Freezer Burn (9 page)

“For someone with a big head, you talk all right. I thought maybe you’d be short on brains. A lot of big heads, they’re like that. More water than gray matter. Not that it’s their fault.”

“I ain’t normally this way. I was mosquito-bit.”

“What?”

Bill told him again, this time with some explanation, but he left the firecracker stand and the dead deputy out of it. In other words, everything he told Conrad, except for being lost in the swamp and being mosquito-bit, was a downright lie.

Conrad nodded his head, said, “Oh, you’re like one of the scams” and went away, as if Bill’s company embarrassed him.

Bill was kind of disappointed he hadn’t turned the conversation to sex. He wanted to know if the dog was getting any, and if he had to do it doggie style. Now it was too late, Conrad was gone. Another mystery was left unanswered.

Bill thought he might like to go back to Frost’s trailer and hang out, but the blonde, Gidget, was still in there, and he was ashamed of how he looked and he didn’t want to be brutalized further by her ambivalence.

Glancing in the direction of the trailer, he saw her
come out. She had on those great shorts and they were way unzipped, held up only by her hips. Another inch down and he would have been able to see the hole show. She was wearing flip-flops and a very tight white T-shirt that was rough cut along the midriff. Her unbridled titties bobbed under the material and poked their .45 caliber tips at the fabric. She came down the steps and trod lightly along and glided past some trailers, on across the field, down a slight rise, and out of sight.

Bill wandered that way until he could see her again. She was sitting down on a lump of dirt smoking a cigarette, looking across the field, through a barbed wire fence, at a bunch of trees and some cows milling about.

He decided right then wasn’t any way she had a dick. She was all woman. Bill thought about trying to make small talk, but the way he looked he didn’t want to do it. He walked back into the camp and waited for nightfall and thought about how things might be going with the law.

He wondered if they were on to him or if he could go home. He wondered how his Mama was doing in the bedroom. If any more of her had melted down and if some kind of bugs had gotten into the house and were crawling all over her.

He got home, and everything was all right, first thing he had to do was get rid of Mama. Maybe drag her out back on that mattress and set her on fire or something. Pick up what was left with a yard rake, bag it, and send it to the dump.

Shit, Bill thought. I can’t do anything right. Can’t even do a simple robbery without it going bad. That goddamn string on the mask breaking, the flat tire, the deputy, Fat Boy and Chaplin biting the big one. And
Mama dying and having the kind of handwriting she did and me not being able to copy it. There is the source of my entire problem. Her stinginess and her bad handwriting.

Way things were going, he was going to end up in jail, or if that didn’t happen and he got away with things, then he might have to get a job.

The thought of that made him weak in the knees. This damn freak show was work enough and already he didn’t like it, but it beat the alternatives.

Whatever they were.

The night arrived and Frost came back. He called out this and he called out that. He pointed and nodded, shook his head and stood with hands on his hips. Things began to happen.

Trailers and cars were pulled in a tight circle. Battery trailers powered up the lights and made them bright. The lights were white and yellow, red and blue, a tossing of green and gold. The whirligig in the glow of the lights became fresh and new, an alien craft waiting to take on passengers.

The crude paintings on the sides of the trailers changed as well. They became sexual, alluring. There was cheap carnival music playing, and barkers, or talkers as they called themselves, stood in front of tents and trailers and called out as cars parked and people entered the carnival through the gap in the wall of trailers where the tickets were sold.

Bill didn’t have his own place as a freak, as Frost had suggested, and he didn’t want one. The idea disgusted him. He was ashamed enough to walk about with his face messed up the way it was, so he pushed
himself back into the shadows by the Ice Man’s trailer and waited there and watched.

It was strange to see what the trailers and tents had become. How it all seemed so fine and rare. Children laughed and ate cotton candy from the stands, and young women in short-shorts and tight-fitting shirts walked about and laughed and seemed impressed and amused by everything. Boys with acne and greasy hair poked each other with elbows, looked at girls and grinned, then laughed one to the other.

The freak tents and trailers were busy, but the Ice Man’s business was slow. However, as people came and left the Ice Man’s trailer, the word spread, and the same people who had been came back, and new ones came, and as the night went on the line grew and stayed long.

Two middle-aged policemen, one slim and one fat, came strolling through. On duty, probably, sent to see that all was well and the freaks weren’t planning a hostile takeover of the town. The cops seemed to be enjoying the women in shorts as much as the acne-faced boys. They had the same grins and elbow motions.

From time to time men and women stopped and watched Bill in the shadows, his face looking all the more strange there, holding darkness behind knots and grooves of mosquito injury. But no one spoke to him, until the cops.

One of the cops, the slim one, saw him in the shadows and said, “What’re you supposed to be?”

Bill wondered if his photograph was on bulletins. He wondered if his face could be recognized beneath the mosquito bites. He stepped out of the shadows, into the light.

“I’m the Blowed Up Man,” he said.

“What?” said the skinny cop.

“The Blowed Up Man. My face blowed up.”

The thin cop laughed. “Well, that ain’t any kind of name. You need to come up with something better for a name.”

“Yeah,” said the fat cop. “That sucks. You could call yourself Mr. Ugly or Knot Head or something like that. That’d work better . . . You fucked up like that at birth?”

“Industrial accident.”

“What kind of industrial accident?”

“Chicken plant blowed up and I was in it.”

“What the hell blows up in a chicken plant?”

“Chickens.”

The slim cop studied on that, then burst out laughing. “You’re pulling my leg, ain’t you?”

“I was hit in the face by flyin’ chickens. They ate too much and one of ’em farted, and there was a foreman lighting a cigarette, and the rest of it’s history. It’s called the Great Owentown Chicken Disaster. Look it up, it’s in the records.”

“Now I know you’re pullin’ my leg,” said the slim cop, and he laughed some more, just like this was the best thing he’d ever heard.

“Come on now,” said the fat cop. “It wasn’t at birth, how’d it happen?”

“A fire.”

“Well, you look it,” said the fat cop. “I got a question. It’s somethin’ I’d like to know. Somethin’ I’ve always wondered about people like you.”

“All right.”

“A face like that, you get much pussy?”

Bill found himself irritated by this, but realized it was the same question he had asked Frost about Conrad.

“I do all right.”

“You get any good pussy—I mean, anyone ain’t messed up or got a disease? I can see you gettin’ the bearded lady, or the one says she’s got a dick and a hole, ’cause, I mean, what are their prospects? But what about good pussy?”

The cops looked up as Gidget appeared, butting her way through the crowd, her face sullen, her lips puffed out as if they had just been punched. She had on her open front shorts and the same tight top. A couple of boys stood nearby in all their pus-pocked grandeur, watching Gidget float by, showing her all the open-mouthed reverence of two monks approaching a religious shrine.

“Like that?” said the fat cop.

“Not that,” Bill said. “Not yet anyway.”

The cops laughed. The fat one said, “Yeah, right, brother, not yet. Somethin’ like that, and somethin’ like you, well, you ain’t even got money she’d want if she was sellin’ it.”

“A fire, huh?” said the skinny one.

Bill nodded.

“Yeah,” said the skinny one. “I can see that, like your face caught on fire and someone put it out with a back hoe.”

Both cops laughed.

“One thing’s for sure,” said the fat one, “whatever happened it happened bad, and you are one ugly dude. Come to think of it, I don’t know that bearded woman would want you after all.”

“Well, now,” the skinny one said, “you have a good night, Blowed Up Man or Burned Up Man, or Chicken Hit Man, whatever you are, and don’t bring that face
into town. You might make a pregnant nigger woman throw a child, you hear?”

The cops laughed themselves away from him and pushed ahead in the line to the Ice Man’s trailer. When they came out of the trailer a few minutes later they were quiet.

They walked on through the carnival and out of sight behind the whirligig, probably on their way to demanding free hot dogs and drinks and cotton candy, ready to peek at adolescent girl asses bending over counters as the girls tossed coins or baseballs.

Bill said softly: “Dumb shits.”

Bill passed the Ice Man’s trailer and went in the direction Gidget had gone. She had slipped through the circle of trailers and was at her earlier spot, sitting on the ground smoking a cigarette in the dark. Her gold hair held the moonlight and it fell butter smooth over her skin, delighted to be there. The white smoke from her cigarette was rising up into the night and floating over her like a venomous cloud. Somewhere off in the distant dark a cow bellowed sadly, as if it had just figured out its true purpose in life.

Bill walked up behind Gidget. “Nice night, huh.” She didn’t turn to look at him. “Get lost, shithead. You ain’t gettin’ nothin’.”

“I’m just being friendly.”

“Howdy. Now fuck off, pencil dick.”

“You ain’t very nice.”

“No, I ain’t, and there ain’t no reason for you to be out here hustlin’ my ass. I don’t fuck freaks. Let me smoke my cigarette. It’s about all the fun I get.”

“I just want to talk.”

“Sure you do. Now fuck off, or I’ll tell Frost you were bothering me.”

“You’re his woman, I wouldn’t try to hustle you none.”

“Bad enough I got to be in this freak show. I don’t want to buddy up to a pomegranate head. Screw off. Now!”

Bill turned and trudged back through the gap in the trailers, throwing up little heaps of pasture as he went. He thought: Hell, I ain’t no pomegranate head. I’m just bug-bit and allergic. Ain’t Frost told her that?

For want of anything better to do, and to help nurse his trampled feelings, he went over to the Ice Man’s trailer and got in line. Conrad, on break, came strolling by on all fours. He saw Bill in line.

“You ain’t got to stand in line you want to see somethin’,” Conrad said. “Go on in. You’re privileged.”

“Hey, Fido,” said a guy in line dressed in a red and white barber pole jacket and rust-colored slacks. He had less grease on his hair than Phil, but he certainly had enough up there to do him and still deep-fry a chicken. “Everyone ought to wait in line, even pimple head here.”

“He works for the carnival,” Conrad said.

“It’s all right,” Bill said. “I don’t mind waitin’.”

“You don’t have to wait,” Conrad said.

“I say he does,” said Barber Pole.

“Say what you want,” Conrad said.

Barber Pole mentally flipped over a series of insults and finally arrived at: “Hey, Fido. You do it doggie style?”

A man standing with Barber Pole, a jar-headed redneck with a tavern tumor and white shoes that were brand-new about 1968, snickered. “A face like that, he don’t do it any kinda style.”