Free Under the Electric Sky by Christopher A. Walsh

carnival virus and that became the thing to say if anyone asked why they did this kind of work. “It gets in your blood,” most carnies still explain of their careers with personal satisfaction.
    But it stood to reason with Soggy that if they all had a common blood condition, then they were all related. It wasn’t a virus at all, but rather a lineage, a bloodline, a DNA that separated carnies from other men. The Bill Lynch Shows was a family, he came to realize and a tight-knit one at that. There were spats between workers on the midway, but it was just like any other family. Everyone could get over disagreements quickly, like two brothers fighting in the dirt and then playing catch an hour later.
    Over the years, Soggy became a central figure in the family by force of his personality. The adventure was upon them and Soggy took a lead role amongst the carny brethren. He worked the old charm effortlessly and everyone instantly liked him, the way people had when he was a teenager. He had a down-home sense of humour, an ineloquent pattern of speech and had developed a magnificently rusted out voice caused over years of heavy smoking. He still wore a dark pompadour, brushed forward and down from the top of his head, leaving only a small space for a forehead between his hair and eyebrows. When he spoke, people automatically listened and he always had time for a laugh. There was something real about the man and every carny identified with him. Who else could get away with telling a female carny she looked like she was putting on weight? That was Soggy striking for the heart again and people respected him for it, even if there wasn’t much tact involved. Everyone went along with the adventure and Soggy was at the centre of it, the place he always managed to be.
    The boxing ring had provided excitement in the early years, but the carnival was where he belonged and by the early 1950s he had given up boxing to pursue it completely with no regrets. He was a king in the City of Lights and it was everything he had imagined. He was making decent money running a few of the games and having a hell of a time on the grand adventure.
    He was a local boy making good in the rough world of the carnival and as he went along he began to understand Lynch’s ethos of a Maritime-run carnival by and for the people of the Maritimes. Not only did he understand it, he was an integral part of it.
    By the 1960s, Soggy was second in command on the number two unit, under Jack, travelling from town to town across the Maritimes through the warm, breezy summer air. Anywhere it blew, that’s where the Bill Lynch Shows would appear. Things were looking good for this new king of the lights, but there was always a matter he had meant to deal with back home and it was now starting to wear at him. Back when he was fifteen, he had met a young woman by the name of Eleanor MacDonald at a local dance and of all the coincidences, she happened to live on Dorchester Street as well. Soggy and Eleanor had kept a relationship going for over fifteen years, even though the last few summers had taken him out of town. Eleanor worked at a restaurant in Charlottetown and had two weeks of vacation each year which she spent with Betty, Soggy’s sister, travelling around with the show. The girls would meet up with Soggy and the carnival in North Sydney and travel through to Truro, working the cookhouse or a joint, wherever they were needed. Betty would tease Soggy about the long and yet-to-be-official courtship with Eleanor to which Soggy would reply, “Not until I have a place to live.”
    So Betty solved that issue by selling her brother a parcel of land next to her house which, again, happened to be on Dorchester Street, next door to the old home where their mother had operated a convenience store after Frank had suffered a stroke. Soggy built a house with the money he had earned out on the show and he and Eleanor legitimized their long-term