Palisades Park (43 page)

Cliff made his entrance in his red, white, and blue jumpsuit, matching crash helmet, and a pair of aviator goggles that made him look like a cross between a jet pilot and a Fourth of July parade marshal. The crowd cheered as he gave them a wave before climbing up a short ladder and into the two-foot-wide mouth of the cannon. His head disappeared below the rim of the barrel, a drum roll played over the loudspeakers, and Cliff’s “trigger puller,” Phil, a young man about Toni’s age, made a great show of lighting the fuse.

“Five—four—three—two—one—FIRE!”

BOOM! With a thunderous crack and a cloud of smoke, the cannon fired, propelling the red, white, and blue figure of “Jetman” out at tremendous speed—head up, arms at his side. He flew in a parabolic arc above the first car … the second … the third … the fourth … and at the last minute, as he reached the net, Toni saw him do a half-somersault, turning his body over in time so that he landed safely on his back.

Toni had seen Victoria Zacchini of the Zacchini cannonball troupe perform at Palisades during the war, so she knew it wasn’t a real cannon and that Cliff was ejected by a blast of compressed air, with some gunpowder ignited for smoke and sound effects—but it was still an impressive feat.

The crowd, unaware of how the act worked, cheered as Cliff got out of the net and waved triumphantly.

Afterward, Toni lingered and approached him. “You’ve got a pretty slick act yourself,” she said. “That was a nice half-somersault into the net.”

“Aw, that’s the only part that takes any real skill,” Cliff said. “For the first part of it you’re literally unconscious.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. That compressed air carries so much kick you’re zooming out of there at seven or eight times the force of gravity. It literally pushes the blood from your brain down to your feet with such force that you black out for a few seconds. Hey, can I buy you a beer?”

He asked her with the same casual tone as when he spoke of blacking out in the middle of his act. This guy was a cool customer. “I’m nineteen, I’m not sure I’m old enough to drink in this state,” she said.

“I’ll buy it for you. This is a carny, no one’s gonna arrest you.”

At a grab stand, Cliff bought them a couple of bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and pretzels with mustard. As they sat munching and drinking at a picnic table, Toni said she found the four-car flyover very impressive.

“Aw, that’s kid’s stuff, really,” Cliff said, washing down a bite of pretzel with a swig of beer. “Ever hear of a cannonballer called the Great Wilno? I was his trigger puller for two years. At the New York World’s Fair he cannonballed over a gigantic Ferris wheel and into his net. The guy he’s got working for him now, Hank DuBois, catapults over
two
Ferris wheels.”

“Wow!”

“Scobey Moser won’t let me jump over his Ferris wheel—he’s afraid I’ll kill myself and someone on the ride, too—so I go for distance instead. I’ve been in this game for five years, I may not be the best but I was taught by one of the best—Wilno—and someday I
will
be the best.” He took a swallow of beer. “Ella Carver’s one of the best too, you’ve got a great teacher.”

“I know it.” She finished her pretzel and said, “What got you into it?”

“Wanted to be a trapeze artist. Wanted to fly. First time I saw Wilno, I thought: Man, that’s like flying a V-2 rocket! The speed hooked me, and the challenge of going higher, farther, faster—that’s what keeps me hooked.

“But higher and faster also brings in bigger dough and gets you booked on better circuits,” he said. “I don’t want to end up as a forty-miler.”

“What’s that?”

“A carny who never travels farther than forty miles from home,” he said with disdain. “I want to see the world and I want the world to see
me.
”

They talked for a little while longer, then Toni looked at the time—was it really almost midnight?—and said her goodbyes. “It’s been really nice meeting you,” she said, “but I better be turning in.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cliff said. “Nice meeting you too, Toni.”

Toni watched him go. Cliff had big ambitions—and he was also kind of delish. But after Slim she wasn’t about to jump into anything.

After Wellington the Central show jumped to Great Bend, then to Dodge City for its annual Boot Hill Celebration. The carnival was torn down and resurrected every five to six days in a succession of small towns, and Toni continued collecting press clippings from newspapers like the
Emporia Gazette,
the
Belleville Telescope,
the
Iola Register,
and the
Arkansas Valley Home.
She mailed these to her father along with her letters from the road, partly out of pride and partly to reassure him she was alive and unhurt.

She was having the time of her life.

Also pleasant was the continued attention she received from the quietly persistent Cliff. She’d finish a show and he’d be there, talking shop with Ella for a while before he and Toni would go grab some hot dogs, burgers, or coffee, talking about what they loved to do and dreaming about the time when they would make it big.

About the only drawback to carny life was the occasional after-closing party, which could get boisterous—Cliff dragged her to one, but Toni was not a party person and left after half an hour. Even Arlan, a quiet man most of the time, got a little boisterous when he brought company “home” to his corner mattress in the truck. It was always late at night, after Toni and Ella had gone to bed, and Toni never saw or heard any of the women, just Arlan’s grunts and groans; but the vibrations from the bucking mattress were prodigious and traveled through the trailer hitch and into the motor home, causing the aluminum flooring to oscillate with desire.

First Toni and then Ella—lying in their bunks, trying to get some sleep—broke into a fit of the giggles. Ella chuckled and said softly, “I’m glad the Lord made him such a strong, healthy man, but—if that floor doesn’t stop tremblin’ like this, I may have to go to confession tomorrow.” Toni whooped; this was the first remotely dirty thing she had ever heard Ella say. “Hush up, you. First thing tomorrow I’m unhooking that towbar.”

That seemed to solve the problem, and the act moved on to county fairs in Scott City and Goodland, Kansas.

In mid-June, on a cloudy, drizzly morning in Goodland, Toni was making a practice dive from ninety feet when a spray of rain blew in on a gust of wind just as Toni was launching herself off the platform. She didn’t notice anything dire at first, but as she came out of her somersault she saw that the tank below was moving
away
from her: the wind had rattled the tower and sent her off at the wrong angle.

Fighting panic, Toni twisted her body to the left, trying to reverse her trajectory. It was only this that saved her from an even worse fate: she straightened her body as best she could, entering the water mere inches from the tank wall. She missed colliding with it, but entered the water at an eighty-degree angle—it felt as though her entire left side had been slammed against a concrete wall, she heard very clearly the sound of her ribs cracking, a fiery lancet of pain stabbing from her waist to her armpit. Between the pain and the crash into the water she had no breath left in her as she sank like a brick to the bottom, bruising her right hip in the bargain.

She thought of Anne Booker Ringens, and then she blacked out.

When she came to, she was being carried out of the water by Arlan, who had her slung over his shoulder as he climbed the ladder. On the catwalk he set her down on her back as she began coughing up water and Ella squatted down to examine her.

“I—I’m okay,” Toni stammered, but when she tried to sit up the fire in her side flared up and she fell back down.

“Hell you are,” Ella said. “Can you breathe all right?”

Toni took a breath. “My side hurts when I breathe.”

“Try it again.” This time Ella put her ear to Toni’s chest, listening, then brought her head up. “No rattle, I think you managed to avoid puncturing a lung. But you’ve broken at least a couple of ribs.” She turned to Arlan. “Find out if there’s a hospital in this little burg, she’ll need X-rays.”

“Oh God,” Toni whispered, “I’m sorry…”

“Wasn’t your fault,” Ella said, “it was the wind. Wind’s the only thing I’m scared of, and this is why. Lord, I hate wind.”

Cliff quickly got word of what had happened and rushed to the scene, offering to take Toni and Ella to the hospital in one of the Chevy sedans he used in his act. Toni readily agreed, only to find herself hurtling across the Great Plains at ninety miles an hour. Cliff liked speed, all right. “For God’s sake, Cliff,” Ella told him, “she’s just got a couple of cracked ribs! If we spin out in this hot rod of yours she’ll crack her skull open too!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Cliff eased off the accelerator and they arrived safely at Boothroy Memorial Hospital, a two-story, redbrick building that looked more like a school than a hospital. But everyone there knew their business, X-rays were taken, and a doctor confirmed to Toni that she had fractured two ribs and severely bruised the cartilage surrounding three more. The doctor iced the ribs to get the swelling down as best he could, then taped the ribs with surgical gauze. “When you get home, ice the ribs, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, for the next few hours,” he told her, “and take two aspirin every six hours. If the pain becomes too severe, call me, I can prescribe you something stronger.”

“How long will it take to heal, Doctor?” Toni asked hopefully.

“Usually? About six weeks.”

“Six weeks!” Toni said in horror.

“Sorry. Get as much rest as you can, no exertion, no jumping off ninety-foot ladders, and you should be fine in about a month and a half.”

Toni didn’t know whether she should be depressed at being sidelined again, or just grateful to be alive. Though she grumbled when Ella told her, back at the carnival, to lay down in the trailer and get some rest, she fell almost instantly asleep and didn’t wake up until that evening, well after Ella’s fire dive. Arlan helped her outside and they sat at a card table eating grab-stand hamburgers, French fries, and root beer. Then, to Toni’s surprise, Ella came out of the trailer holding a cupcake with a single lit candle in it, and placed it in front of Toni.

“What’s this for?” Toni asked.

“Congratulations, you’ve just passed your baptism of fire as a high diver: your first broken bones. I’ve cracked ribs, broken legs, gotten second- and third-degree burns on my hands, and can’t count the number of times I’ve had to wear beefsteak on my eyes to take out black-and-blue marks before I could perform. I lived to dive again, and so will you.”

Toni felt a bit better hearing this, and the cupcake wasn’t bad either.

But it was frustrating to sit on the sidelines as Ella performed alone. Toni got the rest her doctor ordered, but the time she spent napping in the trailer was equal to the tense hours she spent inside listening, on the radio, to the unfolding crisis in Korea. On June 25, Communist North Korea had, without warning, invaded its neighbor to the south, the democratic Republic of Korea. Within four days the South Korean capital, Seoul, had fallen. A day later, under the auspices of a United Nations mandate to repel the invaders, President Truman announced he was sending American troops to aid South Korea in driving the North Koreans back above the 38
th
Parallel. Toni grew fearful that her father, a member of the Naval Reserves, might be ordered back to duty in this latest war, and placed a long-distance telephone call one morning to find out whether he was all right.

But Eddie just laughed and said, “They’re not reactivating old farts like me pushing forty, especially not when we have children to support. Don’t worry about it. Hey, those clippings you sent are mighty impressive. I’m glad to see you’re doing so well, and all in one piece, too.”

Toni laughed nervously, which only made her ribs hurt more, a literal stab of irony. “Yeah, everything’s going great,” she lied.

“Been a few weeks since I got the last one, you too busy to write Dad?”

“Yeah, busy,” she said, then, making a quick verbal U-turn, “So, are you back at Palisades this season?”

“Yeah, one more season and I figure I’ll have enough in the bank to open that—thing we discussed.”

“How’s Jack?”

“He’s right here, want to talk to him?”

Jack came on the phone, breathless: “Holy cow, Sis, have you seen what’s going on in Korea? These dirty Reds launched a sneak attack, just like the Japs did at Pearl Harbor!”

“Yeah, sounds awful.”

Then, with the same breathless excitement: “Toni, guess what? I’ve been accepted at the Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn! All the big-name artists have gone there, even cartoonists like Jack Kirby and Gus Edson—”

“That’s terrific, Jack, congratulations!”

They talked awhile longer and Toni hung up, vastly relieved that her father would not be going off to war.

Now she was able to relax, at least. Cliff visited at least once a day, sometimes spiriting her off—always at something approaching the speed of sound—in his Chevy for lunch at one of the town restaurants. After lunch he would kiss her goodbye, the kisses becoming ever more ardent; either I’m going stir-crazy, Toni thought, or I’m starting to fall for this guy. Luckily her fractured ribs prevented things from getting out of hand—but they didn’t prevent her from
thinking
about things getting out of hand.

At other times Toni would just sit outside Ella’s trailer with her or Arlan, who had played Coney Island’s Luna Park in its heyday and was a sideshow star with Barnum & Bailey for years. It seemed to Toni like quite a comedown from Barnum and Luna Park, and she asked him delicately, “Do you ever miss being a performer?”

“I still am performer,” he declared without batting an eye. “I perform so
you
can perform, you and Miss Ella. Everyone is performer in a carny.”

Toni smiled. “I guess they are, at that.”

“I like working shows. Show people don’t care where you come from. Don’t care what your real name is, what you did before, who you take to bed with you. They only care you do your job.”