The Last Carrousel

I wonder whether there stands yet, on a lonesome stretch of the Mexican border, a green legend welcoming Spanish-speaking motorists to an abandoned gas station:

Sinclair se habla español Sinclair

A sign I once sat beneath, between a chaparral jungle and a state high way, shelling black-eyed peas. With a burlap sack, a pan and a pocket-size English-Spanish dictionary beside me, I shelled through the searing summer of 1932.

I'd painted that green welcome myself. Above a station that was home, storehouse and operational base for me and a long, lopsided cracker named Luther. I was proud to be his partner and proud that the station was in my name. I'd signed the papers.

We were occupying it, ostensibly, to sell Sinclair gas. What we were actually upto was storing local produce, bought or begged, for resale in the border towns. We had sacks, buckets, pails, pans, Mason jars and crates filled to overflowing with black-eyed peas. When word got around to valley wives that they could now buy black-eyed peas already shelled, they'd be driving up from all over southeast Texas. The Sinclair agent would think we weren't selling them anything but gas. By the time he caught on, we'd be rich.

Sitting bolt upright at the wheel of a 1919 Studebaker, under a straw kelly the hue of an old hound's tooth, Luther turned my memory back to the caption on the frontispiece of The Motor Boys in Mexico: "We were bowling along at 15 miles per hour." He lacked only duster and goggles. I feared for the Mexican farmers.

"Protect yourself at all times, son," was Luther's greeting every single morning. "Keep things going up."

I hadn't seen a newspaper for weeks. For news of the world beyond the chaparral, I awaited Luther's evening return. I did the shelling and he did the selling.

There were deer in the chaparral, buzzards in the blue and frogs in the ditch. Once a host of butterflies, all white, came out of the sun and settled about me as though they'd been sent. Then they rose and fled as if they'd been commanded to leave. In the big Rio heat, I shelled on.

Luther was the man who'd discovered the unexploited shelled-pea market. I'd make him foreman of my ranch in return. The Mexican help would love me, too. "Got the whole plumb load for only two dolla'," Luther announced smugly over his latest outwitting of a Mexican farmer: He'd returned with another carload. We sat down toa supper of cold mush and black-eyed peas, in the kerosene lamp's faltering glow. Our kerosene was running low. We were short of everything but peas.

"Collards 'n' black-eyed peas on New Year's Day means silver 'n' gold the whole plumb year," Luther assured me. He was full of great information like that.

"They thought they had Clyde, but they didn't." He gave me the big news once the meal had been eaten.

A sheriff had nearly trapped Clyde Barrow and Ray Hamilton in a farmhouse outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. But Bonnie had held the sheriff off long enough for Clyde to come around the side of the house and get the drop on him with a shotgun. New Mexico police had subsequently brought in a body, found in a ditch beside a highway.

No body was ever Clyde Barrow's.

"They'll never take Clyde alive," I prophesied.

The Sinclair agent had let us have 100 gallons of gas on credit. As well as a high-posted brass bed whose springs bore rust from damp nights at the Alamo. Our chairs were orange crates. I lugged a five-gallon jug of water, pumped from a Mexican farmer's well, two miles down the highway every morning.

When the Sinclair agent had driven up with papers assigning responsibility for payment for the 100 gallons, Luther had claimed illiteracy. "Mister, Ah cain't but barely handwrite mah own name, far less to read what someone else has print-wrote. But this boy has been to college. He's right bright. Got a sight more knowance than Ah'll evah git."

The right-bright boy with all that knowance had felt right proud to sign the papers.

"When we git enough ahead to open a packin' shed." Luther assured me after the agent had left, "Ah'm gonna need your services to meet our buyers--Ah'll just see that the fruit gits packed in the back 'n' you set at the desk up front. How do that suit you, son?" That suited Son just fine. And if Luther averted his eyes, I realized it was only to conceal gratitude.

Once, at midday, the agent caught me in the middle of my bushels, jars and sacks. "We plan to can them for the winter," was my explanation.

"Well, you'll never get to be a millionaire by askin' for raises," he counseled me.

I already knew that you had to work for nothing or you'd never get rich. Grit counted more than money. All a poor boy had to do to get a foothold on the ladder of success was to climb one rung whenever anyone above him fell off. This made the rise from a filling-station partnership to owning a cattle ranch merely a matter of time and patience. And when the day came that I'd made the top rung, the first thing I'd buy would be a pair of Spanish boots and a John Batterson Stetson hat.

The reason we'd sold only one gallon of gas in that whole autumn season, it looked to me, was that Mexican farmers preferred to buy from Spanish-speaking merchants. "¿Quiere usted un poco de este asado?" I would invite myself aloud to dinner while shelling. And, finding the roast beef tasty, would ask for more: "Dame usted un magro, yo le gusta." That made a pleasing change from what actually went on in our mush-encrusted pan.

So I'd painted the sign that invited the Spanish-speaking world to our two pumps: with 50 gallons of gas beneath each pump. I'd gotten as far as "Acérquese usted tengo que decirle una cosa" when a Mexican drove up, hauling a trailer. I raced to give the crank 45 or 50 spins. But the bum didn't want gas. He wanted tequila. What were we doing out here in the brush if we weren't selling whiskey? He turned his coat inside out to prove he wasn't a revenue agent. He couldn't believe that we were actually trying to sell black-eyed peas. Laughing, he swept his hand toward the chaparral: Black-eyed peas were as common as cactus. We must be kidding him.

Still convinced that we had tequila cached somewhere, he showed me a coin, representing itself as an American quarter, to prove he could pay. It was smaller than any quarter I'd ever seen. I wouldn't have taken it even if I'd had whiskey to sell. He wheeled away.

One night I woke up because someone kept snorting. "Is that you, Luther?" I asked.

"No," he grunted, "I thought that was you."

The snorting came again. From under the bed. "Who's under there?" Luther asked, leaning far over. For an answer he got another snort.

He got up, dressed in a union suit, though the night was steaming. He probed under the bed and looked in all the corners with the help of our kerosene lamp. Finally, we both got up and played the lamp under the station's floor: A wild pig was rooting under our heads.

"SOOOO-eeeee, soooo-eeeee! Git out of there, you dern ole hawg!" Luther challenged it. But no amount of sooooeeeeeing could get the brute out. Or stop its snorting.

The next morning, I piled into the front seat of the Studebaker beside Luther. I wanted to go to Harlingen, too. "Now, if we had an accident on the way," Luther pointed out, "with both of us settin' up front, both of us'd be kilt. But if one of us was in the back, he'd likely git off just bein' crippled but still able to carry on our work."

I climbed into the back seat. Luther smiled, smugly yet approvingly, into the rearview mirror. "Done forgot what I told you about protectin' yourself at all times, didn't you, son?"

I picked up a week-old San Antonio paper in town. Four youths had driven up to a dance hall in Atoka, Oklahoma, arguing among themselves. Two officers had come up to pacify them and both had been shot down. Other youths had grabbed the officers' guns and given chase. The outlaws had abandoned their car when it had lost a wheel, had kidnaped a farmer in his car, had set him free at Clayton, had stolen another car at Seminole and then had disappeared themselves. One of the officers survived.

"That got to be Ray Hamilton and Clyde Barrow," I decided.

"And Bonnie Parker," Luther was just as certain.

In the window of the jitney jungle in Harlingen, Luther pointed out a Mason jar of black-eyed peas I'd packed for the industry myself. I could hardly have been more proud. "You're practically the black-eyed-pea king of the whole dern Rio Grande Valley awready," Luther congratulated me. I felt the responsibility.

Sheltered from the sun in the station's shadow, my fingers forgot their cunning in a dream of a Hoover-colored future, where in I supervised a super Sinclair Station wearing a J. B. Stetson hat. Never a yellow kelly.

"I never been North"--Luther came up with curious news--"but my family been struck by the Lincoln disease all the same."

"What disease is that, Luther?"

"The one that stretches your bones. My Auntie Laverne growed to over six feet before she was fifteen, same as Abe Lincoln. Her shoe was fifteen and five eighths inches, it were that long. Same as Lincoln's. It caused her nipples to grow inward. Which made her ashamed. Later she went blind but recovered her sight 'n' spent the rest of her days blessing the light God had sent her personally."

The next night I wakened to hear a motor running that wasn't Luther's Studebaker. Yet I could make out his long lank figure in the dark, bent above the gas tank. I thought he was drunk and trying to vomit, because he had both hands to his mouth. There was someone at the roadster's wheel whose face I couldn't make out. "Llévame a casa" had been chalked on one side of its windshield and "Take me home" on the other.

"Feeling badly, Luther?" I called. He made a long, sucking sound for reply. Then he climbed into the roadster and off he wheeled with the mysterious stranger.

He'd siphoned the last drop of gas out of tank number one. I wasn't going to be the black-eyed-pea king of the Rio Grande Valley after all.

So I filled the Studebaker from the other tank. Then I dumped a bushel of peas into that tank, added five cans of Carnation milk, two plates of dried mush and a can of bacon grease. Then went back to bed content. Toward morning I heard the roadster return. I hoped I hadn't flavored the tank too richly. I didn't want Luther to choke on anything. After he'd emptied it, he wheeled away once more.

In the forenoon I went bowling along in the Studebaker at 15 miles per hour. On a day so blue, so clear, it took my breath away to breathe it.

The Llévame a casa--Take me home roadster was parked out on a shoulder of the road on the last curve into Harlingen. Luther came out of it wigwagging. I pushed my speed to 18 miles per hour and he had to jump for it. In the rearview mirror I saw him standing with his hands hanging at his sides like a disappointed undertaker's.

Now he'd walk into town to save a nickel phone call. And report to the agent that I'd absconded with 100 gallons of Sinclair gas in a stolen Studebaker. Would the agent telephone Dallas to alert the Rangers? Would I have to run a roadblock at Texarkana? Would my picture be posted in every P.O. in Texas: Wanted dead or Alive?

Clyde, Bonnie, Ray Hamilton and I were at large. I'd never felt so elated in my life.

I sold the heap to a garage in McAllen for $11 without being recognized. I treated myself to tortillas and chili in a Mexican woman's lunch counter that leaned toward the Southern Pacific tracks. She didn't recognize me either.

I took cover behind a water tower until a northbound freight came clanking. I climbed into a boxcar, slid the big door shut and fell asleep in a corner. I slept for a long time, waking only to hum contentedly:

Dead or alive, boys, dead or aliveHow do I look, boys, dead or alive?

Until in sleep I heard music, like children calling, between the beating of the wheels. Little lights were pursuing one another under the boxcar door. A calliope's high cry came clearly. I slid the big door open just an inch. Great silver-circling lights were mounting like steps into a Ferris-wheeling sky. A city of pennoned tents was stretching under those mounting lights. Then a tumult of merry-go-rounding children came on a wind that blew the pennons all one way.

I hit the dirt on a run, leaped a ditch, jumped a fence, fell into a bush, crept under a billboard, straddled a low brick wall and followed a throng of Mexicans under a papier-mâché arch into the Jim Hogg County Fair. And the name of that carnival town was Hebbronville.

A banner, strung between two poles in front of a tent and lit by carbon lights, showed two boxers squaring off. Someone began banging on an iron ring. A big woman, tawny as a gypsy, with a yellow bandanna binding her hair, mounted a bally and began barking: "¡Avanza! ¡Avanza! ¡Avanza! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! See the two strongest men on earth battle to the death! See Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery! See the Human Pincushion!"

A dozen rubes were already gaping. A skinny boy, wearing white boxing trunks and muddy tennis shoes, climbed up the bally beside her. "Say hello to the folks, Melvin," the gypsy instructed the boy. The boy grinned stupidly.

"I never saw anything like it!" a roughneck in farmer's jeans exclaimed beside me.

I didn't see anything that remarkable. The boy looked to be about 15, thin as a long-starved hound, with legs that had little more than knobs for knees. His shoulders were so narrow there was just room for his goiterish neck between them. His chin receded so far an ice-cream cone would have had to be inserted beneath his upper lip before he'd be able to lick it. The Human Pincushion looked as if a pin stuck into his egg-shaped skull could cause him no pain, while his hair had the look of bitten-off pink threads.

Two young huskies, one in a tattered red bathrobe and the other in a faded blue one, trotted from opposite sides of the tent and climbed onto the bally, one beside the boy and the other beside the woman. "The Birmingham Strong Boy!" the woman held up the hand of the red-robed terror, who merely looked sullenly out toward the midway. "The Okefenokee Grizzly!" she held up blue-robe's arm. Grizzly merely frowned. Both men were high-cheekboned blonds, unshaven and looking enough alike to be brothers.

The Mexican sheriff came down the midway, checking the joints.

"Keep movin', tin-can cop," Strong Boy challenged him. "Keep movin' or I'll come down there 'n' whup you!" Grizzly, the woman and the Pincushion grappled with him to keep him from assaulting the officer. The sheriff kept on walking, smiling faintly. The rubes grinned knowingly.

"The man is an animal," the roughie whispered to me confidentially.

"You must have seen the show before," I took a guess.

Grizzly threw off his robe, began pounding his chest with his fists and roaring. Strong Boy immediately threw off his robe, pounded his chest and roared back. They created such an uproar that one Mexican came on the run, leaving his wife and two children standing on the midway. Melvin and the woman got between the two monsters and the roughie jumped up onto the bally to keep them from tearing each other to bloody shreds publicly.

"The boys are going to settle their differences inside!" the woman announced after the two had been cooled momentarily. "Mountain style! No holds barred!"

"I don't want to miss this!" Roughie chortled at the crowd and headed for the tent, with the rubes following him like sheep following a bell ram. Melvin jumped down and began taking dimes. His chest, I noticed as I paid him mine, appeared to be mosquito bitten.

Someone had painted both sides of the tent with figures intended to be those of seductive women, but had succeeded only in creating two lines of whorish dwarfs. The angle at which the tent was pitched amplified the breasts and foreshortened the legs, so that each (continued on page 126)The Last Carrousel(continued from page 76) grotesque leaned forward as if she'd been impaled at her ankles. The artist had used too much red. Some whores.

Roughie, standing in front of a curtained closet no higher than himself, announced, "Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery!"--and opened the curtain. Swinging gently there on a child's swing, against a background of velvety black, a girl in a purple-and-cream-colored sweater looked down upon us with long, dark, indolent Indian eyes. Her body apparently ended at her waist.

"As you see," she explained in a voice as low and husky as a child's, "I have no visible means of support and still I don't run around nights. Thank you thank you thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you one all. Señoras y señores, gracias." The crowd sighed, as one man, with pity and love.

"She tires easily," Roughie explained and drew the curtain.

"You believe that?" a simple-looking fellow, in need of confirming his own doubt, asked me.

"Might be she got run over by a train," I took another guess.

He looked at me with the indignation a simple mind feels when confronted with a mind even simpler. "You dern fool," he accused me. "Couldn't you even tell that girl was a-layin' on her belly?"

"Step this way, gentlemen," Roughie commanded us and nodded to the mosquito-bitten boy. "Melvin the Human Pincushion!"

Melvin shuffled onto the bally with a sheepish look and began pinning red-white-and-blue campaign buttons into his skin. Some were for William Gibbs McAdoo. When he used a Hoover button, I thought he'd surely bleed. He didn't bleed for either McAdoo or Hoover. He was a bipartisan pincushion.

Then he jabbed a huge horse-blanket pin into his shoulder and Roughie went face forward in a dead faint. Strong Boy and Grizzly, both in their fighting robes, carried him off. I was glad to see they'd made up their differences in this emergency.

The dark woman handed Melvin a small blackboard and a piece of chalk. He drew a line beside three lines already drawn and held the board up for us all to see. "'N' that's the number of people has fainted during my performance just today!" he announced triumphantly and jumped off the bally without waiting for applause. That was a good idea, because there wasn't any applause.

"In this cawneh!"--and here came Roughie again, now in white referee's trousers, into the center of the makeshift ring--"in this cawneh, at two hundred and fifty-two pounds, the champion of the Florida Coast Guard--the Okefenokee Grizzly!" Pause for scattered applause. "'N' in this cawneh, the champion of the Panama Canal Zone--the Birmin'ham Strong Boy!" Scattered applause by the same hands. "These boys are about to settle a long-standin' grudge, so any of you men who faint easy, kindly leave now. No money refunded once the battle has begun!"

"How about yerself?" Someone had to remind Roughie; but he paid no heed. "Now, this event is presented at no extra cost and no hat passing, because you men are all lovers of good clean sport, auspices of the Rio Grande Valley Wrestlin' Association." He turned to the wrestlers. "Boys, remember you're professional athletes at the top of your class, representin' the honor of the Florida Coast Guard and the American fleet in Panama, respectively, and I'm here to enforce the rules. Now, shake hands, return to your corners, come out fighting and may the best man win!"

Grizzly put out his paw, but Strong Boy, hateful fellow, struck it down. Then he turned on his heel back to his corner, handed his robe to the dark woman and flexed his limbs while holding the ropes.

"You'll pay dearly for that, Strong Boy!" The Human Pincushion threatened him from Grizzly's corner.

"Watch your mouth or I'll whup both of you!" the dark woman answered. Strong Boy, still grasping the ropes, spat across the ring directly at the opposing corner. The yokels loved it.

Strong Boy and Grizzly began circling each other, both frowning, yet not closing. Somebody booed. Grizzly went to the ropes, scanned the faces looking up through a haze made of tobacco and heat.

"What do you want for a dime?" he challenged the whole tent. "Blood?"

"Look out!" Pincushion warned him too late.

Strong Boy leaped on Grizzly from behind and they went to the canvas, rolling over and under from rope to rope in a roaring fury. The canvas shook, the tent poles trembled and the carbon lamps swung. Strong Boy clamped a headlock on Grizzly that nothing human could break. But Grizzly--being subhuman--broke it, sending Strong Boy staggering, his hands waving before his eyes in the throes of blinding shock. Grizzly backed against the ropes to gain leverage, then propelled himself half across the ring. Strong Boy stepped lightly aside, grabbed Grizzly's ankles as he flew past and brought him crashing down on his face. Strong Boy had only been pretending to be hurt! Swiftly applying a double scissors, a toe hold, a half nelson and a Gilligan guzzler with one hand, he began poking his opponent's eyes out with the other.

"Give it to him, Strong Boy!" the crowd came on in full cry, uncaring which of the two brutes got it, as long as one of them was punished murderously. "Wreck him, Birmingham!"

The blood lusters hadn't reckoned on the Human Pincushion. Melvin slipped through the ropes carrying a length of hose and now it was the dark woman who cried warning--"Watch out, Strong Boy!"--just as Melvin conked him behind the ear and knocked him flat on his face.

The referee snatched the hose length from the boy's hand and began loping about the ring, holding it aloft and crying, "I'm here to enforce the rules! Here to enforce the rules!," as if waving a hose length proved that that was what he was doing; while Strong Boy still lay stretched defenselessly with Melvin kneeling in the small of his back. Grizzly, instead of helping Melvin, merely loped after the referee with his fists clasped in the victory sign. A bear's head was tattooed on his right biceps: a grizzly with small red eyes.

Then Strong Boy lurched to his knees, sending Melvin spinning, got to his feet and went loping counterclockwise to Grizzly, holding his fists aloft in victory. They passed each other twice making the same claim. Then both climbed out of the ring, followed by Melvin. Roughie paused to announce the results, "Draw! Draw! Two falls out of three for the world's free-style championship! Final fall in one hour!" Then he climbed out, too.

"That were the worst fake fight I ever seen my whole born days." A voice behind me drawled its disappointment.

"The holler 'n' uproar was pretty fair," a woman observed. Fake fight or real, the holler 'n' uproar had been fair enough to fill the tent with marks, some of whom had now brought women.

"And now, if the ladies will allow, I'll talk to the gentlemen privately," the dark woman said, then waited. The half-dozen women in the crowd retreated, huddled and sheepish, as their fine bold fellows inched forward. "And I know you are gentlemen," she resumed, using a more intimate tone. "Do you see this little bell I hold in my hand?" raising a small tin bell and holding it high until every gentleman had seen it. "Now, I know what you men are here to see. I was young once myself--ha-ha-ha--and although you're gentlemen, you're still hot-blooded Americans." Her eyes scanned their ashen and chinless faces in which most of the teeth were missing. "But there's a city ord'nance against presenting young women in the ex-treem nood within forty feet of the midway--but back there, gentlemen, back there our young women are only waitin' for me to tinkle this bell so's they can start goin' the whole hawg!"

One tinkle and we'd be off! The (continued on page 180)The Last Carrousel(continued from page 126) men craned their necks like trackmen, but she lowered the bell, as if having second thoughts. Then suddenly threw up her hands, as if pleading. "For God's sake, men, don't go tellin' total strangers what you're about to see! You'll spoil it for your friends!" She waited to assure herself nobody was going to tell. Several more marks joined us from the midway while she still held the bell aloft.

"Gentlemen! If there's anyone here who can't control his passions when we get back there, I'll have to ask him to step forward and have his money refunded at the box office! No money refunded once the performance has begun!" Nobody stepped forward. She tinkled the bell at last.

"Awful sex acts goin' on right this way, gentlemen," the Roughie-referee directed us. "Step this way, gentlemen, for awful sex acts!" He was holding a sombrero into which we each dropped a dime as we passed into the partitioned rear of the tent.

"You handle quite a few jobs around here," I observed as I paid him.

"Why not?" he remarked cheerfully. "It's my tent."

A crude wooden cubicle, octagonal, with shutters at the height of a man's eyes, waited in the flickering gloom. We stood around it while crickets began choiring to a generator's beat. The Roughie came in, wearing a coin bag around his neck. "Get your nickels here, boys," he advised us, "two for a dime and five for a quarter, see the little ladies shiver and shake. You pay for the ridin', but the rockin' is free!" I had to wait in line to get change for a dime. A gramophone began playing inside the cubicle:

Ain't she sweet?

See her coming down the street!

I put in a nickel, the shutter lifted and Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery's long, indolent eyes looked straight into mine. She was wearing a red veil tied in a great bow about her hips and a green veil about her breasts. She moved her hips and breasts gently as the gramophone droned on:

Now I ask you very confidentially

Ain't she sweet?

The shutter closed. I put in my other nickel hurriedly. This time she had closed her eyes and was smiling faintly. The gramophone began another inquiry:

How come you do me like youdo? ...

I ain't done nuth-in' to you.

And click. Another nickel shot.

"Mighty short nickel's worth," I complained to the ex-referee.

"Ain't nothin' to what's comin' next, son," he assured me, "and no charge whatsoever for this next show--just keep your voice and your head down, right this way." I stooped to keep from bumping my head as he raised the next flap and then stepped into the ultimate mystery of a wide and stilly night. A full moon was just starting to rise. I stumbled across tent stakes until I'd regained the midway.

Under the new moon's coppery light, the fair seemed strangely changed. The dust that rose down its long midway, catching that light, looked like metallic flecks restlessly drifting. A glow, like beaten bronze, burnished the sides of tents that by day had been mottled gray. And the faces of the men and women behind the wheels and the stands and the galleries looked out more ominously than before.

The dark woman's plea of "¡Avanza! ¡Avanza!" sounded more pleading and the calliope cried La Paloma more urgently now. An air of haste stirred the dark pennons, as if to hurry the tempo of pleasure along. Everyone began moving a little faster, as though time were running out: All lights might darken at the same moment and never come on again.

"Spin 'er, mister!" Someone was challenging the wheel in a wheel-of-fortune tent. "Doublin' up! Let 'er spin! This is my night! Cash on the barrel!" A clinking of silver dollars followed and I hurried over to watch.

If the aging man in the paint-stained cap was having a winning night, he looked to me it must be the first winning night of his life. "Takin' the six!" he announced like an auctioneer. "And the nine!"

"Only one number to a player," said the wheelman, refusing the Cap's double bet. He looked worried.

"Afeerd I'll beat you both numbers, mister?" the Cap taunted the wheelman, yet the wheelman still refused him. I felt the Cap slipping a silver dollar into my hand as he whispered, "Put this on the nine for me, son." I immediately liked his plan of putting something over on the wheelman.

The wheel clicked fast, slowed at 5-6-7-8, then nudged onto 9 and stopped. All the poor wheelman could do was shake his head ruefully and complain, "This is the worst streak of bad luck I've ever run into," while he paid me 12 silver dollars. When I slipped them to my backer, he returned one as a token of his appreciation, whispering, "Play this for yourself, son." I was careful to wait until the wheelman stepped back from the wheel before I put it down. Nobody was working monkey business on me.

I put the dollar on 7. The wheel almost stopped on 6, then nudged over onto 7!

"We're killing him!" the Cap cried joyously.

The wheelman stacked the $12 I'd won just out of my reach. Then stacked 20 of his own beside them and asked me casually, "Try for the jack pot, son?"

"Take him up," the Cap urged me in the same hoarse whisper.

"I don't know how it works," I confessed in a whisper almost as hoarse.

"You get the chance at the twenty-dollar jack pot because you won twice in a row, son. You don't have to bet on a number, you can bet on color 'n' that gives you a fifty-fifty instead of just a thirteen-one chance, 'n' if you bet on both color and number and you hit both, you get paid double on top of thirteen--one, making twenty-six--one 'n' a chance at the twenty-dollar gold piece--"

"Red!" I shouted. But the wheelman just stood waiting.

"It costs a dollar to bet on the color, because the fifty-fifty pay-off gives you too big an edge over the house--that's the rules of the game, son." I put a dollar of my own down and the wheel, sure enough, stopped on the red 5.

"Hit again! I never seen anything like it!" the Cap exulted and I wished he weren't so loud about it. He was attracting the attention of people on the midway. "Whoo-eee! This kid is a gambler! Pay the kid off, mister!" he threatened the wheelman loudly enough for the whole fair to hear. I didn't see any need for threats, because the man was already stacking my winnings in three neat piles.

I decided not to press my luck. "I'll just take my thirty-two," I told him.

"Play," the Cap hissed in my ear. "You can't quit now." Only this time, he wasn't advising. Now he was telling. I felt someone standing right behind me, but I didn't turn to see if it was anyone I knew. I just gave the Cap a fixed smile and then turned it on the wheelman so he wouldn't think I liked the Cap more than I liked him.

"Try for sixty, sport?" the asked.

"Sure thing," Sport agreed. "Make it or break it on the black."

"It costs five dollars to try for sixty," the Cap informed me. "Rules of the game." Could he be making those rules up as he went along?

"I don't have five, I have only two," I lied, because I didn't want to go into my right shoe.

"Let him try for two," a voice behind me commanded. The wheelman spun for two. If I won again, I'd have to make a run for it--but it stopped on red zero. The house had recovered its losses, plus three dollars of my own. I turned to go. Nobody was standing behind me.

"Sport!" the wheelman called me back and handed me two quarters. "Get yourself something to eat at a grabstand and come back. If you want to go to work."

I went wandering down the thronging midway, clicking my two consolation coins. One was smaller than the other. Why was it somebody was always trying to slip me phony money? I turned it over and saw it had Washington's head engraved upon it. I gave it to a woman selling tacos just to try it out. She gave me 15 cents change. Well, I be dawg. That Mexican had been on the up-and-up, after all. With the ten-dollar bill in my shoe and 40 cents in my hand, I had enough to go courting! I worked my way through the throng toward Hannah the Half-Girl's tent.

The ex-referee was sitting on the bally stand chewing a blade of grass, looking as if he'd been put together with wire, then sprayed with sand. A sinewy, freckled, sandy-haired, pointy-nosed little terrier of a fellow of any age between 30 and 50.

"Stick around for the girlie show, son," he hustled me the moment he saw me. "You never seen anything like it."

"I've already seen the show, sir," I let him know. "May I ask you something?"

"Ask away."

"Is that wheel down the midway on the up-and-up?"

"Every show on the grounds is honest, son," he assured me, looking me straight in the eye.

"Reason I ask is that I lost three dollars playing it and that gave rise to some doubt," I explained. "I feel better now."

"Nobody wins all the time, son."

The dark woman came up, walking as though she were wearied out. Behind her the Half-Girl put her head and torso out of the tent. I hoped that that really wasn't all there was to her. Then the rest of her emerged on two sturdy legs and began moving toward us. I kept my eyes on the man and the woman. When she came up, I caught a faint scent of clove and lavender.

"Oh, they're nice enough," I hastened to assure the tent people. "One of them loaned me half a dollar and told me to come back if I wanted to go to work. It's the wheel with the Navaho blanket nailed up in back."

"That's Denver Dixon's," the man informed me. "You're in good hands, son." He added, to the girl, "Dixon has offered this young man a position." All three then looked me up and down, as though one thought were in all their minds.

"I can see how he'd prove useful," the woman decided for them all.

"We take care of Dixon's boarding-house," the girl put in. "It's where you'll stay if you work for him. If you come back here at closing, we'll drive you out."

"I appreciate your hospitality, miss," I assured her.

The man put out his hand. "Name of Bryan Tolliver," he told me. "My wife Jessie. My daughter Hannah."

"That's spelled T-a-l-i-a-f-e-r-r-o," the girl explained. Now, how had a sandy little man held together by wire and a woman as weary and heavy as that gotten themselves a girl so lovely?

• • •

Welcome to Dixon's Showfolks Boarding Home Spanish Cousine a Specialty

Everything was settled, yet nothing was settled. Hard times had taken the people apart and hard times had put them back together: some with parts missing, some with parts belonging to others, some with parts askew, yet others with extra parts they hadn't learned how to handle. The times themselves had come apart and been put together askew.

Doggy Hooper, the shill in the paint-stained cap, had been a railroad clerk on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for 20 years. Now he showed me how he'd made Denver Dixon's wheel stop at 9 by a wire attached to his shoe, how he'd stopped it at 7, and then how he'd stopped it on red zero when I'd bet on the black 11. Doggy replayed such small triumphs with the air of a man who'd made a killing on Wall Street.

"'N' that's the way we flap the jays!" he grinned up at me, but a bit to the side, because his right eye was slightly turned out. "It's how we move the minches 'n' give the rubes dry shaves"--and he did a bit of a jig.

"Son," he suddenly said seriously, "do you have so much as a flash notion of how much people will pay for the chance of losing their shirts?"

I didn't have a flash notion. He showed me a pair of dice, which I had only to weigh in my palm to tell were loaded.

"I wouldn't play against you with these," I toll him.

"Even if I told you beforehand they were loaded, that what I had in mind was to cheat you?"

"Surely not."

He stuck a finger at my chest. "You wouldn't now. But you will, son. You will." And he walked away.

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe had made a good move in getting this old man away from their rolling stock, I concluded. He'd sprung a coupling and been left on a spur.

Doggy Hooper's parts didn't match. But then, nothing else around that old strange house matched. Upstairs or down. There were hens in the yard, but when you looked for a rooster, here came a capon.

Denver Dixon himself belonged somewhere else. Six feet, one and slim in the hips, wearing a dark suit sharply pressed, walking so lightly in his Spanish boots with the yellow string of his Bull Durham pouch dangling from his lapel pocket, keeping his face half-shadowed by his Stetson and his drawl pitched to the Pecos, nothing he wore or said would indicate that he'd been born and brought up in Port Halibut, Massachusetts.

Had his big red-white-and-blue boardinghouse sign stood near the state highway, instead of being smeared across the side of a dilapidated stable, that would have seemed less fanciful. Chicken wire, nailed across the stable to prevent horses from leaping its half door, would have made sense had there been a horse inside. But all the stable held was a domino table teetering on a scatter of straw. Where harness and saddles should have been, fishing tackle hung. Kewpies of another day that once had smiled on crowds tossing colored confetti smiled on, though their smiles were now cracked and all the confetti had long been thrown. Along shelves were clucks of wood and cats of tin remembering, among paint cans in which the paint had dried, their shooting-gallery days. An umbrella hung above the Kewpies--what was that doing here? A burlap sack marked Feed held nothing but dusty joint togs discarded by belly dancers whose bellies by now had turned to dust.

The deep-sea tackle belonged to Doggy, who'd never come closer to a creature of the deep than to a crawfish in a backwater creek. Yet nobody considered the man strange because he practiced casting, with rod and reel, in ranching country. Once, showing me how to reel in bass, he hooked his line into a bristlecone pine. Then stood purely dumfounded that anything like that could happen to a man in a country of cactus and bristlecone pine. If a blue whale could have been hooked in alfalfa, Doggy Hooper was the man with the bait, sinker and line to haul the awful brute in.

Doggy liked beating marks. He liked beating me. He beat me at dominoes and he beat me pitching horseshoes--and every time he beat me, he called me sport. But he never beat me for money again.

One forenoon I found him crouching before an orange crate half-covered with tar paper. Chicken bones, recently gnawed, littered the crate's uncovered side. A hole, sufficiently large for a small animal to enter, had been cut into the top of the covered section. I thought I heard a faint scurrying in there.

"What is it, Doggy?" I asked. He was too preoccupied with what was going on inside that crate to reply. He drew back without taking his eyes off that hole.

"Did you catch something, Doggy?" I asked. Doggy nodded as much as to say he'd caught something but wasn't pleased about it.

"What did you catch, Doggy?" I asked after another minute. "What's in there?"

"What's in there? What's in there?" he mocked me. "The Thing That Fights Snakes, fool! Now, stand back while I rile it up a little." I backed off.

He drew on a pair of canvas gloves, lowered his cap to protect his eyes and bent to the box once more. He appeared puzzled about something. "Damned little bugger just et 'n' now he's hongry again," he reported, shaking his head reflectively.

"It is a pure wonder to me, though," he reflected, turning back to his captive, "that it'd want another rattler so soon. Barely had time to digest that one. Where am I to find another'n?" he asked himself, then answered, "I just plain don't know." He stood up, appearing relieved. "Sleeping," he confided to me in a whisper. I bent clown over the crate with utmost caution.

The top sprang open and a silver-streaking fury, all fur and fangs, flew at my face. I stumbled backward, wigwagging frantically to protect my eyes, then recovered myself and peered down through my fingers. An eviscerated squirrel, its fur painted silver, lay coiled at my feet. A spring had been wired to its tail and a set of old dentures joined to its jaws.

Doggy began leaping about the yard, his laughter breaking like crockery cracking on stone, holding his stomach for sheer joy of his prank. One can't expect too much of a semiliterate booze fighter, I thought, walking to the house and registering contempt with every step.

Jessie was in her rocker on the porch with a copy of the Valley Morning Star on her lap. I took the rocker beside her. A column of coal smoke kept rising from a Southern Pacific switch engine directly across the rutted road into a cloudless and windless sky. Voices, from the iglesia metodista just down the road, rose in praise of that same sky.

"En la cruz, en la cruzYo primera vi la luzY las manchas de mi alma yo lavéFue alli Por fe yo vi a JesúsY siempre feliz con él seré."

"The papers keep puttin' every killing in Texas on Clyde and Bonnie," Jessie complained. "I know for a fact that Bonnie was in jail at Kaufman when them gas stations at Lufkin was robbed. 'N' it wasn't them that shot clown the grocerman at Sherman. That was Hollis Hale 'n' Frank Hardy. Clyde 'n' Bonnie was up in Kansas gettin' married by razzle-dazzle."

"By what?" I asked politely.

"By razzle-dazzle. Flat-ride. Carrousel."

"Merry-go-round?"

"No. A merry-go-round is the gambling wheel you're working with Doggy. Could a couple fixing to get married ride that?" As a victim of one practical joke that day, and the clay still short of noon, I thought it best not to pursue the matter.

"Just one of Mother's pipe dreams," Hannah advised me from the door. She was wearing some kind of hand-me-down burlesque gown, ripped under one arm, to which a few silver sequins still clung. The sun glinted on them so sharply that she canted one arm to shield her eyes, exposing a dark tangle of hair in the pit of the arm. Again I caught that faint scent of lavender or clove, touched now by perspiration.

"If you think me and your pa got married in church," Jessie reminded her sharply, "you'd do well to check with Bill Venable's steam razzle-dazzle in Joplin--'cause it was on that your pa and me got bound in wedlock, holy or not, 'n' don't you go forgettin' it."

And here came Doggy shuffling along with his cap pulled too low over his eyes. Well, let the poor geek tell his sorry joke, I thought, I'll go along with the laugh.

Yet the old man spoke not a word. Simply braced his back against the sun-striped wall with his cap low over his eyes. But when he glanced up, blinking toward the light, I saw his eyes looking inward and his cheeks pale as ash. Jessie gave me a flicker, as if to say she understood something I did not.

"I wasn't disputing you, Mother," the girl explained, "I just purely doubt that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow married that way. After all, they're not carnies."

"They wouldn't be the first outlaws rode the flat-ride because they couldn't risk walkin' through a J. P.'s door," Jessie suspected.

"I'm not an outlaw, Mother," the girl caught Jessie up.

"And not much of a carny, neither," Jessie put her down quite as fast.

"All the more reason for me to be married in church instead of on a merry-go-round."

"We don't call it a merry-go-round," I put in authoritatively, "we call it a flat-ride or razzle-dazzle. Merry-go-round is a gambling wheel. Or a lay-down."

"Now," Jessie exulted at Hannah's expense, "you hear that? Here's an eye tinerant college boy turned carny bare a week 'n' he talks better carny than you who was born 'n' bred to tent life."

"I didn't attend college," Hannah explained, taking the rocker beside her mother's. "I want a church marriage. By a preacher. I'm just not goin' to set on top of some dumb wood brewery horse with a calliope blowing 'n' call that marriage."

"Your pa and me rode wood horses driven by steam 'n' we called it marriage," Jessie said reproachfully, "'n' the flat-ride we rode we could have set atop a zebra or a lion if we'd wanted--that razzle-dazzle had a whole jungle on it. If we find you a steam-driven ride with a zebra, will you like that better, honey?"

"Mother, try to be serious."

I had the impression that this fanciful debate had been fought, uphill and down, numerous times before. Always about whether it would be a carny or a church wedding; and never a reference to a groom.

It had, of course, to be one of the half brothers who alternated nightly in the roles of the Strong Boy and the Grizzly. Lon Bethea, at 233 pounds, outweighed Vinnie by less than four pounds. Yet their combined 462 pounds of sinew, with the sheen of youth and the shine of health and the poise of power upon it, could hardly have left Hannah Taliaferro less impressed.

When they took her into their Model A in a kind of protective custody each evening, she sat in the back seat flipping the pages of a magazine, while they sat up front matching her indifference with their own.

"It's up to Vinnie and Hannah," Lon would say, resigning himself too easily to losing Hannah.

"If Hannah 'n' Lon make the ride, I'll be their best man." Vinnie was equally gallant. "I'm not agoing to stand in my own brother's way."

"It's awright with me if you marry 'em both, sis," Melvin came to his own decision--for which he caught a fast clap on his ear from her.

The Bethea boys hurled themselves into battle night after night, applying airplane spills and turnover scissors, hammer-locking each other, then butting like bulls; stomping each other's feet, barking each other's shins, then choking each other purple with Gilligan guzzlers; yet they breathed nothing but good will toward men by day.

The S. P. engine shunted a boxcar onto a siding, then raced backward, tootling all the way. "What's that fool got to toot about?" Jessie feigned indignation at the engineer. "Because he's driving a yard pig?"

"Goin' backwards is when folks blows their whistles loudest," Doggy decided, "or when they got no mail whatsoever to pick up. Don't I do a lot of tootlin' myself?" he asked. "And what have I got to tootle about? Ain't I been goin' backwards ever since I was born?" he asked in a voice prepared to grieve the whole bright day away.

"I cheated on my folks by playin' hooky," Doggy mourned on, unheeding. "I cheated on my wife with other women. I cheated on my kids by hittin' the bottle. I even cheated countin' boxcar numbers for the Atchison, Topeka 'n' Santa Fe." He paused for dramatic effect. "What else could I do? I were only a child.

"Giving the Atchison, Topeka 'n' Santa Fe a wrong count on boxcar numbers wasn't cheating," lie explained to clear that point up, "it was a subconscious matter I haven't to this day been able to understand myself." He waited to see if we were interested in this mystery. Nobody was.

"I couldn't report a three if I was counting inside," he recalled. "I had to go outside to do it. I could not form that number within walls. Inside, my fingers simply would not do it. Had to write another number or go out in the rain."

The little engine raced all the way back toward us, as if the engineer had been listening to our conversation and wanted to put in a word himself. Surely our voices, in that clear bright air, carried far down the tracks. Then he raced back down to the roundhouse and out of sight. Jessie turned toward Hannah.

"And if you're making plans to sew that seam under your arm before it's ripped to your belly button, young woman, I'll loan you a proper needle."

Doggy poked Isis ferrety face out from under his cap. "Aren't no proper thread." Then he pulled his head back under his cap and began singing challengingly:

"If he's good enough for LindyHe's good enough for meHerbert Hoover is the only manTo be our nation's chief."

"Good enough for Lindbergh ain't good enough for me," Jessie derided the President, the pilot, Doggy and the song. "Franklin D. Roosevelt is the man to set this country free."

"I'll tell you about Roosevelt," Doggy offered: "He's like the bottom part of a double boiler--gets all worked up but don't know what's cookin'. 'N' I'll tell you something, sport." He turned to me. "Any time you get into a town where the cops don't have uniforms, you can be sure the chow is going to be lousy." Doggy seemed to be coming out of his mood nicely.

"Is Mr. Dixon up yet, Mother?" Hannah asked.

"Gone to town bright 'n' early to pick up the Jew fella," Jessie reported. "Took them two fool wrasslers along." The "Jew fella" was Dixon's wheelman, Little British.

Although Hannah Taliaferro was a sturdy girl, she gave an impression of fragility. She was quick in mind and movement, but, even more, the impression came from that strange personal scent that seemed to mingle clove and lavender with perspiration. Men who fixed their eyes on a distant point when she stood directly before them looked perfect fools to me. I avoided looking the fool simply by shutting my eyes until her mother called her away.

The true mystery about Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery was not how her lower body disappeared at tent time, then reappeared as she swept floors, made beds and turned hot cakes the next morning. It was how, whether bending, walking, turning, resting, stretching itself or just standing still, it became more voluptuous at every reincarnation.

Her carelessness toward her own charms was not the least of her charm. She went about barefoot, wearing nothing but a hand-me-down burlesque gown, once red, now faded to brown. Her nipples, always pointing, as if forever taut, stretched the dress's thin fabric. When she bent down over the table to serve a dish, I saw a skin so tawny that the circles about the nipples were only a hue darker than the breasts themselves.

After that, I'd go upstairs to rest.

Doggy got so drunk, between the stable and the town, that he lay all day Sunday, on his garret cot, paralyzed by exhaustion. By Monday noon, however, he'd recuperated sufficiently to go about consumed with remorse: "No, you don't get a cigarette," I heard him pronouncing various penances upon himself--"you had yours Saturday. No, you don't get any lunch today. You had yours Saturday." All day Monday he denied himself, and part of Tuesday, too. Thursday evening he began letting up a bit on himself. By Saturday, we all knew, he'd be ready for an all-night bender once again.

• • •

On September 1, 1932, the moon moved across the face of the sun and I heard an owl hoot in Dixon's stable just before noon. It was lighter than night, yet darker than day. I'd never seen an owl.

So I went searching the stable's shadows, with a flashlight, in hope of seeing that curious bird. All I saw was Doggy Hooper huddled in a corner, his eyes staring at me so fixedly I wondered whether it might have been himself who'd hooted. "You playing owl on us, Doggy?" I asked, playing the flashlight on his face.

"Gonna be a shakedown an' a shake up!" he cried without blinking right into the flashlight's beam. "Union's gonna throw old Doggy out! Roman black snakes after old Doggy!"

An uncorked pint lay on its side, seeping darkly onto the straw. "You're losing good whiskey, Doggy," I told him. His head wobbled, trying to focus on the figure behind the flashlight.

"Awright, Dixon," he muttered, "you come to collect"--he struggled to his feet, holding the wall of the stall for support--"this is the showdown! Showdown. Showup. Shakedown! Shakeup! I'll never borrow another nickel off you the rest of my life! I'll be your swore enemy!" I had to catch my swore enemy to keep him from falling and support him into the yard. Hannah came out to help. Between us, we got him up the narrow stairs to the room above the stable.

A Navaho blanket,' torn and stained by tobacco juice and whiskey, covered Doggy's cot. A cheap alarm clock ticked on the floor. But Doggy wouldn't lie down. He sat stubbornly on the cot's edge and began croaking lonesomely:

"Mother's voice is gone from the kitchen.

She's teaching the angels to sing--"

"Try to sleep it off, Doggy, dear," Hannah pleaded with him, spoon-feeding hot black coffee into him.

"I'll do anything you fellows can force me to do," he finally conceded. "I'll take anything you can give me so long as I don't have to like it." He took a few spoonfuls of coffee from the girl, then looked at her drowsily. "If you don't behave yourself," he warned her, "I'll stop taking your money." And with that threat he fell back, rolled onto his face and sank into a snoring sleep.

Later I wandered down the road paralleling the S. P. tracks, up to the iglesia metodista. The doors were open, though no service was being held. Candles burned in the church's dusty gloom. I sat on the steps and waited for a train to pass in either direction. There was no train nor a rumor of one clown the bright rails.

I wandered back to the house and around to the stable, wondering vaguely whether there might be anything left in the bottle Doggy had abandoned. There were half a dozen drops, no more. I drank them and pitched the bottle into a corner. Then saw, in the shadow, the crate that held the Thing That Fights Snakes. The Thing still lay coiled inside. I fooled around with its spring until I got it to leap. Then I put the cage in full view of the kitchen window.

"How was the tip Saturday night, sport?" Hannah put her head out the window to ask.

My back toward her, I contemplated the cage and made no reply.

"Did you have a good tip Saturday night, sport?" she repeated a bit louder. I held my silence and my pose. Her bare feet came padding up behind me. "Something happening?" I heard her ask softly.

"Shhh," I shushed her, "it's not finished eating."

"What's eating what?" She came up right beside the box. Apparently, Doggy's contraption was new to her. "What's not finished eating what?"

"Shhh, I might have to rile it up a bit."

"Rile what up, for God's sake? What have you got in there?"

She reached for the box, but I held her back with my hand and shouted, "The Thing That Fights Snakes, fool! Back! Stand back!"

That girl wouldn't back for tigers. Hannah put her eye to the opening. I sprang the catch. The Thing flew, claws, fur and silvered teeth, into her face. She fell back, waving her hands before her eyes, yet made no outcry. For a moment, she stood looking clown, until the crazed look in her eyes subsided.

She turned the Thing over with her bare foot. As she turned it onto its back once more, a smile too sly formed on her lips.

Then she came right at me.

Around and around the stable I fled her rage. I had to keep running until she ran out of rage or breath, or stepped on a nail, or all three. Her fingers closed on my shirt, but I ripped away, feinted as if to double back and leaped ahead, gaining enough yardage to take me halfway around the stable once more. Then I stopped short and wheeled about. She barreled bead clown right into me, spinning me backward into the stable, crashing me against the domino table as she bore her whole weight down on me. The table collapsed above us in a cascade of dominoes. I clapped my hands about her buttocks, arching myself against her. She broke my hold by straddling me and we both lay a long minute then, struggling for breath. She recovered hers first, because I had her weight on my chest. I tried to push her off with my hands against her shoulders, but she pinned both my arms and slipped her tongue deep into my mouth. That kiss drained my remaining strength.

"Your buckle is hurting me," she complained, and released my arms to unbuckle it. Instead, I got my hands around her buttocks again. They were round and firm as new melons. I hauled her panties down nearly to her knees. She slipped half on her side to kick them off; when they caught on her ankles, she gave a wild kick and sent them flying toward the stable wall. That gave me my chance to roll out from under. I got halfway out and pressed her back with all the strength I had.

She was nearly pinned before she gathered her own strength and I felt myself being forced back inch by inch. In a flash it came to me why she was evading those heavy brothers. This girl wasn't going to be pinned under anybody: She could not bear it. Either she did the pinning or nothing was going to happen. She entwined her thighs about mine. I thrust upward at the same moment that she thrust down. She gasped with the pain that turns so quickly to pleasure. There was a fast flash of light behind her shoulder and I knew the stable door was standing wide. Then I heard a hoarse cry from far away. I blacked out.

I came to hearing my own cry dying hoarsely in my throat. A moment later, utterly spent, eyes closed, I felt her weight leaving me at last. When I opened my eyes I saw Hannah, silhouetted against the light, scuffling through the straw of the stable floor.

"Lose something?" I asked her.

"My underpants."

"What color were they?"

She glanced over at me. "What kind of question is that?"

"Because if they were pink, it must be somebody else's white pair hangin' over that paint cart over your head."

I'd caught the sun's glint on the panties' white fringe, draped across the can out of which a brush was still sticking. It stood on a shelf behind and above her head. She snatched the panties down. Then, half rueful and half laughing, she held them up for me to see.

"Now, look what that Doggy Hooper done!"

The panties were dripping with silver hoof paint. It seemed that Doggy had half roused himself from sleep and had come down to do some redecorating. He was gone now, but he had daubed everything within reach. This brought heavy worry to my mind.

"Give me a couple minutes to get to the house," I asked her. "I don't want to spoil your marriage plans."

"Those boys wouldn't hurt you even if they did find out," she assured me. I wasn't that sure. I took a long swing around the house, so that I could approach from the front.

Jessie and Lon were taking their ease in the front-porch rockers. The rocker holding Lon looked ready to crumble beneath all that brawn. He was shirtless. That bear's head, tattooed on his right biceps, began studying me with its two small red eyes.

"I suppose Doggy went and told you of the practical joke he pulled on me," I asked as soon as I reached the step, my plan being to start asking questions before anyone started asking me anything.

"He jumped a dead squirrel out of a box on me once," Lon recalled. "I hit him with the box. He ain't tried it again."

But where was Vinnie? Had he been watching the athletics in the stable from his upstairs room? Had he come down the back stairs softly to see what was going on? Had he then conferred with Lon? Had they already set up a plan to catch me that night on the carny grounds? Had they taken Jessie and Bryan in on it? If they consulted Denver Dixon, would he speak a word in my defense?

"Clyde Barrow 'n' Bonnie Parker kidnaped an officer of the law," Jessie said. "Drove him around New Mexico all clay before letting him go."

I couldn't have cared less that the law had been outwitted again. "I reckon I'll ride out tonight with Mr. Dixon," I said, forestalling Lon's usual offer.

"Suit yourself, sport," he said cheerfully.

"There won't be much of a tip tonight." Jessie guessed. "The sand is starting to blow."

I went up the footworn stairs to the little room beneath the eaves. Heat was piling up between the walls. A small clock was making a muted ticking. like news of some lost time too clear for losing.

Fifty-odd years from the bourn of his mother, $22 in debt to Dixon. face down on the cot where he always M. one palm outflung as if to say ".Spent it all!," Doggy Hooper was sleeping it off, fully clothed.

I stretched out on my cot, hearing voices mingling on the porch below. I fell asleep thinking I'd heard Lon speaking my name to Vinnie. Or was it Vinnie to Lon?

In sleep I felt something near and endangering. I struggled to waken. And quite clearly, though framed by a bluish mist, two massive dogs, sitting their haunches, waited for me to waken.

When I woke at last, Doggy was gone. Sand was tapping the eaves. I listened for something else but heard nothing. The small clock had stopped ticking and the wind was blowing up.

The carny folks were gathered about Dixon's board; but I passed the door as if I had somewhere else to go. I went out onto the porch and watched the wind swirling sand betweeb the S. P. ties.

Dixon and Little British drove up, British at the wheel. I climbed into the rear seat.

"Doggy's off on a bender," I told Dixon. British made a U turn. As lie straightened the car out toward the state highway, I glanced back and saw, briefly yet clearly, a pair of silver-colored panties hanging above the stable door like a challenge.

Like a challenge? It was a challenge. A challenge to Jessie and Bryan. as well as to the Betheas. That girl was going to bring on a family row deliberately.

To get out of marrying either of the brothers? Or to get out of her role as the Half-Girl? It had to be one or both. Because Hannah wasn't so thoughtless as to hang her silver-colored panties up to dry on a chicken wire in full view of the kitchen. There simply was no way of explaining away that garment, shining with silver hoof paint. She was going to blow up the family circle. And whether I got my neck broken in the ensuing row was, it was plain enough, a matter of no concern at all to Hannah.

My heart didn't spin with the wheel that night. Everything, it seemed, had stopped with Doggy Hooper's clock. Something had ended; yet nothing new had begun. And in that interval, I had to be more alert than usual, because I was working with Dixon instead of Doggy. In Doggy's absence, Dixon had wired the gaff to his own shoe, while I fronted the marks for him, one by one.

"Don't let your luck get away, mister," I encouraged a Mexican old enough to know better. "All you have to do is hit the red to get the thirty-dollar jack pot!"

It cost that one two dollars to try for the $30 jack pot, while signals went flying between Dixon and British. When they had eight dollars of the man's money, British wanted to get rid of him, but Dixon felt he'd stand more galling. They built the fool up to a $100 jack pot, and I helped by confusing and encouraging him at the same time, until the man had gone for $30 out of his own pocket. Then he turned back to the midway with his collar awry, sweat on his forehead and a dazed look in his eye.

As Jessie had foreseen, the tip was thin that evening. Some of the tent flaps were already down, though it was still two hours until closing. Only the flat-ride seemed to be doing normal business, I judged, by its calliope crying La Paloma without ceasing. When I told Dixon I wanted to walk down to a grabstand because I'd missed supper, he gave me the nod to leave.

As I made the rounds of the joints, chewing a taco, sand was blowing so high that the lights of the Ferris wheel's lower half looked like lights seen under shifting waters.

I'd known, as soon as I'd seen that girl's panties above the stable door, that this was my last night at the Jim Hogg County Fair. But my mind was so dull from the heat and the heavy day, I couldn't think clearly about a means of getting away.

When I went back to Dixon's wheel, there was an old woman in a black-lace mantilla waving her arms at Dixon and British. That is, her tears and Spanish cries made her seem old, but when I went up, I saw she was hardly 30. I hung back, trying to understand a few words of her Spanish rage.

All I caught was "thieves" and "husband." That cleared matters up. She was, most likely, the wife of the Mexican we'd just sheared.

By rights, as one of the hands in the shearing, I ought to be right up there taking some of the fire. On the other hand, what was I doing flapping the jays, anyhow? I didn't belong on any midway.

She was pointing a finger directly at Little British, feeling that he was the villain of the plot. Then Dixon put one hand on her shoulder and I saw him reaching for his wallet with the other. He wasn't going to risk having the sheriff shut his wheel down. And possibly the whole fair.

I took two steps backward, turned slowly away and began walking through the dust storm like a man walking through rising waters. I put a bandanna to my mouth and nose, as if to keep out sand. But it was also, I felt, a disguise. I held it there while moving against the crowd of marks coming in, despite the dust, under the papier-mâché arch with its legend: Jim Hogg County Fair.

Then I ran for it.

I got over the same fence I'd scaled a week before and mounted the embankment before I looked back. In those few moments of flight, the whole sky had darkened. A swirling darkness was enwrapping the tents. Yet the calliope went on crying.

And the merry-go-round kept circling, circling, though its red, yellow, blue and green lights were blind with dust. Finally, the calliope began to subside. The merry-go-round was going around for the last time.

Then the music stopped and pennons and tents, grabstands and galleries, Kewpies and carnies and gaff wheels and all, were lost in a rising dust wind.

Blowing forever away from home.