Joe Lansdale - Freezer Burn

Pretty soon the pair were tumbling across the grass again, cussing, grunting, and calling each other nigger.

The fat lady with the beard produced a towel and mopped up the milk, then wrung the towel out on the ground, coiled it, and popped it at the retards, hitting one in the throat.

“Settle down, now,” she said, and they went at it more slowly for a while, but they didn’t stop.

“One hurts the other,” Bill asked Frost, “does it hurt both of them?”

“Yes,” said Frost, eating a bite of pancake. “They are two but are one. They seem to like fighting. It’s something they do. Every morning. Every meal. And sometimes between meals. You get used to it.”

Bill thought: Not goddamn likely.

Bill found the freaks distracting. The two rolling around on the ground, bathed in syrup and eggs and milk and grass, did nothing for his appetite either.

Frost grabbed Bill’s arm and smiled at him. Bill was surprised to find that Frost had a powerful grip. He looked somewhat doughy, and the white hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and occasional flush of red on his face made him seem soft and weak, but he was actually quite strong. A beardless Santa on steroids.

Frost said, “The swelling on your face has gone down slightly.”

Bill had forgotten about his face. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t even itch. Without thinking, he raised a hand to his face and felt the lumps and had a sudden fear they might not go away.

“Come with me,” Frost said.

He and Frost walked away from the breakfast table toward the trailers. Frost said, “What I need, Bill, is someone to work for me.”

“Looks like you got plenty of help here.”

“I do, but the truth of the matter is, except for Conrad, who is my right-hand man, these people are quite busy with running their acts. Taking care of their trailers, the like.”

“Then what would I do?”

“I need someone to help manage. To help organize. I do most of that myself. Conrad does the rest, but I need someone who can fit in with the general populace. Someone that isn’t special in appearance.”

“What about the blonde?”

“My wife, Gidget. I can’t say she cares much for my day-to-day activities. I find her a blessing, but she can be distracting too. To put it bluntly, that isn’t really any of your business.”

“Sure,” Bill said politely, smelling money behind all this, and wondering if the blonde was some kind of freak herself. Maybe had a cock and balls.

“What I can do is give you room and board and nothing else.”

“Oh.”

“I know that isn’t very promising, but that’s temporary. After a month or two we can evaluate how the two of us feel about one another, and we can decide if we’d like to continue together. If you like, next town, while your face is swollen like that, we can let you in on the freak show.”

“As a freak?”

“While you look like one, yes. We’ll come up with a name for you.” Frost’s face took on a disappointed look. “When your face heals, I’m afraid there won’t be much point in that. But – freaks get tips. Sometimes, they make pretty good. The Afro-American twins, Elvis and Thomas, are favorites. I think because they fight with one another.. . Wouldn’t that be terrible? To not like one another and to be tied together forever.”

“I know I wouldn’t care for it.”

“One believes he is lighter skinned than the other, and that is a source of friction between them.”

“I thought they were just stupid.”

“Retardation plays a part. But so does skin color. Actually, I believe the two of them are exactly the same shade.”

“They both look like niggers to me. Actually, you think about it, they’re just one two-headed nigger.”

Frost stopped walking. “Bill, if you’re going to work for me, and I know you haven’t agreed to, you’re going to have to have more respect for these people, and for other races. I can’t tolerate that kind of talk. Retards. Niggers. This is all outside of my beliefs, and this is my train, as I like to refer to it. So, if this is my train, and I’m the engineer, and you want to ride on it, there are some rules. One. Do not denigrate my freaks. The word freak itself is acceptable. In fact, they call themselves freaks.”

“I heard the retar – the black fellas calling each other nigger.”

“There is that. But I hope you understand what I’m saying. I’d like to have you here, but if you’re going to speak of my people that way, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Bill studied Frost’s face. He looked stern and serious. Bill thought: Asshole. Freak lover. Freak yourself. Nigger lover. But he said, “I understand. I don’t mean nothin’ by what I say sometimes. I’ll try to be more feeling.”

“Good. Then you’ll stay?”

“Sure,” Bill said.

The train, as Frost called it, traveled out of there that day after breakfast with Frost driving a green Chevy station wagon with Gidget in it and all the others following. Frost left Bill to drive his motor home. Frost explained that he normally drove the home and Gidget the Chevy, but now that Bill was working for the freak show, he got to drive the motor home.

They arrived at a little town called Wellington Mills about midday. They parked the trucks and cars and trailers in a field just inside of town. Some of the trailers had sides that opened up and they opened them and propped them so that they might serve as counters for selling hot dogs and pretzels and all manner of junk. They put together little frames with curtains on them and set them about the field and stuffed them full of pins to knock down and hoops and buckets and jars to toss pennies or balls into, arranged stuffed animals all about, the cheap sort with eyes children could peel off and swallow.

They put up some large tents and a couple of fitted grandstands where you could sit, and they brought out and put together a few rides, the tiltawhirl being prominent, but the guy who owned and operated it called it a whirligig and so everyone else did. It was old and rusty with badly painted metal bucket seats. The paint was green, but time had taken a toll on it. When the wind blew, the bolts that held it together – and it was missing a few – rattled and the whirligig buckets swung slightly and the whole thing creaked and made you think of bodies with shards of metal poking through them. The guy who ran it looked like an ex-con and was. He was the second oiliest man in the carnival. Only a fellow worked there with two teeth was nastier looking. A guy called Potty, which was what was suspected of being under his fingernails.

Phil liked to mention he was an ex-con, but he was sketchy on the crime he had committed and how much time he had done. He wore a sleeveless white T-shirt with a cigarette cocked behind his ear. He had lots of tattoos, most of them done with a pocketknife and the residue from match heads. But he had some professional tattoos. Brightly colored devil heads. Women with oversized breasts and their legs spread. A trio of blood-dripping hearts with a sword through them. He had plenty of grease in his hair. You’d have thought that much grease had to be an accident. Like some mean oversized men had held him down and rubbed it in there and made him wear it.

Phil had interesting teeth and a lot of nose. He talked about sex a lot, who he’d done and who he wanted to do. Bill didn’t know any of his list of previously screwed. Gidget was mentioned in the lineup of potential pokes. But so were a number of models and movie starlets. Phil claimed to be the best ride operator in the place, and considering the only other rides were a merry-go-round with paint-flaked horses and a kind of slanting bucket ride that didn’t go any faster than a fat man could run in heavy boots, Bill didn’t doubt this. Mostly the carnival wasn’t about rides. It was tossing hoops and throwing baseballs and looking at weird shit and freaky people.