The Gengar

Luke Bell

It was the middle of the night when my phone buzzed with an unknown number and of course I answered. It was Spider calling from a burner. I guess he knew I’d be up by myself. 

“Ink Master,” he yowled. “Turn on Ink Master, Pluto TV. Turn it on right fucking now.”

“Where are you?” I said because he hadn’t been home in weeks, but he didn’t hear me so I fumbled around in the dark, rifling through empty cans and ashtrays and wadded-up aluminum foil and countless nasal spray bottles until I found the backless remote, and all the while Spider repeated which season, episode, time stamp I needed to flip to five, maybe six times, grinding his teeth so loud I could hear it through the phone. “See it?” he said. “You seeing it?” 

I squinted and worked the sticky buttons and sat through an ad for personal injury lawyers then finally I got there. A woman appeared on screen, a tattoo artist with jet-black hair and arms covered in skulls and bones, the kind where the shading is all tiny black dots. 

“She’s famous now,” Spider declared. “Just like we always said.”

I didn’t understand. 

“Bruh, it’s Lola.” 

I flipped back to the beginning and saw the tattoo artist’s name really was Lola, but the similarities ended there. Whatever Spider was on right now, I wanted some. 

“It’s not the same Lola,” I told him. “It’s a Lola, not our Lola.”

I sat back closing my eyes and took a long drag off my vape. I traced my fingers over the tattoo on my forearm, the lines raised on my skin like braille. If it wasn’t for this tattoo I might have believed Lola—our Lola—was just some angel hallucination from a summer that’d already felt like one endless acid trip. 

“Yeah you’re right,” Spider said quiet-like. “I just kept thinking how stoked Misty would be, you know?” 

I did. 

“How come I can’t think of your nickname from that summer?” he said to change the subject. “Was it Corndog or Porkchop or something?”

I couldn’t tell if he was fucking with me or if he really was that high. I told him I barely ate that summer I was so out of my mind. 

Spider hyena-laughed then broke into a raspy coughing jag that went on forever. “Deadliest Catch. That’s what we called you.” 

Now I cracked up. I gazed down at my forearm in the supernatural glow of the tv. 

“Omen,” I said finally. “You guys called me Omen.” 

I guess it stopped around the time Lola disappeared.

I’d turned up at the carnival that summer expecting fire jugglers and lion tamers and conjoined twins but it wasn’t like that at all. There weren’t any animals or performers or even a ferris wheel. The rides were all rusted. The games were rigged. The foods were fried. How was I supposed to know a carnival from a circus? 

Spider was my drug dealer so he knew I didn’t give a fuck about anything, especially myself. He had a spiderweb tatted over each of his elbows and a single black teardrop on his cheek, though I knew he’d never killed anybody. Spider wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d asked me what I was doing for the summer and I said nothing. 

“You wanna party? Get paid?” 

Spider traveled with this carnival every summer because it paid cash and he sold hella drugs to all the other carnies. We could split gas, he told me. Spider had an old Chevy G20 van that he drove from town to town. All I had to do was meet the bosses, Buck and Lorraine. They were husband and wife but everybody knew Lorraine was the one in charge. Around the carnival Buck was called “Buck the Cuck” because when he partied hard he liked to watch Lorraine ride other men. “Just don’t call him a cuck to his face,” Spider warned me. 

Spider picked me up in the van and drove out of town to a wide open field full of trailers and trucks and machinery but nobody was around. The only movement was some smoke blowing off the ashes of a bonfire chock-full of charred beer cans and melted plastic and cigarette butts. Spider banged on the door of an old Jayco motorhome and Lorraine came out sucking a Marlboro Red. 

“You know how to fix machines?” she asked me. 

“Yeah.” 

“How about trucks?” 

“Yeah.”

“Good with your hands, huh?” She looked me up and down, squinting through the smoke of her cigarette. “Know how to build a fire? Stitch up a wound?” 

“Yeah.”

“Can you hold your liquor?”

This yeah was the truth. 

“The Feds after you?” 

“Yeah.” 

“You ain’t a pedo are you? We got plenty of ex-cons, but I don’t like no pedos creeping around all the rides and games. It’s bad for business.” She spit. “I don’t care who or what you fuck, long as it ain’t kids.” 

Spider cracked up so I couldn’t help but smile. 

“Think that’s funny, huh? You some kind of sicko or something?” She turned to Spider. “Your friend some kind of sicko?” 

“Quit busting his balls,” Spider said. “Daymian’s cool.”

“Damien like The Omen?” she said. 

I started to say mine’s spelled with a y. 

“You remember the scene where the nanny hangs herself in front of everybody at that little shit’s birthday party?” Lorraine grinned, showing her cracked lips, yellow teeth. “Fucking brutal.”

“Fucking brutal,” I agreed. I’d never seen the movie so I didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about. 

“Congrats Omen,” she said, flicking her cigarette butt on the ground and squishing it under her foot. “You’re a carny now.” 

We spit in our palms and shook. 

Back at home I gathered my clothes up in a garbage bag. I dug through my old man’s closet and all the way in the back, behind soiled hankies and plastic grocery bags filled with plastic grocery bags, I found a half-gallon ice-cream tub full of dirty change that he must’ve been saving for years, maybe decades. I lugged the thing out and thumped it down on the floor of Spider’s van, which sank a few inches. There was a Coinstar machine at Walmart that would turn it into cash for a fee, since the banks only did it for free if you had an account. My old man would be furious when he noticed the tub missing, but there’d be nobody here for him to take a swing at.

After cashing out the change we filled up the tank and I bought a pack of Marlboro Reds, just in case. Then we swung by the trailer park to pick up Spider’s friend Misty. She worked the games. Ring toss, she said. Misty had short hair dyed neon blue, bruised legs, a Hatchetman tattoo. On the highway she pulled out a giant hunk of pink crystal. “For cleansing energy,” she said. We watched the sun set through the dirty windows and I thought I felt something. 

We pulled up at the caravan again where the bonfire burned wild now and shadowy figures gathered around feeding it trash. “Don’t tell anybody I’m in high school,” I told Spider. I didn’t want them thinking I was soft. 

Spider took me around camp and instead of shaking hands most of the carnies offered me swigs from random bottles or flasks so I couldn’t remember anybody’s names by the end of it. Back at the fire we dropped acid and watched a shirtless carny with huge ear gauges squirt lighter fluid into the flames. The carny kept calling the lighter fluid fire starter so I knew all this symbolized a new beginning for me. 

The caravan rolled out in the morning, everybody hungover and sore. Misty passed a bowl of skunky weed around the van and we all felt better. The old Chevy shuttered on the open road so we had to crank the music all the way up just to hear it. The van’s name was Van Halen, but I never figured out why since Spider only listened to trap music. Later in the summer he’d have a meth revelation and rename it The Web—“Because it’s where the Spider lives. And what’s a web? It’s a trap. And what’s my van? A trap house. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? It’s multi-dimensional”—but for now we were smoking in Van Halen, which Spider assured us was a much better name than Cooter’s ride. 

“What’s Cooter’s ride called?”

“Uncle Touchy’s Fun Bus.” 

I sprayed a mouthful of vodka all over the backseat. 

We set up the carnival in the fairgrounds of some hick town that was rented to Buck and Lorraine for cheap. Everybody stood around smoking and arguing about where shit went while a skeleton crew of seasoned carnies did all the work without listening to a word anybody said. 

I followed Spider over to where a burly grease-stained carny was banging a wrench against the Merry-Go-Round, or as Spider called it, the Busted-Ass Pony Ride. 

“Shay’s our lesbian mechanic,” he said, passing her a plastic half-gallon bottle of Skol. 

“It’s true,” Shay said. She swigged the vodka like water, letting it drip down her chin. “I can fix anything except men.”

I shadowed Shay while she checked on the skeletons’ progress. The carnival was all rides, games, and food, she explained. There was the Pony Ride, the Tilt-A-Hurl, the Gravitron. Our job was to keep these machines from killing people. “Balloon Shooting, Ring Toss, and Mini Basketball are our most popular scams,” she said. “I mean games.” But at least the food was fire: cheese curds, corn dogs, ice cream, pizza, cotton candy, funnel cakes. Shay’s favorite was deep-fried butter. “Melts in your mouth,” she said. 

We stopped to watch a pair of gnarled old carnies called Crow and Cooter assemble the Gravitron, which looked like a crashed flying saucer. The carnies were shirtless and even though it was only the beginning of summer, Crow’s skin looked dark and leathery while Cooter had a sunburn that Shay said never went away. Crow got his name because he was always drinking Old Crow whiskey from a Bible-sized flask in the back pocket of his jorts. I asked Shay how Cooter got his name and she told me not to ask that again. 

At night I smoked Spice with the carnies. Out of all the dirty drugs I ingested that summer, Spice made me crazier than anything else. For the first hour I laughed hysterically with the others at the bonfire until I was on the verge of suffocating. Then I started seeing foxes beyond the flames and gave chase. Legs burning, I tore across the moonlit field as fast as I could until Misty came running after me and we tumbled down together on the soft grass and kissed, then I was up running again until the foxes dissolved and I returned to the bonfire where Spider was still laughing like a man possessed. That’s when my brain really went haywire because time got scrambled up to where I experienced everything happening around me, but out of order, so I had to piece life back together just to make sense but parts kept repeating themselves and repeating themselves until I wished for Death knowing in my heart that this was true madness. 

“I’m never smoking that shit again,” I said as soon as I came to. Yet the next time Spider lit up I always asked for a hit, fucking Spice. 

The carnival was in motion, everything flashing and loud. As a floater my job was to help out anyplace needing a hand. I locked kids into the Tilt-A-Hurl with Travis and mopped up neon vomit anytime they spewed. I pretended to win an inflatable Stewie doll from Misty to sell ring toss tickets. I bagged trash and broke up fights. But mostly I wandered around watching all the townies. 

The carnies called the locals “townies” no matter where we were at. The townies were  always the same: bony old hillbillies with crazy eyes, blob people on electric scooters, pregnant teens with pierced lips, dirty children with sticky mouths. They looked like us. 

Our carnival traveled from town to town until somewhere in Missouri, a mysterious girl showed up in the night like a stray, purebred dog. Lola. Misty took her in and brought her to Lorraine who hired Lola on the spot. Didn’t even ask if she was a pedo. 

“It’s because Lola’s cute,” Spider explained. “We all look like a pack of decrepit inbreds and it gives Lorraine the creeps, makes her depressed.” Spider sometimes threw out words like “decrepit” or “cretin” or “troglodyte” as if he’d memorized a whole dictionary of insults. “Besides,” he said, “cute’s good for business.”

It was. 

In the next town Lorraine put Lola on Speed Pitch and guys lined up all the way past the corn dog stand trying to impress her with their arms. Everybody was in love with Lola. She could’ve been a model if she’d been born someplace else, with her long hair and her cat eyes and her nose like a dollop of something creamy and sweet. Lola was tough though. She had cigarette burns that looked like bullet holes. Razor blade scars crisscrossed the insides of her wrists and she had a big Gengar tattoo on the back of her hand that she’d inked herself. “Because Gengar’s a shadow who lost its body,” she told me. 

Lola was practicing to become a tattoo artist. Her sketchbook was filled with pencil drawings of anime characters and aliens and roses growing out of skulls, stuff like that. She carried her own shiny black tattoo gun in a velcro kit full of needles and ink cartridges. For a carny, it looked pretty legit.

Late one night we were hotboxing in Van Halen with Lola. The windows were up so the four of us all stripped down to our underwear in the heat passing bowls and bottles between us, laughing and listening to music. Misty and Lola kept their fingers laced together like usual and Spider teased them saying they should kiss. 

“That’s sexist,” Misty said rolling her eyes, even though we all knew she wanted to. 

Spider stuck his tongue in my mouth to prove he wasn’t being sexist and he tasted different than I’d expected. Like burnt sugar, bitter then sweet. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Shay was outside looking for Lola, so we all squeezed together to make room. 

“It’s a marijuana sauna in here,” Shay said wiping her face. 

We all cracked up at that. Shay wouldn’t take off her clothes but she hit the bowl and held it in her lungs a long time. When she finally exhaled she turned to Lola and said she wanted a tattoo. “Your first customer.” 

“But I’m not even licensed yet,” Lola said. She traced her Gengar with her fingertips in the smoke.   

“Do I look like a cop?” Shay said. “Besides, can’t be worse than what I already got.” Shay held out her arms covered in faded blurry blobs. 

“I like the flower,” Spider said. 

“That’s the Grim Reaper you fucker.” 

She looked at Lola. “See? Doesn’t fucking matter how it turns out. Come on, let’s go.” 

“Go where?” 

Shay had turned her camper into a carny tattoo studio. A plastic folding table sat under the awning with a heavy-duty lantern on top swarming with gnats. An extension cord snaked underneath to plug in the gun. It didn’t look like much, but Lola seemed touched. 

Shay wanted a smiley face tattoo with big X’s for the eyes. Lola sketched it out on her pad in thick pencil. 

“Dope,” Shay said. “That’s dope.”

While Lola was preparing the stencil and ink, Crow wandered over from the bonfire speaking in tongues so we gave him shots of Burnett’s to keep him quiet until the only sound was the buzz of Lola’s tattoo gun. 

Lola never blinked the whole time she tattooed. Not even when gnats landed and wriggled in the sweat on her face. After fifteen minutes or so she lowered the gun and wiped away all the ink and the blood with a paper towel. The black smiley face on Shay’s arm looked just like the sketch on the pad. 

“Best tattoo I ever had,” Shay said, turning it in the light. 

Lola looked relieved, but we all hooted and howled for her until she got proud. Shay pulled out a wad of cash but Lola wouldn’t even look at it. “I’m just happy to help a friend,” she said.

“You can get hella practice around the carnival,” Spider said. “Everybody’s got fucked up ink around here.” 

“Not him.” Crow pointed right at me, aiming with one eye closed. “Not Omen.” 

Everybody looked at me and suddenly I felt very naked standing there in my ratty boxers without any ink.  

“What kinda carny doesn’t have tattoos?” Crow slurred. “What kinda Omen is that?” 

———

After two months on the road I called my old man to check in. I felt pretty nervous about it even though I didn’t think he’d answer. I was calling from one of Spider’s phones since I’d lost mine during one of those first wild nights in Indiana when I was out of my mind on Spice.

The phone rang and rang until my old man answered, sounding like I’d woken him up even though it was the middle of the afternoon. “What?” he growled.

“Dad, it’s me.” I thought I could feel his sour-hot breath burning into my cheek. I figured he’d ask me questions or tell me to come back or threaten to gut me for stealing his bucket of coins, but the old man stayed quiet so I asked him how he was doing. I didn’t know what else to say. 

“You gettin’ fresh with me?” 

I heard him shuffling around. 

“We’re outta pop,” he said. “Make yourself useful and pick me up a DC.” Then louder: “A big one. Get a big one.” 

Oh. 

I thought I might cry so I stared up into the sun. 

“Okay dad,” I murmured. “Don’t worry.” 

“A big one.” 

I hung up the phone knowing I’d never call him again. 

My eyes burned but somehow I found my way to the Graviton and cut to the front of the line. The Gravitron looked like a UFO but on the inside it was just a hollow circle with soft-padded walls. I leaned back against the blue padding and watched the townies funnel in like livestock and take their places around me. 

Cooter closed the door and sat down at the switchboard in the center of the room. The Gravitron fired up with a whirr that sounded more like a lawn mower than a spaceship, but then we started to spin. The force of the spinning pressed me back against the wall so I could hardly move. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the weight of the universe, tingling at the feeling of being totally dominated and restrained with nothing I could do. I always left the Gravitron feeling lighter than when I went in. 

Outside I drifted around. When I passed Lorraine’s motorhome she was standing out front screaming into her phone. She hung up and fumbled with her pockets then tilted her head to the sky. 

“Here,” I said, holding out a cigarette. Lorraine glared at me until I shook the box of Marlboro Reds. I slipped one between my lips, lit Lorraine’s, lit mine, and smoked. 

“Bunch of fucking imbeciles,” Lorraine muttered. 

I dragged on my cig like I understood. 

“Can’t trust ‘em with a fucking thing.” 

I nodded, flicked some ash. 

“Omen, I didn’t know you smoked Reds.” 

She caught me eyeing the Playboy bunny tattoo under her collarbone but she didn’t say anything about it, probably thought I was checking out her tits. We smoked another Red together. 

“You still floating?” she asked me. 

In an hour or two Buck would be showing up with some goldfish, she said. “Hundreds of ‘em, all in a barrel full of water.” She told me I could start working Ring Toss with Misty, bagging goldfish to hand out as loser prizes. 

“Congrats Omen,” she said. “You’ve been promoted.”

I spit into my hand but she’d already turned away. 

I got pretty good at netting up goldfish out of a barrel. The trick is to trap them against the side and then slide up. I plunked each one into a plastic baggie of water and tied it off so it wouldn’t leak. Every hour or so I skimmed the floaters off the surface of the barrel and threw them in the trash. The goldfish died fast in the heat so by the end of the week they weren’t really swimming so much as drifting around in the murk. 

I handed a goldfish over to anybody who didn’t win a stuffed animal at Ring Toss, which was everyone, but Misty had a way of making people feel like they’d won even when they hadn’t. “Congrats,” she’d say as I offered them the fish. “His name’s Goldie, be sure to take good care of him.” 

There wasn’t any drama until Friday night when some mouth breather townie in a cowboy hat came up to our booth all red in the jowls with a crying kid. He waved a plastic bag at us with a belly-up goldfish inside. 

“Hey you. Circus clown.” The townie’s eyes bulged at me. “We won this fish not thirty minutes ago. What the fuck you trying to pull?” 

I wanted to tell him they hadn’t won shit because the fish was free, but when I opened my mouth different words came out. “OH GOD,” I shrieked. “YOU KILLED GOLDIE!” 

The kid wailed and before I knew what was happening that big townie chucked the goldfish bag at me with all his strength and it hit me right in the eyeball then flopped down at my feet without breaking. Misty yelled at the townie to get the hell out but I said wait, wait, I’d get another fish for the kid. 

My eye clouded and started to swell as I bagged up another dead goldfish behind the booth. I walked it up to the front where the townie waited, his face red as a beet. I handed the bag to the kid who dropped it and screamed and I spit in the big townie’s face as hard as I could and waited for him to sock me. He leapt over the barrier with surprising agility but slipped on the goldfish bag he’d chucked at me that was still on the floor and somehow still didn’t break. Misty socked the townie in the neck but he pushed her aside and came charging at me. I turned and kicked backward like a mule landing one in his crotch so hard it knocked his cowboy hat off, then I took off across the grass and didn’t look back until I heard hollering behind me. 

The townie’s beet-red face had turned gray as Cooter twisted his thick neck in some kind of complicated chokehold. Within seconds a crowd of bloodthirsty carnies circled around and I heard Spider yelling “ravage him, ravage him,” which I thought was pretty dark, and Lola even carried baseballs over from the Speed Pitch and began chucking them into the townie’s paunch and the whole thing didn’t break up until Buck showed up with a shotgun. 

“That was some WWE smackdown shit,” Shay told Cooter across the bonfire that night. All of us took turns acting out the scuffle while passing around more bottles than usual and the more I drank, the more I thought about how nobody back home or at school really gave a shit whether I lived or died, but these crazy carnies all took care of each other more or less. So it felt like mind-reading when Lorraine came up behind me to place the townie’s cowboy hat on my head and everybody, even Crow, clapped and cheered. 

Misty or Cooter should have the hat, I said, but they shook their heads saying I deserved it. “You’re the one who knocked it off.” 

I got all emotional wearing that cowboy hat and looking around the fire at those decrepit, familiar faces. My gaze settled on Lola’s hand and I pulled her aside saying I finally understood the meaning of the Gengar. It’s about belonging. 

Anybody else would’ve thought it was the acid talking, but Lola saw through all that. She rubbed my back and said yes, even shadows needed to belong. 

I finally decided on my tattoo: a goldfish in a bag. It came to me as I watched Spider pour vodka over a smooth, hairless patch of flesh on his shin. He let it air-dry while Lola prepared the stencil. She’d been talking to Lorraine about adding a tattoo booth to the carnival once she got licensed. Everybody knew it’d be a goldmine. 

My hair was getting long by then and Misty ran her fingers through it under the brim of the cowboy hat while we watched Lola work. The sun hung high in the sky and glinted off the shiny tattoo gun. Around us, in an empty parking lot in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere Oklahoma, the skeleton crew was assembling the carnival in all its rusted glory. It seemed as good a place as any. 

When the tattoo was finished we all leaned over to admire Lola’s work. A black widow spider, the lines sharp and clean, but the tiny hourglass at its center was left blank. 

“I’ll fill it in someday when I get red ink,” Lola said. 

Spider nodded, believed her. We all did. So when Lola disappeared one night on the back of some pillhead’s Harley, that’s what we told ourselves—that Lola hadn’t left us, she’d only gone off to get the red ink. We needed to believe she’d come back and finish what she started.

Luke Bell is an emerging writer from rural Indiana. His work has appeared in SLAB, Collision, and Outrageous Fortune.