The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  “This is J.M. Shelby, my friend and partner, and this gentleman is Emmett McKeon, my foreman.”

  The judge nodded. “Gentlemen.”

  Shelby touched one hand to his hairline in salute. “Your Honor,” he said, and McKeon called him “Your Lordship,” and the judge raised one suspicious eyebrow.

  The judge turned back to Lewis. “How you been, Lewis?”

  “I’m getting by. Can’t complain, George.”

  “Well, there are those who would challenge that. Lewis, you were found in a speakeasy. A blind pig.”

  “Yes, George. I mean, Your Honor.”

  “Lewis, saloons are illegal. That means it’s illegal to be in one. And that’s not all. Here, listen to the actual complaint, written by Sheriff Tyler. His tastes run to the florid but he writes a thorough report. ‘Also in evidence were the accoutrements of gambling and associated apparatus.’”

  The judge raised his eyebrows and looked from Lewis to Shelby. “And he’s not finished yet. ‘Engaged in a public riot resulting in bodily harm and grievous injury to several of the participants and therefore contributed to assault on peace officers attempting to quell aforesaid riot.’”

  “He’s a formidable fellow,” Lewis admitted.

  “He is a horse’s ass. Now look here, Lewis. You are a businessman—have you branched into illegal trafficking, running stills, smuggling whiskey, that sort of thing?”

  “It was just a card game. A little poker, was all.”

  “Winning or losing?”

  “Losing bad. To those two you just sent up the river.”

  “Lost everything?”

  “Well, not quite,” Lewis said, thinking of the roll he’d extracted from Faraday’s pocket, now ripening in Lewis’s sweaty left sock.

  “What are you doing with yourself these days, Lewis?”

  “Training horses, Shelby and me. That’s what we’re doing here, selling a fellow some horses.”

  “No more circuses, eh?”

  Lewis looked down and shook his head.

  “Ever think about starting up another circus?”

  “Oh, once in a blue moon I start thinking about getting another one together, but…I lost a real lot that last time. It takes something out of you.”

  “Wasn’t the first time you’ve run into trouble, Lewis, and you always seemed to land on your feet before.” The judge watched Lewis’s face for a moment. “I know you were running a small show a couple years back.”

  “That wasn’t mine. I was just helping old Oscar Haimisch. He’s passed on. And it wasn’t much of a show.”

  Judge Lester nodded. “How’s Alma?”

  “She’s well, far as I know. We write but I haven’t been back to Chicago in some time.”

  “Give her my kindest regards. Now…” The judge brushed his mop of hair from his eyes. “You are a businessman. As such, you are one of the pillars of what we out here consider Western society. But there is a very fine line between your honest, God-fearing man of commerce and your average scoundrel—some would say an indistinct line. There is in the very nature of business the constant possibility of larceny. Each transaction carries within it the opportunity for mendacity, for swindling, for short-weighting, for price-gouging, for preying on the credulous. Each time a businessman sells his product, two primal questions struggle in his conscience: ‘How much is it worth?’ and, ‘What kind of lies can I tell about it?’

  “It seems to me, Lewis, that you find yourself at a certain juncture in life. You’ve got a look to you that I’ve seen before. You have had some misfortune and now you seek out the company of men of low estate. You find yourself, once a proud member of the brotherhood of business and commerce, involved with miscreants, petty thieves, gamblers and…” Here the judge shot a quick look at Lewis’s companions, “…ne’er-do-wells. You are poised to dive into the privy, Lewis.”

  “I never knew.”

  “Anyway, Lewis, you are a businessman. Out here, we are a simple folk, we have troubles enough without people adding to them, and we suffer when our businessmen cross that line that separates them from their fellows in the nation’s jails. I sense that you are on the verge of becoming a drifter.”

  “There’s some would tell you I have been a drifter all my born days.”

  “Nonsense. You have simply chosen a peripatetic form of commerce. I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about horses, but it seems to me that there are a lot of men who can train horses and damned few who can run circuses. You’re a businessman. Get back into your business.”

  “A man tries to start a circus with as little as I’ve got, why, he’s just being foolish. And it’s late in the year to be starting up a show. By now, there’s shows getting set to go out on the road.”

  One in particular, Lewis thought.

  “The Lewis Tully I remember would find a way around those obstacles.”

  Lewis looked away for a moment and then met the judge’s eyes. “Actually, I’ve been thinking of getting up a small show.” He shot an embarrassed look at Shelby. “Maybe start out with just the horses and a few other things. I was just in the thinking stage.”

  “Better than being a vagabond, Lewis.” The judge leaned forward. “It’s what you know best. If it proves too difficult to get your own show off the ground, maybe you can get work with one of the big shows.”

  He saw Lewis begin a slow stubborn shake of the head. “Or, fine, get your folk together and do what you have to do and get yourself another show. I’m sentencing you and your friends here to ninety days in jail…”

  “Now, George…”

  “…sentence suspended. But the next time I see you or hear about you or read your name in the paper, you had better be gainfully employed or…at the head of a circus. Well, that’s it then, Lewis. Get your affairs in order and bring the good people of the West a circus.” Judge Lester got to his feet, picked up his various papers, and nodded to the two attorneys.

  “Thanks, George.”

  ***

  Lewis picked at his food and tried to suppress the turmoil inside: it was possible, he might be able to put one more show together.

  Across the table from him, Shelby put down his fork.

  “I was wondering when you’d get honest with yourself and admit what you wanted to do. We got all those trucks out back, them wagons. And of course, the elephant.”

  “I never knew what else to do with her.”

  “All the same, a horse breeder don’t need an elephant. But you got one, and everything else, and now that the cat’s out of the bag, tell me what you got in mind. And then tell me how you’re planning to pay for it.” Shelby grinned at him.

  “I hadn’t actually thought it all through. We’ve got a little money left from what-all we had to sell, and from the herd. And I think I can still get a little credit.” Lewis wet his lips. “And I came out ahead in that card game, Shelby.” He wondered if he looked as embarrassed as he felt, as foolish, as moonstruck.

  “I saw you, you were losin’ just like…you got our money back?”

  Lewis nodded slowly. “And I’m sorry to say, in all the commotion, I got some of that fella’s, didn’t have time to sort it out, mine from his, and to be honest with you, it didn’t seem very important to make sure that fat grifter got his money before he went to jail. We’ve got a stake of sorts, Shelby.”

  “And what of it?”

  What of it, indeed, Lewis thought. Without willing it, he saw in his mind’s eye all that could go wrong with a small, poorly financed show, all the many ways a circus could come apart, all of them troubles he had known: bad weather and fire, poor transport, sick people and sick animals, injury and even death to one or both. Hostile towns and poor ones. Competition from bigger circuses—hell, they were all bigger circuses. And old, old enmities.

  As if reading his mind, Shelby said, “One of the
boys in the jail told me Hector Blaney’s got a show coming up from Arkansas. I expect you heard about that.”

  Lewis looked down at his food and felt his partner’s eyes on him. “Yep, I heard that. There’s always gonna be a bigger show.”

  “Only one whose owner gets blood in his eye at the mention of Lewis Tully’s name.”

  “We’ll handle Hector if we have to,” Lewis said casually. And I expect we’ll have to, he said to himself.

  “Well, he’s got a start on us. Plenty of other shows around, too, Lewis,” Shelby said, and Lewis realized that Shelby was enjoying himself. “Preston Crowe, for one.” Shelby gave him an innocent look.

  “Preston,” Lewis said, and heard the resignation in his voice. “Preston’s everybody’s worry, J.M. There’s no show like that one except the Ringlings. You just hope he finds someplace far away to play.”

  He grinned. Shelby nodded and smiled back.

  “How would we get up a show, Lewis?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some of the old bunch will show up if we tell ’em we’re gonna try it one more time.”

  “Who you gonna get, Lewis? Who?”

  Lewis gave his friend a sheepish look. “I kept…you know, I kinda kept track of where they are, some of them.”

  “I was right. You’ve been planning for this.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about someday trying it…”

  “Need a lot of acts, Lewis.”

  “Acts is easy to come by. We’ll keep it small, no sideshow, just a few real unusual acts, good acts. I can get Captain Walling back, Joseph Coates…”

  “Broken down cowboys and a tall man you’re gonna call a giant. A giant is no act.”

  “Man can lift a wagon, that’s an act. I can get the Perezes if they’re not in jail again, the Count and his people, Zheng and his father. Nothing to getting acts. What we need is personalities. Like Roy and Shirley. Harley Fitzroy. Lucy.”

  “God knows how you’d find Harley. If he’s still alive.”

  “He’s alive. And I think I can find him.”

  “And Lucy! Lewis, you can’t get that girl to take up with a circus again—she give all that up. I’m looking at a man has lost his senses,” Shelby said, but there was a high color in his face.

  “We’ll have to see.”

  Shelby studied him for a moment and then grinned. “We’re gonna try it one more time. I knew it, Lewis, I could see it in your eyes.”

  Lewis wondered for a moment if he could bear to go through it all again, starting from scratch. Then he shrugged and tried to keep from smiling.

  “Can’t hurt to try,” he said, and heard the rapid beating of his heart.

  ***

  Lewis waited till Shelby was asleep and then wrote the first of his letters, one to a rooming house in Arroyo Grande, Texas, and another to an address in St. Louis. He would write the others tomorrow.

  He had been in bed for an hour but was no closer to sleep than when he’d started. His mind raced, his thoughts were overrun with faces and images of his old shows, and a hundred tasks now occurred to him, tasks that would have to be completed before he could entertain any notions of a show. Gradually he felt his body succumb to exhaustion, and the circus scenes faded. Just as sleep took him, he was visited by the image of his older sister Alma. She was writing something, and somehow he knew it meant trouble for him. If not trouble, then certainly complications.

  ***

  In Chicago, in a Polk Street house that leaned to its left as though recovering from a blow, a serious-looking gray-haired woman sat at a narrow table and composed a letter.

  Alma Tully put down the pencil for a moment and took a puff of her cigarette. She thought about the boy asleep on her lumpy sofa, a boy without a soul left in the world. Not her trouble, not her responsibility, but she had taken the down-on-her-luck mother under her wing, and now the young mother had died, from pneumonia that made short work of her undernourished body. Just one more sad story of the many Alma Tully had known, almost as sad as a boy about to be put into a home for his habits of theft, that or turned loose on the streets. She’d heard it said that a child died on the streets of Chicago every night, and Alma would not have been surprised to find that the number was much higher, for she knew something of the way the world treated its motherless children. The deaths of her own parents just a year apart, her mother from illness and her father from an accident on the docks, had left Alma a motherless child herself at the age of twelve, with her younger brother Lewis to care for.

  Alma Tully could still recall every sleepless moment of her first night without her father. She saw a thin girl sitting in a window on Parnell Street and staring at the darkened houses of her neighbors. The girl in the window had already seen how they looked at her and her brother, looks that mixed pity and unease, and she wondered if she or Lewis would live out the winter.

  Alma looked across the room at the boy. Like all children in sleep, the boy called Charlie looked innocent, this motherless child who fought constantly and stole and refused to explain himself. A tough little boy.

  She shook her head.

  Won’t matter how tough you are, honey, she said silently.

  She went back to her letter. Lewis would be furious but she would be unrelenting, and she was more than a match for his anger and anything else he cared to throw at her.

  “For God’s sake, Lewis,” she said aloud. “What else can I do with the boy? Besides, what better place for a child than a circus?”

  She wrote another line, listened in her imagination to his predictable replies, shook her head, and said, “You have to do it, Lewis. I’m asking you to do this. And that’s that.”

  Alma examined what she’d written thus far and nodded.

  TWO

  A Complication

  Sleep did not come easily, what with the newness of it all and the fact that he was the only child on the train, but the porter—an old friend of Alma’s—kept reassuring the boy named Charlie that he would be all right. Eventually he slept, his head wedged on a small pillow between the seat back and the window. He slept and dreamt of Oklahoma. In his dream he saw Alma and the porter, whose name was Harry. Alma was nodding at him as though confirmed in some secret belief. There were animals in his dream, though he couldn’t have identified them. They were strange, unearthly beasts, born of his imagination and the rocking of the train and the candy bars and root beer Alma had sent along. In the background, there was a low hill, and as he watched, a man appeared, a tall thin man with a slightly hunched-over walk, as though he were very tired. He was leading a camel on a rope. The camel was trying to bite the man and the man was talking to it.

  “Wake up, son. Time to rise and shine. We’re just about to Jasper, Oklahoma,” Harry the porter was saying, and shaking Charlie’s shoulder. He stared up at the man and smiled, forgetting just for a whisper in time that he was alone in a strange place. Then a chill passed over him and he remembered all of it. He looked out the window and saw that the world had gone flat and gray. In the distance he could see a hill, apparently the sole elevation in the state of Oklahoma and little more than a low ridge with an odd profile that put him in mind of the humps on a camel.

  Harry the porter nodded and patted him on the shoulder. “You want to go back and brush your hair some, son. Sleep good?”

  The boy nodded, suddenly feeling hungry and thirsty, and for a second he believed he was going to cry. As though reading his mind, Harry Mills held out a small bottle of milk and a big round chunk of bread with jam. “Here you go. Something to put in that big hollow space in there,” and he laughed. Patting Charlie on the shoulder again, he strolled off, calling out “Jasper, Oklahoma…next stop Jasper, Oklahoma.”

  Ten minutes later they stood in the center of the platform, and Charlie refused to look around. Then he heard Harry say, “Here he comes, son.”

  Against
his will Charlie looked up to see a pair of men approaching. One was medium height and stocky and badly in need of a shave. He had thick dark eyebrows and a star-shaped scar in the center of his forehead and wore workingman’s clothes and a cap like a baseball player’s. The other man was tall with a hunched-over walk and long arms. In one of them he cradled a cylindrical package. He wore a gray suit over a work shirt and a fedora that looked to have been sat on. His skin was sunburnt and the boy thought he was ugly: a long face with a deep jaw and high cheekbones, big dark eyes and a wide mouth, and he was missing part of an eyebrow where a scar of whitish skin hooked across it.

  The smaller man looked puzzled, the tall man looked uneasy, and as they approached, Charlie felt the big dark eyes studying him, the tall man’s discomfort manifest. The tall man tried to smile as his gaze took Charlie in, measured and assessed, and the boy waited for some sign of approval and got none. Then the tall man turned slightly and when he looked at the boy again, he’d put something like a smile on his face. The man shifted his gaze to Harry, nodded, and stuck out an enormous long-fingered hand.

  “Hello, Harry. How you been?”

  “Fine, Lewis. Been a long time.”

  They shook hands with genuine affection, and Charlie hoped some of it would count for him. For a few moments they spoke.

  Then the tall man was looking down on the boy from his great height, and Charlie reached up stiffly to shake hands.

  The man called Lewis hunkered down on one knee. “Don’t want to make you stretch there, my friend. I’m Lewis Tully. I’m Alma’s brother.”

  “My name is Charlie Barth. I’m nine.”

  “Fine age to be.” He smiled again, an easy one this time. “Pleased to meet you, Charlie. This fellow here is my friend J.M. Shelby.”

  The shorter man nodded and touched his fingers to the bill of the cap. Up close, the boy could see that Shelby’s clothes were oil-stained, and Lewis Tully’s suit was wrinkled and baggy, the battered fedora sweat-stained. One thing he knew for certain: Alma had not sent him to live with royalty. And now that he’d had a chance to look at them close up, he decided they were both ugly.