He takes her hand, and leads her down the midway, all bright lights, steam organ and cinder toffee smell. At the candy butcher he buys pinwheel mints for himself and cotton candy for her, which she teases apart into individual strands, and sends them drifting, weightless into the air. Richie crunches the mints one after the other, little shards of boiled sugar spraying to the ground like broken teeth every time he speaks.
“You want one of those?” he asks. She follows his pointing finger to the prizes on a shooting gallery, overstuffed animals with glazed eyes hanging from its roof. “I’ll get you one.” The little crowd parts to let him through, and he swaggers up to the stall, where money changes hands for three shots on a beaten up old air rifle.
Sylvia watches the pockmarked tin ducks rising and falling as they make their unsteady voyage from right to left. Richie puts the rifle to his shoulder, squeezes the trigger and sends a ball-bearing down the gallery into the wooden backboard, to the accompaniment of a mutter from the crowd. A second shot, another dull impact into wood instead of metal, but his aim is improving. He takes his time over the third, adjusting the sights on the rifle with exaggerated care, a sniper taking careful stock of his target.
This time his aim is true, and the metal ball punches a sad little dent in a tin duck, knocking it out of alignment with the rest of the flock. There’s a round of applause from the crowd, and Richie whoops with delight.
“All right!” he crows, pointing to the dead-eyed bears and rabbits hanging over their heads. “Which one do you want?”
It seems the barker doesn’t hear him. “Bad luck. Try again?”
“What do you mean, try again?”
“It didn’t go down. You want another try?” The barker’s voice is bored, eyes half closed, as though he is slipping towards sleep. On the wall behind him, the dented duck reaches the end of the river. The beak dips first, then the body chases after, like a canoe going over a waterfall.
“I hit it. That means I win.” Richie’s hands are tight on the air rifle.
“Not unless you knock it down.”
Richie makes a noise that’s somewhere between a grunt and a growl. Sylvia feels herself stiffen, poised for fight or flight, except to fight would be unthinkable and to fly impossible. Richie hurls the rifle across the counter with a broad, round-arm swing, the butt end clipping the barker across the shoulder then clattering broadside into the painted wooden river. He turns his back on the stall and the man’s outrage, slings a casual arm around Sylvia’s shoulder, and throws his hands wide for the benefit of the onlookers.
“It’s all rigged,” he says, as the crowd parts to let them through. “Who’d want that junk anyway?”
As they walk away, she wonders if she’s expected to congratulate him on his shot, or commiserate with him on the unfairness of the loss. In the end, she does neither, just nods and smiles as he holds forth on the corruption inherent in the carnival business model, how he could and should have beaten it, how these games are all a con anyway. She risks a surreptitious glance at her watch – quarter to nine, still over an hour to go – which turns out to be the wrong thing to do. Richie’s temper, only just subsiding after the altercation at the duck shoot, flares again into life. His fingers bite into her shoulder. “You bored?”
“I’m not.” She blurts the words too quickly.
“You still sore about last night?”
Her face burns. His arm lies heavy on the back of her neck. A sudden memory of the precise smell of freshly crushed grass floods her mind.
“If you didn’t want it, you should have said no,” he continues, voice deceptively light. “I didn’t make you.”
She shakes her head, but not in disagreement. He’s right. He didn’t make her, never applied force or pressure or threat, yet there had been no single point at which she felt she could have stopped him, no threshold that he crossed in a bold leap, only the smooth flow of one action into the inevitable next. “You been telling folks about what happened?” Another shake of the head. “I thought you enjoyed it.” Then, as an afterthought he adds, “Frigid bitch.”
They walk aimlessly down the midway, past tents, barkers, advertisements, salesmen. “What do you want to do then?” he asks, and when she says nothing, snaps, “Jesus, can you just make a decision?” For a second she fears that his temper is flaring again, but it seems that it’s burned out for now, anger replaced by disgust, his face twisted in contempt. “Screw it. I’ll choose. This one.”
He stops them outside a medium sized tent, dimly lit from the inside. A banner pinned to its walls depicts a semi-naked woman reclining with a snake draped over her naked body, head thrown back in a crude approximation of ecstasy. A small group of men are clustered at the entrance, where a boy is exchanging crumpled notes for admission.
“Why?” she asks, with difficulty.
“Why not?” He shoves her to the doorway and pays for two pink slips of paper. The ink clings to Sylvia’s hands as they take their seats, blurring the curlicued border and the ornate Gothic script. ‘The Medusa – Snake Charmer – Will You Risk Her Coils?’ Sylvia realizes she is, for now, the only woman in the tent.
The low wooden stage is covered in sand, the canvas behind painted to resemble an Egyptian skyline, complete with pyramids, obelisks and a lopsided sphinx. The air is heavy with incense that smells of cedar and sandalwood, and something dark and aromatic that makes her think of expensive perfume. The music begins, a wailing reedy melody and a meandering drumbeat, ersatz Orientalism in audible form. The men of the audience whoop and stamp. Sylvia folds and unfolds her ticket, searching for ways to compress it into a tinier wedge of paper as her fingertips turn gray.
As the music accelerates, the stage becomes a flurry of spinning limbs and billowing silk. Three semi-clad woman appear, making twirling, sinuous leaps that have nothing in common with any dance she has seen or participated in before. The audience react immediately, clapping and catcalling at the dancers. The two girls to either side have long silk scarves held between their outstretched hands, the gossamer cloth billowing across their shoulders, but the girl in the middle—her face veiled in gray silk to preserve a modesty disregarded by every other part of her body—has a snake across her shoulders, a creamy white monster six feet long and a thigh’s width broad at the middle, its round pink eyes surveying the tent with a jaded air. The music swells then falls to a single, low, trembling note, and the two flanking women gracefully fold to the ground, a sweep of silk trailing behind each like a fluttering pennant. The one in the middle – the one holding the snake, steps forward, descending the stage towards the wolf-whistling crowd.
She is beautiful. Even through the lenses of envy and discomfort and something else that she is finding difficult to identify, Sylvia has to acknowledge that. The girl’s body is long and sleek, her skin a smooth, supple mantle over the taut, muscular strength beneath. Long black hair falls across her shoulders in dozens of tiny braids, each tipped with a silver bead, and the eyes above the veil glow a translucent amber in the tent’s dim light.
She weaves between the men with sinuous grace, too quick to touch, brushing greedy hands aside and moving on like smoke through trees. The snake lies dormant over her shoulders, soothed, perhaps, by the heat of her skin, the occasional flick of its tongue all that betrays it as a living creature. Once every few steps her dance takes her closer to one of the seated men, and she fixes the lucky one with a calm amber gaze, running a finger down a chest or across a cheek. They laugh and curse and blush, this roomful of grown men, reduced to teenage boys floundering in the wake of her hypnotic progress.