Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a cane. More blood flows.

Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn’t to demonstrate how one lays on nails without being harmed, I follow Lydia.

The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean, streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that half the tent hides beneath.

Lydia is stomping over the sand, kicking up little plumes with her Docs, headed for the tide line.

– Come get me when it’s over. If I stay, I’m going to make a scene.

I peek through a gap in the entrance, see what the chicks are up to, and figure she’s right.

My Zippo won’t hold a flame in the wind so I take a light from one of the torches and lean against a piling, listening to the rock ’n’ roll and the gasps and screeches of the audience, smoking and looking at the ocean in the moonlight. Counting seconds till the show is over and I can collect the Freaks Boss and get back to my life. Such as it is.

– Bum one of those?

It takes me a second to smell him, another second to see him. The first because he comes at me from downwind, the second because he’s a fucking midget.

I squeeze the pack between my fingers, feel three left, give him one.

He takes the smoke and pats the pockets of the denim overalls he wears over his bare, blue-tattooed torso and arms.

– Light?

I offer him my smoke and he lights his own and gives mine back.

– Thanks.

I take a drag.

– So what’s it like?

He scratches a wrinkled bald head.

– What’s that?

I hold my hand three feet over the sand.

– Midget Vampyre? How’s that work? Find it a bitch getting to someone’s neck?

He smiles, flashing full sets of steel dentures, canines every tooth, and points at my upper thigh.

– Usually find something I can get to in a pinch.

I think about kicking him down the beach. Wonder if I could get him to the water. Wonder if he would float.

He takes a silver flask from the side pocket of the overalls, swigs from it and holds it up.

– You the guy from Manhattan?

I wave the flask off.

– I’m the driver. One you want is by the water.

He takes another slug of the thick dark rum I smell in the flask and slips it away in his pocket.

– Whatsay you come in and take a look at the finale?

– Whatsay we skip the donkey fucking, or whatever you close with and you grab your boss so we can do the swap and I can get back where I belong.

He looks up at me, blows a stream of smoke that just reaches my face.

– Buddy, I am the boss. And till the show is over, no one goes anywhere.

He drops the half-finished smoke at my feet.

– You can finish that if you want.

He turns and heads for the back of the tent.

– Me, I got an entrance to make.

It’s a showstopper.

People cover their eyes, howl, run from the tent, one or two start crying, a couple who’s been here before laugh and shake their heads, still not believing what they’re seeing.

The midget is standing in the middle of the stage, tugging lengths of intestine from the hole he’s chewed in his own belly and draping them over the shoulders of Vendetta and Harm, who admire them like mink stoles, giving them the occasional lick.

Lydia watches, nothing about her moves except her discontent. That’s all over the fucking place.

The midget brings a loop of intestine up to his mouth, shows the steel teeth, the music crescendos, a full- fledged Guitar Wolf freak-out, he opens his jaws wide, the torches flutter suddenly, his teeth glitter and snap down and the torches go out and red and blue strobes pulse and everyone screams as the midget collapses and the girls fall on him and tear his flesh and stuff their mouths full of it and the guy who did a strongman act at the beginning of the show appears in his executioner’s hood and swings a broadsword and hacks at the girls as they continue to feed.

The strobes stop. The tent goes black. The screams kick up a notch.

I smell the midget’s infected blood, whiffs of his bowels, the kerosene the torches were dipped in, seaweed, salt air, stale beer and corndogs from the trash barrel, cigarette and pot smoke and the blush of uninfected blood freshly drawn.

I grab Lydia and push her behind me and put my hand on the butt of Solomon’s hogleg.

Lights come on, strings of red Christmas lights looped among the rigging wires and poles of the tent.

The people on the bleachers stop shrieking.

The midget is standing center stage, dripping gore, he steps forward, does a pratfall over his own intestines, gets up and takes a bow.

The place goes nuts.

The Strongman lifts the girls, placing one on either shoulder, and they wave at the audience with fake severed arms and legs.

Lydia wrenches free of me.

– Fuck are you thinking, Pitt? There’s trouble, stay out of my way so you don’t get hurt.

I raise my hands.

– Yeah, my bad, forgot who’s wearing the trousers.

– Fuck you.

The Freaks wrap their curtain call. The audience laughs and claps and hoots and hollers and throws crumpled bills and loose change and the performers clear the stage and Tom Waits sings “Singapore,” their exit music, and the show is over.

I count heads as the audience files out of the tent, try to figure who’s missing and how many.

– Unconscionable! Immoral! And fantastically idiotic!

– Oh! Oh sweet Jesus! Oh my Lord in Heaven, fuck me now!

The midget has tucked the last of his intestine where it belongs; gritting his fake teeth, he pinches the edges of the wound together as Vendetta pulls a glowing iron rod from the brazier where it’s been heating in a pile of white coals and presses it against the torn flesh.

The midget drops his head back and laughs and screams like a little kid on a roller coaster.

– Hooooo! Whhooohoooo! Oh my! Oh my God! Sheeeeit!

Vendetta pulls the rod away and the Glasseater pours cold water over the steaming cauterization.

The midget brings his face down, tears running from the corners of his eyes, and exhales. He leers at Lydia.

– Sorry about the language, just that hurts like a motherfucker.

He peels one of the Pabst Blue Ribbons from the six at his feet and cracks it open.

– So now, unconscionable, you were saying? I’m not sure about that part, not knowing what the word means and all, but fantastically idiotic is a phrase I could learn to love. That right there, that just about sums up the whole Freak, whatyacallit, value system in two words. Hatter, what’s a good word for value system?

The MC takes a coverless pocket dictionary from inside his tailcoat and looks at a page.-