I knew about Gibsonton. Knew more than most, anyway, because Tomlinson had a fondness for it. He’d told me his daughter had been conceived in what may be the quirkiest little town in a state that’s known for quirkiness. Conceived there in some 1950s-retro motor court with his renegade Japanese feminist girlfriend who now despised him, and who’d had numerous restraining orders served on him.
Even so, I sat back and listened to Harris tell me about the oddball little town of Gibsonton as we motored up the creek, my skiff’s bow transecting then shattering the mirror reflections of overhanging trees that crowded in around us as we wound our way inland.
Since the 1920s, Gibsonton-or Gib’town-has been the favorite winter home of circus, carnival, and sideshow people, both performers and support staff. What attracted them was the weather, the good fishing on the Alafia River, and also a population of locals who didn’t seem to have the usual prejudices against carnies or sideshow attractions such as giants, monkey-faced women, human pincushions, dwarfs, and other curiosities. Instead of staring, the locals accepted them for the good and decent people they happened to be.
In time, county officials made Gib’town even more attractive to that small nomadic society by granting the village “show business” zoning, which meant residents could keep Ferris wheels, trapeze gear, or even caged lions on their property. The post office installed a special mailbox for the ever-increasing population of midgets.
The arrival of the Ringling Brothers’ circus train each November to unload performers and performing animals, who were winter residents, became a notable event on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
“Several years back,” Harris said, “Gibsonton got a lot of bad publicity because of the Lobster Boy murder. Did you hear about that? Lobster Boy had some kind of disease that made his hands and legs look like flippers, and he’d been exhibiting in sideshows since he was seven. His wife said he was a mean drunk, an abuser, and she paid some teenager to shoot him.
“Other than that,” he said, “you never hear anything bad about Gib’town. They’re good people. They have their own tight little society. I’ve heard they even have their own kind of language. Different words that outsiders can’t understand. So the carney folks, the circus people, they’re different. But they’re O.K. I’ve known ’em most of my life. There are a lot of stories about foreign tankers being moored up the river waiting to be loaded with phosphate, and the crews sneaking into town to party with the show people. You know, dwarfs and bearded ladies and things. The Gib’town phosphate docks are so isolated, security has never been real tight-just one cop on the docks so the crew can’t go marching down the gangplank.”
I asked him, “How’s security now?”
“For all of Tampa, if you’re an inbound foreign commercial ship, it’s tighter than it used to be. If a skipper’s smart, and willing to risk it, he can still slip in just about anything he wants. And Gibsonton, it’s still the same-a single cop on the dock when a foreign ship’s in town.”
“How about security for outward-bound foreign vessels?”
I was thinking about how Lourdes might travel if and when he decided to return to Central America. And about where a man with a disfigured face might blend in easily.
“It’s a lot easier. You’ve got to clear customs, but they don’t really look for anything leaving the country. They never have.”
Abruptly, he pointed toward shore. “There you go. There’s an example of what this town’s about. Welcome to Gib’town.”
We’d rounded a bend, and the mangrove fringe opened to reveal a small trailer park on the south bank and a camper-trailer park on the north. The park to the south looked like it dated back to the days of black-and-white television. There were rows of old mobile homes, bread-loaf shapes with peeling aluminum, some with TV antennas sticking up, the wire corroded by years of heat and I Love Lucy reruns.
Along the border of the trailer park were wobbly finger docks and a few inexpensive boats, aluminum mostly.
Lourdes had used a rental boat in Miami. What looked to be a 20-footer or so.
There was nothing like that moored here. But there was a cement ramp. Instead of someone offloading a boat, though, a shirtless man with the biggest handlebar mustache I’ve ever seen was hosing down a young Indian elephant, allowing it to wade in the shallows of the river.
Ashore, parked along the narrow streets of the mobile-home park, I could also see a cage built on a flatbed trailer, its wooden facade painted neon orange and green, with a banner advertising the spectacular Parnell Monkey Act. Nearby, there was another canvas banner draped from a tree, as if recently painted, that read:
SEE TO BELIEVE! RAGTIME KURT AND KATHLEEN STOCKER THE AMAZING AERIALISTS FIRE BREATHER ROBBIE ROEPSTORFF KONG, THE WORLD’S STRONGEST TATTOOED GIANT
A tattooed giant?
That got my attention.
Turning, I watched a snowy egret, standing one-legged on a low limb, stab its yellow beak into the water and skewer a wiggling, silver minnow.
Except for its white feathers, the bird looked very much like its relative, the reddish egret.
Overhead, I heard a wild screeching, squabbling, and I lifted my eyes to see a flock of parrotlike birds seem to tumble past, then crash, bounce, and cling to the high boughs of a pine, still squawking.
They were bright green birds with dark heads-monk parakeets.
I leaned, scooped a handful of water and tasted it: fresh, tannin-sweet.
Gator country.
I had been in this situation many times in my life-closing in on some unsuspecting target of choice-but I had never felt so charged with purpose, or so focused.
My son was here. He was somewhere nearby. I was convinced of it. Could feel that it was so with an atavistic certainty that held no currency or rationale in the frontal lobe of my brain.
When I looked from mobile home to mobile home, window to window, my vision now had a searchlight intensity, and my eyes moved with the same tunneling focus.
In one of the trailers, I noticed curtains move…
In a patch of front lawn of another, a woman in a baggy dress and wearing a huge straw hat seemed to watch us peripherally as she swept her sidewalk…
In the distance, silhouetted in the shade of trees, a large man stood facing us, his face unseen…
Near him was a modern circus wagon with a huge marquee painted in red and blue that proclaimed THE WORLD OF WONDERS awaited inside, including the Half Girl, Half-Snake; the Bear with Three Eyes; and Dezi, the Talking Wonder Dog.
I stared at the marquee, thinking about it as Harris said, “Don’t let these old trailers fool you. The carnies don’t live here, most of them. They make a lot of money in the business. They’ve got a lot nicer places on up.”
He was right about that. We crossed under the U.S. 41 bridge, fast traffic passing overhead, Bullfrog Marina alongside, and motored another mile up the creek and into a pretty lagoon. There were palms and oaks, Spanish moss hanging like fog in the shadows, expensive houses set back, a couple of gators drifting, eyes periscoping above the mirror skein of water.
It was a beautiful area. Backcountry Florida idyllic.
Seeing a place so pretty caused me to recall something that a tattooed giant had recently said into the phone while he was directing us around Miami. He was saying to some woman that the reason she needed to come visit him was because he lived in a part of Florida that still looked the way people dreamed it should.
Here was that little chunk of Florida.
My association between the two was not random or coincidentaclass="underline" There he was, the tattooed Mediator. From the boat, I could see him jogging along the street, beneath shading oaks, unmistakable with his head the size and color of a bleached basketball, skull shaved clean and trapezoid muscles that pyramided to his ears, his skin dyed in Easter egg hues, reds, greens, blues.