Over the line of tents the white lights of the Ferris wheel were revolving under a few early stars. The air was cool. Gene walked across the yard to Wilcox's little trailer and knocked on the door.
"Yes."
"Mike, it's John."
After a moment the door opened; Wilcox stood there, looking a little flushed.
"You were right," Gene said. "Thanks."
Wilcox smiled. "You know, that's the most marvelous -- oh, damn. Come in and have a drink."
"I'll just sit here in the doorway for a minute, if it's all right."
"Of course -- I wasn't thinking. Half a mo." He disappeared and came back with a tumbler of whiskey in each hand. "You're my first giant, actually -- Tim Emerson was before my time. It must be a nuisance, doorways and taxis and so on."
"It wasn't so bad until this year. Then I had some other problems, and I began to think, if it's hard now, what will I do when I'm eight feet tall, or nine? I might as well get used to it."
"Yes, I see. I feel much the same way, if it's any help. There isn't a lot of give in the world, most places, for anybody who's a bit different. I mean they don't seem to make allowances. My God, the people on the street where I lived with my mother in Birmingham, you wouldn't believe it, they lived in identical houses and wore the same clothes, carried the same umbrellas and went to work at the same time every morning, I mean, you couldn't even tell the wives and children apart. I used to think of changing the house numbers; I thought the husbands coming home would go into the wrong houses and say, 'Hullo, Mum, what's for tea?' and nobody would notice. I had dreams about the factory where they made people all alike."
"You said you lived with your mother -- was your father dead?"
"Yes, he jumped off a bridge when I was nine -- bit of a jolt all round." He held up the bottle. "Have another drop of this."
"What is it, Scotch?"
"Yes. Not the best, I'm afraid, but it does the trick. Look, what I meant to say before -- I know it must be hard to get used to. Being on exhibition like a man from Borneo or something, but, you know, these people here are the ones who couldn't stand the conformity. Really when you come to think of it, it's fantastic luck that we've got any place to go to. I can imagine a world where there's nothing but those semidetached houses all in a row. That gives me the shudders."
"I understand what you're saying." Gene stood up. "I'm going on back, I've got some thinking to do."
"God bless," said Wilcox.
The next day, instead of going back to his trailer after the first performance, Gene sat down with a book in the back yard. The Lizard Man, who was also reading, glanced over and nodded. After a while they fell into conversation. The book the Lizard Man was reading was called "Genetics and the Races of Man"; he offered to lend it to Gene when he was through.
In the following week he accepted an invitation to a dinner party in the Fat Lady's trailer. Logan Forster, her husband, a beaming little man with a black mustache, cooked spaghetti in a huge pot and served it with a garlicky sauce. Irma and her husband were there, and Wilcox and the Lizard Man, and Ducklin in his baseball cap. Most of them sat on cushions on the floor; Betty Ann was in her wheelchair, and Logan insisted that Gene take the loveseat. The Forsters were from Australia, and Betty Ann, it turned out, had an astonishing repertoire of bawdy songs, performed in an innocent little-girl voice.
Afterward Irma's quiet husband volunteered to help Logan with the cleanup; Irma sat beside Gene on the loveseat and they began talking about sword-swallowing.
"How did you ever learn to do it?" Gene asked.
"The Human Pincushion taught me -- Jim Simons. That was three seasons ago. He was with the show till last year, then he went to Texas. I just wanted to learn, and he taught me. The only hard part is, you have to learn to keep from gagging when the sword goes past your glottis, right here, where you swallow. That took me two months, but then the rest was easy. You just bend your head back to make a straight line with your mouth and your throat, and then drop the sword down easy, a little bit at a time, until you feel it touch the bottom of your stomach. That's the part I don't like." She studied him for a moment. "I suppose you've heard about giants and sword-swallowers," she said, "but don't take it too seriously."
"Giants and sword-swallowers?" Gene replied. "No, what do you mean?"
"You really don't know? Well, that's okay too. Maybe we'd better keep it that way."
Gene discovered that Ed Parlow, the Lizard Man, liked to play Scrabble; they played two or three times a week, behind the freak tent while they waited to go on, with an alarm clock to remind them if they got too absorbed in the game.
Parlow seemed extraordinarily well read, although from a casual remark he had made Gene gathered that he had had no schooling beyond the sixth grade. One evening in Gene's trailer, they were talking about a book Parlow had lent him, "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren," by Iona and Peter Opie.
"It may be that kids that age haven't had time to develop a super-ego," Parlow said, "but I think the main thing is that they haven't got the formal power structure that grownups have. They have to sort themselves out somehow, and they do it through force partly, and partly through mockery -- if they make you cry, they win."
"I was too big for the seats in school," Gene said. "I had to sit with my feet in the aisle, and they called me Feet."
"They called me Fish-skin," said Parlow apologetically. "One day. two kids caught me going home from school and whitewashed me."
"Whitewashed you ?"
"That's right, there was a can of whitewash in somebody's basement -- they took me down there, pulled my shirt off and painted me. My mother was crying when she washed it off. It was irritating stuff -- my skin was pretty raw for a week or so. My father was furious -- he went to the kids' parents and the principal, It didn't do any good, of course. Kids have an instinct about anybody who's visibly different. It may be a Darwinian trait, to weed out anybody who's too far from the norm."
"There's no cure for this?"
Parlow shook his head. "No. I had all kinds of doctors when I was a kid. You see, it's genetic, or at least -- they call it 'heredofamilial,' which I take to mean they think it's genetic but they can't prove it. It runs in families, anyway. My father had it on his elbows and knees. As Ambrose Bierce said, the best thing is not to be born."
After a moment he reached across the table and touched Gene's arm lightly. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," he said with a smile. "If I had the chance to go back and say, 'No, I don't want to be born,' I wouldn't. There are so many people worse off than I am. Brain-damaged kids, just living vegetables -- that's awful. I've got all my faculties, such as they are; I can read, I can think. I'm alive, I can move around, I don't have a whole lot of pain. And you can't say this isn't a cushy job."
"What would you have done if things had been different?"
"I've thought about that. I would have gone to college, of course, and probably I would have majored in philosophy. And I suppose by now I'd be teaching philosophy somewhere. Well, as a matter of fact, a friend of mine is a philosophy professor in Asheville -- I see him every year or so when we come through there. He hasn't got tenure, and he's got a wife and three kids, and a house -- you know, keeping up with the Joneses. I don't think he respects his students, he doesn't really enjoy what he's doing, and at the same time he's terribly afraid of losing his job.
"I think about him, and his class schedules and meetings and so on. He wears these tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, and he smokes a pipe, but how much time does he have to think about philosophy? I think I've read more than he has. It's funny to say that, but it's true. I always take a carton of books with me, and from October to March I have nothing to do but read. Would I change places with him? I don't know."