Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 17

  “I’m the king of that shit,” Ellis says.

  “What?” asks Jeff Park.

  “If it’s a double-breasted split-tail, letting ’em on for free. It works. Man, I’ve had a avalanche of pussy. Only goddamn fringe benefit you get out here.”

  The engines engage. The men stand together on the deck’s upper tier, watching the fan of Sheila Cloatch’s hair blurring with the swing of the ship.

  “Blond to the bone,” says Ellis. “I’d eat her whole damn child just to taste the thing he squeezed out of.”

  Word gets around that the police are looking for a man who took a child into a toilet, which, at the Pirate Ship, inspires talk of crime and punishment.

  “Hey, Parts,” the giant barks at the new man. “What’s the best state to get sent up on a capital beef?” Jeff Park doesn’t know.

  The answer is Delaware. “In Delaware you get a choice of how they kill you, which means you can still choose hanging.”

  “So what?” says Jeff.

  “Here’s what. If they miss on the first shot—leave you paralyzed, whatever—they have to turn you loose. That’s in the Bill of Rights. Now, I’ve never heard of anyone making it through lethal injection, but with hanging you’ve got a chance. You’d be in funny shape, but you got that sporting chance.”

  The citizens are running out of things to look at in this town. They had a handsome five-story condo skyscraper, but a sinkhole opened under it. A major league baseball team used to spring-train here, but it left years ago for the dry air of Santa Fe. All that’s left to gaze on are the citrus orchards and the green void of the sea.

  How hungry the fairgoers’ eyes are tonight! Everything amazes them. When Ellis climbs into the high steel of the Pirate to change a lightbulb, leaning into the vertex of the trusses sixty feet up, his sneakers just barely lipping the bolt heads he’s standing on, a crowd gathers to yell, “Don’t slip!” When a teenage boy spies Leon’s tattoos—two twisted pairs of fives and a blurry swastika where the tattooer finally got the angles right—the Pirate becomes temporarily popular with teens who line up to titillate themselves with glimpses of the giant’s wicked hand.

  The ride jocks and concessionaires like to look at Gary, the man who runs the Zipper, a chain-saw-shaped ellipse with spinning cars instead of teeth. When the ride is running, Gary bobs and dodges beneath the Zipper, collecting the pocket change and cigarettes that rain down from the cars. The cars hurtle dangerously close, but Gary knows the interval of safety, and how the air piles up when a car is coming close. He moves with a weird and swooning grace, vaguely Oriental, a feinting dream of wind. If Gary were not lightly retarded, Leon says he could make good money on a stage in Las Vegas, but he is here, beloved and famous among the people on the show.

  A rain comes. The crowd shrinks into little drifts beneath booth awnings and then disappears. Jeff Park somersaults a quarter back and forth across his knuckles. Ellis finds the quarter stunt amazing, and insists that Jeff teach it to him.

  The giant does not like the shine that Ellis is taking to the new man. Leon knows it won’t be long before he’s too old for the days of heavy steel work that come every two weeks when the show packs up. His foremanship is at risk, and the alliance between the younger men bodes mutiny.

  “Want to see my magic trick?” Leon says to Jeff Park.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Leon takes the cigarette from his mouth and taps a long gray caterpillar of ash onto Jeff Park’s shoulder.

  “Presto change-o, you’re an ashtray.”

  A woman stands at the gate of the Pirate Ship, staring at nothing. “Come on, lady,” Ellis howls at her. “Come and be a buccaneer.”

  The woman’s face is as blank and guileless as a peeled apple. “What type of ride is this?” she asks Jeff Park, who now understands she is blind.

  “It’s a boat,” he says. “You sit on it and it swings.”

  “Does it go upside down?”

  “No, but it goes really fast.”

  “But not upside down?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then. I want to ride.”

  She clasps Jeff’s hand, holding him close as a lover as they make their way up the platform. With each step, her foot hovers in the air, searching for treacheries in the ground beneath her. Jeff holds on to the thick flesh of her waist and eases her onto the bench.

  The ride begins, and Jeff watches the blind woman, ready to give word to stop the boat if she begins to panic, but she doesn’t. The man beside her roars in terror when the boat goes weightless at the limit of its swing. But the blind woman smiles as though she’s just recalled the answer to a question that had been worrying her for a long time. The ride ends, and Jeff goes to her and helps her down the platform. She is warm against him and cannot stop laughing. “Thank you, thanks very much,” she says, and Jeff Park feels glad to have found work on the Pirate, a machine that draws joy out of people as simply as a derrick draws oil from dirt.

  When the crowds take off, and the lights go out at once, the people on the show board the bus that carries them to the carnival train. The windows are cataracted with blue grime. The bus has no seats. The destination slot above the windshield reads “Palm Beach Tour.”

  Ellis has a spare bunk in his berth on the train, left vacant by the Pirate crew member who wandered off the day before. Jeff balks, and Ellis says, “Or go bunk with the Mexicans. But just so you know, they’ll steal the stink off shit.”

  Jeff takes Ellis’s spare bunk. The air in the berth is humid and rotten. But Jeff is so tired that the promise of sleep is every bit as voluptuous to him as sex or food. He crawls onto the top bunk and lays his cheek against the rubber mattress, which shows brown spangles of old drool.

  Presently, the bed creaks and quakes while Ellis brusquely adores himself in the bunk below. When Ellis is finished, he’s in the mood for talk.

  “Think you’ll stick around awhile, Park?” he asks Jeff.

  “Guess so,” says Jeff. “You stand there and they pay you for it.”

  “Talk to me when we have to break that fucker down.” Ellis’s hand appears in the gap between Jeff’s mattress and the wall. One of his fingers is blue to the second knuckle. “That cocksucker Leon dropped a beam on it, and he laughed about it. Thought I lost the damn thing. If he killed you or me, I don’t think he’d even look on that as being a bad day.”

  Jeff says he’ll look out.

  “I don’t mean no disrespect, but you don’t know what to look out for. I’ll look out for you. I’ll take care of the high-steel shit, for the next stop or two, anyway, and you help me out when you can. Nobody survives out here by theirself. You need a partner on the show.”

  “Right on,” says Jeff. He thinks of the eighty-five dollars he owes the giant, and he gets a bad feeling that he owes Ellis something now.

  A workday on the show lasts sixteen hours, so at night the carnival train echoes and howls with people trying to fit in some living between midnight and dawn.

  At 2:20 a.m. by Jeff Park’s watch, someone kicks open the door of his neighbor’s berth. “What the fuck are you doing?” a man’s voice cries.

  There is no answer, just a crash. Jeff feels the tin wall buckle under his feet.

  At 4:10 a.m., in the berth at Jeff’s head, a woman says, “I mean, you ate my fucking heart, Ron. Devoured it, like a buzzard, straight out of my chest.” There is a gagging back of tears. “Oh, God, Ron, why do I love you so goddamned much? Only thing I love more than you is my kids. No, fuck that. I love you more than my kids.”

  “Would you shut up, Suzanne? You’re embarrassing me.”

  The sobbing breaks off, and Suzanne says, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  ______

  At ten at the fairgrounds, all the carnival workers line up at the top of the midway for a free lunch, courtesy of the county firefighters, who didn’t know what else to do with eighty pounds of barbecued chicken left over from their booth the night before. The breasts are in the f
irehouse freezer. It is a dark-meat-only lunch, one leg and one thigh. At the end of the buffet stands the county detective. Before a firefighter’s wife hands out dessert, a slice of pecan log, the detective asks the male workers to lift their shirtfronts, checking belt buckles. Then he snaps their portraits to show to Henry Lemons later in the day.

  Jeff Park eats his chicken leg alone in the agriculture pavilion, which is full of oat smells and the agreeable bellyaching of competition cattle.

  He visits with the rabbits in their cages, and pokes his finger into an enclosure that holds a large gray hare. The hare flexes the pink cleft of his nose at Jeff’s finger and then nips it hard. When Jeff pulls his finger back, a button of blood is growing on his fingertip. “I am a California Dutch to be used in the meat competition,” reads a sign on the cage.

  Jeff hears the clatter of hose water in the far end of the pavilion. A boy of fourteen or so stands beside a lustrous black steer, holding a blue bucket full of suds. He empties the bucket along the animal’s back and soapy water runs down in pale drips like the icing on a Bundt cake. He hoses the steer down, and then pulls a Scotch comb in long parentheses down the steer’s ribs, ushering peels of water into the sawdust. In the comb’s wake, the steer’s coat gleams like fresh tar.

  Only when the boy has combed out one side of the steer does he turn and notice Jeff. The boy’s name is Chad. He’s clean and so full of health, and Jeff is drawn to him. “Pretty bull,” says Jeff.

  “Steer,” says Chad.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A steer’s where you take his balls. Want to buy him?”

  “How much?” says Jeff.

  “I’ll be pissed if he goes for less than twelve hundred.”

  “You sell him for meat?”

  “Beef project, yeah.”

  “Seems weird to go through the hassle of making him look so good if he’s just going to get killed for beef.”

  “You end up meat someday, but you still comb your hair in the morning,” he says. “Or ought to.”

  The boy picks up his bucket and disappears behind the animal’s spine.

  Jeff Park sits on a hay bale by the petting zoo, where he watches a goose chase a pygmy hog. He has not been sitting there long when he notices that Ellis is standing on the far side of the pen, looking at him. Ellis leans down to scratch the hog’s nose, and the hog grunts appreciatively.

  “I skinned a hog one time, when I was a kid in Kentucky,” he says, and eases himself down on a bench. “Razorback. Blocked it out myself—hams, shoulders, side meat, all that stuff. Deer, squirrel. I can skin anything, just about.” He shakes his head “Nobody here knows that. Nobody here don’t know nothing about me.”

  Jeff Park says he feels the same way.

  Ellis smiles. “You’re like me. You’re quiet. You keep to yourself. That’s good.”

  “I guess.”

  Ellis pats the bench beside him. “Come over here,” he says. Jeff walks over but doesn’t take a seat. “You look like you’re down about something. Look like you got something on your mind.”

  “Nothing much,” Jeff says. “Kind of tired, I guess.”

  “Uh-uh,” Ellis says, grinning. “You can’t lie to me. It’s more than that. I can tell.”

  The young cattleman ambles past, leading his gleaming steer. Ellis turns. He watches the boy with what strikes Jeff Park as disconcerting intensity, his head bobbing slightly to take in the motion of the young man’s gait, as though the event must be recorded in a perfect and durable way. This image comes to Jeff Park’s mind: Ellis asquat in the portable toilet with the schoolchild. Jeff doesn’t recall seeing him in line for the chicken, the photo, and the pecan log. He considers mentioning Ellis to the detective. But, unsure of how to phrase his inkling in a way that wouldn’t sound hysterical or invite suspicion on himself, Jeff abandons the idea and goes back to the Pirate Ship.

  In the afternoon, the crowds slacken. Leon sits in the doghouse, bawling out a balladry of lies:

  “They said I had a cancer on my shoulder blade, and it’d cost ten grand to fix it. Instead, I drank some rye, and my man got in there with a box knife. He cut out a mess of these little purple marbles, and I’ve been fine ever since.

  “You ever see that movie with Steve Martin, happens at the circus? Had me a little part in it. Well, one day he comes up to me—Steve Martin—tells me to go get him a root beer, and fast or he’d get me canned. Know what I did? Turned right around and poled the son of a bitch.”

  Ellis laughs, and Jeff sits on the upper deck, his back turned to the men. He’s thinking of his bedroom in Melbourne. The wound pulses in his thigh, and he contemplates the famous microbial vileness of the human mouth.

  “Park’s sulled up on us, Leon,” Ellis says to the giant. “I don’t think he likes us anymore.”

  “I just don’t feel like talking, Ellis,” Jeff says. “That a problem?”

  “Shit, yeah, it’s a problem. You make the time go slow.”

  Ellis fetches a lightbulb from a carton in the doghouse, and points out a dud in the bulbs that ring the leering pirate’s head hanging high above the ship.

  “Here you go, Park, get up there,” Ellis says, handing Jeff the bulb.

  Park gazes at the climb, fifty feet up an extension ladder, lashed to the back of a support stanchion with nylon rope frayed to needles. His legs feel watery to look at it.

  “I thought—I thought you said you’d do the high work, Ellis,” says Jeff Park.

  Ellis sucks a tooth. “I changed my mind.”

  Jeff scales the stanchion with the lightbulb in his mouth. The ladder is missing rungs, and his arms tremble as he climbs. He has nearly reached the top when a sudden wind rocks the ladder. “Oh,” Jeff cannot help but say. The lightbulb drifts from his lips and shatters on the deck.

  “Three dollars,” the giant calls up to him. “Them shits don’t grow on trees.”

  On a weeknight, you can spend ten dollars on a special yellow pass and have as many rides as you want. A fifteen-year-old girl boards the Pirate nine times in a row. It’s hot out, but she’s sweating in a fuzzy orange sweater. She’s perpetually sucking the phosphorescent candy they sell at the fair. Each time Jeff Park tugs her lap bar to be sure it’s locked down tight, he steals a glimpse of the pale green light glimmering behind her teeth, a light of both desolation and comfort, the light of a lone cottage window on an empty street. He thinks it’s there for him.

  “I’m Katie,” she tells him on her tenth ride. “I’ve seen you so many times, I thought I ought to introduce myself.”

  He says his name. “I don’t know how you keep riding this thing. I’d probably puke if I rode it once.”

  “You stand out here all night, and you never rode it?”

  “No,” says Jeff.

  She bobbles the light on her tongue. “That’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard all day. Hey, can you do me a favor?”

  “What kind?”

  “Can you make it go extra long this time?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” The ride starts up. As the boat swings, Katie watches him, and he watches the blur in her green summer mouth.

  When the swinging stops, she leaves to watch the hatchet juggler at the Village of Yesteryear, but twenty minutes later, she comes back.

  “Remember me?” she says to Jeff, and by way of greeting slips her fingers into his hand.

  “Nope,” he says, grinning.

  “Oh, shut up. You do, too.”

  He has time to chat with her while the benches fill up.

  “Do you know any secrets?” she asks him.

  “Yes.”

  “Fair stuff, I mean. Like, can you show me how to win at the games?”

  “Don’t mess with them in the first place.”

  “Hey, don’t be stale. They don’t show you the tricks?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. They’d feed me to the mermaids.”
He gestures across the midway at the Weeki Wachee Girls, three pretty ladies in bikini tops and fishtails, writhing together in a Plexiglas crate of luminous water.

  “Sounds like a thrill for you.”

  When the boat stops, the girl calls him over.

  “Hey,” she says to Jeff. “Do they ever let you off of here, or do you have to stand on this thing all night?”

  “I get a half hour at nine. What’s up?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. You want to maybe kick it for a while? You could win me some crap.”

  “Sure,” Jeff says.

  “How about over there, at that thing where you toss the dimes?”

  “All right.”

  “Go on, now. Get this thing moving. Get me as high as you can.”

  Night falls, and an envelope arrives for Gary, the dancing Zipper man. He sees it float down through the rushing darkness, a square of folded cellophane. When the ride is over, he goes into the doghouse and opens the letter, which to Gary’s glad surprise contains a minor turd of brown heroin. On the floor of the doghouse, he finds piece of tinfoil, on one side smeared with the leavings from a chili dog, and folds it into a square. Angling the foil in a shallow ramp, he daubs the dope to the top of the grade and holds his lighter under it. As the turd melts and slides, it leaves a smoking stain behind it. Gary sucks the smoke with clasping lips, taking in a flavor of vinegar and seasoned beef.

  The passengers are waiting. He goes out and locks them in the cars. Then he starts the engine and slips under the ride to dance for more falling gifts. But now Gary’s awareness of spinning, swooping things swells beyond the simple motion of the Zipper to take in the whole of the tumbling midway, and beneath all that the vaster, subtler revolutions of the very planet. He is gone in communion with some far-off turning thing when he loses the rhythm of the Zipper, fails to sense the wind against his skin. The angle-iron prow of a barreling car smacks him on the back bulge of his skull. The car carries him for a moment, and then drops him in the sand.

  Jeff Park visits the cinder-block toilet bunker up by the band shell. In the square of dented tin serving as a mirror, he sees an unfamiliar face looking back at him. His cheeks are dark with grime. His eyes look sick and bright.