Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (28 page)

The black colobus is stacking children’s wooden blocks on the kitchenette table. He brought them back one night a couple of weeks ago, and since then he’s been trying to make an arch. After two weeks and Aimee’s showing him repeatedly how a keystone works, he still hasn’t figured it out, but he keeps trying.

Geof’s reading a novel aloud to the capuchin Pango, who watches the pages as though she’s reading along. Sometimes she points to a word and looks up at him with her bright eyes, and he repeats it to her, smiling, and then spells it out.

Zeb is sleeping in his cage: he crept in there at dusk, fluffed up his toys and his blanket, and pulled the door closed behind him. He does this a lot lately.

17.

Aimee’s going to lose Zeb and then what? What happens to the other monkeys? Twenty-six monkeys is a lot of monkeys, but they all like each other. No one except maybe a zoo or a circus can keep that many, and she doesn’t think anyone else will let them sleep wherever they like or watch kitten videos. And if Zeb’s not there, where will they go, those nights when they can no longer drop through the bathtub and into their mystery? And she doesn’t even know whether it
is
Zeb, whether he is the cause of this or that’s just her flailing for reasons again.

And Aimee? She’ll lose her safe artificial world: the bus, the identical fairs, the meaningless boyfriend. The monkeys. And then what?

18.

A few months after she bought the act, when she didn’t care much whether she lived or died, she followed the monkeys up the ladder in the closing act. Zeb raced up the ladder, stepped into the bathtub and stood, lungs filling for his great call. And she ran up after him. She glimpsed the bathtub’s interior, the monkeys tidily sardined in, scrambling to get out of her way as they realized what she was doing. She hopped into the hole they made for her, curled up tight.

This only took an instant. Zeb finished his breath, boomed it out. There was a flash of light, she heard the chains release and felt the bathtub swing down, monkeys shifting around her.

She fell the ten feet alone. Her ankle twisted when she hit the stage but she managed to stay upright. The monkeys were gone.

There was an awkward silence. It wasn’t one of her successful performances.

19.

Aimee and Geof walk through the midway at the Salina Fair. She’s hungry and they don’t want to cook, so they’re looking for somewhere that sells $4.50 hotdogs and $3.25 Cokes, and Geof turns to Aimee and says, “This is bullshit. Why don’t we go into town? Have real food. Act like normal people.”

So they do, pasta and wine at a place called Irina’s Villa. “You’re always asking why they go,” Geof says, a bottle and a half in. His eyes are a cloudy blue-gray, but in this light they look black and very warm. “See, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out what happens. But I don’t think that’s the real question anyway. Maybe the question is, why do they come back?”

Aimee thinks about the foreign coins, the wood blocks, the wonderful things they bring back. “I don’t know,” she says. “Why
do
they come back?”

Later that night, back at the bus, Geof says, “Wherever they go, yeah, it’s cool. But see, here’s my theory.” He gestures to the crowded bus with its clutter of toys and tools. The two tamarins have just come in, and they’re sitting on the kitchenette table, heads close as they examine some new small thing. “They like visiting wherever it is, sure. But this is their home. Everyone likes to come home sooner or later.”

“If they have a home,” Aimee says.

“Everyone has a home, even if they don’t believe it,” Geof says.

20.

That night, when Geof’s asleep curled up around one of the macaques, Aimee kneels by Zeb’s cage. “Can you at least show me?” she asks. “Please? Before you go?”

Zeb is an indeterminate lump under his baby-blue blanket, but he gives a little sigh and climbs slowly out of his cage. He takes her hand with his own hot leathery paw, and they walk out the door into the night.

The back lot where all the trailers and buses are parked is quiet, only the buzz of the generators, a few voices still audible from behind curtained windows. The sky is blue-black and scattered with stars. The moon shines straight down on them, leaving Zeb’s face shadowed. His eyes when he looks up seem bottomless.

The bathtub is backstage, already on its wheeled dais waiting for the next show. The space is nearly pitch-dark, lit by some red EXIT signs and a single sodium-vapor lamp off to one side. Zeb walks her up to the tub, lets her run her hands along its cold curves and the lions’ paws, and shows her the dimly lit interior.

And then he heaves himself onto the dais and over the tub lip. She stands beside him, looking down. He lifts himself upright and gives his great boom. And then he drops flat and the bathtub is empty.

She saw it, him vanishing. He was there and then he was gone. But there was nothing to see, no gate, no flickering reality or soft pop as air snapped in to fill the vacated space. It still doesn’t make sense, but it’s the answer that Zeb has.

He’s already back at the bus when she gets there, already buried under his blanket and wheezing in his sleep.

21.

Then one day:

Everyone is backstage. Aimee is finishing her makeup and Geof is double-checking everything. The monkeys are sitting neatly in a circle in the dressing room, as if trying to keep their bright vests and skirts from creasing. Zeb sits in the middle, beside Pango in her little green sequined outfit. They grunt a bit, then lean back. One after the other, the rest of the monkeys crawl forward and shake his hand and then hers. She nods, like a small queen at a flower show.

That night, Zeb doesn’t run up the ladder. He stays on his stool and it’s Pango who is the last monkey up the ladder, who climbs into the bathtub and gives a screech. Aimee has been wrong that it is Zeb who is the heart of what is happening with the monkeys, but she was so sure of it that she missed all the cues. But Geof didn’t miss a thing, so when Pango screeches, he hits the flash powder. The flash, the empty bathtub.

Afterward, Zeb stands on his stool, bowing like an impresario called onstage for the curtain call. When the curtain drops for the last time, he reaches up to be lifted. Aimee cuddles him as they walk back to the bus. Geof’s arm is around them both.

Zeb falls asleep with them that night, between them in the bed. When she gets up in the morning, he’s back in his cage with his favorite toys. He doesn’t wake up. The monkeys cluster at the bars peeking in.

Aimee cries all day. “It’s okay,” Geof says.

“It’s not about Zeb,” she sobs.

“I know,” he says.

22.

Here’s the trick to the bathtub trick. There is no trick. The monkeys pour across the stage and up the ladder and into the bathtub and they settle in and then they vanish. The world is full of strange things, things that make no sense, and maybe this is one of them. Maybe the monkeys choose not to share, that’s cool, who can blame them.

Maybe this is the monkeys’ mystery, how they found other monkeys that ask questions and try things, and figured out a way to all be together to share it. Maybe Aimee and Geof are really just houseguests in the monkeys’ world: they are there for a while and then they leave.

23.

Six weeks later, a man walks up to Aimee as she and Geof kiss after a show. He’s short, pale, balding. He has the shell-shocked look of a man eaten hollow from the inside. “I need to buy this,” he says.

Aimee nods. “I know you do.” She sells it to him for a dollar.

24.

Three months later, Aimee and Geof get their first houseguest in their new apartment in Bellingham. They hear the refrigerator close and come out to the kitchen to find Pango pouring orange juice from a carton. They send her home with a pinochle deck.

Courting the Queen of Sheba

Amanda C. Davis

We were still setting up for the matinee when Billy came tearing into the grassy back lot, face aglow. He strode right past me and stopped before Arthur Whitman, our minstrel. “You got to see this,” he panted. “There’s a new outside show, and it’s got a dead girl.”

Mr. Whitman and I passed back and forth a look of weary tolerance, as would a set of overtaxed parents. As a lady rider I had been with Prince’s Hippodramatic Show for three years; Mr. Whitman, for two. We knew better than to fuss over the games and exhibitions that poached our customers and took advantage of our advertising for their own profit. But Billy was the newest rider in the show. He had yet to learn.

“A dead girl?” said Mr. Whitman, who had the voice of a droll Easterner when not corked up in blackface. “Waxworks, more like.”

Billy shook his head vehemently. “Not
new
dead—
old
dead. And it’s real as Alice’s—uh—” Luckily at that moment he noticed me nearby, and he stammered into silence. Mr. Whitman’s eyebrows piqued (whether at Billy’s claim or the evaded vulgarism) and he agreed to join Billy for a closer look. I, not yet in my costume and therefore properly attired for a public appearance, followed.

The “dead girl” was housed in a canvas tent not far across the inn yard from our own. The proprietor sat on a collapsible chair near the entrance, beside a wooden marquee: SEE THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, FIVE CENTS. A fair price if she was as advertised, but outside shows never are, so Mr. Whitman offered the proprietor a free ticket to our matinee in exchange for entry, and the man relented. Had he made it to the circus, it would have made him a splendid bargain: seats could be had for a quarter. With all parties thinking they had made a shrewd deal, we slipped inside the tent to pay homage to the Queen of Sheba.

The tent was small; the Queen fit it snugly. She lay in a box with a glass top, barely five feet from head to toe, and every inch of her had shriveled to paper. Most of her body was wrapped in brittle cloth the color of sand that looked as if it might break at a touch, although I could see part of her shrunken hand and much of her skull, to which still clung several wisps of light-colored hair.

“The Queen of Sheba,” said Billy, in a satisfied tone. “She ain’t the looker she’s made out to be.”

Mr. Whitman bent over the case, deep in scrutiny. “Sheba or not, she has been very classically preserved. The weave of the linen is remarkably like those I have seen abroad—” Whether Mr. Whitman had ever been abroad was unconfirmed, but he listed several cities in Africa and Europe. I thought the linen remarkably like the ones we saw every day in cheap hotels. “Look at the narrowness of her torso below the rib cage. The internal organs have undoubtedly been removed. Billing her as the Queen of Sheba—a typical humbug. But she may well be a genuine Egyptian mummy.”

When we had seen our fill, we filed into the bright summer sun.

“It’s remarkable,” I said, as we were leaving, “that the proprietor let us stay as long as he did. Most men would have called us out long ago.”

“He knows we’re fellow showmen,” said Billy confidently. “Did right by us, didn’t you, friend?” He delivered the proprietor a friendly blow to the arm.

The proprietor tipped to one side, slid from the chair, and fell to the ground, stone dead.

Billy’s face went white as bone. Mr. Whitman had more sense. In a flash, he took the proprietor under the shoulders and dragged him into the tent to lay beside the box with the Queen of Sheba. He nearly didn’t fit. We picked up the sign (so as to discourage others from disturbing us) and stuffed ourselves into the tent: three living souls, and two dead ones.

Billy had his hand over his mouth. I suppose it was all he could do to keep from gibbering like a monkey. Mr. Whitman fetched him a box on the ear.

“Hold your mettle,” Mr. Whitman said to him. “No man dies of a bruised arm. Obviously, our friend perished quite naturally while we were within his exhibit. See, his face bears the signs of some heart trouble.”

I avoided the face of the proprietor, instead gazing into the desiccated face of the Queen. “I wonder, was he alone?”

“Alone?” barked Mr. Whitman. “He traveled with the Queen!”

“Heart trouble,” said Billy. He still looked quite pale. “I thought I was a murderer.”

“Only a fool,” said Mr. Whitman. “Come. We will leave this unlucky man with his display and alert Mr. Prince. He is our employer, after all, and to be frank, dealing with corpses is far beyond my level of pay.”

At the word “pay” Billy roused slightly. “Hang on,” he said. You could see the mossy water-wheel of his brain slowly churn up his thoughts. “This poor old coot was chargin’ a half-dime a person just to come in an’ look. Say we got a thousand people here and everyone wanted to see. That’s—that’s—”

“Quite a sum,” said Mr. Whitman.

I saw what they were aiming at, and felt obliged to intervene. “We cannot claim this man’s property just because he died in our presence.”

To our eventual detriment, Mr. Prince did not agree.

I must say this in our defense: we saved the proprietor from the potter’s field. In between the matinee and the evening show we managed to bribe the local Methodists into laying him out in preparation for burial in their churchyard the following Sunday. It cost a small fortune, but Mr. Prince was happy to pay it—we were, after all, expecting to rake in thirty to forty dollars per day showing the Queen. I think the arrangements slaked his conscience. They did not slake mine.

A paper inside the proprietor’s jacket told us his name had been Harold Collins. Billy went quite overboard in pretending to mourn “dear old Harry.” I didn’t speak to him all day. The situation turned my stomach. We had made Collins’s death into profit, his funeral into a play. Then again, he was—as Billy had noted—a showman. Perhaps he would have wanted to participate in one last spectacle.

The circus put on an impressive show that night. We riders performed tricks and tableaux, saddled and bareback, that left the audience gasping. Mr. Whitman capered beautifully. Our acrobats were Mercury; our strongman, Atlas. Quite simply, we astounded them.

We retired to our hotel, boarded the horses, ate late, and claimed our rooms. As a rule I boarded with another rider called Kathleen. Our habits suited one another. We turned in early. I am sure I fell asleep first. It must have been hours, but it seemed to be mere minutes before I awoke to the sound of Kathleen turning restlessly beside me in bed, whispering to herself.