Gene pointed to the shell in the middle. Wilcox lifted it. "Right, and you've won a dollar. Care to try again?"
Next time Gene picked the wrong shell. "Bad luck, you've got to watch closer. Now don't take your eye off the shell with the pea." Gene picked the wrong one again.
"You see how it goes," Wilcox said. "You let the mark win just often enough to keep him enthusiastic, and he always thinks if he pays more attention he'll win next time. Then you begin doubling the bet, and so on, and a good grifter can take all his money away. You see, the pea is compressible: you can squirt it out under the shell and palm it, like this." He showed Gene the pea between his fingers.
"Then you squirt it back in under another shell the same way, and the mark never sees it because you do it so fast."
"So 'the grift' is another word for cheating?"
"Sure. In the old days, the idea was to separate the mark from his money, never mind how. Game of chance, pick his pocket, anything. You had to pay off the law, of course, and so it was really a sort of vicious cycle, I mean, without the grift you couldn't make the payments."
He took a deck of cards out of his pocket. "This is a more sophisticated version." He laid three aces face up on the table, put the rest away. "Here it's the ace of spades you're looking for, and just to make it easier for you, I'll bend it down the middle." He did so, and turned all three cards over; the ace of spades was slightly bowed, the other two flat. He switched the cards hack and forth. "Where is it now?"
Gene turned over the bowed card: it was the ace of hearts. "How did you do that?"
"Simple, you just take the bend out of one card and put in into another one as you move them, but it takes a bit of practice."
"Let me see it again."
"Right, here we go."
Gene touched the three cards one after another, as if indecisive; he felt them change under his fingers. Then he turned over the middle card, the bowed one. It was the ace of spades.
Wilcox stared in disbelief. "Well, I'm damned. I must be losing my touch."
Gene reached out slowly and turned over the other two aces. They were spades, too.
Wilcox sat back and looked at him. "My God, here I am trying to teach you, and I'm an infant. Where did you learn that?"
"Just something I figured out myself."
Wilcox was full of enthusiasm; be wanted Gene to do a magic act in the sideshow. "You'd be the first giant magician -- it would be tremendous. You could go on to bigger and better things."
"I'd rather not."
"Don't you want to be famous?"
"No, obscure."
Gene discovered that he had taken a dislike to the new juggler, whether it was because his practice sessions with Irma disturbed the quiet of the back yard, or because of Hartz's exaggerated deference, or because he felt sorry for Ted LeFever. It had been obvious all along that Ted knew Irma slept with other men, but it had never seemed to make any difference in their affection for each other. Now there was a new sadness in his face when he looked at Irma and Ray Hartz.
Irma still came to Gene every now and then, not as often as before. One night she seemed moody. "I don't know what to do. Ray wants to blow the show and take me with him. He has an offer from Circus Vargas for a double act. He had a partner before -- she got married and moved to Canada, that's why he came here, but now he says I'm already good enough to start, and with him teaching me I'll get better and better."
After a moment Gene asked, "What about Ted?"
"He says it ~ all right, but I know it will hurt him."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
Later she told him she had decided to stay with the show, and Gene was relieved. But a week later, rising early in the morning, he saw her coming tousled out of Hartz's trailer. She gave him a mournful glance, and he knew she was wavering again.
He told himself that it was absurd to feel abandoned by somebody else's wife.
Somewhere along the line, something had gone terribly wrong. When he was a child, the world had been a big juicy apple that he was not tall enough to pluck. The boy-heroes in novels always had a series of tribulations to get through, and then they became men and everything was all right. Now he was twenty-one, legally adult, and it was not like that at all.
The worst of it was that the same thing seemed to happen to most people: not only the freaks in the sideshow, like Ed Parlow, but the ordinary people living their ordinary lives. Only Avila, of all the people he had known in New York, had seemed to have a sense of purpose that gave meaning to everything he did; the rest were drifting in sluggish channels.
He thought now of his childhood more often and with bitter regret. It was a cruel joke that you grew so eagerly, reaching for the sun, and then all the brightness went away.
At long last, he thought he had penetrated the secret of the grownups; it was something they could never tell a child, because it was emptiness and despair. He wrote a poem about this; it was very bad, and he tore it up.
The carnival people had their own names for some of the places they passed through. Two months into the season, they came to a West Virginia town they called "East Asshole."
"Is it that bad?" Gene asked.
"Oh, well, it's a hole," said Wilcox, "but that's not the reason. Two years ago there was some trouble here -- local toughs got into an argument with a couple of the butchers, and there was a 'Hey, rube,' the only one I've ever seen. The constabulary came and cleared them off, but they arrested some of our people too and Ducklin had to go down and bail them out. Then the next night the local boys came back after dark and set fire to the Ferris wheel -- did about fifteen hundred dollars' worth of damage. Ducklin wouldn't show here last season, but I suppose he thinks two years is enough to forgive and forget. I'd have given the place a wide berth for the next century if it was up to me, but it isn't. Anyhow, we're keeping an eye out, so don't worry."
In the summer of 1965, Cooley bought a Chevy station wagon and made a swing south into West Virginia. South of Parkersburg, in a little town called Elvis, he saw a carnival poster on a light pole: COMING JUNE 3, DUCKLIN & RIPLEY ATTRACTIONS -- 7 RIDES 7 -- SEE THE TALLEST MAN IN THE WORLD! At the bottom was a line, SPONSORED BY EAGLES LODGE.
Cooley went to a pay phone, looked up the Eagles, dialed the number. A woman's voice answered.
"Ma'am, you folks have a carnival coming to town next week?"
"Yes, we sure do."
"Well, I hate to bother you, but I'm just in town for the day, and my kids are after me -- I wonder if you could tell me where the carnival's playing at now?"
"Well, let me see. I believe -- let me look it up. Would you hold the phone just a second?" A pause. "Yes, here it is -- they're playing this week in East Anglia, do you know where that is?"
"No, ma'am, I don't."
"Well, it's just about sixty miles from here. You head south on the state highway, and you can't miss it."
An hour and a half later he was in East Anglia, an uninspiring clapboard town with a railroad through the middle of it. He found the carnival on a lot near the tracks. He watched the talker gather a tip for the sideshow, admired the shape of the sword-swallower and the skill of the juggler; then he bought a candy apple from a sad-faced vendor and stood eating it while he waited.
After so many years, he did not expect to be able to recognize Gene Anderson. By the same token, maybe Anderson wouldn't recognize him, but Cooley believed himself to be distinctive in appearance, and he didn't want to take the risk. After fifteen minutes or so the little crowd emerged from the other end of the tent. Cooley strolled over and fell in beside a ten-year-old kid who was carrying a glossy photograph. "Is that the giant's picture?" he asked.