I roll down toward Seagate and pull to a stop and park on Mermaid Ave., around the corner from 37th and the ragged-ass end of the Riegelmann Boardwalk.

– Yeah, funny you should say that about it being none of my business.

I take out the big.44 and flip the cylinder and make sure I filled it with big hollow-point bullets. I did.

– Because I’ve been thinking just those words for the last half a fucking hour.

Lydia points at the gun.

– Planning to use that, Joe?

I drop the revolver in my pocket and take out the hogleg and break it open.

– No plans, just hopes.

She opens her door and swings down.

– Do me a favor, keep it in your pants.

We walk down the sidewalk, windblown sand crunching under our feet. We make for the lights flickering on the far side of the boardwalk.

She inhales sea air.

– Smells good.

I inhale smoke.

– Sure does.

We walk out on the boardwalk.

Lydia stops.

– She could change everything.

I stop.

She’s looking out at the water, a big moon rippling on the waves.

– The girl, Joe. Sela says. Joe. She could change everything.

I drop my smoke and grind it under my heel.

– Don’t talk crazy, Lydia. You’re smarter than that.

And I walk away from her and look down at the canvas tent, painted black and speckled with red gloss, that juts from beneath the edge of the boardwalk, pennants flapping from the center pole, torches burning at the entrance, a big banner cracking in the wind as a tall guy in a top hat and a tailcoat spiels in front of it.

– FREAKS! That’s rightytighty, ladeez and gentilemans! Real! Live! Freaks! Not the cut-rate varietals one finds down the shore! But the Real McCoy! Bearded ladies and tattooed men and wild Borneo savages are best left to the amateurs! Within the folds of this modest tent we will reveal to you actual FREAKS of nature! Creatures that spurn the light of day! Fearful, unnatural sports of fate that were never meant to be! Step up and step in, ladeez and gentilemans! A show unlike any other! A spectacle! A horror show! A festival of disgust and blood! Step! Right! Up!

Lydia comes alongside me.

I look at her.

– Can we leave now, or do we have to sit through this shit?

Apparently we have to sit through this shit.

– Ladeez and gentilemans!

I spill the last unpopped kernels from the red and white striped popcorn box into my mouth and crunch them.

– Know what would make this better?

– Never before on any stage at any time have you witnessed an appetite like the appetite of…The Glasseater!

Lydia is staring through the torch-lit gloom to the tiny stage where the MC gives the tails of his shabby coat a flip and bows as the curtain parts and reveals a scrawny dude in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.

– If it wasn’t utterly exploitive?

Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater’s neck while the other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails, shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent sewing needles.

He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit, dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.

I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.

– If I didn’t know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.

The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.

The frown on Lydia’s face carves itself a little deeper.

– Waste. Immoral waste.

I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the remainders.

– Not your blood.

She glances at me, shakes her head.

– Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It’s mine and it’s yours. And more than that, it’s the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what’s going on.

The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.

Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for the next act.

– That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone, someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole just wasted. It’s like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC on full blast. Makes me want to puke.

The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with “Jailbait.”

The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples, sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.

I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.

– Then I’m guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.

The MC raises his arms.

– Ladeez and gentilemans! The esoteric and erotic mysteries of the Far East as revealed by Vendetta and Harm!

Lydia jumps from the bleachers, puts her head down, storms across the stained and threadbare carpets laid over the sand and ducks out of the tent.

I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a cane. More blood flows.

Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn’t to demonstrate how one lays on nails without being harmed, I follow Lydia.

The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean, streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that half the tent hides beneath.

Lydia is stomping over the sand, kicking up little plumes with her Docs, headed for the tide line.

– Come get me when it’s over. If I stay, I’m going to make a scene.

I peek through a gap in the entrance, see what the chicks are up to, and figure she’s right.

My Zippo won’t hold a flame in the wind so I take a light from one of the torches and lean against a piling, listening to the rock ’n’ roll and the gasps and screeches of the audience, smoking and looking at the ocean in the moonlight. Counting seconds till the show is over and I can collect the Freaks Boss and get back to my life. Such as it is.

– Bum one of those?

It takes me a second to smell him, another second to see him. The first because he comes at me from downwind, the second because he’s a fucking midget.

I squeeze the pack between my fingers, feel three left, give him one.

He takes the smoke and pats the pockets of the denim overalls he wears over his bare, blue-tattooed torso and arms.

– Light?

I offer him my smoke and he lights his own and gives mine back.

– Thanks.

I take a drag.

– So what’s it like?

He scratches a wrinkled bald head.

– What’s that?

I hold my hand three feet over the sand.