“I’d be more than enough willing, but the doctor says I can’t do nothing that excites me. Bad ticker,” the geezer said, pointing to his chest.
“Anyway, he ain’t pretty enough,” the teenager said. “Why don’t you put her up there?”
I didn’t need to turn around to know who he was talking about.
The man sitting next to me nudged my shoulder. “Get on up there, girl,” he said. “Give us something worth looking at.”
Some of the other men echoed his words and I could feel a blush spreading across my face.
“That girl ain’t got the grit to get up there,” the old man said. “I’m getting my money back.”
I looked at him and I knew exactly the kind of customer he’d be. He’d hog a whole booth instead of sitting on a stool and order just coffee and make sure you ran your legs off to keep it hot and up to the brim. He’d sit there an hour and then grumble when he got the bill that seventy-five cents was too much for coffee. There’d be as much chance of a tip from him as from an alley cat.
“I’ll let him throw at me,” I said, knowing me standing in front of that plywood would keep that geezer from getting his dollar back. But it was more than that. I wanted to show Ricardo Mont Blanc that I did have grit.
The tent got real quiet soon as the words left my mouth.
Ricardo Mont Blanc aimed those cool green eyes right at me. Sizing me up, I reckoned. I mostly expected him to say something such as he couldn’t throw at just anyone or there might be a problem with the carnival’s insurance or some other excuse like that.
All he said was “Okay.”
“We got us a show now,” the young rowdy shouted and high-fived another teenager sitting next to him.
Ricardo Mont Blanc led me over to the plywood. He fitted me inside the outline, raising my arms, positioning my head. His hands were soft, not rough and callused like most men’s hands. I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d feel touching other places on my body. But another part of me was all the while looking for the slightest tremble in them.
“What’s your name?” he asked when he had me like he wanted.
“Ellie Higginbotham,” I said.
“Call me Ricky,” he said and took a step back, looked me over a last time.
“Don’t move, Ellie Higginbotham,” he said and walked to the other side of the tent.
Momma had always said I was bad to do things without thinking them through, like after high school marrying Robert instead of taking a scholarship Brevard College offered me. I closed my eyes. Dear Lord, my mother was so right, I prayed. Forgive my foolishness and let me leave this tent alive. I said a silent amen and looked up. Ricky’s eyes met mine. He gave a little nod. My eyes locked on his as his arm came forward.
“YOU AIN’ T THOUGHT this thing through, no more than when you turned down that scholarship,” Momma said four days later as Daddy drove me to the fairgrounds. “You could be teaching school now instead of having knives thrown at you.”
“I don’t know as I could trust a man with a name nobody in South Carolina’s heard the like of,” Daddy chimed in.
“That’s not his real name, Daddy,” I said. “His real name’s Ricky Sandifer.”
“And what does that tell you, him disguising his name like that?” Daddy said. “Where do his parents live? Has he told you that?”
“They’re dead, Daddy.”
“So he claims,” Daddy said. “I’m going to be checking those wanted posters in the post office, girl. You best be eyeballing them too.”
“Even as a child, you always did things different,” Momma said. “Your sisters would never run off with the circus.”
“It’s not a circus, Momma. It’s a carnival.”
“And that’s worse,” Daddy said. “Circus people are high society compared to the riffraff you’ll be with.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” I said and lifted my suitcase from the floorboard.
Momma shook her head.
“That’s what you said when we tried talking you out of marrying Robert,” she said, “those exact same words. Those teachers of yours always bragged about how smart you were, but there’s book smarts and life smarts, Ellie, and they ain’t the same thing.”
“It’s different this time,” I said.
NOW, SIX MONTHS later, I wasn’t nearly so sure. I pulled the knife out of my blouse. The blade had nicked my upper arm, not muscle-deep but deep enough to sting and stain my blouse with blood.
I thought about what Momma said about me not thinking things through. I’d married Robert knowing no more about what holds a man and woman together than I’d known about being an astronaut. But in the years since I’d learned a lot about men and women and love — mostly about how those three things never seemed to make a good fit, at least for me. At eighteen I’d believed love was like a virus. If you stayed around someone, or better yet married him, sooner or later you’d catch it. And maybe love did happen that way for some people, but it hadn’t for me, or at least the kind of love I wanted.
“You expect too much,” my friend Connie told me after the divorce.
“I don’t expect any more than I’m willing to give.”
“Which is everything — heart, mind, body, and soul — nothing held back,” Connie said. “That scares people, Ellie. It’s too intense. It’s like you want nothing between you and the other person, no skin, no muscle, just raw bone against raw bone.”
Connie shook her head.
“Girl, if you don’t learn to lower your expectations, you’ll live a lonely life. There may be a man out there who wants that kind of intensity, has it himself, but he’s one in a million. And even if you found him, how do you know that intensity won’t be like a fire that burns up the both of you? That’s a dangerous love you’re talking about, Ellie Higginbotham.”
BUT I HAD found that kind of love, found it that first night after Ricky’d thrown his knives at me and we’d bought a couple of corn dogs and Pepsis and sat on the steps of his camper. We’d talked easy and open with each other, and before long I was telling him things I’d never told Robert or even Momma. And it felt right to tell him those things, because I’d already trusted him with my heart in that tent. Unlike Robert and the other men I’d known, Ricky wanted to know everything about me. He wanted nothing hidden between us, even on that first night. It was like a hunger we shared, and soon enough he told me about his parents and sister, the car wreck that killed them. He told how he’d worked in the carnival since he was fifteen, first running a cotton candy machine, then working with the Snake Man, throwing knives every morning until he was good enough to earn a tent of his own. All the while he never tried to talk me into his camper and out of my clothes, even when the air got chilly and I snuggled against him.
It was dawn before I left. When I did Ricky knew more about me than Robert had in two years of marriage, more than Momma and Daddy in twenty-four years. I somehow knew myself better too, because different as our lives had been Ricky and me shared something deep inside and we’d shared it with each other for years and not even known. And it was more than how we saw life or how we lived life. It was how we felt life.
“You expect too much,” Connie had said, and in the last four years I’d almost been convinced she was right, but that night on those camper steps I could finally believe she was wrong after all. When I said goodbye to Ricky that morning I knew I’d soon enough see the inside of that camper. I knew already when the carnival left Seneca I’d be leaving with it.
“THOSE TOWNIES DON’T ever come to see me do good,” Ricky had said that night Momma and Daddy brought me to his camper, after I’d unpacked my suitcase, after we’d made love as the carnival’s green and red and blue neon lights splashed across our bodies.