Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus

by Bruce Feiler

  “I didn’t speak to my parents for a year and a half,” Angel said. “My sister, who was already living in America with Juan, called every week, so they knew I was alive. But I never talked to them directly. I had nothing to say to them. Finally, a couple of weeks ago we were in Sterling, Virginia, and Mari was talking to them on the phone in front of a Home Depot. I told her, ‘I want to talk with Mother and Father.’ She said she didn’t think it was a good idea. I told her I thought it would be okay. I picked up the phone and my mother spoke first. ‘We want you to know we love you,’ she said. ‘Everything is fine. We’ve forgiven you. It’s all in the past.’”

  Michelle was holding her husband’s hand. “That night he said, ‘We’re going to visit.’”

  Angel nodded through his tears. “That’s right,” he said, “we’re going home.”

  Circles are hallowed in the circus: even life is lived in rings.

  For the final trick the troupe unites. Little Pablo, who started walking on the wire at the start of the year in an effort to expand the act, grabs an eight-inch stainless-steel wheel and sets it on the wire. Holding the wheel by its two small handles, he tucks his feet underneath Angel’s arms and lowers his head just inches from the wire. To make this human wheelbarrow even more complex, Mari climbs onto Angel’s shoulders and raises her arms in the air. The trick is ready. The band stops playing. With heart-pounding accompaniment from the bass drum, Angel takes up a twenty-foot pole for balance and begins to step across the wire—pushing his brother-in-law, carrying his sister, and inching ever so carefully toward his wife, who stands at the far end of the wire gesturing anxiously at her family and trying to lure them home.

  In the middle of this odd family portrait Angel Quiros remains calm.

  “When I’m on the wire I’m a different person completely,” he said. “I’ve got to show the people: I’m Angel Quiros. That means something to me. I want people to remember us. Sometimes they are a little tired. They’ve seen so many acts. I don’t want that to happen. I want the people to wake up and say, ‘What’s going on? What is he doing…?’”

  And down below they are saying just that.

  “Can you believe it?”

  “His feet are so small.”

  “Oh my God, he’s going to fall.”

  But Angel isn’t going to fall. He’s never even considered it.

  “People always say to me, ‘Look, you’re crazy.’ But I’m not crazy. I know some people who are. They don’t practice. They don’t know what they’re doing. But they go out and work anyway. And they fall. If you know what you’re doing, if you know how to pull everything together, even the most extraordinary act is just doing your job.”

  And what a job it is: before 3,000 people, thirty feet in the air, with your sister on your shoulders, your brother-in-law around your waist, and your wife welcoming you back home with a kiss on the cheek and a thank-you to God. All jobs—all stories—should end so happily…twice a day, seven days a week, every day of the year.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Quiros Troupe!”

  12

  At Heaven’s Door

  Marty came running into the Alley just as intermission approached.

  “Bruce, come quick. It’s happening.”

  “What’s happening?” I asked, standing up to go. At this point, could there be any surprises left?

  “It’s Barisal,” he said. “Her water broke.”

  The answer was a resounding yes: tiger births on Halloween eve.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’m on my way.” I slipped on my floppy shoes.

  The show arrived at the Gulf of Mexico just as the calendar tipped into fall. Now that we were starting our eighth month on the road, signs of aging were everywhere evident. Fabio Estrada, a newborn in March, was already beginning to walk. Georgi Ivanov, a teenager in August, was already sporting an earring. And Esmeralda Jamaica Queen, the baby Burmese python that Pat and Mike of the horse department purchased in Forest Park, had already increased her infant diet from one mouse a week to four. Susie, the ticket seller, meanwhile, had slashed her diet in an effort to lose her baby fat and had passed her maternity clothes on to Blair, who was one of four women on the show to get pregnant since the season began.

  In Clown Alley the strain was beginning to show. In late October my beleaguered trunk finally collapsed, and in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, I spent nineteen dollars on a replacement at Wal-Mart, another reminder that we were back in the South, along with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, NRA bumper stickers (MY WIFE YES, MY DOG MAYBE, MY GUN NEVER), and nineteen different kinds of chewing tobacco in the aisles of the Starvin’ Marvin convenience stores. As the weather got steadily chillier, the boys in the Alley replaced their cans of cheap generic cola with cups of cheap generic tea, and supplanted their Saturday-morning games of pickup softball with Sunday-afternoon games of touch football. Moreover, in the most conspicuous sign of general fatigue, the number of “dick in the ass” jokes declined from a testosterone peak of five an hour to a mere one or two feeble attempts a day. I knew it must be getting late in the season when the boys in the Alley couldn’t even get it up for one another anymore.

  In the midst of this communal death watch—three weeks and twenty-five shows to go—a parallel watch was taking place around the tigers. This one involved a birth. Since Kathleen left in early May, Khris Allen had been confronted three different times with what he thought was a pregnant tiger. The first, Barisal, proved to be a false alarm. The second, Fatima, suffered a miscarriage. Still, acting on Josip’s orders, Khris continued to mate the cats—during pre-show playtime in the ring; overnight in their cages—and by early fall he seemed to have scored. “It happened somewhere in New York,” he recalled, “probably in Queens. Again it was Barisal. She’s a tabby, so I mated her with Taras, another tabby. The general idea was to have a tabby-tabby litter to see what type of colors she would have. In her first litter, with a standard male, she had a snow white and a white. In her second litter, with another standard, she had a tabby and a white. By mating her with another tabby—pale custard in color with dark sienna stripes—we could learn if the tabby is an actual gene or just an aberration.”

  By early October the signs of pregnancy were apparent.

  “Her belly got bigger, much bigger than before,” Khris said. “This time when her nipples dropped they were as big as grapes. Also this time she seemed proud. When I took her into playtime she would march around and say, ‘Yeah, look at me. I’m pregnant. Come scratch my belly and feel my baby.’”

  By the end of the month her anxiety increased. During the last week of October, Khris took her out of the act. Twice a day he checked her nipples to see if they had started producing colostrum—a mixture of antibodies and hormones that’s a sign she’s about to deliver. On Thursday she started defecating a lot, another sign of imminent birth. On Friday she didn’t eat her dinner at all. “For the last few weeks she’s been wolfing down her food,” he said, “then suddenly she only picked and played. I was pretty sure today was the day.”

  And it was.

  Marty and I arrived at the tiger compound just as intermission was beginning. The sky above the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds in Mobile was mottled with clouds and an impending storm. The general buzz inside the tent mirrored the murmur around the tiger cages. Khris was pacing nervously, running his fingers through his hair, which was now even thinner on top and longer in back.

  “I was at home when I heard it,” he explained. “Actually I was in bed…” He winked. The previous night, in a rare moment of bravado, the normally shy Khris had succeeded in breaking the rules of the Roosters nightclub and inviting one of the young female “dancers” back to his compound for a private show. “I was rather proud of myself,” he said. “Score one for the balding men of America…. Anyway, I was taking a nap when I heard Barisal scream. She has a moan that sounds like ‘Aaaoom. Aaaoom.’ But this time it sounded like ‘AAAAAAhhhoooowwww.’ I was like ‘Oh, shit. She’s gone into labor.’” Khris t
hrew on his clothes and ran outside. By the time he arrived a small assembly had gathered—Marty, me, and Khris’s friend Bushwhacker from the mechanics department.

  Rocking back and forth in her cage, Barisal was agitated. Her rear end was covered in brownish fluid. The hay at her feet was clumped on one side. For a few minutes she walked around in a circle unsure what to do. She would lie down for a moment, writhe uncomfortably, then stand up again. Seconds later she would repeat the routine. Finally, at a little after 8:30, as intermission was drawing to a close, Barisal stood up for one last time, roared with a slow, almost mournful yawn, and arched her subtly striped back as the head of a cub—like a large sticky bun—first appeared between her legs.

  “Holy shit!” Khris exclaimed. “The first one’s coming already.”

  The cub’s head was moist, still coated in brine; its legs were hidden from view. Barisal squatted down in her cage, strained the muscles in her brawny legs, and with a rather indelicate pop deposited her plump little bundle of life in the six-inch pile of hay. Almost immediately Barisal turned around and began chewing off the umbilical cord that dangled limply from her baby’s belly. Then she started cleaning her cub—lapping up the afterbirth to stimulate her own milk production; licking the nose to clear it for air; and finally nudging the infant’s mouth to encourage it to breathe. Within minutes the baby began to squirm, and the mother pulled back to observe her cub. An unspoken creation had made the world fresh. The circus had new life.

  Within minutes of the birth, it began to rain. And Khris was starting to panic.

  “I was excited when I saw the baby,” he said later, “but also nervous. I was like an expectant father whose wife was in the hospital. I didn’t know what to do. It was starting to rain harder. We had another show to do, but I still had to keep an eye on her. What if she rejected the cub? What if she started to eat it? At first I thought: What the hell. I’ll just take her into the tent and won’t put her in the ring. Then I realized: What the hell am I thinking? She’s going to be having other babies. She’ll start screaming. People will think she’s dying or something. I decided to load her into the truck. Then Royce came and told me the second show was being canceled because of the storm. That raised a new set of problems.”

  Now freed from the show but burdened by the long jump ahead, Khris moved quickly. He ordered his grooms to tear down the awning and prepare the tigers for the move. One by one he winched the steel cages up the wooden ramp and into the back of the tiger truck, No. 78. He put Barisal’s cage in last so he could monitor her during the night. By 10:15, with only one cub born and the rain starting to muddy the field, he was ready to leave for Panama City, Florida. If he was lucky he could make it to the next lot in under three hours and be there for most of the other births. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it five miles before his truck broke down.

  “I was numb,” he said. “I was really frightened. The whole thing was happening so quickly, and there I was on the side of the road with a truck full of tigers, a mother in labor, and no one else around.”

  Over the next three hours, as Khris waited for the show’s mechanics to arrive, Barisal gave birth to the rest of her litter. By the time they reached Panama City it was 3:15 in the morning and Barisal had a total of four cubs, all of them tabby.

  “I was tired,” Khris said, “but very proud. This is one of the reasons I’m here. Doing a good performance is like performing well in sports. You feel confident in your abilities. You feel proud that the cats responded well. But this was an experience of a lifetime. It’s a true miracle, more so than a human baby, because human babies are born every second. This is an endangered species that I’m helping nurture. She’s doing all the hard work, of course. But I have a lot to consider. When she had the first baby I had to walk away for a moment because I was too emotional. I was at the point where I was ready to cry. I was very proud of her…”

  “So who did you share this with?”

  “Who do you think?” he said. “When Barisal was having her babies by the side of the road I called my dad, my mom, my brother, and my grandmother. They were all excited and wanted to know what was happening. Then I called Kathleen. She’s the only one who really understands how this feels. After that whole experience between me and her it’s really good now because we’re talking again. She understands about the babies…and what might happen tomorrow. After all the bullshit that has happened—the jealousies and the intimidations—our friendship is starting to overcome it all. It’s funny, isn’t it? The tigers are originally what pulled us apart. Now they’re bringing us together.”

  “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  Khris came to my door after the firehouse gag during the 7:30 show on Saturday night. His mood was subdued. His face tightly drawn. It was almost exactly twenty-four hours since the first cub was born, and since that time he had hardly slept.

  “I came to check the tigers after the first show,” he said. “The local media were busy filming a story. I transferred Barisal to an empty cage so I could clean up her mess and examine the babies. One by one I removed them from the hay. They were very soft, like little stuffed animals. Each one was pliable. Their eyes were closed, and will stay so for about two weeks. Their faces were all scrunched up. Their umbilical cords were already drying up and beginning to scab.

  “After taking three cubs I realized one was missing. I searched through the hay. It was wet and bloody. It had a lot of defecation in it. I began to clean it out and that’s when I discovered the missing tiger. I picked it up and rolled it over. The head was in the shape of a wet sack, almost like a water balloon. It had been born with a severe deformity. It wasn’t breathing. I knew Barisal had rejected it. Maybe she buried it after it died; maybe she buried it alive. Either way, I still felt bad. I looked at the photographers and said, ‘Okay, you have to leave now. The mother’s getting upset.’”

  Arriving in front of the tiger compound, Khris turned off the overhead light. He went to the last cage on the right and opened the door. Without speaking, he pulled out the cub—caramel in color with dark vertical stripes—and placed it in a blue laundry basket lined with hay, then covered it with a pink-and-white dishtowel. Even at this moment he was thinking of the cub. The music from the hair hang drifted from the tent. A chilled moisture clogged the air.

  Khris shut the cage and carried the basket behind the tiger truck, alongside the tattered bumper sticker:…AND ON THE 8TH DAY GOD CREATED TIGERS. Moving quickly and with glazed determination, he set the basket by the right rear tire. He kept his eyes focused on the towel, mumbled something to himself, then carefully lifted the tiny bundle from the basket and placed it into a small, coffin-like box. He was crying by now. The light drained from his eyes. All around him the sound seemed to dim. Even the music from the tent couldn’t be heard on that side of the truck. The heavens, at that moment, seemed far out of reach. The circus had lost a star.

  “Barisal might look for the missing cat for a minute or two,” he said, “but then her mothering instincts will take over and she’ll turn her attention to the surviving babies.” His voice was a whisper. His hands had started shaking. Later he would have to calm himself long enough to give the cub a proper burial. “I numbed myself,” he said. “I really did. I tried to be prepared. I know that the remaining babies will be better cared for. I know it’s what Barisal wanted. But still it hurts. Maybe I could have done something different. For all I know this could be something that will get me to hell. I tell you, this is not one of the better parts of animal care. But when we took cats into captivity we knew we couldn’t control everything.”

  “Do you think most people understand?”

  “My mom understands—I called her a few minutes ago—but she said she was sad. The truth is, when you go down to the very core, it’s still the end of a life. That’s something I hold very valuable. In a way I consider animals more valuable than humans, because I know what humans have done. That’s strange, but it’s true. I can care for animals
better because they’re straight up. They don’t stab you in the back. They let you know: ‘Okay, it’s time to play with me. Okay, now it’s not.’ They don’t connive and scheme to hurt you. They aren’t negligent of the world around them. In fact, they go along with it. They are a part of nature. And look what happens…. Sometimes I hate my job.”

  I rested my hand on his shoulder. He started back toward the tent. The final acts were just beginning. It was Halloween night.

  Later that night we climbed the tent.

  The generator as usual went off at midnight and with it the lights on the center poles and in all the trailers down the line. Earlier, Khris and I had gone to have a drink and returned just in time to be summoned as judges for the annual Halloween costume party in the center ring. Kris Kristo had brought a girl from town. Marcos was listening to his Walkman in the seats. Blair was waiting to throw up in ring one from a bout of midnight morning sickness. With the party over, the candy put away, and the lot under cover of darkness, we decided to fulfill our last rites as graduating First of Mays and climb to the top of the World’s Largest Big Top.

  Outside the big top, we tightened the laces on our shoes and shimmied up the now dingy yellow ropes to the outer lip of the tent. The vinyl was moist and clammy, like a fillet of raw fish. It was slightly cold to the touch. As we were resting for a moment abreast of the outer poles, a layer of dirt came off on our bodies from the previously pristine blue and-white fabric that had been rubbed through the asphalt, dirt, and grass of nearly a hundred towns. Up close the brilliant background of the circus was sullied by a palette of multicolored sludge, almost the opposite of an Impressionist painting—swirling mud lilies that disappeared in the light and shone only in the dark. Now soiled ourselves in a layer of grime, we groped to our feet and started up to the top of the tent.