Picture Palace (23 page)

“What I'd like to see,” said Harvey in the Nash again, “is some old gator eat one of them rasslers.”

“That's more like it,” I said. “What about Carney instead of an Indian?”

“Then we'd be out of a job,” said Harvey.

“That's what I want to be,” said Hornette. “Out of a job.”

Harvey glared at her and said, “Shut it, honey.”

“I'm told he's a patron of the arts,” I said.

“If arts means hell-raising, he's a patron all right,” said Harvey. He parked at a roadside stand. “Want an ice cream?”

Hornette and I stayed in the car while Harvey went for the cones. I wanted to know more, but didn't know where to begin. Like the others at Mrs. Fritts's they were not very bright, and yet their combination of good will and guilelessness made them appear more mysterious than they really were, as if they were hiding something. Simple good humor can look like the ultimate pretense.

“No one likes Carney,” I said, groping for an angle.

Hornette shook her head.

“The Pig Dinner,” I said. “What in hell's the Pig Dinner?”

“It's coming up.”

“Ever been to it?”

“Honey,” said Hornette, “we're
it
!”

“Tell me then.”

“You never seen nothing like it,” she said. “There ain't nothing like it.”

“That's what Harvey said about the alligators, and I didn't think much of them.”

“This is worse than the gators. I couldn't tell you about that Pig Dinner if I wanted to. There ain't words for it, or if there is I don't know them.”

“Indescribable?”

“You said it.”

“Just the thing for my friend here.” I patted the Speed Graphic on my lap.

Hornette closed her eyes and said “Yipe!”

“You can help me,” I said. “You will, won't you?”

But before she could reply, Harvey came back to the car with two cones. He gave one to me, and after licking the ice cream from the other he passed Hornette the empty cone to crunch.

“You go on and eat, Maude,” he said. “We got to look after our bodies.”

19

F
LORIDA'S HOT EYE
was shutting on the Gulf, confining us in a black after-image. We were on the porch, sitting together on the glider, kicking the floor. The regular swinging was like thought.

Hornette said, “You don't know what you're asking, girl.”

“What am I asking? Tell me, and I won't say another word.”

She gave the porch an emphatic kick. “Carney don't want you to see it.”

“That's the point,” I said. “That's why I want to.” Hornette considered this. She said, “I can't help you.”

We rocked in blind night.

“So you do everything he says.”

“I do not,” she said crossly, making her eyebrows meet.

“Then help me,” I said. “Get me in—or else tell me what I'm missing.”

“I ain't talking,” she said. She braked the glider by stomping on the porch. She looked around, then whispered, “You'll have to see for yourself. But it sure ain't going to be easy.”

The next morning, Mr. Biker knocked on my darkroom door. “Maudie!”

“Don't come in—I'm processing!”

“There's someone wants you out on the porch.”

I finished off the negatives (Boca Grande, alligator wrestler, swamps, and a nice one of a dog in a green celluloid eyeshade being walked by a tubby man wearing the same get-up on his head). Downstairs, I saw Mama on the glider.

“Maude,” she said, “who was that extraordinary man?”

“That's Mr. Biker.”

“Is there something wrong with him?”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“He's terribly small,” she said. She frowned at the porch. “If I'd known it was like this I would have made other arrangements for you.”

The voice of the patroness; but I let it pass. “I like it,” I said. “I'm going to town here. I've fixed up a darkroom in the attic. Mama, why are you dressed like that?”

She wore smoked glasses, a wide-brimmed hat and gloves. Instead of her usual handbag she was carrying a wicker basket.

“This is my traveling outfit. I'm taking a trip,” she said. “Coral Gables. That's why I stopped in—I thought you might want to come along.”

“What about Papa?”

“He never comes.”

“You've been there before?”

“Every year,” she said. “Papa stays behind for the dinner.”

“Why don't you go to the dinner?”

“Don't be silly.” She tightened the strap on her basket. “It's all men. I wouldn't like it. It's just Carney and his men friends. Besides, we're not allowed. The Pig Dinner's famous for that.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“That's how special it is,” said Mama proudly. “Now how about it? Coral Gables—just the two of us.”

Come on, daughter
, she was saying.
Put that old camera aside and start living
. But I had made my choice.

“No thanks.”

After she went away Mr. Biker looked rather curious, as if he wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to be spared having to deny that she was my mother, or to explain that I had taken this trip to prove to my parents that I wasn't theirs. If he had asked, I would have said, “She's another Guggenheim.” He didn't ask. He was small, but he was a real gentleman.

And he had, as I saw, other things on his mind. A change had come over the boarders. The people who had been so nice to each other, and just grand to me, got in the grip of a kind of tension. They quarreled, complained to Mrs. Fritts, slammed doors, that sort of thing. Brainless anger: they weren't smart enough to argue, so they banged. Mrs. Fritts said nothing. When there was trouble, she studied the messages on her poker-work mottoes. One lunchtime, Digit smacked a ketchup bottle so hard with the finger he used in his act it flooded his scrambled eggs in red goo. He cursed it and flung the whole plate out the window, which mercifully was open. Then he went off, banging.

“He jess thew it out the winda,” said Orrie.

“Shit on him,” said Mr. Biker. He picked up the ketchup bottle, and seeing that it was nearly empty, said, “We ain't got but one of these.”

“Don't mind them,” said Mrs. Fritts, taking her eyes from Y
E
A
RE OF
M
ORE
V
ALUE
T
HAN
M
ANY
S
PARROWS
. She breathed at me, “It's the Pig Dinner.”

Mr. Biker looked smaller, Orrie more mangled, Digit fretful and foul-mouthed. The acrobats paced back and forth and threw themselves into chairs. This was the frenzy of circus folk; I had forgotten they were performers. Under pressure they had become grotesquely grumpy; they carried violence around with them; there was a threat of danger in their silences. And they excluded me: it was like blame, as if I represented that other world, the public, and was responsible for them making fools of themselves. At night, in my darkroom, I heard shouts and the sound of crockery smashing and “I ain't doing it!” and “You gotta!” and little wails, like a child trapped in a chimney.

For my own peace of mind I printed pictures: Boca Grande, the boogie-men, the rain,
Green Eyeshades;
and when I heard the screeches I turned on the faucet hard to drown them. It was so strange: the loud footfalls in my ears and those peaceful footprints in my pictures. But that contradiction showed me how far my work had diverged from my life. “You still serious?” said Hornette the next evening.

I said I was.

“Cause I worked it out,” she said. Her voice was conspiratorial; she was secretive, with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “Try these on for size.”

She gave me a man's jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a derby hat. I put them on and looked in the mirror. I was a man. She said, “That's so they don't eat you up.”

“I barely recognize myself.”

“It's a damn good thing you ain't pretty.”

“I hope you realize I'm going to be taking pictures. And I might exhibit them later on.”

“Girl,” she said, “I want you to show them all over creation.”

“You might get into trouble.”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Or Carney might. It's his show, ain't it?” And in her laugh I identified the little chimney-wail I had heard the previous night.

 

The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner was held in the tent I had seen being hoisted on the grounds of that so-called palace my first day in Verona. I was in my suit, but I think if I had been wearing a sandwich-board and snowshoes I would still have gone unnoticed, because the others were benumbed and rode in the back of the van like people being taken out in the dark to be shot.

I smelled cooking—an odor of woodsmoke and burned meat—as soon as we entered Carney's grounds. After we parked, I peeked through the flap in the tent and saw them all, with red faces, shouting and laughing and finishing their meal. There were about a hundred of them, men in tuxedos, seated at tables which were arranged around a circus ring. In the center of the ring were embers in spokes, the smoldering wheel of a log fire; and on a spit the remains of a cooked pig, hacked apart, and only its tail and trotters intact. It was not hard to identify Carney. He had the place of honor and in front of him on a platter was a pig's head, his spitting image, one meathead above the other, dead eyes in the thick folds of gleaming cheeks and that expression you see on the faces of the very fat—dumb swollen pain, as if the scowl has been roasted onto it.

I wanted that picture.

“You just keep out of sight,” said Hornette. “But don't worry—no one'll see you. They'll be looking at us.”

“What are you doing here?” It was Harvey.

“She came along for the ride,” said Hornette.

I said, “The whole thing was my idea.”

“Go on home,” said Harvey.

“She can't,” said Hornette, “on account of they'll see her leaving the grounds if she does, huh.”

It was true: we had passed through a number of checkpoints on the way in and surly guards had waved us on. Now we were in a small tent, an anteroom to the big top in which the men were eating.

“Show starts in ten minutes,” said a man dressed as a ringmaster. He was wearing tails and a silk hat, and he had a whip which he cracked at nothing in particular. “Positions,” he said, “positions.”

“That's Millsaps,” said Harvey. “If he squawks I'm not taking the blame for you.”

I smelled animals, the steam of fur and feet, but it didn't come from the cages—it was the circus folk who had started taking off their clothes.

“Get on up there,” said Hornette. She motioned to a tower of scaffolding just inside the tent. “And don't forget what I said—all over creation.”

I slipped through the tent flap and climbed a tall ladder to a platform, where there was a cubicle and a rack of spotlights. I could not have been in a better place than this crow's nest, in the darkness behind the lights. I had a view of everything and yet was made invisible by the lights' glare.

A moment later I was joined by the lighting engineer: baseball hat, screwdrivers tucked into the belt of his dungarees. The canvas tent-top slumped near our heads and the smoke and chatter rose to the height of the poles.

The man said, “You got authorization? You can't stay here if you ain't got authorization.”

“This is my authorization,” I said. “Smile.”

He did, and I snapped his picture. After that he was nice as pie. His name was Monk.

“Shift,” he said and signaled for me to move. “Look at them.” He jerked the lights into position. “I wish I had me a gun. Ain't they the limit?”

Ain't this?
I thought, as Monk slashed the diners with light. And I knew I had passed a frontier and had left all the other practitioners behind. Where were they, anyhow? Out goofing off, shooting sourbob trees and dingbats, rubber tires, storefronts, cottages, snow, Abandoned Playground, Ragged Beggar on Wall Street, Torso with Tits: embalming quaintness for the next generation. But this was different; it smelled different and had art's startling flaw as its beautifying scar. It was flesh and riotous, a cannibal feast in tuxedos, an event which no previous photographer had drained of its light. By a combination of luck, risk, and gumption I was its first witness.

But I almost cried at my bravado, for down there not ten feet from Carney, clouting his food and moving his hands to his mouth, and with an eater's squirming motion—his back turned to the world and gobbling like the rest of them—was my original patron, my father. If he had not been there I might have seen it as less momentous, this pattern of hogs merely a piece of news. He made me hesitate; he made me act. What a long way I had come to catch him!

His was the first picture I took. I half expected him to keel over from the shock of it—-just pitch back with his face missing and his feet sticking up. Nothing happened. But I knew I had started something: my Third Eye told me. Not skirmishing with the picturesque or tinkering with technique, but acting on the raw conviction that, alone in this tent, I was leading an attack on patronage.

They had finished eating when the band marched in, going oompah-oompah and wearing blue uniforms with gold braid. Millsaps was a blur on the bass drum. It was the brandy and cigars phase of the dinner, and while the music was playing—the diners banging spoons—two blacks came on and shoveled the remains of the barbecue—the burned logs, the carcass of the pig—into a barrel and carted it away. The band continued to march. And there was a new sound, a whistling and fluting—this was the steam calliope puffing on a horse-drawn wagon. It was a beautiful contraption, smoke and steam and flute notes: a man was seated at an enormous red and gold pipe organ and beating the trays of keys while the pipes shot jets of steam out as whinnying music.