THOUGH ARVIN NEVER CAUSED HER any serious trouble, Emma could easily see Willard in him, especially when it came to the fighting. By the time he was fourteen, he had been kicked out of school several times for using his fists. Pick your own time, he remembered his father telling him, and Arvin learned that lesson well, catching whoever his enemy happened to be at the moment alone and unaware in the restroom or stairwell or under the bleachers in the gymnasium. For the most part, however, he was known throughout Coal Creek for his easygoing ways, and to his credit, most of the scraps he got caught up in were because of Lenora, defending her from bullies who made fun of her pious manner and pinched face and that damn bonnet she insisted on wearing. Though just a few months younger than Arvin, she already seemed dried up, a pale winter spud left too long in the furrow. He loved her like his own sister, but it could be embarrassing, walking into the schoolhouse in the morning with her following meekly on his heels. “She ain’t never gonna make cheerleader, that’s for sure,” he told Uncle Earskell. He wished to hell his grandmother had never given her the black-and-white photograph of Helen standing under the apple tree behind the church in a long, shapeless dress with a ruffled hat covering her head. As far as he was concerned, Lenora certainly didn’t need any new ideas on how to make herself look more like the shade of her pitiful mother.
WHENEVER EMMA ASKED HIM about the fighting, Arvin always thought of his father and that damp fall day long ago when he had defended Charlotte’s honor in the Bull Pen parking lot. Though it was the best day he ever remembered spending with Willard, he never told anybody about it, or, for that matter, mentioned any of the bad days that soon followed. Instead, he would simply say to her, his father’s voice echoing faintly in his head, “Grandma, there’s a lot of no-good sonsofbitches out there.”
“My Lord, Arvin, why do you keep saying that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Well, maybe you should try praying for them then,” she’d suggest. “That wouldn’t hurt none, would it?” It was times like this when she regretted ever telling Reverend Sykes to leave the boy to find the path to God on his own terms. As far as she could tell, Arvin was always on the verge of heading the other direction.
He rolled his eyes; that was her advice for everything. “Maybe not,” he said, “but Lenora already does enough of that for the both of us, and I don’t see where it’s doing her much good.”
18
THEY SHARED A TENT DOWN AT THE END of the midway with the Flamingo Lady, a rail-thin woman with the longest nose Roy had ever seen on a human being. “She ain’t really a bird, is she?” Theodore asked him after the first time they met her, his usual brash voice turned timid and shaky. Her strange appearance had frightened him. They had worked with freaks before, but nothing that looked quite like this one.
“No,” Roy assured him. “She’s just putting on a show.”
“I didn’t think so,” the cripple said, relieved to find out that she wasn’t real. He looked over and noticed Roy checking out her ass as she walked toward her trailer. “Hard to tell what kind of diseases something like that’s got,” he added, his cockiness quickly returning once he was satisfied she was out of hearing range. “Women like that, they’ll fuck a dog or a donkey or anything else for a buck or two.”
The Flamingo Lady’s wild, bushy hair was dyed pink, and she wore a bikini that had ragged pigeon feathers glued to the flesh-colored material. Her act consisted mostly of standing on one leg in a little rubber swimming pool filled with dirty water while preening herself with her pointy beak. A record player sat on a table behind her playing slow, sad violin music that sometimes made her cry if she had accidentally taken too many of her nerve pills that day. Just as he had feared, Theodore figured out after a couple of months that Roy was tapping it, though try as he might, he could never actually catch them in the filthy act. “That ugly bitch is gonna hatch an egg one of these days,” he railed at Roy, “and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut the goddamn chick will look just like you.” Sometimes he cared; sometimes he didn’t. It depended on how he and Flapjack the Clown were getting along at the moment. Flapjack had come to Theodore wanting to learn a few chords on the guitar, but then he’d showed the cripple how to play the skin flute instead. Roy once made the mistake of pointing out to his cousin that what he and the clown were doing was an abomination in the eyes of God. Theodore had set his guitar down on the sawdust floor and spit some brown juice in a paper cup. He’d recently taken to chewing tobacco. It made him a little sick to his stomach, but Flapjack liked the way it made his breath smell. “Damn, Roy, if you ain’t a good one to talk, you crazy bastard,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean? I ain’t no peter puffer.”
“Maybe not, but you sure as hell murdered your old lady with that screwdriver, didn’t you? You ain’t forgot about that, have you?”
“I ain’t forgot,” Roy said.
“Well then, you figure the Lord thinks any worse of me than He does of you?”
Roy hesitated for a minute before answering. According to what he had read in a pamphlet that he had found under a pillow in a Salvation Army shelter one time, a man laying with another man was probably equal to killing your wife, but Roy wasn’t sure if it was any worse or not. The manner in which the weight of certain sins was calculated sometimes confused him. “No, I don’t reckon,” he finally said.
“Then I suggest you stick to your pink-haired crow or pelican or whatever the hell she is and leave me and Flapjack the fuck alone,” Theodore said, digging the wet wad of chew out of his mouth and slinging it toward the Flamingo Lady’s wading pool. They both heard a tiny splash. “We ain’t hurting nobody.”
The banner outside the tent read THE PROPHET AND THE PICKER. Roy delivered his grisly version of the End Times while Theodore provided the background music. It cost a quarter to get inside the tent, and convincing people that religion could be entertaining was tough when just a few yards away were a number of other more exciting and less serious distractions, so Roy came up with the idea of eating insects during his sermon, a slightly different take on his old spider act. Every couple of minutes, he’d stop preaching and pull a squirming worm or crunchy roach or slimy slug out of an old bait bucket and chew on it like a piece of candy. Business picked up after that. Depending on the crowd, they did four, sometimes five shows every evening, alternating with the Flamingo Lady every forty-five minutes. At the end of each show, Roy would quickly step out behind the tent to regurgitate the bugs and Theodore would follow in his wheelchair. While waiting to go on again, they smoked and sipped from a bottle, half listened to the drunks inside whoop and holler and try to coax the fake bird into stripping off her plumes.
By 1963, they had been with this particular carnival, Billy Bradford Family Amusements, for almost four years, traveling from one end of the hot, humid South to the other from early spring until late fall in a retired school bus packed with moldering canvas and folding chairs and metal poles, always setting up in dusty, pig-shit towns where the locals thought a couple of creaky whirly rides and some toothless, flea-bitten jungle cats along with a tattered freak show was high-class entertainment. On a good night, Roy and Theodore could make twenty or thirty bucks. The Flamingo Lady and Flapjack the Clown got most of what they didn’t spend on booze or bugs or at the hot dog stand. West Virginia seemed like a million miles away, and the two fugitives couldn’t imagine the arm of the law in Coal Creek ever stretching that far. It had been nearly fourteen years since they had buried Helen and fled south. They didn’t even bother to change their names anymore.