The School of Beauty and Charm (28 page)

Zane looked at his watch. “Two and a half minutes—counting the time he was thrown over the wire.” Another gurney appeared. Daisy climbed into the ring, put a towel around Spencer's neck, and then handed him a banana.

Beside me, a woman in a pink seersucker pantsuit sighed and said, “And he paid five dollars for that.”

Suddenly, the teenage girl who had been glowering beside her mother stood up and made her way to the ring. She wore a T-shirt that said
I LOVE NEW YORK
and a friendship bracelet on her thick wrist. When Arthur took her glasses off, he had to help her find her way into the ring.

“I'm not going to tell you how much I weigh,” she told Arthur in a serious voice.

“I would never ask a lady such a question.”

In the stands, her mother was going nuts. “Linda!” she called. “Linda you get back up here right now before I have to come get you. You hear me? I won't have this. I will not. Young lady, I am counting to ten!”

Linda sighed. When Arthur whispered something in her ear, she scowled and turned reluctantly to her audience. “I love you, Mother,” she said sullenly.

“Don't you smart off to me,” said her mother, making her
way through the bleachers with her pocketbook in hand. “Mister, if you put my girl in there with that animal I'm gonna call the police. You all hear that? I'm gonna call the police!” The crowd gave appreciative murmurs.

Before anyone could stop her, Linda had hauled herself over the chickenwire and stood in the middle of the mattress facing the killer chimp. In his corner, Spencer crossed his arms over his chest, watching her closely. She was a big girl, with thick dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail on top of her head. Her jeans looked painfully tight, and the i love new york T-shirt stretched over her ballooning chest. Without her glasses, her face seemed sleepy and naked. She just stood there.

Cautiously, Spencer approached on all fours. He examined her tennis shoes and untied one lace. Then he tried to look up her pant leg. Jumping up, he circled her, pulled lightly on her ponytail, grinned, and did it again. She held out her hand.

I shut my eyes. Would he bite off her fingers? I didn't hear a sound. When I opened my eyes, he was on his knees, kissing Linda's hand. The rubes went wild. Linda's mother, who had been restrained by the side of the ring, wept.

“Five minutes,” called Arthur, but Linda stayed one minute more and made two hundred dollars.

The Boxing Chimps were followed by the Most Beautiful Teenager in America, starring Sunny, who turned into a gorilla at the end of the act. Even with Tic Toc furiously working smoke and mirrors backstage, the appearance of Jim in a gorilla suit timed to coincide with the disappearance of Sunny in a bathing suit was not convincing. Then there was the snake. It was a rubber snake, the kind sold in bins at discount stores:
kelly green on top and white on the belly, with a long red forked tongue striking between two flimsy fangs. Sunny was terrified of it. She wore the toy around her neck, stroking it only when someone backstage hissed out an order. Then she shuddered.

As Tic Toc dimmed the lights to a rosy pink, Arthur announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen! I present Sunny Boudreaux! The Most Beautiful Teenager in America!” Scowling, Sunny slouched forward in a beige bikini that sagged over her flat bottom. The rubber snake hung around her neck like a towel. Tic Toc had snuck in his favorite Jimmy Buffet song, and now Sunny was obliged to dance to “Why Don't We Get Drunk.” She stroked the snake once, twice, and then gave her hips a lethargic wiggle.

“Her act sucks,” I told Zane, who was watching her closely. “It's fake.”

“People need a break from reality, especially after watching the Boxing Chimps. That was real blood. Real pain. Arthur is a genius at manipulating the marks' emotions. They need this. You'll see.” He added, “Don't take this the wrong way, but she's very sexy.”

“She's tacky,” I said hotly.

“People like tacky. You've probably spent your whole life trying to develop good taste. You think all the tackiness you see in the world is evidence of your progress in refinement. You refuse to believe that people hang air fresheners shaped like Christmas trees from their rearview mirrors because that makes them happy. Oh no, they do that because they have poor taste.”

“You're calling me middle class.”

“A wild guess. You went to prep school, but no one's ever
heard of it. Your family belongs to a country club that calls the toilet a powder room and can't afford a doorman. Middle class is in the damn middle. Middle of the road. Do you know what's in the middle of the road?”

He looked at me, eyes blazing. “Roadkill,” he said.

“Your tan looks fake. It's orange.”

“Is this a fight? Are you starting a fight, Louise?”

“You bought her a bra,” I said, my eyes smarting with tears. “And panties.”

“Oh, fuck! Fuck me! I knew you were going to do this. I just knew it.”

As the music played on, Sunny's indolence became sultry and hypnotic. The corners of her wide mouth turned down, and as she stroked the snake, her lackluster eyes took on a faraway glaze. Zane watched as she stroked the snake.

“Do what? What does roadkill do? We sit and rot, right? We stink. That's what I'm doing, I'm—”

“I'm sorry, okay? I didn't put that the right way. I just meant that people are different. You need to be open to that.”

“Shut up.” I was crying, so I covered my face with one hand, but I kept the fingers slightly spread to see Sunny. She had the snake's head between her boobs now and had closed her eyes. As she swayed back and forth, her stringy hair fell into her face, and her bathing suit bottom sagged further down her hips. The snake slipped down to her belly, and then around one white thigh. Zane was all over it.

I kept telling myself,
It's okay. She's going to turn into a gorilla. She will go away
. I waited. Finally, Tic Toc crossed the lights, sent up some smoke, and after some noisy fumbling on the
dark stage, showed us that yes indeed, the Most Beautiful Teenager in America had turned into a big ugly gorilla.

I turned to Zane, ready to make up, but he had disappeared.

“W
HAT IS NORMAL
?” Arthur asked when he gathered us before the sign zane wilder, the human dragon. I glanced at the table to make sure I'd set it up right. “Most of what you've seen in our show tonight requires that you change the way you ordinarily think about the world. What you are about to see will challenge your most basic assumptions about the human body. I will do my best to prepare you for the startling revelations to come.”

“'Scuse me!” called Lollibells in falsetto. Then he pranced through the crowd on stilts, dressed as a nun. “Oooh, you bad boy!” he said, bending down at a terrifying angle to slap Arthur's head. “Don't look up my dress!” Warren danced on his stilts, raising a leg high to poke a man in the ribs, then to remove a child's hat. He hopped on one leg, then on his hands, revealing a pair of Satan-red underwear, and then on one hand. “Oooh, sword swallower,” he called out. “Here, dragon! Here, kitty kitty!” Then he leapt into the air and did a back flip, landing on Zane's table, perfectly balanced on the stilts.

“What is normal?” continued Arthur after he had chased Lollibells off. “We all know that it's not normal to lay a hand on a hot object, such as an iron, but wetting a finger to check an iron is normal, isn't it? Sticking pins in one's body is not normal, but diabetics do it every day. Sword swallowing is done every day in hospitals when an anesthesiologist inserts an airway into a stomach tube. If you take a bead, say a pearl, and
feed a piece of string through it, you'll find that you can easily snuff it up your nose, catch it at the back of your throat, and pull the whole string out of your mouth. Now, if you tie the ends of the string together, you can make a loop; you can run it around and around, into your nose and out of your mouth. In India, this is the way people clean their nasal passages. To them, it is normal. I see this young man eyeing his mother's necklace; please don't try this at home.

“What is abnormal is to find men and women with the courage to pursue these talents. I have found such a man. May I introduce to you, the fire-eating, sword-swallowing, ultimate wonder of the Arthur Reese Traveling Show—the Human Dragon, Zane Wilder!”

Zane stepped into the spotlight, hair braided, spangled vest open as usual over his washboard belly, pirate earrings glinting. Silently, he put on his white gloves, dipped his finger into the pan of lighter fluid, and lit it on the votive candle. He put the flame out in his mouth. By the time several rubes had concluded, in stage whispers, that the glove was the trick, Zane removed it and lit his finger. He used the flaming finger to light his first torch. Even though he had told me that only vapor burns, I cringed as he put the flaming torch in his mouth. Next, he lit a cigarette, pumping it until the head was red hot, touched it to his tongue, and then held it out with his finger on the glowing red cherry. Lollibells had said something about an insulator cap created by the wet tongue, but this only lasted a few seconds. I held my breath until he bit off the cherry.

“Eat a lightbulb!” yelled a mark, and I glared at him.

Zane moved with the rhythm of a sleepwalker as he lit one torch, and then another, and began to pass them back and forth
from his mouth, lighting one with the other. I almost missed the sleight of hand when he squeezed some lighter fluid onto his tongue. Holding his chin high, with his legs spread for balance, and his mouth partly open, he exhaled softly, producing a fountain of fire.

He lit the next torch from the fountain of flame at his mouth. Again, he lit his tongue and lit a torch from that flame. The rubes were clapping madly, and Arthur Reese smiled. Zane threw the torches to the ground, stomped them with his feet, and bowed.

Then he turned his back to us, a smoking statue with a single braid down his back. People began to shuffle and whisper; to my horror, someone coughed. “One cough and I'm a dead man,” Zane had told me.

When he finally turned around, he held his grandfather's Civil War bayonet. It was eighteen inches long. The nickel plating he'd added to it to make it glide more smoothly glimmered. He spread his legs, tilted his head back, opened his mouth. Slowly, with his eyes shut, he inserted the point of the blade into his throat. Down it went, behind the gently bobbing Adam's apple, down, down, down, until he held the hilt between his strong white teeth. It was all I could do not to cough.

After the show, while I was having a glass of red wine outside the tent, Lollibells stepped out from the shadows holding a white rat by the tail. I screamed.

“Oh you hush,” he said. “I been watching you, girl; you ain't afraid of nothing! You waltz in here telling everybody you're a clown! Right in front of ole has-been Lollibells! Now that is funny.” He dangled the rat in front of me. “You want to be with
it. Don't fib to me. I seen it in your face. You have made the foolish decision to go on the road with the Arthur Reese Traveling Show. You already sleeping with Smokey the Bear, bless yo little pea-picking heart. Ain't that what they say back home, Georgia peach?”

“Georgia roadkill.”

“Excuse me?”

“That's what Zane called me.”

“Tsk, tsk . . . that little firecracker. Well, I cannot speak for the Human Dragon, but immodest mockery of those I love is one of my defects of character.”

“Love is pretty cheap around here.”

“Take it or leave it.” He held out the rat.

Gingerly, I grasped the tail between two fingers, flinching as the thing jerked. “See what I tole ya? Courage. That lil ole hook-wormy thang from Louisiana ain't got nothing on you. Now you run this mouse over to Madge Olinick. You ask her real nice if you can feed it to Percy. Be sweet now. Girl, if Madge don't like you, you ain't going nowhere.”

I turned away.

“One more thing . . . there's a gentleman here to see you. A fine-looking colored gentleman from Georgia. He's having a hot dog.”

“I
HAVE TO
feed this mouse to a snake,” I explained when Jeremiah offered to buy me a hot dog.

“Well, I won't keep you. I was just in town and thought I'd drop by. You working here now?”

“Not exactly.”

“I see.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin, threw it in the garbage can, and then put his hands in his pockets and leaned back on his heels. Except for some distinguished streaks of gray in his temples, he looked the same as he did two summers ago at Southern Board. “Looks like you caught you a rat,” he said, smiling.

“I think it's a mouse,” I said, dangling it by its tail. Around us, barkers shouted, children shrieked on rides, and the faint strain of “Le Sabre” played from the merry-go-round.

“Your mama and daddy are looking for you. They been right worried. Got all the police in Wapanog County out looking.
Your daddy got him a police radio. Listens to it all the time. Figuring you might be kidnapped.”

“Did they send you after me?”

“Naw.” He took a toothpick out of his pocket and began to suck on it. “I just brought my family down here for a little vacation, and I saw that Ferris wheel and got to thinking.” I looked around for his family, but he was alone. He was the only mark on the lot who looked like he couldn't be cheated. He looked like Henry.

“I have to go,” I said. “I have to feed the snake.”

“Caught you a rat after all, didn't ya?” He put his broad hand on my shoulder. “Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to get to a phone and call your mama and daddy. I imagine they'll take it collect.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“You not the only chile that ever ran off to the circus. I tried it myself once.”

I
STOOD BESIDE
Madge as Percy followed the mouse around the bottom of her bathtub. It took over an hour for him to open his jaws and swallow the shrieking rodent, and by that time I was ready to faint. Madge and I watched the snake swallow, slowly squeezing the mouse down its long yellow body. Finally, she said, “I forgive you.”