Unhappy Hooligan (7 page)

Rook wandered on around the outside of the Big Top, past the hundreds of dressing rooms with their iron stairways and the dressing areas between the tracks. Some of them were already occupied, trunks set in place and opened, camp chairs outside under the canvas flaps and water buckets filled and standing ready, each stenciled with the name of its owner. Some of them bore very famous names indeed.

Outside one dressing room a small dark girl of perhaps eleven was gravely doing turns on a homemade trapeze over and over again. “Hello, sister,” said Rook cheerily.

He got barely a glance from sloe eyes. “Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, hello, mister, sixty-nine…” Rook went on, slightly abashed. Finally on his aimless peregrinations he found himself in the vicinity of the first tent to be erected that morning, the largest spread of canvas on the lot apart from the Big Top itself. There was no doubt as to its function; the smells emanating from it reminded Howie Rook very forcibly that he had had only a cup of coffee today. He ventured inside, where a few others were already trickling, and sat down on a bench before one of the hundred or so rough pine tables. Waiters were congregated at the other end of the room, but none of them came near him. He waited. Finally he took out one of his dollar cigars—

A steward materialized from out of nowhere.
“Don’t
light that in here!” he yelped.

Rook hastily made the cigar disappear. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just—”

“Well, whatever you were doing you better do it somewhere else. We’ll have a thousand or so men roaring in here in about five minutes, and you’ll get trampled in the rush.” He glanced at the magic card with the emblazoned elephants. “Oh, you’re
with it.
Mr. Timken should have told you where to sit. Performers and guests on the other side.” The man pointed, and Rook got hastily up, feeling slightly abashed, and went out to the entrance and in again past the canvas division. This end of the big tent was a duplicate of the other, except that acrobats and other performers were straggling in. At the farther end, partially hidden by a canvas flat, he could see that the freaks, the Strange People, were eating at a special table, the Armless Wonder dexterously scooping up soup with a tablespoon held in his toes next to the Fat Lady with a well-heaped plate. He chose a place in a quiet corner and sat down.

A waiter came up to him immediately, gave him a peculiar look, and then said in a singsong voice, “Veg soup, beef stew or fried fish?” Rook settled for stew, which appeared in a matter of seconds, along with the soup, coffee, a quart container of milk, half a loaf of sliced bread, and pie. It was a meal that would have staggered a lumberjack, but he did his best with the hunks of meat, the almost whole potatoes and onions. He was almost through when he became conscious that somebody was practically breathing down the back of his neck. He turned to look into the cold, unfriendly eyes of a spare, swarthy, beak-nosed character sporting a large waxed mustache and whipcord breeches with shiny black boots, who demanded, “And what are
you
doing here?”

“Finishing my lunch, obviously,” said Howie Rook.

The man said something under his breath in a foreign tongue, shook his head, then went around the table and plunked himself down in the opposite seat. A waiter appeared and took his order, after which they had a whispered conclave. The waiter went away and came back with the food—and also with a head steward, who approached Rook. “And just what
are
you doing here, mister?”

“Eating my pie,” explained Rook. He showed the card. “Mr. Timken—”

The steward relaxed, but only just a little. “One of those, eh? Well, you should have got a table assignment. Our seats are all reserved, and you’ve taken Captain Larsen’s place. Next time come to me and I’ll seat you somewhere.” He went away.

The man across the table was soaking bread in his soup and washing it down with copious drafts of milk out of the container, crouched over his food like one of his own great cats. He ate swiftly, efficiently, and noisily.

“Sorry I took your seat, Captain,” Rook apologized, anxious to make a friend. “You see, I’m
new
here.”

“Yes, you are,” said the other through a mouthful. He barely looked up, but Rook caught a glimpse of dark, pinpointed eyes that blinked about once every second from beneath the shadow of the sola topee the man affected.

“These are magnificent tigers you have; I was just admiring them.”

This time the glance was purely baleful. “I’ll thank you and everybody else to keep strictly the hell away from my cats,” said Captain Larsen. He rose abruptly, his meal half finished, and stalked out of the cook tent.

“Don’t mind him,” spoke up a tall, round-faced man with sideburns, who had just sat himself down nearby, “The Captain is always touchy just before a performance; maybe you’d feel the same if you had to go in and wrestle seven tigers.”

“Completely understandable,” nodded Rook. He noticed that his neighbor wore a silk shirt and bright blue uniform trousers with a red stripe down the sides. “Do you work with the animals?” he asked, still hopeful of making friends.

“I do—with human animals. I’m boss windjammer, bandmaster to you.” His name turned out to be Leo Dawes; a serene, friendly seeming sort. But his manner changed perceptibly when Howie Rook proudly explained the ostensible reason for his presence here among them. “A guest clown, eh?” Dawes said rather thoughtfully, including the others around the rapidly filling table in his remark. “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be any more of that sort of thing after last week?”

“Last
week?” prompted Rook. Here perhaps was his first real lead.

“The less said about last week, the better,” spoke up a slight, muscular-looking man in a white terry-cloth bathrobe who had just appeared and taken a place across the table. With him was an exotically pretty Latin woman in street clothes, who wore her right arm in a sling, also the little girl Rook had seen earlier doing practice turns outside the dressing rooms.

The conversation died, and Rook poked at his pie. “How’s the shoulder, Gina?” asked the bandmaster after a moment.

“Stinking.” She spoke in a heavy Italian accent. “What do you expect? I’m grounded for two weeks, maybe more.”

“Mama
mia,”
spoke up the little girl, “if you can’t fly for a while why don’t papa work out some sort of a fill-in act with du Mond? She’d be willing—”

“Eat and be silent, small one,” said Gina. “Drink your milk.”

They all continued eating in a heavy silence. Howie Rook felt more baffled than ever; the circus and its people seemed to have taboos well beyond his ken. At any rate, he reminded himself, James McFarley must have made some of the same mistakes, and trodden on some of the same toes. All he could do was to try to retrace the other’s footsteps, to walk that same shadowed path that had led eventually to the discovery of that painted, bewigged corpse in the locked apartment. Without, of course, walking it too far. Rook was a prudent man.

Clowns are pegs, used to hang circuses on.

—P. T. Barnum

I
T WAS ONE O’CLOCK NOW,
and Howie Rook hastily wound his way through the maze of tents and machinery and trucks, looking for the domain of the clowns, the place called Clown Alley. He tried to take what he thought was a short cut—and found himself in the horse-top. Here he rashly decided to go straight on through, noting as he passed that the magnificent Percherons and Clydesdales of the circuses he remembered had disappeared forever; all of the great draft horses that once had drawn the gaily painted wagons through the streets were gone with the parade itself. Here were only a hundred or so thoroughbreds, pure-bred Arabians, and white-and-gray resin-backs with stubby legs. Some of them turned to whicker at him, then noticed his formal apparel or his clean smell and wisely turned back, certain that he had brought them nothing to eat.

At the farther end of the tent were a pair of fat little striped zebras, gay sport-model jackasses. Rook had never seen a zebra this close, and he came up behind them and chirped pleasantly. He was surprised, to say the least, when both animals whirled as one and slashed out at him with neat little hind feet which came inches from his brisket. He leaped back and swore under his breath, not as much at them as at himself.

There was a rumble of laughter from the near-by exit, and he looked up to see Gordo, the Muscle Man human mattress, looking very amused and not at all sympathetic. “I didn’t know they were loaded,” Rook said wryly.

Gordo, in Cossack uniform now and evidently whiling away the time by throwing knives at an improvised target affixed to a tent pole, slammed a knife into the bull’s-eye and said, “A lot of things are loaded around the circus, mister. The show grounds is a bad place for an ammytoor to wander around in. People can even get theirselves hurt. You hell-bent to be a clown, you go be one. But you leave the animals—and the performers—strictly alone if you’re smart, see?” He came closer. “Don’t make the same mistakes as that smooth-talking guy who was around here last week with his little black notebook and his silly questions.”

Gordo turned and walked away, just as Howie Rook was about to ask a sensible question. There might be the makings of trouble here, he decided. The Muscle Man evidently had a sort of proprietary interest in Mary Kelly. It would stand looking into. He made more notes on his pad of yellow paper. The trouble seemed to be that nobody would tell him anything! So far only the animals had shown any friendly interest, and not all of them. Now he could hear the beginning roar and bustle of the incoming crowd, the amplified voices of the “talkers” along the Midway, and all at once the band inside the Big Top burst into the overture, the famous “Here Comes the Circus.” He hurried on, not knowing whether he was headed right or wrong. Finally he came face to face with a small figure wearing police-clown uniform, and seized his arm. “Sonny, can you tell me where to find Hap Hammett, the clown?”

The tiny face, under its heavy grease paint, twisted into a sneer of undisguised loathing. “You know where you can go with that sonny stuff?” he exploded. “I’m older than you are, see?” He flounced off, and there was a titter of laughter from the nearest dressing room, which did nothing for Rook’s offended dignity.

He finally chose the scientific method of cruising around the outside of the Big Top, past dressing room after dressing room, until he found the right name stenciled on a water bucket. He was outside a little raised cubicle in which four big men and half a dozen trunks were somehow crowded; they were all in various halfway stages of putting on make-up, smearing their faces with white and with bright reds and greens and blues. “Mr. Hammett?” he tried hopefully. “Mr. Timken said I was to see you about being a clown.”

They had all turned as one, and somebody in the rear of the dressing room said softly, “My dear God, not another of
them!”
But the burly man nearest the door put down his can of grease paint.

“I’m Hap,” he said. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Rook.” His painted grin was too wide for the newcomer to see whether or not there was a real smile underneath, but the clown wiped off his hand and extended it. “Yes, the boss said you’d be with us. I can take it if you can.” He looked Rook up and down appraisingly. “Well, don’t just stand there; we go on in twelve minutes. Get out of that Sunday suit; you’ll ruin it.” He handed Rook a spare hanger for his clothes, and turned to one of the others, a cadaverous man almost seven feet tall. “Bozo, you’re about ready. Would you run over to wardrobe and get that outfit we keep for company?”

Bozo said something under his breath, but he came lightly down the steps and hurried off. Next Hap Hammett hailed a passing midget dressed as a clown baby, complete with bonnet and bottle. “Max, will you be a good guy and make up our friend here in a hurry? Use white-face—and try to paint out the mustache if you can.”

“Why not?” said little Max amiably. The next few minutes were pure bedlam. Max stood on a chair and began to sling white goo at his victim’s face, then smoothed it out and added wild eyebrows and a great
risus
grin. He showed Rook a mirror, and the neophyte shuddered. He looked like all circus clowns rolled into one; he also looked fearfully like the last photos of James McFarley.

He was swiftly helped into a flaringly striped jersey, triple-sized corduroy pants, and a flaming Tartan frock coat heavy as a mackinaw; he donned a pair of red shoes the size of watermelons and the weight of anchors. And last Hap Hammett himself, now wearing his famous padded fat-lady drag costume, came down the steps to add a red rubber nose, a carroty fright-wig and sailor hat, and to hand him a pair of white gloves. Then Hap stood back to survey the results.

“Joe Grimaldi is probably turning over in his grave,” he said. “But come on, clown! Hear the band? That’s the finale for the cat act we follow.” From inside the Big Top, Rook could hear the sharp crack of blank cartridges and the muffled roaring of the tigers. Hap Hammett beckoned to him and trotted away.

Rook took two steps—and almost fell flat on his face. There were howls of unsympathetic glee from the few clowns remaining in the Alley. “Walk duck-footed, like I do,” counseled Hap over his shoulder. They came to the side entrance, and Rook could see that the show was now on in full blast. Captain Larsen was marshaling his seven great tigers out of the working cage and into their traveling wagon, with much snarling on their part and much show of obvious bravery on the part of their trainer, who slapped their behinds contemptuously as they passed one by one into the chute. The end rings were filled with trained bears gravely riding on roller skates, a sea-lion act playing horns, and overhead the aerialists whirled back and forth in perfect time with the music of the band.

Suddenly a black mongrel dog, wearing a silly hat like her master’s, appeared out of nowhere. “Meet Cordelia,” said Hap Hammett. “She won’t bite you, unless you crab her act or ruin her laughs.”

“But what do I
do
in there?” Rook asked a little feebly.

“Just follow us, about ten feet behind. I’ll cue you as we go—nobody can hear us over the din of the crowd. Sometimes during the World Series I even wear a little portable radio under my costume.” The band now broke into the clown promenade—the fast galop, “High Riding.”