For several moments the boy stood looking slowly around at what seemed to him a dazzling array of tents, huts, fencing, trucks, and wagons—a little city in the middle of nothing—and tried to imagine what it would take to destroy it. Shelby’s words were a shock: it had never occurred to him to doubt the permanence of this place, or his place within it.
In the days that followed, he found himself following Shelby around and soon began to change his opinion of him. His first impressions, colored by Shelby’s rough, hairy appearance, his stubby arms and legs and the perpetual frown that seemed to herald puzzlement or low intelligence, gradually fell away under the evidence of Shelby’s indefatigable activity and surprising gifts. For one thing, it soon became clear that Shelby was gifted with the ability to see possibilities that hadn’t occurred to others. Several times, the boy watched adults, including Lewis, wrestle with a situation that clearly overmatched them all, and then Shelby arrived on the scene, took it over, and solved the problem.
He was a natural engineer, he understood basic problems of weight and leverage, regardless of their scope. He could also draw, could sketch his ideas in a few seconds, so that the work crew was not left to their own recollection of his instructions.
It took little time for men to see the reality of things: that Lewis Tully’s hirsute second-in-command was considerably more than the sum of his humble parts. Even before they came to this knowledge, most of the men came to like Shelby. His wry good humor, his kindness, and his unwavering optimism about the most daunting of tasks were enough to make him friends of his work crew.
Occasionally Shelby became aware that the boy was following or watching him, and at these times he would look puzzled, as though this were some inexplicable eccentricity of the boy’s, but he never expressed anything like irritation. More than anyone else, he seemed willing to tolerate the boy’s presence, and on a good day he might have a kind word or a small joke for him.
Charlie found other ways to occupy if not amuse himself. He fancied that these pastimes were his secret, and he frequently stole about the empty edges of the camp, slipping in and out of its dark corners. His explorations took him to every part of the camp, to the stock tents and corrals, the work areas and storage shacks. At last he ventured, exhilarated and breathless, into the living quarters of the performers and their families.
The first such visit took him into the darkened tent of the DePerczels. For a moment he stood motionless, breathing in the smells and listening to the pounding of his own heart, finally assuring himself that the whole family was out working on their high-wire act. The tent smelled of Mrs. DePerczel’s perfume and her cooking—her tent was heated with a small cookstove, for she insisted on feeding her husband a good Hungarian meal now and then—and of the bay rum that the Count applied so liberally to his gleaming pompadour.
As Charlie’s eyes adjusted to the faint light, he began to explore, looking into drawers and trunks, touching clothing, brushes, books in Hungarian, the children’s toys. He threw himself into a small painted chair and shut his eyes and tried to imagine living amidst that noisy clan, taking part in their laughter, waking each morning to find them all there. In the end, he took a small coin from a short chest of drawers, and buried it at the bottom of his carpetbag when he returned to his hut.
He continued to explore the quarters of the performers, exulting each time he’d successfully invaded one more private place, sitting in dark and silence to imagine the life that must take place there. He crept into the Zhengs’ tent, into the small square hut of the Perez Brothers, into the long tent shared by the Jeanettes, into the canvas-topped hut where Roy Green and Shirley Morrissey lived, into the exotic-smelling quarters of the Russians, and finally into Lucy Brown’s tent, expecting a place of powder and perfume and finding instead a barren little living space filled to overflowing with saddles, bridles, horse blankets, and boots, and smelling richly of leather and horse.
In each place, he tried to imagine himself as one of the occupants. From each, he took something. Later, when the thrill subsided, he was wracked by guilt, almost sickened when he later ran across the person whose quarters he’d just invaded, but he said nothing to anyone. In the bottom of his little bag, the cache of pilfered souvenirs grew. When he was in Lewis’s hut, he found himself staring at the bag. At first he tried stuffing it well out of sight under his cot. Later, he brought it out into the open and left it in plain view.
He was returning from a stealthy visit to the quarters of the Antoninis, Lewis’s jugglers, with a small mother-of-pearl comb thrust into his back pocket, when he saw Helen Larsen. She was standing alone in front of her tent, and something in her attitude told him she’d been there for a while. The boy took a quick glance behind him and reassured himself that her line of vision wouldn’t have allowed her to see him enter or leave the Antonini tent, but there was something in her face that bothered him. He met her eyes, a steady, unblinking gaze that made him look away, and moved faster till he was in his own quarters. From then on, he frequently found her watching him. It seemed to him that she was trying to tell him something. The boy soon began to avoid her.
The evenings were the boy’s favorite time. After dinner he played for a while with the other children. Later, when they had gone back to their families, he made long solitary tours of the camp and imagined himself in a shadowy world populated by exotic beasts and magic. He saw himself as an adventurous explorer thrust alone into the unknown, moving out beyond the range of voices and the night sounds of the people in their quarters, until he was hidden by the trees and could pretend he was the sole human inhabitant of this strange place. On more than one of these odysseys, he fancied that he was rescuing Lewis Tully or Shelby or old Harley Fitzroy from danger beyond measure. On one occasion, Lewis himself was the villain, a dark, taciturn figure of evil who needed a good sword stroke in his midsection to set him straight.
Occasionally the boy saw himself rescuing Lucy Brown, and once he was retrieving Helen Larsen from unspeakable jungle terrors when he recalled the look in her eye and decided to stop playing for the night.
He explored his world in earnest. The woods around the camp were filled with small animals and birds, snakes and lizards and insects. He watched ground squirrels and chipmunks scamper through the underbrush and threw himself at them in vain attempts to catch one. He sat in fascination as a large spider snared a deerfly and then wrapped it for a later meal.
The camp provided him with what he enjoyed thinking of as true occasions of danger. He clambered along the top of the corral past the dozing horses and told himself a fall would mean certain death. But he fancied that each visit to the camel was a genuine chance at death. Frequently she stared at him in manifest boredom, and he sometimes had the feeling that she couldn’t see him. Once, however, his appearance seemed to anger her, and she galloped across the corral and threw her shaggy body sideways against the wood fence. The boy heard the wood groan from the blow and jumped back. The camel thrust her long head across the top plank at him and bared her huge blocky teeth, then snapped at him with the sound of rocks colliding.
Terrified, Charlie fell back on the ground and lay there motionless until he was convinced she couldn’t reach him or come over the fence. For a moment it seemed that his heart was attempting to pry its way loose from its cage, and he wondered if he would die. The camel seemed to be wondering the same thing: she stood at the fence, head tilted to one side, making little chewing motions and losing saliva from one corner of her mouth. Then she snorted and turned away, trotting to the exact center of her corral and dropping to the ground, where she proceeded to nod off.
The camel tried to kill me, he said to himself.
Exhilarated, he jumped to his feet, brushed himself off, and ran back into the camp to find someone to tell.
A few yards away, the camel dozed. She had enjoyed terrifying the boy even more than she enjoyed harassing the horses in the corral next to her, but th
ese were transitory amusements compared with the one that kept her alive, the daily thought of the Man with the Whip and what she would do when they crossed paths again.
To Charlie’s delight, the first person he encountered was Lucy Brown, and before she had time to greet him, the boy was calling out his news.
“The camel tried to kill me!”
“Oh, honey, you didn’t go in there with that nasty old thing, did you?”
“No, but it tried to get me, it come over the fence after me.”
Lucy opened her mouth and then just nodded. “I see. Well, I would have been scared to death. Were you scared?”
“No. But I thought sure it was coming over that fence.”
“Well, you just be careful,” she said. He nodded and went on, face alight with the joy of having survived danger, and Lucy kept her face solemn until he was out of sight.
He found himself alone in Lewis’s hut once more, and set forth immediately to record his heart-pounding adventure in a picture. When he was finished, he took out another piece of paper and began drawing a new adventure, this time involving Jupiter. That night he dreamt of his mother. In the dream he astounded her with accounts of his many adventures. In the morning he awoke looking for her.
FIFTEEN
Legerdemain
On a warm morning when Lewis Tully and most of the adults were working on the twin trucks that would carry tent, poles, and grandstands, the boy crept out to watch the old magician. He crawled forward on his stomach and took his position behind a low line of bush. A few feet away, shaded from the mid-morning sun by the branches of an enormous cottonwood, Harley Fitzroy had become Fitzroy the Magnificent, a transformation the boy had watched every morning for a week, as the old man dragged his bag and his boxes, his hat and cape, out to the furthest reaches of the pecan grove, where a line of cottonwoods outlined the stream. The other members of the troupe knew enough to allow the old man privacy in his arcane preparations.
The boy watched as Harley Fitzroy went through the key elements of his repertoire. There seemed to be a hierarchy to the tricks. Once, Lewis had come out to fetch the magician for something and interrupted him in the middle of a trick involving his cape and a pair of boxes. Harley had continued to perform while Lewis spoke, as though he didn’t mind the audience. On other occasions, however, the boy had seen the old man go rigid at the sound of a twig snapping in the trees. At these times Harley Fitzroy stared unblinking into the forest and did not move until he was convinced that he was alone.
The boy could see no reason for the old man’s capricious behavior. As far as he knew, it was all magic and it was all dazzling. He thought there was something unearthly about Harley Fitzroy: once he had come upon the old man and Mr. Dugan, the hobo-turned-cook’s helper, out behind the camp.
Harley was speaking, and Dugan was coughing and shaking his head, and as Charlie watched, the magician put his hand on the skinny man’s shoulder and seemed to stare into Dugan’s eyes for several seconds. Mr. Dugan straightened, and the cough seemed to subside, and when Dugan went back to his work a few minutes later, there was a surprised look on his face. In the aftermath, Harley looked drawn and tired, and to the boy, this made perfect sense.
Harley had just made his cat Xenophon vanish from the nether regions of a large box on a tree stump. Harley peered into the bottom of the box, assured himself that this part of the trick had been performed satisfactorily, and then muttered something to himself as he tapped a second box with his battered little wand. He made a very fine flourish of a multicolored scarf over the second box, then stepped back with an expectant smile and looked into this box. His face fell.
He peered into the box, picked it up, shook it. Xenophon did not materialize.
“Well, damn it all to perdition!”
Xenophon mewed plaintively, and Harley peered about the clearing until he located the cat in the lower branches of a pecan tree, pawing at the newly formed green pods. The old man sighed and went over to help the cat out of the tree.
“Forgive me, Xenophon. This feat will require some fine-tuning but we’ll have the thing right yet, and you have my word on it.” The cat made plaintive noises and looked disappointed. “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll get you a nice piece of fish from Mr. Royce. You go chase the field mice for a while and I’ll work on some of the sleights.”
On several occasions the boy had seen Harley cause a living object, usually the cat, to disappear from one location and reappear in another. He had seen the old man produce odd things from empty containers, turn certain objects into others of completely different composition, and on one occasion he’d seen Harley Fitzroy levitate Xenophon several inches off the ground. The trick had lasted no more than five seconds and ended with Xenophon falling to earth with a loud plop and a cloud of dust. Harley’s feat seemed to vex both master and cat: Xenophon trotted off with a dark look over his shoulder at the magician, and Harley stood muttering and looking down at his hands.
Yet in spite of these and other wonders, large and small, Harley appeared to be disappointed in his performance. After his tricks, the old man might sigh or mutter to himself, or simply stare at what he’d wrought as though it was the furthest thing from his intention. His attempts at transporting things, particularly the unhappy Xenophon, seemed to cause him the greatest vexation and elicited the magician’s rare but colorful ventures into profanity. And one feat in particular seemed to elude him, something having to do with a small pile of silk handkerchiefs that Harley just waved his hands at, with no result.
Through it all, the boy watched and held his breath to keep from gasping, and wondered why this old man wasn’t tickled to death at his great gift. It was not only the tricks themselves that drew him time and again to the hidden place in the woods, but the old man himself, with his funny clothes, his imitation sorcerer’s hat, and the cape that hung on him like a badly dyed bedsheet, the bristly white hair that ignored the old man’s halfhearted attempts to control it, and most of all his face.
Harley Fitzroy’s face, amusing enough to a nine-year-old boy when revealing an adult’s annoyance at things beyond his control, took on a new character when he was in the midst of his act. The watery blue eyes grew wider and brighter and wore a hopeful look, the skin took on something of its lost youth, and it was clear even to the boy that when the tricks were going well, the old man was having the time of his life.
So it was on this warm morning when the old man dismissed his cat and busied himself with rope tricks, strange knots that disappeared at a shake of Harley’s hand, cut ropes that miraculously joined themselves when commanded to do so. The boy watched the old man pick up a straight steel bar and cause it to bend in its middle.
“Gosh!” the boy whispered.
“Oho!” the old man said to himself, holding the curved bar out and admiring it. A moment later he straightened it and burst into a delighted cackle.
He fell to whistling as he went through his repertoire, and then seemed puzzled. He looked up in the direction of the camp, appeared to listen for a moment, then shrugged. He turned a small black box upside down, shook it, and then placed it on the stump. After a moment’s hesitation, the old man said something softly, tapped the box, lifted it up, and revealed a magnificent toad, fat and warty and shiny green. Harley stooped down as quickly as his arthritic limbs would allow and stroked the toad with a forefinger.
“You’re a real beauty, aren’t you. Quite handsome, for your kind. Let’s see what else we can do with you.” And then he stepped back, made a long sweep with his cloak, muttered something to himself, and then stepped back, cackling.
The frog was gone.
Charlie’s heart sank. Toads were, after all, something special in the general hierarchy of nature’s creatures. He sighed. The toad croaked. Charlie looked down and saw it blinking up at him from less than six inches away.
“Gosh!” he blurted, forgetting all secrec
y and stealth.
“Thought you might fancy him,” the old man said, and Charlie jumped. He stood, his body already leaning in the general direction of camp, and braced himself for a verbal salvo from the angry magician.
In the center of his practice arena, Harley Fitzroy made a one-handed shrug. “Maybe not. Most boys like toads—or so I thought. How it was in my day, you see. We liked ’em.”
“I…I like ’em fine,” Charlie heard himself say.
The magician nodded. “Well, have a look at that one then, and let him go when you’re through. But don’t let him get in there with those big animals, or you won’t have a toad anymore. You’ll have a green flapjack.”
The mental image of a toad-shaped flapjack apparently found Harley’s laughing spot, and for a moment he could not speak, half-folded over as he was with silent mirth. When he was able to collect himself again, he looked embarrassed.
“Anyway, keep an eye on him. They’re none too bright. It’s why they live off bugs.”
The boy looked from the toad to the magician. “You knew I was here,” he said finally.
“What did you expect?”
“I didn’t think you could see me.”
“Some days I don’t. But most days I know you’re there.”
The boy blinked several times and looked down as he digested this information.
“How?”
“Stop asking foolish questions. I have to get back to my work. If you haven’t been sleeping out here, you’ll be aware that I’m having difficulties.”
“No. I think you’re a dandy magician.”
“I was a dandy magician. Now I’m a forgetful old man,” he said and strode away, dark cape billowing out behind him like a great sail.
“Can I stay?” Charlie called out.
The magician stopped and wheeled about suddenly. He pointed a long bony finger at the boy and for a moment his eyes were hard and unfriendly.
The Blue Moon Circus Page 14