The Man in the Tree

Chapter Thirteen

In the morning when he opened the door, he found the carnival already set up. The rides were clustered near the entrance -- the sky ride, the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, loop-the-loop and the rest. Beyond them, booths selling food and soft drinks were in a line down the middle, and around the sides of the lot were the games of skill and the sideshow. Gene had picked up a little carny jargon; he knew that anybody who sold food or drink was a "butcher," and that the purple and orange drinks that the carnival people made in big tubs were called "flookum."

The freak tent was called "the string joint," because its compartments were arranged in a row or "string." Behind it, campers and trailers were parked, leaving an enclosed space, "the back yard"; the freaks were allowed to use it between performances, but only the Lizard Man did so; the Fat Lady, who was too heavy to move without great effort, sat in her special chair in the freak tent all day long, and Gene Anderson stayed in his trailer.

They showed three days in Orlando, then packed up and moved overnight to Leesburg. All day the carnival went on, out there beyond the walls of the tent; he could hear the canned music bracketing the lot from loudspeakers on poles, and the distant chime of the merry-go-round, and he could hear Wilcox's voice as he gathered a tip, but he could only imagine the crowds, the young men and girls in short-sleeved shirts, the mothers carrying children, the old people in their Sunday clothes.

At night after the show closed he sometimes wandered around the lot, watching as the concessionaires shut up their stands -- the dart throw with its limp array of balloons on a board punctured by a thousand misses; the string pull, the penny toss, the steeplechase. The ground was covered with a sad litter, candy wrappers, ticket stubs, paper cups, the detritus of pleasure. He often saw Irma LeFever at the candy-apple stand, where she worked between shows with the sad-faced young man who appeared to be her husband. She spoke to him when he passed, but the other concessionaires were too busy to talk.

In the mornings it was another kind of loneliness: the early sun lit up the wooden and canvas stalls with a pathetic promise; the lot was clean and empty. Everyone was busy then too, the ride attendants taking canvas covers off the cars, butchers filling their popcorn machines, mixing flookum, breaking out cartons of foot-long dogs.

It was an unspoken rule in the carnival that the freaks did not appear on the midway or in town. The fire eater could come and go as she pleased, and so could Wilcox, but if the real freaks had appeared in public, they would have been giving away what they had for sale. They could not eat in local restaurants, or even go to the drugstore for a tube of toothpaste; others performed such errands for them. Their view was always the same: the canvas walls of the tents, the rear ends of trailers, the tattered grass.

The first performance of the sideshow was at one o'clock; after that, as long as the talker could keep gathering a tip, they appeared every twenty minutes until dinner time. By the second week, Gene no longer had to look at his watch; he knew when it was time to leave the trailer, sit for a moment in his outsize canvas chair behind the string joint, and then enter through the back wall and sit on his throne as Wilcox finished his spiel about the preserved calf embryo. He worked only five minutes in every twenty throughout the day, and during those five minutes he learned to carry in his mind the argument of the book he had been reading, to look at the customers -- "the marks" -- and not see them.

The Carnival moved north up the Atlantic coast, then west into Georgia and South Carolina, a week here, three days there. Sometimes they traveled as much as a hundred miles between stops, sometimes only thirty or forty.

One evening after the last performance, Wilcox came up to him at the door of his trailer. "Like to talk to you a moment, John."

"Okay. Come in."

"No, I'll stay here, thanks. It's just this. You've been with the show almost a month, and I'm practically the only one you talk to. You don't even eat with the others. Why is that?"

"Not feeling very social."

"If you don't mind my saying so, you're like a guy running off to join the Foreign Legion because his girl's thrown him over. You came here because you thought it was going to be awful, and now all you can think about is how awful it is. When you look at the others, you're thinking, 'Ugh, they're freaks.'"

"I'm a freak too," Gene said. He was trembling, and he could feel his face growing warm.

"Yes, you are, but we're using the word in two different senses. In a sideshow a freak is a member of the aristocracy, something most people can never be. But when you say 'freak,' you mean not human. Well, they are human, and so are you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get drunk." He turned and walked away.

Gene closed the door and sat down with his hands between his knees, staring at nothing. After a few minutes he went to the refrigerator and got out the ham and vegetables he had been thawing for his dinner, but one look was enough; he knew the food would choke him. Shame and anger came in waves. He wanted to hit Wilcox; he wanted to walk out of the trailer and never come back; he didn't know what he wanted.

Over the line of tents the white lights of the Ferris wheel were revolving under a few early stars. The air was cool. Gene walked across the yard to Wilcox's little trailer and knocked on the door.

"Yes."

"Mike, it's John."

After a moment the door opened; Wilcox stood there, looking a little flushed.

"You were right," Gene said. "Thanks."

Wilcox smiled. "You know, that's the most marvelous -- oh, damn. Come in and have a drink."

"I'll just sit here in the doorway for a minute, if it's all right."

"Of course -- I wasn't thinking. Half a mo." He disappeared and came back with a tumbler of whiskey in each hand. "You're my first giant, actually -- Tim Emerson was before my time. It must be a nuisance, doorways and taxis and so on."

"It wasn't so bad until this year. Then I had some other problems, and I began to think, if it's hard now, what will I do when I'm eight feet tall, or nine? I might as well get used to it."

"Yes, I see. I feel much the same way, if it's any help. There isn't a lot of give in the world, most places, for anybody who's a bit different. I mean they don't seem to make allowances. My God, the people on the street where I lived with my mother in Birmingham, you wouldn't believe it, they lived in identical houses and wore the same clothes, carried the same umbrellas and went to work at the same time every morning, I mean, you couldn't even tell the wives and children apart. I used to think of changing the house numbers; I thought the husbands coming home would go into the wrong houses and say, 'Hullo, Mum, what's for tea?' and nobody would notice. I had dreams about the factory where they made people all alike."

"You said you lived with your mother -- was your father dead?"

"Yes, he jumped off a bridge when I was nine -- bit of a jolt all round." He held up the bottle. "Have another drop of this."

"What is it, Scotch?"

"Yes. Not the best, I'm afraid, but it does the trick. Look, what I meant to say before -- I know it must be hard to get used to. Being on exhibition like a man from Borneo or something, but, you know, these people here are the ones who couldn't stand the conformity. Really when you come to think of it, it's fantastic luck that we've got any place to go to. I can imagine a world where there's nothing but those semidetached houses all in a row. That gives me the shudders."

"I understand what you're saying." Gene stood up. "I'm going on back, I've got some thinking to do."

"God bless," said Wilcox.

The next day, instead of going back to his trailer after the first performance, Gene sat down with a book in the back yard. The Lizard Man, who was also reading, glanced over and nodded. After a while they fell into conversation. The book the Lizard Man was reading was called "Genetics and the Races of Man"; he offered to lend it to Gene when he was through.

In the following week he accepted an invitation to a dinner party in the Fat Lady's trailer. Logan Forster, her husband, a beaming little man with a black mustache, cooked spaghetti in a huge pot and served it with a garlicky sauce. Irma and her husband were there, and Wilcox and the Lizard Man, and Ducklin in his baseball cap. Most of them sat on cushions on the floor; Betty Ann was in her wheelchair, and Logan insisted that Gene take the loveseat. The Forsters were from Australia, and Betty Ann, it turned out, had an astonishing repertoire of bawdy songs, performed in an innocent little-girl voice.

Afterward Irma's quiet husband volunteered to help Logan with the cleanup; Irma sat beside Gene on the loveseat and they began talking about sword-swallowing.

"How did you ever learn to do it?" Gene asked.

"The Human Pincushion taught me -- Jim Simons. That was three seasons ago. He was with the show till last year, then he went to Texas. I just wanted to learn, and he taught me. The only hard part is, you have to learn to keep from gagging when the sword goes past your glottis, right here, where you swallow. That took me two months, but then the rest was easy. You just bend your head back to make a straight line with your mouth and your throat, and then drop the sword down easy, a little bit at a time, until you feel it touch the bottom of your stomach. That's the part I don't like." She studied him for a moment. "I suppose you've heard about giants and sword-swallowers," she said, "but don't take it too seriously."

"Giants and sword-swallowers?" Gene replied. "No, what do you mean?"

"You really don't know? Well, that's okay too. Maybe we'd better keep it that way."

Gene discovered that Ed Parlow, the Lizard Man, liked to play Scrabble; they played two or three times a week, behind the freak tent while they waited to go on, with an alarm clock to remind them if they got too absorbed in the game.

Parlow seemed extraordinarily well read, although from a casual remark he had made Gene gathered that he had had no schooling beyond the sixth grade. One evening in Gene's trailer, they were talking about a book Parlow had lent him, "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren," by Iona and Peter Opie.

"It may be that kids that age haven't had time to develop a super-ego," Parlow said, "but I think the main thing is that they haven't got the formal power structure that grownups have. They have to sort themselves out somehow, and they do it through force partly, and partly through mockery -- if they make you cry, they win."

"I was too big for the seats in school," Gene said. "I had to sit with my feet in the aisle, and they called me Feet."

"They called me Fish-skin," said Parlow apologetically. "One day. two kids caught me going home from school and whitewashed me."

"Whitewashed you ?"

"That's right, there was a can of whitewash in somebody's basement -- they took me down there, pulled my shirt off and painted me. My mother was crying when she washed it off. It was irritating stuff -- my skin was pretty raw for a week or so. My father was furious -- he went to the kids' parents and the principal, It didn't do any good, of course. Kids have an instinct about anybody who's visibly different. It may be a Darwinian trait, to weed out anybody who's too far from the norm."

"There's no cure for this?"

Parlow shook his head. "No. I had all kinds of doctors when I was a kid. You see, it's genetic, or at least -- they call it 'heredofamilial,' which I take to mean they think it's genetic but they can't prove it. It runs in families, anyway. My father had it on his elbows and knees. As Ambrose Bierce said, the best thing is not to be born."

After a moment he reached across the table and touched Gene's arm lightly. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," he said with a smile. "If I had the chance to go back and say, 'No, I don't want to be born,' I wouldn't. There are so many people worse off than I am. Brain-damaged kids, just living vegetables -- that's awful. I've got all my faculties, such as they are; I can read, I can think. I'm alive, I can move around, I don't have a whole lot of pain. And you can't say this isn't a cushy job."

"What would you have done if things had been different?"

"I've thought about that. I would have gone to college, of course, and probably I would have majored in philosophy. And I suppose by now I'd be teaching philosophy somewhere. Well, as a matter of fact, a friend of mine is a philosophy professor in Asheville -- I see him every year or so when we come through there. He hasn't got tenure, and he's got a wife and three kids, and a house -- you know, keeping up with the Joneses. I don't think he respects his students, he doesn't really enjoy what he's doing, and at the same time he's terribly afraid of losing his job.

"I think about him, and his class schedules and meetings and so on. He wears these tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, and he smokes a pipe, but how much time does he have to think about philosophy? I think I've read more than he has. It's funny to say that, but it's true. I always take a carton of books with me, and from October to March I have nothing to do but read. Would I change places with him? I don't know."

One morning in early May, someone rapped on the trailer door. Gene opened it; there stood Irma, dressed in a terrycloth robe.

"Hi there," she said. "Listen, is your plumbing okay?"

"Plumbing? Yes, why?"

"Well, my shower's on the fritz. Would you mind?"

"Mind?"

"If I took a shower."

"Oh. No, of course not -- come on in."

She brushed past him with a whiff of fragrance, something flowery, but too faint to identify. "Don't get too near me," she said over her shoulder, "I probably stink like a goat."

"No, you smell good."

She gave him a smile and turned to inspect the trailer. "Hey, this is nice. You had it all done over inside, didn't you?"

"Yes, pretty much."

She glanced up at the unmade bed, then mounted the two steps to the rear section. "Oh, the shower's new, too!" she said as she opened the door. "Oh, this is terrific." She took a yellow plastic cap out of the pocket of her robe.

"Here's a towel," Gene said.

"Keep it for me. Here." She slipped out of her robe, handed it to him and walked with a flash of pale buttocks into the shower stall. The door closed; after a moment the pump started and he heard the water hissing on the metal floor.

Gene put the towel and the terry-cloth robe on the counter. He took off his own dressing gown. His throat was dry; he could feel his heart beating. He opened the shower door and stepped in.

Irma glanced at him with one eye; the other was covered by soapsuds. "Well, hello," she said.

Gene took the soap from her and began to lather her smooth back. Presently he put the soap down and rubbed the lather with his hands over her breasts and belly. She leaned her head back against his breastbone. Her hip came against him, but he twisted away.

"What's the matter?" she asked, and looked down. "Oh. My gosh, he's a big one, isn't he?" She turned around in his arms. "Now I'll do you."

Her hands were gentle. When they were both rinsed, she turned off the water, opened the door, stepped out, and picked up the towel. As soon as he came through the doorway, she began to dry him. Gene reached over her head to the cabinet, got another towel. Their efforts interfered with each other, and she began to laugh. He followed her down the steps and up again to the front of the trailer.

"Do you know why I like you?" she asked between kisses. They were in bed together; she was curled up against him, and his hand was on her breasts. "Because you make me feel small."

"You are small."

"No, I'm enormous, I'm five nine and a half. If I wear heels, I'm almost six feet tall. But you make me feel petite. You're so big." Her finger traveled slowly down the length of his erect penis. "Too big for my lady Jane."

"Your what?"

"Didn't you ever read "Lady Chatterley's Lover"? That's what she called her thing. I think it's nicer than 'cunt' or 'muff.' And this is your John Thomas, and he must be ten inches long."

Gene tried to get closer to her, but she held him away. "Get up a minute, honey. Please. Just for a minute, all right?"

Angry and confused, he got out of bed. "Stay there," Irma said. She squirmed around on her back until her head hung over the edge. "Now I'm going to show you about sword-swallowers and giants, honey. Come on. Don't worry, it's all right. Come on."