Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top (42 page)

“Apologies,” the polished man said. “I got carried away with the welcome.”

Tarasov coughed. The crowd looked up. The paper birds dangled silent from his fingers and offered the group no show. They turned their backs to him.

“What a marvel you are, Mack Johnson,” Joey Docherty said.

“My companion, Tarasov Baranowski, is the showman. I am just a thin man with dehydrated skin and a visible network of veins, muscle and bones.”

“He is a large man indeed but giants do not make for many dollars. For one, their heads tend to poke from the top of their tents. We were forced to use the last pair as tent poles.”

Tarasov’s fingers twitched but did not conduct, giving the impression that the birds were dying. The giant sank to his knees and caused the earth to rumble. He met this new audience eye to eye. Tarasov raised his hands.

As Mack took a step back, he pulled Joey with him.

“He is angry.”

With the crook of the middle finger of Tarasov’s right hand, a bird pecked the monocle from a one-eyed man, and then returned to pluck an eyelash from his startled eye.

“Bravo,” a man said, clapping. He wore top hat and tails. “Bravo, bravo, I can offer ten percent of the door rate plus free tent and breakfast. Oh and give Sebastian his monocle back or the roustabouts will have an awful mess to clean up.”

As Mack found himself sitting in a cage with a rickety chair and wobbly table, he declared himself almost satisfied. Having access to the key would have sealed the deal.

Joey leant against the bars with his arms folded and sweat stains on his shirt. He grumbled on about his morning spent clearing up after the Human Bear and Sebastian after they got into a fight over the last sausage.

“There was meat, fur, and blood all over the benches and tables. Stoker had me carry them, plus the Bear’s carcass, over to a new tent he has set up next to your friend Tarasov’s pitch. That man is sure pulling in the dollars.”

Mack sighed. He needed a talent. The donation bucket that dangled from his cage contained cigarette papers, lollypop sticks, and spit. He didn’t even have the clothes on his back or the shoes on his feet. All Stoker had allowed him to keep were his soiled underpants and string vest.

“Roll up, roll up,” Barker called out as the crowds began to make their way over the dust-dry fields. “Grotesques galore. See the Wasting Human in his cage, visit the great Tarasov and his magical birds, witness a corpse escaping its coffin, drink with Siamese Twins in our saloon, and marvel at our Aerial Acrobats and Dancing Monkeys. Roll up, roll up.”

“He’s giving me a headache.” Mack held his head in his hands.

“They’ll give you a bigger one.”

Joey ducked under the cage as a gaggle of children darted into the circle. A round boy, destined for a future tent, stuck out his tongue. Twin girls spat onto the floor of his cage. A ginger-haired boy emptied his pockets of rotten apple cores and plopped them into the bucket one by one as if playing a game. Mack heard Joey snigger.

“Come closer, children,” Mack urged. “Let me tell you the secret of the . . . ”

Joey rushed out from beneath the cage with a roar. The children scattered. Mack slumped off his chair and clutched his stomach. It hurt to laugh, yet he couldn’t stop. Joey pulled at his lips, turning them into a frown.

“Tut.”

Breath wheezed as Mack thumped his fist against the floor.

“Tut, tut”—an umbrella rattled against the bars of the cage—“tut.”

“Pardon us, madam.” Joey clutched hold of his side.

“You should be ashamed,” she admonished.

She smacked the umbrella against Joey’s arm, and then poked it through the bars to prod Mack. Recovered, Mack grabbed hold of the end of the umbrella and twisted it hard. The woman let out a gasp as she did a full revolution. Her skirts fell over her head as she turned for a second time. A crowd began to gather.

“Roll up, roll up. See the Wasted Human and the Spinning Schoolmarm. Roll up, roll up.”

“Put me down.”

Mack couldn’t. His bucket was filling with every cent the crowd had. Pockets were emptying faster than she was spinning. A riotous applause went straight to his head. An eyeful of projectile vomit caused him to hesitate and left the Schoolmarm dangling upside down. She showered Joey’s boots. A paper bird flew between the bars and stabbed him in the arm.

Tarasov towered over the crowd. He cured their laughter. The giant picked the Schoolmarm off the umbrella and placed her on the ground. A flock of birds darted above her.

“Roll up, roll up. See the Giant Tarasov revive a Vomiting Spinning Underwear Flashing Schoolmarm. Roll up.”

“I’ll roll up my sleeves and give them another show in a minute.” Joey showed Barker his fists.

“Roll up, roll up. See the Roustabout dangle from a tent pole.”

Joey backed away. He slammed his fist against Mack’s cage and swatted at one of Tarasov’s paper birds as it mocked him. His humor evaporated. As the crowd followed Tarasov and his birds back to his tent, emptying Mack’s bucket as they departed, Joey pushed his face against the bars.

“Hey,” a voice called out.

As Mack looked up and Joey turned, twin bags of flour hit them both in the face. They sputtered, the expected expletives muffled. Joey’s fists and feet went into automatic pugilist stance. Mack wiped the flour from his eyes, lips and nostrils. As Joey boxed blindly at empty air, the flour-throwing child fled. Barker brought his fist up to Joey’s nose with a thud!

“Ouch, what did you do that for?” Joey clutched his nose. Tears streaked down his cheeks. His voice distorted. “I’m bleeding.”

“You need to remember your place, Roustabout.”

Barker shoved a brush into Joey’s hand. “Roll up, roll up. Watch as a couple of Fools realize their place in the Great Stoker’s Distorted Carnival & Sideshow.”

Joey looked at his brush.

“Hit him,” Mack urged. “Knock out his teeth.”

Joey sank back against the cage. His nose was a bloody red. Mack reached down and grabbed the keys from Joey’s belt. The roustabout didn’t complain as he jangled them in the lock. Dust billowed as he jumped down. Mack grabbed the brush and as he made a run at Barker, he glimpsed Stoker from the corner of his eye. He tripped on the brush, rolled forward and knocked Barker out cold with the end of the brush. He jumped up with a flourish, the flush to his cheeks concealed by the flour.

“Bravo, bravo,” Stoker clapped. “So you’re more than skin and bones, Mr. Johnson. We must get you a tent and a costume.”

“The green wig is an insult,” Joey sneered. “And if you want a red nose so much, I can thump you like Barker thumped me.”

Joey still wore the flour, as did he, though for Mack the flour was now part of his costume. Tarasov stood in the doorway to the tent, manipulating his paper birds.

“So what are you going to do?” Tarasov asked. “In your act, I mean.”

Mack looked at his sorry reflection. His lips down turned and the wig did nothing to complement his translucent skin. His sigh released a shower of dust that clouded the mirror. As his parents had long ago said, he was useless, and now he was about to prove it in front of a crowd.

“You should never have left the pit.”

Tarasov was right.

“Don’t listen to him, jealousy works his lips,” Joey whispered. “He won’t make a dime when your tent opens. I’ll help you.”

Joey took the wig off Mack’s head and placed it on his own. His fist wiped the mirror clean. They looked like twins—the before and after photos, life and de-wigged death. A breeze slipped into the tent as Tarasov left. A single paper bird perched on the chair. Life twitched through its wings though it had been de-strung.

“He wants me back in that pit.”

“He can want.”

“Roll up, roll up. Groom your beards, gleam your swords, repaint your faces, for the crowd is journeying across the field. Roll up, roll up. Be at your most grotesque, I hear the dimes jangling, I see the dollars peeling back in eager fingers. Be the jester. Roll up.”

Joey poked his bloodied nose out of the tent door. “They’re lining up outside Tarasov’s tent.”

Mack crushed the bird between his fists and left it balled up in the corner. “If the crowd won’t come to us, we shall go to it.”

He pulled a blue nylon wig, with a DuPont label, out of his costume box. They appeared grotesque twins. They should name themselves something hideous.

Mack and Joey crept between the tents, appeared only as glimpses of evil to scare the smallest of children. They made a pit stop at Henry the Haircutter’s wagon to steal scissors. Blades glinted as the snipped their way through the back of Tarasov’s tent. Like naughty children, they sniggered. They crept up behind the mighty Tarasov and his erratic aerial display. The giant squawked. Mack was amused to find his old friend so enthralled before an audience.
Shove him in the pit and leave him there.
They rushed forward. The crowd guffawed as the two clowns began to snip at the strings as if liberating the birds. The crowd screamed as blood spurted. Mack had snipped off Tarasov’s left thumb, Joey his right.

Joey grinned at the reaction of the audience. He stabbed the scissors into the giant’s chest and then placed his fingers to his red lips in an
oh!

“Did I do that?” He giggled.

A swarm of paper birds flapped their wings and attacked the two . . . clowns.

“Roll up, roll up. Visit us in the next town. Tell your neighbors of the Great Stoker’s Distorted Carnival & Sideshow. Roll up, roll up. Follow us to Wiggonsville.”

“Help me remove this grille,” Joey said, perched on the top of the ladder. “Stop sulking and do something. I’ll find you,” he called out to the departing carnival. “I’ll follow you to Wiggonsville or Columbus or wherever. Joey Docherty knows your routes. Expect to find Joey Docherty in your nightmares. You are not the only carnival in town. Joey will be famous.”

“They were.”

“You’re not the only carnival in the country. Gentry, Davenport, Cole Brothers, Honest Bill. They’ll come looking to sign us up. Okay, maybe not Honest Bill.”

“Do you like pigeon?” Mack asked.

“Pigeon pie?”

“Not quite.”

“We just have to wait,” Joey’s eyes bulged as he peered between the bars of the grille. “Next circus that pitches, we’ll be its stars.”

Winter Quarters

Howard Waldrop

Perhaps I should start “When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus.”

Maybe I should begin “As circuses go, it was a small one. It only had two mammoths.”

I’ll just start at the beginning: The phone rang.

“Hey, Marie!” said the voice of my friend Dr. Bob the paleontologist. “Do you remember Arnaud?”

“Was the Pope Polish?” I asked.

“Well, the circus is in town, and he’s in it. Susie Neruda took her nieces and nephews yesterday and recognized him. She just called me.” Then he paused. “You want to go see him?”

“I didn’t think you and circuses got along,” I said.

“For this, I’ll ignore everything in my peripheral vision.”

“When would you like to go?”

“Next show’s in forty-five minutes. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

“Uh, sure,” I said, looking at the stack of departmental memos on my desk. I threw the antimacassar from the back of my office chair over them.

He hung up.

When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus. Dr. Bob Oulijian, I mean. His father had managed two of them while Bob was trying to grow up. One day he showed up on the doorstep of his favorite aunt and said, “If I ever have to see another trapeze act or smell another zebra’s butt in my life, Aunt Gracie, I’ll throw up.” Things were worked out; Aunt Gracie raised him, and he went on to become the fairly respected head of the paleontology department in the semi-podunk portion of the state university system where we both teach. What was, to others, a dim, misty vista of life in past geologic ages, to him was, as he once said, “a better circus than anyone could have thought up.”

We whined down the highway in his Toyota Heaviside, passing the occasional Daimler-Chrysler Faraday. A noise dopplered up behind us, and a 1932 bucket-T roadster came by, piloted by a geezer in motorcycle goggles.

“Soon you’ll be studying
them
,” I said to Dr. Bob, pointing.

“Oh,” he said. “Dinosaurs.
Très amusant.
”

Did I remember Arnaud?

It was while we were all—me, Dr. Bob, our colleague Dr. Fred Luntz the archaeologist, Susie Neruda (neé Baxter)—undergraduates
here
, at this podunk North Carolina branch of the state university, just after the turn of the millennium, that Arnaud showed up. We assumed he was French, maybe Belgian or Swiss, we didn’t know, because he didn’t talk. Much, anyway. He had that Jacques Tati-Marcel Marceau-Fernandel body type, tall and thin, like he’d been raised in a drainpipe. He was in the drama department; before we knew him, we knew
of
him.

About half the time we saw him, he was in some form of clown déshabille, or mime getup. We assumed it was for the acting classes, but a grad student over there said no, he just showed up like that, some days.

“Does he do anything special?” I asked Dr. Bob. “Did Susan say?”

“I don’t think so, or she would have. I’m assuming he mostly puts out fires inefficiently and throws pies with accuracy, unless circuses have changed a great deal since my time.”

For what do we remember Arnaud?

It was in November, his first semester, and he was out on the east mall passing out flyers, in full regalia: a polka-dot clown suit, clownwhite, bald headpiece, a hat the size of a fifty-cent flowerpot. He had a Harpo bulbhorn he honked as people came by.

The flyer said:

HITLER THE MAGNIFICENT

An Evening of Transformational Sorcery

JONES HALL 112

7 p.m. NOVEMBER 8th

Well, uh-oh.

It wasn’t an evening, it was more like fourteen or fifteen minutes.

It wasn’t sorcery, but it was transformative: it transformed him right out of college. To say that it wasn’t well received is bending the language.