The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  The camel trotted eagerly across her own corral to stare at him with her head cocked to one side just the way a person might. She peered at Lewis with her big dark eyes and he thought, not for the first time, that she was nearsighted. Something else about the eyes he noticed: a certain odd cast, an unnatural gleam that in a human would have told the onlooker he was in the presence of insanity. The camel was shedding as well, and her dense winter coat hung from her in tatters. She sniffed him, put her shaggy head across the heavy wooden bar, and eyed him for several seconds before filling the air with a wet snort and trotting away, clearly bored. As she moved off, Lewis noticed the dark mark on her rump, where a clump of winter hair had fallen off, and made a mental note to take a look at it in the morning. The mark looked like a brand.

  His circuit of the tents and shacks and houses eventually took him past Lucy Brown’s tent, dark and quiet. A sudden image came to him unbidden, Lucy Brown in a long flannel nightgown, her copper hair down her back. He hadn’t thought of her this way in years—had worked to banish the image—but now it returned. He’d seen Lucy Brown in the daring costumes she wore in her act and thought nothing of it—all equestriennes dressed this way. But once, when she was barely nineteen, he’d seen Lucy Brown in the door of her quarters, in her nightgown, and the picture would stay with him forever.

  Damn, Lewis, half your age. She’d laugh at you. Anybody with sense would laugh at you.

  He moved faster, toward his own quarters, and tried to look down as he passed Helen’s tent. He could hear her moving around inside, he knew exactly what she was doing. She ended each day the same way, brushing her hair, putting out her clothes for the next day, straightening things to bring neatness to wherever she was staying, she’d bring neatness to a ditch. And then, by the light of a small lamp, she would read books, magazines, month-old newspapers.

  There’s the trouble, he told himself. There’s the problem right there. Lucy Brown is just some passing foolishness. This woman I’ve known for thirty-four years, this is a horse of a different color.

  Lewis admitted to himself that he had hoped Helen would come, even though he couldn’t muster the nerve to invite her. And now that she was here, he wondered if this wouldn’t turn out to be just one more source of trouble, a reminder of more past failures.

  He paused and listened to her night noises, then realized with a small shock that she was no longer moving around. She was listening. Lewis hurried off to his own quarters, walking as quietly as possible and conscious that half the camp could hear his heavy boots on the hard earth.

  In his hut he undressed quietly while the two sleepers made more noises than a field of frogs. In the faint light he could just make out the boy’s outline. He huddled under his blanket, wrapping it completely around his head so that almost nothing showed. The first night Lewis had noticed this habit, he had been afraid the boy would suffocate in the night, and had pulled the blanket down. A few minutes later, the boy had pulled it back up like a woolen burnoose.

  Lewis stared at the sleeping boy and felt a rush of confusion. It occurred to him that he knew nothing of what this boy thought or felt, actually knew little of how the boy spent his time out of Lewis’s company. He tried to put himself in the child’s place: alone in the company of busy, tired, worried strangers. Busy, tired, worried men.

  I ought to know how that feels, he thought. I ought to know how you feel, boy, because I been to that cold hard place and I wouldn’t want to wish that on anybody. But I can’t seem to do a thing for you.

  He moved closer to the boy’s cot and stared down at him.

  I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, son, and that’s a fact.

  Lewis Tully backed away from the boy, told himself he’d surrounded himself with trouble on all sides, and got into his bed. In the darkness he stole a last, quick look across the hut and tried to ignore his sudden feeling of guilt.

  He woke to more trouble.

  Before first light, he got up to see Shelby and his crew off. Then, as the first groggy sounds of morning came from the huts and tents, Lewis went back to the corral where the camel slept. At his approach, she opened one eye, peered at him from the far side of the corral, and, when he climbed up onto the log fence, she got unsteadily to her feet. Lewis held his place astride the log until the camel was a few yards away, then leaped down.

  The camel made an irritated snort and then took the last few yards at the full gallop. Her speed surprised Lewis, and he jumped away as she threw her heavy body against the logs and strained them almost to the breaking point. She hung her big head over the top bar and snapped at him, clacking her huge teeth together and giving him what he’d have sworn was the evil eye. Then she trotted away and gave him a good look at the mark on her rump. It was the last mark he’d wanted to see.

  It said U.S. ARMY.

  “Oh, Lord.” To the camel he said, “Figures you’d find your way to my circus. You’re older than you look, I’ll say that.”

  Now, he said to himself, now look what I’ve gone and done. I’ve got her. Yessir, I’ve got the most famous camel of the Old West.

  “Nice to make your acquaintance, Sheba. Wish there was a market for camel meat.”

  Across the corral, Sheba turned her head to one side and squinted at him.

  Lewis shook his head. He knew all the stories about her and thought at least half of them were probably true: toward the end of the 1880s, an enterprising cavalry administrator had hit upon the audacious idea of using camels in the U.S. Army’s desert campaigns. A dozen of the beasts had been purchased, and the cavalry had attempted to train them for use on patrol, on long marches, on reconnaissance.

  The experiment had been a disaster. The camels soon proved to be quick-tempered, more intelligent than horses but stubborn, ill-suited to the U.S. Army’s rough-handed notions of animal husbandry. After several incidents during which the young camels attempted to slaughter their trainers, the task of breaking the beasts had been handed over to a particularly brutal sergeant named Brierly. Under his campaign of violence and hard use, the camels had achieved a nominal state of training. They had also learned to turn on their trainers. A drunken corporal assisting Sergeant Brierly had been trampled near to death by the largest of the camels, the one called Sheba. Sergeant Brierly had responded by beating her half to death with a bullwhip.

  When Sheba recovered, the animal had spent weeks whimpering and cowering whenever Brierly came near, until a hot July morning when he came into her pen alone, carrying his bullwhip. Sheba turned her head to one side and moved a few steps back as he approached. She continued backing away until he brought up the whip, and then she charged and stomped and kicked and snapped her huge teeth until Brierly was a raw, bloody mess rolling across the corral. A dozen men rushed into the pen with ropes and rifles, and a young trooper handy with a lasso succeeded in getting a rope around her neck. When they pulled her off Brierly, he was unconscious but not dead, and the camel had bitten the ends off two of his fingers.

  Eventually several of the animals died from illnesses unknown in their native habitat, and a number proved unmanageable. The remainder were sold to circuses or zoos. Two escaped and became the subject of many tales. It was said that one carried a rider who looked like Death and whose coming meant it. Many years later, one of the beasts, a male, was indeed found crossing the plains with a hideous burden atop his hump: the decaying corpse of a man, tied and propped in place in some macabre joke or malevolent act of revenge. The brand on the camel’s rump proved that this camel had been one of the Army’s original group.

  The lone beast never fully accounted for over the years was the big female named Sheba, but she hadn’t entirely dropped from sight. For three decades, travelers through the Southwest reported her, a shaggy apparition of uncertain temper and bellicose disposition, capable of sudden violence. It was said that she would attack any man carrying a bullwhip and she was believed to harbor a particul
ar animus for any man unfortunate enough to be wearing a sergeant’s stripes.

  Lewis Tully leaned against the corral, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and gazed at his camel. Boots scuffed against the earth behind him and he felt the newcomer lean against the fence beside him.

  “Grown partial to your camel, Lewis?” Sam Jeanette asked.

  “Not exactly. Know what we’ve got here?”

  “One ugly camel with a temperament to match.”

  “Ugly camel…with a U.S. Army brand.”

  Lewis turned to watch the old cavalryman’s reaction. Samuel Jeanette’s mouth made a little “o” and his gaze went from the camel to Lewis.

  “But that was almost forty years ago—make sense here, Lewis.”

  “They live forever and they never forget anything, and there ain’t but one left unaccounted for and that’s…”

  “Sheba,” Sam Jeanette finished, and Lewis heard the note of wonder in his voice.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m looking at a legend of the West.”

  “You’re looking at trouble with humps. And she found her way to my show.”

  “Well, Mr. Lewis Tully, wouldn’t that figure?”

  Lewis began to nod, and Sam Jeanette started to chuckle, and in no time Lewis Tully was laughing as hard as he’d laughed in a long time.

  EIGHTEEN

  Rasslers

  As the boy crouched over an ant colony, he became aware of the sounds. He knew these sounds, he’d heard them before, he’d heard them in his own house long ago. But it took several seconds to process them. When he did, he stood up and realized he was afraid. It was a fight, men were fighting.

  He began to move fearfully toward the line of wagons, as adults passed him on the run. Men appeared from all the work crews, panting, wide-eyed, losing their hats as they ran to see the fight. Beyond the wagons he could hear the nervous horses reacting to the sounds of violence.

  The boy burrowed through a wall of adults and broke into the open, and for a moment he couldn’t quite tell what he was seeing. In the center of the circle of people, two men sent up a cloud of yellow dust as they tumbled and fell to the ground, rose up and threw one another down with growls and grunts of pain. When he finally got a glimpse of their sweaty faces, he gasped. The combatants were Joseph Coates and the Russian—the kindly Joseph Coates and the smiling Alexei Dostoevski, and just now they appeared neither smiling nor kindly. Both men were drenched with sweat, and the dirt on their faces had become mud. Their shirts were nearly ripped off, and they panted as though exhausted.

  Charlie was horrified. Each of these men had shown numerous kindnesses to him, and now he found them intent on doing one another mayhem. It occurred to him that one of them might be hurt badly, perhaps even killed. He scanned the faces of the spectators and saw that they were shocked, some of them recoiling from the scene but a few clearly enjoying it. He searched in vain for Lewis’s face, wished Shelby were still in camp, and then he saw Irina.

  The Russian woman stood off to one side, and her eyes never left the fighting men. She watched from a half-crouch, as though tensed to go to her husband’s aid, and she was smiling.

  Lewis and Sam Jeanette ran up from the corral, and Lewis pushed and pulled at the massed bodies until he reached the roiling, clawing pair in the center.

  “What in the hell is this?” He looked around and the few onlookers who met his gaze seemed as confused as he was.

  “What’s this about, what…” Then he saw the woman. He opened his mouth to shout to her, and her face stopped him.

  For one thing, her cheeks were flushed and her forehead was shiny with sweat, and a single strand of black hair had come loose from her tight hairdo, and she looked utterly beautiful. What caught Lewis Tully in mid-syllable, however, was her obvious joy at what she was seeing. She trembled in her excitement, and now a grin spread across her face.

  In the dust a few feet from her, her husband was struggling to crawl atop Joseph Coates’s back. She watched tensely, and when he was on Coates’s shoulders, she clapped and yelled, “Good, Alex, good, good, good.” A moment later, her husband’s enormous form flew into the air as Mr. Coates shook him off like a pup shaking off water. Dostoevski landed on his back with a heavy thud, and his wife burst into a high-pitched laugh.

  “Oh, Mr. Coates, very nice, very nice.”

  Surprised, Coates turned and made an exhausted salute just as the woman’s husband left his feet in a flying tackle. His force and the weight of both men sent them into the crowd, and they took a ten-foot section out of the front line of spectators. They got to their feet and grabbed one another’s shoulders and flung themselves onto the ground with a crash like trees falling. The Russian was quicker and got onto Coates again, gasping—Lewis could see the man’s tongue and suddenly had a bloody vision of one of his performers biting off his tongue in a fight. Alexei clasped Joseph Coates in a headlock and pulled him slowly, inexorably over onto his back, then leapt onto his chest to pin him.

  At the last second, Coates rolled, and the Russian landed on the ground face first. Joseph Coates pulled himself up onto his haunches and panted, waiting for his adversary to get up. A gash had opened over the Russian’s left eye. He wiped it, looked at the blood, and bowed to Coates.

  “Most excellent.”

  Lewis saw a chance to get between the two men and then had to jump back when the Russian flew at Coates. As they rolled on the ground, he approached the woman.

  “Dammit, you like to see men fight?”

  She blinked, looked at him in blue-eyed wonder and then frowned. “Of course I do not. Americans like to see fights. Fights over nothing. This is not fight, they are playing.” She made a tight little shake of her perfect head, and he saw that she was disappointed in him.

  “They’re playing?” Lewis looked around for support and found Sam. “Mr. Jeanette, seems this is no fight.”

  “Looks like Bloody Shiloh to me.”

  “A little sport, is all,” Lewis said.

  “Hmmph. Guess this is the first time either of ’em run into a playmate his own size.”

  The woman turned on Mr. Jeanette with a grin. “This is exactly correct, Mr. Jeanette. Exactly correct.”

  In the center of the ring the participants were fading. Now they fought on their knees and grappled and threw themselves onto the dirt, and the Russian was making groaning noises. A growling sound came from Joseph Coates, a low wolfen sound, and then both men burst out laughing. They sank onto the ground holding onto one another, giggling and patting one another on the back.

  Lewis Tully sighed. “Let’s help these rasslers on their feet, folks.”

  When the men were standing again, listing to one side but standing, Lewis said, “You fellows all right?”

  Joseph Coates was gasping and bent over, holding onto his knees. He nodded, and his voice came in a parched rasp. “Fine. Just…I’m fine.”

  “I also am fine,” the bloody Russian said. “And I am very tired.”

  “You two get the notion to do this again, maybe try it on grass.”

  Alexei put his dirty fingers to the gash over his eye. “Grass, yes, this is a good idea for wrestle with Mr. Coates, my good friend Coates,” and he patted the giant on his back. Coates put his long arm across the Russian’s shoulders and they staggered away.

  The woman watched Lewis for a reaction. She cocked an eyebrow, as though challenging him to comment.

  Looking after the two brawlers, he shook his head. “Looked real enough to me.”

  “Of course. It is how they play. They try hard to win.”

  “It’s just dangerous, is the thing.”

  “Only a little. And it is necessary. My husband, for him this is very good, a little play. He smiles always, he smiles at everyone, at you, at circus people, at workers. It is hard work for him, this smiling because inside he does no
t smile much. All his family is dead, all of them except Father.”

  “From the Bolsheviks?”

  “Ah, Bolsheviks, starvation, even White Army. One brother, very young, fought for Bolsheviks and he is dead now, too. So for my husband, this is very nice. Very necessary. And for your wonderful Mr. Coates, this is very important.”

  “Yeah, getting himself near killed.”

  She shook her head. “No. It is important someone touches him. Who touches this one in his life? You? Do you put your hands on this man, Mr. Tully? All people need be touched, someone put hands on them. Do you put arm around Mr. Coates, put hand on his back?” She smiled brightly. “I think you do not. Americans do not touch each other so much. Russians like to touch.” A playful gleam came into her eyes and he looked away and swallowed. “Like to hug. For Mr. Coates, this is like hug.”

  She made a little nod, as though bowing, and walked in the direction of the two tired warriors.

  He stared after her, thinking that in at least one area of his life the Russian’s luck was running, and then became aware that he was staring. He looked up at the sky for a moment as though deep in thought, and when he thought it was safe to meet people’s eyes, he found Helen Larsen gazing at him. By now he could read all her looks, and this one said she was worried.

  “They had me worried for a second, but they were just playing.”

  She was shaking her head before he’d gotten to the middle of his thought. “No, it’s not them. I need to talk to you.”

  “You having some trouble?”

  She held up a little carpetbag. “No, you have some trouble.”