“Madre de Dios, Lucretia!” cried the ringmaster.
For the canvas heaved, exhaled. The tent skeleton groaned. The angle-pullers, the rope-haulers shut their eyes, moaning, afraid to see that insanity in the air.
Lucy-Lucretia snapped both hands. Zap! A Mexican flag, an American flag sprang from nowhere into her fingers. Crick!
The band, seeing this, played the Mexican national anthem (four bars), and ended with Francis Scott Key (two).
The audience clapped, yelled! With luck, that midget dynamo would be down on the earth instead of the tent down on our heads! Olé!
The three ropemen let her drop.
She fell a full ten feet before they remembered she had no net. They seized the smoking rope again. You could smell their burning skin. Devil’s fire leaped from their palms. They laughed with pain.
The little toy lady hit the sawdust, her smile still attached to the buckle. She reached up, unplucked the rope, and stood waving the two bright flags at the gone-mad crowd.
The tent, relieved of 110 pounds of mighty muscle, sighed. Through the many moth holes in the gray-brown canvas skin, I saw a thousand stars twinkling in celebration. The circus was to live for yet another day.
Pursued by a tidal wave of applause, the Smile and the tiny lady who owned it ran along the sawdust shore, gone.
Now: the finale.
Now, an act which would put out our lives, blow out our souls, destroy our sanity by its beauty, terror, weight, power, and imagination!
So said a rope-hauler over the lilyhorns!
The rope-hauler waved his trumpet. The band fell in a heap of super-induced affection upon a triumphal march.
The lion-tamer, in a banging cloud of pistol-fire, bounded into the ring.
He wore a white African hunter’s helmet, a Clyde Beatty blouse and puttees, and Frank Buck boots.
He cracked a black whip. He fired his pistol to wake us up. The air was filled with an immense bloom of scent.
But under the shadow of his white helmet, and behind his fierce new mustache, I saw the face of the ticket-seller out front an hour ago, and the eyes of the ringmaster.
Another pistol crack. Ta!
The round lion-tamer’s cage, hidden until now under a bright tarpaulin toward the rear of the tent, was revealed as its brilliant cover was yanked off.
The ring-attendants came trudging in, pulling a crate inside which we could smell a single lion. This they pushed up to the far side of the cage. Doors were opened. The lion-tamer leaped into the main cage, slammed the door, and fired his weapon at the open door of the lion’s shadowy crate.
“Leo! Ándale!” cried the tamer.
The audience leaned forward.
But … no Leo.
He was asleep somewhere in that small portable crate.
“Leo! Vamanos! Ándale! Presto!” The tamer snapped in through the small crate door with his whip, like someone turning meat on a tired spit.
A big fluff of yellow mane rolled over with an irritable mumble.
“Gah!” The pistol was next fired into the deaf old lion’s ear.
There was a most deliciously satisfying roar.
The audience beamed and settled back.
Leo suddenly manifested in the crate door. He blinked into the damned light. And he was—
The oldest lion I have ever seen.
It was a beast come forth from a retirement farm in the Dublin Zoo on a bleak day in December. So wrinkled was his face, it was a smashed window, and his gold was old gold left out in the long rains and beginning to run.
The lion needed glasses, this we could guess from his furious blinking and squinting. Some of his teeth had fallen out in his breakfast gruel only that morning. His ribs could be seen under his mangy pelt which had the look of a welcome mat trampled on by a billion lion-tamers’ feet.
There was no more outrage in him. He was angered out. There was only one thing to do. Fire his pistol into the beast’s left nostril—bang!
“Leo.”
Roar! went the lion. Ah! said the audience. The drummer stirred up a storm on his snare drum.
The lion took a step. The tamer took a step. Suspense!
Then a dreadful thing …
The lion opened his mouth and yawned.
Then an even more dreadful thing …
A small boy, no more than three years old, somehow freed from his mother’s clutch, left the elite table at the edge of the ring and toddled forward across the sawdust toward the monstrous iron cage. Cries filled the tent: No, no! But before anyone could move, the small boy plunged laughing forward and seized the bars.
No! came the gasp.
But worse still, the little boy shook not just two bars, but the entire cage.
With the littlest move of his tiny pink-brown fists, the boy threatened to topple the whole jungle edifice.
No! cried everyone silently, leaning forward, gesticulating at the boy with fingers and eyebrows.
The lion-tamer, with his whip and pistol upraised, sweated, waited.
The lion exhaled through his fangless mouth, eyes shut.
The small boy gave the bars a last rattling shake of terrible Doom.
Just as his father, in one swift run, scooped him up, half hid him under his Sunday coat, and retreated to the nearest formal table.
Bang! The audience exhaled, collapsed in relief, the lion roared, circled round after its own tail, and leaped upon a flake-painted pedestal, there to rear up on its hind feet.
By now, the shaken cage had stopped trembling.
Bang! The tamer fired into that vast yellow-sun face. The lion blazed a real scream of anguish and leaped! The tamer ran pell-mell. The lion raced. The tamer reached the cage door, with the lion not one pace behind. The audience shrieked. The tamer flung the door wide, spun, fired, bang, bang! then out, clang! and the door locked safe, he whipped his toupee off, flung his pistol to earth, cracked his whip, and smiled a smile that swallowed us all!
Roar! That’s what the crowd did. On its feet, it imitated the lion-beast. Roar!
The show was over.
The two bands were playing outside in the watermelon-eating dust-blowing cricket-jumping night and the audience was going out and my friend and I sat for a long while until we were almost alone in the moth-eaten tent through which the stars moved yet new bright constellations into place and would continue to move their small strange fires during the night. The tent flapped its wings in a hot wind of ancient applause. We went out with the last of the crowd in silence.
We looked back in at the empty ring, at the high line at the tent-top where the silver buckle waited to be attached to the Smile.
I felt a taco in my hand and looked up. There before me was the tiny lady who rode disorganized camels, juggled kegs, tore tickets, and changed from moth to butterfly each night in the small sky. Her Smile was near, her eyes searched to find the cynic in me, and found but a friend. We both had hold of opposite ends of one taco. At last she let go. With my gift, I went.
Nearby, the phonograph hissed “La Galondrina.” And there stood the lion-tamer, perspiration falling from his brow to make a suit of lights where it touched his khaki shirt. Lips pressed to his horn, eyes shut, he did not see me pass.
Under dusty trees, we turned a corner, and the circus was gone.
All night the wind blew warm up out of Mexico, taking the dry land with it. All night the crickets rained on our bungalow windowpanes.
We drove north. For weeks after, I beat the hot dust out of my clothes and picked the dead crickets out of my typewriter and luggage.
And still nights, twenty-nine years later, I hear that one-ring circus playing its two bands, one real, one hiccuping on records, a long way off on a warm Santa Ana wind, and I wake and sit up in bed, alone, and it is not there.
Someone in the Rain
Everything was almost the same. Now that the luggage was brought into the echoing damp cottage, with the raindrops still shining on it, and he had drawn the canvas over t
he car which was still warm and smelling of the drive two hundred miles north into Wisconsin from Chicago, he had time to think. First of all, he had been very lucky to get this same cabin, the one he and his brother Skip and his folks had rented twenty years ago, in 1927. It sounded just the same, there was the empty echo of your voice and your feet. Now, for some unaccountable reason, he was walking about barefoot, because it felt good, perhaps. He closed his eyes as he sat on the bed and listened to the rain on the thin roof. You had to take a lot of things into account. First of all, the trees were larger. You looked out of your streaming car window in the rain and you saw the Lake Lawn sign looming up and something was different and it was only now, as he heard the wind outside, that he realized what the real change was. The trees, of course. Twenty years of growing lush and high. The grass, too; if you wanted to get particular, it was the same grass, perhaps, he had lain in that long time ago, after the jump in the lake, his swimsuit still cold around his loins and around his thin small chest. He wondered, idly, if the latrine still smelled the way it did: of brass and disinfectant and old shuffling fumbling men and soap.
The rain stopped. It tapped occasionally on the house from the washing trees above, and the sky was the color and had the feel and expectancy of gunpowder. Now and again it cracked down the middle, all light; and then the crack was mended.
Linda was over in the ladies’ rest room, which was just a run between the bushes and the trees and the small white cottages, a run through puddles now, he supposed, and bushes that shook like startled dogs when you passed, showering you with a fresh burst of cool and odorous rain. It was good that she was gone for awhile. He wanted to look for certain things. First there was the initial he had carved on the windowsill fifteen years ago on their last trip up for the late summer of 1932. It was a thing he would never have done with anyone about, but now, alone, he walked to the window and ran his hand over the surface. It was perfectly smooth.
Well then, he thought, it must have been another window. No. It was this room. And this cottage, no doubt of it. He felt a sudden resentment at the carpen-ter who had come in here some time ago and smoothed and sandpapered surfaces and taken away the immortality he had promised himself that rainy night when, locked into the house by the storm, he had busied himself with the careful initialing. Then he had said to himself, People will come by, years from now, and see this.
He rubbed his hand on the empty sill.
Linda arrived through the front door. “Oh, what a place,” she cried, and she was almost soaked, her blonde hair was full of rain, and her face was wet. She looked at him with half an accusation. “So this is Wonderland. When did they build it? You’d think each house would have a toilet, but oh no! It’s just a stone’s throw to the toilet, where I spent two minutes trying to find the light switch, and five minutes after that batting off a big moth while I tried to wash up!”
A large moth. He straightened up and smiled. “Here.” He gave her a towel. “Dry off. You’ll be all right.”
“I ran into a bush, look at my dress, drenched. God.” She submerged into the towel, talking.
“I’ve got to go over to the men’s room myself,” he said, looking out the door, smiling at a thing that had come into his mind. “I’ll be back.”
“If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll send the Coast Guard—”
The door banged.
He walked very slowly, taking deep breaths. He just let the rain fall on him and he felt the wind tugging at the cuffs of his pants. That cottage there was where Marion, his cousin, had stayed with her mother and father. God, how many nights had they crept off to the woods and sat on damp grass to tell ghost stories while looking at the lake. And get so scared that Marion would want to hold hands and then maybe kiss, just those small innocent kisses of ten- and eleven-year-old cousins, only touches, only gestures against loneliness. He could smell her now, Marion, the way she was before the nicotine got to her and the bottled perfumes got to her. She hadn’t been his cousin, really now, for ten years or so, never really, since growing up. The really natural creature had been back here somewhere. Oh, Marion was mature now, and so was he to a certain degree. But all the same, the smell of maturity wasn’t quite as pleasant.
He reached the men’s washroom, and Christ, it wasn’t changed a bit.
The moth was waiting for him.
It was a big soft fluttery white ghost of a moth, batting and whispering against the single filament bulb. It had been there twenty years, sighing and beating in the moist night air of the rest room, waiting for him to come back. He remembered his first encounter with it. He had been only eight and the moth had come at him like a powdery phantom, dusting down its horrible wings, screaming silently at him.
He had run, shrieking, out of the latrine, across the dark August grass, into his cottage. And, rather than go back to the latrine, he watered himself free of his bursting pain behind the cottage. After that, he had been sure to go to the toilet many times during the day, so he would not have to go back to the latrine to face the powdering terror.
Now he looked at the Moth.
“Hello,” he said. “Been waiting long?”
It was a silly thing to say, but it was good being silly. He didn’t like the look on Linda’s face. He knew that the more excuses he could make in the next day or so to be out of her sight, the better for himself. He would save money on cigarettes by not being too near her. He would be very solicitous. “What if I run up for a bottle of whiskey, darling?” “Darling, I’m going down to the boat dock to pick up some bait.” “Darling, Sam wants me to golf this afternoon.” Linda didn’t keep well in this kind of weather. There was something a little sour about her already.
The moth beat gently at his face. “You’re pretty damned big,” he said, suddenly feeling a return of the cool chill to his spine, where it had used to be. He hadn’t been afraid in years, now he let himself be just a little, enjoyably, afraid of the white, whispering moth. It tinkled against the light bulb. He washed up, and for the hell of it looked into a booth to see if there was some of that mysterious writing he had once read as a boy. Magic words then, incomprehensible, strange. Now—nothing. “I know what you mean, now,” he said. “Words. Limericks. All the magic gone.”
Somehow, he caught himself in the mirror, the blurred, fuzzy mirror, and his face was disappointed. All the words had not turned out to be half as grand as he had conjured them to seem. Once they had been golden pronouncements of mystery. Now they were vulgar, short, shocks against accumulated taste.
He lingered to finish out a cigarette, not wanting quite yet to return to Linda.
When he entered the cottage, Linda looked at his shirt.
“That’s your good shirt, and why didn’t you put on your coat, it’s all wet.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“You’ll catch cold,” she said. She was unpacking some things on the bed. “Boy, the bed’s hard,” she said.
“I used to sleep the sleep of the innocent on it,” he said.
“Frankly,” she said, “I’m getting old. When they put out a bed made of whipped cream, I’m bait.”
“Lie down for awhile,” he suggested. “We’ve got three hours before dinner—”
“How long will this rain go on?” she said.
“I don’t know, probably just today, and then tomorrow, everything green. Boy, does it smell good after a rain.”
But he was lying. Sometimes it rained for a week. And he hadn’t minded it. He had run down to the gray choppy lake in the needling rain, while the sky over him, like a great gray crock overturned and storming, from time to time took on a crackle glaze of electric blue. Then the thunder knocked him off his feet. And he had swum in the lake, his head out, the lake feeling warm and comfortable, just because the air was filled with cold needles and he looked out at the pavilion where people danced nights, and the hotels with the warm long dim corridors hushed and quiet with running porters, and he looked at the cottage under the Augu
st thunder, him in the lake, paddling dog-fashion, the air like winter above. And he never wanted to come out of the lake, he wanted only to remain suspended in the warm water, until he turned purple with enjoyment.
Linda lay down on the bed. “God, what a mattress,” she said.
He lay down beside her, not touching her.
The rain started again, gently, upon the cottage. It was as dark as night, but a very special feeling, because you knew it was four in the afternoon, though black, and the sun was above all the blackness, oh, very special.
At six o’clock, Linda painted a fresh mouth on. “Well, I hope the food’s good,” she said. It was still raining, a thumping, pounding, never-ending drop of storm upon the house. “What do we do this evening?” she wanted to know.
“Dance? There’s a pavilion, cost a million dollars, built in 1929 just before the crash,” he said, tying his tie. And again he was out of the room, in thought, and under the raining trees, eighteen years ago. Him and Marion and Skip, running in their rustling slickers, making a noise like cellophane, with the rain patting them all over, their faces greased with it, past the play-ground and the slides, along the posted road, and to the pavilion. Children were not allowed inside. They had stood outside with their faces pressed to the screen, watching the people inside, buying drinks, laughing, sitting at the tables, getting up and going out to dance on the dance floor to music that was muted and enclosed. Marion had stood there, enchanted, the light on her face. “Someday,” she had said, “I’m going to be inside, and dance.”
They had stood, with the rain touching around them, in the dark wet night, the rain dripping from the eaves of the pavilion. And the music had played “I Found My Love in Avalon” and things like “In Old Monterrey.”
Then, after half an hour of the rain seeping into their shoes, and their noses chilling, and rain slipping into their raincoat collars, they had turned from the warm pavilion light and walked off, silently, the music fading, down the road back to their cabins.
Someone knocked on the front door. “Sam!” called a voice. “Hey, you two! Ready? Time for dinner!”