Sideshow: Tales of the Galactic Midway, Vol. 1 Read online

  We share a trailer except when Thaddeus has feminine company, which means we don't share a trailer very often at all. The night we came back from the Ahasuerus Traveling Sideshow, Thaddeus picked up one of the local girls, and I spent the night with Jupiter Monk, our wild animal trainer. He's a nice, friendly guy, and one of the few members of the carny who can discuss books with me, but he keeps a pair of leopards in his trailer and I spent most of the night sleeping in his tub with the door locked. Every now and then he'd knock on the door and ask if I needed anything, and when I told him I didn't he'd go back to wrestling with his animals.

  Still, it was better than spending a night with some of the others. Jason Diggs—he runs our games and is known, less than lovingly, as Digger the Rigger—won't let me in unless I agree to play cards with him. Even playing for nickels and dimes, a night's rent can get pretty expensive. And Billybuck Dancer, our trick-shot artist, just sits in his chair all night and stares at photographs of Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo; I think he's a little crazy, even if he is the best gun-and-knife man I've ever seen in a carny.

  In fact, thanks to Thaddeus’ incredibly complicated love life, I spend two or three nights in every trailer on the lot during the course of a season. Except Alma's, that is.

  Alma is Alma Pafko. She's also Honeysuckle Rose, one of the girls in the strip show, although Thaddeus replaced her as the headliner last year. She's also Thaddeus’ steady bedmate, although that gets a little complicated, too.

  She knows that he sleeps with other women in the show, and while I know it bothers her, she puts up with it; but she goes crazy when he picks up one of the locals. She loves him, and she won't sleep with anyone else, but she realizes that he has his faults, so in her mind she's drawn an imaginary line around the carny: as long as he keeps it in the family, so to speak, she tolerates it.

  Alma and I used to be friends. In fact, for a long time she was my only friend. She would take care of me when I got sick, and she'd stick up for me whenever Thaddeus started picking on me, and she even set up a kind of screen so that I wouldn't have to leave the trailer on cold nights. I used to lend her books, and while she was never really interested in them, at least she'd make an effort to read them. We even traded Christmas presents.

  We would spend long afternoons sitting around the trailer discussing the future. Alma was always going to quit the girlie show, though of course she never did. I don't think she felt especially degraded by stripping, but it always bothered her when Thaddeus would pass the word that the cops were in the bag and the girls could work strong. She didn't mind the men pawing and kissing her, but it upset the hell out of her that he didn't mind it either.

  She kept talking about wanting to become a legitimate actress on the New York stage (unless, of course, she could talk Thaddeus into marrying her, which was what she really wanted). I don't think she had ever seen a live play in her life, but I don't imagine it was any sillier than my own ambition: from the day I first saw Thaddeus standing on a platform in front of the girlie show, taunting and joking with his audience, teasing and prodding them into buying tickets and out-heckling the hecklers, I'd wanted to be a barker for a carny.

  I even sent off for a couple of speech-improvement courses, but they didn't improve my stammer any more than the Albee and Williams plays I loaned Alma improved her acting.

  Still, it was nice to sit around and dream, and we did a lot of it—until the day Thaddeus got an opportunity to buy out Jonas Stark, the carny's owner.

  He begged and borrowed and connived and conned for the down payment, and still came up a couple of thousand dollars short. It looked like the deal was going to fall apart, and then one day he walked into the trailer while Alma and I were sitting there talking to each other and announced that he had found a way to get his hands on the rest of the money.

  It turned out that one of the locals had attended the girlie show every night for two weeks, and had a real thing about Alma. He'd heard Thaddeus trying to round up the money, and had offered to make up the difference in exchange for a little something “special.” That something turned out to be a privately made film produced expressly for him. He wanted to watch Alma having sex with one of the freaks from the sideshow, but since they were just a bunch of actors in makeup, Thaddeus had decided to use me, since according to him I was the closest thing we had to a real freak.

  We both objected, but Thaddeus hit the roof, screaming that there was a time limit on raising the money and that so far neither of us had contributed a red cent, that he had been carrying us for months. I expected Alma to walk out on him then, but she just sat very still and told him to get his camera, and when it was set up she began doing her standard strip for it.

  Then Thaddeus aimed the lens at me, and I started shaking like a leaf. I had never had a woman before, and I was scared to death—and besides, this wasn't just any woman. It was Alma, and it made me feel cheap and dirty.

  Thaddeus begged and pleaded and taunted and cajoled me, just the way he did with marks on the Midway, a parallel that wasn't lost on any of us. I looked at Alma lying back on the bed, totally nude, her face an expressionless mask, her legs spread apart, her clitoris glistening like a moist pearl in its blond velvet setting, tears trickling down her cheek, and I began crying too. I had dreamed of someday making love to a woman—even fumble-mouthed hunchbacks can dream—but never like this. I had never been farther from having an erection in my life, but then Thaddeus directed Alma to do certain things to me, and almost against my will I was suddenly able to perform. I felt her shudder—with disgust? Who knows—as I lay on top of her and her arms encircled me and came in contact with my hump, I saw our tears mingling as they rolled down her face and onto her neck, I sensed her muscles fighting against the urge to get up and run from the trailer, and finally it was over and Thaddeus got his money and owned his carnival. I've never been with a woman again.

  It was weeks before Alma and I could even nod hello to each other. We've never sat down and spoken again the way we used to—oh, we exchange information when we have to, but we never talk about our hopes and dreams and fears anymore—and of all the things Thaddeus has done, that is the one I've never forgiven him for. He cost me a friend, and nobody has so many friends that they can afford to lose one. Especially not me.

  Alma and I stayed with the carnival even after Thaddeus took it over. I had nowhere else to go, and impossible as it may sound, she still loved him. I don't think she liked him anymore, but evidently she could differentiate between the two. And after a while, our wounds healed, even if the memories remained.

  Thaddeus wasted no time assembling our rather odd crew. He recruited old Stogie—an aging baggy-pants comic whose real name was Max Bloom and who hadn't worked in perhaps twenty years—to work the girlie show in the evenings so the girls would have a few minutes to rest between performances.

  Stogie specialized in jokes that were so old that even Captain Billy's Whiz Bang hadn't bothered with them half a century ago; on the other hand, as Thaddeus was fond of confiding to me, he was too damned old and feeble to present any competition with the girls. As for Alma and the rest, they appreciated the brief respite from leering old men. (There was nothing altruistic about it, of course; Thaddeus just didn't think they pulled in as much money when they looked tired, but since it worked out well all the way around no one objected to his motivation.) If Stogie ever drew a laugh I never heard it, but I suppose he served much the same purpose as I did: people looked at me or listened to him, and suddenly they were a little more content with the way they were.

  After a couple of the girls got attacked while working as strong as Thaddeus wanted them to, he decided to get a roughie for the show. Real bouncers cost too much, so he picked up a former pro football lineman named Big Alvin. (I never found out his last name, though I suppose it's in the record books somewhere.) Big Alvin was a big pussycat—he quit football because he didn't like hurting opposing players—but he looked like the Hulk, and when the rowdies saw him they
didn't misbehave long enough to find out if he'd actually throw them out. The smart money around the carny said that he wouldn't lift a finger to save anyone, but fortunately the situation never arose.

  Thaddeus even hired a former strip star from the heyday of burlesque, Joannie Pym, to act as a kind of den mother for the girls. Her official title, for reasons I'm still not totally clear about, was Queen Bee. Everyone called her Queenie, and her job, as near as I could tell, was to see to it that the girls didn't go to bed with anyone except Thaddeus. Outside of that, she worked on their costumes (since most of them started out naked, there wasn't an awful lot of work involved) and sobered them up when they needed it, which was almost every night.

  Thaddeus always wanted a freak show. Jonas Stark had thought they were perverted and unnatural, so when Thaddeus took over the carnival he had to put one together from scratch. The only legitimate freak he ever got was Merrymax, an honest-to-God hermaphrodite. No matter how hard he looked, he never came up with a second one, which was one of the reasons he was so sensitive about the Ahasuerus Traveling Sideshow. He tried displaying me for a couple of nights, but no one was impressed. He hired a guy called Bill Koonce, who stood seven feet ten and was once offered a tryout with the New York Knicks; he dubbed him Treetop and even bought him a pair of elevator shoes, but after a week Treetop was setting up tents and stands on the Midway like everyone else. The one person besides Merrymax who stuck was Little Lulu, a forty-two-inch midget whose real name was Lulu Toole. I think Thaddeus kept her around for my benefit, but nothing ever happened: I found her appallingly unattractive, and she used to get furious trying to understand what I was saying. The only other oddity we carried was Hunkie, our geek.

  I don't know his name either—in point of fact, we had had four different Hunkies before the current one—but it was rumored that he used to be a newspaper writer before he developed a taste for sniffing coke and biting off chickens’ heads.

  When he finally realized that he wasn't going to be able to round up a batch of “real” freaks, Thaddeus started hiring fake ones. Maybe because he himself was so drawn to the odd and the bizarre, he was absolutely convinced there were enormous profits to be made from a freak show, and he kept trying—unsuccessfully—to put one together.

  Anyway, Digger the Rigger kept us above water—barely—for the first year, and the strip show contributed a little, and then somewhere along the way Thaddeus picked up Billybuck Dancer. The Dancer is the most polite, soft-spoken guy you'd ever want to meet—he always stands when a woman enters the room, always tips his hat and even calls the strippers “ma'am” in his lilting Texas drawl, never drinks or smokes—but like I said, he's a little bit crazy.

  There was even a story making the rounds that he once won a shootout with a famous Argentinean outlaw. As the story goes, they rented out a huge soccer arena in Buenos Aires and sold tickets. I don't know if it's true, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. At any rate, the Dancer is an exciting entertainer: he's a crack shot—Thaddeus made me his assistant for a month, so I can vouch for it—and he's so handsome that all the girls pay to see him while their husbands and boyfriends are watching the strip show. He's a sad man, always giving the impression that he wishes he were somewhere else, or maybe sometime else. One thing I know: He's the only man on the lot that Thaddeus has never picked a fight with.

  And then there's Jupiter Monk. After the Dancer started drawing crowds, Thaddeus decided that we needed another specialty act. I don't know where he heard about Monk, but he sent for him, and one day Monk appeared on our doorstep, a huge burly man with a drooping handlebar mustache, dressed like some wild Russian Cossack and accompanied by a bear, a lion, and two leopards. He's good at his trade, I suppose, but I think he'd be even better working the games: he's the only person the Rigger has never been able to beat at cards or craps. (Or maybe the Rigger loses on purpose: I know I sure wouldn't want a lion tamer mad at me.) For a while we had a sword swallower, too. He called himself Carlos the Magnificent, though his real name was Julian Levy, and he drew pretty good crowds until the night he showed up drunk and practically gutted himself.

  About a year ago Thaddeus decided that Alma wasn't putting her heart into her work (it took him that long to notice), so he sent off to a strippers’ school—they really do have one, out in California somewhere—and hired Gloria Stunkel, a gorgeous young girl who dances under the name of Butterfly Delight. He moved her into the headliner's spot the day she arrived; I think Alma was actually happy about it, since the star is supposed to work even stronger than the other girls. But Gloria turned out to be a double oddity in the strip show: she wouldn't work strong, and she wouldn't go to bed with Thaddeus. The customers never liked her, since they weren't paying for an artful striptease, but Thaddeus kept her around anyway, either because she amused him or because she presented a challenge, I'm still not sure which.

  We were a motley crew, all right, but we got along pretty well together, especially when Thaddeus wasn't around. I can't say I was truly happy with the carnival, but I know that I was less unhappy than I'd been anywhere else.

  Thaddeus may have treated me like dirt—but he treated me like normal dirt, a little on the stupid side because of my stammer, but nothing to be fussed over. And if he displayed a certain disregard of my feelings, well, he behaved no differently toward anyone else. After a lifetime of being patronized, you can't imagine what that meant to me.

  I was sitting down at a wooden table near one of the concession stands the morning after we had been to see Mr. Ahasuerus’ show, drinking some coffee and trying to keep warm, when Queenie and Alma walked over and sat down across from me. Alma sat a little distance away, like she always does, but Queenie leaned forward until her face was maybe ten inches away from mine.

  “I hear you went with him last night,” she said.

  “That's right,” I replied.

  “To see this freak show that everyone's talking about?”

  I nodded.

  She pulled a small flask of whiskey out of her coat pocket and took a swig, then offered some to Alma.

  “No, thank you,” said Alma, not looking at either of us.

  “Come on, honey, it'll keep you warm,” said Queenie, throwing an arm around Alma's shoulders. Alma just shook her head and edged away, and I could see that Queenie didn't like that any more than Alma liked having a woman's arm around her.

  “Was it any good?” demanded Queenie.

  It took me a minute to figure out that she was talking to me.

  “Was what any good?” I asked.

  “The freak show, you demented little toad!” snapped Queenie. “What the hell have we been talking about?”

  “It was good,” I said.

  “As good as they say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit!” she said. “He's going to get his hands on it, isn't he?”

  I brushed away a couple of leaves that had blown onto the table next to my coffee cup. “I don't think it's for sale,” I said.

  “Who said anything about buying it? You ought to know him by now. He's going to take it over one way or another, and then we'll all be out in the cold.”

  “He won't do that, Queenie,” I said.

  “You think he likes you!” snorted Queenie. “This stupid little bitch"—she gestured to Alma—"thinks he loves her. Well, let me tell you: he doesn't like or love anyone. He uses you, just like he uses everyone else around here.”

  Alma kind of flinched when she said that.

  “It's not true,” I said. “I know he loves Alma.” Not only didn't I know it, but it was hard to sound soothing and confident at a rate of six words a minute.

  Still, I tried.

  “Oh, shut up, Tojo!” said Alma, still not looking at me.

  I wanted to reach out and touch her hand, to do something to comfort her, but I didn't know what to do, so I just sat still.

  “You don't love someone and treat her the way he treats Alma,” said Queenie. There was a look on her face that
implied she'd know how to treat someone she loved.

  “Even if that's true,” I said at last, “even if he cuts everyone loose, that wouldn't be so terrible, would it, Alma? After all, you've wanted to quit for years.”

  She finally looked at me. “I'm twenty-nine years old,” she said bitterly, “and the only thing I know how to do is walk out naked on a stage and let a bunch of strange men paw my body.”

  “I thought you wanted to be an actress,” I said. I knew it was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn't think of anything else.

  “You think someone's going to put up a million dollars just so I can play Blanche Du Bois on Broadway?” she said with a self-deprecating little laugh.

  “Look at what I am, Tojo. Who would have me?”

  “There, there, baby,” said Queenie, putting her arm around Alma's shoulders again, and this time Alma didn't move away. “You see what you've done?” said Queenie, turning to me. “You've got her crying now.”

  “I didn't mean to,” I said.

  “It's him,” said Queenie, which was her way of accepting my apology. “We hang around him long enough and suddenly we start acting like him.”