“They’d like nothing better than to see me put a knife right into your heart. That’s why that tent wasn’t but half filled till you stepped inside the outline. You can see it in the way they squint their eyes, trying to send mind messages so I’ll screw up.”
“Then look into my eyes, listen for my mind messages,” I said, pulling Ricky close to me.
And that’s what he’d done. Before each throw his eyes met mine and I thought hard as I could, willing his knife to the right place.
Most of the time, and always on the first night in a new town, I’d be seated in the stands. Ricky would start off throwing at the outline and soon enough someone in the bleachers would complain or demand a refund. Then I’d volunteer and the townies would whoop and clap. When we did it that way they always left more satisfied, thinking they’d gotten more than they’d paid for.
I’d always sit in the same place in the bleachers, end of the third row, because Ricky liked things done the same way every time. He had other rituals as well. He’d get dressed thirty minutes before the show, then take each knife from the carrying case and rub it with a piece of black velvet. He’d turn on his tape player and lie on the bed with his eyes closed.
He played the same song each time, “Don’t Fear the Reefer,” which seemed a strange kind of choice since Ricky didn’t drink, much less smoke marijuana. As soon as the song ended he got up and went straight to the tent.
Everything had gone well the first five months. Then one night as we lay in the sawdust, Ricky said he loved me.
“I’ve known that a long time, baby,” I said, brushing the sawdust from his hair. “But it’s nice to hear you say it.”
“I’ve known it a long time too,” Ricky said, his voice low and serious. “I just didn’t want to admit it, not so much to you but to myself.”
I lay my head against his chest.
“Why not?”
“Because love for me is all or nothing. I don’t know how to hold anything back,” Ricky said. “You’d think that car wreck would have taught me different but it didn’t.”
“That’s who you are, Ricky. That’s the kind of people we are.”
“And you’re glad of that?” Ricky asked.
“I haven’t always been,” I said. “But I am now. I want you to be glad too, Ricky.”
After that night Ricky no longer looked in my eyes when he threw. He’d look above me, below me, anywhere but at me. His aim suffered, most of the time wider and wider, sometimes not even hitting the plywood.
“Hell, boy,” a townie in Shelby, North Carolina, had said. “My blind granny could get closer than that.”
But sometimes he had gotten too close, the knife so near the handle would brush my skin as it wavered. And now he had drawn blood.
“WHAT YOU WAITING for?” a townie wearing a cowboy hat shouted at Ricky.
“It’s just getting interesting,” a bald-headed man on the front row added.
“Show’s over,” I said, my index finger feeling the depth of the cut. “You got more than your money’s worth.”
“But he only thrown one knife.”
“That’s right,” I said, “and if he’d thrown it eight inches farther to the right, I’d be a dead woman.”
I stepped away from the plywood as the bleachers emptied.
“Here,” I said, handing Ricky his knife. “I’m going back to the trailer and sew up this blouse. When you get your knives packed, you come on home. We need to talk this thing out.”
I stepped out of the tent and walked down the midway, everything looking the same to me as it would for someone who lived in a regular home in a regular neighborhood, for though we were two states away from where we’d been last weekend, nothing had changed. The tents remained in the same order, from the Snake Man’s at the start of the midway to the Human Skeleton’s down at the end. The air smelled of corn dogs and cotton candy and the same rides circled and plunged while the same neon lights rainbowed the night.
The Human Skeleton stood outside his tent sipping a Diet Coke.
“Damn, Ellie,” he said. “Looks like you earned your money tonight. If Ricky keeps whittling off your flesh you might end up working with me.”
“I reckon so,” I said and walked behind the tent and up the steps of me and Ricky’s camper.
Ricky came in a few minutes later, quiet and tense, the way he’d been the last few days.
“So what is it?” I asked, and if he’d been any other man I’d known he’d have hemmed and hawed an hour before answering that question. But that wasn’t the way we were with each other.
“I’m afraid I’ll lose you,” he said. “Seems that’s what happened to anyone I’ve ever cared about. You might get tired of this life before long and start looking for a man who can give you a home you can turn around in without bumping into the other person, a yard with grass instead of sawdust. You may decide you want kids, and if you do you’ll not want them living this kind of life.”
I could have said the easy things, maybe the true things — that I’d always want to be with the carnival and would always be happy living in a camper trailer. Or said the thing I most believed, which was that I’d always be with him, and if I did have children I’d want to have them with him, because I’d never find another man who could give me the kind of nothing-held-back love he’d given me. But I didn’t, because always is a tricky word, especially concerning matters of the heart.
“I don’t feel that way now,” I said. “But I’m twenty-four, Ricky. How can I know for sure what I’ll want?”
“I don’t want to ever lose you,” Ricky said.
I stepped over to him, lay my hand on his face.
“I don’t want to lose you either, baby,” I said.
Ricky closed his eyes.
“Now when I throw I get afraid. I think about what could happen if … I could lose you that way too.”
“That’s how it is, Ricky,” I said, “at least in the kind of relationship me and you have. Maybe it’s best when nothing’s held back, nothing’s taken for granted.”
And when I said that I thought about nights after we’d finish the performance, the knives that had whizzed inches from my flesh still stuck in the plywood. The last townie would barely be out of the tent and Ricky and me would be tearing the clothes off each other like they were on fire. We’d make love right there in the sawdust, unable to wait the two minutes it would take to get to the camper. Because we’d taken each other to a place few people go together, a place where your faith in each other is a matter of life and death — him believing I wouldn’t move an inch, me believing his aim would be true. Those moments I felt more alive than any time in my life, and I could tell Ricky felt the same way. We’d lay there covered with sweat and sawdust, our hearts pressed against each other’s, as close as two human beings can ever be.
“I want you to wear this,” Ricky said, and pulled from under the bed what looked like a cross between a corset and a knight’s armor. “It’ll fit under your clothes. Nobody will know the difference.”
I felt the weight of the thing, lighter than you’d expect.
Nobody but you and me, I thought.
“I’m tired,” Ricky said. He pulled off his boots and clothes and lay down in the bed, his face turned to the wall.
I sat in the chair and stared at Ricky’s back, the back my hands moved across nights our bodies merged into what seemed the sweet everlasting. I could hear the music and loudspeakers and shrieks as the townies got flung around the sky, but everything outside that camper seemed miles away. I was deep inside myself, thinking things out.
I laid the body armor beside the door and undressed. I lay down beside Ricky, my breasts touching his back, my arm on his side, my hand spread across his stomach. I knew he was still awake. I moved my hand higher, feeling the smooth skin, the hair on his chest.
“Don’t,” he said, removing my hand.
I lay there listening to the noises, knowing neither of us would sleep much that night. I got up after a while and went to the pay phone out by the front gate.
Momma answered on the fourth ring, still half asleep.
“What’s wrong, Ellie?” she said, because after midnight she knew well as me no one calls with good news.
“It’s complicated.”
“Then I reckon there’s a man involved,” Momma said. “Are you and Ricky having problems?”
“Yes, but not what you’d think.”
“So it’s not money, drinking, or snoring.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, if it’s sex you best read Cosmopolitan. All I know is what it’s like for me and your daddy, and I got the feeling you’d rather not know the details.”
“It’s not that, either. Ricky says he’s afraid he loves me too much.”
“Well,” Momma said, “all I can say is there’s many a woman who would be happy to have that kind of problem.”
Right then I knew there was no way to explain it to Momma. There was one person who could help me work this out and he was back at the camper.
“Yes, Momma,” I finally said. “I guess you’re right. I’m sorry I woke you.”
I walked back to the trailer and lay next to Ricky. His breath was deep and regular, and I knew he’d finally managed to fall asleep. I thought how it had been with Robert and how one morning I’d woke up and felt to be in bed with a stranger. I thought about the family photos, how I was always on the edge, almost out of the picture — even in the five-by-seven black-and-whites somehow apart from the rest of the family. I thought about how the last eight months I’d found something that finally felt like home. Because home for me wasn’t so much a place but a feeling you were where you should be, and at the center of that feeling was Ricky. I finally went to sleep. I dreamed I stood in front of the plywood. Ricky was down at the far end of the tent, a bow in his hands. It was not knives that crossed the space between us. It was arrows.