Boys Life

forehead. I winced and Johnny shifted uncomfortably when the man picked up the formaldehyde-filled bottle, the Cyclops baby drifting in its dream. He started showing it to everybody up close. “This is the sin of the flesh, and here’s the eye of God as punishment for that sin,” he said. I had the feeling he might get along famously with Reverend Blessett. When the man paused in front of me, I saw that the eye was golden, like Rocket’s. The baby’s face was so wrinkled it might have been that of a tiny old man, about to open his toothless mouth and call for a sip of white lightning to ease his aches. “Notice, son, how the finger of God has wiped clean the means of sin,” the man said, his baggy-drawered eyes glinting with a spark of evangelical fever. I saw what he meant: the baby had neither male nor female equipment. There was nothing but wrinkled pink skin down there. The man turned the bottle to show me the baby’s back. The baby drifted against the glass, and I heard its shoulder make a soft wet noise of collision.
    I saw the Cyclops baby’s shoulder blades. They were thick, bony protrusions. Like the stumps of wings, I thought.
    And I knew. I really did.
    The Cyclops baby was somebody’s angel, fallen to earth.
    “Woe to the sinner,” the man said as he moved on to Johnny and Davy Ray. “Woe to the sinner, under the eye of God.”
    “Ah, that was a gyp!” Davy Ray ranted when we were outside on the midway again. “I thought it was gonna be alive! I thought it could talk to you!”
    “Didn’t it?” I asked him, and he looked at me like I was halfway around the bend.
    We went to a show where motorcycle drivers raced around and around a caged-in cylinder, the engines screaming right in front of our faces and the tires gripping disaster’s edge. Then we went to the Indian pony show, under a large tent where palefaces who wouldn’t know Geronimo from Sitting Bull jumped around in loincloths and feathers and tried to spur some spirit into horses one hay bale away from the glue factory. The finale came when a wagon with cowboys on it circled the tent with the pseudo-Indians in pursuit, and the cowboys shot off their blanks and the white redmen hollered and ran for their lives. Alabama history was never so boring, but at the end of the show Johnny gave a wan smile and said that one of the ponies, a little tawny thing with a swayed back, looked as if it really could gallop if it had half a field.
    By this time Davy Ray was freak-hungry again, so we accompanied him to see a rail-skinny red-haired woman who could make electric bulbs light up by holding them in her mouth. Next was the Al Capone Death Car, the display of which showed bleeding bodies sprawled on a city sidewalk while leering gangsters raked the air with tommy-gun bullets. The actual car, which had a dummy behind the wheel and four dummies standing there gawking at it, was a piece of junk Mr. Sculley would’ve scorned. We hung in with Davy Ray, as he worked up to speed. The Gator Boy, the Human Caterpillar, and the Giraffe-Necked Woman lured him from behind their canvas folds.
    And then we rounded a corner, and we caught that smell.
    Just a hint of it, drifting down at the bottom below the reeks of hamburger grease and doughnut fat.
    Lizardy, I thought.
    “Ben’s messed his pants!” Davy Ray said. He should talk.
    “Did not!” Ben ought to know by now not to invoke this vicious cycle.
    “There it is,” Johnny said, and right in front of me was the huge red LOST with THE and WORLD on either side of it.
    The trailer had steps that went up into a large, square boxcarlike opening. A dingy brown curtain was pulled across it. At the ticket booth, a man with greasy strands of dark hair combed flat across his bald skull was sitting on a stool, chewing on a toothpick and reading a Jughead comic book. His small, pale blue marbles of eyes flickered up and saw us, and he reached drowsily for a microphone. His voice rasped through a nearby speaker: “Come one, come all! See the beast from the lost world! Come one, come…” He lost interest in his spiel and returned to the cartoon balloons.
    “Stinks around here,” Davy Ray said. “Let’s go!”
    “Wait a minute,” I told him. “Just a minute.”
    “Why?”
    LOST filled up my vision. “I might want to see what this is.”
    “Don’t waste your money on this!” Ben warned. “It’ll be a big snake or somethin’!”
    “Well, it can’t be any dumber than the Death