“Congratulations, Dad,” Savannah said, raising her glass of milk for a toast.
“This is the big one,” my father said. “This is the chance I’ve been waiting for. Don’t be upset by your mother. She’s really happy about the whole thing. She’s always had trouble expressing her real feelings.”
Savannah said, “She didn’t seem to have much trouble expressing her real feelings this time, Daddy. She thinks you’re going to lose your shirt again.”
“No, wrong. This time I can smell the ol’ jackpot. Henry Wingo’s number is coming up. You wait. This gas station is going to take off and your mother’s going to be wearing ermine and having strings of real pearls hanging down to her ankles. She doesn’t understand that you got to take risks. I’m the risk taker in the family. I’m like a riverboat gambler. I take chances the average Joe would never dream of taking.”
The Esso station my father had bought was located directly across the street from Ferguson’s Gulf station, the most successful service station in Colleton County, by far. Three men before my father had tried to make a go of the gas station on that corner but had failed. There was no logical reason why people would pull into the Gulf station instead of the Esso station except for some mysterious concept known as location. In all small towns, there is such a thing as a good corner and a bad one, and it has more to do with metaphysics than with geography. One corner of a street simply welcomes a gas station more than another. My father purchased the corner station that did not feel right. He believed his flair and showmanship would ensure his success where others before him had failed so dismally.
He did have a singular talent for extravaganza and he opened Wingo Esso with enough fanfare to bring half the town to his corner of the world. He talked the band director into marching the high school band straight down the Street of Tides at high noon, led by baton-twirling majorettes and Mr. Fruit shimmying and shaking out his own wild improvised dance, keeping time with his whistle, throwing his head straight back into sunlight, then jackknifing forward until his nose nearly touched his shoelaces. When the band made the turn into the gas station, my father released three hundred helium-filled balloons, which rose straight up into the air and hovered over the town like lost flowers. He handed out lollipops and bubble gum to the kids. Roman candles exploded on the roof, showering sparks to the ground. The circus clown showed up late and my father was both surprised and delighted that he was a midget. The clown was drunk and broke a dozen Coke bottles trying to juggle them on the back of our pickup truck. The mayor of Colleton, Boogie Weiters, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, made a rather impassioned speech on the importance of attracting new industry to Colleton County. The drunk clown shouted that that should be easy since Colleton County had never attracted any old industry. The crowd applauded the clown, who responded with a spectacular handstand on the cab of the pickup. The Volunteer Fire Department arrived with their new fire truck and received a whole tank of gas free of charge because Henry Wingo wanted them to know how much he appreciated the fine job they were doing protecting the property of Colleton. A reporter from the Colleton Gazette interviewed my father and took his picture with the clown sitting on his shoulder. The high school band played a medley of patriotic songs and my father raised an American flag on top of the gas station when they played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Toward the end of the day, the flag was set afire by an errant Roman candle and was extinguished by the members of the Volunteer Fire Department.
That night we celebrated the successful opening-day ceremonies of Wingo Esso by going to the circus. Even though my mother had refused to attend either the opening-day festivities or the circus, I had never seen my father’s mood so effervescent or irrepressible. If he had been a nimble man, I’m sure he would have backflipped his way onto the circus grounds. There was a new buoyancy and cockiness to his walk and he high-stepped it among the crowd that moved to the rhythms of the carnival music. Outside the circus tent, he pitched baseballs at weighted tenpins until he won my mother a teddy bear. He applauded as Luke and I sank free throws with a cheap basketball at a tilted steel rim.
We entered the freak show and watched in amazement as the bearded lady spit tobacco juice into a Dr. Pepper bottle. Luke shook hands with the hundred-year-old baby and we listened to Siamese twins sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” We cheered as Altus Rossiter, the town bully, was knocked unconscious by a kangaroo wearing boxing gloves.
The owner of the circus, Smitty Smith, came up to talk with my father. They had met at the shrimp dock the morning the circus arrived in Colleton and Smitty had bought every fish my father caught that day to feed the five seals that Smitty had described as the backbone of the circus. He had claimed to have the best seal act in the Southeast and the worst tiger and elephant show in the world. The elephant was too old, Smitty had explained, and the tiger was too young. There was nothing lower than a one-clown circus, my father had said after the midget had passed out in the back of the pickup truck that afternoon, but we saw him working the crowd at the entrance to the main tent, and though he seemed wobbly, he was performing a passable handstand.
We pulled our father away and took seats high in the bleachers on the top row. A woman dressed in a goldsequined outfit rode an elephant around the ring. The elephant was wrinkled with great age and when he went down on his knees to make his bow, he had to be helped to his feet again by the woman, the clown, and Smitty. The elephant looked weary and threadbare to the point of extinction. The clown juggled two balls in the air and Savannah said that she could juggle two balls.
“I wonder how much he’d take for the elephant?” I heard my father say. “He’d be great for the gas station.”
“Yeah, he could pump high-test with his trunk,” said Luke.
The spotlight centered on Smitty, who, dressed in a top hat and a garish red tuxedo, spoke into a scratchy microphone. The echoes made it sound as if four men were exhorting the crowd; his words overlapped like waves.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I will now enter the cage of the great Bengal tiger, Caesar, who was taken from his home in India after he killed three rajahs and thirteen villagers. Thirteen very slow villagers. Caesar is a new addition to my circus family and is rather jumpy in front of crowds. We must ask for absolute silence during the next act. Caesar mauled our former animal trainer outside of Aiken, South Carolina, and I have been forced to step in because, as you know, ladies and gentlemen, the show must go on.”
The elephant may have been old and the kangaroo a little seedy, but the tiger was a young, magnificent animal. It watched Smitty as the ringmaster entered the large cage armed with a whip and a chair. Everything about the tiger implied menace. It lacked the humility of a circus animal, that quality of appeasement and cringing servitude that comes from years of bondage and performance under the glaring lights. The tiger’s gaze was a study in wildness. Smitty snapped his whip above the tiger’s ear and commanded that the tiger circle the ring. The tiger did not move but stared at Smitty with a concentration that unnerved the crowd. The whip sang again and Smitty’s voice rose once more above the hum of the crowd. The tiger left his perch and circled the cage reluctantly, snarling with discontent. Smitty threw his hat near the tiger and shouted “Fetch” to the tiger. The tiger pounced on the hat, hurled it into the air, and cut it into pieces with his claws before it could hit the earth. The whip caught the tiger on the shoulder and Smitty drove the beast into a corner and bent down angrily to study what was left of his hat, which now looked like the remnants of a blown-out retread. You could tell Smitty was not taking the loss of his top hat well. The performance became secondary to the shimmering, palpable hatred between the tiger and the ringmaster.
Smitty lit a ring of fire and, lashing the tiger again and again, made the tiger leap through the burning hoop, its shining coat iridescent against the flames. The audience cheered. Smitty, lathered with perspiration, then approached Caesar with his chair, his whip exploding above the tiger’s yellow eyes, and shouted another
command; but Caesar moved directly toward Smitty, slashing the air with his claws fully extended. Smitty withdrew and the cat sent him on a headlong dizzying retreat across the ring, and the sweeps of the forepaws caused tremors of awe in the exhilarated crowd. Smitty was running backward with only the chair between him and certain decapitation. Two roustabouts rushed up to the cage with long poles and stopped the tiger’s furious attack, allowing Smitty to make his escape through the cage door. Caesar took one of the poles in his jaws and snapped it in half, then retreated with dignity to the center of the cage and sat on his haunches in the most kingly repose. In frustration, Smitty lashed the cage with his whip and the crowd rose to its feet to applaud the untamable cat. Caesar rolled and stretched voluptuously in folds of black and gold. Then he lifted his eyes when he heard the seals barking as they were moved into the center ring. The lights shifted and the tiger disappeared into the night.
The seals were snappy, enthusiastic, and seemed to be born entertainers as they bounced into the lights balancing great yellow balls on their shining ebony noses. Smitty had recovered his composure and he directed the performance like a man pulling silk through a loom. After each trick, he flung them a fish, which they caught and consumed in a single fluid motion. Their heads were cunning, angelic, and sleek. Brightly, they applauded themselves with their front flippers.
“Those are my fish those seals are eating, kids. My fish. I think they ought to make an announcement,” said my father.
The five seals were named Sambone, Helen of Troy, Nebuchadnezzar, Cleopatra, and Nashua, but Sambone was clearly the star of their frivolous satiny performance. They moved like otters who had mated with dolphins, and there was an ungainly grace to their spirited antics. The five of them sent one ball spinning from black nose to black nose, bouncing it high in the air and sending it aloft until it fell expertly on the nose of another seal who executed the same precise moves and sailed the ball high into the lights again. When Cleopatra finally misjudged the ball and it went sailing into the darkness, she sulked when she was not rewarded with a fish. Then the seals had a bowling match and a baseball game before Sambone mounted a small platform and began playing “Dixie” on a row of horns. The other seals barked along in harmony and the crowd joined in the song. We had only got to “Look away, look away,” when we heard a loud roar from Caesar in his cage in the darkened downstage ring. As the song ended, the spotlight moved away from the seals and we saw the tiger with his face pressed against the bars swinging his powerful forelegs outside the cage, roaring out his hatred for the seals. Sambone took no notice and began again his cacophonous rendition of “Dixie.” Still working the seals, Smitty moved out of the center ring and moved Caesar out of the limelight by whipping his ferocious head until he went snarling back in retreat.
“He either hates seals or those horns hurt his ears,” my father said.
“Maybe he just hates ‘Dixie,’ ” Savannah said.
For the grand finale the seals spread out in a wide circle and began to toss the ball again, and this time they hurled the ball twenty feet in the air, each seal trying to toss the ball higher and higher, the circle widening each time. Each time it seemed like the ball had strayed too far from the perimeter, a seal would make a running spectacular catch and then, taking a moment to control the ball, would launch it anew in a towering parabola toward the other side of the ring. Once again it was Cleopatra who made the error of judgment that ended the act. Nashua sent the ball in a towering arc that almost touched the trapeze hanging from the roof supports; Cleopatra could not quite reach the ball and it veered off her nose into the dark. Sambone, who played the game with the passion of a center fielder, pursued the ball into the darkness and Smitty blew his whistle for the seals to assemble for the final bow.
Through the applause we heard the death screams of Sambone. The lights swung to the downstage ring and caught the moment when the tiger lifted the seal against the bars and bit Sambone’s head off. Smitty was there, illuminated in ghastly shadow, whipping the tiger. Children were running from their seats and the entire crowd groaned when the tiger put Sambone to the ground and, with one great swipe of its claws, eviscerated the seal. Sambone’s intestines flowed out of his body in a glistening flood and the tiger’s jaws were bright red with blood. In hysteria and revulsion, the crowd ran for the exits and mothers hid their children’s eyes with their hands. The tiger began eating the seal before three hundred schoolchildren.
That was the night my father bought the tiger.
I thought my mother would take her shotgun down from the gun case and kill both my father and Caesar when we arrived home towing the tiger’s cage behind our pickup. Caesar was still gnawing on the half-eaten seal when my mother began screaming at Dad. She was not so much angry as she was homicidal. Smitty was going to kill Caesar himself after the show when my father intervened and offered to take the tiger off Smitty’s hands. Someone had forgotten to feed the tiger before the performance and my father had pleaded for the tiger’s life by suggesting he had only done the natural thing. My father wrote Smitty a check for two hundred dollars and got him to throw in the whip, the cage, and the ring of fire in the deal. Sambone had been the heart and soul of the animal act, the only one of the seals who could play “Dixie” on the horns. The other seals, Smitty explained hysterically, could only toss balls and eat mullet. When the clown had teased Smitty about his prowess as an animal trainer, Smitty hung the midget on a coat-rack in his trailer. The clown’s profanity added a touch of unreality to the purchase of Caesar. As we stood outside in the darkness, we watched the tiger devour the entrails of the seal he had forced through the bars of his cage. Luke speculated that Sambone was the first seal in history ever devoured by a tiger.
“Seals don’t worry much about tigers in the wild,” Luke explained as we watched the tiger while Dad was haggling over the price with Smitty. “It’s just not one of their big problems.”
“I wonder if a message goes out to all the seals in the world,” Savannah mused. “When you play ‘Dixie’ on the horns, look out for tigers. Isn’t that how evolution is supposed to work?”
“I’d look out for anything that big,” I said in awe. “What in God’s name does Dad want with a Bengal tiger?”
“We haven’t had a house pet since Joop died,” Savannah said. “You know how sentimental Dad is.”
“You did it again, Henry,” my mother said, inspecting the tiger at a distance. “We’ll be the laughingstock of Colleton once again. I want that tiger gone by sunrise. I don’t want word to get out again that I married the biggest fool in South Carolina.”
“I can’t just set the bastard loose, Lila. He’s liable to eat one of those nice families while they’re heehawing at us Wingos. He killed that seal he’s chewing on in there. That’s how come I got him so cheap.”
“I guess I couldn’t expect you to pass up a golden opportunity like that, could I now, Henry?”
“It’s an advertising gimmick,” my father said proudly, “for my gas station. I thought of it almost as soon as I heard that seal screaming. It hit me, bang, a brainstorm: This will draw the customers in.”
“Dad’s going to teach the tiger how to play ‘Dixie’ on the horns,” Savannah said.
“Nope, he’s gonna throw a live seal to the tiger every night and let the customers bet on who wins,” Luke said, doubling over with laughter.
“I may throw my mouthy children to the tiger if they don’t shut their yaps and have some respect for their father. I’m in a real good mood, so I don’t want anyone pissing me off. Got it? I can teach you something about the way the modern world works if you’ll just listen. We just bought an Esso station, right?”
“Right,” Luke said.
“Esso advertises all over the world, right? Follow me so far? They spend millions of dollars advertising their products so grinning butthooks will drive their cars into an Esso station when they could just as easily fill up with Shell or Texaco or Gulf. Still with me?”
?
??Yes, sir.”
“Okay, nectarines. What is their advertisement right now, this very minute?” he said, his voice rising in excitement. “Playing on every television and radio in the free world. Making people buy Esso instead of that other crap. Bringing droves of paying customers up to the Esso pumps begging for the right kind of gas because they’ve been brainwashed by a brilliant advertising campaign. Get it? Get it?”
“Oh, no,” Savannah said, nearly hysterical. “I got it. I got it.”
“Well, what is it, Savannah?” my mother asked impatiently.
“When you buy Esso, Mama,” she said, “you put a tiger in your tank.”
“Damn right,” my father exploded. “And who’s the only goddamn Esso station owner in the country who’s got him a real tiger sitting beside the pumps? Wingo Esso. That’s who. Henry Goddamn Genius Wingo, that’s who.”
Henry Goddamn Genius Wingo kept his gas station running for six months, and he was proven right about the tiger. He set the tiger’s cage up on the corner next to the bridge and motorists could watch the tiger pace and growl as they got their car serviced. Children begged their parents to take them to see the tiger even if there was no need to buy gas. Caesar held children in the same high esteem as he held seals and there was some initial worry about Caesar making his lunch of the preschoolers of the town, but the tiger inspired a rare vigilance among the mothers of Colleton. Languor and ferocity were the tiger’s two prevailing moods, but the appearance of children always stimulated Caesar to interludes of extraordinary wildness. He would lunge out of his cage, claws extended and swinging, sending the children and their parents surging backward, squealing and having a marvelous time. My father thought Caesar acted like a rabid dog but noted that he outweighed any rabid dog by four hundred or more pounds.
Feeding Caesar was a problem my father happily assigned to his sons. I had never entertained a single prejudice against a tiger until I realized that Caesar would as soon eat me as he would a chicken neck. Nor was it a simple thing to approach Caesar’s cage during feeding time. From the beginning, Caesar and I had a simple, straightforward relationship, one built on a solid foundation of mutual loathing. Caesar would come to love Luke and even allow him to scratch his back through the bars, but the relationship would evolve slowly and did not apply during the first months of Wingo Esso. Luke would signal for me to approach the front of the cage, where I would speak to the tiger in a soothing voice as he tried to behead me with those fabulous claws. While I was risking my life, Luke would sneak around to the back of the cage and slide a hubcap, brimming with chicken necks and dry cat food, through the bars. Caesar would hear Luke, disengage from my side of the cage, and with the quickest, most unpredictable movement I had yet witnessed in the animal kingdom would be trying to impale Luke with one of those violent swings as Luke fell away from the bars and landed on his back.