of colored lights, rolled up a couple thousand feet of heavy-duty
extension cords. They pulled off the canvas roof and folded it.
Grunting, sweating, they disconnected and stacked the gondola tracks.
They removed the mechanical ghouls, ghosts, and ax murderers that had
terrorized thousands of marks, and they wrapped the animated figures in
blankets and other padding.
They unbolted wooden wall panels, disassembled beams and braces, took
up slabs of plank flooring, skinned their knuckles, knocked down the
ticket booth, guzzled soda, and packed generators and transformers and
a mess of machinery into the waiting trucks, which were checked
periodically by Max Freed or one of his assistants.
Max, superintendent of transportation for Big American Midway
Shows–BAM to its employees and fellow travelers–supervised the
tearing down and loading of the huge midway. Next to the famous E.
James Strates organization, BAM was the largest carnival in the
world.
It was no ragbag, gilly, or lousy little forty-miler, it was a
first-rate show. BAM traveled in forty-four railroad cars and more
than sixty enormous trucks. Although some of the equipment belonged to
the independent concessionaires, not to BAM, every truckload had to
pass Max Freed’s inspection, for the carnival company would bear the
brunt of any bad publicity if one of the vehicles proved to be less
than roadworthy and was the cause of an accident.
While Conrad and his men dismantled the funhouse, a couple of hundred
other carnies were also at work on the midway–roughies,
concessionaires, animal trainers, jointees, wheelmen, pitchmen, jam
auctioneers, short-order cooks, strippers, midgets, dwarves, even the
elephants. Except for the men, now sleeping soundly, who would drive
the trucks off the lot a few hours from now, no one could call it a
night until his part of the show was bundled and strapped down and
ready to hit the road.
The Ferris wheel came down. Partially dismantled, it looked like a
pair of gigantic, jagged jaws biting at the sky.
Other rides were quickly and efficiently torn apart. The Sky Diver.
The Tip Top. The Tilt-aWhirl. The carousel. Magical machineries of
fun, all locked away in ordinary-looking, dusty, greasy vans.
One minute the tents rippled like sheets of dark rain. The next minute
they lay in still, black puddles.
The grotesque images on the freak show banners–all painted by the
renowned carnival artist David “Snap” Wyatt–fluttered and billowed
between their moorings. Some of the large canvases portrayed the
twisted, mutant faces of a few of the human oddities who made their
living in Freak-o-rama, and these appeared to leer and wink and snarl
and sneer at the carnies who labored below, a trick of the wind as it
played with the canvas. Then the ropes were loosened, the pulley
wheels squeaked, and the banners slid down their mooring poles to the
pitchman’s platform, where they were rolled up and put away-nightmares
in large cardboard tubes.
At five-thirty in the morning, exhausted, Conrad surveyed the site
where the funhouse had stood, and he decided he could finally go to
bed.
Everything had been broken down. A small pile of gear remained to be
loaded, but that would take only half an hour and could be left to
Ghost, Gunther, and one or two of the others. Conrad paid the local
laborers and the free-lance roughies. He instructed Ghost to supervise
the completion of the job and to obtain final approval from Max Freed,
he told Gunther to do exactly what Ghost wanted him to do. He paid an
advance against salary to the two fresh-eyed roughies who, having just
gotten up from a good sleep, were prepared to drive the trucks to
Clearfield, Pennsylvania, which was the next stand, Conrad would follow
later in the day in his thirty-four-foot Travelmaster. At last, aching
in every muscle, he trudged back to his motor home– which was parked
among more than two hundred similar vehicles, trailers, and mobile
homes–in the back lot, at the west end of the fairgrounds.
The nearer he drew to the Travelmaster, the slower he moved. He
dawdled. He took time to appreciate the night. It was quiet,
serene.
The breezes had blown away to another part of the . county, and the
air was preternaturally still.