The Same River Twice (14 page)

The audience nodded and the plant faced me. “Okay, Louie, what's the square root of nine?”

He turned his back again and showed three fingers so that the audience could see, but not me. Kaybach began to stutter a protest. The plant shut him up and asked me again. To build suspense, I waited thirty seconds before clapping my flippers three times.

The audience always applauded, as much to see a bully get shutdown by a walrus as for the answer. The plant shook his head in disbelief. Kaybach tossed a fish and asked the final question.

“Are you a walrus, Louie?”

I shook my head no.

“Oh, I guess you think you're human, then.”

I nodded very fast.

“I'm sorry, Louie. You're nothing but a walrus. You'll never be a man.”

I sank into the water, performed an awkward circling manuever, and scuttled behind a rock. Kaybach thanked everyone and asked for a big hand for a walrus so smart that he knew genuine sadness—he'd never be a human.

I had a half-hour break before beginning again with a new plant and a different fake question. I had become a circus performer, or in Barney's parlance, a kinker. The name came from the effects of the nightlong wagon rides in the old days, after which the performers spent a couple of hours stretching kinks from their bodies.

The various sideshows were tucked into a midway of carny games as crooked as a dog's hind leg. Even the benign ring toss and dart throw were rigged. The con operators allowed a few people to win large, highly visible prizes. They picked the winners carefully. The best investments were young couples, or a family that moved as a group. Forced to carry the prize the rest of their visit, the winners served as advertising. Many people won at the start of the day; none toward the end.

As a full-fledged kinker, I had access to the forbidden zone of performer alley. Here the clowns played chess, the aerialists disdained anyone confined to earth, and the dwarfs spent most of their time baiting the Parrot Lady. They constantly threatened to pluck her, and commented quite openly on her presumed skill at fellatio.

One Sunday, in a community so religious the circus wasn't allowed to admit the public until well past noon, the heat rose to ninety-eight. Only the aerialists and the Parrot Lady had trailers with air-conditioning. The rest of us sat semiclothed in available shade. The dwarfs began crooning a love song on the Parrot Lady's aluminum steps. She opened her door with enough force to smack it against the trailer. The dwarfs retreated like tumbleweed.

“A bird in hand,” one said.

“Is worth a hand in the bush,” said the other.

“I got a sword she can't swallow.”

“Get lost, you little pissants,” the Parrot Lady said. She leaned against the doorjamb in the shimmering heat. “Hey, Walrus Man,” she called. “Come here.”

All the kinkers blinked from a doze, staring at me, then at her. I stumbled to her trailer as if moving through fog. My clothes clung to me.

“Save me a sandwich,” said one of the dwarfs.

The air-conditioned trailer made the sweat cold on my body. She motioned me to a couch. Gingham curtains hung from each window, and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley sat on a tiny TV. The room was very small, very neat.

“Thirsty?” she said. “Like a drink?”

I nodded and she poured clear liquid from a pitcher into a glass, added ice and an olive.

“Nothing better in summer than a martini,” she said.

Not wanting her to know that I'd never sampled such an exotic drink, I drank it in one chug and asked for another. She lifted her eyebrows and poured me one. I drank half for the sake of civility.

“The one thing I hate more than dwarfs,” she said, “is the circus.”

She wore a long white dress with a high collar and sleeves that ran to her wrists. No tattoos were visible. A rowing machine occupied a third of the trailer's space. She topped my drink and filled her own glass.

“This is my fourth circus,” she said. “I've worked with fat ladies, bearded women, Siamese twins, rubber-skinned people, and midgets. The three-legged man. A giant. Freaks by nature, all freaks but me.”

“Not you.”

She offered her glass for a toast and I drained mine. She filled it again. We sat across from each other. The room was so narrow our knees touched.

“They hate me because they can't understand why someone would choose to be a freak. It took me five years to get tattooed. You can't do it all at once. I had the best artists in the country tattoo me.”

“Did it hurt?”

“That's the main part of it. Freaks have to hurt and I wanted mine real. Everyone can see that I'm a freak now. I finally suffered for real to get there.”

I nodded, confused. A row of dolls stood on a shelf bracketed to the wall. She poured more drinks and settled into the chair. Her ankles were primly crossed, exposing only her toes. She wore no jewelry.

“I hate them because they're what I was in secret, before the tattoos. I was a freak too. You just couldn't tell. I was tired of hurting on the inside, like them. I hate my tattoos and I hate the men who pay to see them. Nobody knows about my inside. The rest of the freaks are the opposite. They're normal inside but stuck in a freak's body. Not me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“That's why I'm telling you.”

“What?”

“I can't have children.”

I sipped my drink. I wanted a cigarette but didn't see an ashtray. I didn't know what to say.

“Yes,” I said.

“That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me.”

“You could adopt.”

“Shut up!” she said. “I've seen ads in the paper for adoption. ‘Call collect,' they say. ‘All expenses paid.' I won't buy a baby. You better go. Don't tell anyone anything. Let them believe we fucked like minks.”

I stood and fell sideways on the couch. Moving slowly, I got to the door and turned to say goodbye. Her pale hands covered her face. She was crying.

“I love those dwarfs,” she said. “They're my kids.”

I opened the door and made it to the bottom step before falling. The difference in temperature was swift and hard as a roundhouse blow. Someone helped me stand. The dust on my skin turned to mud from my abrupt sweating. An aerialist walked me to a truck and lay me in the shade.

An hour later Kaybach kicked me awake, berating me for being late, though he'd heard the reason. I staggered after him. Con men and kinkers wiggled their eyebrows, winked and grinned. A female equestrian caressed me with her gaze as if I were the last wild mustang out of the Bighorns. I barely had time to wriggle into my costume before Kaybach began herding the suckers in.

Our tent had no ventilation and was ten degrees hotter than outside. The water in the pool had a skin on the surface. When I lay down on the fake rocks, the world began spinning. Closing my eyes made me twice as dizzy. From a great distance Kaybach called his cue and I realized that he had been yelling for some time. I slid into the nasty water.

I managed to get through the preliminary routines with Kaybach's patient repetition of cue. He threw a fish as reward, which I dutifully tucked inside the mouth flap. Its body was swollen from heat. Mixed with fish stink was the heavy odor of gin oozing from my pores. I clenched my teeth to quell nausea. While Kaybach spieled about my intelligence, I shoved the dead fish back into the water. The smell clung to my chin and face. Water had seeped through the eye slits, encasing me in an amnion of scum. My head throbbed. As long as I didn't move, my belly remained under control.

Kaybach asked the yes-or-no questions. I squatted to make the walrus rear on his haunches, each movement an effort. The mask felt welded to my head. Kaybach threw a fish that bounced off my torso. The thought of retrieving it ruined me. My belly folded in on itself, and I knew that the spew would suffocate me. Kaybach was yelling. My face poured sweat.

I pulled my hands from the flipper compartments, worked my arms into position, and treated the crowd to the rare sight of a walrus decapitating itself. The mask splashed into the water. I retched a stream that arced from Louie's neck. Kaybach stepped into the pool and yelled for everyone to leave. People were screaming and demanding refunds.

I swam to the safety of my fake ice floe. Water had gushed into the oilskin suit, and briefly I feared drowning. I left the costume in the water, crawled to the edge of the tent, lifted the canvas and inhaled. The hundred-degree air tasted sweet and glorious. Sideshow tents were butted against the big top with a small space in between for stakes and ropes. I fled down the alley in my underwear. Peaches and Barney were gone from the truck. I rinsed my body in a tub of her drinking water and dressed in my extra clothes. The parking lot was a rolling field with beat-down grass. Locals worked it for a few bucks and a free pass. The third car picked me up. Twenty minutes later I stood in a town, the name of which I didn't know.

I oriented myself so the setting sun lay on my left, and began walking north. The Drinking Gourd emerged at dusk. Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Like Kentuckians of the Civil War, I was loyal to no direction. I was neither kinker nor freak, yankee nor reb, boss nor bum. I wasn't much of a playwright either.

A
utumn has fled in a blur of wind and leaves. The first frost never let up, clamping cold to the earth. Rita is now nine months and one week pregnant. If the baby doesn't volunteer soon, the doctor will induce its birth in a week. Beside the front door is a suitcase packed with food, diapers, cigars, a deck of cards, and a baby-naming book that reminds me of a wildlife identification guide. Rita is weary of her awkward gait, my incessant presence underfoot. I am powerless to comfort her. She listens to an inner music and I hear only the tow of the woods.

The sky is domed solid blue, pale at the edges as if the world floats inside a balloon. Beyond the perimeter lies endless time, an absence of gravity and light, the very world in which our child exists. The fetus is said to dream in utero. I suppose it must recall the passage of its own brief time—the fifth week of its gills and tail, the later limbless period when its organs were blooming. At week twenty-six it forms bones. A month later the brain doubles, increasing its capacity to dream.

Last night I dreamed that Rita gave birth to a boy who was also my father. I became the middle man, discarded and ignored. This morning Rita lay on her side with hands clasped below her bulging belly, as if proffering her child to the world. She said the baby kicked all night, I stoked the fire and left for the woods.

Wind pushes snow away from the river, forming a powder that shifts like vapor. These ground blizzards demolish vision. It is as if one walks through a haze of chalk. Because I would prefer a son, I say that I want a girl so as not to be disappointed. Rita is honest. She stakes her claim for a boy-child early, choosing faith in her own biology. She has no use for common hope.

There are more females born per year because the X sperm lives slightly longer while hunting the egg. Less likely to be born, men are more prone to death. I am the first son of a first son of a first son, and I want to continue the cycle. Rita says it is a boy. I hope she knows.

Cold air numbs my face above my beard. On certain days the radio forbids pregnant women from drinking tap water. We buy it in gallon jugs, wondering when the amnion will break. Rita recently woke from a nap lying in dampness, the sheets cold against her flesh. She called to me, her voice excited, certain that the time had come. I raced to her side. The sheets were stained pale violet, a color that scared me. My mouth was dry. I rubbed the sheet and sniffed my fingers, surprised at the faint scent of grapes. Rita rolled over. Buried in the blankets beside her was an empty glass of juice. Laughter arrived, always overdue, evidence of life.

Last month offered a blue moon, the second full moon in the same month. It was the brightest moon of our lifetime, closer to earth than any time since 1912. Both coasts were drenched by enormous tides. Since humans are sixty percent water, perpetually hauling eleven gallons inside our bodies, the moon affects us, too. I thought it might draw the baby from the womb, but Rita didn't even have Braxton-Hicks, contractions that are known as false labor pains. First-time mothers take longer to give the baby up. First-time fathers, I've found, take longer to get to sleep at night.

Rita is the focus of our lives, her belly the pinpoint. I feel the futility of a laid-off worker, the fading sense of being useful. I am left with the memory of our last sex two months ago, in which the child had literally come between us, or swayed below. I'd felt as though I were trespassing, hoping not to damage whatever lived inside.

The wind halts abruptly and I see faint fox tracks at the bottom of a rise. Blown snow fills the upwind side of the prints, which remind me more of a cat than a dog. I follow the trail, aware that seeing a wild animal requires giving up hope, the same way Rita has abandoned her hope for gender. She simply knows. Wind whips mist in the air and I crouch, aiming ray face along the path of tracks. Snow is against my eyes, down my collar. My bad knee begins to ache. The fox never hunts with hope for prey, but with
yarak,
an Arabic word without English equivalent that means “hunting condition, ready to kill.” As we lost our animal instincts, we replaced them with the veils of reason, love, superstition, and hope. No fox ever hoped for gender. Only humanity hopes, which makes us the most hopeless.

At birth my child's brain will be equal in size to the brain of a baby gorilla. My father is bald and toothless, exactly the way he was born. By prolonging childhood, we are able to learn the alphabet, mathematics, the sense of awe and doubt, how to kill for pleasure. The palm of a Down's baby has two lines instead of three, like that of an ape. My father's palm is often damp. When I made mistakes as a child, he referred to me as a cretin, and I felt proud, believing it meant I was from the island of Crete. I hope for a son who is not like me.