After a year or so, these jokes stopped. Gene had been a foot taller than Avila when they first met. By 1962 the difference was nearly a foot and a half. Avila, who was taller than most men, was so much shorter than Gene that they looked absurd together.
Year by year, the world and everyone in it was growing smaller around him. Ordinary chairs and tables were not big enough; plates, knives, and forks were like a doll's tea set in his hands. He was better proportioned now, and at a distance he could appear of normal height; he had learned to slump when he sat down, and to keep his hands in his lap as much as possible to avoid calling attention to their size. But it was impossible to walk on the street or in any public place without making people stare. They called, "Hey, Shorty!" or "How's the air up there?" and he had to pretend that he did not mind.
He could no longer travel on buses or subways; he had to jackknife himself into a taxi, and then he took up the whole back seat; Avila rode with the driver. In 1963, when he was not quite twenty, he was seven feet seven inches tall.
That was the year when Avila got a commission for a monumental work to be erected in a shopping plaza in Atlanta; he flew there several times for conferences with the architect and the committee. If it were not for these commissions, Gene realized, Avila would not be able to survive. Even though he had an international reputation and his prices were high, he could not make a living by doing small pieces because he worked so slowly and with such care.
On his return from one of these trips, Avila looked more tired than Gene had ever seen him. At lunch he complained of a pain in the chest, but it passed away quickly. Two days later, when they were eating breakfast together, Avila suddenly put down his coffee cup and bent over, grunting with pain. His face had taken on a grayish hue, and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Gene took him in his arms. "Manolo, what is it?"
"Can't breathe," Avila croaked.
Gene felt for his pulse; it was fluttery and weak. He helped Avila out of the chair, carried him into the bedroom and put two pillows under his head. Avila was curled up in agony; his breath wheezed in his throat.
Gene ran to the telephone and called an ambulance. When he got back, Avila's color was worse and he did not seem to hear when Gene spoke to him.
Gene realized with cold clarity that there might not be time for the ambulance. He put his hand on Avila's chest and felt for the heartbeat. It was rapid and irregular. He closed his eyes and felt deeper. He could feel where something was the matter with the heart: the blood was going in the wrong place. He tried desperately to understand. There was a valve, opening and shutting, but it was working out of rhythm, and the blood was not moving through one side. He reached in and felt the nerves. For a moment Avila's heartbeat steadied; then it stopped. He was not breathing. Gene threw himself across the body, willing with all his soul, Make him well! Make him well! But Avila's heart did not beat and he did not breathe. By the time the ambulance came, it was much too late.
Afterward what he felt was not grief but emptiness. There seemed to be no reason to do anything in particular. It was not worth the trouble to go anywhere; there was no one he wanted to see.
In his wallet, preserved all these years, he found the card the carnival man had given him: Ducklin & Ripley Attractions, Ron E. Ducklin, Owner, and a box number in Orlando, Florida. On New Year's Day, 1964, he sent a telegram: CAN YOU USE GIANT?
Chapter Twelve
What does it profit us to preserve these bones, Pretending that the dead will rise some day Clotted with earth, like monsters in a movie, Knowing that underneath the stone The slow centuries leach them one by one away?
Why should it disturb us that a loved one's eye Tomorrow may become a coney's foot and join the dance? Let the molecules go, dispersing into earth and silence: Let them turn again to wrist and elbow, hip and thigh, Trying the old game again, taking another chance. --Gene Anderson
He found Ducklin in a house trailer fitted out as an office, parked among other trailers and semis on a muddy lot outside Orlando. The carnival owner was a little older and fatter; he still wore his baseball cap, pushed back over his balding head. He shook hands and then sat down behind his desk, staring up at Gene. "How tall are you?" he asked.
"Seven feet eight, about."
Ducklin squinted at him and rubbed his cheek with his hand. "Well, we can hype that up a little. Maybe put lifts on you. Now, our season starts March twenty-eight. What I'd like you to do, if you could get down here say about the twenty-sixth, then Mike Wilcox, he's the sideshow agent, he could start showing you the ropes. One thing I can tell you now, you'll need a gold ring that fits easy enough so you can take it on and off and show it to the marks. Just a plain ring, like a wedding ring. Get it made by a jeweler. Then you sell 'em brass copies. Mike might have a box of them brass rings around somewhere to get you started. You buy them by the gross, cost you about eight cents apiece, and you sell 'em for seventy-five cents. Then there's photographs -- eight-by-ten glossies -- you can get them made before you come down. You ought to have about two thousand to start. You sell them, too, autographed, for a buck a shot. Now about transportation, you probably noticed, we travel by truck. How did you come down here?"
"I flew to Orlando and took a cab."
"Uh-huh. Well, you'll need a trailer or something to live in. Tim Emerson, that was our last giant, he had a converted moving van -- he died in fifty-eight. His widow probably still has it; I'll get Mike to find out and let you know. Now, let's see." He opened a drawer of the desk and pawed through it with grunts of exasperation. "Can't find a damn -- Oh, here. Now this is our standard contract for performers." He took out a ballpoint pen, scribbled briefly, and handed the pages over. "You can fill in your name and address up there, and then just sign at the bottom."
"I don't have a permanent address; I thought I'd look around for something down here."
"Well, put down the old one, then, just so we have a mailing address. Then when you get settled, let us know."
Under "Salary," Ducklin had written in an amount that seemed very low, but Gene signed the contract without comment. Ducklin put the pages away in his desk.
"Well, that's about it, then," he said, and held out his hand. "Glad to have you with us, John, and we'll see you, say, around the end of March."
He rented an A-frame cabin on Lake Brantley, north of Orlando, and spent the rest of the winter there alone. He had some of his things shipped down from New York; there was not room for much. The A-frame was jerry-built, and the window wall in front dripped cold air like a slow invisible waterfall.
At the end of January, Ducklin sent him a telegram advising him that Mrs. Emerson still had the converted van and was willing to sell. She lived in Augusta, Georgia. Gene telephoned and arranged to meet her.
The dead giant's house was a tall white Victorian building. It needed a coat of paint, and some of the gingerbread was missing. An orange cat rubbed itself against his legs as he rang the bell.
Mrs. Emerson was a pale, auburn-haired woman with discolored pouches under her eyes. He could not judge her height, but she seemed to be a little taller than most women. "You must be Mr. Davis," she said. "Come in."
They sat in the high-ceilinged living room, on faded plush chairs covered with antimacassars. "I understand you're with the Ducklin show now," she said, with a faint smile.
"Yes. I'm sorry about your husband, Mrs. Emerson."
"It's all right. It was hard on me at first, he was only forty-seven. We were talking about him retiring after the next season. It's a pretty poor life he had, on the road all the time, but what can you do?"