Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top

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1

Dunc folded the newspaper neatly, exactly as it had been folded when it was fresh, and placed it on his desk carefully, the edge of the paper lined up with the edge of the desk. Then he rearranged his pencil holder—an old distributor cap off a car—so that the older pencils, the shorter ones, were in front and the longer new ones were in the rear …

“Stop it!” Amos, his truly best friend for life, except for the time Dunc made Amos go hang-gliding and they got lost in a wilderness area and Amos was rich but grabbed a can of Spam instead of a bar of gold—Amos couldn’t stand it when Dunc was being neat.

“You’ve been fiddling with that desk and stuff for hours and hours.”

“No,” Dunc said, looking at his watch. “Altogether I spend about thirty-five seconds a day straightening my desk, and by rough calculations that thirty-five seconds saves me nearly seventy-four minutes through the day because I don’t have to hunt for things—”

“I’m going to strangle you.”

“—the way you have to search for things. Besides, what does it matter how much time I spend straightening my desk?”

Amos moved to the desk and picked up the paper, jerked it open, ripped a page loose (Dunc winced at the sound of the tearing paper), and held it out to Dunc. “This is why it matters.”

Dunc took the page of paper and scanned it. “It’s an advertisement. So what?”

Amos looked at the ceiling, started to think of a word to say that he’d seen written on a locker in the gym, then sighed. “What is it an advertisement for?”

Dunc shrugged. “A circus.”

Amos shook his head. “No, Dunc—not just
a
circus. This is
the
circus. This is the annual Chamber of Commerce circus.”

Dunc shrugged again. “Like I said, so what? A bunch of tacky costumes and bored animals and stale popcorn. We go every year, and every year it’s the same thing.”

Amos shook his head. “Not this time. This time, if you had taken the extra moment to read the small print at the bottom of the ad, you would have found that they are going to include a special section for amateur talent.”

Dunc nodded. “I read that. So?”

“Man—sometimes you are so dense. So every year Melissa goes to the circus, and I have been trying to get her to notice me.”

Dunc nodded again. Amos had long ago decided that Melissa Hansen was pretty much the cosmic center of the universe as he’d come to know it, and she pretty much didn’t think of him at all. Ever.

“So,” Amos said. “I’ve signed up for the amateur talent night at the circus. Melissa will be sitting right down front, and there I’ll be, right out there where she can’t miss me.”

“Amos …”

“On the trapeze.”

“The trapeze?”

Amos smiled. “You bet—I need something that shows, something great. I figured the trapeze was the best way to go. I thought about lion taming, but I’m not sure they’ll let you in with the lions—you know, if you’re an amateur.”

“Trapeze?” Dunc repeated, shaking his head slowly. “Amos, you can’t be serious.”

“Dead serious.”

“That might be exactly what it comes to—dead. Amos, you just got the neck brace off, or have you forgotten last week?”

Amos rubbed his neck. “No. I haven’t forgotten.”

“That was in the privacy of your own home, your own room—what will it be like on a trapeze?”

Amos held up his hand. “That was a fluke.”

“You were answering the phone and almost killed yourself.”

Amos rolled his neck from side to side and shook his head. “That isn’t quite right. I was
trying
to answer the phone, and I had a little accident.”

“Little accident? You totaled the house!”

“No—it wasn’t even close to the whole house. More just the kitchen and the back porch and part of the garage and the trash cans in the alley.” He paused, remembering.

Amos was always certain Melissa was going to call, and he always tried to get to the phone by the end of the first ring.

And never made it.

This had been a classic case of phone answering. Amos had been walking down the hallway that led off the front door to the house when he heard the phone ring.

Many things happened when the phone rang in Amos’s house. First, anybody and everybody in the house froze where they were in terror, wondering if they were in the line of travel between Amos and the nearest phone. This included Scruff, the family dog, who had been run over so many times, he almost no longer bit Amos when he went by.

In Amos’s mind the ringing phone triggered a whole different set of responses. First, as the ring started, almost automatically his legs began to pump, driving him into a run before he really knew which direction to move. Second, within a split instant, his brain
registered the closest phone ringing—his father had no less than four phones in the house (he kept increasing the number as the disasters occurred)—and the direction and exact distance to the phone.

All this happened in the first second.

It was during the second second that things usually began to fall apart, and this time had been no exception.

He’d had good form, almost classic, knees pumping, tongue out the side of his mouth, a good lungful of air for the start.

But he’d been going in the wrong direction when the phone rang.

Dunc had tried to explain inertia to him many times. A body in motion tends to stay in motion; every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

But applying it was always hard for Amos, and he’d made two good pumps, his hand out for the phone, when his brain ordered him to turn and go the other way.

The top half of his body began the turn, but his legs took one more step before swinging around, and in that step he came down on
Scruff, who had stopped dead in the middle of the hallway when the phone rang.

Scruff reacted normally, violently. He started down with Amos on his back and reached up and around and grabbed Amos’s foot, catching a fang in the looped end of Amos’s shoelace, then cutting sideways to get out of the way.

The fang pulled the shoelace with it, and the shoelace pulled the shoe, and the shoe pulled the foot, and the foot pulled the leg.

Like falling dominoes, Amos came over and down.

Except that he was still moving in full stride, his body still propelled forward, and his eyes widened in horror as he saw he was aimed at the center of the kitchen table, where his mother was busy preparing a snack after a hard day at work. She was holding a butcher knife.

She turned, her own eyes widening to see a careening pile of boy and dog and shoes coming at her end over end. She moved deftly sideways, throwing the knife into the sink to get it out of the way just in time for Amos and Scruff to hit the table, driving it through the
kitchen and onto the back porch, through the back porch and out across the small back yard into the trash barrels, swiping the trim off the side of the garage as they passed.

On the way by, Amos had snagged the phone from the hook, and he held it to his ear in the middle of the pile of wreckage in the alley, Scruff still hanging on his foot. He said: “Hello?”

But the wire had torn from the wall, and he’d been talking to nobody.

“No,” he said now, remembering, “it wasn’t the whole house at all. Now, let’s go to the circus—I’ve got to sign up for the trapeze.”

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2

The circus was on the edge of town and was almost not a circus. At one time it had been a big, three-ring spectacular show—but that had been back in the fifties.