got both the hammer and the split. There’s real folks got both kinds of equipment, you know, but they ain’t split down the middle, and she ain’t one of them. There’s some others like that here; scams, I mean. Claiming they’re one thing or another but they ain’t none of it. And there’s the Pickled Punks. It’s the trailer ain’t open yet. The long one.”
“Pickled Punks?”
“You’ll see them tonight. Babies died at birth, or early on. Ones with tails and too many legs, heads, eyeballs, or what have you. Babies had they lived would have grown up to look like some of us. They’re in jars of preservative – pickled, you see. Folks like to look at them.”
“What about the Ice Man?”
Conrad the Wonder Dog was silent for a moment. “That’s special.”
“Is it a fake?”
“Frost came by it years ago, you see. It don’t sound like much, but once you see it… Well, there ain’t nothing like it. It’s special. I don’t look at it anymore. Damn thing bothers me.”
Bill thought: You ain’t got no mirrors in your trailer.
“Is it fake?” he asked again.
“All these paintings on the sides of trailers, they make all of us more than we are. You should see my trailer. Way it’s painted, I look exactly like a dog with some human features.”
Yes, thought Bill, and…
“But you look at us, you don’t see what you see on the side of the trailer. Same with the others. The paintings make us something we aren’t. They work on the mind. The Ice Man, his painting, it ain’t nothing to what’s inside. They can’t paint what’s inside, and they can’t make it any more than what it is, and yet, it ain’t nothing but this body layin’ there in a freezer. It’s nothing much and everything there is.”
“Is it fake?”
“It is what it is,” Conrad said.
Bill didn’t quite get what Conrad was saying, but he didn’t know how to ask him to explain himself. Conrad had finished his cigarette and had returned his attention to the painting of the Ice Man.
“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.
Fourteen
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.
