Boys Life

tilt of her chin. “I have no earthly idea what you’re talkin’ about!”
    “Well, okay, then.” He shrugged. “Don’t matter none to me.”
    “Boys! Will you close that door and stop lettin’ all the heat out?”
    “Come on, Cory!” Davy Ray called, already astride his bike. “We’re late enough as it is!”
    A door opened in the back. Miss Green Glass said from the hallway, “He’s quiet now, thank the Lord! Just don’t play that song again, whatever you do!”
    “I’ve told you it’s not that song, Katharina! I used to play it for him all the time and he loved it!”
    “Well, he hates it now! Just don’t play it!”
    Their squawking was beginning to remind me of two squabbling old parrots, one blue and one green. “Close that door, if you please!” Miss Blue Glass yelled at me, and Johnny gave me a shove onto the porch to uproot my feet. He closed the door behind us, but we could still hear the Glass sisters clamoring like buzz saws. I pitied that poor little Osborne girl.
    “Those two are loony!” Ben said as he got on his bike. “Man, that was even worse than school!”
    “You must’ve done somethin’ to make your mom awful mad at you,” was Davy Ray’s opinion. “Time’s wastin’!” He gave a whoop and took off in the direction of the carnival, his bike’s pedals flying.
    I lagged behind the others, though they kept yelling for me to catch up. German curse words, I was thinking. How come Miss Sonia Glass’s parrot knew German curse words? As far as I knew, neither of the sisters spoke anything but Southern English. I hadn’t realized Mr. Osborne was in the Big Red One. That, I knew from my reading, was a very famous infantry division. Mr. Osborne had really been there, on the same war-torn earth as Sgt. Rock! Wow, I thought. Neato!
    But how come the parrot knew German curse words?
    Then the happy sounds of the carnival drifted to me along with the aromas of buttered popcorn and carameled apples. I left the German-cursing parrot behind, and sped up to catch my buddies.
    We paid our dollars at the admission gate and threw ourselves into the carnival like famished beggars at a feast. The strings of light bulbs gleamed over our heads like trapped stars. A lot of kids our age were there, along with their parents, and some older people and high school kids, too. Around us the rides grunted, clattered, and rattled. We bought our tickets and got on the Ferris wheel, and I made the mistake of sitting with Davy Ray. When we got to the very top and the wheel paused to allow riders on the bottommost gondola, he grinned and started rocking us back and forth and yelling that the bolts were about to come loose. “Stop it! Stop it!” I pleaded, my body freezing solid to offset his elasticity. At that height, I could see all across the carnival. My gaze fell on a garish sign with crude green jungle fronds and the red, dripping words FROM THE LOST WORLD.
    I paid Davy Ray back in the haunted house. When the warty-nosed witch jumped out of the darkness at our clanking railcar, I grabbed the back of his neck and wailed to shame the scratchy recorded gibberings of ghost and goblin. “Quit it!” he said after he’d come down onto his seat again. Outside, he told me the haunted house was the dumbest thing he’d ever seen in his life and it wasn’t even a bit scary. But he sure was walking funny, and he hustled himself off to the row of portable toilets.
    We stuffed our faces with cotton candy, buttered popcorn, and glazed miniature doughnuts. We ate candied apples covered with peanuts. We packed away corn dogs and drank enough root beer to make our bellies slosh. Then Ben wanted to ride the Scrambler, with results that were not pretty. We got him into one of the portable toilets, and luckily his aim was good and his clothes were spared a Technicolor splatter.
    Ben passed on entering the tent that displayed the big, wrinkled one-eyed face. Davy Ray almost chewed his way through the canvas in his hurry to get in there, but Johnny and I went with him against our better judgment.
    In the gloomy confines, a dour-looking man with a nose as large as a dill pickle held court before a half dozen other freak aficionados. He went on for a while about the sins of the flesh and the eye of the Lord. Then he drew back a small curtain and switched on a spotlight and there in a big glass bottle was a shriveled, pink and naked baby with two arms, two legs, and a Cyclops eye in the center of its domed