by Jeffrey Ford
The next morning, I woke in my trailer, with a headache from the whiskey and coughing out of both sides of my head from Maybell’s harsh muggles. The only thing I could remember was the sight of Ichbon reeling drunkenly beneath the stars, going after the Three Miserable Clowns with a lion-taming whip. They were running around him, ducking and weaving, and he was snapping that thing in the air like gunshots. They were all laughing hysterically. “Miserable bastards,” the Maestro bellowed and cracked the whip. When I left the trailer, hurrying to make it to breakfast on time, I nearly ran over Mirchland. He said, “The Maestro wants you in the tent in a hurry.”
I was hungry, and the thought of facing the smell of the Dust Demon with a hangover didn’t sit well. Still, I went. When I got there, I found Ichbon standing next to the cage of the creature. His hat was off, his head was bowed.
“Yes, Maestro,” I said.
He nodded toward the cage. The beast was lying motionless. I stared for a long while, trying to notice the rise and fall of its breathing, but it was still. By that time, the flies had arrived, and although it seemed impossible the thing stunk worse.
“You see that on the floor of the cage?”
I nodded.
“That’s the future.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Considering I don’t first blow my brains out and that I had the money, I’d have that thing stuffed,” said Ichbon. “We could still make a fortune off the carcass with the right banner and bullshit in the towns, but a stitch job like that would sink us. I’m afraid we’ll just have to move ahead without it.” Never let it be said that the Maestro was a quitter. “The Dust Demon,” he said as if picturing the creature rendered in full color bursting out of the ground toward an unsuspecting farmer’s wife. Just then, I glimpsed a black dot of an insect leap off the creature’s head and land on the back of Ichbon’s wrist. He looked down, brought his hand closer to his eyes, and squinted.
Moments passed and he continued to study it.
“What is that?” I finally asked.
“It’s a flea,” he said. “Quick, go get the professor and round up the clowns.” As I hurriedly left the tent, I saw, through the eyes in the back of my head, the Maestro cover the insect on his wrist with the opposite hand. He was smiling broadly. “When life is shit, make shit soup,” he yelled after me.
Professor Dunce was Jon Hibbler’s show name. He was the only one in the caravan older than Ichbon. Throughout his long life in the business he’d done nearly every act, once even passing as Jeez Louise, the Bearded, Tattooed Fat Lady. He’d seen all there was to see on the road, and the Maestro kept him around as a sort of advisor. Still, the creaky Hibbler had to pay his way and so pretended for the crowds that he was an imbecile. Dressed in a graduation gown and wearing a dunce cap, the professor would sit in a chair, and Ichbon would stand next to him, calling the patrons over and beseeching, “Ladies and gentlemen, could anyone really be this stupid?” It cost three cents to ask the dunce a question, and I never ceased to wonder how many couldn’t wait to spend their pennies. Hibbler had a college degree, though, and had a rasher of high academic terminology that he would splice together to make a whirling lecture devoid of sense. The crowd loved their own love of his inanity.
The professor moved slowly, shuffling along amid the trailers in his black gown like some grim clergy. The cold affected him greatly. He was pale as a ghost, with a shock of white hair and a white beard. By the time I rounded up the clowns, Hibbler was just passing into the shade of the tent. Immediately, Ichbon ordered the clowns to go and bring back three glass jars with screw-on lids and eyebrow tweezers. Then he turned to the professor and said, “Do you remember, Jon, your act back twenty years ago, Hibbler’s Minions?”
Ichbon’s words took a moment to sink in, and then the professor smiled and said, “You mean the fleas?”
The Maestro stepped close to me and said, “This man, at one time, was the proprietor of the most renowned flea circus in the world. God, what a moneymaker it was.”
“It was a good act,” said the professor.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“I couldn’t get the fleas. You have to be able to loop a very thin gold wire around them to get them to perform. Cat and dog fleas are too small, but human fleas—Pulex Irritans—were large enough. I’d harness them to miniature chariots and have them walk a tightrope, carrying a little umbrella. At the end, I’d shoot one out of a cannon and catch it in midair. It’s the cleanliness of the modern world that’s put them in decline. You can’t find them anymore.”
The Maestro said, “I hope you still have some of that gold wire,” uncapped his hand from off his wrist and brought it up for the professor to see more clearly. “Look at the size of that thing.”
Hibbler nodded, slowly at first, but then with more determination. “I could work with that flea,” he said. “It would be easy.”
“I’ll have the clowns collect as many as they can from the carcass of this worthless pile before I have it burned.”
There came a day in early spring when the caravan finally lurched forward toward the rising sun. To be moving, to be caught up in a day’s work, I found preferable to the purgatory of wintering. After the Dust Demon had been burned down to its bones and Ichbon had retrieved the skull and claws, the aroma lingered in camp till the day we departed. Despite the dust storms, everyone breathed easier on the plains, out of reach of the tentacles of that stench.
I brushed up on my act, which besides cheap tricks like inhaling a cigarette with one mouth and expelling the smoke out the other, took the form of an argument with myself. The Maestro always warned me, “Don’t leave the audience for too long with your other face. It’s too strange, too hungry. When it licks its lips, the customers walk away.” I’d only viewed my other face once, in a room of mirrors, but the sight of me struck me unconscious on the spot. I was left with amnesia of the incident, unable to picture me. Whenever I tried, the hair would rise on the backs of my arms and the saliva would leave my mouth. I rewrote the script of the argument so that my other face had half as much dialogue. It meant fewer times I would have to turn completely around to answer myself, and that was fine with me as the act was exhausting.
The Maestro was right; the crowds that March were so dejected, they pretended we were good. By the time we made it to Muskogee, Professor Dunce had shed his graduation gown for a tuxedo and top hat and been reborn as Hibbler, Master of Minions. He sat with me and the Maestro and Maybell one evening. We passed the smoke and the bottle and he explained, “These are no ordinary fleas. They’re disproportionately large, with enormous heads. I can see their eyes watching for my commands. Under the jeweler’s loupe I have discovered they don’t have insect limbs, insignificant sticks, but muscular arms and legs with feet and hand-like grippers.”
“But will they perform?” asked Ichbon, taking a toke.
“I dare say they’re smarter than dogs,” said Hibbler. “I don’t even have to bind them and they willingly perform the feats I require.”
“They feed on your blood?” asked the Rubber Lady.
“They don’t touch me. When I doze off at night, they leave the trailer and go hunting. I think they must be into the animals, but I knew it was right to let them find their own diet. How much could they take? There are only six of them.”
“The peacock is looking a little peaked,” said Ichbon.
“When we open in Muskogee and you see the act and the money it brings, you won’t care if they’re feasting on your balls, Maestro.”
“There’s a lady present,” said the face at the back of my head.
I saw the first show of the new flea circus, and Hibbler’s Minions was the hit the old man had promised. Every night after the first, it was packed for his performance in the back left corner of the tent. The crowd could readily see the fleas and were astonished at what they’d been trained
to do. Incredible lifting, pulling, acrobatics, tightrope walking, leaping, and all without a harness, all initiated by voice command from Hibbler. Laid out on a board was a three-ring circus, and in each ring a different flea performed a different feat. One lifted a silver cigarette lighter over its head, the next juggled caraway seeds, the third tumbled and leaped high into the air. Above them one crossed on a high wire. All six of them enacted a chariot race with two tiny chariots going around the circumference of the center ring. Word spread far and wide about the Minions. And when their act drew to a close the damn things would line up in a row and bow to applause.
Hibbler was back in old form and there was actually a spring in his step. He’d become the star attraction of the Caravan and was relishing it. “I rule them with an iron fist,” he told me. “They know they’d better listen.” But he dismissed me when I mentioned the fact that both the peacock and Brutus, the Orangutan, had recently passed on. Both animals were withered and lethargic in their final days.
“Do you really believe that fleas could drain an orangutan of its life? Please, Janus.”
“There are only six,” I admitted.
“There were only six,” he said. “Now there are ten. But still, ten fleas?”
I lost my skepticism for a while in the success of the show. All the acts were doing well what with the crowd Hibbler drew. Instead of being pleased with the money that flowed in, though, the Maestro seemed anxious. Sometimes he didn’t even wait for nightfall to start on the Old Overholt. “A tenuous thing, a flea,” he was overheard to say. When the Falling Angel asked him what he meant, Ichbon whispered, “It’s not the fleas I’m worried about in that act.” Then the anteater was taken by an acute malaise and in a matter of a week became depleted and died. It was noted that the creature’s eyes were missing at the discovery of its death. With this my skepticism returned, and I feared the Minions were behind it. Mirchland had the same idea, and we discussed it one night, standing under a full moon behind the mess wagon when neither of us could sleep for the phantom itching brought on by our knowledge of what was happening to the menagerie.
“All that’s left is the albino skunk,” he said. “Then what?”
By the next morning, the albino skunk had also gone the way of all splendors, and the caravan was for the first time since its inception without a menagerie of any sort, save fleas. The burial of the poor creature was pathetic. Everyone was there but no one had anything to say. Finally, Ichbon took his hat off, cleared his throat, and spoke. “I, for one, have no regrets seeing this overgrown rat pass on. It bit me once. In fact, I celebrate the passing of the entire menagerie. Good riddance to the damn beasts. The whole thing was a crime I’ll now wash my hands of.” When he was finished, the fleas dragged a dandelion onto the grave. Hibbler said, “Now say your prayers.” I swear I saw them kneel all in a row and bow their heads. Mirchland looked up at me from the other side of the grave and carefully nodded. Beside me, I noticed the Falling Angel was looking pale, his once skintight lavender outfit now sagging with wrinkles.
Performers on the circuit agreed: the Falling Angel, Walter Hupsh, had an act so simple it was beautiful. He took a ladder to a platform at the peak of the big top, twenty feet in the air. Then he bent cautiously forward, grimaced, and fell. He was tall and lanky and not well built for it, plummeting like a bird forgetting its gift. Granted, there were two old mattresses buried in the packed dirt beneath the ladder where he hit. They were covered over with sawdust, and the public never knew. But still, with each performance there was an impact. Hupsh was head-rattled from a life of falling, that we knew, but a strange lethargy overtook him as we left Tulsa for Wichita. His trips up the ladder had become pathetic, his flights, as he called them, tragic. Mirchland and I kept tabs on him.
One afternoon, out of design, I sat next to him at lunch. “You look tired, Walter,” I said. “Not been sleeping well?”
“I think I busted my ribs,” he said, and a little drool of oatmeal issued from the corner of his lips. “And I got the itches something fierce. I wake up with the itches.”
“Are you being bitten by a bug, maybe?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said and went back to his oatmeal.
In the days that followed, Walter came to rival Jack Sprat for most emaciated, and Sprat challenged the Falling Angel to a duel for sole ownership of the title. Cooler heads prevailed. The Maestro took me aside and said, “The falling guy looks like shit. Reminds me of the peacock.”
I told him what I thought was going on and that Mirchland was on to it too. “Those fleas, whatever they are, drained the life out of all of the animals and now have turned to human blood.”
“You mean Hupsh?” he said.
“Of course,” I answered. “Look at him.”
Just then the man was practicing his act. We looked over toward the center of the tent. The Angel took the ladder as if he were gravity itself. I could feel the weight of each labored step, but up he went, a trooper. Ichbon smoked a cigarette in the time it took him to reach the platform. Once there, he inched out to the edge. He stumbled, grasped at his throat, and groaned pitifully in the descent. He hit with a rattle. The Maestro and I ran to him. There was nothing left but a flesh bag of broken bones covered in sawdust.
When Ichbon caught his breath, he turned to me and said, “Get the clowns.”
Mirchland and I were already there, sitting with Ichbon outside his trailer, passing the Old Overholt, when the Miserable Ones delivered Hibbler to our meeting. The Maestro said, “Pass the bottle to Jon,” and I did. Hibbler was in his graduation gown, which, though no longer part of his act, he still wore to bed.
“We need to talk,” said Ichbon.
“Give me a cigarette,” said Hibbler.
I handed him one and he lit it with the silver lighter lifted by the flea in his show. His hands quivered. “Talk about what?” he asked.
“Falling Angel.”
“A tragedy.”
“We think your fleas did him in,” said the Maestro.
“My fleas? You shouldn’t have said that.” Hibbler became indignant and sat up straight in his chair.
“They have to be squashed.”
The old performer shook his head. “Impossible. There are too many of them. They’re listening right now.” The professor’s bravado of recent weeks was gone, and he seemed shakier than he’d been since I’d known him. After a long draw on the bottle, he wiped his mouth, slumped forward, and gazed at the ground.
“I thought you were in charge,” said Ichbon.
“I thought I was too.”
“Let’s burn them,” said Mirchland in a whisper.
“No, you might as well set fire to yourselves and the whole damn caravan,” said the professor. “Before you could light a torch they could be all over you, sucking you drier than no man’s land.”
“Well, I’m not going to sit around and wait till I’m on the menu,” said Ichbon. “Call them together for a meeting and we’ll ambush them.”
“Shhh,” said Hibbler. “I told you, they can hear us.”
“Fuck the fleas!” yelled the Maestro.
Mirchland and I stood up and walked slowly away from the meeting.
Ichbon watched our dull escape. “You chickenshits,” he said.
From my back mouth, I warned him, “Caution.”
Two days later, the Maestro blew his brains out in his trailer. Jack Sprat found him, slumped back in his chair, a hole the size of a silver dollar between his eyes. There were also bullet holes in his feet, his shins, his stomach, his rear end, and his thigh. We knew he must have gone mad from the itching and tried to eradicate his persecutors with bullets. Only the Miserable Clowns dared to touch his corpse. They dragged it out to the edge of the field we were set up in, gathered brush, and made a bier. One by one, the members of the caravan came out of hiding to pay their last respects. There was less said at
the event than for the burial of the albino skunk, but as his smoke rose, we watched with tears in our eyes, as much for our own fates as his. The Minions made a presence: their rank and file by the hundreds kneeled and prayed. When the fire burned down, the clowns retrieved the Maestro’s blackened skull and mounted it on the bumper of the lead truck in the caravan.
Forgive me if I don’t dwell on the list of my comrades who withered and succumbed to the hunger of the Minions. We left a trail of smoldering biers in our wake as we moved inexorably from town to town. By the time we hit St. Joseph, near the Kansas-Missouri border, Jack Sprat, Mr. Electric, the World’s Ugliest Man and his beautiful wife, Ronnie, the Crab Boy, Gaston, the cook, and more had weakened, shriveled, and passed on. No one dared to speak about the horror we were trapped within. To speak out moved you immediately to the top of the menu. Whispers were dangerous. Those of us remaining had to take on more jobs in order to keep the caravan rolling.
Once the itching, started your hours were numbered. Most were dragged down in a state of grim and silent acceptance, but there were one or two who raged against it. The latter were far harder to witness, their antics pathetic against the inevitable. As for the performers who survived, the stress of insect servitude, the fact that they were like cattle kept for slaughter, quickly began to undermine their acts. The fortune-teller saw only one future. The knife-thrower’s hands fluttered like trapped birds, and his poor assistant was numb with the fear that if the fleas didn’t kill her he would. The Miserable Clowns lost their sense of humor. As terrible as the rest of the caravan was, at each stop the crowd still showed up to see Hibbler’s Minions. The new grand finale of the act consisted of thousands of fleas coming together to form the figure of a man tipping his flea hat to the audience.