E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

It’s nothing. A line squall.

The nights seemed to race by. The weather got colder. The freaks got nastier. We came one day to a town less promising than any I’d seen. It was shut down and boarded. One tavern and one store were open. I don’t remember the name of this town, it was like a tree with just a branch or two still alive.

In a lot beside the boarded-up railroad depot Sim Hearn gave the signal and the carney put up for business. In the evening we turned on the lights and a few mountain people straggled in but most of the time the freaks talked to each other because nothing else was doing. The rides went around empty. I thought Sim Hearn had lost his marbles.

The next night the same thing, the wind blew through the booths and rattled the tent flaps, they sounded like over the mountains somewhere there was some gang war of Tommy guns going on.

I thought Sim Hearn was telling us the season was over by enacting the news. The cook built a fire on the ground and heated an ash can of water. He scrubbed his pots and pans with brown soap. Other people were packing. Mrs. Hearn grabbed my arm and we stepped behind a wagon.

“Hearn goes no farther,” she said. “Look, a sweater I have for you so you wouldn’t be cold.”

She was a pain in the ass with her presents. She brought me cigarettes, oranges, she washed my clothes, all in secret of course. Nobody knew about it except the whole carney.

It chilled me to think Sim Hearn might know it. But his distance from me was unchanged and his peculiar authority maintained itself in my mind. It was as if no matter what I did to his wife I could never break through that supreme indifference. I decided no man was that godlike. I decided he didn’t know. I wished he did know. Then I wouldn’t be some nameless creature so low as to be beneath his line of vision.

The next morning we struck everything but the show tent. We raised the wood shutters on the wagons and nailed them shut. We pushed the wagons into an old car barn across the tracks from the depot. After lunch a few people left with their bags or bundles. Nobody said so long or even looked at anyone else. I think I was shocked. Despite all my other feelings about the carney, I could believe it was a privilege to be attached to it. It angered me that people would walk away as if Hearn Bros. had no more distinction than a mission flop.

On the other hand, why should it be different? Sim Hearn couldn’t care less if any one of them lived or died and they knew that. He was going to take the trucks down to Florida for the winter and let them get down there on their own. If they showed up, he’d hire them; if they didn’t, that was all right too.

Fanny the Fat Lady’s wagon was in place and hadn’t been moved. I saw Mrs. Hearn coming out of her trailer. “Fanny wheezes like calliope,” she said.

“Well, why doesn’t someone get a doctor?”

She put her hand on my cheek and looked in my eyes. “I worry to think someday if we are not together what will happen to you.”

Several of the freaks were leaving in a group. I was told to take a truck and drive them about fifteen miles to a town called Chester, where there was a spur line to Albany. It was the afternoon, already getting dark. In the cab with me sat the woman who took care of Fanny. The whole ride she wept and blew her nose. She spoke to herself in Spanish as if her running stream of thoughts and sorrows came up over the banks every now and then. She thought I wasn’t looking when she lifted her skirt and fingered the metal clip of her garter to make sure it was fastened properly. I saw tucked in the top of her stocking a wad of bills that looked like a lot of money.

I let off the truckload of freaks and their keepers in Chester, New York, and they hopped, climbed or were lowered from the tailgate. They went limping and scuttling into the waiting room carrying their bags like anyone. Why not? They were mostly immigrants, after all — the same people but with a twist who worked for pennies in the sawmills or stood on the bread lines. But I imagined the Stationmaster seeing through his grill this company of freaks in ordinary streetclothes approaching him with questions of schedule and tickets.

Why didn’t I get on the train with them? Did I really want to drive a truck to Florida? Did I want to bang Mrs. Magda Hearn in more states of the Union?

I thought of the freaks as pilgrims or revolutionaries of some angry religion nobody knew anything about yet.

When I got back it was already dark. I could tell something was wrong, there were lots of cars there and wagon teams. I cut the engine and stood on the running board. Beyond the lot was a hill that rose steeply, blacker than the sky, I could see its outline against the blue-black space of sky behind it. I thought I heard a scream. I listened — it was something else, a drumming of the earth or the sound of a rug being beaten. I walked toward the show tent, there was the dimmest light in there. A man stepped out of the shadow and put his hand on my arm. A flashlight shone in my eyes. “Who’s this?” a voice said.

And then I heard Magda Hearn. “It’s all right. He’s with the show.”

My arm was still held and I could feel the consideration of this intelligence in the mind behind the light. The flashlight went off. I made out the figure of a state trooper, blocked hat and gun and Sam Browne belt. Then my arm was released, the marks of the fingers still on me, like the afterimage on the eye.

Magda Hearn was walking me toward the show tent. “Joe,” she said, “I want you to see, to understand. And I wait for you in the car. Do you hear me?”

“What’s going on?” I said. “What are the police doing here?”

“Joe, please to listen.” She was whispering in my ear and in each cycle of her crippled gait, the sibilance rose and fell in waves of urgency.

Then I passed through the flaps.

The show tent had a few rows of wooden bleachers and a small ring where the ponies could run around and the bareback sisters, if they were so inclined, could do their turns. A cat act had been featured here for a while.

The bleachers were empty. One bulb burned from the tent pole. Eighty, maybe a hundred men stood in a circle in the dirt of the ring. I couldn’t see over their backs but I heard the not unfamiliar night music, the grunts and gurgling moans and squeals of Fanny the Fat Lady. As the rhythm got faster the crowd shouted encouragement. Then I heard that peculiar basso thumping as if the earth itself was being drummed. Then an abrupt silence and the hoarse male roar of expiration. Whistles and cheers came from the crowd, men turned outward, I saw them drinking from bottles, exchanging money. Staggering through the ring, buttoning his pants, was a grifter I recognized. He sank down on his knees beside me, removed a flask from his back pocket and took a long pull.

Some sort of hot shame rose from the roots of my sex into my stomach and chest: it felt like illness. I pushed forward and saw Fanny on her back, arms and legs flung outward. She was naked. She lay twitching, each spasm jerking her flesh into ripples. She wheezed and fought for breath. The sweated slathered flesh was caked in dirt, but with white crevasses in the folds of her and a red blotch in the middle. I was pushed aside and spun around. A moment later another lover had fallen on her. The crowd yelled and jammed up around me. She was quickly brought to pitch, her great back rising and thumping into the earth, but this one didn’t last long, and to great merry raucous hoots and jeers he stumbled out of the ring.

Almost immediately another rube was moving forward for his turn. I jumped him just as he unbuckled his belt. I knocked him down and kicked him in the groin. He yowled, doubling up and clutching himself and I took his place crouching beside Fanny, facing them all, my fists clenched. I was screaming something, I don’t remember what, it stunned them for a second, and then they were laughing and taunting me and shouting at me to wait my turn.