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Those who don’t fit standard pigeonholes must make their own. . . .
Joey sat in his glass display case, wearing his overlarge uniform, doing statistical analysis in his head to keep from invading the spectators’ thoughts. With the show currently in south Arkansas, he wore a hand-me-down St. Louis Cardinals jersey and pinstripe pants that reached almost to his cheap cleats. The woolen sleeves itched his arms, and his eyes watered at the acrid residue of whatever they had used to wash the shirt.
Dust kicked up from the crowd’s feet clouded the view through the sawdust-strewn tent. On the thigh-high stage at the far end, Hector juggled some knives to warm up for his act. Around the periphery, the other freaks sat in their own glassed-in cages: Big Barbara in her enormous booth, Mabel and Perry in their booths the same size as Joey’s.
At this distance, under the tinted lights, Mabel’s beard looked almost as full and thick as the sideshow handbill pictures. Joey cringed a little at the thought of how prickly her whiskers felt whenever she kissed him on the cheek.
Lights, dust, and distance didn’t make Perry look all that much like a dog, but then Joey knew Perry up close. The crowd, influenced by the crude caricatures that exaggerated Perry’s protruding jaw into a snout, would think his whiskers looked real enough. It was a good illusion, the add-ons Fineas had installed through Perry’s cheeks; better in some ways than the stitches around the lump on Joey’s head. A better illusion, anyway: Joey listened to Perry cry himself to sleep most nights because his face hurt so bad.
Each booth had a fancy hand-lettered sign on an easel in front of it. Joey’s was turned away from him, of course, but he knew what it said.
“The Baseball Boy.”
Joey resisted the urge to scratch at the tight little knots on his head. The stitches simulated baseball seams around the bony extrusion of skull that was his claim to freakish fame. Sometimes when he messed with them the stitches bled, which gave the lie to the whole illusion; but it was worse when they came out. Then Fineas re-stitched him and it always hurt.
Almost as bad as the thinking.
He’d been part of the sideshow about two and a half years, and had grown to realize that the customers’ thoughts were much the same no matter where the show went. He always found a mix of pity and revulsion aimed at him, sometimes more and sometimes less than what they thought about the other freaks, and even when their thoughts turned to normal things like home or business or farming it wasn’t worth enduring the agony to listen to them. So Joey retreated into numbers and formulas, the defense mechanism he’d learned growing up.
Today he was examining a nonlinear model of the stock market. He had developed the model over the last six months, and was revising it based on the latest Lend-Lease projections he’d read about. But he couldn’t concentrate as much as he would’ve liked: Fineas was barking, and the sideshow’s owner always distracted Joey more than when Olivia called out to the customers.
“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!” Fineas barked, waving his silver-tipped cane for emphasis. “Observe a sad accident preserved by a medical miracle! Young Joseph Carter had dreams of a Major League career, and might have grown into as fine an example of skill and courage as the dearly departed Mr. Gehrig. But this young boy’s dreams were tragically dashed when an errant fastball lodged itself in his skull. Unlike Ray Chapman, killed these many years ago by a pitch from that Yankee Carl Mays, young Mr. Carter survived the impact. However, doctors judged the projectile too dangerous to remove, and there it remains to this day! Ladies and gentlemen, the Baseball Boy!”
Fineas waved a flourish that left Joey wishing for Olivia’s understated delivery. Fineas expected animation from his freaks; Olivia was satisfied that the sideshow members put up with the shtick.
The booth was too small for Joey to swing the Louisville Slugger that rested on his shoulder. The glass walls were set wide enough to keep people from getting too close, so they wouldn’t pick out irregularities in the fake seams or see how the white-dyed “ball” was actually Joey’s own skin. He wished he had enough room to swing the bat, but just lifted it in a mock salute.
He turned to his right and then back to face center, so the light could play over his head. He rotated slowly as a windup doll, so his longish hair wouldn’t move and disturb the effect.
Fineas ushered the people along to the next exhibit. He’d want to get as many people through the show as possible so tonight the troupe could pack up and be on their way the next day. The weather was already turning colder here in the hinterlands, and the whole show was anxious to get through the upper Mississippi swing and into Louisiana so they could settle in for the winter in Boudreaux.
Joey started tinkering with a variable in his stock market model when he noticed a boy about his own age—or maybe only ten—standing, arms crossed, not moving with the crowd. Boys were usually fascinated by the freak show, but this one wasn’t. His lower lip stuck out and he scuffed the sawdust with the toe of one boot, and when a woman reached toward him, he pulled away. Joey’s curiosity got the better of him, and as fast as a trout jumping for a fly, he touched the boy’s mind. The pain began behind Joey’s left ear as he crept in. The boy had seen the freaks the day before . . . he didn’t see why he had to come just because his cousins came to town for the fair . . . other things were more important—
—simple pain became torment that ricocheted off the inside of Joey’s skull, shredding his brain. His vision wavered—
—the boy’s thoughts were hours in the future, where he was already tasting apples and sweets, smashing pumpkins, and running about in gaudy costume—
—torment escalated into torture, and Joey went blind.
The doctor saw the tumor on the side of Joey’s head as Joey was born. It was May of 1930, the year—as Joey’s father always said—Hack Wilson scored a record 191 runs batted in and Bill Terry hit .401 for the season.
The bulge on the left side of Joey’s skull, behind and a little higher than his ear, was actually a bit larger than a regulation baseball, but on a baby’s head it looked massive. While Joey was making his escape from the womb, as his misshapen head forced its way out between his mother’s legs, the midwife gasped and the doctor blasphemed; after he had done all he could to repair the damage, the man told Molly Carter that she would never bear another child. Molly held Joey close and washed his face with her tears. The doctor muttered as he left, but Molly heard him clearly, that at first he thought her son was some two-headed monster.
Molly told the story to Paul when they let him in the recovery room. On his deathbed, Paul told it to his eight-year-old son.
By then Joey already knew the story from seeing it in his parent’s own minds. Hearing it from his father like that was a shock, the most unkind thing Joey’s father ever said to him.
Joey’s earliest memories were a disturbing montage of visions and emotions that only now was he coming to understand, layered on top of waves of pain and episodes of temporary blindness. He might have gone mad had he not learned to focus on the cool precision of the logic puzzles and number games his father loved. Through the agonizing slowness of early childhood, Joey learned to distract himself from the chaotic thought patterns around him by concentrating on ever more abstract mathematics that he first pulled from his father’s thoughts and then explored in the man’s books. As long as he held fast to a computational problem or even a table of logarithms, he could push the other minds away and stave off the pain and blindness.
Perhaps, though, he had gone mad. His primary pleasure was avoidance of pain using higher order equations. Math in all its forms was his therapy and his salvation, and a cage more effective than any glass booth. The elegance of proofs, the complexities of formulas and calculations, the beauty of numbers kept his mind occupied and kept him out of other people’s thoughts.
The doctors had examined him, of course: they x-rayed and fluoroscoped him at the university and mapped the bony and fleshy fingers that spread downward from the asymmetry of his skull into the soft contours of his brain. Later he learned the words, though they were difficult for him: vision center, occipital lobe, temporal lobe; surgery risky, prognosis poor, intellectual impact unknown. But despite his appearance and infirmity, his mother and father loved him and taught him; and to their amazement, and everyone else’s, he learned. Though only he knew the secret that quieted his probing mind and kept the darkness at bay.
As much as he had concentrated on the orderly, formulaic thoughts of his father, he hadn’t ignored his mother’s thoughts. But since he did not find in them the comfort of calculation, he didn’t investigate them as deeply. She had died too early for him to have explored her mind in conversation: by the time he began to understand what he knew of her, she had been dead for almost two years. For a while after that he’d read some of her books—literature both exciting and banal—to feel closer to her and how she thought. But the stories were too much like touching the minds of real people, so they never captivated him the way mathematics did.
And then his father died, coughing flecks of crimson blood even as he smiled up at Joey. When the funeral was over Joey’s Uncle David pulled him away from the graveside, his sense of familial duty a thin veneer over the loathing that struck Joey like a physical blow. David took Joey to his tiny home in Tullahoma, where Joey’s cousins called him a monster and his mathematical fortress crumbled more often than it held. Joey spent his ninth birthday in blind agony, curled up in the corner of the back stoop and ignored by the whole household. A few weeks later, as May slipped into June of 1939, David sold Joey to Fineas Ferguson’s Fabulous Freakshow as it passed on its northward march.
* * *
“Wake up, Joey,” Fineas called through the glass. He rapped on it hard, twice, with his cane—that affectation to status, a symbol of his sovereignty over his tiny traveling kingdom. Fineas Ferguson’s real name was Horace MacInnerny, and when they met Joey had called him “Mr. MacInnerny.” Fineas waited until his Uncle David was gone, then hit Joey in the stomach and beat him across the back until Joey thought the stiff old cane might break. It didn’t.
Joey opened his eyes, but the light was vague and diffuse like the deep gray mists that crept over the bayou. He rubbed his eyes and stood up, grateful that he’d stumbled into the chair at the back of his cage after his foray into the boy’s mind. Joey’s head felt as if Big Barbara had stepped on it, putting all of her bulk behind her tiny instep to produce the highest possible pressure. He was already disabled and disoriented, and another excursion would do little more harm, so he let his mind touch the man’s on the other side of the glass. Thankfully, to Fineas Joey just appeared tired. Fineas didn’t notice much difference between this episode and any of a hundred others since Joey had joined the freak show. Weak constitution, Fineas always said.
Joey nodded to him, and Fineas turned away to bring in the next group of customers. Joey leaned on the bat—it made a passable cane—and retreated into the relaxing exercise of finding large prime numbers while he waited for his head to clear and his vision to return.
His memory of that boy in the last group intruded with irritating persistence, and it took Joey a long time—two more parades of gawkers—to figure out why. The boy had been the sort of normal boy Joey always wished he could be. But Joey felt no jealousy toward him. On the contrary, he felt gratitude: that boy had given him the clue he needed to escape from the freak show and seize a little normalcy of his own.
Joey shifted his mind away from the pure numbers into the applied mathematics of probabilities, and laid his plans.
It was too late for trick-or-treating when the last customers went through the freaks’ tent, but Joey didn’t care. He stepped away from the carnies heading to the meal tent for late supper, slipped back to his cot, tore the sheet from the thin mattress, and made his way to the park entrance. He reached out as he went, carefully, touching minds and retreating almost immediately, just enough to know where they were going and how he might avoid them. Even with such caution, he was sick with vertigo by the time he got to the edge of the fairgrounds.
He stopped at the perimeter. His pulse beat in his temple, and he automatically counted it out as he cut eyeholes in the sheet. His hands shook, and the dull penknife tore the holes as much as it cut them.
The nearest neighborhood to the fairgrounds was poor, with few lights burning and fewer people still out and about. Joey draped the sheet over himself and walked the hard-packed dirt road, not even bothering to approach the houses to ask for handouts. The cool air smelled of wet grass and decaying leaves. In the distance two dogs barked at each other; a block away a couple argued, their words indistinct but their tones strident. Joey had not been so free since he had walked around Clinton, Tennessee, holding his father’s hand.
The memory of his father—the feel of his hand, of being so open and relaxed with someone who looked on him with love instead of curiosity or loathing—hit him like a fastball and shattered the shield around his mind. The thoughts of the nearest group of people crept in behind the memory, widening the breach and taking more of his attention. Envy, pride, bitterness, ecstasy flew at him like Hector’s throwing knives, and drove deep into his cerebral cortex.
The dirt road collided with Joey’s knees. He swayed for a second, then landed on his side and chuffed out a gust of air at the impact.
He tried to move, tried to count the seconds as they passed, to grasp any number or symbol that might mask the pain. He failed.
Some time later, perhaps a minute, perhaps ten, hands shook him. “You sick, kid?” someone asked. Concern, opportunity, greed, cruelty slipped from their minds into his.
Joey reached up as if he were a mental boxer guarding his head from psychic blows, but the pain got through his defenses just ahead of the blindness. He felt someone pulling at the sheet, and he thrashed on the ground and held it close around his head—but his hands betrayed him and the fabric slipped through his fingers and fell away.
It took only a second before one of the others recognized him. Unconsciousness strangled Joey as footsteps ran into the distance.
The first time Joey had walked away from the freak show was a month after his uncle sold him to Fineas. Somewhere up in Ohio or West Virginia, with fairgrounds near a river, Joey wanted to go fishing like he’d done with his dad back in Clinton. He put on a pork pie hat that a customer had left behind in the show tent, but he didn’t make it even a hundred yards before one of the teamsters found him and brought him back. Fineas broke a cane on Joey’s back that day, then got a new one and beat him more.
Now, over two years later, the strokes of the little man’s cane seemed less painful. Joey wondered whether that was because he was bigger—even at eleven, he was quite tall for his age—or because Fineas was older. The blows gave him something to concentrate on so he could stay out of Fineas’s mind, but he doubted the mental benefit was worth the price of the bruises.
Fineas may have grown weaker, but he had the endurance of a man who had worked hard every day of his life. He beat Joey for a long time, but didn’t break his silver-tipped cane.
“You let them see you up close, you idiot,” Fineas said. “Good thing it was dark, so they couldn’t get a good look at your head.” Fineas railed at him between blows and during most of them. He questioned Joey’s parentage; extolled his own virtue and charity in taking Joey in and giving him a life of relative ease, travel, and luxury; and used all manner of scatological, vulgar, and profane references that Joey’s dad had told him were the marks of inferior thinking. Joey used the pain to keep from examining Fineas’s thinking; it was enough to know that his choice of words was the product of barely controlled rage.
The blows shifted from Joey’s back to his thighs and upper arms and back again, and gradually they came less frequently and then stopped altogether.
Fineas backed away, breathing hard. “Make no mistake, little Joey. You make me money, I take care of you—that’s why I don’t ever hit you in your precious ugly head. But I won’t put up with this. So if you ever pull a stunt like this again, I won’t hurt you any more. Instead, I’ll find new and exciting ways to hurt everyone you care about—Perry, maybe, or Mabel or Olivia.”
Fineas smacked him one last time on the sole of his foot, and left Joey with bruises on bruises. He must have slept—it was the only time his brain contented itself inside the confines of his lopsided skull—but it seemed like a bare instant before he felt a cool cloth being daubed on his welts.
“I wish I could help you,” Olivia said.
You always have, Joey wanted to say. You are.
Olivia had accepted him more than anyone when Joey first came to the freak show. She’d helped him learn the routines of carnival life: the fetching and carrying and cleaning that broke up the monotony of the booth and the customers. She had mothered him when he’d been without his own mother for years.
“I just want to be a normal kid, a regular kid,” Joey said.
“You can’t be regular, because you’re special.”
It was what his mom and dad had told him, too, but he knew better. “That’s what you say to make someone feel better for being a freak.”
Olivia didn’t disagree. Her slick, dark hair half-obscured her deep brown eyes, but didn’t hide the light of understanding in them.
“My dad let me be regular, sometimes,” Joey said. “Did I tell you that he used to play ball with me? I can’t throw hard, or catch very well, but we laughed and had fun.”
The cloth soothed most of the hurt away, and instead of math, Joey clung to memory, of his dad on the green under the big oaks, patiently pitching and catching with his weird, wounded son. He tried to be a big boy, not to cry as he thought of afternoons at the ball park where the local team played. How his dad loved the game. He would’ve been amazed at Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak this year, and Ted Williams hitting .406 for the season. If his dad were still alive they would’ve argued over the probabilities, and it would have been joyous.
“He took me to ball games sometimes,” Joey said. “We used to calculate stats on all the players, and we tried to figure the fractions of seconds to see how fast the pitcher threw or how fast a runner got to first base. If I figured it out before he did, he’d buy me ice cream or cotton candy or whatever I wanted.”
Olivia stopped dabbing his bruises. She pulled back on her hair and looked him in the eye, and the corners of her eyes crinkled. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said.
Joey shrugged. It hurt, but it was only physical pain. He grinned at the thought of it, because it was so much more pleasant than the lightning-hot pains he endured in his mind. He said, “My dad taught physics at the University of Tennessee, at Knoxville. He taught me calculus and statistics when I was little. It was,” he almost choked on the word, “normal for me.”
Olivia tipped her head, as if she was listening to another voice. Joey concentrated on the bruise over his right kidney in order to leave her to her private thoughts. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she repeated, and her voice carried the recognition—or the revelation—that there were different kinds of freaks, and it didn’t matter to her what kind of freak Joey was.
Olivia pressed the cloth into Joey’s hand, pointed to the basin of water, and left him to treat himself. He lay back on the cot and put the cool cloth over the bulbous lump on the side of his head. He thought of his dad, and warm summer days, and calculated the rate of spin on Dizzy Dean’s curve ball.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
in our September issue,
on sale now.
Copyright © 2011 Gray Rinehart
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