Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

The audience nodded and the plant faced me. “Okay, Louie, what’s the square root of nine?”

He turned his back again and showed three fingers so that the audience could see, but not me. Kaybach began to stutter a protest. The plant shut him up and asked me again. To build suspense, I waited thirty seconds before clapping my flippers three times.

The audience always applauded, as much to see a bully get shutdown by a walrus as for the answer. The plant shook his head in disbelief. Kaybach tossed a fish and asked the final question.

“Are you a walrus, Louie?”

I shook my head no.

“Oh, I guess you think you’re human, then.”

I nodded very fast.

“I’m sorry, Louie. You’re nothing but a walrus. You’ll never be a man.”

I sank into the water, performed an awkward circling manuever, and scuttled behind a rock. Kaybach thanked everyone and asked for a big hand for a walrus so smart that he knew genuine sadness — he’d never be a human.

I had a half-hour break before beginning again with a new plant and a different fake question. I had become a circus performer, or in Barney’s parlance, a kinker. The name came from the effects of the nightlong wagon rides in the old days, after which the performers spent a couple of hours stretching kinks from their bodies.

The various sideshows were tucked into a midway of carny games as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Even the benign ring toss and dart throw were rigged. The con operators allowed a few people to win large, highly visible prizes. They picked the winners carefully. The best investments were young couples, or a family that moved as a group. Forced to carry the prize the rest of their visit, the winners served as advertising. Many people won at the start of the day; none toward the end.

As a full-fledged kinker, I had access to the forbidden zone of performer alley. Here the clowns played chess, the aerialists disdained anyone confined to earth, and the dwarfs spent most of their time baiting the Parrot Lady. They constantly threatened to pluck her, and commented quite openly on her presumed skill at fellatio.

One Sunday, in a community so religious the circus wasn’t allowed to admit the public until well past noon, the heat rose to ninety-eight. Only the aerialists and the Parrot Lady had trailers with air-conditioning. The rest of us sat semiclothed in available shade. The dwarfs began crooning a love song on the Parrot Lady’s aluminum steps. She opened her door with enough force to smack it against the trailer. The dwarfs retreated like tumbleweed.

“A bird in hand,” one said.

“Is worth a hand in the bush,” said the other.

“I got a sword she can’t swallow.”

“Get lost, you little pissants,” the Parrot Lady said. She leaned against the doorjamb in the shimmering heat. “Hey, Walrus Man,” she called. “Come here.”

All the kinkers blinked from a doze, staring at me, then at her. I stumbled to her trailer as if moving through fog. My clothes clung to me.

“Save me a sandwich,” said one of the dwarfs.

The air-conditioned trailer made the sweat cold on my body. She motioned me to a couch. Gingham curtains hung from each window, and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley sat on a tiny TV. The room was very small, very neat.

“Thirsty?” she said. “Like a drink?”

I nodded and she poured clear liquid from a pitcher into a glass, added ice and an olive.

“Nothing better in summer than a martini,” she said.

Not wanting her to know that I’d never sampled such an exotic drink, I drank it in one chug and asked for another. She lifted her eyebrows and poured me one. I drank half for the sake of civility.

“The one thing I hate more than dwarfs,” she said, “is the circus.”

She wore a long white dress with a high collar and sleeves that ran to her wrists. No tattoos were visible. A rowing machine occupied a third of the trailer’s space. She topped my drink and filled her own glass.

“This is my fourth circus,” she said. “I’ve worked with fat ladies, bearded women, Siamese twins, rubber-skinned people, and midgets. The three-legged man. A giant. Freaks by nature, all freaks but me.”

“Not you.”

She offered her glass for a toast and I drained mine. She filled it again. We sat across from each other. The room was so narrow our knees touched.

“They hate me because they can’t understand why someone would choose to be a freak. It took me five years to get tattooed. You can’t do it all at once. I had the best artists in the country tattoo me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“That’s the main part of it. Freaks have to hurt and I wanted mine real. Everyone can see that I’m a freak now. I finally suffered for real to get there.”

I nodded, confused. A row of dolls stood on a shelf bracketed to the wall. She poured more drinks and settled into the chair. Her ankles were primly crossed, exposing only her toes. She wore no jewelry.

“I hate them because they’re what I was in secret, before the tattoos. I was a freak too. You just couldn’t tell. I was tired of hurting on the inside, like them. I hate my tattoos and I hate the men who pay to see them. Nobody knows about my inside. The rest of the freaks are the opposite. They’re normal inside but stuck in a freak’s body. Not me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s why I’m telling you.”

“What?”

“I can’t have children.”

I sipped my drink. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t see an ashtray. I didn’t know what to say.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“You could adopt.”

“Shut up!” she said. “I’ve seen ads in the paper for adoption. ‘Call collect,’ they say. ‘All expenses paid.’ I won’t buy a baby. You better go. Don’t tell anyone anything. Let them believe we fucked like minks.”

I stood and fell sideways on the couch. Moving slowly, I got to the door and turned to say goodbye. Her pale hands covered her face. She was crying.

“I love those dwarfs,” she said. “They’re my kids.”

I opened the door and made it to the bottom step before falling. The difference in temperature was swift and hard as a roundhouse blow. Someone helped me stand. The dust on my skin turned to mud from my abrupt sweating. An aerialist walked me to a truck and lay me in the shade.

An hour later Kaybach kicked me awake, berating me for being late, though he’d heard the reason. I staggered after him. Con men and kinkers wiggled their eyebrows, winked and grinned. A female equestrian caressed me with her gaze as if I were the last wild mustang out of the Bighorns. I barely had time to wriggle into my costume before Kaybach began herding the suckers in.

Our tent had no ventilation and was ten degrees hotter than outside. The water in the pool had a skin on the surface. When I lay down on the fake rocks, the world began spinning. Closing my eyes made me twice as dizzy. From a great distance Kaybach called his cue and I realized that he had been yelling for some time. I slid into the nasty water.

I managed to get through the preliminary routines with Kaybach’s patient repetition of cue. He threw a fish as reward, which I dutifully tucked inside the mouth flap. Its body was swollen from heat. Mixed with fish stink was the heavy odor of gin oozing from my pores. I clenched my teeth to quell nausea. While Kaybach spieled about my intelligence, I shoved the dead fish back into the water. The smell clung to my chin and face. Water had seeped through the eye slits, encasing me in an amnion of scum. My head throbbed. As long as I didn’t move, my belly remained under control.

Kaybach asked the yes-or-no questions. I squatted to make the walrus rear on his haunches, each movement an effort. The mask felt welded to my head. Kaybach threw a fish that bounced off my torso. The thought of retrieving it ruined me. My belly folded in on itself, and I knew that the spew would suffocate me. Kaybach was yelling. My face poured sweat.