have to do what he says.” Gigi leaned back to stare into the shadows. “It’s just Lola,” she said over her shoulder.
The room behind her still held the sepia tones of dawn. The ordinary objects hadn’t yet resolved themselves into their usual shapes. Ike, wearing jeans but no shirt, slid open the divider wall of the bedroom.
“I thought you might be Hinkle,” Gigi said to me. I realized she was naked underneath her housecoat.
Ike stood behind Gigi, putting his arm around her shoulder. “You getting out of here? I’m thinking I might go stay with a buddy of mine out in Sacramento that’s got a tattoo parlor and maybe see about learning the trade or getting with a new outfit next season.”
“Oh, Ike,” I said. “Little Freddy took off. What’s going to happen to us if everyone leaves?” Our little sideshow family might disappear altogether at this rate.
Gigi’s face softened at the distressed sound of my voice, and she reached over to hug me. “Don’t worry, okay? I mean, of course I’m going to. Just not right this second.”
I nodded and reached over to pat Ike’s forearm. “You take care of yourself.”
***
Gigi and I stayed at the Whispering Winds campground outside of Red River Falls for nearly a week. A bunch of us congregated there, even Ike, who failed to make good on his threat to head off to Sacramento, opting instead to spend most of his time with Gigi. Their relationship, such as it was, intense and obvious in close surroundings and ultimately short-lived, sent up a hot flare, something for people to talk about when there was nothing else to do.
Jim showed up to tell us that the carnival was moving on to Patawaunee. I think we were all relieved to be given a plan, a way to move forward—a break from the possible obligation of having to make new arrangements on our own. Later that night when Jim and I were alone in bed together, he talked about the departure from Red River Falls, about how ugly and protracted it had been. When Hinkle didn’t have enough money to make payroll, workers had fled like rats from a sinking ship, so Jim hired a bunch of local boys and offered to pay them cash to help break down the carnival. Then he had had to stiff them the money.
“I didn’t feel good about it,” he said. “I even paid a few of the kids—the ones who really looked like they needed it—out of my own pocket.”
As Jim spoke, the word Patawaunee echoed in my mind. Why, I didn’t know or couldn’t remember. The beast, long submerged and slinking its way through the water, raised its back and broke the surface.