Hot Night in the City

although sparsely attended, was at least watertight.

So the agreement to do the work ourselves and to purchase the tiles by levying a small tax on our land was easily arrived at... perhaps three glasses around, with old Aramburu keeping tab on his slate. Of course there were complaints from the Colonel, who was rich and stingy and who had no children and was unlikely ever to have, as he was no longer strong with women. And there was some grumbling about the Ibar family, which had very little land to tax, but which nevertheless gave God a baby every year, and the village had to school them. But such complications are to be expected. As the old saying has it: Nothing is completely fair but the Last Judgement... so much the worse for us.

It all seemed sufficiently clear-cut that we could draw up the ruling minutes in just a few hours of close reasoning and arguing.

But then someone thought of the Widow Jaureguiberry! 'But wait! The widow will either have to pay her share, or she will have to admit publicly that she has no land of her own. And that would shame her!'

'But she is too poor to pay! She lives on nothing but cheese and prayer!'

'Bof!' said the Colonel. 'What shame will there be? She knows that we know that she has no land!' The Colonel was bitter about the Widow Jaureguiberry because she always allowed her sheep to linger longest in his fields, as he was the richest of us all.

'Of course she knows that we know. That is not the point! The point is that no one has ever said it aloud! The shame of such things comes with admitting them, as any fool would know, if he were not so stingy that he pisses vinegar—no offence intended to anyone here, ex-army officer or otherwise.'

'Oh my, oh my, oh my,' said old Aramburu, rubbing his palms together. 'I'm afraid this is a puzzle that will have to be untangled over several little glasses, if we are to get the wording of the minutes just right.'

And so, for the next three hours, there was sharp and probing debate in the home of the wine merchant. Although as a creator of pastorales I am known to have a great fondness for words, and perhaps even a certain gift in that direction (I do not brag of this, lest God numb my tongue and dry up my mind), it was the oldest man of the village who was chosen to take down the minutes. It made my hands itch to see how he constantly wet the lead of his stubby pencil with his tongue as he labored clumsily over his smudged sheet, his body hunched over the table, his face not twenty centimeters from the paper, scratching out and rephrasing, scratching out and rephrasing, while the rest of us took turns speaking our minds and offering new and more precise wording.

And this is how the minutes finally read:

MINUTES OF THE MEETING ABOUT THE NEW ROOF ON THE ECOLE MATERNELLE

It is resolved and agreed that from each farm—or from each man if there are two or more adult men living on one farm (and by 'adult' is meant over eighteen years of age, or already married, or both) but exception is made for anyone who is hoping to be admitted to study medicine at the university next year and who needs every centime his family can save for that purpose—but not excepting him if it turns out that he is not received at the university because sometimes he plays pelote against the church wall when he should be cudgeling his brains over his books—and also excepting any man who became one of God's 'innocents' when he was struck in the head by a ball in 1881, after crushing all opposition for eight straight years at the annual jai alai competitions in Mauleon, bringing great glory to our village (should there be such a person); and also excepting any old tramp who lives in the loft of someone's barn and eats only bread and onions, and who wanders about the roads in all weather, muttering to himself (and this is definitely not a reference to anyone named Benat, no matter how much it might seem to be)—but each and every other farm will contribute twenty-three francs per hectare (or part thereof). And the number of hectares owned by a person will not be based on what he or she claims for the purpose of his or her taxes, but rather upon his or her estimate of his land the last time he or she tried to borrow against it, and in one case upon how much land he told the potential father-in-law he had when he was trying to marry off his daughter to this trusting man's son—if any such person there be. (Note: it is understood that the Elicabe family takes exception to this last part because they consider it to be dangerously close to slander and will fight anyone who intended it to be so, particularly Bernard Irouleguy, who proposed the phrasing in the first place.)

However, if any person happens to own fields in some other village (such as Etchebar, to cite but one example), then that person (or these persons, whoever they might be) will not have to pay the general levy, because this council cannot find a way to make them (or her) pay without incurring the shame of seeming to ask Etchebar to contribute to our infant-school. And anyway, such persons probably do not have any children in school because of her (or his) age.

But if any person (ex-officer or other) decides to buy a bit of land in Etchebar to escape paying his share, then this exception does not apply to him, so he might as well forget it.

Signed by the Undersigned 11th day of March, 1911

SNATCH OFF YOUR CAP, KID!

When did I get started with the carnivals?

Well, it was the summer of 1934, and down in the Kansas/Oklahoma dust bowl it was hotter than a Methodist's vision of hell, almost as dry as one of their sermons. The dust rising off those dirt farm roads would make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth till you couldn't work up enough mouth water to swallow, let alone spit.

The Great Depression had America by the throat and it was squeezing. Everywhere up and down this blessed republic you could see men plodding along dirt farm roads, the heel-chewed cuffs of their overalls dragging up little dust eddies. It sometimes seemed that the whole country was on the move. Some were looking for work—any kind of work—but most had been on the road for months and no longer hoped to find work; they were just looking for a new place to be miserable in. Sort of like the way you toss and turn on a hot mattress.

Earlier on, back in '30 or '31, when people still had reserves of spunk left over from the good old days, local wiseacres down at the feed store would plunge their fists into the pockets of their overalls until their elbows were straight and say, 'You mark my words, boys, this fine young country of ours is going to lick this depression. Yessir! It'll kick Mr Depression in the ass so hard he'll have to eat his dinner standing up at the sideboard! Pretty soon, all the Gloomy Guses who run around bitching about not being able to find work will be busier'n the official fart-catcher at a Baptist baked bean social!'

But months stretched into years, and still there was no work. Dust storms came and blew farms away; and a man's kids would look up at him with big eyes when there wasn't enough to eat; and most people couldn't remember the last time they'd laughed.

Early in the depression, carnivals and circuses and medicine shows had done lively business for the same reasons that movies showing slick-talking rich people with white telephones and tuxedos were popular: because the people were hungry for dreams. They wanted to be told that the best things in life were free, and that you could find million-dollar babies in five-and-ten-cent stores; they needed to believe that you could get something for nothing, because nothing was how much they had in their jeans. Every hayseed from Rubeville to Hicksburg wanted to forget his troubles for a while and lose himself in the blare and glare of the midway, in the oom-pah-pah of the jenny organ and the mind-numbing gabble of the pitchmen. He wanted to show off his skill to the little lady by spilling wooden milk bottles and winning a ten-cent Kewpie doll with a buck's worth of battered baseballs. But as the months and years passed without things getting any better, it was no good telling the rubes that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself, because they were scared stiff. Fear was sucking their hopes dry, leaving their spirits too brittle to bounce back. Pretty soon pickings got so slim that even rinky-dink three-truck carnivals began to offer free entrance to the shows. The rubes would shuffle around the midway, licking the rides and games with their eyes, but holding on to their nickels so tight that little drops of piss ran down the buffalo's leg. The wheels and the jennies would turn all day long under the hot sun, empty, and the guy ballyhooing the girlie show would find himself talking to a handful of kids and a couple of old geezers who'd ask wise-assed questions, then cackle and nudge one another as though they'd been around and there was no fooling them.

But no matter how bad things got, the true carnie never lost his inborn sense of superiority to any mark: the gullible local townspeople whom he viewed as an undifferentiated wad of humanity whose only purpose in Life's Great Plan was to ride the rides, gawk at the shows, lose money at the games, and gobble down cotton candy, candied apples, and all the rest of the punk junk. Oh, sure, a carnie might be down on his luck; he might not have