NOSES

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

'm in the grease paint alley at a stop in Peoria when an old pal of mine peeks in, smelling of Jim Beame and mildew.  We used to do walkabouts for the Cole Brothers, town to town, till he started acting funny, and he kind of drifted away.  It happens.  He found himself a cracker of a partner, I'd heard, and started in to doing gigs in the boonies.

"Take a load off, you old hack," I tell him. "How's your nose?"

Suddenly he looks like he is passing a gallstone.  His face turns grey and he sits down on my trunk.  You'd think it was his mother's casket.

"What's up?" I says, and I put down my paw full of greasy kleenex and powder.

He does me a long, soulful take, which used to be his trademark move, and then he starts in to talking about the old days, slow and careful, like deposing to a copper.

This is the story he tells me:

 

e used to joke noses, my partner Tim and me, before I knew the score.  Say, there's Tim picking through butts and bottles on the floor, and he'd say, "I lost my nose."

"You're lucky," I'd say. "Mine's melted."

Or else it would be, "Can you lend me your nose tomorrow?"

Or, "Damn!  I left my nose in the can!"

Well, if you ask me, Tim didn't even need a nose, but maybe just a spot of rouge on the tip of his schnoz.  He was a natural-born Auguste, six foot two and skinny, with a face like a harvest moon.  Me, I drag my five-six from gig to gig with a lachrymose mug an inch of grease paint won't prettify.  My nose made me.  I'm too short to be normal and too tall to be funny.  Besides, I sweat too much, and when I sweat, I stink.  Not a favorable configuration for the buffoon trade.

Couple summers back, we were doing our little dirt show in Bliss, New York, in back of the Baptist Bible School.  It was the third gig of the day and I was so sweaty, I could hardly see; the makeup was smearing under my eyes and burning.

"Why do we have to do Bliss?" I asked him.  "I hate Bliss.  They've got no stage.  They've got no hall.  They've got no money.  And the laughs cost plenty; these rubes are not subtle."

"Because that's where I got my start.  It's hard for me to tell them no.  See that orchard?  I taught myself to juggle there in 1973; I flashed a cascade of three Ida Reds, and decided to be a clown, to travel, me and my nose, my red nose, wherever it would take me.  It all started in that orchard, brother.  These townies were my first audience."

"He said that?" I ask my old pal.  "He said he got his start in an orchard?"

"Yeah," he says, "juggling, like I said.  Why?"

"I started like that," I says, "in an orchard.  But not juggling.  What about you?"

"No," he says, "it wasn't like that for me.  I went to the Ringling Brothers school in Venice, Florida," he says.  "What's the difference?"

"Did he say what happened in the orchard?"

"No.  What do you mean?  He juggled there, like I said."

I reach over by the mirror to pick up my little case.  I keep mine in a case, a tight little case like what you keep a wedding ring in, you know, the kind that snaps open and snaps shut with a sharp click.  I blow off the powder.  I open it up and show him my nose.

"I bet your partner didn't have a nose like this one," I ask him.  He gives my baby a sly peek and then slides those beady peepers back to his shoes.

"What about you?" I says, still sizing him up.  "Did they teach you how to make them at Venice, Florida?  Wax?  Papier-mâché?  Sponge balls?  Or what?"

He's not buying it.  He's not interested.  "OK," I says, "finish your story.  Tell me what happened in Bliss."

 

Well, I hated the sun.  I was so sweaty that day in Bliss that when I tapped Tim's shoulder for the blowoff, and jumped into his arms--"Eek!  A mouse!"--he couldn't hold me.  He shifted and squirmed, gagging it up the whole time, making like it was part of the lazzo, but I was too slick.  Finally, I went down, and he went down on top of me.  Thank God, my nose was gummed on tight, but while I was sliding down, my fright wig snagged Tim's nose, and it shot off into space like a champagne cork.

 

"The old lazzo!" I says.

"No," he says, "it wasn't.  I know what you're talking about.  Tim was doing that one, in fact, on that very tour.  The old mime trick.  He'd make it look like the nose was flying away from him, pulling at his hand.  Then he'd have to push it back onto his face.  Not very effective, in my opinion."

"I knew it," I says, getting the picture.  "The old chestnut, the runaway schnoz!"  Only it hadn't been a lazzo, not in Bliss and not before that, either.  But I figure my pal is still in the dark.

"In Bliss," he says, "that's not what happened.  There, Tim wasn't doing it.  It just got pulled off."

"Go on," I says.

 

he fall was a big success--They howled--but Tim scrambled to his feet and started screaming.  "Hey!" he said.  "Stop that rube!" he said.   They thought it was part of the act, but I could see my man was strictly in a panic.  Then I saw his raw cabonza; it was red and pasty where the spirit gum held a patch of enamel from the rim of that famous proboscis of his.  He was staring out toward a spot at the edge of the field; this little gal in a raggedy smock was running toward the road.  "She's got my nose!"

My fanny was still in the clover when Tim bolted for the pickup.  We were using it for a backdrop--the truck, I mean, not my fanny; there was a big, blue tarp gaffer-taped over the driver's side.  Tim ducked under it and pulled the door open.  He started the engine right up--a miracle--and jammed the truck into gear.  Then he swung around and headed toward the girl.

"Hey!  You can't drive stick!"  I was dodging divots and mud spray, but I leapt onto the truck bed.  The audience loved it.  They were convinced the little gal was a ringer.  It was absolutely the best blowoff those hicks had ever seen.

We were bouncing over spalled concrete on dead, rusted shocks.  I crawled to the front of the truck bed and tore through the tarp, grabbing onto the side window.  "What's the big deal?" I shouted.  "You can get another nose."

"You don't get it!"  He was crying and wheezing, trying to understand the stick shift without losing sight of the girl.  "I'm nothing without my nose!  Nothing!"

We turned onto the road and saw the girl up ahead, making for an apple orchard on the other side.  Tim floored it.   I hung onto the tarp for dear life.  We followed right up behind her into the orchard, along the windbreak, and into this broad stream.  He was trying to charge across it in my half-ton, which stalled out, which I knew it had to, half way across.

Tim jumped out and dashed after this girl.  I was at his heels.  "Jeepers, Tim, you've lost your nose before!"

"Yeah, but I always got it back!  If she makes off with it, I'm finished!"

"You're not gonna hurt her, Tim?" I begged him.  I kept falling and skinning my knees.  My baggy pants were soaked and ripped--and I can't sew worth spit, how do you like that?  I could see that the girl was having a rough time too, poor kid, falling and scrambling across the stream.

Tim shouted back at me, "There's gotta be a ship in there.  She's taking it back!"

I was running out of breath, hanging onto Tim's shoulder as we caromed around plum trees on the other side of the stream.  "Timbo, it's just a nose." 

"No,"--We almost had her!--"your nose is just a nose!"  He had a handful of her smock, but it ripped, and she pulled away.  She scrambled up a little hill and was out of sight for a second.  Tim vaulted over the rise.  "No!  God, no!  Don't leave me!  Don't leave me to die!"

I followed him.  There was a sort of cave, the size of a brick oven, on the other side.  Tim was sticking his head and arms into it, and he was crying.  "Come back!  Come back!"  I saw him get hold of the girl's feet and pull them out of the hole.  Then her torso showed, all dirty and scraped, and her arms, but she pawed that hole to try and stay in it.

 

t this point, I stop listening.  I've heard things like this from other poor slobs.  It's always in an orchard.  It has nothing to do with me.  I smack on some more Albolene and squeegee the rest of my face off while he's talking.  I'm packing up.  I'm shipping out.  I'm waiting for him to get off my trunk so I can get the show on the road.  I got an itinerary to follow, and it ain't mine to change.  He's blabbing away, staring at his dogs.  I can tell you the rest of what he said:

 

 tried to pull Tim off her, but he pushed me away.  Then he threw the girl to the ground.  She was all out of breath and staring up at us like we wanted to do something real bad to her.  She was wearing the nose.  "Don't hurt me," she said.  "I didn't mean to steal nothing."

"I know," Tim said.  "It rode you.  Just like it's been riding me.  Only, after awhile, you don't know nothing else.  You can't do nothing else.  It's bored with me, I guess, but I'm not gonna let it go."  He grabbed her wrist then, and pulled her to her feet.  He crooked her arm behind her back so she couldn't go anywhere.

But when he reached for the nose, it snapped away.  Just like that.  It snapped off her smooth, young face and rolled through the opening into the hill.  The mound shuddered.  Then it collapsed, closing up the cave.  Then it trembled some more and started cracking open at the top.  Me, I ran for the trees, but Tim stayed put, frozen, panicked.  The kid was trapped in his arms.

I'm telling you now, this little torpedo of a ship come rising out of that hill--up smooth at first, like a periscope--and it was filled with red noses.  It had a big, curved window that they crowded into.  They were peeping out at us through those tiny nostril holes as if we were zoo animals.  Then there was a roar--not a big one--like the crowd yokking it up at the Bliss Baptist Bible School, no louder, and they shot into the sky, leaving a smell of burnt oil and ozone.

The little girl tore herself away and raced back toward the stream, wailing.  Nobody chased her.

I ran to Tim.  I couldn't stop shaking.  "I didn't see that.  I didn't see anything."

"Of course not.  Who'd believe it?"  His face was white.  There was no feeling left in him.  He followed me back to the road like a zombie.

Not long after that, Tim disappeared, and I had to work up a solo show.  I don't use makeup any more.  It's a class act, educational, no clown stuff.  And I don't like to talk about noses.

 

ell," he says, doing me another one of his long takes, "do you think I'm nuts?"

"The truth?" I says, playing it safe.  "I think you had it right the first time.  You didn't see a thing."

He nods.  We exchange pleasantries.  He says thank you, and he's about to take his mildew and his class act--educational!--out of the tent and back into the streets of Peoria, like someone who's just gotten the bum's rush.  Between you and me, at this point, I can't figure what to think.  Obviously, he has had some kind of extreme reaction, but I am not in a position to help.

Then he stops, like something's eating him, and he does me his sadsack take once more--number three--an exit tag, I figure.  "Let me see that nose one last time, pal, would you?" he says.

That's when I get it.

"You son of a bitch," I says, and I give him a shove.  He falls back onto the trunk.  His shoulders are scrunched up to his ears and he's holding his dukes in front of that ugly puss of his like he's ready for my sockdolager.

"I know what you come for," I says. "Venice, Florida, my ass!  That wasn't your partner's nose popped away.  It was yours.  Wasn't it?"

He tries to break past me to the mirror, where my nose is sitting in the little case, but I'm too fast for him.

"You almost had me, you bastard," I says.  "Nice patter, but a little weak on the blowoff.  Now you blow."

"It'll happen to you," he says.  "It'll leave you, just like mine left me, and then what'll you do, wise guy?"

"You're nuts," I says.  "I'm showing my nose the goddamn world.  We're doing the Edinburgh Fringe next month.  What do you think of that?"

"You better steer clear of orchards," he says, and he blows.

Well, the road crew is fixing to strike the tent.  I only have a few minutes left to load up my trunk and make the train for Chicago, where my nose wants to check out American jazz.  What it comes down to, like I said, is that that guy's troubles have nothing to do with me.  I use plenty of spirit gum, you can bet, and in my life, nothing's leaving nobody.