The Beet Fields (10 page)

“Took your time, didn't you?”

“I didn't want the deputy to see me.”

“He's gone. Ipaid the bastard off and he left hours ago. Wanted a little tip on the side with Ruby and I told him to blow it out his ass unless he paid. Here, get to work. All those panels need to be loaded on that flatbed. Start unhooking them.”

The boy didn't have the slightest idea what Taylor was talking about—Ruby or whoever and the tip on the side or why Taylor had to pay the deputy off—but it didn't seem like the time to ask questions and he started working at unhooking the floor panels from each other.

He was soon lost in the work. Trying to horse the heavy panels apart was nearly impossible and within fifteen minutes he was greasy and his knuckles were bleeding and he was swearing and pissed and wondering if maybe working on a farm wasn't better than this.

“Here, I'll help.”

The boy turned and almost jumped back. He was facing a tall man—he had to be six-five or more—with his head shaved and his eyebrows gone and covered with some kind of black grease that made his face disappear in the darkness except for his eyes and teeth.

“I'm Bobby,” he said, grabbing the side of the panel the boy was hoisting and helping him throw it onto the flatbed truck. “Taylor's brother.”

The boy nodded and stared at Bobby. He knew it was rude but he couldn't help it.

The man noted the stare and smiled. “Don't worry. I do the geek show. I just haven't washed the makeup off. Taylor, he likes to get going when the show breaks down. It keeps the farm boys off Ruby. It don't pay after the show is down.”

There it was again: Ruby. He wanted to ask a dozen questions—what was a geek, who was Ruby and why did the farm boys want to be on her and what did Taylor have to do with any of it—but the work was hard, harder than any farmwork, and soon the two of them—Taylor had disappeared as soon as Bobby arrived—were grunting and heaving to get all the parts of the Tilt-A-Whirl on the
flatbed. When it was lashed into place Bobby went to the cab of the truck.

“Get in.”

The boy—covered now with grime and sweat and grease, every muscle in his body aching— moved to the offside of the truck and climbed in. Bobby started the engine, reached under the seat, pulled out a pint of Four Roses, took two swallows and handed it to the boy, smiling. “Want a snort?”

The boy stared at the bottle. It was
the
me brandhis parents drank and he hated
the
four roses on the label, hated the smell of it, hated
the
memory of it. But there was Bobby, smiling, the makeup coming off in streaks with the sweat, and the boy was a man now on the run with the carnival so he took the bottle and pretended to sip, handed it back, nearly puking from the taste of it on his tongue.

“Makes the night drive easier," Bobby said, putting the bottle back under the seat. “That's all we do—drive all night, work all day.” He delicately worked the clutch and shifted into gear—with much grinding—and started out of the fairgrounds. Other rides were loaded and leaving as well and he had to stop twice to wait for other trucks to get on the highway before he could line
it out and shift up into highway speed. The mufflers were bad and the noise was loud but not as deafening as tractors and the boy decided to ask one question. He had many but didn't want to be a bother and thought he would learn things as they came anyway but he was curious about Taylor and wanted to know more about him except that he didn't want to seem nosy.

So he turned to Bobby and asked, “Where is Taylor?”

It was the right thing to do. Bobby was one of those who just need a start and they keep going and he shifted, grabbed a towel off the seat and wiped some makeup off his face and laughed. “He's driving the pickup that tows the Ruby wagon. You won't see them until we're all set up in Harken in a couple of days. Taylor, he'll sometimes help break down but he hates to set up. I remember once in—I think it was Hastings—he didn't come out at all until it was time to get the money boxes. Then there was the time in Cordovia when he went home with two farm sisters and I didn't see him till nine days and two towns later….”

The boy nodded and tried to pay attention but it all just made more questions come and the
night air blowing in the window was soft and warm and in spite of sleeping all day he was hard tired, bone tired. He closed his eyes.

• • •

He dreamt while he slept. There was his mother and she was sitting at a table and she pointed her finger at a window and he turned to see what she was pointing to but he never saw, couldn't see and then he woke up.

It was daylight. Bobby was still driving and the boy closed his eyes again, wanting to see what his mother had been pointing to, but he could not. The drone of the truck worked up through the metal of the doorframe into his skull where he rested his head and he moved away from it, sat up, wiped his mouth.

“Want another snort?” Bobby again held out the bottle, which was now nearly empty, and he shook his head.

“No. It's too early for me.? He'd heard men say that asan excuse to not drink. Never his parents. It was never too early for them. But other peoplej other men.

“I'll bet you're hungry.”

The boy nodded and realized that he was— starving.

“You'll find some prunes in a bag under the seat. Hand them up.”

“Prunes?”

“Damn right. Good food, keeps you regular-just don't swallow the pits.”

The boy fished under the seat and found the prunes, handed them over. “I'll wait until later.”

“Later. Shit, kid, there ain't no later. We don't get to Harken until tonight. You'll starve by then. You'd better eat some.”

Another thing that men do, the boy thought— eat like this, on the run. He remembered the meals with Robert, the food on the tailgate at the farm, the pots of food with the Mexicans. Prunes. Jeez. Prunes. He sighed and took a handful and popped one in his mouth, chewing.

“See—they ain't bad. I started eating them with whiskey to take the taste of chicken heads out of my mouth but now I like them. Prunes and whiskey.” He laughed. “Gives you the runs, but you don't care….”

“Chicken heads?” The boy couldn't help it. “You put chicken heads in your mouth?”

Bobby looked at him. “You don't know what a geek is?”

The boy shook his head. “I don't know anything about carnivals.”

Bobby laughed. “Not many do. Once you've been a carny you never look at people the same way again. It's just like being a cop. You know everybody as a loser.”

Not everybody, the boy thought. For sure the deputy, and his parents,
but not Hazel and the
Mexicans and Bill-—but he didn't say anything.

“A geek is a wild man from Borneo who lives in a cage. He's so wild he can't be out with other people and once a day the carnival people throw a live chicken into the cage and the geek bites the head off.”

“You're the geek?”

Bobby nodded.

“Are you from Borneo?”

Bobby stared at the boy, smiled and then shook his head. “You don't get it, do you? I'm from Michigan. There
are
no real wild men from Borneo. It's a setup. A lie. It's all a bunch of bull to take money from the farmers.”

“Oh.”

“I use makeup and turn my skin black and wear some rags to hide my privates—only let it show a litde now and then to get the women to peeking—and sit in a cage pretending to pick bugs off my skin. The suckers pay fifty cents each to get in the tent and see me and then another fifty cents to watch me being fed.”

“You actually bite the head off a chicken?”

Bobby laughed. “I've bit worse than that, boy. I was in jail in Mexico once and ate a rat. Raw. And I was damn glad to have that.”

Maybe that's why prunes aren't so bad for him, the boy thought. If he has to eat chicken heads and rats.

“If you do it right you can get them to puke. Best night I ever had was seventeen people and nine of them puked. Course it wasn't all me. When I bit the head and I spit blood and shook the chicken around some to splatter blood on the hicks two women started puking. Then another one smelled that and I think it caused the rest to let go. It was great I left the upchuck on the ground in front of the cage and the smell of it got the next batch going—hey, I had all of Lincoln puking before it was over.”

The boy felt queasy and looked out the window,
let the wind blow on his face until the feeling passed. He turned back. A different question—to get Bobby off puke. “Who is Ruby?”

Bobby stopped talking for a moment" looking out the windshield. “She's Taylor's… wife. She dances the kootch.”

“Kootch?”

“Hootchy-kootchy. She takes her clothes off for the farm boys.”

“And Taylor doesn't
care?”

“You are
so
green!“ Bobby snorted. “Taylor doesn't care what she does as long as she makes money for him.”

Bobby stopped talking then. He finished the rest of the whiskey in one swallow and threw the bottle out on the highway, fished under the seat and pulled out another pint. The boy was to find that while he never saw Bobby actually act drunk he was never without a pint of Four Roses.

“All right.” Bobby slowed the truck and pulled over to the side of the road near some brush. “The prunes have hit. I have
got
to take a dump.”

He jerked the hand brake on, slammed the door open and was squatting in the brush before the boy had his own door unlatched.

The boy found another bush and peed, listening to the meadowlarks, looking across the prairie until he was done. As he walked back to the truck a car roared by and the boy was surprised to see the driver—he looked like a salesman—give him the finger. He climbed back into the cab and waited for Bobby, who was done in a short time.

“That guy gave me the finger. I don't even know the guy and he flipped me the bird!“

Bobby laughed. “That's because you're in a carny truck. He saw the ride on the back. Nobody likes carnies.”

Bobby started the truck moving and worked through the whining of the gears until they were at highway speed again. He was silent while shifting but started talking when they got up to speed. The boy tried to listen—something about a man who would swallow anything as part of a geek act—but he was still drowsy and the sun was high enough to warm his cheek and he closed his eyes and was sleeping again.

I
N THE FIRST WEEK WITH THE CARNIVAL THE
boy learned more than he had in his whole life before that, and in some ways more than he would learn in all the time he lived afterward. He learned carny rules, carny thoughts, carny lives.

He learned that everybody who wasn't with the carnival and some who were with the carnival were suckers. Bobby taught him that. Along with how to know how much money a man was carrying by the way he stood when he thought he was going to have to spend it, and whether or not a woman would put out. That was how Bobby said it—put out.

“See that one?” he said as they were setting up the ride and two young women were walking by, heading for the stock barns. “The one on the left? She'll put out. The other one won't but that one will. She'll put out like a machine.”

“Put out what?” The boy had honestly never heard the phrase and while it was true that he thought almost literally of nothing but sex by this time—the condition had worsened as he stopped worrying about the law and being a fugitive and felt more secure—he did not put it together with what Bobby was saying.

“Poon,” Bobby said. “Poontang, pussy—you know. Screwing. She'll do it, the other won't.”

So the boy looked at the two women. They were both wearing tight jeans and light sweaters and both walked with their hips moving in the way the boy had come to have difficulty watching. He could see no difference between them, no indication of what Bobby meant. “How can you tell?”

Bobby stared at the women until they were out of sight. “You get to where you can. It's experience. You just know.”

“I couldn't tell at all.”

“I could. That's all that counts.”

For you, maybe, the boy thought, but he said no more and even later when he saw that it wasn't so and that Bobby didn't really know how to tell and that he never did anything with
any
women it didn't matter. It was still something the boy learned and besides there were other things that Bobby had to teach him.

That all people wanted to lose. Bobby taught him that as well.

“They say they want to win, they say they want to be right, but it's just a bunch of hooey. All they want to do is bitch, and getting shafted gives them something to bitch about. Watch them on the rip games—“

“Rip games?”

“The nickel toss, ring a looie, the sucker ball. They keep coming back even when they know they can't win. They keep trying when it's a dead toss just so they can bitch about it later. They walk awa/ shaking their heads and whining but they always come back. Suckers.”

And while the boy knew that what Bobby said wasn't always true and that all people weren't suckers—he thought of Hazel and of the man
who died when the pheasant hit him—he came to see what Bobby meant as he worked at the carnival and became more a carny and less a boy.