The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (11 page)

Every night and practically every matinee, my admirer was there,
in the audience, at the back, a man in a fine suit and snakeskin boots and
a hat made of fine brushed suede leather and sometimes you'd see him
checking the time on a pocket watch that must've cost him a fair penny. All of this added up to an aura of mystery, a hard fact being that the
thing women like most about men is generally the thing they can't put
their finger on. When he looked at me, unblinking, from back there in
the Superba tent, I could never quite tell whether he was someone
who'd do a good job protecting me or whether he was someone I needed protecting from, and it was this mixture that grabbed my attention.

We finally met the last night in Galveston. I was rounding the
Superba tent corner, fixing on a cup of coffee at the pie car, when I ran
headlong into him. He was so broad his shadow was twice the width of
mine and for a second it felt like I'd wandered into the darkness cast by
an eclipse.

He slowly removed his hat, and I had my first close look. His face
was rectangular, the jaw and forehead taking up a goodly portion of
surface area, and his hair was cut short enough it stuck straight up,
looking sandy and stiff as brush thistles. Though he wasn't handsome,
he was close to it, with the rugged look that comes from having the sun
grow creases around the eyes. Plus he was older, probably Dimitri's age.
(Advice to women: if you want to attract older men, just have your father
die on you when you're thirteen. They can practically smell it on you.)

He just stood there, slowly rotating that big brushed-suede hat in
his hands, until finally I had to say, "Is there something I can help you
with, mister?"

"No ma'am," he said in a voice quarry deep, "I just wanted to tell
you how much I enjoyed your dancing."

"Thank you."

"I think you're the best one up there."

"Well. Thank you again."

"No, really, ma'am. I mean it."

There were a few moments of silence. I suppose he was hoping
I'd continue the conversation, a chore Texan men usually leave to the
women. Finally, all he could do was say, "Name's Williams. James
Williams. From Beaumont, Texas. Pleased to meet you."

"My name's Mary Aganosticus."

"Funny name."

"Funny world."

He smiled, and a whole whack of wrinkles I hadn't seen before
came trampolining to life. Then he put his hat back on his head, tapped
the brim and strode off. Late that night we made the jump to Pasadena,
just outside of Houston, and he went back to whatever it was that kept
him busy when he wasn't taking up space on the last stringer at a
Superba show.

When we finally emerged from Texas (you can get lost in there
for months, the damn place is so big), we spent the winter in Arizona,
New Mexico, Nevada and Southern California, the first two not even
states of the Union yet so it was like visiting different countries, with
different money and cooking and types of houses. We headed north
once the weather turned spring-like, which in a city like San Diego happens sometime around mid-February. Mostly I was learning how to fit
in on a show, which wasn't hard, a carnival not being all that much different from a madhouse. For one thing, whenever people talked about
themselves you heard pretty much the same stories as the ones I heard
in the madhouse. Stories of woe, mostly, with heavy doses of bad planning tossed in. I was already used to sleeping in a room full of others,
so occupying a stateroom with the other Dancing Girls of Baghdad
wasn't a hardship. The food was a crime, powdered this and dehydrated that, without fruit or anything milk or meat related, but I was used
to that too.

Also: in the hospital I had a place to go to when I needed to be
alone. On walk mornings, when the lunatics began to wander in different directions, I'd drift off to a big old live-oak with a U-shaped limb
that grazed the lawn before ricocheting back skyward. That's where I'd
take up. If I was facing away from the hospital, I'd study the gaps in the
forests or the knots in the fence or the types of birds scooping up
worms after a nighttime rain. If I was facing toward the hospital, I'd watch those big-armed orderlies, ex-farm boys mostly, corral the
lunatics. This was a difficulty in and of itself, for when a patient was led
back to the middle of the lawn she'd often as not wander off as soon as
the orderly went to grab another, so that after a while the orderlies got
impatient and resorted to foul language and throwing the lunatics over
their shoulders, like bags of sorghum, just to keep them in one place for
a minute.

(More advice? In life you take your laughs where you can get
them.)

Same thing on a show, and by this I mean people finding a quiet
place to go off to. Otherwise the constant din and people were liable to
drive you nuts, the consequences of which I've already related. It's
called "finding a corner" and eventually others get to know where
yours is and they respect it.

Mine was off the midway, in the Wild Animal exhibit, next to the
cage filled with a big old Siberian tiger named Royal. Was the first tiger
I'd ever seen in my life, which doesn't explain the attraction because I
also'd never seen elephants, lions, zebras, camels, leopards, Friesian
horses, Sicilian burros, brown bears, anacondas, tapirs, mandrills,
cockatoos, bald eagles, dalmations, yaks, gila monsters or pygmy hippos. And if it sounds strange that a person could reach twenty-two
years of age without laying eyes on a wild animal, remember there
were hardly any zoos back then. Only travelling menageries, and if any
had come to Princeton when I was little, my parents were too busy
catching TB or getting torn to bits in farming accidents to take me.

Now, you take a Siberian with good bones and round paws, like a
Bengal, and you've got the most magnificent creature you've ever seen,
as they can weigh as much as eight hundred pounds with fur as orange
as New Mexican soil. But most aren't like that. Most are leaning toward
the scrawny end of the spectrum, with a tall arching backbone that adds
a sway to the stomach when they walk. Long-limbed and a little dim,
describes most Siberians, which is why they usually warm seats during cat acts. Royal was no exception, a moving bag of bones he was, though
with eyes the green of jewellery and the dignified nature all tigers have.
I'd come at day's end, when the crowds were gone, and keep him company, reading a book or doing my knitting or having a sandwich from the
cookhouse while that lonely old tiger gnawed on a horse hock. Or sometimes I'd deliberately not bring anything, so as to force myself to do
some thinking, my not yet understanding that the best pondering tends
to get done when your mind's occupied with small, repetitive tasks.

After a while I'd get frustrated and say out loud, "What do you
think's gonna happen to me, Royal? Something good, maybe?
Something worth sticking around for? just how is it a person's supposed
to know?" To this he'd arf, or do nothing, or chew louder, or give me a
low rasping grrrrrrrrrrr which in feline talk always means the same thing.

I'm a tiger. Don't take me lightly.

All of which I'm telling you because my fondness for Royal was
the reason I got to know the guy who ran the Wild Animal Show. I'd
seen him working before we met, a well-proportioned man in a donkey
jacket and strawboater, ordering the groomers to clean out this tent or
that, or give extra feed to such-and-such an animal, or scrub the mange
off of this-or-that elephant. For the longest time we never talked, he
being a boss and me a dancing girl and the line not being mine to cross.
Yet one day, after I'd been with the show maybe a month, he seemed
keenly interested on doing just that, for he came up and smiled and
plunked himself beside me. With him was an older Negro, who sort of
hung back to one side, looking fidgety.

"Now, you tell me. When you were a child and you went to the
circus what was it you remembered afterwards? The clowns? The
acrobats? The sideshow? Maybe. Maybe not. I'll tell you the thing I
remembered the most. I remembered the animals. The elephants, the
roar of the lions, the dog and pony, the dancing bears. Am I right?"

Was such a bald introduction I could do nothing but answer the
question seriously.

"Can't say for sure," I told him. "I never went to the circus as
a kid."

"Jesus," he said, laughing. "That twang. You really are from
Kentucky, aren't you?"

"I am."

"I'll try not to hold that against you."

"I'd appreciate that."

"My name is Al G. Barnes. People call me Lucky Barnes. This is
my educated valet, Dan."

I was feeling chagrined, for I've never taken well to teasing,
which I realize is a fault but one I suffer from nonetheless. So I just said,
"I know who you are."

Al G. was still grinning and looking into a place neither near nor
distant. Seemed to me he enjoyed my being a little difficult, which is
a trait common to men born for success: they look at problems as
games instead of hindrances, as though they were nothing more than
crosswords in a newspaper. After a time, he wiggled himself a little
closer to me and resumed talking in a voice that'd lowered itself considerably. This hushing of tone signalled something to Dan, exactly
what I wasn't sure, though within a few seconds Al G.'s educated
valet was backing away and backing away until he just plain wasn't
there anymore. Even Royal turned and lay down and farted.

"In that case," Al G. Barnes said, "I won't beat around the
bush. I saw the Superba show again last night. Exquisite. There's
something about you, Kentucky. Something I can't quite put my finger on, and that's what this show needs. Performers with mystique.
Intrigue. Appeal with a capital A. Plus that stomach of yours-flatter than Iowa, especially considering what's above it and what's
below it. I think I'll have a little meeting with Con T. about you.
Maybe get you on to something better. Something that'll earn you a
little more."

"You'd do that?"

"Sure I'd do that. I will do that. I'll do it tomorrow. So. How's
about puckering up?"

Now there are two types of philanderers. There're those who do
it because they never got past the age of sixteen and those who do it to
scare. Al G. was the least objectionable of the two, so I let him kiss me
a minute, mostly because I'd been feeling lonely and didn't mind the
attention. His lips were warm and gentle, and like all handsome men
he concentrated on his kissing technique rather than the person he was
kissing. Still, I didn't mind, human closeness being human closeness,
until I felt his right hand slip inside my blouse and squeeze my nipple
between his second and third fingers. This I let continue for two or
three seconds only, just long enough for it to feel silly, as I knew for a
fact Al G. Barnes had at least one wife everyone knew about and
another they pretended not to know about. So I pushed his hand
away, saying, "There's a bit of my first husband in you" by means
of explanation.

"Is that bad?" he asked.

"About as bad as bad gets," I answered, pretending to be more
amused than I really was.

Without missing a beat he peered into the middle distance and
said, "If all goes well I'll be out on my own again next year. A threering with nothing but animal acts. I've had a few setbacks but you just
watch. What do you think of this: `The Show That's Different'? It's
got a ring to it, don't you think?"

I told him I thought it was fine, despite the real thought in my
head: heavens to Betsy it's like his lips weren't just pressed against mine
and his hands all over my chest. It's as though nothing like that even
happened. At that moment I knew Al G. was going to do anything he
set his mind to, the ability to recast history being rare and wondrous
and one central to the art of crowd pleasing.

Naturally, I never really expected him to talk to Con T., the I'm
gonna tell the boss about you being a tried-and-true way of getting young impressionables to open their hearts and, more to the point, their knees.
Miracle of miracles, the next day I spotted Con T. Kennedy, manager
of the Great Parker Carnival number-two unit and brother-in-law of
C. W. Parker himself, sitting smack in the middle of the first stringer.
He was eating midway peanuts and keeping a keen eye on what my
belly was doing. Later that day he sent someone to fetch me. I went to
his tent. He was smoking a cigar the size of a cucumber while eating a
similiarly sized frank and bun; back then circus and carny managers did
everything they could to be like John Ringling, and that included growing fat and impulsive.

"Mary," he said, "take a seat."

I did.

"Gonna make this quick"-here he took his cigar out of his
mouth and pointed the soggy end in my direction-"I saw the show
today and Al G.'s right. You got yourself an attitude that's interesting
to the opposite sex. There's a bitterness in you and I'd bet my bottom
dollar it's been hard won. Am I right? Don't bother answering, I don't
need to know. I only know it's there and it makes the rubes think
there'd be trouble were they to mess with you so naturally that's the
one idea get's planted in their head and won't go away. Messing with
you. Not the other girls. You."

I sat there, blinking.

"We need someone to do a Serpentine at the end of the evening
show. Something to give it a real kick. As of now, you'll be getting $6
a week."

He looked down, puffed on his cigar and started scribbling in a
ledger. I waited for his not-talking to extend past a few seconds and signal the meeting was over. Finally, I figured we were through, so I got
myself up and I walked myself out.

That night. Little Miss Mary Haynie of Princeton slash Mary
Aganosticus of Louisville, hair dyed black and eyes festooned with fake lashes long as matchsticks, walks onto a stage gone completely dark. In
front of me's a screen made of a fibre fine enough you could half way
see through it when a light was shone. I drop my robe and, hidden from
view by the screen, I'm naked as the day I was born, my body enfolded by hot beery tent air. I can practically feel it against my unclothed
skin, and it's a feeling makes me scared and tingly at the same time.
Behind me, Ned Stoughton lights a candle and magnifies it through
glass so my silhouette is cast on the screen in front of me, and when he
does I close my eyes and picture the languid way Royal moves when he
has a bead on something, practically flow it is, more music than movement, and I impersonate that motion, writhing and moving in such a
stimulating manner a roomful of men turn into a roomful of silent
boys. They don't make a peep-in fact, they do nothing but sit and
gape, like they were in church instead of a tent rank with cigar smoke
and paraffin fumes and the perspiration produced by men who've just
finished losing a week's feed money. I keep my eyes closed the whole
time, feeling heady and warm and in control, which is a weird way to
feel when naked in front of a tentful of men, a goodly percentage of
whom have put their hats on their laps for fear of embarrassment. After
exactly seven minutes, Stoughton snuffs the candle and I put my robe
on and sneak out before the kerosene lanterns are lit and the rubes look
at themselves, red-eyed and disbelieving and wishing they had different wives to go home to.