This little man was something else, however, something that gradually drew the onlooker’s attention and held it: he was terrified. His eyes, his breathing, the stiff-backed posture, the pallor that now mottled his dark skin, all attested to the fact that Mr. Patel was nearly aswoon with his dread of whatever resided in his picnic basket. Lewis had to admit that this certainly lent appeal to his act, albeit a base and unsophisticated sort of attraction. This understanding that an animal trainer, whether working with big cats, bears, or poisonous snakes, put himself in harm’s way, Lewis realized, was a basic attraction to an audience. But Mr. Patel’s fevered and discordant playing, his wild-eyed stare, his corpselike posture made his onlookers squirm.
“This fella’s gonna get himself hurt, Lewis,” Shelby said.
“We can all hope there’s no snake in the basket,” Harley said.
As luck would have it, there was indeed a snake in the basket, and as the little man had boasted, it was a singular specimen.
“God Almighty, that’s a big cobra, Lewis.”
“And a damned ugly one too. Kinda deformed looking.”
The snake was all these things and more: big, ill-favored, with a slightly askew snout that suggested either a defect of birth or a hard life by herpetological standards. It was also an odd shade of green, almost luminescent, and for a few seconds the men were transfixed by its appearance and the slow, inevitable levitation from the basket.
Lewis felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Harley Fitzroy. “Lewis, that little man looks like he’s just heard his death sentence.”
“I know. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Mr. Patel’s dark eyes scanned them quickly for approval and he managed to show a grin around the mouthpiece of his flute. Lewis nodded encouragement that he did not feel, and the flute made louder noise. The evil-looking snake rose to show something of its great size, seemed to tilt its head first to the right and then to the left, and then it stunned them all as it struck Mr. Patel, driving its fangs deep into the little man’s throat. Mr. Patel fell backward with a sharp cry and hit the ground.
“Damn!” Lewis said.
“Oh, Lord,” Shelby muttered and rushed forward, but Lewis was already hovering over the stricken snake-charmer. He put his hands around the jagged bite and began to suck at the poison, spitting it behind him. Shelby threw a kick in the snake’s direction, but the reptile was already slinking back into the dark world of the basket. When it was inside, Shelby slammed the flaps of the basket shut.
“Get the Doc, and get Old Zheng,” Lewis shouted, and Shelby tore off in search of them. A small crowd had materialized when the little man began to play and now the crowd grew to match the drama of the moment. Charlie and the Count’s older son Laszlo moved slowly from the edge of the crowd to its heart, and the boys stared in silent dread at the skinny corpse.
“Harley?” Lewis said.
The magician gave him an uneasy look and moved forward. Someone in the back of the crowd was shouting that the Doc was coming, and Lewis thought he could hear Shelby’s voice, but he sank back on his haunches and hung his head, for the Doc would do no good now. Mr. Patel was growing colder by the moment. Lewis Tully felt his heart grow leaden in the old familiar way, and was conscious as always of the uselessness of his hands in the presence of death. He moved to let Harley get closer but knew there was no urgency.
Doc Morin fought through the crowd, glanced from the little man to Lewis, and cursed under his breath. He knelt down beside the corpse, felt in vain for a pulse, and shot Lewis a quick look.
“A snake, Lewis? For the love of God, how did a thing like this happen?”
Lewis just shook his head and stared down at the ground.
The doctor shrugged and bent to the perfunctory task of making certain of death. Old Zheng appeared, took one look at the man on the ground, and made the faintest shake of his head. The circus people watched the Doc’s sloped back as he worked and could see from his total lack of tension that he worked on a dead man. He made a slow, heavy shake of his head and began to get to his feet. And then he jumped.
A gasp went through the crowd, for in all his adult life Doc Morin had never been known to be precipitate about anything, had never spoken, acted, worked, or moved quickly, not even, Lewis would have said, when the fire took away the whole camp in 1917, nor when the great wall of muddy water swept away most of their camp in 1919, not even when a drunk in a North Dakota town threw a knife that missed the Doc by the width of one of his whiskers. But jump he did, backwards and onto his feet, with a little croaking noise, and Lewis stared at him in mute wonder until from the corner of his eye he saw the other movement, the cause of the Doc’s newfound athleticism.
The corpse was moving.
He walked slowly toward the body and stopped. Mr. Patel’s chest was heaving. Lewis turned to the onlookers and said, “Shelby, get on over here. I won’t look at this alone.”
Shelby moved to his side, then Harley, and together they stooped down beside the body. Lewis looked at Mr. Patel’s face, then his gaze went from the corpse to the magician’s clever eyes, and Harley read the look.
“Don’t look at me, Lewis. This is way out of my line.”
Then, as they stared at the heaving chest, a pulse became visible in Mr. Patel’s bruised throat. The bite even showed a seepage of blood. Then the eyelids fluttered, opened, stared up at the heavens in an unmistakable look of gratitude, and Mr. Patel smiled.
His dark eyes moved to take in his companions and he grinned a bit wider. They realized he was trying to speak, and craned forward to hear what he wanted to say.
“Hello,” he said.
“He’s alive,” the Doc said.
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Patel said. “I am very alive.” He pulled himself onto one elbow and grinned at Lewis, then at the wondering crowd that had gathered to view his passing. “I told you, this is very excellent act.”
Lewis Tully stared at him for several seconds and then croaked “Act? This is your act?”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Patel said, head bobbing in firm agreement with himself. “It is jim-dandy act. Very nice.”
“You’ve done this before? I mean, you let this thing bite you and you kinda—lose consciousness?”
“I die,” he said simply.
The Doc cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t know as I’d go that far…”
“You die?” Lewis repeated. “Every time, just like this?”
“Oh, no. Sometimes I play and she is like regular snake. And sometimes we fight, I hit her with the flute, this is one damn nasty snake. But sometimes she bites me. And I die. I fall asleep from the poison, very fast damn poison, and I have no pulse and my heart it is not beating. I die,” he said brightly. “It is a gift.”
“Some gift.”
“He’s got some kinda immunity, Lewis,” the Doc said.
“It is from my father. He has such a gift. He has many strange and wonderful gifts. With his legs he can make knots…”
Lewis stared at him and for a moment experienced another old familiar feeling, that of a man whose pocket has just been picked clean.
“Mr. Patel, I’m thinking about pounding you into a crack in the parched Oklahoma earth.”
A quick look in Lewis’s eyes told the Indian that he was now in graver danger than he’d been with the snake. He pulled himself first into a sitting position, then got onto his feet in a crouch.
“You come here and tell me you’re a snake man and then you scare the bejesus out of all of us by letting this thing bite you…” Lewis felt himself warming up, and Shelby took a backward step, believing they were about to hear one of Lewis’s more formal orations.
“You would not believe me!” Mr. Patel said.
“What?”
“You would throw me out on my seat of the pants,” the Indian said, and pointed a righteously accusi
ng finger in Lewis’s general direction, though he was afraid to point it too close to Lewis’s face. As a result he appeared to be remonstrating with a small pecan tree a few feet to Lewis’s left.
“If I said, ‘Hello, Mr. Tully, I am one fine snake man,’ you would hire me? No, no, sir, I am thinking no. I think you are throwing me out in the cold of the Oklahoma wilderness.”
Several of his audience, Charlie included, looked around them for a second in search of what could be considered the Oklahoma wilderness, or even the cold.
“I must show you this act,” Mr. Patel insisted. “I show you this act, you can see that it is first-rate act. Nobody else does this act.”
“You said your Old Man does it,” Lewis said.
“He is in India. And soon he will retire. He is ninety. Very old. His snake is even older, not so fast. The act is not dramatic, old man, very old snake.” Mr. Patel showed them all his pearly little smile but something else was in his eyes and Lewis had seen it before. Lewis looked at the man’s wrinkled suit and the dark weary circles beneath his eyes. “My act is jim-dandy act, Mr. Tully. Dangerous snake, very mean snake. Man is attacked. People will like this act.”
Lewis Tully looked into the little man’s eyes and counted slowly to ten.
“Lewis?” Harley Fitzroy said. “There’s a nickel or two to be made here. Folks pay to see a snake half the size of this one come out and do the hootchie-kootchie to some flute playing. They’ll pay to see this. Fella actually gets himself nailed by the damn thing.”
“Makes some sense, Lewis,” Shelby offered.
But Lewis Tully, who had already made up his mind, just said, “You’re hired, Mr. Patel, but you better make that damn turban thing fit on your head if you’re working for a Tully Circus.” He brushed the red dirt off his knees and began to walk away.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, you will be happy you made right decision…”
Lewis slowed down and looked over his shoulder. “Tell me one thing: is this creature gonna kill you some night in my Big Top? You were out for quite a while there.”
“Oh, no, no, no, sir. Each time, it is better, not so long. It is the gift from my father. Each time, I am sick not so much as time before. First time, I was unconscious for very long time. My poor mother, she went to arrange funeral. She was very sad.”
Mr. Patel’s eyes misted at the recollection. “When she came back, I was alive again.” He spread his little arms wide.
“Bet that brought her tears of joy.”
“Only later. First, she beat me. She beat my father, too.”
“A family prone to violence,” Harley Fitzroy said.
Lewis studied the little man one last time. “If the snake kills you, you’re fired.”
ELEVEN
Two Women
The woman arrived late in the morning, in a lurching, dust-covered, much-abused automobile with dented fenders, cracked windows and a door that appeared to be held in place with twine.
She pulled up behind a truck and got out, shaking dust from her curly brown hair and slapping at her skirt with a cowboy hat.
Her only audience was a group of children playing in the bushes, but she stood in front of her car and waited in silence until she had their attention.
“Are you the official welcoming committee?”
One of them, a girl, giggled. The boys stared.
“Where is everybody?”
“They’re all working on the Big Top,” the bigger boy said. He was about ten, and she didn’t recognize him. The two black boys meant that Sam Jeanette was handling Lewis’s herd. The other boy was Chinese—that meant Zheng was here—and she thought she remembered the curly-haired younger daughter of the Count, now almost a young woman.
“Pretty big tent, is it? Some patches on the sides?”
“Lots of patches,” the girl said. “Every color there is.”
“Mr. Tully is a colorful man.” She looked at the other boy with interest. There was a watchfulness in his eyes that she’d seen in none of the circus children, and she would have bet a gold eagle that this one had a story. This was a street child. Trust Lewis Tully to turn up with a boy like this in his circus.
“My name is Helen Larsen. Will you go tell Mr. Tully that I’m here?”
The boy’s hand went unconsciously to his unruly red hair, and he nodded. Then, half a heartbeat later, he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well-mannered boy, aren’t you? Helen Larsen, tell him.”
The boy turned and ran off to fetch Lewis, and the woman made small-talk with the younger children to shake her mind free of the notion that she was about to make a fool of herself. Two minutes later she saw them coming and pretended not to notice. When they were just a few yards away she looked up and feigned surprise, approximating the look on Lewis Tully’s face but not quite equaling the depths of it.
She felt the smile taking form on her lips and smothered it, and hoped she didn’t look as starry-eyed as she felt. A step or two behind Lewis, as always, Shelby was openly grinning at her. Bringing up the rear at his more stately pace was Harley Fitzroy and a step behind him, the red-haired question mark.
Lewis was looking younger somehow, though she couldn’t tell just what it was. The spidery lines at the corners of his eyes were still there, the deeper ones across his forehead, and she could see the grey in his hair, but he still looked younger. His shirt stuck to his body where the sweat made dark blotches on the cloth, and he had grease on one hand. Wagon work, she thought.
Lewis felt his chest pounding in a combination of nervousness and delight, and the resulting facial expression made him look distracted. He opened his mouth to say something and she got there first, as always.
“Hello, Lewis. I hear you’ve got yourself a mud show.”
He nodded hesitantly and said, “Helen. How you been?”
“Getting by.” She chanced a half-smile and saw the little answering light in his eyes. He met her eyes for a moment, then looked away.
“How are the…Patsy and Mollie and Jake?”
“They’re all fine. The girls are both married, and Jake’s got himself a small store in Bridger.”
He put his hand to the back of his neck and craned around to look at Shelby and Harley. “You boys recollect Helen, don’t you?”
Give a man enough time, she thought, and he’ll say something truly stupid.
“Now what do you think, Lewis?” Harley asked, and then nodded at her. “Good to see you again, Helen.”
“Thought you gave all this up for an honest job, Harley.”
“Oh, not yet,” he was saying when she crossed over to him and planted a kiss on his stubble-covered cheek.
Shelby came forward and gave her a gentle squeeze, and she planted one on him as well, then gave Lewis a sly look.
“You’re looking real…fit, Helen,” Lewis said.
Fit? For fifty I look a lot better than “fit,” she thought.
Still giving him the look intended to make him feel like a schoolboy, she held out one hand. When he took it, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. She kissed him as he was turning his head and caught him on the bridge of his nose, and they both laughed.
The woman stood back and cocked her head to one side and frowned.
“I don’t know if it’s the sun on your face, but you look different.”
“Oh, you know how it is…” He took his first good look at her and lost the rest of his sentence. A little heavier, he thought, unabashedly heavier because it had never bothered her, and it suited him just fine. There might have been a little more grey in her dark brown hair, but he had to concede that it gave her a regal look. She’d cut her hair as well, the women were all cutting their hair short these days, but it looked becoming. There might have been a few more tiny wrinkles and laughlines in her skin, but she still had that color to her complexion, th
e skin of a girl who hasn’t seen a hard day’s work in the sun. And the deep green eyes that were the first thing he’d noticed when they’d met all those years ago, and what he remembered when she was a thousand miles away. And now, as so many times before, she was laughing at him.
“I’m getting a show together,” he said unnecessarily, and Shelby rolled his eyes.
“I heard it might come up our way, maybe.”
“Could be. We’re gonna follow the Canty Road.”
She frowned. “How far?”
“Oh, a ways up there. Wyoming, I guess. Maybe all the way to Sheridan. Maybe into Montana if we’re feeling bold.”
Shelby snorted. “We’ll be lucky if our trucks make it to Wyoming, but finding out’s half the fun.”
“If the trucks don’t make it, we’ll walk,” Lewis said without taking his eyes off her.
“I was beginning to think we might not see you this time around, Helen,” Shelby said.
“Mr. Tully didn’t let me know. I had to hear second-hand.”
“Well, I figured you would,” Lewis began.
“Had to help the girls with the planting,” she said to Shelby. She turned to Lewis. “My kids are keeping busy, Lewis. That leaves me. I need work.”
“I thought you had something with the Perry Circus.”
“That was a while back. He gave my job to his daughter. Seemed fair enough to me. I thought I might sign on with John Falls, but he went bust.”
“John went bust? I hadn’t heard that. Not surprised though—any of us small shows can go bust any time.”
Lewis waited for her to fill the space, but she just watched him with a little half-smile. For the first time, he grew self-conscious of his sweaty appearance.
“I look like I been rolling around in the dirt. We were working on the Top, and putting a new axle on one of the trucks…”
The Blue Moon Circus Page 11