Loon Lake (3 page)

I hung around. I made myself useful. They were still putting it together. I helped lay the wooden track for the kiddy cars. I heaved-ho the tent ropes, I set the corral poles for the pony ride. There were three or four tired stiffs doing these things. I recognized them for what they were, everyone of them had a pint of wine in his pocket, they were no problem at all. I thought the Hearn Bros. were lucky to have me.

But nothing happened. Nobody paid attention. At dusk the generator was cranked, and the power went on with a thump. The string lights glowed, the Victrola band music came out of the loudspeakers, the Wheel of Fortune went ratatat-tat, and I saw how money was made from the poor. They drifted in, appearing starved and sucked dry, but holding in their palms the nickels and dimes that would give them a view of Wolf Woman, Lizard Man, the Living Oyster, the Fingerling Family and in fact the whole Hearn Bros. bestiary of human virtue and excellence.

The clear favorite was Fanny the Fat Lady. She sat on a scale that was like a porch swing. Over her head a big red arrow attested to six hundred and eight pounds. Someone doubted that. She responded with an emphatic sigh and the arrow fluctuated wildly, going as high as nine hundred. This made people laugh. She was dressed in a short jumper with a big collar and a bow in her hair, just like Shirley Temple. Her dyed red hair was set in waves over her small skull. The other freaks did routines or sold souvenirs and pamphlets of their life stories. Not the Fat Lady. She only sat and suffered herself to be gazed on, her slathered legs crossed at the ankles. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Finally I caught her attention, and her little painted mouth widened like the wings of a butterfly as if it were basking on some pulpy extragalactic flower. The folds of her chins rising in cups of delicate hue, her blue eyes setting like moons behind her cheeks, she smiled at me and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled, sitting there with each arm resting on the base of a plump hand supported by a knee that was like the cap of an exotic giant white mushroom.

I realized she was slow-witted. Behind her and off to the side was a woman who was keeping an eye out, maybe a relative, a mother, an aunt. This woman looked at me with the alert eyes of the carney.

And as I went about I saw those eyes everywhere behind the show, alert carney eyes on the gaunt man with a white shirt and tie and sleeve garters,
on the girl in the ticket booth, on the freaks themselves staring out from their enclosures. What were they looking for? Life! A threat! An advantage! I had that look myself. I recognized it, I knew these people.

But I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. By midnight the crowd had thinned out. The lights were blinked in warning and the generator was turned off. The last of the rubes drifted back into the hills. They held Kewpie dolls. They held pinwheels.

I saw the acts going into their trailers to find some supper or drink some wine. I sat across the road with my back against a tree. I wanted a job with the carney. It seemed to me the finest possible way to live.

A while later a truck came along running without headlights and it turned into the dark lot. I sat up. I heard the truck doors slam. A few minutes later an old car and three men got out and walked into the carney. Other men arrived on foot, in jalopies. A few lights had gone back on. I crossed the road. There was some kind of renewed commerce, I didn’t understand. I saw the belly dancer standing in the door of her trailer her arms folded a man at the foot of the steps tipped his cap. I saw the girl who sold tickets outside her booth she was looking into a hand mirror and primping her hair. At the back end of the lot in the shadow of the trees a line of men and boys outside a trailer. I went there and got on the end of the line. A man came out and talked in low tones to the others. I heard something moaning. Another man went in. From the trailer came these sounds of life’s panic, shivers and moans and shrieks and crashings and hoarse cries, the most awesome fuckmusic I had ever heard. I got closer. I hadn’t seen before sitting on a chair at the foot of the trailer steps that same woman attendant from the afternoon who kept a close and watchful eye on the crowd in front of Fanny the Fat Lady.

I
led her from the trailer to the tent in the afternoon and back to her trailer at the end of the night. She placed her hand on my shoulder, and walking behind me at arm’s length with a great quivering resettlement of herself at each step, she made her stately trustful way down the midway.

Once she hugged me. She was surprisingly gentle I did not share the popular lust for her I was embarrassed and maybe frightened by that mountainous softness I pulled away. Right away I saw I’d made a mistake. Fanny had a cleft palate and on top of that the sounds she made were in Spanish but I could tell her feelings were hurt. I moved to her and let her hug me. She put her warm hand on the small of my back. I thought I felt the touch of an astute intelligence.

She was truly sensitive to men, she had a real affection for them. She didn’t know she was making money, she never saw the money. She held out her arms and loved them, and it didn’t matter what happened, if they came in the folds of her thighs or the creases in the sides of her which spilled over the structure of her trunk like down quilts, she always screamed as if they had found her true center.

I decided that between this retarded whore freak and the riffraff who stood in line to fuck her some really important sacrament was taken, some means of continuing with hope, a ritual oath of life which did not wear away but grew in the memory of her around the bars and taverns of the mountains, catching her image in the sawdust flying up through the sunlight in the mill yards or lying like the mist of the morning over the clear lakes.

On the other hand it was common knowledge in the carney that fat ladies were the biggest draw.

I got along with all the freaks, I made a point to. It was as if I had to acclimate myself to the worst there was. I never let them see that I had any special awareness of them. I knew it was important not to act like a rube. After a while they stopped looking at me with the carney eyes and
forgot I was there. Some, the Living Oyster for instance, were taken care of by members of their families who lived with them and probably got them their jobs in the first place. There was about them all, freaks and family, such competence that you almost wondered how normal people got along. There was a harmony of malformation and life that could only scare the shit out of you if you thought about it. The freaks read the papers and talked about Roosevelt, just like everyone else in the country.

But with all of that they lived invalid lives, as someone in the pain of constant hopeless bad health, and so their dispositions were seldom sunny.

The Fingerlings were mean little bastards, they were not really a family but who could tell? They all had these little pug faces. They used to get into fights all the time and only the dwarf could do anything with them. They used to torture Wolf Woman. What she had done to arouse their wrath I never knew. They liked to sneak up on her and pull out tufts of her hair. “That’s all right,” they screamed, scuttling out of her way. “Plenty more where that came from!”

And every day the rubes paid their money to see them and then went off and took a chance on Fortune’s wheel.

I had great respect for Sim Hearn. He was the owner of the enterprise. He was pretty strange himself, a tall thin man who walked with a stoop. Even the hottest days of the summer he wore an old gray fedora with the brim pulled way down, and a white-on-white shirt with a black tie and rubber bands around the sleeves above the elbows. He had stick arms. He was always sucking on his teeth, alighting on a particular crevasse with his tongue and then pulling air through it.
Cheeup cheeup!
If you wanted to know where Hearn was on the lot, all you had to do was listen. Sometimes you’d be doing your work and you’d realize it was you he was watching, the
cheeup cheeup
just behind your ear, as if he’d landed on your shoulder. You’d turn and there he’d be. He’d point at what he wanted done with his chin. “That,” he’d say. He was a stingy son of a bitch even with his words.

I was fascinated by him. Sucking his teeth and never speaking more than he had to gave him an air of preoccupation, as if he had weightier matters on his mind than a fifth-rate carney. But he knew his business, all right. He knew what towns to skip, he knew what games would go in
one place but not another, and he knew when it was time to pull up stakes. We were a smooth efficient outfit under Sim Hearn. He’d go on ahead to find the location and make the payoff. And when we drove into town he’d be waiting where we could see him sitting behind the wheel of his Model A with one arm out the window, the rubber band around the shirt sleeve.

His real genius was in freak dealing. Where did he get them? Could they be ordered? Was there a clearing house for freaks somewhere? There really was—a theatrical agency in New York on lower Broadway. But if he could, Sim Hearn liked to find them himself. People would come up to him and he’d go with them to see what was hidden in the basement or the barn. If he liked what he saw, he named his terms and didn’t have to pay a commission. Maybe he had dreams of finding something so inspiring that he’d make his fortune, like Barnum. But to the afflicted of the countryside, he was a chance in a million. I’d go to work one morning and see some grotesque I hadn’t seen before, not necessarily in costume at show time but definitely with the carney. Sometimes they didn’t want to display themselves in their own neighborhoods. Sometimes Hearn’s particular conviction of their ability was lacking or maybe he hadn’t figured out how best to show them. They required some kind of seasoning, like rookie ballplayers, to give them their competence as professionals. One would be around awhile and disappear just as another would show up, I think they were traded back and forth among the different franchises of this mysterious league.

But when a new freak was introduced, that evening everyone would shine, the new one would tone them all up in competitive awareness, except for Fanny, secure and serene in her mightiness.

Herewith bio the poet Warren Penfield.
Born Indianapolis Indiana August 2 1899.
Moved at an early age with parents to southern Colorado.
First place Ludlow Consolidated Grade School Spelling Bee 1908.
Ludlow Colorado Boy of the Year 1913.
Colorado State Mental Asylum 1914, 1915.
Enlisted US Army Signal Corps 1916.
Valedictorian US Army Semaphore School Augusta Georgia.
Assigned First Carrier Pigeon Company Seventh Signal Battalion
First Division, AEF. Saw action Somme Offensive
pigeons having the shit shot out of them feathers falling over
trenches blasted in bits like snowflakes drifting through the
concussions of air or balancing on the thin fountain of a scream.
Citation accompanying Silver Star awarded Warren
Penfield 1918: that his company of pigeons having been
rendered inoperable and all other signal apparatus including
field telephone no longer available to him Corporal Penfield
did stand in an exposed position lit by flare under enemy
heavy fire and transmit in extended arm semaphore the urgent
communication of his battalion commander until accurate and
redemptive fire from his own artillery indicated the message
had been received. This was not true. What he transmitted
via full arm semaphore under enemy heavy fire was the first
verse of English poet William Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood as follows
quote: There was a time when meadow grove and stream the
earth and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in
celestial light the glory and the freshness of a dream. It
is not now as it hath been of yore—turn wheresoe’er I may by
night or day the things which I have seen I now can see
no more endquote.
So informed Secretary of Army in letter July 4 1918, medal
enclosed. Incarceration US Army Veterans Psychological
Facility Nutley New Jersey 1918. First volume of verse
The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo
unpaged published by
the author 1918. No reviews. Crosscountry journey to
Seattle Washington 1919. Trans-Pacific voyage 1919.
Resident of Japan 1919–1927. Second volume of verse
Child
Bride in a Zen Garden
unpaged published in English
by Nosaka Publishing Company, Tokyo, 1926. No reviews.
Deported Japan undesirable alien 1927. Poet in residence
private mountain retreat Loon Lake NY 1929–1937.
Disappeared presumed lost at sea on around-
the-world airplane voyage 1937. No survivors.
Third volume of verse
Loon Lake
unpaged published
posthumously by the Grebe Press, Loon Lake NY 1939.
No reviews.

Y
ou are what? said Jack Penfield, leaning over the table to hear better. His brow lowered and his mouth opened, the face was poised in skeptical anticipation of the intelligence he was about to receive. Or had he received it? In his middle age he no longer wanted to be the recipient of good news of any kind. And if some was forthcoming he quickly rendered it ineffective, almost as if it were more important that the world be grimly consistent at this point than that it would offer a surprise. You are what?

The boy of the year, his son said.

What does that mean?

Oh Warren, his mother said, isn’t that fine. She sat down beside her son, pulling the wooden chair next to his, and she faced her husband across the table. He would have to work on both of them now.

I don’t know, Warren said. You get a certificate and five dollars at the spring ceremony.

Jack Penfield leaned back in his chair. I see. He got up and went to the mantel and took his pipe and tobacco tin and came back to the table and
fixed up for a while while they watched. The large flat fingers tamped the tobacco in the bowl. The hand of the lifelong miner with its unerasable lines of charcoal in the knuckles and under the nails. He lit his pipe. You know, he said, when I come up this evening there was a man with a rifle on Watertank Hill.