Carny Closure: A Fable of Fate

In a previous episode, Hitch Grimes unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, who ran a hotel in Bessemer, Alabama. Learning the truth, he fled in horror to become an itinerant gambler. Eighty-one years later, his son finishes the story.

Hitch Grimes, Jr., 2001

Growing up, Daddy’s curse was confined to the grinning photograph of a young man I never met in a gold frame by Mama’s bed. Everything else was fine. The Bessemer steel plants staggered through the Depression, and the Manila House had regular tenants even as residential hotels went out of style. When I moved out, Uncle Sam bought my ticket.

    After VE Day, I married the wrong woman, left her, failed in business, burned out on the blast furnaces, and returned like a prodigal to Mama’s hotel, where I kept the desk after her health failed. An old mama’s boy in an inn that barely made costs on a peeling street by the tracks. So there I was in 1959, driving away from her funeral to a real estate office to get shed of that old pile of bricks. I knew I wouldn’t get much, not in Bessemer, a city as cursed as I was.

    Don’t ask what led me to the dark end of the midway at the Birmingham Fairgrounds, nothing to my name but Mama’s Hudson Hornet and a roll of bills, the settlement for the Manila House. There’s a popular word for it now, depression, and I don’t mean Roosevelt’s. I’d hit bottom and was hunting a hole to crawl in. What I found was a wormhole to deliverance. Forty-two years later, my old heart going the way of Mama’s, I’ve shed every earthly curse but my mortality, served hand and foot now by sweet-smelling nurses. They call me a slumlord now, but I’m just satisfied to be some kind of lord, and I owe it all to a carny with my name.

I kept walking that night past brighter strings of lights to a booth of tattered canvas where the midway dead-ended into a hurricane fence. A grizzled old man, his face vaguely familiar, sat in front of a board covered in numbers and called me in.

        “Score a hundred yards and make your fortune,” he told me. “The only honest game on the  midway, sir. That’s why I can’t afford the big rents. I don’t give fuzzy-ass prizes here, sir, just hard cash. The only straight game at the fair. It’s all on the board, sir. Just a dollar a play.”

The game, which he called football, involved throwing balls onto the numbered board and counting up a score, then reading results off a complicated chart behind him. I didn’t believe a word he said but felt a tug of fate and laid down a twenty. Chart or no, I had to trust him. The old man added scores faster than I could count, scooped up the balls, congratulated me on yards scored, and handed me me balls to throw again. Halfway down the field, I hit a double, which meant I could win hundreds but the plays cost twice as much. Then more doubles until my twenties were going fast, and I suspected, even as I reached the eighty yard line, that the old man with his slick counts could hold me back from the goalpost until he broke me. But I was infected with the crazy hope that made Mama hoard jars of pennies when we couldn’t afford pork chops. In so deep, why not go for broke?  At the ninety-three yard line, I ran out of cash, and he offered to put the game on hold if I could get more money, so I offered the Hudson.

He’d have to see the car, of course. The old man opened a gate in the hurricane fence so I could pull it into an alley beside the tent he lived in back of his game. He took me in the tent where he could read the title better—nothing there but a bare bulb, a folding table and chairs, an army bunk, and a trunk. He lived sparse, but he had money, mine and more. The old man put on reading glasses, unfolded the title, and the blood seemed to leave his face.

“This here your name?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hitch Grimes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’d you come by a name like that.”

“After my daddy. I’m a junior.”

“Where is your daddy, Hitch?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Thank God for that.”

“How old are you, Hitch?”

“Thirty-nine, sir.”

The old man shuddered as he whispered four syllables:

“1920.”

Sitting close at the table, not distracted by trying to read numbers and the chart, I got a good look at him. His hair, what was left of it, was just going gray, so I wondered if he was as old as his creased face suggested. His face and shoulders, the way the eyes set over his nose, brought to mind Mama’s brother, uncle Jess, almost like the old man was kin. Then I noticed white letters printed on the side of the steamer trunk: “H. Grimes.”

“1920,” he said again. “How is your mama?”

“She just died, sir. Old age.”

I can’t explain his reaction. Relief almost. A raising of eyes toward Heaven. Then a quick recovery and condolences. 

“So the money you gambled, son?”

“My inheritance. I sold the hotel.”

His mouth moved. A lip reader might confirm he formed the words Manila House. I can’t be sure. I know he gazed at the canvas walls for long moments, visualizing something remote or long ago. I’m no fool. I suspected this might be a providential meeting with my lost father, the man in the gold frame by Mama’s bed, an almost impossible happenstance, and so I tested him.

“Your name,” I said, reaching for the title.

“Grimes. Maybe distant kin. I’m from Mississippi.”

“What will you give me?” I asked, ready to write in his name.

“An honest chance, brother.” He took the ballpoint from my hand. “You ought to know better than to play carny games, especially football. It’s crooked as hell. I’m a crook, Hitch. Your daddy should’ve taught you better. Let’s play another game now. Here’s your stake.”

He gave me a hundred dollars and pulled three cards from a deck in his pocket.

“You ever heard of three-card monte, son? No. Well, it’s a simple game of skill. See, here’s the ace of spades, the money card, and two jacks. We’ll start face up, then flip the cards and slide them around a bit. All you got to do is watch the ace. Put your finger on it, and you win. Okay? Now, look sharp.”

Of course, I didn’t trust old Grimes, but it was his money, so I played, and to my surprise, I won. Well, I did the first two times. I lost the third, but I won the fourth, and it kept on like that. Meanwhile, the old man kept up his crazy patter. If it was supposed to distract me, it didn’t work.

“You got much schooling, Hitch?”

“High school.”

“Not me. I’m just a country boy. Eighth grade is all, but I read a little. Things that interest me. Old Greek writings. I like those. You win. You hear about things, and they get your attention. Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask. You win. But you look it up, things like, well, did you ever hear of old King Oedipus? You lose. No? He was cursed too, but it wasn’t his fault, just like it never was mine or yours or your mama's either, Hitch. He had no idea it was his daddy on the road. The fathers eat persimmons, the children’s teeth are set on edge. That’s the Bible. You win. It ain’t fair. Nothing fair about it. It just happens. You win. Oedipus didn’t know the queen was his natural mother. Fate happens. You lose. Things get out of kilter, and as long as they are, well, look at me, son. Look at me. You win. I reckon a million dollars slipped through these old fingers and here I am. Look around you. You win. They write about the eldest curse and the mark of Cain, but Cain's wasn't a curse. No, sir. In fact, it was a blessing. You win, son. Yes, sir. Read your Bible, my friend. It was a blessing. Cain was blessed by that killing. You lose. He went on to found a city and be granddaddy of half the people. It’s like Jesus. Somebody’s got to die. You win. Cain and Abel. Some old story. Sometimes it takes blood. You win. Death is the Lord’s way of setting things right.”

He ran his mouth for an hour, old Rutherford, and when he ran out of talk, I had all his cash. The next day I counted more than a hundred thousand. I offered him his hundred back, but he wouldn’t take it. He’d be fine, he said. Always had been. One born every minute. Besides, it was my inheritance he'd footballed out of me. When I went to shake hands, he pulled me in for a bearhug smelling like ten-cent cigars. I thought maybe it was our shared name, both being Grimes. Now I believe it was more.

But back to the curse, the one we all felt, it lifted that night. The old man opened the gate in the hurricane fence while I drove the old Hudson around. He was beside it, and then he wasn’t. I’m surprised somebody his age could move that fast. My right front tire lurched over something—a heave I can still feel now sitting in this battery powered chair—and since the fair was closing, folks in the parking lot saw what happened, how the old man didn’t give me a choice. Nobody could blame me for his death.