by Robert Hough
The season opened in Santa Monica, California, the atmosphere so hot and heavy when the rain finally settled on hot concrete wispy clouds rose off. The show started with an opening spectacle called "The Conquest of Nyanza," Nyanza being a name made up to sound African, Al G. wanting to distinguish ours from all the Far Eastern specs logging miles around America. A chorus dressed in loincloths chased around a gold-painted chariot pulled by a team of bears dressed to look like Masai plainsmen, and if reporters with the Santa Monica Reporter knew there was no such thing as an African bear they were nice enough to keep it to themselves. Meanwhile, an orchestra blared, and there was an excess of drumming and chanting and spear waving and, for no reason I could ever figure, the sideshow Wild Man riding willy-nilly on a llama. In the middle of the melee was Leonora Speeks herself, barely dressed in a drooping cavewoman outfit and roped tight to a quarter pole, being carried through the air by savages, as though being led away for sacrifice. Course, she loved it, for it afforded her the opportunity to do a lot of shrieking and wriggling and calling attention to herself. Rumour had it the savages were under strict instructions to carry her straight out of the big top and over to Al G.'s car, where she stayed tied up for another twenty minutes, if you understand my meaning.
After the spectacle-I played a camel-riding tribeswoman, which isn't as easy as it sounds seeing as camels are foul, nasty and lazy by nature, though at least my eye patch was newly off and though my eye still throbbed I could judge depth again-I didn't come on again till the twentieth display, when every able-bodied female performer had to mount a high-school horse and ride around smiling prettily. Five displays later, I put on my new seven-tiger act, Al G. having bought me another two Bengals named Kitty and Ruby. Was a decent little act, all seven tigers sitting up while in a pyramid, something no other trainer was doing with tigers back then. Plus I got five of the seven to do a rollover together, the two holdouts being Queen, who looked at me with blank blinking eyes every time I tried teaching her something new, and King, who had a tendency to start fights if he got touched by another animal's fur. He more than made up for it with his hurdle jumping and hind-leg walking, though.
Display thirty was the clowns, and after that the big top went dark; the Barnes show was the first circus in history to travel with generators and electrical lights, so just making a big place suddenly go dark was enough to impress. Was no introduction, no hyperbole, no swell of music, nothing. Just a light, suddenly shining on the steel arena, Rajah sitting on his pedestal. Then I came in myself, wearing tight black leather with a pair of black boots that tied up the inside and stretched to the knees. Felt like something, I did, for I was strong from all that cage work and limber from jumping out of the way of paw swipes, and if there's one thing the body's good for when young and fit it's parading itself.
I stood eyeing the congregation of rubes, as though I'd completely missed the fact a tiger grown to almost five hundred pounds was sitting behind me. Grinning, I was, in a way suggesting I was either naive or stupid, and in either case in a state of high vulnerability. Meanwhile, Rajah was squirming and licking his lips and adjusting his paws and basically acting like a tiger yearning for action. The house fell silent. Completely silent. Was a silence I pretended confused me, my flummoxed expression stating, "Hey, we're in a circus-ain't no place for quiet. I even put my hands on my hips and scrunched my face to play up my perplexity. The calls started: "Look out behind you" and "Mind the tiger" and "For Pete's sake-over your shoulder lady!" In response, I bent at the waist and put a hand to my ear, as though I was hard of hearing. This made them call louder, and pretty soon each and every rube was screaming to beat the band, while I stood there cupping my ear, pretending I'd chosen that moment to turn stone deaf. I was also trying not to laugh, the ears being amazing things in that they somehow filter the din and let the funnier warnings sail through. For instance: the man in the front straw row, standing red-faced and frantic, shrieking, "Fer the love of Christ, lady, you're gonna get your ass et!"
Was then I whistled. None of the rubes knew I did it, for they were noisy and I'd lowered my head so no one would see me doing something different with my lips. The only thing they knew was their worst fears were coming true, something that excites people and makes them feel good: Rajah stormed off that pedestal and hit me three-quarter force and roaring, knocking me down and leaping on top in the process. The whole world went away, both my hearing and vision muffled by soft orange. Once I turned my head to get a breathing passage, I was completely safe, and would've even been comfortable were it not for the weight on me getting serious every time Rajah took a breath. Plus his belly fur tickled.
Later, the workingmen told me when Rajah hit and my neck whipped back, the whole audience thought he'd snapped the bone clear in two, a suspicion confirmed by the fact my hands and feet, the only parts of me poking out from underneath the tiger, weren't in any way moving. Apparently the screams and cries were deafening, ladies fainting and children screaming and some of the braver men rushing the steel arena to rescue me, though what they thought they were going to do once they got there is beyond me; it took a dozen clowns and elephant groomers to hold them back. Meanwhile, Rajah roared and growled and aired his back teeth, acting for all he was worth like a tiger guarding its kill. I lay under a mound of animal, thinking it probably all looked mighty funny from outside the cage. After a bit, I pulled my right arm underneath Rajah and scratched his pleasure spot, a signal to him that everything was fine and dandy and that despite the addition of hollering rubes the game was the same as ever. With that, he rolled off me onto his back, something a cat normally hates to do, and let me roll atop him, at which point he crossed his paws over my back and hugged me like we were slow dancing.
Well. Was a crest of applause-a crest one part relief and one part resentment at having been scared witless and one part disappointment they weren't there the night Rajah the wrestling tiger ripped apart his trainer. These three parts got all whipped up into a din had a life of its own. The din expanded to fill the big top, where it sat like rain clouds trapped in a valley, getting louder without even trying, when finally it began to transform into laughter, and here I'm talking about the laughter caused by people realizing they've been had and had bad. Even after Rajah and I had stopped rolling around and we'd taken our bows, they were still holding their stomachs and wiping tears, though as I walked Rajah out of the arena toward the blue curtain they started applauding as well. And whistling. And standing on their feet and cheering; was like I'd just showed them all the secret of immortality. Inside the curtain, I handed the cat off to Red and looked at Al G., who was beaming and not because he'd just feasted on the tied-up lusciousness of one Miss Leonora Speeks.
He had to yell to be heard over the applause: "Well, go out and give them what they want, Kentucky!"
So I did. I went back out there and bowed. Was just a quick dip at the waist, for despite Al G.'s generosity the one thing a trouper never does is interrupt the flow of a performance. Still, during those five or ten seconds everything that'd ever happened to me suddenly seemed sensible and worthwhile, if only because it'd led me to this. I ducked back behind the blue performers' curtain and floated on air through the dancing bears and the bucking mules and the elephants parading around the hippodrome while wearing giant tutus.
Then came the finale, Louis's lion act, the numbers having been cut from twenty to twelve for Al G. had recently developed worries about Louis handling a group that large. Though the act ran smoothly, Louis suffered from a slowness of step that would've been dangerous if his cats hadn't been so well trained. In fact he looked like he was wading through water; though the cats were doing their sit-ups and rollovers and pyramids, they weren't doing them with the crispness that separates a good cat act from one just getting by. Truth was, his cats were lollygagging, and normally in the world of Louis Roth there was no worse sin than that. I half watched the act, and half watched Al G. watch the act-his eyes were narrowed and his jaws muscles flexed un
der powdered skin, though his showmen's guise bounced back into place when Miss Speeks squealed, "Look at all the lions, sweetheart!" and started to hop on both feet. The act ended with a group sit-up that impressed the rubes but seemed to drain Louis: he had to struggle to keep them all paws up at the same time.
That year the after-show was a bunch of magic and song-anddance acts we called a Vaudeville Presentation, Miss Specks herself acting as the woman who gets herself sawed in half by a dastardly magician. Was put on in the sideshow tent so we could get to tearing down the big top right away. And when I say we, I'm being literal, for there was a war on, and most of the workingmen had taken farm jobs that'd opened up on account of young farmhands all across America feeling patriotic and signing up. A few of the workingmen had gone off to fight as well, though not many, the typical razorback being too afflicted with alcoholism, nervous problems or pederasty to get by a draft board. There were so few workingmen left, in fact, that Al G. had to inform the performers if they didn't chip in and be troupers that big top wasn't about to get up and down all on its own.
The main performance ran till ten in the evening. Normally, the workingmen would get the big top down and rolled and loaded by midnight. Took us till four in the a.m. that first night, tear-down being a complex job involving precision and timing and a whole team of elephants pulling up tent pegs with their trunks. The boss canvasman, a guy named Peterson, yelled till he was blue in the face, though all the yelling in the world couldn't change the fact we didn't know what we were doing. There were slowdowns and fuck-ups and rigging injuries galore. That night I mostly ended up bandaging people who'd been hit by sliding bail rings, and putting icepacks on noggins conked by toppling quarter poles (for as you know, I'd worked as a nurse and was therefore knowledgeable of things medical). The whole operation bogged down around half-past one in the morning, when the centre pole team somehow got way ahead of everybody else, meaning the whole tarp came wafting down with everybody still underneath it, and if you want to get an idea what disorientation's all about try having a canvas tarp bigger by half than a football field fall on your head. Suddenly the whole world was screaming and pitch-blackness. For the next twenty minutes we were all occupied by crawling our way out. More than once I bumped into someone confused and heading back toward the centre, and when we were all finally out from under we had to figure a way to go back in and retrieve all the fallen half poles and aerial riggings and electric light stands. Jesus, what a kerfuffle. Poor old Peterson got so agitated I made him sit still and breathe into a brown paper bag and think pleasant thoughts.
By the time we were finally done, I was tired and cold and my fingers ached. I went off to our stateroom, not having seen my husband all night and knowing full well for what reason. The stench was terrible, practically manufactured it was, Louis lying spread-eagled in the centre of the bed, his boots and uniform not in any way bothering him seeing as he was practically in a coma. Thankfully, it was one of those times when there's enough good going on in your life you sort of need a dose of bad, if only to balance things out and keep the gods happy. I closed his eyes, pushed him to one side and crawled under the covers. That night I dreamt of the way applause has a rise and a fall that's as close to music as something non-musical gets.
We all left as tired and sore as it's possible to be, and made it so late into San Diego we had to cancel the matinee, which left Al G. mighty sore. Thankfully, it was a two-night stand, and we caught up on some sleep before a night in Escondido and three full days in Los Angeles. Then there was the Mojave and over the Tehachapi Pass to Bakersfield, where we played all the usual towns in the San Joaquin Valley before heading up to northern California and San Francisco, a place that always made me feel a little agitated owing to my wedding with that rich voyeur James Williams. Still, things were good, Al G.'s theory about wartime attendance holding firm, for the houses just kept getting bigger and bigger. According to Bandwagon, Sells-Floto and John Robinson and Hagenbeck-Wallace were all doing sellout business too. The only difference from before was the faces belonged to kids and grandparents and women without men, all easily entertained because they needed it so badly.
Al G. bought me three more tigers, including a cantankerous Sumatran named jewel who tried killing me on a number of occasions, Sumatrans being extra dangerous because they're so small and quick. The way I was feeling back then I could've dodged bullets, so I took her natural tendency toward springing and turned her into a hoop jumper par excellence. When White Tops reported I'd done the impossible by mixing a Sumatran in with nine Bengals, I scoffed out loud at the article. "No such thing," I said to myself, "as impossible."
Rajah knew it too. As he crept up to his first birthdate, he reached his adult weight of 550 pounds, which is huge for a Bengal; I've known smallish female Siberians that weren't that big. He was the most beautiful tiger I've ever seen: face shaped like a heart, eyes the green of a jewel, fur thick and gleaming, whiskers long and delicate and purple black. Plus everything the right size for everything else, something you don't find that often on a big cat. Plus he'd gotten an ovation every night since Santa Monica and don't think that won't swell a tiger's head. Soon he had himself a regalness the other tigers lacked (except for maybe King), and by this I mean he moved slowly with his head up and his shoulders back, not unlike a deb learning to walk. Dignified, he was, his bearing reminding me a little of Louis when he wasn't on the drink.
Which brings me to the topic of Louis.
I'm in the Holt car, talking to Al G., Dan having gone to town with Miss Speeks.
Al G.: "That husband of yours, Kentucky. What are we going to do?"
Me: A shrug, as it seemed unfaithful for a wife to out-and-out admit her husband was lost to the bottle.
Al G.: "Talk to him, Kentucky. Spell it out. Though do it in a way he doesn't realize he's having it spelled out for him. You hear what I'm saying? Use tact and niceness and your God-given wiles."
That night, Al G. lent me his rail car and I made Louis a dinner of goulash and dumplings he was practically too drunk to eat. When I suggested maybe his crapulence was getting on Al G.'s nerves and that bosses' nerves were something you definitely didn't want to get on, he became defensive and upset, and the next thing you know he spat out a subject reserved for wounding and wounding only: children, or to be more exact, the fact we didn't have any.
I saw red. The fight could be heard all over the lot. I even hurled a dish or two, which irked Al G., for he'd had them shipped all the way from Provence. I decided to spend the night in the menage car, bunked beside Rajah, one of his paws on my chest. In the morning I awoke with straw marks on my cheeks.
That day, we pulled into a little town in southeast Nebraska called Falls City. Though it was nothing but a tiny dot on the map, it was memorable to Barnes troupers in that it represented the farthest east the show had ever gone, the Barnes circus being a West Coast show and nothing but. It was late July and hot, the smell of fresh corn hanging over town like an overcoat. I had some time before parade so I went downtown as a little treat, wearing a hat pulled low. Was a nice place, Falls City. Course, most towns were before the interstates: the town square had a gazebo and carved wooden benches and a place where a band played on holidays. Plus a neat little courthouse and a drugstore that sold penny sodas. It was a Saturday, and because the stores had closed for the circus, there was a little open-air market in the square, bonnetted women selling preserves and baked goods.
Despite my fight with Louis, I was feeling good about the world. After parade, the usual gaggle of reporters asked for interviews, and believe me when I say it wasn't Louis they wanted to talk to. Nor was it Cheerful Gardiner the elephant man, or Captain Stonewall the seal man, or Al Crook the producing clown, or even the charismatic owner, a man known throughout the circus world as Lucky Barnes. Uh-uh, wasn't any of them.
That night during the wrestling display, I stood in the steel arena, Rajah seated behind me, peering into the audience, pretending to be deaf or stupid or
both, while the audience hollered out variations on "My God, look over your shoulder!" I whistled, and Rajah came jetting off his pedestal and knocked me down, and as sometimes happened he jumped on me before I had time to roll over, such that my belly was down and the right side of my face pressed against tanbark. I entered my world of heavy furry silence, though this time something different happened: Rajah gave me a bit of air and he leaned his jowls beside my ear and he offered up a little rumble that sounded both affectionate and dangerous. He licked the side of my face, and was then I felt both big paws settle on my shoulders, his claws sinking deep into padding. He held me down. He opened his jaws and closed them over my neck, eyeteeth pressing against skin, me saying, "Rajah, no no no," which he ignored. For a second, I thought something was going totally wrong, and that maybe it was true you never could trust a tiger, even one you've raised from birth.
Rajah began rubbing his body against mine. To the rubes it must've looked like he was fixing on having me for breakfast, which in a way he was: I could feel his manhood, about the size of a whip handle and covered with a white wispy down, searching for an entrance in my leather. Finding none, it contented itself with rubbing against me, a motion that shook me like a Raggedy Ann. Rajah let go of my neck and roared the way a male tiger does when so occupied, the rubes screaming and yelling for help and the usual assortment of bravehearts rushing the cage and getting held back by groomers and cage boys and clowns, a sight that got the rubes whipped up all the more. Rajah picked up the pace and, with a roar that scared even me, finished and then rolled me over with a paw and buried his face in my neck and gurgled. I hugged him as the rubes' screams turned into screams of relief.