Bill remembered that Celeste had been a female baby with a vagina, a pecker, and a swollen head.
“I ended up burying her beside the road. Ever since her birth, and simultaneous death, she has been in that jar. And not long after, on the road. All these years, on the road. I thought it appropriate she was buried by the highway.”
Bill thought probably about a half hour later some dog had dug her up and was making a meal of her in a thicket somewhere.
“Anyway, the whirligig is ours, it’ll be here tomorrow. Phil is shipping it in.”
There wasn’t exactly a murmur of enthusiasm. Setting up that whirligig was a pain in the ass. Even Conrad, who could be easygoing about most things, had said one day he’d rather drink a bucket of runny rat shit than help put that bolt-rattling sonofabitch up.
Usually, it came time for putting together the whirligig, Phil got drunk to do it and called for volunteers to help. It was then that the carnivalites began to suffer minor ailments. Anything from a paper cut to a bad back surfaced. But somehow, every time they camped, the damn thing got put up so unsuspecting folks could risk their lives.
Bill wished Phil had just gone off with his whirligig and not stolen anything. Everyone would have been a lot happier. Now, with that damn whirligig coming back, Bill thought he’d like to hunt Phil down with a pack of dogs, a rifle, and a few angry peasants with torches.
“Who says he’ll show?” asked Conrad.
“Well, I had him write out what he’d done on a piece of paper, and I said he didn’t show in the morning, I’d give the paper to the cops. Now, I understand a number of you had some trouble yesterday. I’m glad no one was hurt. I was rude earlier today, and I hope Bill and Conrad can forgive me for my loss of temper, and my seeming lack of interest in the living. I assure you, I care about all of you, very much.”
“We gonna eat now?” Double Buckwheat asked.
Frost smiled. “I suppose so.”
Night settled in, gray at first with strands of the sun ripped up and strewn through it, like orange confetti. Bill, who had been interested in the dark cloud that had settled over them, looked up. It was no longer distinguishable, it was just part of the starless night, like a sack had been pulled over everything.
Everyone went off to their spot to eat. Bill wished it were breakfast, when they ate together at the picnic tables. He felt lonely going back to the Ice Man’s trailer. Lonely and confused. He hadn’t had such an unsettling day since his mother died. Well, since the firecracker stand robbery. Well, since Deputy Cocksucker and the discovery of the freak show and carnival.
Come to think of it, lately most of his days were unsettling. But today was unsettling in a different way. He wasn’t sure if it had been a good day or a bad one. He felt he had truly become friends with Conrad, and he liked the feeling. He had never had a real friend before, just people he could do small crimes with.
And Gidget. Jesus, she was something. And there was that stuff about James Dean. He had to see one of his movies sometime. He had to find out more about him, now that he knew he and the Sausage Man weren’t one and the same.
And there were other feelings. Guilt feelings. He had betrayed Frost, one of the first people in his life to truly do something for him out of the goodness of his heart. Before, he had seen Frost as a sucker, now he wasn’t so sure. Things inside him were being stirred he didn’t even know he had.
Twenty-three
Serious rain was thumping down and the river outside sounded as if it were running through the Ice Man’s trailer.
Bill was eating a mustard-dipped corn dog he’d warmed in the trailer’s little microwave. He was eating it and pondering about the Ice Man being not only frozen, but petrified. Was he petrified because he was frozen, or was he petrified and then frozen, and what was the point of freezing him if he was petrified?
Bill was working these mysteries about in the great room of his head when there was a scratching at the door, like a cat wanting in. At first he thought it might be coming from inside the freezer itself, made by the nails of a petrified hand. He jerked when he heard it and dropped the corn dog. It rolled across the glass and stopped, smearing mustard so that it looked like a great bug collision on a windshield.
Glancing at the Ice Man, he discovered the old boy hadn’t moved a smidgen. The scratching was coming from the door and it made the hairs on his upper back and neck salute. He was suddenly brought to mind of all those cats of his mother’s he had bagged and drowned. He had a vision of the raging river having washed them free and brought them back to seek him out.
Bill went over to the door, put his ear to it, heard Gidget’s voice say, “Bill?”
When he opened the door she was dressed in a yellow rain slicker with a hood. She looked like a plastic monk. He let her in and she took off the raincoat immediately and tossed it on the floor. Water ran out from under it. She said, “I thought you weren’t ever going to open the door.”
“I didn’t hear you out there at first. Or I didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m soaked to the bone. Damn water ran inside the slicker. It’s blowing ass over tea kettle.”
Gidget was wearing blue jean shorts and a man’s white T-shirt. Her shirt was wet and her breasts were visible through it.
“I don’t know you should be here.”
“Hell, Frost is out. I slipped him a Mickey. He won’t wake up until tomorrow morning. I said I was going to fix us drinks, and I did, but mine didn’t have a Mickey in it.”
“Someone could have seen you come over here.”
“In this rain, not likely. I couldn’t see myself out there. I damn near wandered off the edge into the river. It’s really perfect for me coming here.”
“Why are you here?”
Gidget looked at Bill as if she had just discovered his head had been hollowed out with a spoon. “Didn’t today mean anything to you?”
“I wasn’t sure it meant much to you. Way you disappeared.”
“I guess I was thinking, Bill. I was kind of overwhelmed. I was thinking about us. I was thinking about lots of things. For Christ sakes, offer me a towel. You got any liquor?”
Bill shook his head and got a towel. By the time he handed it to her she was out of her shorts, shirt, and shoes, and was wiping off. She wore only black panties with frilly black lace on the edges. When she spread her legs to wipe the insides of her thighs, he discovered the panties were split in the middle; the split rolled on either side of her pubic mound.
“Those made like that?”
Gidget, who seemed unaware of the fact she was nearly naked, glanced up. “Oh, yeah. They come like that. You like ’em?”
“Yeah.”
“Come here, baby.”
He moved toward her. When he touched her, her skin was cool and clammy, but after a few moments it was warm and damp. He touched her everywhere he could. Her lips were soft and her tongue was like a hot probe.
Finally he pushed her away and came out of his clothes. She did not help him undress. She bent across the freezer, her naked breasts against the mustard and the glass, her tail, trimmed by black lace, lifted to him.
Bill did not remember moving across the room to take her from behind. He felt as if he had fallen into her from a great height. He began to thrust. She moaned and her breasts slid across the mustard-smeared glass and made a sound like a squeegee cleaning a windshield. The corn dog bobbed about and leaped to the floor and rolled under the bed.
“Hurt me,” she said, and he slapped her buttocks with his hands, leaving great red palm and finger marks. He was reminded of pictures he had seen of Indian ponies where their owners had dipped hands in red paint and pressed their palms against the horse’s sides, leaving bright signs of ownership and decoration.
He spanked her harder and rammed her harder and she let out little happy hurt sounds. She rose up on the
