Kaleidoscope Read online

  “So I’ll be working a carnival?”

  “You’ll be building the carnival. Lot’s already laid out. Got most of the sawdust down. Once the stalls are up and everybody’s got his act up, we’ll be ready to go.”

  “Expecting a crowd?”

  Speck shrugged. “Who knows? But if we fold we don’t have to hit the road. No tear down, no gas or traincars or wagons. ’Course by spring we’ll have itchy feet, but till then—it’s step up and smile, gents. And keep yer hands in yer pockets!”

  It was not yet six in the morning as Jack lugged a sledge hammer and a coil of rope through the midst of a midway in the making. He spotted a familiar figure just ahead, lumbering behind a wheelbarrow.

  “Hey, Freddie,” Jack spoke up as he pulled alongside and was snubbed without comment.

  “What’s Freddie’s beef?” Jack asked when he caught up with Tommy Speck.

  “Freddie? You mean Friederich?”

  “I mean the carney hauling his balls in a wheelbarrow.”

  Tommy glanced back. “You don’t chitchat with Friederich,” Tommy informed him coldly. “You don’t gab with anybody’s a performer. You ain’t earned that right.”

  Jack blanched, “I was just being polite.”

  “Not your place,” Tommy snapped. “Especially when he’s on his way to his pit, right over there.”

  Jack followed Tommy’s finger to a life-sized linotype stretched over a newly-built stage. It was a shocking photograph; if Jack hadn’t seen the man with his own two eyes he’d swear the lino was faked. A man perched naked on a pair of cajones larger than an ottoman! A banner above making the unnecessarily exaggerated claim:

  —SEE FRIEDERICH THE UNPARALLELED—

  THE MAN WITH SIXTY POUND TESTICLES

  “Goddamn class act,” Tommy declared. “The real thing, front-row. Brings in the marks like tits and beer.”

  It was not a big carnival, not much more than a forty-miler, as Tommy described it, which made no sense at all to Jack as the grounds were definitely not forty miles across. Barely forty goddamn yards across. Not that size made all that much difference, at least not for a brodie. Carnivals were all laid out in similar fashion, Jack learned, a wide, straight artery interrupted along the sides at intervals with pits or stalls or tents offering cheap temptations.

  It all began with staking out the lot. Tommy Speck was Luna’s designated pro which meant among other things that it was Tommy’s prerogative to assign and measure out the positions of the various games, shows and concessions along the midway’s front and back end.

  “The ‘Front End’ starts right inside the gate,” Tommy instructed his brodie on the run. “Front end’s for family, hotdogs, cotton candy. The talkers hit ’em once they get their goodies, work ’em to the stalls or shows. But this morning I got you brodying the Back End.”

  The back end was reserved for more exotic entertainment, the strippers, torture shows and such. Most prominent among the back-enders were the geeks, glommers and freaks who were the stars of Kaleidoscope. There were stalls going up all over the place. Brightly painted banners stretched between poles hung with kerosene lanterns. Bunting and banners erotically illustrated with promises of forbidden fruit.

  “Hi, Jack.”

  The Penguin Lady in a costume of seagreen and sequins smiling behind a barricade of oilcloth and timber.

  “’Lo, Pencil Dick.”

  This from Cassandra. A banner overhead gave hints of her blarney: “SEE CASSANDRA, THREE-BREASTED PRIESTESS OF THE DELPHIC ISLES.”

  The back end, clearly, was a place to lose innocence, or find it. A place where rubes found themselves both attracted and repulsed by aberrations of flesh which they had not thought possible. There were no gimmicks here, Tommy insisted. No flimflam. It was here that a giddy young girl might write her beau a valentine on The Human Slate’s permeable chest. It was here that crowds shrieked as Pinhead drove nails up his nose. Here was where you’d find The Snake Lady and The Wild Men of Borneo, Circassian Princesses and Cannibals.

  Here was where, once a week, Half Track The Severed Torso and The Penguin Lady resurrected their roadshow acts. And it was here, too, in canvas tents, that young men crowded to experience their first hootchy-kootchy. Jack saw the enticing banner: LUNA THE MOON MAIDEN.

  “One thin diiiiime,” Tommy barked. “One tenth of a dollaaaah…. ’S’matter, Jack?”

  “Nothing,” Jack dragged his attention away. He should be thinking about Sally Price and Alex Goodman and Oliver Bladehorn.

  And Martin and Mamere.

  “Grab a bucket of nails,” Tommy directed him. “And a shovel, too. Looks like we need to spread some more sawdust.”

  Every performer was jealous of his position on the midway, everybody cursing or cajoling to put his pit in the choicest location. On the road those negotiations could get nasty, but here, in this beddy, the performers seemed content with, or resigned to, Tommy Speck’s high-pitched verdicts.

  Jack began his apprenticeship as a brodie shoveling sawdust in the blistering sun. By noon he was hammering nails and stretching canvas for the pits and booths designed to part marks from their money. A whistle from a calliope brought sandwiches and ice water for a twenty minute reprieve. Then it was back to work, this time nearer the front end and in the construction of what was euphemistically described as “GAMES OF SKILL!!”

  “Oh, there’s skill, all right,” Speck chuckled going on to demonstrate how easy it was to dull a dart so that it would not lodge on its target board. Other games of skill were rigged from the get-go. Take the old bottle-throw, for instance. What could be simpler than knocking a milk bottle off a crate with a baseball?

  “Can I try?” Jack asked.

  “Sure,” Tommy smiled and let him waste a dozen pitches and a half-dozen strikes before he told Jack that the bottles were weighted at their bases with lead or cement.

  Assembling the barrel toss gave Jack a chance to see a variation on the pitch-and-toss. All the rube had to do was throw a baseball into a barrel and get a prize. How hard could that be? But the barrel was rigged with a false bottom as resilient as a trampoline so that a ball thrown from the specified distance invariably bounced out.

  Not everything was a flattie. “This here ‘Fish the Bottle’ is hanky-pank,” Tommy noted, which in the carney’s twisted lingo meant it was honest. “Gotta let the schmucks win something.”

  “Looks like you’d lose money.”

  Tommy shook his head. “Way you come out on a hanky-pank is you only give away brummagem for prizes. But there’s more money stackin’ the deck. Like I say, Luna ain’t got us runnin’ no Sunday School.”

  She sure as hell wasn’t. Jack saw more varieties of cheating along that fifty yards of sawdust than he’d seen in a lifetime of poker. Foot-pedals stopped the Wheel of Fortune anywhere the carney wanted. The skilos’ arrow never stopped on a winning color. The rifles at the shooting gallery shot blanks. You could swing the mallet as hard as you wanted on the High Striker, but its iron weight wouldn’t travel two feet skyward to gong the bell, win you a Teddy and get you laid by the gal who always thought you were something special unless Half Track released the tension on the knob that adjusted the friction along the traveling wire.

  The carney who worked the gaff on one flattie would play the stick on the one next door, winning some rigged game of skill or chance as a come-on to rubes eager to part with their money. Even brodies were allowed to look down on rubes, a breed of person universally courted and yet held in contempt.

  There were other things to learn, besides, expectations of behavior related to propriety and decorum that had the force of law. Some of these obiter dicta Jack had already learned. The rest Tommy Speck supplied rapid-fire.

  Rule Number One: A brodie never, for any reason, talks to a mark.

  If a yokel got riled it was generally Luna’s job to patch him, though of course The Giant was always available if muscle was required. But most rubes were easy to smooth. Amazing what a free ticke
t to the torture pit did to mollify some outraged cowboy or what a teddy bear could do to squawk the occasionally mortified Sunday schooler.

  Rule Number Two was easy: Never forget Rule Number One.

  There was a pecking order in this world that was ignored only at one’s peril. Top dog was the owner and operator. That was Luna Chevreaux. Jack learned that Luna didn’t actually own a thing on the property, but every concession, sideshow, game and ride on the midway paid her fifty percent of its profit.

  In return for that consideration Luna bankrolled most of the acts. She handled the books, the drunks, and the local John Q. Luna was operator, lot man, patch and ride superintendent rolled into one. She did everything from inspect the Tilt-A-Wheel to bribe the Hillsborough sheriff not to bother looking for liquor in the hootchy-kootchies that offered strippers to single men driving all the way from Tampa for a walk on the wild side. Everything was a fix, Jack learned. A con. A scam.

  Except for the geeks.

  The lepers of polite society were the aristocrats in Kaleidoscope and there were no fakes. Pinhead actually did hammer real nails up his nose. Penguin’s limbs were webbed from birth and Half Track had no fake bottom within which to hide a healthy pair of legs. The Half Woman and The Dog Man and The Svengali Siamese Violinists and The Alligator Man and Freddie Bronkowski with his wheelbarrowed balls—these along with giants, midgets, and other misfits were the royalty of Kaleidoscope. And first among these peers was the carney’s most enduring and profitable attraction, the Matron of the Midway, the Colossus of Sex…The Amazing—! The Inimitable——!

  Princess Peewee.

  More widely known as, simply, The Fat Lady.

  Her banner advertised a weight of six hundred and forty-seven pounds

  “Jesus Christ, is that possible?”

  “That ain’t even the heaviest,” Tommy confirmed. “But Peewee’s special. She’s got class.”

  The word “class” did not come to mind when Jack recalled the wallowing mound of flesh that he had seen wagoned off a freight car, but even a rookie knew there were times you kept your trap shut.

  Romaine finished his first day as a brodie with a sunburn, blistered hands and an overarching preoccupation—in the course of that long day he had gleaned not a smidgeon of information regarding Alex Goodman, much less any surrogate. Jack dreaded his first report back to Cincinnati; Oliver Bladehorn would not be happy to learn that a pachyderm had stomped his only solid lead to pulp.

  The only encouraging news—somebody down here was clearly hiding something. Who was the rumored benefactor bailing geeks out of hard times? The Fiddle Twins assumed Jack was the moneybag, but who was it really? If Alex Goodman hadn’t been in Cincinnati to meet Sally Price, then who had? It didn’t take a Pinkerton to figure that Luna had hired Jack largely to make sure he didn’t get answers to those questions. She had Jack by the balls and he had to play along. He wasn’t going to find any leads to Bladehorn’s stash from the outside of this closed-in camp, after all. If there was something down here that belonged to Bladehorn, somebody inside this tight knit of misfits had the beans and Jack had to make them spill.

  He fell into bed exhausted, but could not sleep. Tommy roused the new brodie the second day at five sharp to work another day just like the first. By the third day Jack was close to folding.

  What if he’d simply hit a dead end? What if there was nothing to be found in this fucking place but snakes and mosquitoes and freaks who never rubbed two honest dimes together in their lives?

  Problem was, there was no other place to look. You couldn’t stash fifteen large and a quarter million in bonds on your lonesome. Somebody in this con-wise camp had to know something.

  But what are the odds, Jack, that they’ll talk to you?

  By the fourth day, Jack decided it didn’t matter what the odds were. Sometimes you got a bad hand you couldn’t fold; you just had to keep on playing hoping to draw that ace or else slip it up your sleeve. Jack decided he’d work on Tommy Speck. Four days of constant labor had diminished the distance between the two men. Tommy liked to talk. He liked to drink, too, and to gamble. Those were diversions which might be worked to advantage.

  The G-tent provided his opportunity. On the road, a G-tent was a kind of social hall for carneys, a place to trade the virtually constant gossip that characterized the freaks’ conversation, and a place to gamble, which was their continual recreation. Brodies were generally discouraged from socializing with performers. The card table, however, proved a major exception to that rule.

  The tent was raised on the backside of the midway, just behind the menagerie and the mechanical rides. The canvas was glowing like a jack o’ lantern from kerosene lamps as Jack stepped inside. Tommy was already in high form over a stein of homebrew, descanting to everyone in earshot on the differences between carney life and circus life right down to the knots used to secure the stakes anchoring their always-separate tents (“…Ya never see a carney usin’ that extra hitch!”), swapping stories with The Giant and Jo Jo and Frankie about the great carnivals and their owners, names completely unfamiliar to Jack—Mr. Jones, Mr. Ferari, and the feisty Hody Hurd.

  “Fuck with that lady, you’d be redlighted overnight,” Tommy promised. “You’d be nursing a hangover in the stockcar, just sleepin’ it off at sixty miles an hour, next thing you know the sidedoor’s open and your ass is wrapped around a telegraph pole!”

  “Lady knew how to take care of business!” Cassandra chortled, those three breasts rising and falling in perfect, firmly packed unison.

  “Got sawdust in her veins,” Tommy echoed the sentiment. You might miss the small, plump woman smiling quietly at his side. In all their conversation, Tommy had not once referred to his wife. Eileen was her name, Jack learned that much from Penguin. Had been married to Tommy for years but was only just now embarasso with their first child.

  She was a small woman, barely four feet tall, which still made her a head taller than her husband, but Penguin told Jack that Eileen was not a dwarf.

  “Not all little people are dwarfs,” Charlotte informed him. “You can tell by looking at her joints, the way she walks—she’s not like Tommy. She’s a midget.”

  “Will their child be a dwarf?”

  “Won’t know ’til the pickle pops.”

  Jack was tempted to sample the carney’s homebrew but settled instead for a firkin of tea sugared like molasses and poured over ice. He found a crate near Speck and his wife and settled in, feigning interest as the little man recalled his days with Guy Dodson and May Cody Fleming. Jack laughed along with the other carneys as Tommy aped or skewered the various managers whose railroad cars took shows all over the country. Speck knew them all. He knew the corporate side of the midway, as well, tracing the Byzantine ownership of the Royal American or the Amusement Corporation of America with the same rigor that a biographer would bring to bear on Carnegie or Mellon.

  The more the dwarf drank, the less precision was involved, naturally, Tommy turning from fact to fiction, spinning yarns that always tied to girls and cards and booze and claiming a ringside seat at every significant event in history.

  “I was in Buffalo in 1901 when they shot President McKinley.”

  “Ought-One,” Half Track repeated and pressed the date onto The Slate’s palimpsest skin with a spoon.

  One outrageous lie after another. Or perhaps they really were outrageous truths—no one seemed to care.

  Every freak, knife-thrower and sword-swallower present had stories to tell, weaving incidents with histories and genealogies completely foreign to any outsider. There was a pair of faces though, new arrivals, who seemed very familiar to Jack.

  They were twins, good looking brunettes, bright, happy faces. Kind of sexy.

  He nudged Half Track.

  “Know those two?”

  “What two?”

  “By Jo Jo. Sitting back to back.”

  She followed his finger and snorted, “They ain’t sittin’ back to back, moron. They’re joined
back to back.”

  Even Jack had heard of the famous Hilton Sisters, and now he recalled where he’d seen them. It had been a vaudeville in Chicago. The twins headlined the show, two sweetly harmonized voices forever linked. He’d even bought a photograph afterward, that photo along with the attached promotional material intended to show how perfectly “adjusted” and “normal” the sisters really, truly were. Jack recalled the picture clearly now. Two young ladies dancing back to back with a pair of smiling, well-dressed beaus.

  And here they were, another pair of Siamese freaks, sitting not ten feet from Jacques and Marcel. But unlike the Svengali Violinists, the Hilton Sisters were famous.

  Were they rich as well?

  Jack edged over to Tommy Speck’s wife.

  “Somebody said those are the Hiltons, over there,” he pointed.

  She smiled affirmation.

  “They’re pretty big, aren’t they?”

  She smiled again. “Tommy said you weren’t too sharp.”

  There you go. Another dead end. But Jack had to keep playing.

  “Jack Romaine. Don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “Eileen. Pleased to meetcha.”

  “Is it true the sisters are gonna be in the pictures? I heard something about a talkie.”

  “They’re real troupers,” she nodded.

  “Not a bad life,” Jack offered.

  “Depends,” she shrugged and something in her tone changed.

  Jack leaned over. “They got problems?”

  Gossip. That was all it took for Eileen to open up.

  “Word is they’re damn near hostage to their managers,” she said, and her little nostrils flared. “They never see a dime of their take. They’re put up in this mansion in San Antonio but it might as well be a prison. Poor kids never see a fella unless it’s for some promotional. Never get loose from the show unless the Meyers orchestrate it.

  “Took a month to give those pricks the slip. The girls—? The Meyers think they’re in Saratoga. Luna brought ’em up to see an attorney in Tampa. See if she can cut ’em loose from Meyer and Edith. Those two! They ain’t even the girls’ real parents, for God’s sake!”