The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  The man named Lewis smiled at him again and wet his lips, but he said nothing. After a moment he stood again, chatted briefly with Harry the porter, and then handed him the parcel, saying, “Brought you something, Harry.”

  “Mighty kind of you, Lewis.”

  “Just a token of our, you know…” And he held out the parcel.

  Harry Mills took the parcel in both hands and cradled it the way he might hold relics of the saints or a newborn infant.

  “Well, thank you, Lewis.” He shook the package and it made a sloshing sound. He seemed to remember Charlie now, and held out his thick hand. “Good luck to you, Charlie. You’re gonna be just fine with Lewis here. If he don’t take good care of you, he has Alma to answer to.”

  Harry laughed and made a little salute off the glossy brim of his conductor’s cap.

  The boy watched Harry waddle off, clutching his parcel to his breast, and a sudden panic engulfed him: his legs felt like stone, his chest pounded. He shot a quick glance up at Lewis Tully to see if his terror was as obvious as it felt, and saw that it was.

  Both men stared at him, then looked at each other, and Charlie thought they both looked afraid. Lewis came down on one knee again and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Right now this is a hard time for you. You don’t know us, you’re in a strange place, you don’t know if you’re gonna like any of it. All I can say is…” Here Lewis Tully looked to Shelby for support but received none. He made a little wave with one hand and the boy waited for him to locate the tail end of his sentence. “All I can say is we’ll take care of you, you’ll be well treated, and you’ll—it’ll be interesting. I think I speak without fear of contradiction on that score.”

  He looked to Shelby and received a short nod in confirmation. “We have an interesting life here, Charlie. You won’t be bored, least I don’t think so. I run a circus, son. I’m putting it together right now. Got to…marshal my, uh, my resources and my stock and what-have-you.” Lewis looked away, and his eyes took on the look of a man reviewing his many worries.

  The boy stared at him for a moment. He remembered a circus in Chicago, a flamboyant, colorful affair of noise and music and wild animals and people who did fantastic things. The man in charge of it all was a tall wavy-haired man in a top hat and a coat with long tails, with the bearing of a grand duke. He didn’t look at all like Lewis Tully.

  Lewis stood up and brushed off his knees.

  “Well…” he began and then stopped immediately. “Might as well get to work. Oh. Did you eat anything on the train?”

  “Yeah. Yes, sir. Alma made me sandwiches. And I had root beer and chocolate bars and then I had bread and milk when I woke up.”

  “You been eating like the Prince of Wales. Later on, we’ll get you something on the road. Best that we make some time now.” Lewis stopped as though expecting the boy to say something. When he didn’t, Lewis said, “We’re going to take a little trip, the three of us, into Texas. Then we’ll come on back here to a place just outside town.”

  “The place where you live?”

  “You could say that. Jasper’s what you’d call our headquarters. But first we’re goin’ to Texas.”

  “Why do you have to go there?”

  “That’s where the magician is,” Lewis said, as though this were common knowledge.

  “You have a magician?”

  “Not yet, but I will shortly. And on our way back into Oklahoma, we’ll stop and we’ll pick us up a camel. Let’s get a start, J.M.”

  He followed the two men to Lewis’s vehicle, an old milk truck with bars across the double back doors. The cab had been painted yellow and the door bore the legend Lewis A. Tully’s Blue Moon Circus and Menagerie in blue letters. Lewis held open the cab door and waited for the boy to climb in.

  Shelby clambered up into the cab from the right and Lewis took his seat behind the wheel and they were off in a cloud of exhaust and dust and the harsh ratcheting noises of the truck’s chain drive. A seat had been added behind the front one so that the cab could seat three across and a couple behind, but the boy sat between the two men. He watched the dull flat landscape dive beneath the truck for what seemed days, certain that this was the longest ride in a truck that anyone had ever taken and that these were probably the two quietest men. From time to time he looked up to find one or the other glancing at him—Lewis looking as though he could not quite believe the boy was there and Shelby just looking uncomfortable. Charlie felt himself beginning to nod off. As he dozed, he heard Shelby’s throaty growl, speaking of the logistics of carting “the beast” and “Old Harley.”

  The boy made one last attempt to demonstrate his alertness.

  “What’s the beast?”

  “The camel,” Lewis said.

  “Is Harley the magician?” Charlie asked.

  Lewis gave him a wry look. “Inquisitive young fella, huh? Yes, Harley’s my magician.”

  This earned a snort from Shelby. “If you can find him.”

  “I can find him.”

  “If you can talk him into to comin’ back.”

  “I can.”

  “If you can keep him awake.”

  “Nobody can work miracles, save the Lord His Own Self.”

  Charlie sat up straight. “Is he a real magician?”

  “As genuine a magician as there is extant. The greatest of them all. Harley Fitzroy. Fitzroy the Magnificent. Ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  Lewis frowned, then shrugged. “Ah, well. Back there in Chicago you wouldn’t necessarily hear of him. All those lesser magicians with the big shows. The Ringling Show and the Sells Brothers Show and so on. Spend all their money and effort on decoration and promotion and whatnot, won’t scour the country for the real talent. Your big show goes for spectacle, you see, not individual genius. The big shows did away with the long clowns, you know.”

  “What’s a long clown?”

  “Clown that performs all by himself, with every eye in the place on him, no help, no silly props, just one funny fella doing his tricks for five hundred or a thousand or five thousand people. Lost art.

  “Anyway, there’s hundreds if not thousands of magicians in the world, but Harley Fitzroy is the greatest magician that ever lived. He taught half of these other fellows everything they know. The greatest there ever was.”

  “Oldest, too,” Shelby added.

  “Age is no crime, least of all in a magician. You don’t get dumber as you age, Shelby, you get smarter, excepting in your case. He’s a wise old man. And as a magician, he is without peer. The Nonpareil, he is sometimes called.” Lewis stole a sidelong look at the boy. “I saw Harley make a tiger disappear.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “I know but I’m not saying. Also saw him make a man in the front row disappear, this was a fella giving him some lip. Saw him make this man vanish. Fella wound up at the entrance to the tent. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Scared that fella witless.”

  “Do you know how he did that one, too?”

  “Harley himself doesn’t know how he did that one,” Lewis said after a pause.

  The boy pondered the mysteries of disappearing people and tigers and began to drift off again. He heard Lewis’s low voice saying, “…claims to have learned all his magic from a great magician he met on the road.”

  Shelby answered this remark with a low comment that the boy didn’t quite hear, and the last thing the boy heard as sleep took him was Lewis’s quiet laughter. He went in and out of dreams, in and out of consciousness. Once he woke to hear the two men discussing someone named “Preston” and another named “Hector,” and these names seemed to trouble them.

  When he dreamt, his dreams were strange, peopled by odd men and women, bizarre creatures who surrounded him and seemed to think him different. He was angry and frustrated and for some reason nearly overcome by th
e need to pee. In his dream he was trying to find a toilet in an enormous dark building, and neither Lewis nor Shelby would tell him where he could find one.

  When he came out of it, a pale blue light was seeping into the sky and they were talking about him.

  “…and now you got a kid to look after, Lewis.”

  “Indeed I do.” He could hear Lewis sigh. Shelby chuckled and took a slurpy drink out of something. The boy heard the liquid sloshing in the bottle and then he could smell it, and Shelby was passing it to Lewis.

  “We got us a complication, Lewis. The kind you and I never seen before.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, J. M. Seems to me the grown men I’ve known were as much trouble as any kid is likely to give me. That fella from New York, the wirewalker? Remember him? He was a rum one, all right. Caused his share of trouble all the way around. Cost me money, brought me into acrimonious relations with the law, got that little girl in Tennessee with child, got himself shot up by her father. He left his mark on us, Shelby.”

  “And the Irish kid, the drinker.”

  Lewis growled. “Foley. I won’t forget him soon. Just when I had a season going, running off with the star of my show. So, no, I don’t think this little boy here is gonna be that much trouble.”

  He laughed. “And of course he can’t be any more trouble than old Rex.”

  Beside him in the darkened truck, the boy heard Shelby sigh as though recollecting happier times.

  “Yes, sir, old Rex. Now there was a genuine attraction of the big top. Rex the Red Ape. A colorful beast he was.”

  “That he was. Had a personality all his own. Affectionate, too, though folks didn’t quite know how to take him. It’s unfortunate that people’s ignorance and just plain short-haired meanness makes them intolerant of things that are new to them.”

  “He liked the ladies,” Shelby said.

  “Of course he did. He was a robust animal.”

  “Remember when he kissed that woman? Big slobby kiss all over her powdered cheek…” Shelby chuckled to himself.

  “An unfortunate misunderstanding, and that fool of a husband of hers made it worse. Just a show of feeling, that’s all that was. I think she was put off by Rex’s odor,” Lewis said in a musing tone. “Had a fine personality, though. A genuine character of the circus, Shelby.”

  “We won’t see his like again.”

  There was a long pause, and Lewis cleared his throat.

  “Well, my friend, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

  “What’s that mean, Lewis? What you got now?”

  “I got his…cub, his, you know, his offspring.”

  “His what?”

  “His issue, Shelby. His son. I have found the son of Rex the Red Ape.”

  “Well I’ll be damned. Where?”

  Lewis gave a little laugh, as though startled by it all. “Right about now, I’d say he’s passing through Indiana or Illinois. He’s on his way out here from the East. Fella that found ’im is gonna bring ’im to the camp. Yep, it’s starting to resemble a circus again. Well, hello, sleepy.”

  Charlie looked up to find Lewis glancing at him.

  “I have to go.”

  Lewis nodded. “We’ll stop right up ahead. I get the idea you didn’t sleep much on that train.”

  “No, sir.”

  Lewis nodded, his eyes on the dark road ahead. “You were excited. I remember riding the train when I was small. I was too excited to sleep. Alma didn’t sleep either.”

  No, she didn’t sleep ’cause she had an idea what might happen, Lewis thought.

  “Where did you go?”

  “We were traveling west. To Kansas.” A cold flat note crept into Lewis’s voice.

  “Why did you go there?”

  “We were sent. We went out to Kansas to find a family ’cause we had none of our own.”

  “Why not?”

  “They were…they’d passed on. Mr. Shelby here had a similar story. Just another orphan like you.” Lewis took his eyes from the road and gave the boy a small smile. Then he looked back at the road.

  Lewis seemed ready to let the matter drop, then added, “So my, uh, situation was kinda like yours, coming out to meet people you don’t know, excepting that you and I have some common acquaintances. We both know Alma and old Harry Mills.”

  “Did you like the train?”

  “The train? I thought the train was fine. Just fine.”

  A quiet, final note in Lewis’s voice told the boy they’d speak no more of the experience.

  Charlie peered out through the windshield and listened to the wind rushing by and watched the western sky attempting to hold onto the last of the dark.

  THREE

  The Mage of Arroyo Grande

  At precisely the moment that Lewis Tully began to fear he had missed Arroyo Grande, the town appeared in the distance. A harsh Texas sun bathed the world in a white heat that made the buildings shimmer, as though they were about to vanish. For a second Lewis believed he was looking at a mirage, then decided that Arroyo Grande was too squalid to be a mirage. He slowed the truck and studied the tiny mud-colored assemblage of houses.

  “Pretty bold folk to call this a town,” he muttered. “Trust that old man to settle down in a hole-in-the-ground like this.”

  Lewis wiped sweat from his eyes and ran a sleeve across his forehead. Beside him, the boy and Shelby were both snoring, Shelby filling the truck with deep guttural sounds like a horse clearing its nasal passages and the boy making little whistling sounds through a half-open mouth. Lewis stole a quick look at the sleeping child and felt a surprising rush of pleasure, followed immediately by a faint churning in his stomach.

  This last was a more familiar feeling, precursor of stark fear: he remembered it clearly from the time in Omaha when the mandrills had escaped in the night, and more clearly still from the dark day in Missouri when a bursting levee had washed away his Big Top. The mandrills had later been recovered after what a local paper had called a “simian reign of terror,” frightening horses, stealing food, fighting a pitched street battle with a pack of local dogs that had never been seen again, and flashing their purple posteriors from a rooftop at passersby. They’d been apprehended at last by a terrified local posse as the mandrills attempted to get at the window display of a German bakery. There had been a heart-pounding moment when Lewis thought he would lose the creatures to the battle-fury of the baker’s wife, but the local men had taken the ax from her.

  The fire in Nebraska in 1917 had been something else again, a total loss of a brand new tent and half a dozen of his wagons, and it had killed his show for the rest of the season. Neither experience had cost him what he’d lost in the fall of 1919, when he’d gone through accident and injury, stock lost to hoof-and-mouth or pneumonia, defections and a great paper tower of bills he could no longer pay; then the washout, a grey wall of river water taking his wagons, equipment, the tent. His last show before this one.

  And now a child. Good God.

  “Alma, what have you done to me?” he muttered.

  In all his days Lewis had never had to attend the needs of a small child, had long since stopped picturing a life for himself with children. His initial reaction to Alma’s letter had been a quick, decisive “No,” accompanied by a snort and a slap of his big flat hand on the table. It had helped that Alma herself wasn’t present at that particular moment. Lewis’s audience had been Shelby and Samuel Jeanette, the three of them huddling over a bottle of Belle of Marion.

  “No,” he’d said, and meant it to be the endmark to the whole piece. His companions had nodded in approval, neither of them believing for one second that Alma wouldn’t chew Lewis up and spit him out in the long run.

  He’d left a message for her at the Chicago drugstore where she used the telephone, told her it was “out of the question,” and Alma called back and
left her response with Roy Cookson, who ran the Jasper Mercantile. Alma’s message said, simply, “You have to do it. There’s nobody else.”

  Lewis had stood there in the general store staring at the note. There was no point in arguing, for he could hear all her arguments already in his inner ear, in his inner self where he was neither businessman nor circus master but forever a skinny boy with a permanently confused facial expression and she was the voice of worldly wisdom, part sister, part mother, part back-alley gambler forever calling in debts. In the end, he took a pencil to a short sheet of unlined paper and wrote his laconic reply:

  “Dear Alma, this will be a disaster. Just remember I warned you. This is no life for a boy without family. Am I coming to fetch him, or are you going to send him by mail? Please advise. Lewis.”

  Lewis stole another look at the child. A skinny boy, perhaps a bit undersized as well. Red hair that needed cutting and a wash of freckles across his face. Not the handsomest kid God had ever planted, big ears and a flat nose and a tooth that hadn’t quite made up its mind if it was coming in. The full import of the boy’s situation struck Lewis: a nine-year-old child riding a broken-down truck through the desert in the company of a pair of hardscrabble circus men, a child without family, a child with—call a spade a spade—no prospects in the world whatever.

  “God Almighty,” Lewis said aloud, and Shelby woke with a gurgling sound. A moment later, the boy stirred, then looked around in confusion. Lewis wanted to say something reassuring but could come up with nothing.

  “We’re here,” he said. To Shelby, he said, “This is what passes for a town in Texas.”

  “We’ve seen worse, Lewis. Hell, we’ve played in worse.”

  Lewis Tully stared at the houses. “More than once.”

  He sighed like a man indulging once again in a forbidden habit and pulled the truck back onto the road. They passed an old man driving a wagon. The man waved his hand in greeting without taking his eyes from the swayback bay that he drove.