Freezer Burn (17 page)

“Yeah.”

“Hot and nasty and I like it. He’s like angel food cake out of the oven, all sweet and fresh baked. It gets to me. And that hand. I make him wear a glove when we fuck.”

Bill thought of the time Frost had stopped the fight between Conrad and Phil. He had been wearing the glove then. He remembered Gidget at the door of the motor home, somewhat peeved and slightly dressed.

“Why the glove?”

“I don’t like looking at it.”

“You still have to look at it, except it’s in a glove.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have to feel that hand. When he lays against me, I feel that hand. If he lifts up, the hand drops and touches me . . . You just don’t know. That
hand . . . Sometimes I think it’s alive, not just flapping around against me. I keep thinking that hand wants to get hold of my throat.”

“Frost don’t seem that way to me.”

“He isn’t, but I think that hand is . . . and don’t smile at me like that. You’ve never had to touch it. It’s like something wet and muddy crawling over you. It feels like you think a snake ought to feel. I can’t take much more of it. He’s talking about us having a baby, and I’m thinking, yeah, great, we have a baby I can teach it to wash three hands. It might have four. It could work here in the carnival, wave at the crowd and knit a sweater. I don’t want to have no freak baby. It’s bad enough I got to have a freak inside me trying to get off.”

“But you went with him. It was your choice.”

“I’d have screwed a monkey while I was blowin’ the organ grinder to get out of that damn restaurant. I didn’t know what I was gettin’ into. I thought I could take it. I can’t take it. I want you, not him. We’re a beautiful couple, Bill.”

Bill’s body turned cool and goose bumps rose over him and the bumps were hard, like headstones. No one had ever wanted him before, least of all someone who looked like, felt like, and smelled like Gidget.

“I got to get rid of him, you know.”

“We could go away.”

“I thought about that.”

“We could just go off and you could get a divorce.”

“I could, yeah.”

“It seems like the only way.”

“I’ve gone off before, and I’m always just the same when I get to where I go. I might as well have stayed
before I went. Everything I do is like fuckin’ déjà vu. This time I got to do different.”

“We could go off and you could get a divorce and I could get a job.”

“Doing what? Brain surgery? You look good, baby, and I like what you do to me, how you make me feel, but you’re not exactly a hot job property.”

“It wouldn’t matter as long as we had each other.”

“It would matter to me. I don’t want to live in no shithole little town in a goddamn trailer with three snot-nosed brats pulling at my dress. I may not be worth a shit, and you may not be either, but I still want something better.”

“Then what can we do?”

“How much do you love me?”

Love hadn’t been mentioned before. Bill was taken aback. “I . . . I don’t know.”

Gidget turned away from him and stuck her face in a pillow and began to cry. “Jesus. Fuckin’ Jesus.”

“What?”

“Here I am pouring my heart out to you, and I’m just a piece to you. You don’t care about me. You don’t care I got to stay with this freak. It don’t mean a thing to you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Gidget got up, still crying. She found her panties in the light from the lamp and tried to pull them on, but they were wrecked. She threw them on the floor, began to thrash about looking for the rest of her clothes.

Bill lay on the bed and looked at her and tried to think of something to say.

“I thought you loved me,” she said as she pulled her shorts on one leg.

“I didn’t say I didn’t love you.”

“It’s not something you have to think about, goddamnit.”

“Look, Gidget. I love you. I just . . . I’ve never been in love before. I didn’t know how to say it.”

She smiled and sniffed. “You just say it. That’s all. You just say it.”

“I love you.”

She pulled her shorts off the one leg she had managed to get them on, came back to bed and rolled up against him and ran her fingers down his cheeks and kissed him. They lay together for a while, not speaking. Bill broke the ice.

“So what do we do?”

“You want to be together, right?”

“I said so.”

“Then we do what we have to do.”

Bill let that one roll around inside his thoughts for a while. “God in heaven, Gidget. We couldn’t do that.”

“We could.”

“We shouldn’t. I mean, I’ve done some things, but I haven’t ever done anything like that. Well, not exactly.”

“What do you mean not exactly?”

He told her about his mother, the firecracker stand robbery and how his partner had shot the operator. He told her everything. It came out like water boiling over, every little detail.

“That stand operator should have kept his mouth shut and just given the money. That fella Chaplin didn’t do any more than he had to do. It just didn’t work out in the long run, but he was doing what needed to be done. The cop you didn’t kill, he killed himself. You haven’t killed anybody and you’re whining.”

“I’m not whinin’. I’m just sayin’.”

“Sounds like a whine to me.”

Bill lay still. “I planned the whole thing, but I didn’t mean for nothing like that. It’s one thing for a murder to happen, it’s another to plot it and do it yourself. And the truth is, I like Frost. I owe him.”

“Maybe you do, but you’ve paid that debt. It’s not like a lifetime thing.”

“There’s a line I’ve stepped over already and I don’t like it. I do this on purpose, there ain’t even a line. We shouldn’t do something like that.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t, but we could, and I would. And there isn’t any line, Bill. Never has been. The only line is the one you draw yourself. Listen here, hon. I got to get loose, and I divorce him, I got nothing. He dies, a little accident, I got a little something. And I got you. And you got those checks of your mother’s. I’m a forger, remember. It would be seed money for us to get going, you know.”

“You said he dies you got a little something. What little something?”

“The Ice Man. The carnival, for that matter. Do you know how much that Ice Man takes in? It isn’t exactly Fort Knox numbers, but you could live pretty good. Get rid of the rest of these freaks, ditch ’em. Just keep the Ice Man, take him around.”

“Wouldn’t you make more with the carnival altogether?”

“Sure. Shit, Bill, I don’t care. I’m just saying we get rid of Frost, we got the Ice Man, carnival if we want it, and we got your mother’s checks. It’s a good start. Time comes we want to sell the Ice Man, we get a good
price, and we use that money to invest in something else.”

“Something straight.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to run the Ice Man around Texas all my life. I just want to get shed of Frost and have some seed money, a little income till we get our shit together. We could maybe open some cafe or something, hire waitresses to do what I used to do. I don’t even care you pinch one or two of them on the ass once in a while.”

Bill grinned. “We could do that, couldn’t we?”

“Or something like it.”

“I don’t know. Frost has done me all right.”

“Good. Take advantage of it. Build on that. Look at it this way, Bill, an opportunity is an opportunity, and if it comes to you, you ought to take it. You don’t look to me you’re a fella with a lot of grabs at brass rings.”

“Could be there’s a warrant out on me. You think about that? You and me doing this thing, then going into something like that, them looking for me. He dies, cops’ll be around asking questions.”

“We’ll dodge it until it blows over. Hell, cops don’t catch one in ten criminals anymore, and I bet there’s not that many people sweating over a firecracker stand and its owner. Then again, there may not be any warrants. Probably don’t even know you’re involved. We start with this one thing, then we worry about the other problems as we come to them.”

“Christ, I don’t know.”

“Tell you what,” Gidget said, getting up, sliding into her shorts more easily this time. “You think about the poontang you aren’t getting and the poontang he’s getting, and you think about that dead hand of his rubbing
me down.” She fastened her shorts and pulled on her T-shirt. “You think about that, baby. Then you let me know how you feel. Tell me you haven’t got anything against him. Fact he’s fuckin’ me like I was a fertility goddess ought to be cause enough you want to see him dead. What he’s getting, you aren’t getting. Remember that.”

Gidget pulled the slicker over her head, stopped at the door, and looked back. “You ought to clean up that mustard. And there’s a corn dog under your bed. I can see it from here.”

She went out in the rain and closed the door. After a time, Bill got up, cleaned the freezer, rinsed off the corn dog, rewarmed it in the microwave and ate it.

Next day the rain cleared up. Dampness hung from every tree limb and leaf and blade of grass and the trailers were slicked as if coated with gloss. The whirligig arrived from its last location via the trailer, along with the Pickled Punks. Phil had driven the trailer himself and a wetback he’d hired followed him in a car with a smoking exhaust. It looked like an old-fashioned mosquito fogger.

Phil and Frost parleyed and Phil went out of there with a scowl on his face, his South of the Border driver at the wheel.

Frost rounded up enough folks to erect the whirligig. It was wet from being dragged around on the damp grass. Much of it had worn bright silver through the green paint.

This was the very thing that was getting Frost. The green paint worn away. He was standing under the whirligig with the only two helpers who hadn’t faded. Double Buckwheat and Conrad, who, as usual, was smoking a cigarette. Breakfast had not only involved eggs but grits, so Double Buckwheat’s two heads looked
like Brillo pads that had scoured most of the breakfast dishes of the continental United States.

Each stood with a hand over his eyes to shield out the brightness of the sun. Conrad had on a felt hat with a black band with a feather in it. He looked kind of cute, the way a dog does when you dress it up in clothes.

Bill, who had not participated in erecting the whirligig or done anything else this morning, came out and leaned against the Ice Man’s trailer, eating a corn dog. He watched them stare up at the whirligig. He would have felt last night had been a dream had he not woken up this morning and found Gidget’s ruined panties. He had lain in bed with them over his face, his nose sticking through the slit designed for what he felt might be the best part of her. He smelled the panties for a time, and when he got up, he realized he had missed breakfast.

He ate the corn dog slowly. He was so worn out his teeth hurt. He thought about what he and Gidget had talked about, and decided maybe Gidget had been half goofy last night, thinking out loud about something she didn’t really want.

He walked over to where Frost, Double Buckwheat, and Conrad stood looking up at the whirligig.

“Bird watching?” Bill asked.

“Bird watching,” one of Double Buckwheat’s heads said.

“Needs paint,” Frost said.

“Needs paint,” the other Double Buckwheat head said.

“I think it’s all right,” Conrad said. “Especially since he’s wanting to get us up there to paint it. This ground down here would be littered with pinheads and such. And I’m not so good at climbing either.”

“Not everyone here is mentally handicapped,” Frost said.

“Handicapped,” Double Buckwheat said.

“Let me think on that,” Conrad said. “I ain’t so sure.”

“He ain’t sure,” the other head said.

“I’m just saying it needs paint,” Frost said.

“Paint,” said Double Buckwheat.

“I know how you are when you think something needs paint,” Conrad said. “Or something needs this, or something needs that. You can’t leave it alone until it’s done. And that generally means I’m in on the doing it.”

“You do work here, Conrad.”

“I do everything but wipe the twins’ ass,” Conrad said, “and I ain’t about to add to my job description ass-wiping or climbing up there on that bolt-rattling sonofabitch to paint it.”

“Sonofabitch,” both heads said.

“Very well,” Frost said. “I’ll paint it myself.”

“He’ll paint it,” one head said.

“It’s gonna rain again anyhow,” Conrad said.

“Rain,” the other head said.

Frost turned and looked at Double Buckwheat. He smiled. “Do you think you boys could go somewhere else to stand? And maybe you could wash your hair.”

One of the Buckwheats said, “Packin’ it in,” and off they went.

“I think the rain is finished for the next day or two,” Frost said, “and if I can get it painted, the sun’s hot enough it’ll dry out all right before this weekend’s show.”