Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (36 page)

“No,” the boy said, sniffing. “I want to see.”

Yes. Of course he did. They all did. And Josh would give them what they wanted. He had no choice. “I want to protect you,” he told Erin, this time lopping off her right arm. She looked at the dry stump in mild bemusement, then turned her radiant smile on him.

“I’m safe as long as I’m with you,” she said.

His right shoulder was an orchestra of pain. Blood gushed to the floor in torrents of bubbling claret, and he gritted his teeth. It was all he could do. The ability to scream had been taken from him. Everything had been taken from him, other than the abilities he had used most in life: the release of his own blood, and the damaging of the one he held most dear whilst hurting himself.

This was his great and secret show.

In the back row, behind the spectators and the little man in the tutu who clapped his hands in delight at each new blow, a familiar boy stood. His face was contorted with grief, and he wrung his hands in distress. Blood red tears dripped from his black eyes. His t-shirt declared to the world his preference for
BLIMEY’S DINER
.

“Should have let me in, Josh,” he whispered. “I tried to warn you, to save you. I try to save them all. They never let me in.”

The man in the tutu’s tattooed head spun 180 degrees on his shoulders, his neck bunching in pink ridges. His eyes locked on the Black Eyed Kid, and his mouth widened in an immense snarl. The boy slipped away through the red velvet curtain.

“I really must do something about that ’un,” the man said, adjusting his STEVE-O badge and turning back to the bloody onstage action. “He’s a pest, to be sure. Still, he never does any real harm. There’s no stopping them when they’re determined to see the show.”

In the background, the tune of an ancient calliope ground on and on, and the scent of popcorn and sawdust drifted on the thick, rancid air.

Learning to Leave

Christopher Barzak

When I was twelve years old, my mother broke one of the ceramic elephants my father had given her as an anniversary present. I’m not sure for which anniversary it had been a gift, but it was my mother’s favorite, a circus elephant, with gold braiding draped around its neck, a red fez on its head, and a brown glazed saddle on its back where an absent rider could sit if they’d wanted to. My mother used to let me play with her elephant collection whenever I took to a terrible boredom but remained well behaved, which was often. I was a good girl in those days. So often I’d found my mother crying over my father that, growing up, I tried hard not to cause her any more sadness.

The argument that led to the smashing of the anniversary elephant occurred sometime in the early hours of a Friday in late June. I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, a shriek that filled the house, followed by the smash of the elephant on the tiles of the kitchen floor.

Three days earlier we had celebrated my father’s birthday by driving to a truck stop on I-90 for dinner. This was my father’s favorite place to eat. At dinner, everyone had seemed pleasant and happy. I ate beans and potatoes and egg salad from the buffet. My mother settled on a small breast of chicken. My grandmother, who had lived with us for the past year, ate nothing but mashed potatoes. She said her gums were hurting her something fierce. My father ate steak with a ravishing hunger, sopping up the orange yolk of his eggs with triangles of toast. This was his favorite meal, whether it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Afterwards, we went home and watched television until we were so tired we fell into our beds.

When I woke the next morning to the sound of my mother smashing the elephant, I nearly turned over and fell back to sleep. But something, guilt or compassion or both of these things, made me sit up, brush my hair, and go down to see what was the matter.

My mother sat on the floor next to the elephant shards. My father was nowhere to be found. This was not a shocking scene really. Let’s get that clear right off. Mine was not a happy family, even if we managed to have pleasant birthday meals together. My mother was the saddest person I’d ever met. What made her sad was my father, who was also sad, but in a different way. My father was sad for some unnamable reason. He worked in a factory that made paint can lids, just the lids, and drank at a bar called the Roanoke nearly every day, after a ten hour shift. Sometimes he came home from the bar. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he went home with women who drank there, too. This was disrespectful to my mother, and also to me, his adolescent daughter who needed a good male role model so that she would not grow up to fall into romances with men who were just like her father, who she thought she could change, but that is another story altogether. I say all the things my father did were disrespectful, but the most disrespectful thing was that my father did nothing to hide these things from other people, or from his family. I might have scored his bad behavior test a little easier if he’d have taken our feelings into account more often.

I didn’t ask my mother what happened. The possible disasters associated with my father made a list of small but powerful things. He had either come home drunk that morning, or he had not come home at all. Instead of prying, I let her sit with her arms wrapped around her legs, her head on her knees, and sob. I took the broom from its corner, swept up the pieces of elephant, and disposed of them in the trash for her instead.

Later that day my grandmother would suck her teeth and shake her head at my mother’s weakness. “I could have told you he’d do that,” she’d say. My grandmother was a nasty woman and did not realize her own nastiness. She was fond of telling my mother all the bad things she knew about my father after he had just committed one of his atrocious acts. I think when my grandmother said things like, “I heard he goes round to that Sylvia Cordial’s house too. Don’t think he’s got only one hussy,” that she was intending to push a little so that my mother would finally break and throw him out. But all she managed to do with her well intended, badly reasoned, dirty laundry lists about my father was to make my mother cry.

My father didn’t come home all that day or night. It was not until the next morning that we’d hear from him. Let me revise: That I’d hear from him. I was the one who picked up the phone while my mother lay in bed to hear my father say, “Ellie, morning darlin’. Be a good girl and put your mother on the phone.”

I did not immediately move to do anything. Instead I decided to ask a question. This was very bold of me, if I do say so myself. I was not one to ask questions. I believed that, for the most part, this was between him and my mother, that they needed to solve their own problems and that I shouldn’t have to be involved. But I was lying to myself with that reasoning and slowly coming to the realization that I, too, suffered from their problems. It was when I realized I would have to live with them for six more years that I decided to ask my question. “What happened?” I asked. I figured when an elephant gets broken, blood badder than usual has been spilled.

“Just put your mother on the phone, Ellie,” he told me.

I covered the mouthpiece with the palm of my hand and thought about this for a while. Then I uncovered the phone and said, “No. I want you to tell me what happened.”

I waited for a while and my father finally said, “Ellie, God damn it! Do as you’re told!”

This time I listened. I hated when my father raised his voice. It made something inside me go rubbery with fear. So I did as he said and shouted up the stairs, “Dad’s on the phone!” But I didn’t hear my mother stir. I uncovered the phone and said, “No dice,” to my father, and he hung up from wherever he’d been calling from.

It didn’t take long for my parents to make up. Since this was a regularly occurring event in our household, they had their forgiveness rituals down pat. Later that night my father came home with a handful of flowers. He handed them to my mother through the narrow space of the chain-locked door. The flowers were wilted and hopeless, with roots and dirt dangling from their stems. He had obviously picked them from someone else’s yard. Still, when he begged her, she swung the door open and he thanked her by wrapping her up in his arms. My mother hated when he begged. She couldn’t refuse his ability to make her feel as though she was so powerful he’d do anything to make her happy again. And maybe that was true some, because for a while, he
would
try to make her happy, and me too.

I dreaded it when my father decided to take an interest in us. He’d give me things, but they were never what I wanted, and I would accept his offerings feeling as though I had to be the worst daughter in the world. Or at least in Ohio. Or at least in our town.

Every summer a traveling carnival dragged its sorry act through our part of the state, on its way across the country. It set up red-striped tents and sideshow booths and tables filled with memorabilia to buy. It played circus music, organ pipes, as loud as possible, hoping the music would have pied-piper effects on the local kids. Usually we never went—my father said nothing but Amish would be milling around those fairgrounds—but now, suddenly, he thought it would be the perfect cure for our woes.

So we went on what had to be the hottest day of summer, in the third week of July, and saw everything the carnival offered. There was a man who swallowed swords. There was a man who walked on a bed of hot coals. There was a woman who clenched a rope in her teeth and spun on it in midair. There was a woman they stuffed in a box, who twisted her body into unbelievable positions. Her manager would pierce her box with knives but she always managed to bend around their blades. They called her the Plastic Woman, and her manager would let you slip round to the back of the box to see her for a dollar. My father and mother and I went back to see her. Her legs were up behind her ears and her arms were spread across the width of the box, her hands placed flat against its sides. She gritted her teeth in a forced smile. We stared at her for a while, gaping, and the man behind us chuckled. He told my father he wondered what else she might do for a dollar. Both of them laughed and went off to have a beer.

There were other things to see at the fair, too. There was a large blue tent where two monkeys guarded the entrance. They took the ticket you bought to get inside. Sometimes they fought over which one got to take your ticket, and all the town mothers would laugh and say, “Aren’t they something?” while the kids rolled their eyes and sighed.

Inside the tent, bleachers were arranged in a circle against the walls, and pale orange sawdust covered the floor. A lion tamer stood in the center of the tent. He snapped his whip at the lions. A man on a trapeze threw women in the air to another man on another trapeze. The women’s bodies floated in space for what seemed like eternity, before the men grasped their hands and swung them to safety. They didn’t use a net, which my mother said was illegal, but nobody seemed to mind. There were elephants as well, which excited my mother. She said, “I haven’t seen a live elephant since I was nine years old and your grandpa, God rest his soul, took me to the circus.”

The elephants paraded behind their trainer, a man who made them roll over, sound their trumpets, stand on their hind legs, kneel down and pick him up for a ride, trot in circles, and finally stand on pedestals. My mother and I watched all of this in a glaze of amazement. Her own excitement excited me. She said, “Elephants are one of the smartest creatures on this here earth, Ellie,” and I nodded and sighed with wonder.

After the elephants performed we went to see them in what the ringmaster called their natural environment. The natural environment happened to be behind the tent. We ran back there as if we were rock star groupies with backstage passes, only to be disappointed to find the elephants behind the lion cages, tied to posts. It ruined the moment, really, to see them standing there, chewing on hay, completely and utterly mundane. A man fed them hay and my mother warned him that the posts didn’t seem strong enough to keep an elephant tied down. “Those posts,” she said, waggling her finger, “why they’re no bigger than saplings.”

The man laughed like we were dumb. He said, “These here elephants are too stupid to pull at their posts, ma’am,” and proceeded to tell us they’d been tied up since they were babies, when they weren’t strong enough to pull away. “They’ve learned to have a rope round their necks by now,” he said, grinning, reassuring us of something. “Really,” he said, “they don’t know the difference. They don’t realize they’re strong enough now to pull away.”

For the rest of the day, my mother behaved strangely. She gave me caramel apples and quarters to play arcade games, she let me drink five lemon shakes. A vacant stare was all she could manage, and sometimes she’d snap suddenly awake and say something like, “Yes? Come again?”

Finally, hours later, I told my mother I wanted to go home. My mother agreed, but we couldn’t find my father. We checked everywhere, and checked everywhere again, until finally one of our neighbors, Mrs. Banesville, a woman who played piano for the church choir and worked at the butcher shop cleaning carcasses, told us she’d seen him leave several hours ago. “With that Pliable Woman,” she said.

My mother corrected her. “It’s the Plastic Woman, Mrs. Banesville,” she said. To which Mrs. Banesville replied by nodding and blinking. “The Plastic Woman,” my mother repeated, as if we hadn’t heard her the first time.

My mother didn’t go home and cry like I expected. She didn’t wait up for my father or tell me to go to bed. She ignored my grandma, who paced the hallways with her arms waving wildly as she advised my mother on exactly what she had to do to save herself from this torture, which consisted of divorcing my father or else maiming him. My mother simply sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She stared into space and agreed with my grandma, but you could tell she wasn’t really listening.

I went out on the porch roof that sat just below my bedroom window, thinking things would be fine even though my father wasn’t home. He’d done far worse things to upset my mother in the past. I saw our neighbors, the Hendersons, return from the fair a couple of hours later, and watched as the yellow lights in their house turned off, one by one. I imagined Mrs. Henderson going from room to room, flipping off switches. I imagined her tucking her small children into bed, turning on a bedside fan. It was all very peaceful and strange, thinking about the Henderson family, and soon I fell asleep beneath the stars with the taste of caramel still in my mouth, and the organ music from the fairgrounds still piping in my ears.