The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  Jasper, Oklahoma, had not seen a circus since a horse-drawn show had come through ten years ago, and Lewis Tully knew it. He drew his column up half a mile outside the town and waited as the wagons were taken off the trucks and hitched to snorting teams of horses and mules. When all was ready, Lewis walked up and down the length of the line, nodding curtly at the brilliance of the red, orange, and yellow wagons in the bright Oklahoma sun. He paused at the lime-green pickup truck carrying the children of the Tully Circus.

  “Everybody ready to be a circus parade?”

  The children giggled and nodded. In the back of the truckbed, Charlie made a little nod and wet his lips, avoiding eye contact. Lewis studied him for a second: seated just a few inches from the other children, the boy somehow managed to show that he wasn’t part of them. Charlie fidgeted under Lewis’s gaze, and Lewis realized that the boy was atremble with excitement.

  Tied up in knots and nobody to share it with.

  “Charlie, you’re in charge of this truck full of short people.” The younger ones giggled and a faint smile broke on the boy’s face. “Your task, Mr. Barth, is to see that no one falls out of the truck. I expect a complete headcount later.”

  The boy dared a look and Lewis winked at him, then turned away.

  At the head of the column, Mr. Zheng sat atop the carillon, poised to operate his bells. A team of Lewis’s big Belgians pawed at the ground, ready to pull it. Zheng stared wide-eyed off into space. When he noticed Lewis, he beamed.

  “You’re the center pole in this tent, Mr. Zheng. Are you ready?”

  “Oh, yes, Lewis. I am ready to play the bells.”

  “Fine.” He nodded to Zheng’s young driver, who took hold of the reins. “Give ’em some noise, Mr. Zheng, and remember it’s a circus, not a funeral.”

  “It is my plan to…” Zheng ransacked his English for the right word. “To startle them,” Zheng said, and began ringing his bells, first in a raucous clatter that promised “to startle” the entire state, then sliding into a joyous metallic version of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The carillon moved off with Zheng cackling madly over his bells.

  Lewis laughed and waved the rest of the column on. Behind the carillon came the rejuvenated circus wagons, each filled with animals, and after this vanguard, Lewis gave the townspeople horses, row upon row of horses, led by Lucy Brown on her tall gray mare. Captain Walling’s men in their blue-and-khaki Rough Rider uniforms led the rest of Lewis’s herd, and then Jupiter pounded into view, transformed under a gold-and-red howdah and half a mile of colored belts and ribbons. The brilliant yellow truck full of Russians came next and then the children’s truck. Lewis caught sight of his makeshift bandwagon, another of Shelby’s conversions, adorned with the enormous plywood silhouettes of a dragon and pulled by quarterhorses. In the little top compartment, Mr. Hettman and his three mates made little practice puffs into the mouthpieces of their instruments.

  Lewis himself fell into line now, and behind him the remaining supply and equipment vehicles and the cars, all newly washed and papered with red, white and blue cockades. Spread out and proceeding at the proper speed, Lewis knew he could make his circus seem three blocks long.

  Beside him, Shelby drummed his fingers on the dashboard and smiled. “Well? We gonna join the fun or not?”

  “We are,” Lewis said, hitting his horn and holding it, then he followed his gaudy wagon train into the town.

  If Jasper had not seen a circus since 1916, it appeared that the town hadn’t seen much of anything else, either. This much could be gauged from the near-hysterical response of the “towners,” who came spilling out of every building.

  Somewhere in the distance, almost smothered by Mr. Zheng’s passionate rendering of “The Old Rugged Cross,” an alarm of some sort sounded. A moment later it was clear that this was a fire alarm. The Jasper Volunteer Fire Department appeared in the street at the far end of town, a dozen well-meaning plainsmen struggling to get into firefighting gear and mount their equipment before it sped off without them. In spite of their game efforts, several of the volunteers could be seen running behind the engines as the twin green trucks of the Jasper fire department bore down on the Lewis Tully Circus Parade.

  Closer to hand, Lewis spotted the sheriff who had arrested him that night in the blind pig, backed by two deputies, all three carrying rifles and wearing an expression that suggested a renewal of old troubles with the Pawnee.

  Lewis pulled out of line and drove up to the peace officers just as the fire trucks came bumper to bumper with Mr. Zheng, who clearly saw no reason to stop playing. With a wry look at Shelby, Lewis climbed out of the truck and nodded to the officers.

  “What in the hell is this?” the sheriff asked. He squinted up and down the street, now filled with objects and creatures so alien to Jasper, Oklahoma, that they might have been visitors from the moon.

  “It’s a circus parade, sheriff. It’s my circus parade, and for this one day, it’s yours.”

  The sheriff winced and cupped a hand to his ear. He shot an irritated look up the street where Zheng was filling the air with bells.

  “Can you make that fellow stop?”

  Lewis shook his head. “He’s Chinese. They’re a very musical people.”

  The sheriff gave Lewis a long look, trying to place him.

  “Hasn’t been a circus through here in years.”

  “There’s one here now, sir. Unless there’s some objection. I had my men put up some of our bills and posters…”

  “No, there’s no objection. Mayor’s fond of animals anyway. Just…” The sheriff searched for some appropriate admonition. “Just don’t cause any trouble in my town.”

  “No, sir,” Lewis said.

  “All right, Circus Man,” he said, and stepped aside.

  A crowd had now gathered along both sides of the street, shops had emptied, windows were thrown open. Up the street, the handsome green fire trucks had sorted themselves out from the circus wagons and backed up. They rang their bells like poor cousins to Lewis’s fine carillon and retreated to the firehouse, and the parade began moving to the cheers and gay waves of the populace.

  Back inside his truck, Lewis drove one-handed and waved out the window and sighed. He scanned the faces, some of them wild-eyed with the strangeness of the moment, some exhilarated, some laughing, and knew that they would recollect this Wednesday afternoon for years to come. At last Lewis motored past the tiny courthouse, where the Honorable George Lester stood, dignified and berobed in the doorway. The judge laughed and waved, and Lewis tipped his hat.

  They set up camp on a wide expanse of empty lot just west of the town, where a small stream came down from the hills. In half an hour, using every able-bodied man or woman, they had the tent rolled out, the stake line laid along the edges, center pole and the smaller poles laid on the ground inside. The hammer gang went to work and an hour later, hoisted on ropes and supported by the poles, the tent came to life on the grassy Oklahoma plain and drew admiring murmurs from the bystanders. At seventy-three feet high, it was the tallest thing within three miles of Jasper, overshadowed only by a distant lump of dirt and prairie grass known locally as Mount Jasper. By one in the afternoon, a small harlequin village had come to life, a nomadic place of trucks and trailers and colored tents.

  For the rest of the afternoon, the performers readied themselves and their equipment while the townspeople milled through the Lewis Tully Menagerie on the front lot. Jupiter drew the expected crowd, and Tony Aiello had her doing a little dance and his favorite trick, in which she reared back, trumpeted, and stomped with her front paws in a studied show of anger.

  As the people jumped back and cowered, Aiello chewed at a cigar and lied about Jupiter’s weight—he gave it at forty tons—her disposition—he called her “a Nubian nightmare of ferocity”—and even her gender, explaining that she was a male and thus subject to periodic attacks of the dre
ad elephant madness known as “musth” during which she became homicidal. He compared her to the near-legendary “Romeo” of the old Mabie Brothers Circus, who had reportedly killed five men and two dozen horses. By the time he finished, the crowd’s mood had gone from respect and excitement to abject worship of this most deadly of creatures. There was a killer in town, and the public loved it.

  The lion drew the second-largest crowd despite the fact that he slept through the afternoon, waking only to be fed. Children and adults gathered round the llamas, the antelopes, the zebras, the bears, which put their snouts between the bars of their cages and begged shamelessly for food, and Lewis’s little shaggy herd of bison—billed as “the last American Buffalo Herd.”

  “The Red Wagon is set up, Lewis.” He hadn’t heard Helen come up and wondered how long she’d been standing behind him. Lewis’s “Red Wagon” wasn’t even a wagon but a converted truck with a side panel that went up to create a ticket window.

  “Lucy taking the tickets?”

  She gave him a shrewd look. “Of course. You want to give the gentlemen of Jasper something to look at when they’re deciding whether to spend their nickel.” She followed his gaze out to Roy and Shirley.

  “What’s next for these good people, Lewis?”

  Now he felt he could meet her eye. “Oh, I’ve got a couple more things to help out the undecided. Thought I’d turn the old man loose on them, see if he can make a couple of them disappear.”

  She laughed and he felt compelled to talk. “Just wait till they see my show.” He chanced a look at her. She gave him an appraising gaze and then started a certain long, slow smile that he hadn’t seen in many years, and he found himself laughing.

  “Nobody will ever bring them a better one, Mr. Tully,” she said, and patted him lightly on his shoulder. He felt the pressure of her fingers linger for a second, and at that moment he would not have trusted himself to speak. As she walked away, he forced himself to concentrate on matters at hand.

  Across the lot he spied Charlie. The boy walked alone through the menagerie, looking not at the animals but at the people. For a moment, Lewis saw him as a stranger might, a boy wandering unnoticed in the crowd. An afterthought. Lewis saw him watching a family as they pointed out animals to one another.

  Two small ragged boys stood with arms around one another in front of his zebras. Their clothes told him as much as he needed to know about their life.

  Got one just like you in our circus, he thought. World’s full of you.

  “You like our zebras?”

  They turned in unison and he saw that they were brothers, one slightly taller than the other. They looked at him and he nodded toward the animals. “I say, do you like ’em?”

  They nodded, again in unison, and he bent down to look at them from their own level. “Make sure you see the elephant, it’s the biggest one in this entire part of the world. You’ll never see a bigger one.” They nodded and he thought of Rex. “In my show, we’ve got…Are you coming to the show?”

  Without hesitation they shook their heads. There was no doubt in their minds that the show was something beyond possibility. They had nothing.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He saw Charlie look away at his approach and pretended not to notice.

  “Well, there you are. What do you think?”

  “It’s fine,” the boy said, not looking directly at him.

  “Hate to put you to work on such a fine afternoon but I need your assistance.” Lewis reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a sheaf of prepunched blue tickets.

  “We call these ‘Annie Oakleys’ because of the holes in ’em. They’re to pass out to folks in the crowd that look like they might not have the money to see the show. Take those two small boys over there, for instance. I don’t guess they’d be going to the show. What do you think?”

  Charlie frowned in the direction of the two boys and shook his head. “I don’t think so. They look kinda poor.”

  “My thought exactly. Why don’t you go on over there and see if they’d be interested in a couple of these? Maybe three, if they’ve got, you know, a ma or pa that would be inclined to see a genuine circus. And then maybe you could go around the lot and see if there’s any other likely recipients.”

  The boy nodded eagerly. “Okay.”

  “I can trust you to do that? It’s kind of important for the show to be on good terms with folks.”

  “I can do it.”

  “All right, then.” He rested one hand briefly on the boy’s back, and Charlie flinched at the unfamiliar gesture. Lewis could feel the bony points of the boy’s shoulderblades.

  Do we make sure this kid eats?

  He gave the boy a stiff pat and then went on, careful to watch the excited reaction of the two ragged boys when Charlie handed them three tickets.

  A tight knot of people showed him that Harley Fitzroy had made his appearance, and Lewis hurried over to see which of his many personas the old man had settled on. The first time Lewis had ever seen Harley Fitzroy more than thirty years before, the old man had come out and scared bloody hell out of an audience, dressed in black and staring into each face with the eyes of a madman. Since then, Lewis had seen Harley come out and perform his act as a prissy schoolmaster, a doddering old man, a drunk, a pedantic German professor, and a clown.

  Now, Lewis peered over the outer ring of heads and saw that Harley had settled on portraying himself. He had come out with the cat under his arm, stroking its head. He wore a brown derby and had brushed his old suit, and he smiled at as many of the faces as he could. He nodded at the children, patted the cat, did something with his hands, said, “Whoops!” and the cat was gone. For a moment, he searched his pockets as the crowd laughed, then spied a man in a ten-gallon hat and strode purposefully toward him. The man gave him a worried look and took a step back, but the old man was on him in seconds, lifting the hat with one hand and feeling around on the top of the man’s head with the other.

  He let out a triumphant “Hah!” and held up the contents of his hand for all to see: not his cat but a finch. Harley screwed up his ancient face at it and frowned as though the man had planned the whole thing. The magician scanned the faces until his gaze came to rest on a small, sad-eyed, poorly dressed girl whose life could be read in her face. Behind her was a skinny man whose slump-shouldered frame suggested his many failures: he rested his hand on this one cherished possession, his great achievement. Harley approached the girl and locked eyes with her. He stared at her and put a careful hand on her shoulder. The father stood back.

  “Good morning, young lady. It’s a fine day for a circus.”

  He kept his hand on her until he could feel her growing warmer, until she blinked and something like youth came back into her pale skin. Then he reached behind her neck.

  “Ye Gods, what is this?”

  He came up with a canary, and held it accusingly before her.

  The girl gasped and then burst out laughing. Harley exchanged a quick glance with the father and saw that the girl’s laugh was every bit as surprising to him as the bird.

  “Take her to the show tonight,” Harley said quietly, and the man nodded.

  Take her to the show and let her see that there is life yet in her world, Harley’s gaze said, and then he walked away.

  A child pointed over Harley’s shoulder and the old man turned to see Xenophon tucked in a shallow fold of canvas just above the entrance to the big top.

  “There you are, you scalawag!” he shouted, and the crowd laughed. Under his breath, Harley muttered, “How in the hell did you get up there?” He turned and gave the crowd a little half-smile, tipped his hat, and was gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  First Show

  A hot blue current ran through the cook tent—the boy could feel it and see it in the excited faces of the performers and crew—and it had him as well, hav
ing taken up residence deep in his stomach so that he picked at his food. It was hard to sit still, impossible to concentrate. He sat at the very edge of the bench as if ready to make a running start. When they weren’t looking, he scanned their faces and told himself they’d all gone silly, giggling and acting as if they’d been in the sun too long. He poked at his cold food and shifted from one position to another, a jangling knot of nerves, near to combustion. He felt a hand come to rest lightly his shoulder and knew it was Helen.

  “You have to eat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Charlie said.

  “If you don’t eat, all this excitement will make you sick. And sick boys get no sweets. Be a sad thing to be the only boy at a circus that got no candy.”

  He met her eye and saw that she was having fun with him. She had a faint reddish glow, and he realized that the blue flame had touched Helen, too. She patted him once more on the shoulder and moved off.

  When he’d finished his supper, the boy moved off to the edge of the camp and took it all in. Crowd noises and new smells filled the air. Mr. Royce had cleared the cook tent and commenced making popcorn, and somewhere Charlie smelled something as removed from the smells of the Oklahoma plains as the very stars: someone was making cotton candy. Just beyond the camp, enterprising townspeople had set up little food stands, serving up sandwiches, fried chicken, wieners, and even beer—the hand-lettered sign argued that it was “root beer” but no one paid it any heed.

  From inside the top, Charlie could hear the strains of a waltz performed by Mr. Hettman’s tiny band, and from the camp, the quiet but faintly frantic murmur of three dozen people dressing in a hurry. In every tent or hut, a transformation took place: a tired, grimy crew member went in and a butterfly flew out, fresh-shaved men in bright-colored shirts or handsome coats with long tails, women in dazzling dresses or tights covered in sequins. The boy was outside the tent of the Antoninis when they emerged in their bold costumes with the air of royalty. He moved along and gasped aloud when Mr. Zheng appeared in a long gold robe and a red and gold cap. Zheng moved toward him at a stately pace and raised his eyebrows.