The music from the calliope trailed us down the midway as we hurried to meet the guys at the beacon, but they were nowhere to be seen. We walked on past the little kids’ Merry-Go-Round and pony rides. Past the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Bullet. Past the balloon game and shooting game and ring game. We ended up at the far end of the midway where most of the side shows were set up.
Grandma had warned us those places were just as crooked as a rattlesnake and we had no business whatsoever going anywhere near them and she’d better not hear tell that we had or we would be plenty sorry and we should mark her words because we’d have her to deal with when we got home and make no mistake about that.
So that’s where we headed.
We walked past gaudy signs advertising the Fun House and Freaks of Nature and the Tunnel of Love before Vonnie spotted Hursey and Billy standing in front of a rickety stage gazing up at hoochie-coochie girls. The sign overhead said “Ooh La La Ladies, Fresh from Paris, France.” The women wore skimpy skirts and fishnet stockings with holes in them and sequined halters on top. They had painted their shoes with gilt, black streaks showing through the brush marks on their skint-up high heels. Puckering their lips and making kissy sounds, they gyrated to music that thrummed through big loudspeakers that crackled and buzzed. One girl tapped to the front and did a routine to “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy,” spreading a mouth smeared with red lipstick in the direction of the men, her tongue licking out around bad teeth.
The record got stuck on “choo-choo,” repeating it over and over.
The bad-teeth girl kept right on dancing to the “choo-choo choo-choo choo-choo” and pretty soon the men were egging her on.
The barker, sensing the excitement, shooed the girls into the tent behind the stage and began his pitch. “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Come on inside where the real show is about to begin. It’s gonna be the best two bits you’re ever gonna spend. Yes sirree, you’ll be down on your knees thankin’ me, and that’s no lie. Last call, gentlemen, show’s gonna start in two minutes.”
The men and boys swiveled their heads as they snaked hands into pockets to fish out a quarter. Seeing hoochie-coochie girls wasn’t anything I was interested in when I could see a real live alligator man and a two-headed chicken right down the midway. Hursey bought tickets for him and Billy, making me pinky swear I’d never tell. And I wouldn’t, because that would be the end of us ever going anywhere with him again.
My brother and sister were always saying I was dumb, but I wasn’t that dumb.
Vonnie and I bought cherry snow cones piled high with ice and drenched with sticky red syrup that dripped onto our shoes. We spent what was left of our money to buy tickets to the Oddities of the World freak show which promised not only the alligator man and the two-headed chicken, but a half-man, half-woman, who was pictured on one of the huge, hand-painted posters hanging behind the stage. The painting showed a figure that was split down the middle from top to bottom, one half of it a man and the other half a woman, with words that said:
SEE A GREEK MYTH COME TO LIFE
HERMAPHRODITE
GOD AND GODDESS IN ONE BODY
Holding hands tight, Vonnie and I walked down boards laid for a ramp into the tent. A huge woman lolled in a chair, her natural bulk made bigger by horsehair padding you could see a little of poking out of her sleeves. Sweat teared down her face, washing tracks through her makeup. Her hand, white and bloated as a dead fish, waved back and forth.
The two-headed chicken walking around in a cage and the scaly alligator man both looked real enough to me, but I didn’t know how to tell if the coal black figure stretched out in a coffin was a genuine petrified man.
A midget dressed in a red and yellow checkered clown suit ran around in the audience doing handstands. Sometimes he bent down and looked up the women’s dresses, honking a horn and covering his eyes every time he did it. One woman squealed while another cussed at him and kicked him in the knee. He laughed and pretended it didn’t hurt.
The man-woman walked to the front of the stage, keeping its face turned toward the naked bulb that hung from a cord in the center of the tent. It lifted its skirt to expose a fingerling of pink flesh dangling from a furry nest. A flash, then the skirt dropped. When it spun around and walked away, a sign on its back declared, “I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT I AM.”
A few hoots and catcalls started up and died away.
Vonnie and I turned and clambered back up the ramp as fast as we could, the uneven boards bouncing under our feet. I stumbled and fell, Vonnie still clutching my hand and dragging me along before I regained my footing. I hadn’t even felt the splinter pierce my knee, but when she pulled it out, bright red blood and cherry snow cone juice mingled on my white Easter shoes and anklets.
Hursey gave the kewpie doll he won at the carnival to Vonnie so she wouldn’t tattle to Grandma about the hoochie-coochie girls, and he talked Billy into giving me a yoyo, for the same reason, I suspected. He gave Grandma a green glass bowl. She served potato salad in it that night and from then on.
I’d always believed Grandma had eyes in the back of her head. Like the portraits of ancestors hanging on our
