George Mills (22 page)

All the while looking at George—who hadn’t seen his sister yet but had recently had from his father a bit of the story of the first George Mills—examining him as he’d advised George to examine the roustabouts and circus performers. (And when, George wondered, will I be brave enough to look at another human being the way this strange man is looking at me?)

“Of
course
they fraternized. Hell, maybe it wasn’t even fraternization, maybe it was just family reunion. But remember what they were there for, too. Marked race of Romany or no, cousins or no, these roustabouts and artistes were just so much
gadge
gold to the gypsies. (And maybe that’s why you don’t find rings in a roustabout’s ear. Because the gypsies stole them!) They sold them their daughters’ virginity, or its appearance, its raw chicken skin prosthetic equivalency, its family secret recipe cosmetic blood, or sold them to the roustabouts anyway, the artistes having daughters of their own, their own merchandise, and gambled with them, the artistes, too, and told their fortunes and worked spells against their enemies for money, and something which was even of more importance and real value to them, to the artistes, not the roustabouts, than anything else. They sold them magic.

“The marked race of Romany sold the circus people their talent. They sold them magic balance. Before the gypsies came in from Cassadaga, the wire walkers were merely skilled, trained, vaguely equilibriumally inclined, say. Afterward, they were surefooted as mules, as cats and mountain goats, with a gift for recovery and balance like a bubble in a level. There was inner ear in the soles of their feet. They could walk up a tree as casually as you climb stairs.

“They sold strength to the acrobats, infusing their legs and arms with the force of bombs, selling them flexibility, endurance, the tractables of great apes, a lung capacity that was operatic. The pyramids they did now were Cheopsic, Pharaonic. They could hang by a pinkie or stand on their hair.

“And height to the flyers, loft and lift, the tucks, spins and gainers of birds, the timing of salmon.

“And sold to the animal trainers, the lion tamers and bear and elephant handlers, the equerry and equestriennes, a Doolittle knowledge of the beastly heart, some Braille brute feel for fauna that was not so much mastery as plain hard bargaining, actual clausal, contractual negotiation, some stipulate Done! Shake! binding agreement, and the locked cage like a union shop! Selling them not magic courage, because you can’t buy courage, but a gift for magic enterprise, magic haggle—the bull market, the bear—faerie quid pro quo, the tiger’s leap through a fiery hoop knocked down for red meat, the bears and horses humbled for a sweet, extra straw. Selling them not courage but courage’s opposite——risklessness: that watered cement and short-cut materiel of the soul which permitted the purchaser never even ever to need courage again, so that each time he walked into the cage or raised the now entirely ornamental whip in the center ring as the panthers fled past in lively lockstep dressage, it was with the knowledge—his
and
the animals’—that the fix was in. (Maybe
that’s
what ‘Cassadaga’ means. Perhaps it’s only Gypsy for ‘Do this trick and I’ll leave you alone.’)

“And even something for the clowns. The marked race of Romany sold the clowns mark, the putty projections, high relief like Nepal on a map, some magic dispensation for the malleable, lending their faces and heads a talent for perspective——for protuberance, salience, jut and cavity, some easy canvas character in the skin itself which permitted their faces to shine like chameleon, to glow in primary colors like a waved flag.

“(Selling all of them the same thing finally, even the earthbound, giftless roustabouts on whom they turned loose their supposititious virgins, dealing in the one legitimate, renewable resource they had going for them, their heritage you could say. I mean their sticky-ringlet swarth and smoked-game stink, their forest-scarred skin and bad breath. Their animality I mean.)”

Why’s he telling me all this? George wondered. How does this show me the tricks of the trade or help prepare me to choose whatever it is I’m supposed to choose?

“Because we’re no better,” Professor Sunshine said. “If we think we are we’re only kidding our——” He broke off. He reached over and grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled it toward his face. George thought he was going to kiss it, but the man only gathered it in and held it there. His nostrils flared and relaxed. He’s sniffing me, George thought, and wanted to cry. “You’re not from around here,” Sunshine said. He released George’s hand. “Where do you come from? I forget.”

“I came from Milwaukee with my parents.”

“Gypsies have parents,” he said. “There are gypsies in Wisconsin,” he said slyly.

“We’re English,” the boy said, and thought: We’re English. Father says Millses go back to before the Norman Conquest. Then he remembered what his father had lately been hinting was their doom: never to rise, never to break free of their class, marked as Cain—my God! he thought, marked!—forever to toil, wander, luckless as roustabout.

Professor Sunshine smiled, no longer looking at George. Some of the edge had come out of his voice. He spoke, George thought, as his teacher sometimes did when she was telling them about some place in the world that neither she nor anyone else in the class would ever see. “The psychics came only after the gypsies had already cleared off, but, like the marked race of Romany itself, settled in Cassadaga. They showed little interest in the roustabouts or circus performers and, except for the occasional seance or consultation, had almost nothing to do with them. From the first their attention and interest, to the extent that they were drawn to the circus at all, was focused on the personnel from the side show.

“Not the fire eaters or sword swallowers, not the geeks—they had geeks then—or any of the rest of those who had trained their appetites or reamed passages in their throats and bellies to bank their snacks. They were just more athletes. Not even the fat ladies or giants. Bulk couldn’t be feigned but it could be cultivated. You could grow a fat lady as you grow a rose. And height, though unintentional, was merely excessive, the stockpiling of what otherwise was not only a normal but even an attractive quality.

“No, the brotherhood was attracted to monsters. It sought out bogy, ogre, eyesore, sport——all those unfortunates whose busted bodies were the evidence that they came directly from the pinched hand of God Himself. It wanted the alligator woman and the dog-faced boy, the pinhead and the Cyclops, the Siamese twins and the hermaphrodite. It wanted people with extra thumbs, too many toes. Too many? There could never
be
enough!

“They were from up North. I don’t know how the paranormals found out about Cassadaga. Perhaps they read the trades. They’d have done that. They do it today. What we do, our gifts, has never been that far removed from show business. My colleagues would not only have kept up with the trends but followed the gates too——of vaudeville, mud show, circus, nightclub and novelty acts. They’d have read all about it when the circus came to De Land to set up permanent winter quarters. Or maybe it wasn’t the trades. Maybe they just used their talents for divination, telepathy, second sight, all their occult, mystic jungle telegraph.

“There was a sort of gold rush. Cassadaga became a kind of boom town, some Sutter’s Mill of the extraordinary. I have some of their early correspondence with the freaks, though most didn’t bother to write; they just came. It’s very strange stuff. Even the envelopes are strange. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? They had no addresses for them. Christ, they didn’t even have their names!

“ ‘
To the young fourteen-year-old-girl,
’ they would write on the front of the envelope above the De Land destination, ‘
with the gray hair and withered body of an old woman.’ ‘For the man,
’ they’d write, ‘
born with sores.’ ‘The lady with green blood.’ ‘Personal!
’ they’d write.

“The letters themselves were always elaborate concoctions of sympathy, buttressed with the writer’s credentials and followed by a request for an interview with a view to the misfit’s throwing his lot in with the writer’s. They couldn’t expect to be paid much of course, at least at first, but if the spiritualist was correct in his assumptions about the unfortunate
lusus naturae
—spiritualists were wonderfully euphemistic with these freaks and death’s heads—then perhaps they could get to the bottom of things together, and settle once and for all the nagging, age-old question ‘Why me?’ ”

Why me? George Mills thought.

“You’d be wrong if you assumed my paranormal friends sought the freaks out just to juice up their failing acts, that they were in it simply for the money. Well, you’d be partly wrong.

“Because they really
did
believe that the body’s disgrace, that cleft blood and blighted flesh and faulted bones brittle as toothpick—there was one fellow, the Glass-Boned Man, who would permit children to shatter his fingers for a dollar; you could hear the snap as his bone fragmented; there wasn’t much to it; the bones in his arms and hands were fragile as Saltines; the sound was real, but it was an ever depleting resource; the bones became smaller and smaller chips; after a while all you could hear was the muffled grinding of sand—were the outward, visible signs of inner psychic energies. These were your real McCoy Cains, your truly marked. Marked and marked down, too——discounted, slashed from the human race itself, whom chipped genes and bombed biology had doomed. Such things count. There’s compensation. Surely that centered eye of the Cyclops wore a honed vision, and the ping-pong ball brain of the pinhead felt what it couldn’t know.

“Superstition? Medieval? Just one more way of rubbing luck like paint off a hunchback? All right. Maybe. Even probably. But they put them through it, our forefathers did, and went through it themselves, too. It was almost as if they had to test them out, to prove to themselves that the dogfaced boys and the pinheads, that the alligator girls and glass-boned guys hadn’t any more real psychic powers than a dollar’s worth of loose change before they ever dared to use them in the act or teach them the scam.

“Because there really is such a thing as hypnotism and these folks, the paranormals in all their infinite varieties, were past masters of the art. They had
some
sessions, believe me.

“ ‘Where do you come from?’

“ ‘Hartford.’

“ ‘No, before that. I’m going to take you back to the time of the womb. What do you see?’

“ ‘Pussy.’

“ ‘You’re no longer in the womb. This is before conception now. I’ve set you down on the astral plane among the primary emanations. Describe what it’s like.’

“ ‘——’

“ ‘I command you to describe the dematerialized world.’

“ ‘Ain’t no worsteds, ain’t no wools. Ain’t no cotton, ain’t no silk.’

“ ‘At the count of three you’ll wake up refreshed.’

“Sure they were disappointed. So were the dwarfs. (There were dwarfs now, they’d gone over to dwarfs, had graduated downward in birth defect, some unevolutionary, pulled-horns substitute that covered over the scabs and open sores and inside-out arrangements of ordinary physiological disfigurement.) You’d have been disappointed yourself. The desire and pursuit of the mysterious is a lifelong life. The occult is a hard taskmaster. Like mathematics or physics or astronomy or any other science. Like painting or music or sculpture or any other art.

“So of course they were disappointed. But a little relieved, too, not to have ready to hand a key to the astonishing secret of life, its nagging riddle: ‘Why me?’ Because people, God bless them, are terrified of the strange. It may be that you’ve seen a man in a bear suit. On the street, say, or at a game between halves. You know that the man is a man, the costume a costume. But when he comes to
you
to dance, you pull back, you shy. You’re pulling back now. Has such a thing happened?”

He thought of Madam Grace Treasury’s bruised cosmetics.

“How much more effective when the costume is shriveled skin, limbs that don’t size, a dubious sex? Power is only amok scale, the gauges off true and the needle in red. Send in the dwarf.”

George looked up but there was only Professor Sunshine, talking to himself.

“ ‘How far can you expect to go in the circus on your little legs?’

“ ‘Go ahead, I heard it all. Go ahead, I’ll help you out. I sleep in a crib, I eat in a high chair. I got a dong the size of a safety pin and I bite my wrists when the Campfire Girls come to town. Go ahead, I heard it already. I have a tiny appetite. If the thermometer reads 98.6 I’m running a fever. If I work hard, someday I can make it in the small time. I’m a little late for an appointment.’

“ ’isn’t it humil—’

“ ‘—iating for me when some broad picks me up and puts me on her lap? Nah, I got high hopes. Go ahead.’

“ ‘You can read my mind. Evidently you have second sight.’

“ ‘Nah, I’m shortsighted.’

“Because they were runt realistic. All wrong, you’d suppose, for our founders’ purposes. But think about it. Who would have been better? My God,
some
body had to be in control. Somebody had to hold in check those airy fairy elements of our fathers’ style. Who’d be better with their sideshow hearts and their eye for a mark than those little rationalists?

“And wasn’t it just good sound show business after all to make it appear that the dummy was in control and not the ventriloquist? Wasn’t that as much a part of the program as an intermission? You don’t horse around with what works. So all that was left was to teach him the fundamentals, show him what had already been shown to the phony red Indian, that marked man whose time had gone, and the nigger slave and gypsy before
him,
and let the midget take it from there. (They were midgets now, dwarfs being still too deformed for the public taste, something too bandy and buckled in their being, their botched, bitched bodies; you don’t want to scare the customers half to death, you know, and a midget was just a little scaled-down man; a midget was almost cute, but still tight enough to the terror, close enough, enough nicked by it to leave its mark.)