The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (59 page)

"Of course," he said. "For Pete's sake, he would have killed anyone else who tried to wrestle him. Common sense, Kentucky."

We talked a little while longer, mostly about the old days. Then, as suddenly as he'd woken, he tired. Seemed like one minute he was gesturing with his hands and the next minute he was sinking back on his pillow and pulling the blankets to his chin and saying in a voice gone
breathy, "Maybe you should go, Kentucky. I'm feeling a little punk...."

A second later he was asleep. My cheeks dampened, for he'd been
so animated and Al G.-like I'd forgotten the reason I was visiting was
his being on his deathbed.

I stayed in Portland a lot longer than I'd originally intended. I'd
visit during the mornings and run errands for Margaret in the afternoons. Often she'd invite me to stay for dinner, but I'd always beg off,
saying I had plans with other friends in the city. If I was hungry I'd go
eat someplace, though mostly what I'd do was spend the night walking.
Truth was, having spent the better part of two years in a noisy hospital, I liked roaming around by myself, freer than most, the city quieting
itself down.

As for my visits with Al G., they were variable. Some mornings
I'd do nothing but thumb through magazines, Al G. asleep the whole
time. Other times he'd come awake groggy, and murmur and grunt and
make strange comments before drifting back to motionlessness. Other
times he'd pop awake, as alert as you or me. I'd give him a little apple
brandy I'd snuck in, and we'd talk about silly things, like fashion or
news. One morning he taught me to play Chinese checkers, which I found a hell of a lot more interesting than American checkers. Other
times I'd read dime novels to him; he liked westerns and gangster tales.

One morning, after I'd been coming for almost ten days, I
stepped in the apartment and realized something: I hadn't once, in all
that time, seen Margaret go outdoors, which may've accounted for the
pastiness of her complexion.

I marched straight up.

"Margaret, you're taking the morning off."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've been cooped up in this apartment for ten whole days and
how much more before that I hate to think. Take the morning off. Go
get your nails done. Visit your mother. Take a long walk. I'm not asking, I'm telling."

Competing thoughts swirled through her head. Slowly, she raised
a hand toward her brow. "Well," she said hesitantly, "I suppose I could
get my hair done."

"Now you're talking."

"And I have cleaned him...."

"Well then, nothing's keeping you here. Don't you worry. I'm a
trained nurse, so he couldn't be in better hands. Go on, now. Scram.
Take a powder. And don't come back till people on the street start wishing you a good afternoon."

Slowly she turned and put on her coat. Before leaving she turned
and said, "Thank you, Mabel."

After tidying a little, I went into Al G.'s bedroom and sat with him
while he slept. At around ten o'clock, he sputtered and came fully
awake, groaning and waving his arms and sitting up simultaneously.

"Jesus, Al G. You scare me when you do that."

"I'm sorry about that."

"Well, the next time you come out of your coma, would you do
it a little more peacefully?"

He yawned and stretched and looked full of hope. "Ah, I'm getting better, Kentucky. I can just feel it."

"Glad to hear it." The truth was, he did look a little pinker that
morning. "So, Al G., tell me. What're you in the mood for this morning. Some crime stories? Those Chinese checkers? How about a coddled egg? Margaret's gone out, so you're all mine."

He didn't answer, unless you counted the grin that was in the
process of crossing his features.

"What is it, Al G.? What's running through that head of yours?"

He suddenly looked a little embarrassed.

"It's just that ... well ... the thing of it is..." He took a deep breath
and collected himself, an action that made him wince. "Have a seat,
Kentucky. I need to explain something. You see ... it has to do with
Margaret. It has to do with ... well, what I'm trying to say is she's a
wonderful woman and she excels in many departments. Cleaning and
making soup, for instance. And keeping her hands off my money, not
that I have any money for a woman to keep her hands off nowadays,
but if I did I know I wouldn't have to worry. There is, however, one
area in which she's proven a little, shall we say, reluctant?"

I looked at him, less confused than I pretended to be.

"You see, Kentucky, whenever I wake up fully rested and full of
vim and vigour, like right now for instance, I have a tendency to suffer
from a certain, uh, shall we say, sprightliness?"

Here I suppose I should've been offended, but the fact was I was
just too amused by the mischievous little boy still inside Al G.-all the
heart attacks in the world weren't about to curb that rascal. To make
sure Al G. and I were talking about the same thing, I reached under the
covers and let my hand travel southward and sure enough he was stiff
as a man in traction.

"Goodness."

"Jesus, Kentucky, I hate asking but you're the only comely thing
to have come within a country mile of this apartment for weeks and weeks. If there's anything you could do to relieve my misery I'd be
grateful."

I thought about this for a minute, understanding what a kind and
honourable thing it would be to help Al G. out. Only problem was, I'd
made a solemn pledge I'd never be biblical with a man again, not after
what I'd done to Art. I sat there weighing upsides and downsides. What
finally tipped the meter was my realizing there was precious little I
could do to harm him, considering he wasn't going to live much longer
anyway. And even if he was, it wouldn't be in a fashion a man like Al
G. Barnes could ever put up with. I decided to break my policy, just this
once, and make Al G. Barnes the last man I ever joined in bed, clothed
or otherwise.

"Think your heart can take it?"

"Frankly, Kentucky, I don't much care if it can."

"Will you be cold if I pull back the covers?"

"Probably."

I chuckled and pulled down his blankets and tried to keep my eyes
off the spindliness of his body. He was poking up through the fly in his
pyjamas, and it was nice to see his penile girth was the one thing hadn't
been affected by heart disease. In fact, it looked like the property of a
young man. I couldn't help but think of the first time I ever saw a thickened member: hard to believe I'd been so shocked and scared and curious by something so out-and-out homely.

Was then I decided if I was going to kill Al G. Barnes, I might as
well do it grand fashion. I bent over and geared up to do something I'd
never done but had seen done twice: the first time in a sepia presented
to me by Dimitri Aganosticus, the second time in a jail cell in Bowling
Green, Kentucky. Yet beyond having a mind's-eye image of what was
involved I swear I didn't have a clue how to start. For this reason, my
first few licks and kisses were on the feeble side. Finally, I decided I'd
treat it like an ice cream cone filled with my favourite flavour: with each
swirl I imagined my tongue coating with strawberry. This must've been more than agreeable, for after a time the patient gave a little moan. A
second later he came fountaining up. Course, it didn't taste like strawberry ice cream. Was more like an egg cream flavoured with anchovy.

After spitting his froth into a tissue, I sat back down and was glad
to see he was still among the living. In fact, he was smiling.

"You can still breathe?" I asked.

"It appears so."

"No big pains in your chest?"

"None whatsoever."

"And you feel okay? No arm tingling? No bright lights? No
visions of heaven?"

"I feel fine, Kentucky. More than fine, in fact."

"Good. I'm glad."

For the longest time, we didn't say a word, instead enjoying a
moment that would've made us giggle had we been teenagers. "Thank
you, Kentucky," he said, and a minute later he was asleep, his breathing
deep and slow. Watching my old friend, I realized there was something
else new I wanted to do that day, something I'd never done with a man
(or leastways one who didn't make his eyes up with shadow).

Reached out, I did, and for the longest time just sat there, holding Al G.'s hand.

SUICIDE NOTE, FOUND ATOP A FOLDED CHILD'S SWEATER ON
THE desk of Mabel Stark:

Well. Here it is, Roger. Like I promised. I made it
big, so she'll grow into it. Buttons shaped like teddy bears.

Yours truly,

Mabel Stark

P.S.: Hand wash, cold water only.

Charting the broad strokes of Mabel Stark's career was not difficult.
The Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center, which operates
under the auspices of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin
(birthplace of the Ringling brothers), has indexed every issue of
Bandwagon, White Tops and a few lesser-known circus publications; I
had only to write the name Mabel Stark on a sheet of paper and hand it
to the head librarian, an endlessly helpful person named Fred
Dahlinger, to be presented an hour later with a sheet of references.
Mostly, these mentions were no more than a line or two tossed off in
general news sections. My job was putting them in order.

This, then, is what we know for certain about Mabel Stark's professional life. She joined the Parker Carnival as a sideshow dancer in
1909, and that at the time she was using a Greek last name. (I saw different versions of that name, the one I preferred being Aganosticus.)
She left to marry a rich man in Texas, only to get a job cooching a few
months later with the Cosmopolitan Amusement Company. By the beginning of the following season, she was doing the free act for the
all-new Al G. Barnes Circus, Barnes having been the head animal man
on the Parker show. Later that year, she was performing a mixed act
with two tigers and a pair of lions borrowed from Barnes's lion trainer,
Louis Roth. Stark soon graduated to a tiger act, her career rising meteorically until, by the early twenties, her wrestling bit with Rajah was
the best-known cat act in the American circus. Her fame dwindled
when the Ringling circus ended cat acts in 1925, and by 1928 she was
with the John Robinson show, where she suffered her worst mauling.
She ended her circus career with the Al G. Barnes show of the thirties,
before moving on to JungleLand.

As for Mabel Stark's private life, I refer to a series of letters written by Stark herself, which are also found at the Circus World Museum
library. It seems that in the thirties, Mabel Stark wanted to publish an
honest account of her life in and out of the circus. She contacted a ghost
writer named Earl Chapin May, and the two started corresponding.
These letters are a wealth of information; in them, she described Louis
Roth as a drinker, and her next husband, Albert Ewing, as a cheque
forger who left the Ringling circus owing $10,000. She described her
next man, Art Rooney, as "the only one I ever loved enough to give up
the tigers for," and also wrote, "I was told he never went with any girl,
he was supposed to be a woman."

In another letter, this one devoted solely to Rajah, Stark revealed
the highly intimate nature of her famous act: "When I turned and
called him he would come up on his hind feet and put both feet round
my neck. Pull me to the ground, grab me by the head, you know a male
tiger grabs the female by the neck and holds her and growls till the critical moment is over. So in this fashion Rajah grabbed me and held me.
We kept rolling over till he was through and while the audience could
not see what Rajah was doing, his growling made a hit."

Though Earl Chapin May's book never materialized, a Mabel
Stark autobiography titled Hold That Tiger was published by a circus
vanity press in 1938. Like most circus autobiographies of the time, it was intended to promote the circus, and may have even been written by
the Ringling press department. Suffice to say, it is highly sanitized and
highly inaccurate; I found it useful only in its descriptions of her maulings and her animal-care methods.

Finally, I interviewed anyone I could find who knew Mabel Stark
in the latter days of JungleLand (and who would also agree to talk to
me). Clearly, it was Stark's opinion that a personality clash with the
new owners was the reason for her firing. While this may or may not
have been true, this book was written to express her point of view, and
for me this was enough justification to use this rendition of events.

The rest is fiction. The characterizations of the more famous
people-Al G. Barnes, John and Charles Ringling, Lillian Leitzel,
Louis Roth-were the result of research.

A few more notes.

In my book, Mabel Stark has an early brush with the mental
health system as it existed at that time. Though this is speculation, it is
not speculation made lightly. We know that something fairly significant
caused her to leave the respected profession of nursing to become a
cooch. Those who knew her at JungleLand said she always lied about
her age, the suspicion being that something happened to her early in her
life that she worked hard to obscure. In the book Wild Animal Trainers
of America, a circus writer named Joanne joys claims that Mabel Stark's
departure from the nursing profession was due to a nervous breakdown. Given the way that Stark's life ended, this seemed to account for
the highest number of mysteries concerning her early years.