Henry-etta bent over and pulled the long skirt up to her waist. She wore nothing underneath.
“Good Lord,” Sonny croaked.
“I was bigger than that when I was five years old,” Harold snickered.
“You can see my male sex for yourselves,” Henry-etta continued, a little bored with it all. “The female part is more difficult to see—but it’s easy to feel. Would any of you gentlemen like to come up and feel for yourselves?”
Henry-etta looked around questioningly, but she had no offers. Some of the men shifted nervously and others did their best not to laugh. Suddenly a man rose from the rear of the tent and walked to the stage.
“Who’s that?” Sonny asked. “I never saw him around here before.”
“Me neither,” Billy agreed.
“Of course not,” Harold said with a superior tone. “He’s with the show. He’s a shill.”
“What’s a shill?” Billy asked.
The man stepped up onto the stage. Henry-etta moved to him and he very matter-of-factly stuck his hand between her legs. “Ooooh,” she moaned and squirmed. “Don’t stick it in too far,” she said wryly. “You might lose it. Are you satisfied? Is it the real thing?”
The man leered and nodded.
“Okay. That’s enough. Don’t get carried away.”
The man dropped his hand, stepped off the stage, and walked back down the aisle. Harold turned and watched him leave the tent.
“As you can see, I am fully equipped as a man and as a woman. For an additional ten cents, you can watch me screw myself.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Harold grunted. They left, as did all the others.
Henry-etta watched them leave, standing there with her skirt ridiculously around her waist before the rows of empty benches. She sighed and let her skirt drop. “We really had an adventurous crowd tonight,” she said in a deeper voice. “Thank goodness.” She sighed again and pulled off the orange wig, then turned and walked through the curtains at the rear of the stage.
Harold, Sonny, and Billy joined the girls outside the tent. There were more people gathered around the lined-up circus wagons than there had been earlier. Those who had seen the show were excitedly telling all about it to those who hadn’t.
“What happened?” Rose asked excitedly.
“It was very tacky,” Harold grimaced. “I’ll tell you later.”
Finney and Jack ran up to them, their bare feet pounding on the hard ground, their chests heaving in excitement.
“Did you see Henry-etta?” Finney gasped. “What did she do? Tell me. I want to know. I want to know everything.”
“Oh, Finney, you can’t know everything,” Jack said. “There just isn’t time.”
“But you can try, Jack. You gotta at least try.”
“Henry-etta’s a phony and his act wouldn’t interest you, believe me,” Harold said seriously.
Finney looked at him a moment, then nodded, accepting his word. He and Jack ran to get in the rapidly growing line for tickets to the next show. The word had spread like a grass fire. Those who had missed the first show weren’t about to miss the second. There was suddenly cheering and applause as Henry-etta came around the side of the tent, the cash box and roll of tickets under her arm.
Rose shook her head, staring at Finney. “I swear. That kid gets stranger by the minute.”
Evelyn also looked at Finney, but she smiled and understood.
9.
Hawley, Kansas, like any small farming town on Saturday morning, began to stir. Slowly at first, gradually shrugging off the lethargy of the uneventful weekdays, it prepared itself for Saturday afternoon when the farmers and the country people would quit for the weekend and go to town. It was a ritual, Saturday afternoon in town, a necessary vacation. It was a time to visit with neighbors on the courthouse lawn, a time to exchange gossip, to compare the growth of babies. It was a time to escape the kitchen, to forget cooking square meals and eat junk, hamburgers and hot dogs and ice cream cones and all the marvelous things a sensible person never cooked at home.
And it was a time for necessary things; the next week’s groceries, flour and coffee and cornmeal and maybe, if there was money to spare, as a special treat, a few cans of fruits or vegetables they hadn’t been able to grow and can themselves. Other stops were often necessary: the feed store, the dry goods store, the dime store, the auto store, but these were done first, done quickly, gotten out of the way for the holiday part of the afternoon.
Many of the merchants could count on twice as much revenue on Saturday afternoon as they had taken in all week. It was the choice part of the week for almost everyone.
The farther out they lived, the bigger the occasion. They came thirty or forty miles on dusty roads, in old cars and trucks that would barely get up to thirty-five on a downhill grade. They came with the back seat or the truck bed filled with children. The children were as well behaved as their clock-spring bodies would allow them to be, as angelic as the endless ride would permit. They were well aware that an infraction that early in the day could easily lead to a curtailment of activities later on.
Saturday afternoon was especially good for the children. No adult was capable of anticipating it with such feverish intensity. It was an afternoon free of chores, of freedom to explode—within prescribed bounds. And most important of all, it was an afternoon to go to the picture show.
Some had already heard that there would be no picture show on that particular Saturday; Mier’s Majestic was still being fumigated.
But what would have been a tragedy on any other Saturday was of no consequence. The tent show was in town.
Folks usually came to town right after dinner and returned home in time for evening chores and a late supper, but not that Saturday. The tent show was in town. Chores were rearranged, schedules were shifted, plans were made to stay late that one time.
The telephone lines had been singing down the lanes and across the fields. It was the most fantastic tent show ever. It was an experience of a lifetime, a sight not to be missed. It was the Columbian Exposition and Halley’s Comet rolled into one.
The events had been related over and over until everyone in the county knew exactly what they would see. Those who weren’t called heard it on the party line. Most didn’t believe the fantastic claims, but they would go anyway—just to see if the teller of the tale was as windy as they suspected.
Early that Saturday morning, before the heat had become uncomfortable, while Hawley was still yawning and stretching, Evelyn Bradley left Mier’s Dry Goods with a bundle under her tan arm. She felt good, enjoying the relatively cool air, thinking of the night before. She felt a certain ambiguity about what she had seen at the tent show. She couldn’t accept her brother’s unshaken conviction that everything had been a sham—entertaining and brilliant, to be sure, but a fake nevertheless. Nor could she quite accept it at face value. She was certainly aware of the implications, the disturbing implications, if it were real. But, for some reason, she wasn’t at all disturbed by it. Instead she felt only wonder and a nagging worry that Harold was probably right, after all.
Sonny had been something of a disappointment. He had driven the Packard to the picnic grounds on Crooked Creek and parked with obviously amorous intentions. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the Wonder Show at all—and she hadn’t been able to get her mind off it.
She put the bundle in the wire basket on her bicycle and pedaled down the quiet street toward home. She wondered if her father would make an “arrangement” for her the way Judge Willet had for Grace Elizabeth. She smiled at the thought and then felt a little depressed. She didn’t know anyone she’d want to marry, and she supposed she knew every eligible boy in Hawley County.