E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

I hung around. I made myself useful. They were still putting it together. I helped lay the wooden track for the kiddy cars. I heaved-ho the tent ropes, I set the corral poles for the pony ride. There were three or four tired stiffs doing these things. I recognized them for what they were, everyone of them had a pint of wine in his pocket, they were no problem at all. I thought the Hearn Bros. were lucky to have me.

But nothing happened. Nobody paid attention. At dusk the generator was cranked, and the power went on with a thump. The string lights glowed, the Victrola band music came out of the loudspeakers, the Wheel of Fortune went ratatat-tat, and I saw how money was made from the poor. They drifted in, appearing starved and sucked dry, but holding in their palms the nickels and dimes that would give them a view of Wolf Woman, Lizard Man, the Living Oyster, the Fingerling Family and in fact the whole Hearn Bros. bestiary of human virtue and excellence.

The clear favorite was Fanny the Fat Lady. She sat on a scale that was like a porch swing. Over her head a big red arrow attested to six hundred and eight pounds. Someone doubted that. She responded with an emphatic sigh and the arrow fluctuated wildly, going as high as nine hundred. This made people laugh. She was dressed in a short jumper with a big collar and a bow in her hair, just like Shirley Temple. Her dyed red hair was set in waves over her small skull. The other freaks did routines or sold souvenirs and pamphlets of their life stories. Not the Fat Lady. She only sat and suffered herself to be gazed on, her slathered legs crossed at the ankles. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Finally I caught her attention, and her little painted mouth widened like the wings of a butterfly as if it were basking on some pulpy extragalactic flower. The folds of her chins rising in cups of delicate hue, her blue eyes setting like moons behind her cheeks, she smiled at me and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled, sitting there with each arm resting on the base of a plump hand supported by a knee that was like the cap of an exotic giant white mushroom.

I realized she was slow-witted. Behind her and off to the side was a woman who was keeping an eye out, maybe a relative, a mother, an aunt. This woman looked at me with the alert eyes of the carney.

And as I went about I saw those eyes everywhere behind the show, alert carney eyes on the gaunt man with a white shirt and tie and sleeve garters, on the girl in the ticket booth, on the freaks themselves staring out from their enclosures. What were they looking for? Life! A threat! An advantage! I had that look myself. I recognized it, I knew these people.

But I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. By midnight the crowd had thinned out. The lights were blinked in warning and the generator was turned off. The last of the rubes drifted back into the hills. They held Kewpie dolls. They held pinwheels.

I saw the acts going into their trailers to find some supper or drink some wine. I sat across the road with my back against a tree. I wanted a job with the carney. It seemed to me the finest possible way to live.

A while later a truck came along running without headlights and it turned into the dark lot. I sat up. I heard the truck doors slam. A few minutes later an old car and three men got out and walked into the carney. Other men arrived on foot, in jalopies. A few lights had gone back on. I crossed the road. There was some kind of renewed commerce, I didn’t understand. I saw the belly dancer standing in the door of her trailer her arms folded a man at the foot of the steps tipped his cap. I saw the girl who sold tickets outside her booth she was looking into a hand mirror and primping her hair. At the back end of the lot in the shadow of the trees a line of men and boys outside a trailer. I went there and got on the end of the line. A man came out and talked in low tones to the others. I heard something moaning. Another man went in. From the trailer came these sounds of life’s panic, shivers and moans and shrieks and crashings and hoarse cries, the most awesome fuckmusic I had ever heard. I got closer. I hadn’t seen before sitting on a chair at the foot of the trailer steps that same woman attendant from the afternoon who kept a close and watchful eye on the crowd in front of Fanny the Fat Lady.

Iled her from the trailer to the tent in the afternoon and back to her trailer at the end of the night. She placed her hand on my shoulder, and walking behind me at arm’s length with a great quivering resettlement of herself at each step, she made her stately trustful way down the midway.

Once she hugged me. She was surprisingly gentle I did not share the popular lust for her I was embarrassed and maybe frightened by that mountainous softness I pulled away. Right away I saw I’d made a mistake. Fanny had a cleft palate and on top of that the sounds she made were in Spanish but I could tell her feelings were hurt. I moved to her and let her hug me. She put her warm hand on the small of my back. I thought I felt the touch of an astute intelligence.

She was truly sensitive to men, she had a real affection for them. She didn’t know she was making money, she never saw the money. She held out her arms and loved them, and it didn’t matter what happened, if they came in the folds of her thighs or the creases in the sides of her which spilled over the structure of her trunk like down quilts, she always screamed as if they had found her true center.

I decided that between this retarded whore freak and the riffraff who stood in line to fuck her some really important sacrament was taken, some means of continuing with hope, a ritual oath of life which did not wear away but grew in the memory of her around the bars and taverns of the mountains, catching her image in the sawdust flying up through the sunlight in the mill yards or lying like the mist of the morning over the clear lakes.

On the other hand it was common knowledge in the carney that fat ladies were the biggest draw.

I got along with all the freaks, I made a point to. It was as if I had to acclimate myself to the worst there was. I never let them see that I had any special awareness of them. I knew it was important not to act like a rube. After a while they stopped looking at me with the carney eyes and forgot I was there. Some, the Living Oyster for instance, were taken care of by members of their families who lived with them and probably got them their jobs in the first place. There was about them all, freaks and family, such competence that you almost wondered how normal people got along. There was a harmony of malformation and life that could only scare the shit out of you if you thought about it. The freaks read the papers and talked about Roosevelt, just like everyone else in the country.

But with all of that they lived invalid lives, as someone in the pain of constant hopeless bad health, and so their dispositions were seldom sunny.

The Fingerlings were mean little bastards, they were not really a family but who could tell? They all had these little pug faces. They used to get into fights all the time and only the dwarf could do anything with them. They used to torture Wolf Woman. What she had done to arouse their wrath I never knew. They liked to sneak up on her and pull out tufts of her hair. “That’s all right,” they screamed, scuttling out of her way. “Plenty more where that came from!”

And every day the rubes paid their money to see them and then went off and took a chance on Fortune’s wheel.

I had great respect for Sim Hearn. He was the owner of the enterprise. He was pretty strange himself, a tall thin man who walked with a stoop. Even the hottest days of the summer he wore an old gray fedora with the brim pulled way down, and a white-on-white shirt with a black tie and rubber bands around the sleeves above the elbows. He had stick arms. He was always sucking on his teeth, alighting on a particular crevasse with his tongue and then pulling air through it. Cheeup cheeup! If you wanted to know where Hearn was on the lot, all you had to do was listen. Sometimes you’d be doing your work and you’d realize it was you he was watching, the cheeup cheeup just behind your ear, as if he’d landed on your shoulder. You’d turn and there he’d be. He’d point at what he wanted done with his chin. “That,” he’d say. He was a stingy son of a bitch even with his words.