article went on to say that the police and church were at a loss to explain the incident because nothing had been taken. The only clues, the article said, were that a passer-by had seen a disheveled-looking woman coming out of the rectory in a rush during the time was Father Coughlin was tied up in the closet, and that some mysterious stains had been found in the rectory which the police lab was in the process of analyzing.
The whole thing was eerie, but I didn't want to think about it. After giving the article a third scanning, I rapidly flipped the pages of the paper until I came to the entertainment section so I could find the ad for the carnival. When my eyes finally lit on it, I breathed a big sigh of relief, anxious to have something to think about that would put the strange business about the church out of my mind.
The carnival was located in the shabbiest part of town, down by the river adjacent to the stockyards. Unfortunately, there were more cows in the stockyards than people patronizing the carnival, a ratio to which the ripe smell in the air attested. The natural seediness of the carnival took on an almost grotesque glow when combined in my senses with the stench of cow manure, the whole enterprise seeming to have been conceived in sleaziness. Of all of this tackiness, the freak show was the worst example, a crude tent, the entrance to which was presided over by a fat man hawking tickets for fifty cents yelling, 'See the freaks for only four bits! Only ones a their kind in the entire world!'
I got in line and paid my money, being shuttled inside by an oily-looking fellow at the door who looked at the customers as though they were the ones who were the freaks, which was rather paradoxical since he appeared to have two noses.
The lighting was terrible inside the tent. Two or three naked lightbulbs dangled from the canvas ceiling, their power emerging from a struggling generator that sputtered just outside the entrance flap. In the gloomy light, the horseshoe of freaks which dotted the edge of the shabby tent took on an almost holy cast, as though they were religious figures of special spiritual significance, the most martyred of saints.
I walked around the tent slowly, looking at each of them individually while I searched for R.Q. There was the fat lady, her enormously puffy thighs oozing doughily out of the spangled tights she was wearing, a coarse suggestion of her scraggly pussy hair poking out of each side of the tautly strained satin crotch. At her side an especially misshapen dwarf, with feet and hands seeming to emerge from his bull-neck, was being passed off as a midget named Mr. Littlebit, supposedly married to the fat lady. Next to them the Indian Rubber Man was busily contorting himself. He was naked except for a turban and a strip of cloth around his waist as he bent his head between his legs and locked his ankles behind his back while his face pressed to his crotch. As he did this, behind me I could hear one teen snicker to another, 'I wonder if that guy ever blows himself.' Immediately I conjured a mental image of the man in the same position with no loincloth, his erect cock stabbing all the way down his throat so that I could see his balls bobbing against his chin from my vantage point.
Moving on quickly from the disturbingly arousing Indian Rubber Man, it occurred to me that there was something very erotic about the atmosphere here, almost as though the distorted bodies of the freak were, in addition to their apparent religious significance, a strange cry to lust. Perhaps the lust itself is the ultimate religious experience, I thought in an instant rationalization as I took a step forward and discovered that my pussy was uncontrollably full of sticky juice and that just looking at these freaks had started my cunt flowing.
I got so involved in looking at them that I'm afraid I gawked as I studied every freak on display in the show. My pussy spasmed and gushed with each new revelation of human deformity, my thighs wallowing in the gushing reaction from each distorted twist of flesh and bone. But the fat lady and the dwarf, the Indian Rubber Man, the pinhead, the geek, and the Human Pincushion notwithstanding, the picture was incomplete as there were two factors obviously missing – the tattooed man, and the poor armless and legless R.Q.
In order to find my troubled correspondent, I walked up to the Indian Rubber Man and asked, 'Do you have a girl working here with the initials R.Q.?' hoping he would recognize her from the limited description of her I had at my command.
He mumbled something in reply, but I couldn't make out a word of it because he was mumbling into the crotch of his loincloth. I was just getting ready to approach the Human Pincushion, when suddenly a man I hadn't seen before approached me from behind. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn't put my finger on it because he was wearing a purple ski-mask. Before I had time to puzzle over it, he pulled out a billfold, quick flashed a badge at me, and returned it to his pocket within seconds.
'What's this?' I blurted.
'Shhh,' he hissed, and then whispered, 'Marmelstein of the FBI. We've got this place staked out for violation of the Mann Act… white slavery as the great unwashed call it. We're waiting for some overt evidence to develop so we can knock heads without a warrant.'
'Why are you wearing that mask?' I asked for some reason.
'I don't want to take a chance on anybody recognizing me,' he said. 'My picture's been in People magazine for receiving a heroism medal for burning out a militant gang of senior citizens who'd barricaded themselves in a rest home and taken the nurses as hostages.'
'Oh,' I said, still breathless from this sudden development. 'You know, isn't this a coincidence, I just met another man named Marmelstein the other day. He was a priest.'
'Oh, yes, that's my brother, Rick. We're all very proud of him,' he said tersely. 'Now that we've got my credentials settled, what about yours?' he asked officiously.
'What do you mean?' I asked, totally perplexed, unaware of the necessity of proving who I was while in the everyday act of attending a freak show, even if I did happen to encounter a G-man in front of the Human Pincushion.
'Don't try to hide anything,' he warned, 'it'll only be held against you later when it comes out you didn't cooperate with the Bureau. Now stop withholding information and tell me about R.Q. What is her full identity? Come clean and we'll go easy with you.'
'That's all I know about her, believe me, just her initials,' I explained.
'Yeah, sure – R.Q., that's all you know. There're only about a thousand people in the metropolitan area with the initials R.Q. and you happen to show up here looking for one of them,' he hissed bitingly. 'Come on, there must be something about her you know that you're not telling.'
'I can't think of anything,' I responded.
'She wouldn't happen to be without arms or legs?' he snapped accusingly.
'Come to think of it, she is handicapped… er, exceptional,' I said, 'but that could be just a coincidence.'
'Stop covering up,' he snarled. 'Her name's Rhonda Quigley, she's a minor, and they're using her as a Goddamn quadriplegic whore. All we have to do is catch her in the act with somebody sticking their big you- know-what up her cookie and we'll have the goods on these scum.'
For some reason his rough way of talking excited me, and when he started talking about the 'big you- know-what', my lips automatically formed the syllables for 'big, hairy cock', recalling the image from R.Q.'s letter of the tattooed man's snakelike prick reaming out the helpless teenager's thighless cunt.
'What's that you said?' he snapped, glaring at me like I was fresh shit.
'Nothing… nothing…' I stammered, mortified that I had been caught.
'You said, and I repeat, 'big, hairy cock'. You can't fool an agent by remaining silent. We're trained in lip- reading from the first day we join the Bureau. It assists us in tracking down deaf and dumb subversives, of which there are more than you would ordinarily expect, a handicap not necessarily making a person into a patriot despite the excellent care they receive in this country,' he hissed at me, withering my ability to stand up to him. 'By saying what you did about the big, hairy you-know-what, you reveal that you do know what's going on in this den of iniquity. I must warn you now that unless you fully cooperate with me, I may have to hold you for concealing information and obstructing justice. Now come with me, you're going to help me catch these degenerates in the act.'
I was so intimidated by his dominant air of authority that I would have gone with him even if he hadn't specifically threatened me and pulled me along with him by the wrist. The fact of the matter was that I was more than just intimidated by him, I was mesmerized, hypnotized by his stark, authoritarian masculinity.
CHAPTER EIGHT
