Palisades Park (44 page)

All at once, it clicked—the bucking mattress, the grunts and groans: there were two
men
in bed.

And like a true carny, Toni didn’t care.

She smiled and said, “And sometimes more than your job—like rescuing waterlogged high divers.”

“Ah,” he said, waving a hand, “you do the same for me.”

Yes, Toni thought again, this was very much like Palisades.

*   *   *

By August Toni’s pain was gone and the show doctor pronounced her ribs healed. Gingerly, she began practicing her routines in the morning from a cautious forty-foot height, and when after a few days she felt no ill effects, she climbed up to the full ninety feet. She had a moment’s fear standing on the platform, the panic of the botched dive still raw in her memory, but reminded herself that that had been the fault of an errant wind and not anything she had done wrong—and there wasn’t a breath of wind, at the moment, on the great plains surrounding Phillipsburg, Kansas. She looked down, gauged her distance, then leapt into the air, tucking herself into a ball and tumbling end-over-end before straightening her legs. As she plummeted toward the tank she felt a calm exhilaration, the spinning Ferris wheel a garish blur of color and motion that thrilled and comforted her with its presence; she hit the water and entered her safe, quiet place of triumph.

She dove that afternoon during Ella’s first performance, repeating her routine flawlessly, surfacing to the cheers of the crowd. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed that sound until now.

Perhaps it was her exhilaration at performing again, or simply the growing sexual tension between them, but when, after dinner in town that night, Cliff asked Toni, “Would you like to come back to my trailer?”—she looked at him, at his sparkling eyes, and found herself saying, nervously, “I’d like to, but—first—you should know, I’ve … never done this before.”

“There’s a first time for everybody, hon,” he said gently. “If you can dive into a Dixie cup, you can do this.”

“And second, the last thing this show needs is a pregnant high diver.”

Cliff slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out—discreetly, so that only she could see—a paper-wrapped Deer Skin brand prophylactic.

“I always wear a helmet,” he said, “before I take a flying jump.”

She laughed, kissed him hard, then went with him to the trailer.

There she discovered that Ella was wrong about those “best damn three seconds of your life.” This lasted considerably more than three seconds, and diving was at best a close second.

After five days at Phillipsburg the show moved on to the Nebraska State Rodeo in Burwell, Nebraska, for five days; a fair in Norton, Kansas, for another five days; and then Abilene, Kansas, for an eight-day engagement ending August 29. There were seven more major fairs on the schedule in Texas and Oklahoma, but Ella had promised to appear at the St. Petersburg Lions Club’s Labor Day Festival on September 6 as she had the past two years, and she was not about to disappoint the hometown crowd. So as Central States Shows made the jump to its own Labor Day commitment in Holzington, Kansas, Toni kissed Cliff goodbye and she, Ella, and Arlan headed south to Florida. Ella would play the St. Pete Festival on the sixth, then hit the road and head west, meeting up with the Central show in time for the Cimarron Territory Celebration and Fair in Beaver, Oklahoma.

They arrived in St. Petersburg on September 2 and began erecting the tower and tank amidst the carnival-like rides and concessions the Lions Club had set up on Sunset Beach. The next day, word came in that a “baby hurricane,” as some in the press were calling it, was entering the Gulf of Mexico. Storm warnings for Hurricane Easy—soon to belie its name—were issued from Key West to Pensacola. Ella gazed nervously at the ocean as the tide in Tampa Bay rose six and a half feet, a thirty-year high.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered to herself. But it was too late to do anything about it.

Hurricane Easy blew haphazardly up the coast, causing among other disasters a dam rupture that flooded the north Tampa community of Sulphur Springs with two feet of water, destroying some forty homes. Tides of between six and eight feet, fed by raging winds, immersed beachfront property from St. Petersburg to Clearwater to Sarasota, turning roads into rivers, smashing beach homes to splinters, and sinking boats.

Ella, Toni, and Arlan drove the truck and trailer inland and rode out the storm in a public shelter. By September 8, the hurricane departed Florida as a tropical storm, dying out over Georgia, and Ella returned to Sunset Beach to find that Hurricane Easy had been anything but on her equipment. The diving tower had been blown off its feet, the winds snapping it apart section by section, mangling and twisting them like licorice sticks. The tank had rolled on its side some distance before it, too, burst apart, some pieces vaguely identifiable while others had simply vanished, washed into the sea.

“Oh my God,” Toni said softly.

“Jesus Kristus,” Arlan murmured under his breath.

Ella stared at the wreckage with a mixture of shock, grief, and anger.

“Didn’t I tell you?” She shook her head disgustedly. “I
hate
wind.”

*   *   *

The hurricane had destroyed three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, and Ella wasn’t sure how much, if anything, her insurance would cover. The Lions Club announced it would hold a benefit on November 9 to raise funds for Ella to replace her equipment, but even if enough money was raised, it would take her months, maybe a year, to put her act back together.

“You’re welcome to come back and join me when I do,” she told Toni, “but you’re a damn good diver. You’ll find work.” She promised to recommend her to her agent in Miami.

Toni hugged Ella and thanked her for everything she had done for her, then went to the nearest Western Union office and sent off two telegrams: the first one went to Cliff, c/o the Central States Shows, saying:

ELLAS EQUIPMENT DESTROYED BY HURRICANE. WONT BE RETURNING TO SHOW THIS SEASON. WILL WRITE MORE LATER. TONI

The second telegram went to her father, telling him she was returning home. The next morning she boarded the
Florida Special
, this time as a paying passenger all the way to Newark.

Eddie met her at the train station on Monday. If Toni had any doubts that her ribs were fully healed, Eddie’s bear hug dispelled them. “It’s good to see you, Dad.”

“Good to see you too, honey. Look at you, a veteran carny now! I’m proud of you, Toni. I haven’t stopped worrying, but I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She hugged him again, then Eddie picked up her bags and they started outside. “Jack’s in Brooklyn, we found him a nice room in a boardinghouse on DeKalb Avenue. He starts classes next week.”

“That’s great,” Toni said with a smile, “I’m happy for him.”

“By the way,” Eddie said as they went to his parked car on the street, “you mind if we make a stop? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

*   *   *

When they reached Fort Lee, instead of turning right on Route 5 toward Edgewater, Eddie continued down Palisade Avenue until they pulled into the parking lot of a small, one-story structure—a boarded-up roadstand, with a marquee sign stripped of its name—squatting on a tiny parcel of land about two miles north of the amusement park.

They got out of the car, Eddie pulled out a key from his hip pocket and inserted it in the door lock. “It’s just about the perfect size for what I need,” he said. He walked in, Toni following. “So what do you think?”

It was hard for Toni to tell anything in the dimly lit room, the electricity having been turned off; but Eddie, looking more animated than Toni had seen him in years, hurried to the only window not boarded up, rolled up the shade, and let as much sunlight in as he could. “It doesn’t look like much now,” he admitted, “but it’s got real potential.”

Toni looked around at the old roadhouse with its dark wood paneling and floors. It was essentially one room, maybe eight hundred square feet, with about a dozen sets of tables and chairs (the chairs now resting upside down on the tabletops) and a wooden bar about twenty feet long. The barstools had seen better days, as had the mirror—cracked in several places—behind the bar. The empty shelves that had once contained bottles of liquor sagged even with no weight on them. Toni thought it looked small and kind of depressing, but by the smile on her father’s face she could see he clearly thought otherwise.

“It used to serve hot dogs and hamburgers, like Hiram’s,” Eddie said, pointing toward a pair of swinging doors next to the bar, “so it’s got a small kitchen, but big enough for me to make
pūpūs.”

“Poo whats?”

“Appetizers, Hawaiian style, like
kālua
pork spareribs. People will mainly come for the drinks at first, but I want the food to be good too, and maybe in time we can expand to a full dinner menu.”

She peeked into the kitchen, the stove looking more grease-encrusted than the one at the French fry stand, and smiled wanly.

“Dad, don’t you think it’ll take a lot of—work—to remodel…?”

“Oh hell yes,” he agreed. “This is just a dump now, I know that. I’ll have to strip the wood floor, lighten it—replace as much of it with bamboo as I can—fill in the windows with drywall and plaster…”

“What? You can barely see in here as it is!”

“No no, you don’t want windows looking out onto Palisade Avenue, it’ll spoil the illusion that you’re in the tropics.”

Right now it looked about as tropical as the inside of Grant’s Tomb, but her father looked so excited—and it had been so long, it seemed, that he had
been
excited by anything—that Toni was reluctant to dampen his enthusiasm. “How much rent do they want for this?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m not renting,” Eddie said blithely. “I bought it.”

Toni felt as if she had been pushed, backward, at ninety feet up.

“You … bought it?”

“You bet. It was only twelve grand! Hell, there’s a gas station down the road that sold at close-out prices for eighteen, this was a steal.”

One of the concession agents at the Central Show, a gentile with a nonetheless vast command of Yiddish, sometimes used a hybrid exclamation that Toni found amusing:
“Oy
dear,” a combination of “
Oy vey
” and “Oh dear.”

Toni looked around the grimy little tavern and thought:
Oy dear.

She tried desperately to see it as her father did: decorated with wicker tables, adorned with ferns, an exotic, charming, tropical retreat.

Nope. She saw only a dank, narrow, costly little shoebox of a tavern that would need months of scrubbing, repairing, painting, and God knew what else before anyone would step willingly through its dark doorway.

But he’d actually purchased the place—what else could she do? She couldn’t let him lose his life’s savings without trying to make it a success.

“Well, I’m ‘at liberty,’ as they say, for the winter,” she said, feigning enthusiasm and a bright smile. “So let’s get to work.”

But inside she was still thinking:
Oy dear.

19

T
HAT NIGHT,
T
ONI WROTE
a short letter to Cliff, telling him she’d returned to New Jersey and was helping her dad start up a new business. She talked about the hurricane and how it knocked apart Ella’s equipment like a petulant child smashing his Tinkertoys. And she ended by saying
I miss you, wish I could be with you. Please write soon, Love, Toni.

She agonized before signing it—“Sincerely” seemed ridiculous and “Best Wishes” sounded like a birthday card—finally deciding to hell with it, and wrote
Love.
If that scared him off, then it wasn’t meant to be.

According to Central States’ tour schedule, the show would open at the Cimarron Territory Celebration this Thursday, September 14—and so she addressed the envelope to Cliff at the Central States Shows, c/o General Delivery at Beaver, Oklahoma, and mailed it first thing the next morning.

After the post office she and her dad returned to work on the tavern. The power was now turned on, but to Toni’s dismay, electricity only served to illuminate how truly dirty and dingy the place was. Toni hauled all the heavy walnut-stained tables and chairs out back, then called the Salvation Army to come take it all away. With Eddie’s okay she threw in what was left of the glassware, particularly the big beer steins that conjured images not of the South Seas but of the Sudetanland. Eddie swept the bare floors, kicking up dust devils big enough to carry them both to Oz, but didn’t bother to do so to the faded linoleum because he immediately began tearing it up. Toni scrubbed down the mahogany bar, since Eddie planned to strip off the dark stain, lighten the countertop, and add a bamboo facade to the front.

“So where do we get bamboo in New Jersey?” Toni asked.

“Bill Holahan at the lumberyard can order it for us from a supplier in the Philippines. They also carry rattan, which we’re going to need too.”

It was a long week—Toni and Eddie spent an entire day scrubbing years of accumulated grease off the kitchen stove, cleaning the oven, which was caked black with burnt food drippings, and scouring the sink and counters with Ajax. She was bone tired at the end of the day, but it was a vacation compared to the next, when they attacked the restrooms. The sight of the filthy urinals made her gag and she told her father, “This one’s yours, I’ll take the ladies’ room,” and Eddie didn’t object. Toni went through two bottles of Lysol and a can of Ajax before the little girls’ room looked remotely like a place a little girl could enter without contracting scabies.

By the end of the week, all Toni could think was that she had gone from an exciting new career as a high diver to an unpaid janitor’s position. She was careful never to show her dismay to her father, who even as he mopped the men’s room floor was enthusiastically telling her about the rattan wallpaper that would spruce up the room’s dank-looking walls. But try as she may, she couldn’t imagine how this squalid little place was going to be transformed into the thing of beauty her father envisioned.