Shoeless Joe (25 page)

I was scared. There is no other word for it. How can I walk up to this man who will one day be my father, and treat him like any other ballplayer?

Perhaps Richard
has
been drawn here by something other than curiosity about a long-lost brother.

*  *  *

The next afternoon I go into Iowa City and stop by the change booth at the midway. It is just large enough to hold two women, sitting back-to-back on high stools and dealing out quarters, dimes, and nickels to the sparse afternoon crowd.

I stop and look up at the one I know must be Gypsy.

“My God. He told me he had a twin, but I didn’t really believe him,” she says. “Thought maybe he’d latched on to some local fluff and was taking a vacation from me these nights.”

“How did you know it wasn’t Richard in a change of clothes?” I ask.

“The eyes. The eyes. Richard’s are harder than yours: His look is like jade that might crack at any second. Yours are warmer, wittier. You’ve probably loved somebody very much.”

“And are you a fortuneteller, too?”

“I have been. You do whatever you have to do in this business. I want to look you over. Hey, Molly, I’m taking a break,” she says to the woman behind her, who nods the back of her blond wig to acknowledge the statement.

“I’m Gypsy,” she says, sticking out a small brown hand. She is tiny and wiry with straight black hair that looks like an untidy pile of shingles. She is wearing a black T-shirt with a silver picture of an unfamiliar rock singer on the front, blue jeans, and black cowboy boots. She has a small tattoo on her left forearm. Her mouth is thin, her smile ironic.

“You haven’t seen the show,” she says, waving her hand toward a twenty-foot trailer partially hidden behind canvas banners, splashed with garish pictures and lettering. “We have a truck with a camper that we live in and use to pull the trailer from town to town.” In the background, Richard’s voice emanates from a chipped black speaker wired to the rod holding up the canvas banners: “Stay as long as you like. Come out when you’re ready. You owe it to yourself to see these strange babies. You’ve read about them. Heard about them. Now come in and see them …”

“Can I?” I nod toward the trailer. Gypsy takes a pack of Winstons from her T-shirt pocket, shakes out a cigarette, and lights it. She grins up at me, smoke leaking through her teeth.

“Why not? Richard and me bought it from the grandson of the owner. Old man died two years ago while we were wintering in Florida.”

We climb a ramp that leads to the door of the trailer, where a sad-looking black man in a greasy jacket and baggy overalls sits on a backless chair.

“Hey Owen,” Gypsy says to the man, “going on a cooks’ tour.” She parts the faded blue-velvet drapes, which are decorated by amber watermarks. The man, Owen, scarcely nods. If he sees me, he assumes I am Richard.

Inside, Richard’s voice, my voice, becomes indistinct and mixes with the midway sounds. The trailer smells of dust and rose-scented room freshener. The floor is covered by cheap brown-brindle tiles, and one or two have their corners sticking up like marked playing cards. The walls are draped with faded blue velvet, and about a dozen glass containers, like built-in fish tanks, are inset at intervals. Each one contains a photograph of a deformed fetus and a small typed card describing the origins of the photo, with a few clinical details. The photos are black and white, faded, curled around the edges. Some of the explanatory cards have fallen face down or lay at odd angles. The bottom of each container was at one time covered in fuchsia-colored velvet, but in places it has faded to a pale pink. Dust, grit, and dead insects cover the bottom of most of the containers.

“Is this all?” I ask.

“What did you expect, live babies?” says Gypsy, blowing smoke. “This is a seventh-rate carnival. The posts are bigger than the rings you toss at them. There’s lead in the milk bottles. The darts are made of bamboo, so if you breathe as you throw, they drift a foot. This is a carnival. People pay to be disappointed.”

“I guess from hearing the pitch I expected more. At least a specimen floating in alcohol.”

“You’ve lived in the country too long, Ray,” she says with a good-natured smile. She closes one eye when she-smiles.

“How much does it cost?”

“Seventy-five cents. Best moneymaker on the midway. No overhead.”

“If it’s profitable, why not clean it up?”

“What do you want, a science lab? People expect scruffy stuff. They don’t go in there because of scientific curiosity. They go because they want to be shocked. They want to come out and say how awful it was, how scummy and sickening—something they can talk about to all their friends, and when the friends think nobody is looking, they’ll sneak in and see if it was as bad as they heard.”

“Would you tell me something, Gypsy?”

“I might.”

“Your first name.”

“Want to get one up on your double?”

“It will be our secret, I promise.”

“But why? What does it matter?”

“Can’t tell you.”

She looks at me, figuring the angles and the odds, the tiny lines around her eyes and mouth fanning out as she flexes her facial muscles without smiling. “Our secret,” she says, holding out her small dark hand for me to clasp.

“Our secret.”

“Annie,” she says, smiling through her teeth.

On the drive back to the farm, I recall our childhood, and, as I do, I realize that it was I and not Richard who was fascinated by carnivals and midways. I believe it was the Laughlin Midway that used to come to Great Falls for a week each summer. When we were little, Dad used to take us on the rides and feed us outrageous amounts of ice cream, hot dogs, burgers, and cotton candy. We would tour the midway and listen to the spiels of the pitchmen. He would take us to see the freak show, the dancing waters, and even the girlie show—”Harlem in Havana,” it was billed—which, in retrospect, seems as tame as a dancing class.

The year we were nine, my father decided we were capable of traveling the grounds alone, and gifted us with enough money to make our usual tour. Richard, however, chose to accompany my father to the horse races, while I ambled off to explore the midway on my own. The carnival was set up in an open field at the edge of town, and the ground had been generously covered in sawdust, and iced with cedar shavings. It had rained during the night, and the shavings and sawdust had mixed into the ground to form a firm and pungent base. By midafternoon I was walking along game row, which consisted of two dozen booths where you threw balsa-wood darts at half-inflated balloons, or tried to knock three plaster bottles off a milking stool, using balls soft as rolled-up socks.

I stopped to listen to the spiel of the barker at the milk-bottle booth. He had a crooked arm that he used to attract attention and wave people in, and I followed the arm as if it were hooked around my neck and gently easing me forward. There were a dozen or so people around the booth, and the carny and his assistant, a brush-cut youth with eyes tiny as black peas, gently baited the customers and kept them trying again and again to not only knock the bottles over but clear them from the top of the stool. The carny, his hair tufted, face square and scruffy-looking as a tomcat, would set up the bottles, take a ball, bend over, and fire it between his legs, and the bottles would fly off in different directions. Then he would taunt his audience.

“Look at that! If an old one-armed side-hill gouger like me can do it backwards, you big strong fellows should be able to do it frontwards! And you get three tries to do it! Only three for a quarter!” And the big farm boys and squinty-eyed cowboys in denim would step forward, plunk their money down, and fire wildly at the bottles.

I worked my way forward, mouth hanging open in fascination as I listened to the carny and watched the balls smacking into the canvas behind the target or hitting the bench and ricocheting about the tent like trapped birds. There was a row of trunks across the mouth of the booth. The white balls rested on the battered green-and-brown surfaces. As I watched, I imagined the carny and his assistant packing the trunks full of green-and-vermilion-feathered monkeys-on-sticks, which were the prizes, and heading out for a new town.

I moved in until, pressed forward by the crowd, I sat down on one of the old, mistreated trunks at the far right of the booth. I must have been there a half-hour when the crowd thinned out, the big-shouldered farm boys walking stiffly away, ignoring the carny’s entreaty to “Try it one more time there, Sonny. You almost won last time. Look! I’ll show you how it’s done.” There was one man in a dirty suit coat playing, and two or three gawkers, when the carny noticed me.

“What are you doin’ there, kid?” he said loudly, moving toward my corner of the booth. I was startled and jumped down from where I had been sitting. He could see I was scared, and pressed his advantage. “Look what you done to my trunk!” he shouted. “Look at the dents you put in it.” I looked at the battered metal. It was difficult to see where one dent started and another finished.

“You’re gonna have to pay for it, kid,” he said, and I could feel my eyes getting larger. I shuffled my feet nervously in the dry shavings at the base of the trunk.

“How much money have you got?” the carny asked, moving over in front of me. I dutifully reached in my pocket and pulled out a dollar and a few coins. I counted it carefully. There was $1.80.

“Kid, you done twenty dollars’ worth of damage to that trunk. You’re gonna have to make it up some way.” He was close to me. His face was scarred and craggy, like a map of Montana, all mountains, lakes, and plains. He smelled of sweat and cigars. He had a black canvas apron tied around his waist, and his good left arm was brown as an Indian’s. I could imagine him calling my father and making him pay for the damage I had done—and then the long, silent ride back to Deer Lodge in the pickup truck, my father furious, my brother nudging me in the ribs and laughing.

“A dollar eighty,” he said scornfully. “Is that all you’ve got?”

I looked at him wide-eyed and nodded.

“Okay, kid. Listen. I tell you what I’m gonna do. You can work it off.” I felt like a car had just been lifted off my chest. I stood eager as a dog waiting for a stick to be thrown.

“You know where the freak show is?” I nodded that I did. “Well, I want you to run down there and tell the barker that I sent you to get the left-handed glass stretcher. Then you bring it back to me and I’ll let you off the hook.” He smiled, showing short yellow-stained teeth.

I sprinted off across the sawdust, the shavings crinkling around my ankles. At the freak show, the barker was in the middle of a spiel. A beautiful girl in a bathing suit with a red-satin cape over her shoulders stood to his right, looking tired and bored, while behind them, just inside the flimsy brown curtain, stood a man in formal outfit complete with top hat and white gloves, holding a black-handled handsaw that was at least four feet long. The barker was telling the crowd that in just a few moments, the Great Mancini—who was making a special appearance with the Laughlin Midway, direct from performing before all the crowned heads of Europe and Asia—would dazzle and mystify them by sawing this very-alive young lady in half before their unbelieving eyes. Mancini bowed slightly and raised his hat, revealing slick black brilliantined hair. The girl ran a hand languidly across her belly, to show where the wicked-looking saw was going to do its work, and the barker began his pitch to sell tickets. I snaked my way through the crowd until I was at the stage, which came up to the middle of my chest. I stood on tiptoe, reached forward, and tapped the barker on the toe of his run-down black loafers. He glanced down and continued with the spiel. The Great Mancini and the caped girl stood like wax dummies. I stretched up and tapped again, harder, like knocking at a door after receiving no answer. The air smelled strongly of cedar shavings, and as I glanced down I saw that I was buried ankle deep in the red-and-white curlicues. The carny swung his microphone away from his body and hissed down at me, “What do you want, kid?”

“The guy down there”—and I waved vaguely in the direction of the game booths—”wants the left-handed glass stretcher.”

There was a long pause as he at first looked puzzled. Then, as a light began to shine in his eyes, he smiled. “Just a minute, kid,” he said, and parked his microphone on its stand. He walked back past the catatonic figures of Mancini and the girl, and dug into a wooden chest that was painted a pale battleship-gray. The people up close who had been listening to the carny’s spiel were now looking at me.

“You old enough to be working?” a man said to me.

“Should be in school,” grumbled another.

“His parents are probably show people, and you know what
they’re
like,” said a bulky woman wearing a blue print dress and a matching bonnet.

The barker returned and thrust into my hands as wondrous an object as I have ever seen: shiny as a hubcap, small as a can opener, able to turn in my hand like a chrome frog. I have never seen anything like it. Perhaps it was indeed a left-handed glass stretcher. The barker bent down and spoke into my face. “Run this right back to the guy who sent ya,” the barker said, but to his shoulder, as if he still had his mike under his chin. “This is the only left-handed one in the whole carnival, so tell him to guard it with his life. Ya sure ya know where you’re goin’, kid?”

I nodded dumbly.

Clutching the wonderful silver-jointed object in my hand, I whipped through the crowd and back down the midway to the bottle booth. I sat my treasure delicately on top of the very trunk I had damaged, and looked up into the face of the carny, who seemed genuinely surprised to see me.

“What have you got there?” he said, and lifted up the object as he might pull a hair from his breakfast cereal.

“It’s what you sent me for,” I said. “The guy at the freak show gave it to me. He says to tell you it’s the only …”

“Kid, you just can’t do nothin’ right, can you?” he said scornfully. I could feel my mouth drop open.

“Kid, I sent you for a left-handed glass stretcher. Any fool can see this is a right-handed one.” He held the object up as he might hold a dead mouse by its tail. Then he dropped it in the side pocket of his stained plaid jacket. “Now you go back down there and get me a left-handed one like I sent you for, and hurry up about it.” I pushed through the crowd and began running again, but about halfway to the freak show a strange feeling, like bees buzzing, began low in my body and gradually moved up to my stomach and chest, leaving me feeling empty and foolish. It began to dawn on me that I had been the butt of a joke. I stopped and looked around. The carnival buzzed all about me. But what if I was wrong? What if the man from the bottle booth came after me, made my father pay for the damage to his trunk? I looked down at myself and cursed my choice of clothing. I was wearing a bright green T-shirt with horizontal white stripes. I stood out like a large green apple. Looking over my shoulder all the way, I skulked to the exit and made my way to the parking lot, making certain I was not followed. When my father and Richard returned from the races, they found me asleep in the truck box, my T-shirt carefully covered by a sheet of canvas.