“Yes, Mother! Congratulations.” He was facing a pudding-cheeked woman with a pregnant belly. “What would you like me to guess? Name? Age? Date of your wedding day? Yes? Okay. Fifty cents, please. If I don’t get it right, one of my fine china dolls is yours.”
He was not talking to the cat after all. Why would he? she scolded herself. He offered his invitation to the dozens of people walking by. And many of them stopped for him, perhaps because there was a wry poetry in his voice, or perhaps because he was young and not ugly. Slim, dressed in denims and boots, he stood tall though he was in fact not very tall. In front of the booth that marked his place on the midway he took a stance like a bard in a courtyard. Something about him made her want to see his eyes, but because he wore dark glasses she could not. His face was quiet, unexceptional, yet he seemed like one who had something more to him than muscle and manhead.
Not that she needed anything more. It was enough that he was young and not ugly. He would suffice.
She trotted on, looking for a private place to make the change. It would take only a minute.
Within a few strides the familiar musky scent of lust touched her whiskers. Her delicate lip drew back from her tiny pointed teeth, and she slipped under a tent flap. She had reached the location of “Hinkleman’s G-String Goddess Revue.”
This will do.
Inside, all was heat, mosquitoes, dim light, and the smell of sweating men. Forty of them were crowded in there, watching a stripper at work on the small stage. The golden visitor leapt to a chair back and watched also. No one noticed her. She sat with her long tail curled around her slender haunches, and its softly furred tip twitched with scorn for what she was seeing.
Stupid, simpleminded cow. She uses her body like a club. She does not know how to walk, how to move, how to tease. Her breasts are huge, like melons, and that is all she knows.
The thoughts of everyone in the tent swarmed in its air thicker than the mosquitoes. Therefore the cat quickly knew that the stripper, called a kootch girl, was expected to more than mildly arouse the men, called marks. She knew that the kootch girl’s repertory was limited by her meager talents, that the girl was planning to get out of her G-string in order to achieve maximum effect. She knew that several of the marks were thinking in terms of audience participation. She knew that in back of the tent was a trailer where those with fifty dollars might buy some private action later.
The men roared. The stripper was flashing her pudenda. Jumping down from her perch, the cat darted backstage, hot with scorn and anger.
Is that what they call a woman these days? Can no one show them how it should be done?
Backstage were two more strippers, spraying one another’s semi-naked bodies with mosquito repellent. Mr. Hinkleman, the owner, was back there also, lounging in a tilted chair, bored, drinking gin between hot hoarse stints in the bally box. Off to one side was a booth with a flimsy curtain, a changing facility, not much used by women who were about to take off their clothes in front of an audience anyway. The golden cat walked into it. A moment later, a golden woman walked out.
“Carrumba!” Mr. Hinkleman, who had seen a lot over a career spanning twenty-three years in the carnival, nevertheless let his chair legs slam to the floor, jolting himself bolt upright. “Hoo! Where did you come from, honey?”
She answered only with a faint smile. There had been a time when she was more fully human, when she could talk. But that ability was a thousand years and four lifetimes gone. And she did not regret the loss. With each incarnation she found there were fewer to whom she wished to speak. Talking meant little but thoughts told her more truth.
“What’s your name?”
The level look she gave him caused him to suddenly remember, without any resentment, the training his mother thought he had forgotten years before. He stood up to greet the naked visitor more properly.
“Hello, ma’am, welcome to—to wherever the heck this is. I’m Fred Hinkleman.” His hand hovered in air, then went to his head as if to remove an invisible hat in her presence. “What can I do for you? Do you want to be in my show?”
“She don’t got but little tits,” one of the strippers put in scornfully. The girl from onstage had joined those backstage, and the three Hinkleman Goddesses stood huddled together like moose when the scent of panther is in the air.
“I know how she gets to look glowy like that all over,” complained the dark kootch girl who was billed as the Wild Indian. “She just eats carrots, that’s all. Any of us could do it. Eat carrots till they’re coming out the kazoo.”
Fred Hinkleman seemed not to hear them at all. His gaze was stuck on the newcomer. “Tell you what,” he said to her. “You go onstage and show the yahoos what you can do. I’ll go introduce you right now. What should I call you?”
Her mouth, smiling, opened into a soundless meow.
“Cat? Good. Suits you.” He went out, and a moment later could be heard promising the marks “the hottest new talent in the adult entertainment business, the sleek, feline Miss Cat, uh, Miss Cat Pagan.”
“Just another pussy,” one of the strippers muttered.
She made her entrance onstage. Contrary to the logic of the word “stripper,” it is not necessary for one actually to be wearing anything in order to perform. Cat was wearing nothing at all, but that was not what made the already-sated marks go wild and leap up and stand on their chairs in order to see her. It was the way she wore it.
She did not bump or grind or flash for them. All she did was walk, pose, hint at possibilities, and possess the stage as she had once possessed the known world. Dignity clothed her as if in robes of gold. No mark thought of touching her. Every mark knew that the price of going to her afterward would be more than he could afford.
Looking out over them, she knew she could have any one of them—and many of them were young and well built, far more showily muscled than the man in sunglasses on the midway. But no. It was him she wanted. There was something about the way he stood. He had dignity, too.
When she considered that the marks had seen enough, she went backstage and helped herself to clothing: a short strapless red dress with a flared skirt, a wisp of lace to throw around her shoulders, a picture hat. The other Hinkleman’s G-String Goddess Revue girls watched her silently and did not try to stop her. Now that she had showed her stuff she was one of them. In the backstage air she could sense their stoical acceptance, and it surprised her. She had expected dislike, even enmity. But these women were carnies. They breakfasted with snake-eating geeks and sword swallowers, they bathed in buckets, camped in mud, and every day they were expected to perform magic, creating glamour out of dirt. So what was one more freak or freakish event to them? If the stranger wanted to show up out of nowhere, that was okay. They had weathered storms before.
“Honeycat, you’re a walking advertisement,” Hinkleman remarked when he saw her. “Go on, go do the midway. Have some fun.”
The kootcher with the melon breasts went along with Cat—in order to be seen with her, Cat surmised, noticing the other woman’s thoughts the way she noticed gnats in the air, with only a small portion of her attention. Melons wanted to make the best of a situation. Melons was not unwise.
“Been around the carousel a time or two, honey?” Melons chirped.
Married, she meant. Ignoring her, Cat headed straight toward the Guess Anything stand. Now that she was in her human form, she would make sure that the man there saw her. From her experience she knew this was all that would be necessary. She would smile just a little and look into his eyes, and when she walked away he would follow her as if she led him by an invisible chain of gold.