Wilcox looked at his watch and remarked, "Just on eighteen minutes -- that's a bit long, but we'll trim it down. Thanks, all."
The performers began to disperse; Gene saw Irma walking away hand in hand with a slender young man in dungarees. A stout little man had come up with a wheelchair, so large that Gene thought it must have been custom made; with the help of two workmen, he got the Fat Lady into the wheelchair and began pushing her toward the line of trailers. After a moment Gene found himself alone with Wilcox.
"I suppose you know you've added a couple of feet to my height," he said.
"Yes, that's all right. The marks don't know the difference, and nobody's going to measure you. There's never been a giant whose size wasn't exaggerated -- beginning with Goliath, probably."
"Or the Nephilim."
"Oh, sorry, who'were they?"
"'The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.' Genesis. The Nephilim were the children born of those unions -- 'There were giants in the earth in those days.' They had a lot of other names too -- Anakim, Emmim, Zamzummim. The Israelites found them in Canaan, and they said, 'We were as grasshoppers in their sight.'"
"Yes, I see. I'm not very strong on the Bible, I'm afraid -- never got past the begats. But about the nine feet and so on -- it's harmless deception, or beneficial really, because the marks pay to see a tall man, and the taller they think he is, the more they get for their money. We're all in the illusion business here. Well, I'm off -- tomorrow's the first of May."
"The first of May?"
"That's what they call opening day, heaven knows why. If anybody asks you, 'Are you first of May?' that's what they mean -- are you new to the show? You'll catch on. See you tomorrow."
The driver Wilcox had promised appeared later that afternoon; he was a pleasant, shy young man named Larry Scanlon, who seemed to think it was a privilege to drive for a giant. The carnival caravan put itself together late that evening, with what seemed an enormous amount of confusion; it was after one o'clock when Larry told him they were ready to roll.
"Does the carnival always travel at night?" Gene asked.
"Sure, because, you know, you got to tear down one place and set up the next day somewheres else. And besides there's less traffic at night and the staties don't hassle you so much. You might as well go on and go to bed, Mr. Kimberley. I see there's a intercom here in the cab -- is it working?"
"I suppose so."
"Let's try her out."
Gene went into the trailer and turned on the intercom over his bed. There was a hiss, then a crackling voice: "Mr. Kimberley, can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Well, okay, then we're all set. If you want to talk to me, like if you wake up or anything, or there's any problem, give me a holler. Otherwise, why, just get your sleep. Good night, Mr. Kimberley."
Chapter Thirteen
In the morning when he opened the door, he found the carnival already set up. The rides were clustered near the entrance -- the sky ride, the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, loop-the-loop and the rest. Beyond them, booths selling food and soft drinks were in a line down the middle, and around the sides of the lot were the games of skill and the sideshow. Gene had picked up a little carny jargon; he knew that anybody who sold food or drink was a "butcher," and that the purple and orange drinks that the carnival people made in big tubs were called "flookum."
The freak tent was called "the string joint," because its compartments were arranged in a row or "string." Behind it, campers and trailers were parked, leaving an enclosed space, "the back yard"; the freaks were allowed to use it between performances, but only the Lizard Man did so; the Fat Lady, who was too heavy to move without great effort, sat in her special chair in the freak tent all day long, and Gene Anderson stayed in his trailer.
They showed three days in Orlando, then packed up and moved overnight to Leesburg. All day the carnival went on, out there beyond the walls of the tent; he could hear the canned music bracketing the lot from loudspeakers on poles, and the distant chime of the merry-go-round, and he could hear Wilcox's voice as he gathered a tip, but he could only imagine the crowds, the young men and girls in short-sleeved shirts, the mothers carrying children, the old people in their Sunday clothes.
At night after the show closed he sometimes wandered around the lot, watching as the concessionaires shut up their stands -- the dart throw with its limp array of balloons on a board punctured by a thousand misses; the string pull, the penny toss, the steeplechase. The ground was covered with a sad litter, candy wrappers, ticket stubs, paper cups, the detritus of pleasure. He often saw Irma LeFever at the candy-apple stand, where she worked between shows with the sad-faced young man who appeared to be her husband. She spoke to him when he passed, but the other concessionaires were too busy to talk.
In the mornings it was another kind of loneliness: the early sun lit up the wooden and canvas stalls with a pathetic promise; the lot was clean and empty. Everyone was busy then too, the ride attendants taking canvas covers off the cars, butchers filling their popcorn machines, mixing flookum, breaking out cartons of foot-long dogs.
It was an unspoken rule in the carnival that the freaks did not appear on the midway or in town. The fire eater could come and go as she pleased, and so could Wilcox, but if the real freaks had appeared in public, they would have been giving away what they had for sale. They could not eat in local restaurants, or even go to the drugstore for a tube of toothpaste; others performed such errands for them. Their view was always the same: the canvas walls of the tents, the rear ends of trailers, the tattered grass.
The first performance of the sideshow was at one o'clock; after that, as long as the talker could keep gathering a tip, they appeared every twenty minutes until dinner time. By the second week, Gene no longer had to look at his watch; he knew when it was time to leave the trailer, sit for a moment in his outsize canvas chair behind the string joint, and then enter through the back wall and sit on his throne as Wilcox finished his spiel about the preserved calf embryo. He worked only five minutes in every twenty throughout the day, and during those five minutes he learned to carry in his mind the argument of the book he had been reading, to look at the customers -- "the marks" -- and not see them.
The Carnival moved north up the Atlantic coast, then west into Georgia and South Carolina, a week here, three days there. Sometimes they traveled as much as a hundred miles between stops, sometimes only thirty or forty.
One evening after the last performance, Wilcox came up to him at the door of his trailer. "Like to talk to you a moment, John."
"Okay. Come in."
"No, I'll stay here, thanks. It's just this. You've been with the show almost a month, and I'm practically the only one you talk to. You don't even eat with the others. Why is that?"
"Not feeling very social."
"If you don't mind my saying so, you're like a guy running off to join the Foreign Legion because his girl's thrown him over. You came here because you thought it was going to be awful, and now all you can think about is how awful it is. When you look at the others, you're thinking, 'Ugh, they're freaks.'"
"I'm a freak too," Gene said. He was trembling, and he could feel his face growing warm.
"Yes, you are, but we're using the word in two different senses. In a sideshow a freak is a member of the aristocracy, something most people can never be. But when you say 'freak,' you mean not human. Well, they are human, and so are you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get drunk." He turned and walked away.
Gene closed the door and sat down with his hands between his knees, staring at nothing. After a few minutes he went to the refrigerator and got out the ham and vegetables he had been thawing for his dinner, but one look was enough; he knew the food would choke him. Shame and anger came in waves. He wanted to hit Wilcox; he wanted to walk out of the trailer and never come back; he didn't know what he wanted.