“That,” he said, “is what I’m going to find out.”
“Three-ring outfit?”
“Yes. It works out of Peru, Indiana and ordinarily sticks to the Middle West, which is why I haven’t caught it lately. It’s one of the largest truck shows, though if you’re polite when you’re on the lot, you refer to it as a motorized show. And don’t call the tents, tents; they are tops except for the one you eat in. That’s the cookhouse. A mitt camp is the fortune-teller’s booth; zebras are convicts; barkers are never called that, but talkers, openers, or grinders; show elephants are all female, but are referred to as bulls; a rubber man is not a freak — he sells balloons; the picture gallery is the tattooed man; a mush is an umbrella and a skinned mush, consequently, a cane. A grab joint is a hot-dog stand; a grease joint is a lunch wagon or stand; a juice joint, the lemonade—”
“That,” I said, breaking in on the foreign language broadcast, “is a good idea.” I pulled off the road before a white house with a neatly dignified sign that read, Ye Old-Fashioned Cookie Jar — Chicken and Waffles, Our Specialty. “This grease joint do?” I asked.
We reached Waterboro at eight o’clock and, as I braked before the town’s one traffic light, I hailed a boy on the corner. “Which way to the show grounds?”
Merlini’s voice beside me answered. “Turn right, here.”
“Oh. You know the town, then?” I asked, turning.
“No. Never set eyes on it before. Now turn left.”
“Clairvoyance?”
“Something like that,” he said. “Just give the car its head. I’ve had it so long that it turns in at circus lots automatically. Force of habit.”
I could believe that. Merlini, as I should have explained before now, was born to calliopes, elephants, spangles, and sawdust. His mother was turning somersaults on a resin-back as late as five months before he was born and within a couple of weeks after. At one time or other when you were in knee-pants or short dresses you probably saw the Riding Merlinis, an equestrian act that circus people still talk about. Merlini, himself, began his career of mystification as a side-show sorcerer, and he still has a very warm spot in his heart for the whitetops. I’m fairly certain that he’d have found himself at Waterboro that night even though the headless lady incident had never happened.
We made one more turn at his direction and came onto a street at the town’s edge lined on either side with parked cars. At its farther end there were lights and music, the gay, thumping, nostalgic sound of brasses that held all the old gala promise of excitement, color, and pageantry. As we came closer, I glimpsed the bellying, pennon-topped silhouettes of the tents rising above the brightly lighted side-show banners with their hot, garish splashes of color. We were downwind, and all at once I got the first whiff of that inimitable circus odor, the complex blended smell of elephants, cats, horses, hay, sawdust, crackerjack, hot peanuts, and candy floss.
“Is that your secret?” I asked. “Hypersensitive sense of smell?”
“The telephone poles were chalked,” he explained, sitting forward expectantly in his seat. “When the show moves, the crew on the first truck out puts arrows on the poles, marking the turns so that the following drivers can dispense with maps or having to ask questions.”
We turned right, up over the curb and onto the lot, pulling in and parking near several trailers behind the side-show top. Merlini was out almost before she stopped rolling.
He didn’t bother to circumnavigate the tent, but went directly to the side wall. His tall figure, silhouetted against the lighted canvas, stooped as if to lift its lower edge, then stopped. I hurried toward him as he picked something from the grass at his feet.
“Well!” he said in a faintly, surprised voice. “A grift show.”
He fanned the three purses and then flipped them open one at a time, looking at the identification cards behind the celluloids. As he glanced at the second, his voice showed real surprise.
“That,” he said, “is definitely a bloomer. I wonder—”
“Now what?” I asked. “Not clues already?”
He stuffed the billfolds into his pocket, bent quickly, lifted the side wall, and said, “Come on.”
He held the canvas up as I ducked in behind him. We emerged between two of the dozen or more low platforms that were set at even intervals around the interior. A tall square-shouldered man in an ankle-length, gaudy, somewhat soiled red and yellow robe, was arranging on the table before him a glittering assortment of long knives and swords. He turned, hearing us, and scowled ill-naturedly. His forehead had a Neanderthal slant, and his bony underjaw projected belligerently.
“Where the hell duh ya think you’re going, Mac?” he growled.
“Nowhere,” Merlini said calmly. “We’re here. We’re with it.”
The reception committee was skeptical. “Oh, yeah? Since when?”
“Since now.” With his customary deftness, Merlini produced a cigarette from thin air, reached again, and got a paper of matches. “Magician,” he explained somewhat unnecessarily. “Where’s the mitt camp? I’m looking for Gus and Stella Milbauer.”
The sword-swallower’s suspicion melted slightly. “Over there,” he said, jerking his head to the left. We stepped out from between the platforms and saw a small tented structure of awning-striped canvas down the line. Above its entrance hung a large drawing of Cheiro’s chart of the hand. Merlini started toward it.
There were twenty or thirty customers within the side-show tent, mostly gathered in a group at the far end listening to a five-piece Negro band that was playing with more fervor than harmony, and watching a buxom, coffee-colored, undulant wench who shouted a faintly off-color lyric to one of Mr. Handy’s Blues. She wore a skin-tight scarlet evening gown, and her hips operated on the principle of the universal joint.
Just beyond the band there was a platform surmounted by a square boxlike enclosure formed of dark red drapes, the front curtains tightly drawn.
Merlini pointed. “Success,” he said. “That’s it.”
The singer stopped just then, and the band music faded. From outside on the midway came the leathery exhorting voice of the opener shouting, “… and the weirdest sight of all, my friends, the sci-un-tific mahvel of ouah time — Mademwahselle Christine, the lady without a head! Positively living and buh-reathing! While the big show is going on you see it all for the one price — fifteen cents! Step right up … ”
Gus, standing by the mitt camp, greeted Merlini with pleased surprise. He was a skinny little man with a scrawny neck, thinning gray hair, a black-rimmed pince-nez, a rather hammy dignity, and a warm smile.
“Stella,” he exclaimed, turning. “Look who’s here!”
A middle-aged, completely ordinary-looking woman sat on a camp chair before the tent. She wore a black evening gown, too much eye shadow, and an abstracted air. She looked at Merlini with faded blue eyes and nodded politely but with little enthusiasm.
Gus and Merlini, however, burst into a rapid-fire exchange of reminiscences. “Haven’t seen you since Coney-Island in ’33 … played the Orpheum circuit together … remember the Curtises? … They’re on the Russell show this season …”
I looked interestedly around the tent at the silent gaping crowd and at the blasé matter-of-fact freaks, and performers who were awaiting their turns. Hoodoo, the Headhunter from the Amazon, an inky-black, fuzz-topped colored man with war paint on his face, sat on a campstool before his collection of war clubs and shrunken human heads, cleaning his fingernails with a jack-knife. One of the grass-skirted cooch dancers was knitting busily at a small pink sweater.