Episode List

“…Pain is an unavoidable side-effect…” Shells are flying and weary medics attempt to help an array of maimed and screaming soldiers, one of whom has lost his legs and an arm…until Ben finally wakes up from this terrible dream. Pulling the sheets off his body, he sees that his arm and legs, too, have become bloody stumps…until, he finally wakes from his dream of waking. “They’re getting worse, aren’t they? The dreams.” says Lod, who is squatting nearby. But Ben stomps away from his offer of breakfast. Rita Sue finds Stumpy sitting alone in the car, drinking a morning beer and listening to the radio. She tries to entice Stumpy into a little “picnic” but the still grieving father says he can’t. Rita Sue is hurt. “Don’t you miss me?” she asks. Sophie delights Jonesy by bringing over a couple of baseball gloves, and the two enjoy a catch and conversation, as in happier days. But when the conversation turns to Sophie’s mother, Jonesy fails to defend Sophie’s new friend Libby, and the pleasant afternoon turns ugly. Samson collars Ben and sends him on a mission: he’s to recruit a freak with claws for hands, known in the area as “Scorpion Boy.” Samson gives Ben directions and fifteen dollars to bribe the boy’s parents if necessary. Brother Justin, meanwhile, is in a mental institution, receiving round after round of radical-and painful-therapies, involving icy submersions, insulin injections and rubber tubes. Interviewed by a doctor in a padded cell, Justin answers his questions. “I’ve always been what I am,” he says. “The left hand of God.” Asked what that means, Justin says, “It means I am no longer his servant.” As the doctor takes notes about Justin’s various psychoses, Justin, who is several feet away tells him he misspelled “excitation.” “I broke a man’s neck. I willed it and it was so,” Justin says. “Why don’t you try that with me?” the doctor asks. “Perhaps I already have,” is Justin’s reply. Later, as the psychiatrist walks away, he distractedly corrects a misspelling of “excitation” in his notes. Bouncing along country roads in the truck, Ben asks a sharp-dressed man the way to the town he’s looking for. Glancing at the Carny logo on Ben’s truck, the man offers a set of complex directions, and Ben sets off. At the carnival, Stumpy listens to Jonesy’s complaints about women. “What you need is to get your candle waxed,” Stumpy says, and tries to talk him into paying a visit to Rita Sue. Jonesy is surprised and refuses, but Stumpy pushes. “You could help me out.” he says. “I need a relief pitcher here.” Nearby, Rita Sue notices Libby and Sophie dancing and laughing as Libby practices her routine, and hatches a idea of her own-to get Sophie to join the cootch tent. “Why don’t you work the bally?” she asks, after sending Libby for a Nehi. “ I’m not asking you to strip, just get em worked up while Felix turns the tip.” Sophie refuses. “I got a job,” she says. Anyway “Momma’d blow a gasket.” When Libby returns, she knows immediately what her mother has been up to and is furious.Ben has tracked down the freak not a Scorpion Boy, it turns out, but a Lobster Gal. But as he enters the foul-smelling shack where she lives, the girl is already signing a contract with the sharp-dressed man who sent Ben on the goose chase. The man, Phineas Boffo, is an old colleague of Samson’s and offers his hand. “We freak finders gotta stick together,” he says. Angry at being outsmarted, Ben takes his hand, and terrible visions of Crusaders and torture appear. When Ben looks down, he has Boffo’s lodge ring in his hand, and he drives off, with the man yelling after him to give the ring back.Rita Sue rejects Stumpy’s suggestion about Jonesy. “I don’t roll with trade,” she says. But Stumpy persists. “Why would you want to do something like that to us?” But Stumpy persists. “It’s just another trick, he says.“Sophie argues with Appollonia over Rita Sue’s offer and her association with Libby. “At least she knows who her father is,” Sophie says. Her mother slaps her, without moving, and Sophie slaps her back. Before long she is back at Rita Sue’s tent.At the mental institution, Justin seems have a strange effect on the other inmates and on the staff. With a glance, he causes a nurse to change the radio station, and the sound of Tommy Dolan fills the room. “Where are you, Brother Justin,” he calls out to his audience. “Where are you?“Ben is filling the truck’s tank when he is approached by a man offering to sell a chair. The man is stranded with his dispossessed family, and they don’t have money for a new tire. The gas station proprietor yells at the man, but Ben offers some of Samson’s money to pay for the repair. As Ben pulls off, a piece of paper on a weathered bulletin board catches the Okie’s eye. Ben’s face is on the poster, along with the words: Wanted for Murder. The man quickly tears the sheet down.Sophie’s bally debut is a disaster, as a shocked Jonesy ends up beating an over affectionate audience member. Ben returns to the carnival and informs Samson that “some weasel beat me to the punch.” Samson laughs: “Sounds like the kid’s got your number, Phin,” he calls to his old friend. Phineas Boffo emerges from the cook’s tent and angrily demands his ring back. Ben hands the ring over to Samson, who returns it, but not before clocking its insignia.Outside the Dreifuss’s tent, Jonesy is torn over keeping the appointment Stumpy set up for him with Rita Sue. Eventually she comes out to get him. He’s nervous and tries to back out, but Rita Sue is all business. Gently removing his clothes, she’s startled by the look of Jonesy’s scarred knee. He is shaking as she touches it, then kisses it, and soon he is crying. Touched, Rita Sue kisses his lips and they embrace with increasing passion.Samson walks up to Management’s trailer, and, thinking her hears voices, steps inside. Lodz is inside talking and laughing, and mentions Scudder. Stunned, Samson looks over to the curtain separating Management, and a growling voice rasps, “Samson, leave us.“Standing alone outside, Samson looks at the trailer, and then at object he has been nervously rolling in his hand, an old watch fob. a medal of some sort. On its front is, the same emblem that was emblazoned on Boffo’s lodge ring. On the back, the initials: H.S.