Freezer Burn (10 page)

Conrad, accustomed to insults, sat back on his
haunches and fished for a cigarette. He gave Barber Pole and his pal a contemptuous look, like a cantankerous dog who won’t do a trick in front of his master’s friends. “Who the fuck dresses you, Ronald McDonald?” Conrad put the smoke between his lips. “I had a coat like that, I’d shit on it before I wore it.” He lit the cigarette. “It’d make it look about three times better.”

“Why you freaky piece of trash,” said Barber Pole, moving toward Conrad.

Conrad held up one leather-wrapped hand. “You’re gonna lose your place in line, you step out. And worse, you might get your funky redneck ass whipped.”

Now everyone in the Ice Man line glanced apprehensively at Conrad and Barber Pole, tried to appear as if they weren’t really looking. Curious, but not wanting to be sucked into things.

“I ought to kick you,” said Barber Pole, but he hadn’t come any nearer.

Conrad plucked the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it away. “What you ought to do is get you a decent haircut and a better run of clothes from the Goodwill and maybe scrape a layer off your teeth and drain your hairdo, is what you ought to do. And if you folded some paper or cardboard thick enough in them shoes, they might give you a half inch of needed height.”

The man came out of the line then, and Conrad, not really making any effort about it, reached into his red overalls and produced a razor and flicked it open with his left hand and brought out another pack of cigarettes with his right and used the razor to slice the top. He used his rubbery lips to pull a smoke from the pack and he put the pack away and continued to hold the open razor. He got his lighter with his free hand and flicked
it and put the flame to the cigarette. He looked at Barber Pole out of the corner of his eye and put the lighter away, said, “You do what you’re thinkin’, I’m gonna do what you think I’m thinking.”

Barber Pole turned to look at his companion, who appeared to be no longer interested. He was in line, staring straight ahead. You would have thought he’d have never been aware of anything but the Ice Man. He craned his neck forward as if he were examining the movement of the line, maybe hoping to see the Ice Man make an appearance at the doorway of the trailer.

Barber Pole huffed and puffed a bit, and after a moment he left the line and wandered off. “I’m gonna talk to the cops about you.”

“Give ’em my best wishes,” Conrad said.

Conrad put the razor away, blew smoke, said to Bill, “Go on in.”

“Ain’t you goin’?”

“No. I think about it now and then, but I don’t go see it anymore.”

Bill broke line and pushed past an old couple in the doorway who started at his appearance. The old woman grabbed the old man and nearly knocked him off the steps, sent his Panama hat flying. A boy of twelve in a Cub Scout suit leaned out of line and picked up the hat and took off his scout cap and put the Panama on his head and said, “Look, I’m a bird feeder.”

The old man snatched the hat off the Cub Scout’s head and put it on and glared at the twelve-year-old, who didn’t seem intimidated in the least. He had an air about him that said, I’ve taken better beatin’s than you can give. The little Cub Scout put on his hat and cocked it at a rakish angle and stared the old man down, then
looked at the old woman as if he might ask her for a date and make her buy the rubbers.

Bill slipped inside. It was very cool in there. Goose bumps broke out on his arms and the backs of his hands. Frost was dressed in a white suit with pale blue shoes and a pale blue shirt and dark blue tie. His socks were thin and his pants were short and you could see the socks were held up with black silk garters. He was sitting in a chair on a raised platform at the back of the trailer and he had his feet cocked back and hung behind one of the chair rungs, which was what allowed his pants to hike up and his socks and garters to be seen. He was bathed in a bright light from a bare overhead bulb. It gave him a kind of glow, like a skid row angel. In front of him was a deep freezer and over the freezer where a lid should have been was a glass plate beaded up like a cold beer mug. Frost had a hair dryer plugged in and lying in his lap, and when there were enough people to surround the freezer, he turned on the hair dryer and waved it over the glass a bit. The cloud on the glass faded and people looked down and changed their expressions. They craned their necks and turned their heads and leaned forward and tilted back and looked at what was in the freezer from all angles. One man, holding his little boy in his arms, said, “My almighty.”

The little boy, possibly four years old, leaned forward for a look and said, “Daddy, don’t he get cold?”

The man laughed, said, “Reckon he don’t get much of anything.”

“Let me tell you about him,” Frost said suddenly over the roar of the dryer. He cut the device and leaned back in his chair. He had already given this spiel a hundred times tonight, but now his face looked as fresh as a
young woman’s tittie. Now that Frost was about to tell his story, something about his body changed. He still slumped in his chair, but it was as if he were a jack-in-the-box and someone had pressed a heavy weight on his head to keep him from springing up.

He lowered his eyes to the glass plate over the freezer, which was once again clouded with cold. Frost’s beautiful blue eyes were soft as a summer cloud.

“There are all manner of stories about our man here. He came to me like this from another carnival. All that was left of the carnival was this and a display of giant Russian rats. The old man running the carnival only showed his exhibits at tractor pulls and the like and he was tired and wanting to retire. He couldn’t feed the rats or afford the electricity to keep the body in shape and he didn’t like the tractor pulls because the noise hurt his ears. His last tractor pull, the heavyweight champion of the world and a group that sang gospel songs were supposed to show, but the boxer canceled and one of the gospel singers died in route, so the show lost its entertainment, except for the Ice Man and the rats. The Ice Man was displayed poorly, in near darkness, and when people saw the rats there was darn near a riot. Disappointed, ready to quit anyway, the owner gave me an opportunity and I took it.

“I was forced to buy rats and body, all in one swoop. The rats are no longer with us. They broke loose and are probably in the East Texas bottoms going under the guise of possums now.”

A little laugh from the crowd. Nothing to warm your heart, but a chuckle. One man said softly to the woman he was with, “Iff’n niggers ain’t killed and ate ’em.”

Frost gave this man a stare and the man cleared his
throat, turned his attention to what was in the freezer, but he held a smile on his face, like a child who had farted softly in church and was proud of it. The woman he was with, dressed in a faded green pants suit and uncomfortable shoes, wilted slightly and smiled at Frost as if to let him know she wasn’t that way and felt sorry for her companion’s ignorance, but what could you do.

Bill tried to get a look at the exhibit. He strained his neck and his eyes, but all he could see was the frosty glass top and something shadowy beneath. There was a bit of room around the freezer, and he could have slid in there for a look, but he kept himself pulled back and out of the way. He didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he had to. Already a few people were taking sly looks at him.

“The history of this body is more complex. I bought it from the carnival, but the owner of the carnival bought it from a man who claimed it was a wild man shot up in Wisconsin. It hasn’t been shot, however. The wounds you see are from something else. Another story is this body was found in an ice floe and that it is the body of a Neanderthal trapped in a glacier during a prehistoric storm. If that is the case, there is no telling how old it is. Perhaps someday I will have it carbon-dated, but as you can tell from looking at it, it is unique and ancient, yet fresh and new as tomorrow. This is the story I believe, the one about the ice, and he is still in ice, figuratively anyway, and here in front of you is a man from across the centuries, a forerunner to who we are now.”

“Yeah, or he’s just some fella died and got put in a freezer,” said the man who had remarked about the possums.

The woman with him, as if to stay in Frost’s good graces, said, “You can tell he ain’t no regular man.”

“Might be Big Foot,” the man with her said. “And talkin’ about feet, he’s got something between his toes too. Dog poo maybe.”

The woman took the man by the arm and hustled him out with the others, and in between the next group, Bill eased forward and took a peek.

At first he saw nothing other than finger writing on the frosty glass where someone, the talkative man perhaps, had written
Alley Oop.

Then Frost turned on the hair dryer and let it blow across the top of the glass, warming it. The condensation peeled away and the writing retreated. Bill was startled at what he could see. He was clearly looking at a man, but it was not a withered tar-colored husk as he had expected. Here was a naked man near six feet tall with pink skin and very clear features. He had a large forehead and wide jaws, a long slightly crooked nose and lips like fat fishing worms. There were little wounds on his forehead, and another beneath the short ribs on the left side. He had a thick black beard and a full head of hair and the hair was thick on his shoulders, chest, groin, and legs. The eyes were wide open and blue without pupils, slicked over by the cold, but those eyes, so blue, so strange, seemed to see right up and through the glass into Bill’s head. Those eyes made him think about things, all manner of things, and all at once.

The glass filmed over again, and Frost waved the dryer over the lid once more, chasing the icy curtain away. This time Bill took note of the corpse’s short, yellow teeth, touched by a gloss of refrigerated winter and the bright light, giving them the appearance of being
carved from dirty soap and greased with Vaseline. He looked at the rough hands and feet, the man’s penis and testicles. He was pleased to discover the man’s sexual apparatus was not as large as his own; it was neither an acorn nor a hose, but in shape and size like peckers and nuts on white marble statues made by the ancients, uncircumcised and covered by a flap of skin like a pantyhose pulled over a face, huddled silent in a patch of wiry black hair, a masked creature bent on filling station robbery that had died in its nest.

Bill and Frost exchanged glances, and a slow smile came over Frost’s lips and Bill turned and went out alongside the line which was now three times as long as before and still growing. He did not see Conrad. He didn’t see anyone he knew from the carnival. He went out and through the gap in the trailers and walked across the pasture to where Gidget had been. She was gone now, and he was glad, because something inside of him was all turned around, and he thought if she were there he might hit her. He felt as he had felt when his mother died and he realized no more checks were forthcoming. He felt as if he had awakened for the first time only to discover that permanent sleep was better.

He sat where Gidget had sat, and the spot was damp with her, and warm, and the night was warm and the sky was clear. Way off in the distance he heard the cow moo again, long and harsh, like a plea for help, and he wished to hell it would die and everyone else would die and just leave him alone in the pasture, in the warm night, under the clear sky, and then he would fade and fade until he was nothing but a dot in the dark, then not even that.

PART THREE

Gidget

Bill’s days and nights rolled one into another, same into same, driving from town to town, helping set the carnival up, then hanging out until it was time to do it all over again.

He hated it. Work had never agreed with him, but at his most down-and-out moment he had never considered working with a dog-man, a bearded lady, assorted ruined heads, damaged bodies, and a pleasant man with a hand growing out of his tit. He had never thought of himself as way up on the food chain, but had felt he was above such as this, and now he was more than slightly troubled to discover he was wrong.

Mama was right again. He was not only stupid, he was a loser. Everywhere he turned he was socked with the mallet of stupidity, kicked in the balls by fate, given a dunce hat and the finger.

He considered leaving, then he’d run his hand over his face and dismiss the idea. Where would he go? He was a freak himself. He no longer found himself able to look in the mirror and had finally quit touching his face, even when it itched, and it had really begun to itch.

Sometimes at night when the carnival was in swing, he loitered outside the Ice Man’s trailer, like a boy whose former lover was dating someone else, so he parks his car near her house, watching, mooning, not knowing what to do. He had not been back in to see the Ice Man, but the image of those eyes was burned into the back of his head as deep as a radiation wound.

Sometimes when he lay down at night he felt as if the Ice Man’s eyes were falling out of the blackness toward him, then he would feel it was he who was falling. Diving down toward those two dark pools, then, just before he was drowned by them, he would wake up.