This Side of Jordan (43 page)

“Sure we will, darling,” Mademoiselle Estralada murmured in a soothing tone as Chester passed out. “Beautiful fun.”

 

The farm boy and dwarf waited silently behind the hidden closet slot, hardly breathing in the dark. Wind rattled the wagon as they watched Mademoiselle Estralada stroke Chester's forehead with her fingertips. After a few minutes she quit and whispered something into his ear. Then she turned toward the closet and nodded.

“Let's go,” the dwarf said, nudging Alvin away from the trapdoor.

“Huh?”

The wagon's front door opened and Alvin heard a flurry of footsteps. One of the Keystone Kops poked his head through the beaded curtain. He held a cotton cloth and a red rubber clown nose, which he handed wordlessly to the gypsy. The farm boy watched bug-eyed as Mademoiselle Estralada went back to the divan and stuffed the fat clown nose into Chester's mouth and tied a fierce gag around the back of his head with the cotton cloth. Both Kaiser Wilhelm and another Keystone Kop slipped into the boudoir.

“Are they going to kill him?” Alvin whispered to the dwarf who had already dropped down through the trap door.

“Oh, heavens no! That would be murder. Hurry up!”

The farm boy heard the circus midgets dragging something into the gypsy's boudoir, then the dwarf tugged on his ankle and Alvin wriggled his way back down out of the closet and dropped onto his knees in the sawdust beneath the painted wagon. As he crawled out into the cold wind, the farm boy told the dwarf, “When he sees what we done to him, he'll shoot us all in the head.”

“No, he won't.”

Across the showgrounds, the shrill music of the grand calliope,
Seraphonium,
piped into the night air with the noise of the gleeful crowds. By the front stairs, Emperor Nero and Chief Crazy Horse and Merlin and Sir Lancelot and Billy the Kid had gathered with more Keystone Kops, all bearing grave expressions. A wild animal cage had been rolled up next to the gypsy's wagon, its iron door swung open.

The dwarf took Alvin by the arm. “Come on now, we have to leave.”

A chill ran through the farm boy, fear needling his spine. He said, “I tell you, this is all a lot of nonsense. He'll kill us for sure.”

“Let's go.”

They left the painted wagon to head off in the direction of the noisy midway. Nearby, a great cheer went up as someone rang the big steel gong atop the Strongman Pole. After Alvin's confinement in the dark closet, the glittering lights of Laswell's Circus Giganticus seemed wildly incandescent, a dazzling barrage of electric merriment. The farm boy's head swam, his legs tingled, as he chased the dwarf past the Palace of Mirrors and Laswell's shivery Hall of Freaks toward the whirling Ferris Wheel where lovely little Josephine sat waiting for them atop an apple crate between the dart throw and the shooting gallery. The hot roseate lights dyed her powdered pompadour a glittery pink like cotton candy and she held a paper fan at her chin to protect her show makeup from the windblown grime of the evening midway. When she saw the dwarf emerging from the crowd by the penny pitch, she shot to her feet with a squeal. The dwarf rushed forward to receive an embrace.

Josephine kissed him on the cheek. “My darling, you were so brave!”

Catching his breath as he came up behind her, the farm boy remarked, “Aw, he ain't done nothin' but watch.”

The pretty circus midget smiled. “You were both very brave.”

“Well, I guess that's so.”

With a solemn voice, the dwarf told Josephine, “This is the beginning of the end.”

She nodded. “Then we ought to be very careful.”

Behind them, the glittering Ferris Wheel stopped briefly to discharge a load of rowdy passengers, mostly young people anxious to rejoin the midway crowds. Perhaps a hundred yards away, just beyond the nickel games and the hootchy-kootchy tent, a big roar went up in the direction of the animal cages. Alvin heard a round of applause amid the buzzing “oohs” and “aahs” of delighted children. The fresh tide of strolling circus-goers along the midway shifted immediately toward the excitement. Even the sideshow talkers and pitchmen paused in mid-spiel, looking somewhat quizzical.

“Let's all wait here,” Josephine advised, her hand on the dwarf.

He shook his head. “No, dear. My friend and I must see this through to its conclusion, but perhaps you should stay. It'll certainly be perilous.”

“What're you cooking up now?” Alvin asked as he watched a pack of panting schoolboys rush up the circus midway toward the commotion. His own head was buzzing with fever and excitement.

“You and I have one last duty to perform,” replied the dwarf. “I'm afraid it's unavoidable.”

“If I stay here,” Josephine asked, “will you promise to come back safely?”

“You have my word.”

“Then I won't go. Please be careful, darling.”

She leaned forward and kissed the dwarf and hugged him tightly. Once they broke apart, the dwarf turned to the farm boy. “We mustn't be cowards.”

“I ain't saying nothing till you feed me the dope on where we're going.”

“This way,” the dwarf said, directing Alvin into the weltering crowds up the midway, which resembled a street parade of circus-goers and roughnecks and curious tent performers in silken capes and silver spangles. Half the distance to the furor, a bearded albino magician stood high on a gilded stool, casting white doves into the night sky. Here and there, somersaulting clowns zigzagged toward the hubbub. Farther ahead, the farm boy saw a mob of people jamming together near the Topsy-Turvy House. The dwarf cut a path closer yet until he and the farm boy drew at last within sight of the ballyhoo—a hulking caged gorilla hauled out from the menagerie onto the crowded midway for all to see. Atop the iron cage, a sign read:

 

CONGO THE GREAT! FEROCIOUS MAN-EATING BEAST FROM DARKEST AFRICA!!!

 

A gang of boys had already encircled the exhibit, banging on the bars and taunting the creature with sticks. No trainer showed his face. The burly gorilla lolled in one squalid corner of the wild animal cage, heedless of the clamor. People shouted filthy curses and hurled garbage. Arriving from the Big Top, the Dixie Jubilee Minstrels played a stirring “Invictus” to exuberant cheers. Then Alvin saw a boy with a hefty firecracker light it with a safety match and toss the firecracker into the cage beside the gorilla. When it exploded with an ear-jarring bang, the monster awoke with a vicious roar, sweeping most of the crowd back from the iron cage. A tall boy carrying a long stout stick jabbed the gorilla from behind. Two deputies from Icaria emerged from the crowd to chase the boy away, but another youth tossed a second burning firecracker at the gorilla. It detonated an instant after hitting the beast, driving the creature into a frenzy. Howling with rage, the huge gorilla threw itself at the bars, side to side, then leaped for the front of the cage whose iron door, when struck by the angry beast, simply swung open to the riotous midway. A red-haired fellow in a plaid tam o'shanter standing next to Alvin and the dwarf fainted dead away as the gorilla climbed down from the iron cage and bellowed at its tormentors. Women screamed. Children ran. The gorilla moved toward those too frightened to escape as a strident voice from the gallery behind the Topsy-Turvy House shouted, “SHOOT HIM! SHOOT HIM!”

Which the deputies certainly did, emptying both their revolvers into the crazed beast from a dozen feet away, firing and firing and firing, until the gorilla toppled over backward.

When the echo of gunshots had fled across the dark, a strange hush permeated the midway.

Not a soul moved.

Only the colored flags and banners flapping in the cold wind over the Big Top disturbed the quiet.

Then one of the deputies approached the fallen gorilla and poked the carcass with the toe of his boot. He holstered his revolver and walked carefully around the perimeter of the beast whose blood soaked the dirt. He paused at the gorilla's head, then bent down for a closer look. He frowned. “Well, I'll be damned.”

He leaned forward and undid two buttons poorly hidden in the fur at the neckline.

“Looky-here, Tom!” he called to his partner.

Then the deputy slipped off the head of the fallen beast, exposing the ashen lifeless face of Chester Burke. “Why, this ain't no gorilla. It's just some fellow in a monkey suit.”

 

One morning in early October, Alvin Pendergast sat in a prairie grass meadow watching the old trucks and painted wagons of Emmett J.

Laswell's Traveling Circus Giganticus load up along a narrow dirt road that led west beyond the woods to a farther country. He had packed his own suitcase in the upper dark of the boardinghouse and left by the back door without saying a word. He brought three apples and a handful of crackers in the pockets of his coat and ate one of the apples while he sat there. His brown Montgomery Ward suitcase lay beside him in the damp switchgrass. Except for the spare cash-money Chester had neglected to collect from the dwarf, the farm boy believed it contained all he owned in the world.

Half a year ago he had left home for fear of being put in the grave, woefully ignorant of life. He had thought to escape somehow the relapse of consumption that raced through his blood by going away where nobody he laid eyes upon would judge him according to the prognosis of his decay, where each day would be a clean slate upon which brave new adventures would be written. Instead, some secret corner of his heart longed for familiarities unaffected by disease: a bee-swarmed path behind Culbertson's lumber shanties, goodnight melodies from his daddy's radio set, that old signalman on the Burlington railway staggering along the tracks at six o'clock each evening with a load of hootch in him, the damp Illinois corn wind in autumn. Guarded mercies too numerous to evade. Six months of sneaking in and out of these strange towns had left him lonely and tired, reconciled to worsening nightsweats and a malignant guilt. On the wooded path back to the boardinghouse after Chester's death at the circus, Alvin had asked the dwarf about the disposition of the gangster's departed spirit, if he knew where such sinners reside in the afterlife. The dwarf explained that their late companion was a moral imbecile whose criminal passions had consigned him forever to a lightless Hades, incapable of inflicting further pain and misery on fellow souls yet held slave by his habitual desire to do so. He would thirst but never drink, complicit in his own agony. There is no peace for the wicked and the damned, the dwarf assured Alvin, and left it at that. They were free now, their torment resolved, and that would have to be enough. He refused to utter another word on the subject. What he had failed to clarify was what Chester's fate meant for Alvin, to where the farm boy's own spirit was tending, shamed as he was by unforgivable behavior all this past summer long. Contrition was meaningless; what's done was done. How was he supposed to live out what days remained him now, infected body and soul? That secret corner of his heart provided the answer: He would go back home to the farm where he belonged, after all. He would take up a tin pail and fling oats to Mama's chickens and sweep potato bugs off the porch after supper and help old Uncle Boyd dig that ditch along his driveway and repair Uncle Henry's barn floor and fill a bushel peach basket for Aunt Hattie and another for Auntie Emma and learn to whistle a dandy ragtime jig outside Granny Chamberlain's window where autumn's shadows are thatched with maple branches and moonlight, for it was she who told him once that the answers to all life's riddles are found within a box of tricks hidden up in this good earth, God alone knows where, and nothing of truth is revealed until all our days here have run their course. Some tomorrow he would put on his work-clothes at dawn and breathe the field smoke of burning cornstubble and share another dinner plate of fried catfish with Cousin Frenchy and tell his sisters a pretty swell bedtime story; and when his own time came, be it sooner or later, he would go to his rest, safe at last in the bosom of his family.

Alvin left the chewed-over apple core in the thick grass and wiped his hands on the back of his trousers. Most of the circus wagons were loaded. Rumbling truck engines spewed exhaust into the cold morning air. He saw the dwarf on the road by the great steam calliope, a black derby hat on his misshapen head. Rascal carried a flat wooden box under one arm as he left the circus caravan and crossed the road down into the grassy meadow toward the farm boy. A chilly breeze rippled through the autumn maples, scattering old dried leaves all about. The farm boy smelled burning ash on the morning air. He picked up the cheap matting suitcase and began walking toward the wagons. The first couple of trucks started rolling forward. Fifty yards from the road, he met the dwarf who told him, earnestly, “They were quite disappointed.”

The farm boy set his old suitcase back down in the wet switchgrass. “You know I didn't promise nothing.”

“Of course I do.”

“I ain't got an act like you. I'd be shoveling manure like some hick.”

The farm boy kicked at a muddy clump of grass. His fever was gone for now, but he still felt tired. Up on the road, another truck engine roared to life.

“Why should our endeavor be so loved, and the performance so loathed?”

“Beg your pardon?”

Rascal smiled. “My dear Josephine asked me to give you this.”

He handed Alvin the wooden box.

“What is it?”

“See for yourself.”

Alvin undid the brass latch that held it shut. Inside the box he found a polished steel throwing-knife with a leather handle.

The dwarf told him, “It's a souvenir from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show where my very own Josephine performed the treacherous Wheel of Death on two continents. She risked her mortal life for six dollars a day and meals, and when the show closed, a Pawnee warrior by the name of Gideon White Cloud gave it to her in celebration of her extraordinary courage. Josephine wishes you to have it in appreciation of your own.”