a week. One night when Jeff was alone in the house with his stepmother, he was awakened by the sound of his bedroom door opening. Moments later he felt a soft, naked body next to his. Jeff sat up in alarm.
"Hold me, Jeffie," his stepmother whispered. "I'm afraid of thunder."
"It - it isn't thundering," Jeff stammered.
"But it could be. The paper said rain." She pressed her body close to his. "Make love to me, baby."
The boy was in a panic. "Sure. Can we do it in Dad's bed?"
"Okay." She laughed. "Kinky, huh?"
"I'll be right there," Jeff promised.
She slid out of bed and went into the other bedroom. Jeff had never dressed faster in his life. He went out the window and headed for Cimarron, Kansas, where Uncle Willie's carnival was playing. He never looked back.
When Uncle Willie asked Jeff why he had run away from home, all he would say was, "I don't get along with my stepmother."
Uncle Willie telephoned Jeff's father, and after a long conversation, it was decided that the boy should remain with the carnival. "He'll get a better education here than any school could ever give him," Uncle Willie promised.
The carnival was a world unto itself. "We don't run a Sunday school show," Uncle Willie explained to Jeff. "We're flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can't con people unless they're greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can't cheat an honest man."
The carnies became Jeff's friends. There were the "front-end" men, who had the concessions, and the "back-end" people, who ran shows like the fat woman and the tattooed lady, and the flat-store operators, who operated the games. The carnival had its share of nubile girls, and they were attracted to the young boy. Jeff had inherited his mother's sensitivity and his father's dark, good looks, and the ladies fought over who was going to relieve Jeff of his virginity. His first sexual experience was with a pretty contortionist, and for years she was the high-water mark that other women had to live up to.
Uncle Willie arranged for Jeff to work at various jobs around the carnival.
"Someday all this will be yours," Uncle Willie told the boy, "and the only way you're gonna hang on to it is to know more about it than anybody else does."
Jeff started out with the six-cat "hanky-park," a scam where customers paid to throw balls to try to knock six cats made out of canvas with a wood-base bottom into a net. The operator running the joint would demonstrate how easy it was to knock them over, but when the customer tried it, a "gunner" hiding in back of the canvas lifted a rod to keep the wooden base on the cats steady. Not even Sandy Koufax could have downed the cats.
"Hey, you hit it too low," the operator would say. "All you have to do is hit it nice and easy."
Nice and easy was the password, and the moment the operator said it, the hidden gunner would drop the rod, and the operator would knock the cat off the board. He would then say, "See what I mean?" and that was the gunner's signal to put up the rod again. There was always another rube who wanted to show off his pitching arm to his giggling girl friend.
Jeff worked the "count stores," where clothespins were arranged in a line. The customer would pay to throw rubber rings over the clothespins, which were numbered, and if the total added up to twenty-nine, he would win an expensive toy. What the sucker did not know was that the clothespins had different numbers at each end, so that the man running the count store could conceal the number that would add up to twenty-nine and make sure the mark never won.
One day Uncle Willie said to Jeff, "You're doin' real good, kid, and I'm proud of you. You're ready to move up to the skillo."
The skillo operators were the cr懈me de la cr懈me, and all the other carnies looked up to them. They made more money than anyone else in the carnival, stayed at the best hotels, and drove flashy cars. The skillo game consisted of a flat wheel with an arrow balanced very carefully on glass with a thin piece of paper in the center. Each section was numbered, and when the customer spun the wheel and it stopped on a number, that number would be blocked off. The customer would pay again for another