“Naw, nothing like murder. Just a little trouble. I reckon it’ll blow over afore long. And yeah, I know better.”
“Good,” Frost said. “I’ve been watching you, and I think you’re the man to do what I first asked you about.”
“Managing?”
“Sort of. I need a man who can go into town and do some of the things I’m doing. I’m sick of it. I’ll make a lot of the arrangements still, but I need someone to go in and pay some money here and there and pick up a few things and make sure permits are in order and advertising is taken care of. Got me?”
“I don’t know anything about permits and that kind of stuff.”
“Frankly, you don’t have to. It’s all arranged. Look, Bill, it isn’t really a managing job. It’s just donkey work, but it isn’t difficult donkey work and I’d rather not do it. It’s a way for you to start picking up a little money, and being a little more useful around here. Some of the others are starting to think you’re some kind of pet of mine because you don’t have oddities.”
“Reckon I look odd enough.”
“Everyone knows now it isn’t a permanent oddity, and that you aren’t trying to work up an oddity. I got to tell you straight, Bill, you have to do this, you want to stay on. We don’t really need anyone else to just set things up.”
“Am I gonna have to keep doing that too?”
“Yes. I said we don’t need you, but you’re here, you help.”
“But this town stuff… With this face?”
“Another week, you’ll be good as new.”
“Yeah?”
“A little puffy, maybe, but lots better. Surely you’ve noticed it’s better.”
Bill, who had avoided examining his face for some time, went into the bathroom. Normally he just glanced into the sink and ran the water and washed his face and hands without looking in the mirror, but now he raised his head slowly and saw his reflection.
The Blowed Up Man was gone. He was puffy and red, even blue in a couple of spots. Knotty over the eyes, on the cheeks, at the corners of his lips, and right under the nose. Not pretty, but no one would mistake him for a freak now, just a guy who couldn’t keep his hands up in a barroom brawl.
Bill washed and toweled his face dry, happy about the improvement. He came back in and sat down on the bed. “You’re right, I’m gettin’ better.”
“These shots will make it cure up all the faster.”
“This job going to actually pay me something besides room and board, huh?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How much?”
“It depends what we haul in. I take the money for entrance and for looking at the Ice Man, everyone else runs their own show. They take what they get for people looking at them, any tips they can finagle. I get a little slice of their pie so they can stay in the carnival. Way I’d do you is give you a percentage of what I get, plus room and board. You’ll be in another trailer.”
“What trailer?”
“The Ice Man’s trailer. It’s the only one with enough extra space. It’s got facilities. I’ve even bought you some clothes. A few pairs of pants and T-shirts. A light jacket. Tennis shoes, socks, and underwear.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Feeling better, Bill became a shrewd businessman. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “I still don’t know what kind of money we’re talkin’.”
“You’ll find when I have a really good week I’ll be generous. We usually do all right.”
“Yeah, I’m surprised the jack this racket brings in. I always thought carnivals were by the skin of their teeth.”
“It might seem like a lot to you, but by the time I deal with expenses and such it’s no great shakes. The Ice Man, believe it or not, draws more people than anything.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“It’s a full third of my income. There may come a time when I semiretire, and just put the Ice Man up somewhere for exhibit. I wouldn’t have the expenses I have now, and it’d be a good living, I think. You see, people are getting so they don’t like to look at freaks. Political correctness, I guess, but my children, the ones everyone else calls the Pickled Punks, and the Ice Man, people don’t feel guilty because they’re already dead. They’ll pay to look, because what they’re looking at can’t look back.”
“That Ice Man, he what you said he was, a Neanderthal?”
“I said he might be. He looks a little too good to be a Neanderthal, don’t you think?”
Bill wasn’t really sure what a Neanderthal looked like, so he held back judgment. “You ever had the electricity go off on that thing? I mean, it did, wouldn’t the Ice Man come to pieces pretty quick?”
“I’m prepared. What do you say? Is it a deal?”
They shook hands on it.
Seventeen
Bill awoke mornings atwist in his blankets, his cot squeaking as he rolled over and looked at the Ice Man’s refrigerated tomb.
It was the same each day. He found living in the trailer with the Ice Man bothersome. At night, so he could sleep, he lay a blanket over the top of the freezer glass. He was uncertain what this accomplished, but it made him feel better.
Sometimes in a deep sleep he dreamed the Ice Man was breathing and he could hear it as certain as he could hear his own breath. In and out. And beyond the breathing was the thumping of a heart.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Most certainly the beating of an ancient bloodless heart. And there was the tapping at the glass. The tapping would grow more desperate, work in rhythm to the breathing and the pounding of the dead heart, and he would try to awake to make the dream end, but he feared if he awoke it would all be real. At least in the dream, he could call it a dream.
Other times he thought he heard the glass splintering, or thought he heard footsteps gliding up behind him, but when he broke the spell of sleep, turned with a start and an explosion of breath, there was only the freezer with the blanket stretched over it, its motor humming, and the beating of the little fan stirring hot air. He knew then the noise was the freezer and the fan and the outside wind rocking the trailer, working in tandem to scare the shit out of him.
If he turned the fan off, it grew hot and sticky and he couldn’t sleep at all. So he ran the fan and it and the wind and the humming freezer gave him the Ice Man to deal with.
Except for bedtime the trailer wasn’t so bad. During the day he drove Frost’s motor home. The Ice Man’s trailer was pulled by a semi-cab driven by Conrad. Conrad wore a black cowboy hat pulled low on his head. He was mounted on a leather cushion. He used a crutchlike device fastened to his leg to work the pedals. When he drove he assumed the appearance of a fella waiting for his last meal to pass.
When the caravan stopped it was soon show time. After the last customer left, the trailer was his again. He enjoyed it then, before there was the sound of the wind, the fan, and the freezer. He was even brave enough to place his dinner on the freezer glass and eat while looking at the Ice Man’s face, clearing the glass from time to time with the hair dryer. Later, if they were near where he could pick up a channel, he would grapple with his aluminum-foil-covered rabbit ears, trying to bring in a TV station, or he would listen to the radio, listen to anything playing or talking, as long as it was noise.
Conrad loaned him books, and he was amazed at how much company they were. He had never read much before, just some little Reader’s Digest things, but he found the Westerns soothing. Most of them were by someone called Louis L’Amour, and there were older ones that he liked even better by someone called Luke Short, and sometimes the books were not Westerns, but were about men with blazing machine guns who killed lots of other
