by Robert Hough
I made it to our stateroom. The wind and rain had whipped the note off the door. Still, what you do is hope. You pretend otherwise.You come up that hill and you see that body heaped beside a horse and you think, Nope, uh-uh, can't be her. So I reached out, figuring if the door was still locked then everything was fine, Art was still in the menage tending to the elephants (which he loved more than all other animals put together, though as a menage boss would never admit it). I reached out, thinking if it was still locked then Art hadn't come back to change or have a smoke or file a broken nail.
Soaking wet, I reached out.
PART THREE
JOHN ROBINSON / BARNES
CHAPTER 14
LUCKY BARNES
ART ROONEY WAS BURIED THE NEXT MORNING ON A KNOLL outside of town. Was a sight, all those workingmen, heads lowered and weeping, though beyond that my memory of it's cloudy. As for Rajah, the circus was obliged by law to put him down, and all the newspapermen printed that's what happened. As usual, what the newspapermen printed and what really happened bore no resemblance. Like all big animals gone rogue, Rajah would've been sold to a Mexican circus, where he'd've fought lions or bears or small elephants for a special admission. For a while, there was a rumour saying he'd died somewhere in Nuevo Leon, torn apart by a pack of unfed prairie wolves. If it's true, at least he died to the sound of cheering.
About a week after the killing, Charles Curley visited me in my Pullman suite.
"Can we talk, Mabel?"
I stood away from the door, not particularly caring whether he came in or not. He did, and though I can't say for sure whether I offered him tea or coffee, to the best of my recollection I didn't. We sat in my living room. It was a horrible mess, papers everywhere and dirty dishes on the coffee table, and because I was known for being such a neat person it was a mess Charles Curley noticed. He looked around, uncomfortable. Then he cleared his throat.
"Mabel, I was talking to John Robinson this morning. He'd heard about your efforts during the outbreak and said you must be a real trouper."
I was noticing a stain on the wallpaper above Curley's left shoulder, not because I had any inclination to clean it but because its shape was curious.
"Mabel, he told me he's put you on John Robinson paper. He says we've wasted you here, which is true, and that it's high time someone made you a star again, and that someone's going to be him. He says he's promoting your arrival like you were the second coming. He's going to personally ensure you have a comeback."
I stared at him blankly.
"You're going to be a star again, Mabel. You hearing me?"
"Yes," I answered. "Was there anything else?"
A month or so later, I caught up with the John Robinson show somewhere in the south: Georgia, I seem to remember, or maybe across the border in Alabama. I was thirty-eight years old, and everything I owned fit in a single steamer trunk. Soon after, I started getting acquainted with the Robinson cats, who like all show animals preferred work to lollygagging. It didn't take long before one of the Bengals, a wiry specimen named Khan, was leaping through the double-flaming hoop. Along with Boston and Beauty, my Ringling twolings, I now had three cats who knew the trick; with one more I could send them all through in a continuous circle, a solid ring of black-and-orange through a tunnel of flame. Not long after that, Pasha took her first nervous steps along a single thick rope stretched taut, and I knew in no time I'd have a wire walker. The only problem was me. Here I was, the first person in the history of the world to teach these tricks, and I didn't care. For a while I thought it was the neurasthenia talking, and that one day the fog would lift and I'd be mightily impressed with myself. It didn't happen.
What did happen was I started hearing Art's voice in the back of my head-Flash, it said, flash, da~~le and ra~~mata~~-and it was this voice got me to thinking. One day in late February, I put my cats in the training arena and I signalled Boston through two hoops and while he soared through I figured why not? and I watched it sideways. What I saw was such a surprise I could barely catch my breath. Looking out the sides of my eyeballs, I did see beauty, but I didn't see it in Boston. What I saw there was hours and hours of rewarded behaviour. What I saw there was science. But I did see beauty in the way the other tigers were all sitting on their pedestals, with the same posture and the same proud tiger expressions, all facing in the same direction, not caring whether they got a piece of meat and not caring whether I yelled "Good kitty!" but just up there, exuding true noble tigerness. They weren't doing it to please me or an audience or anyone else. They were doing it for themselves.
That day, I dropped the hoop tricks and the wire-walking trick and started mixing the Ringling cats with the John Robinson cats. Over the next week, there were some minor flare-ups though nothing serious. Mostly I wished Art could've seen it: they were like streams of orange and black, their green eyes like stones catching light. I began to think of my display as ballet rather than a cat act, and instead of doing idiot stunts like ball rolling, I had them move around the steel arena in swirls, in patterns. As I stood in the middle of the arena, the cats would flow around me. I taught them snail patterns, figure eights, waves of movement, all of it a pure ode to Art which I figured was the least I could do. I had them sit in pyramids so unusual in shape they really weren't pyramids at all-more like shapes created by tiger. I brought down a gramophone and became the first big cat trainer to use music in a display. Sure enough, the cats learned the score and took their cues from it, so that after a while I barely needed my voice or my buggy whip to trigger the next movement. Mainly I acted as a centrepiece, my blond Eton crop a place to look when the rubes didn't know where to rest their eyes, and believe me when I say that was a startling way for a cat act to work. It got so I started thinking the ultimate act wouldn't even have the trainer in the ring (and though there were a thousand reasons why this was near impossible, it was what I was working toward). Course, word got round I'd whipped together a new kind of tiger display. One day John Robinson himself came down to the training barn and asked to see what he was taking on the road. I geared up the player. Afterwards he stood there, staring straight ahead, cigar puffing and looking fat. Also not saying a word. Later that day, I caught up to one of the managers and asked him if the boss had said anything about my act.
"He did. Said it was wondrous. And that he wished he'd seen it in someone else's circus."
I debuted the act on July 26, 1927, in Toledo, Ohio. After the peanut pitch, the matinee started with a spec called "King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba," which they billed as "A Massive and Exotic Spectacle of Ancient Days." Display number two was a polar bear act, flanked by unrideable mules getting ridden. Display number three was dog acts. Number four was ponies. Number five was tumblers doing a knockabout.
Then: the largest group of Siberian, Royal Bengal and Sumatran tigers ever assembled in a circus arena, presented by the incomparable Mabel Stark. I entered the ring, alone as always, blond hair glimmering, one hand on my hip and one hand holding a whip. This confused the rubes, for there wasn't a cat in sight. I stood under the spotlight just long enough for them to get fidgety and bored. The orchestra started up. And as it played, Old Dad, the cage boy, lifted the tunnel door and the cats filed in, and with sixteen tigers it wasn't hard to make it look like a river of tawny fur flowing into that arena. They formed a giant snail-shape pattern with me in the nexus. Was a change in the music and the tigers started moving around the arena in circles, the smallest ring and the biggest ring moving clockwise, the tigers in the middle ring moving counterclockwise. After the audience had gotten a good long eyeful of this the tigers took their seats, though instead of each one going directly to his own pedestal they filed in from two sides, leaping from seat to seat, slowly filling in the pyramid like black-and-orange liquid filling a vase. I even had two tigers share the pedestal at the summit, something that wasn't supposed to be possible seeing as tigers are so territorial. I held the pyramid through a swell of music, and then with nothing more th
an a tilting of chin I had the tigers forming the sides of the pyramid come down and do a simultaneous rollover, first one way and then the next, each cat so close he was in danger of rubbing the fur off the cat beside him. When they were done, they reformed the pyramid in time for my finale: with all sixteen tigers on their seats I turned my back to them and lifted my arms in the air, and as I lifted my arms in the air each and every one of those tigers sat up, in unison, just because they all wanted to be looked at. Believe me. Was beauty at its most honest, whether you looked at it sideways, frontward or through slits in the back of your head.
The orchestra crescendoed and I waited for the applause and it was: respectful. At most, hearty. My throat box went achy. The cats were already filing out through the tunnel. As I stepped outside the steel arena I had myself a comforting thought: maybe the small house was to blame, for if there's one thing a crowd does is breed excitement, and it occurred to me vacant seats might've caused the rubes to miss what was going on in the ring.
Display number seven was the aerial show, featuring most of the girls who'd seashelled their chests during the opening spec. Then came display number eight, performing camels in rings one and three, with the all-new John Robinson fighting act in the centre ring.
Back then, he went by the name Capt. Terrell Jacques, though later he'd poke an eye out with his own whip and change his name, becoming the famous one-eyed Terrell Jacobs. His act was a complete steal of Beatty's, the one wrinkle being he used four black-maned Nubians instead of lions and tigers mixed. Was a drum roll, and Jacques swaggered in with his animals, all of whom looked like they'd bit into something bad at lunch. What followed was an excess of snarling and charging and air swipes and pistol discharges. The lions fought so much among themselves I understood why they all had scarring on their snouts and foreheads. It took all eight minutes for Jacques to get his cats seated, though after a second and a half they came charging off the pedestals so he flung open the cage door and hurled himself to the tanbark like he was dodging shrapnel on the beaches of Normandy. Then he stood, not as drenched as Beatty would've been but close. For a few seconds, he pretended to be humbled by the neardeath he'd just faced. Then he bowed and the lights came up on the rubes sitting on the risers.
Only they weren't sitting. Standing, they were. Standing and cheering and giving an ovation.
We played a few more shows before heading into Canada via Detroit and making our way northeast along the St. Lawrence. It was cold and wet the whole time and everyone got tired of shivering in the mud. You can imagine how I was feeling. In a word, distractable. Mine was the kind of act that needed constant polishing, and I confess there were days I was just too heavy feeling to squeeze in extra practise. After a couple of weeks, the tigers stopped filing into the steel arena in that beautiful snail pattern; instead, they started to look like commuters filing into a train. My concentric circles stopped moving concentrically, and when the tigers bumped into one another there were little fights I barely had the energy to break up. One day in a town called Cornwall, Ontario, I was feeling particularly foggy. Midway through my display, I forgot where I was. To get my attention a cat named Sheik, who'd been beaten by a previous trainer and carried a meanness in his bones, came up and ran his claws down the right side of my uniform. Wasn't a bad wound, the costume taking most of it, though it looked bad and I could hear the rubes draw breath. Sheik roared, and it was clear he was fixing on finishing the job when he noticed I wasn't showing fear or concern. Not one smidgen. I was just standing there, looking at the wound as though it belonged to someone else. This chilled him, and he stepped back into the confusion of tigers circling around me, though as he did he looked back over his shoulder and glared, which was his way of saying Next time.
That afternoon, I got word from John Robinson he liked how I was developing my act.
The weather. Wasn't the driving rain that helped me murder Art Rooney but the chilling wet misty kind that gets in your bones and refuses to go away. It followed us all through eastern Canada, into Quebec and round the bend into New Brunswick, where the mist turned into actual rain, hitting the ground and turning into a wet haze that rose up frigid. A quiet fell on the lot, people sticking to their bunks, though when they did go out they looked hunched and miserable. Management ordered a new shipment of rubber boots, and they turned out to be just as leaky as the ones they replaced. The paraffin sealing the canvas started to soak off, the big top springing leaks. There were a lot of colds, and people feeling blue. One of the spec girls, a darty-eyed thing who suffered from real daffiness and not just everyday circus daffiness, started complaining she saw leprechauns, playing in the damp, fearsome ones with sharp teeth. The next day she was given a train ticket home.
Sometime in late May, we crossed back into the United States at a place called Houlton, Maine. As usual, we were held up for hours, the border officials combing the train for gypsies, opium takers, fugitives and distempered livestock. Finally they let us go, having arrested a cookhouse helper who turned out to have plugged his wife somewhere in Mississipi. We all hoped the change of country might stop the rains, as if rain clouds pull up at borders too.
A day later, we pulled into Bangor.
Finally we had nice weather, sunny and hot and sticky as a Danish, though with all the rain of the past few weeks the fair grounds were mud and nothing but. The guy-out elephants kept getting stuck in the earth, and the workingmen kept losing their boots. The big top steamed. By the time the tent was up and the cookhouse serving coffee, it was after six in the evening, management furious the matinee had been cancelled. Everyone else was tired and hungry, including the animals.
My cages pulled up just moments before the show began, so instead of going to the menage where the cats would've been fed and watered, they got lined up directly behind the arena tunnel. A blind man could've seen the cats were in no mood-no surprise, seeing as they'd spent a full day on wet bedding. They were growling and displaying teeth and trying to swipe each other through the cage bars. I went on anyway. Fact was, I was eager.
Once inside the steel arena, I signalled Old Dad to send in the cats. They filed in looking slinky and tough, heads low, panting and barking because mud was getting between their claws. Sensing a melee was about to break out, I didn't cue the orchestra; instead, I called, "Seat," and when this didn't work I called it again though louder. One of the dumber cats, a female named Belle, settled on the wrong seat and of course that seat belonged to my mean cat Sheik. Seeing this, Sheik blamed me, and he came up and gave me a swipe on the left leg that wasn't in any way a warning: his claws tore through bone and pretty near took the leg off above the knee. I dropped like a sack. When I got up, the left side of me felt wobbly, like it couldn't be trusted.
Old Dad started rattling the door and Sheik went for the tunnel. We were using the old swing-type door, and in his panic Old Dad swung the door into another tiger, and that tiger was none other than my oversized Bengal, Zoo, who'd nursed a grudge ever since the time I hit him for refusing to ball walk. He jumped straight into the air and came down resentful. He lit on me as I was struggling to get up, taking a big gnaw of muscle from my right leg. I hollered and he let me go and I somehow got to my feet, though as I did I could hear blood swishing in my boots. I took my whip and hit Zoo hard, sending him to the far side of the arena. At this point, I was so light-headed I started to think I could finish my act so long as I got that demon Sheik on his pedestal. So I called, "Seat," while looking Sheik straight in the eyes. When he didn't move, I buggy-whipped him on the nose. He approached his pedestal, stopped, thought about his pride and charged. On my broken leg I sidestepped him, though the sudden move sank my left boot in mud and mired my foot. Suddenly I was as stuck as sin.
Throughout, Old Dad had been hollering and waving and rattling the cage door like mad and for some reason Sheik chose that moment to respond. Problem was, he responded at the same time as a tiger named Mary, who was one of my quieter cats and had probably figured she'd seen enough.
The two collided at the tunnel entrance. Mary howled and Sheik went insane. Came straight for me, not making a sound, mouth wide open, murderous. I jammed my training stick hard down his throat, though Sheik was so mad he howled and swiped at the stick while I pounded the tip again and again into the back of his throat, all of which might've saved me had Zoo not decided to attack. I didn't see him until his jaws seized my right leg and slammed me into the mud, a motion snapping the ankle that'd been mired. On my way down Sheik hit me with a roundhouse to the head and though it was a glancing blow he'd used full claws so it took off a big piece of scalp and a thicket of my precious blond hair. This angered Zoo, and he tore apart Sheik's right shoulder, Sheik backing off for fear of having the same done to the other side. With Sheik banished, and me driven halfway into the mud, and the other cats either backed up or on their pedestals, Zoo relaxed. Took his time, even. He looked down at me, licked his chops, and with forepaw nails peeled back my belly, from navel to rib cage, like he was opening a can of herring.
Then lie bent over and dined.
It's hard to say why I didn't die that day. All I know is I should've, and that I wouldn't've even minded, what with Art six feet under and Rajah fighting somewhere in Mexico. Often I feel like I've got two angels following me around, one good and one bad, neither one of them gentle, and they were duking it out that day. Question is, was it the good angel decided I was going to live, or was it the bad one?