U.S. Grant had brought out a lawn chair and was seated in it next to her truck and trailer. The pin- and pumpkin heads had been riding with her and they were outside now, playing, running about and splashing in ditch water. Passing traffic slowed to look at this and wonder.
Bill looped around and went back and parked and he and Conrad got out. As soon as U.S. Grant saw Conrad she started crying and came out of her chair in a leap and grabbed him as if to pick him up like a pet. Instead she bent down and dropped a big hairy knee out from under her shift and rested it in the mud and hugged him.
“We spun around and the trailer snapped loose,” she said. “I kept thinking I was gonna die and things weren’t like they ought to be between us.”
Conrad stroked her with his weird little hand. “It’s all right.”
“I didn’t want to die with us not reconciled.”
“We are. We’re fine.”
“What I done was wrong.”
“I’ve already forgiven you. It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t blame you for nothing.”
The pinheads and the pumpkin heads were throwing dirt clods at one another.
“Bill,” Conrad said, “I’m going to stay here with U.S. Grant. You go on to the next town and call in some wrecker service.”
Conrad popped a snap on a back pocket and took out his razor and then his wallet. He removed a card. “This here is our road service. You use most anyone, we get a little discount. We can always use a discount. You call and tell them where we are, and they’ll come. Tell them where my trailer is too. Any others you might see on the way in.”
Bill took the card and Conrad replaced his wallet and razor and sat back on his haunches and shook Bill’s hand. “You watch out for ditches now. There still might be some slick spots.”
PART FOUR
A Feast of Possibilities
Twenty-two
Before Frost returned, wreckers did their work. Pinheads, pumpkin heads, a bearded lady, a dog-man, and the trailers were recovered. They were all brought to the designated place for the night. This place was near a hill overlooking a clutch of willows fastened precariously by thin roots to red mud. The rain had swollen the river and turned it brown as a turd. There was a light wind, and the air tasted damp and smelled of fish.
Frost was cranky when he returned. He came into camp driving fast. He slammed the Chevy to a stop, throwing up mud and bogging the station wagon about halfway to the hubcaps. That made him even madder. He got out and kicked a tire, stomped about camp bellowing orders. When he heard about all that had happened, about the bang in his motor home, he put one hand on his hip and looked at the ground for a long time. Bill was standing nearby, Frost looked at him and frowned. “Wasn’t anything you could do to keep this from happening?”
“It was the storm. I didn’t start it.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have drove careful.”
“It wasn’t about driving. It was about a storm. It washed me off the road.”
“Me too, Boss.” It was Conrad. He suddenly appeared, waddling forward on all fours. He was wearing a pair of cuffed blue jeans and a red jersey, his odd shoes and hand protectors. “The Ice Man trailer was blown off the road, and me in it.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s all right, Boss. It didn’t do nothing to it. U.S. Grant and some of the folks had a little adventure too. Everybody is okay. We’re gonna have a wrecker bill, but that’s all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. No one was hurt.”
“Of course. Good. But I mean the Ice Man.”
“He’s fine. His hairs are all in place. I don’t even think his dick swung to the other side.”
“He’s petrified. Nothing is going to swing.”
“No shit?” Bill said.
Frost didn’t answer. He went past Conrad, heading quickly for the Ice Man’s trailer.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Bill said.
“Well, he gets like that when it comes to the carnival, and especially when it comes to the Ice Man. Normally he’s all right, but now and then he’ll go into a snit. This stuff with Phil didn’t do him any good neither. I always hated Phil. He was more full of shit than a compost pile.”
“Petrified? He said the Ice Man was petrified.”
“That’s what the man said.”
“He don’t look petrified.”
“First I’ve heard of it, and I’ve known Frost for a long time now, and he’s always had the Ice Man exhibit. Then again, I’m not that inquisitive about the Ice Man. Personally, I don’t fuck around with it. I don’t care if he’s petrified or putrefied. Hauling a dead body around seems crazy to me. It ought to be buried. It gives me the willies.”
“Try sleeping with him.”
“Does he give good head?”
Bill turned and looked at Conrad, and slowly he smiled, and they both laughed.
Late in the day, Frost gathered everyone in the center of the camp and made a talk. A single cloud overhead darkened and the dipping sun fell westward into the Sabine, struggling as if about to drown, throwing out color like yells for help.
“First off, I want to apologize for the way I came in here today.”
Mostly no one had noticed, but everyone nodded, more out of respect that this was important to Frost, if not to them.
“I was angry. I had to deal with the police. They found Phil. He was drunk and parked in a truck stop, sleeping it off in the cab of his trailer with a woman he had hired who turned out to be man in a skirt, wig, and pantyhose.”
“What color wig?” someone asked. Some snickers followed.
“In place of pressing charges we worked some things out, me and Phil. He gave me the papers on his trailer, and the trailer of course. And the whirligig, which I’ve hired some men to load this very night. All of it will arrive here tomorrow morning – along with my children – courtesy of Phil. We’ll set up, stay here until the weekend, and make a couple nights of it then.
“One of the children was destroyed. Phil turned a corner too fast and he hadn’t made any attempt at proper packing. Celeste’s jar fell over and her head came off.”
Bill remembered that Celeste had been a female baby with a vagina, a pecker, and a swollen head.
“I ended up burying her beside the road. Ever since her birth, and simultaneous death, she has been in that jar. And not long after, on the road. All these years, on the road. I thought it appropriate she was buried by the highway.”
Bill thought probably about a half hour later some dog had dug her up and was making a meal of her in a thicket somewhere.
“Anyway, the whirligig is ours, it’ll be here tomorrow. Phil is shipping it in.”
There wasn’t exactly a murmur of enthusiasm. Setting up that whirligig was a pain in the ass. Even Conrad, who could be easygoing about most things, had said one day he’d rather drink a bucket of runny rat shit than help put that bolt-rattling sonofabitch up.
Usually, it came time for putting together the whirligig, Phil got drunk to do it and called for volunteers to help. It was then that the carnivalites began to suffer minor ailments. Anything from a paper cut to a bad back surfaced. But somehow, every time they camped, the damn thing got put up so unsuspecting folks could risk their lives.
Bill wished Phil had just gone off with his whirligig and not stolen anything. Everyone would have been a lot happier. Now, with that damn whirligig coming back, Bill thought he’d like to hunt Phil down with a pack of dogs, a rifle, and a few angry peasants with torches.
“Who says he’ll show?” asked Conrad.
“Well, I had him write out what he’d done on a piece of paper, and I said he didn’t show in the morning, I’d give the paper to the cops. Now, I understand a number of you had some trouble yesterday. I’m glad no one was hurt. I was rude earlier today, and I hope Bill and Conrad can forgive me for my loss of temper, and my seeming lack of interest in the living. I assure you, I care about all of you, very much.”