The geek had picked up a black snake, holding it close behind the head so it couldn’t snap at him, and was rocking it in his arms like a baby, muttering sounds.
The talker waited while the crowd rubbered.
“You may well ask how he associates with poisonous serpents without harm. Why, my friends, their poison has no effect whatsoever upon him. But if he were to sink his teeth in my hand nothing on God’s green earth could save me.”
The geek gave a growl, blinking stupidly up into the light from the bare bulb. Stan noticed that at one corner of his mouth there was a glint from a gold tooth.
“But now, ladies and gentlemen, when I told you that this creature was more beast than man I was not asking you to take my word for it. Stan-” He turned to the young man, whose brilliant blue eyes had not a trace of revelation in them. “Stan, we’re going to feed him one more time for this audience alone. Hand me the basket.”
Stanton Carlisle reached down, gripped a small covered market basket by the handle, and boosted it over the heads of the crowd. They fell back, jamming and pushing. Clem Hoately, the talker, laughed with a touch of weariness. “It’s all right, folks; nothing you haven’t seen before. No, I reckon you all know what this is.” From the basket he drew a half-grown leghorn pullet, complaining. Then he held it up so they could see it. With one hand he motioned for silence.
The necks craned down.
The geek had leaned forward on all fours, his mouth hanging open vacantly. Suddenly the talker threw the pullet into the pit with a whirl of feathers.
The geek moved toward it, shaking his black cotton mop of wig. He grabbed for the chicken, but it spread its stumpy wings in a frenzy of self-preservation and dodged. He crawled after it.
For the first time the paint-smeared face of the geek showed some life. His bloodshot eyes were nearly closed. Stan saw his lips shape words without sound. The words were, “You son of a bitch.”
Gently the youth eased himself out of the crowd, which was straining, looking down. He walked stiffly around to the entrance, his hands in his pockets.
From the pit came a panicky clucking and cackling and the crowd drew its breath. The drunk beat his grimy straw hat on the rail. “Get ’at ole shicken, boy! Go get ’at ole shicken!”
Then a woman screamed and began to leap up and down jerkily; the crowd moaned in an old language, pressing their bodies tighter against the board walls of the pit and stretching. The cackling had been cut off short, and there was a click of teeth and a grunt of someone working hard.
Stan shoved his hands deeper in his pockets. He moved through the flap entrance back into the main ring of the Ten-in-One show, crossed it to the gate and stood looking out on the carnival midway. When his hands came from his pockets one of them held a shiny half-dollar. He reached for it with his other hand and it vanished. Then with a secret, inner smile of contempt and triumph, he felt along the edge of his white flannel trousers and produced the coin.
Against the summer night the ferris wheel lights winked with the gaiety of rhinestones, the calliope’s blast sounded as if the very steam pipes were tired.
“Christ a-mighty, it’s hot, huh, kid?”
Clem Hoately, the talker, stood beside Stan, wiping the sweat from the band of his panama with a handkerchief. “Say, Stan, run over and get me a bottle of lemon soda from the juice joint. Here’s a dime; get yourself one too.”
When Stan came back with the cold bottles, Hoately tilted his gratefully. “Jesus, my throat’s sore as a bull’s ass in fly time.”
Stan drank the pop slowly. “Mr. Hoately?”
“Yeah, what?”
“How do you ever get a guy to geek? Or is this the only one? I mean, is a guy born that way-liking to bite the heads off chickens?”
Clem slowly closed one eye. “Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.”
“Okay. But did you just happen to find this fellow-doing-doing this somewhere behind a barn, and work up the act?”
Clem pushed back his hat. “I like you, kid. I like you a lot. And just for that I’m going to give you a treat. I’m not going to give you a boot in the ass, get it? That’s the treat.”
Stan grinned, his cool, bright blue eyes never leaving the older man’s face. Suddenly Hoately dropped his voice.
“Just because I’m your pal I ain’t going to crap you up. You want to know where geeks came from. Well, listen-you don’t find ’em. You make ’em.”
He let this sink in, but Stanton Carlisle never moved a muscle. “Okay. But how?”
Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek-he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.”’
Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.
“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”
The crowd was coming out of the geek show, gray and listless and silent except for the drunk. Stan watched them with a strange, sweet, faraway smile on his face. It was the smile of a prisoner who has found a file in a pie.
CARD II
who holds toward heaven the wand of fire and points with his other hand toward earth.
“IF YOU’LL step right over this way, folks, I want to call your attention to the attraction now appearing on the first platform. Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness one of the most spectacular performances of physical strenth the world has ever seen. Now some of you young fellows in the crowd look pretty husky but I want to tell you, gents, the man you are about to see makes the ordinary blacksmith or athlete look like a babe in arms. The power of an African gorilla in the body of a Greek god. Ladies and gents, Herculo, the world’s most perfect man.”
Bruno Hertz: If only once she would over here look while I have the robe off I would be glad to drop dead that minute. Um Gotteswillen, I would cut my heart out and hand it to her on a plate. Cannot she ever see that? I cannot get up courage to hold her hand in the kinema. Why has a man always to feel over some woman like this? I cannot even tell Zeena how crazy I am for her because then Zeena would try to put us together and then I would feel a dummkopf from not knowing how to say to her. Molly-a beautiful Amerikanische name. She will never love me. I know it in my heart. But I can tear to pieces any of the wolves in the show such as would hurt that girl. If one of them would try, then maybe Molly could see it. Perhaps then she could guess the way I feel and would give me one word for me to remember always. To remember, back in Wien.