Pages Torn From a Travel Journal by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online

a glance at me. “That’s all?”
    “Well . . . yes. It was the simplest matter, really. He affixed the poster, provided some tickets at no cost–a grateful excess of generosity, I must say—then was off in his motor.”
    “Did you . . . ,” but she gulped as if disconcerted. “Did you see the drawing of me on the poster?”
    “Why, no,” I prevaricated with an immediacy that darkened my spirit.
    “And Septimus told you nothing about me?”
    “He mentioned you not at all.”
    “In here,” she said hastily, & turned me through a narrow gap between a stall selling funnel cakes & that of a Negro woman whose forte was apparently the bending of spoons & other elongated metal objects, all by force of mind alone.
    The compressed gap led us to a surprisingly silent nook created by several transport trailers squared off. Bliss struck flint to ignite several lamps whose odor told me they’d been filled with candlefish oil. Wan light exposed several tin cans of cigarette butts & crates serving as seats. “How convenient and comfortably secluded from the crowd,” said I. “An area where workers– carnies, I’m sorry—may partake in respite.”
    Her face turned blank at my remark. More & more a cast of sullenness seemed to weigh her down on the wooden props. “It’s what we call a ‘possum belly,’ Howard–”
    “A what? ”
    “A possum belly. Don’t know where that came from but that’s what they’re called.”
    I chuckled at the queer designation. “I’m sure I don’t understand, Bliss.”
    Her expression remained blank. “A possum belly is a secret place at a carnival, an area between trailers, an out-of-the-way tent, or even the storage compartments under the trailers themselves.” She pointed to a bare mattress, befouled by stains, which was half-visible in the shifting dark. “It’s a place where carny girls . . . can bring men to–you know. For money.”
    I tried to act unfazed. “Ah, I see.”
    “Do you really, Howard?” She sat on a crate, leaning the crutches aside. When I chose a farther crate, she reached up & snatched my wrist, a sub-verbal insistence that I sit, instead, next to her. Then she went on in the same agitation. “Girls come here to hook, Howard! And I’m  one of them!”
    The silence oscillated in the wavering oil light.
    “That’s why Septimus let me leave, to work you,” & now a tear glimmered in her eye.
    Work me, I let the words drool down some slope in my gut. “Bliss, I–”
    Now that lovely, sun-bright face turned to stone. “I can’t lie to you, Howard. I lie all the time, I have to! But I can’t to you!” She began to cry openly. “I’m a prostitute! I sell myself!”
    It was without conscious forethought that I took her hand. “Bliss. I don’t care about such things–”
    “Did you know?”
    “Of course not,” came my next lie, but what choice did this cringing circumstance leave me? “I don’t care, and I don’t engage in the assigning of judgments. I’m quite taken by you.”
    She collapsed in my arms, sobbing. “Oh, thank God, thank God! I knew He’d answer my prayer.” Her svelte arms tightened about me. “You’re so different. You remind me of the part of the world I can never have. To everyone else, I’m just a freak to fuck. I’m like-I’m like a spittoon–”
    “Don’t speak of yourself like that; it is an untenable circumstance which has effected your burdens.” My own arm tightened about her as she continued to sob into my chest. The hair-scent dizzied me most pleasantly, & in spite of my determination not to regard her sexually, my chest constricted from an all-pervading rouse.
    “I feel so good now–that you didn’t know,” her whisper slipped against my ear. “I thought–I thought you were just another john who’d . . . heard about me,” & then she kissed me ever-so-daintily on my lips.
    “Set your mind at ease, Bliss,” I tried to console. “I could never in eons think of you in such terms; and, truly,