The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  The boy listened to Lewis’s footsteps moving off toward Jupiter’s enclosure, pleased with the compliment but still self-conscious. As he worked, he repeated Lewis’s words to himself: “Good job, real good.” He paused, remembering that just the previous day Lewis had come by when he was working and had said nothing. Charlie leaned on the heavy pitchfork and remembered Shelby’s admonition not to take these things personally. At such times he found that he missed Shelby. He knew he wouldn’t have asked Shelby about this private thing, but he could have come at the subject obliquely, he could have learned more about Lewis Tully, for Shelby was always willing to talk about Lewis.

  The show in Goode’s Crossing, performed in the coolness of late afternoon, broke the routine of shows performed without a hitch. They had their first accident when Caesar, the youngest Antonini, fell while riding a unicycle off a low ramp. He landed on one of his brothers, injuring his leg and twisting the thin wheel beyond use. The other Antoninis rushed to rescue their brothers and the cycle—the eldest was plainly more upset at the damage to the equipment—and Lewis’s redoubtable band played “Hail to the Chief,” the time-honored signal to the circus troupers that a problem or accident had occurred.

  In a show like the Ringlings, the tune might bring two dozen clowns, men on stilts, dwarfs shooting one another with seltzer bottles, a multicolored crowd of characters to distract the audience while the circus folk tended to disaster.

  Lewis scanned the concerned faces in the crowd as the young Antonini and his cycle were carted off to safety—young Antonini did his part, playing to the crowd nicely, exaggerating the gravity of his injury and pretending to smile through gritted teeth.

  Over three decades with circuses, Lewis Tully had seen hundreds of such moments, ranging in gravity from a split costume to a fatal accident or a mauling by the big cats, and he’d seen a hundred ways to handle this moment, any of them more spectacular than his own.

  “Go find Roy,” he said to Shelby. A moment later the old clown hobbled in, face pale. Paintless.

  Lewis tried to conceal his surprise, sought a way to cover the mistake, and in the end gave up.

  “Need somebody to fill a hole,” he said.

  The old clown grinned at him. “Without my paint? You want to scare all these white folk to death?”

  He read the clown’s look. “Want to take a whack at ’em, Roy?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe I do.”

  “I can send for Shirley…”

  Roy Green shook his head. “No. I did this before, Lewis, and more than once. It’ll be all right.”

  “Go show ’em something,” Lewis said. To Sam Jeanette he said, “Tell Captain Walling he’s cavalry again. I need him to go on soon as Roy’s through with them.”

  From the curtain opening, Lewis watched the clown make his painful way on shot knees toward the center of the ring. He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it was Shirley.

  “This your idea, Lewis?”

  He faced the concern in her eyes. “His as much as mine. And it’s where I want him. I’ve got the last of the long clowns, and there’s no better place for him.”

  One tentful of people, one clown to hook them and hold them: the way it had been in the old days, before the big shows had gone to spectacle, done away with simple traditions. Lewis folded his arms and watched Roy Green, hoping Shirley couldn’t hear the leaping and jumping in his heart.

  Roy Green gimped and shuffled until he stood in the center of the ring and slowly scanned the crowd. From his vantage point, Lewis could see only the clown’s back, but he knew what this crowd was seeing. A burly-looking black man, hat in hand—even in makeup, he always showed his hair to let them know he was black, to give them a chance to decide whether that made a difference to them—smiling, meeting each person’s gaze with enormous, childlike hazel eyes. Working the crowd into what would have been anathema for any of the other performers, into silence. Breathy, blinking, fidgeting silence.

  Roy Green looked into a wall of white faces, let his gaze rest on as many as possible, let them all feel his smile, his heart, and before he’d done a thing for them, he had half the crowd smiling at him.

  Lewis pictured another circus man coming by at just this moment, hearing the stillness in Lewis Tully’s patchwork tent and concluding he had no competition from the Tully Circus.

  Lewis watched the transfixed faces.

  I could come up there, people, I could take your valuables, lift the watches from your pockets and the rings from your fingers and you wouldn’t figure it all out till later, because Roy Green’s got you, and he’s gonna take you places.

  Roy gave them a pantomime of a man cooking a disastrous supper, spilling and dropping things and causing what seemed to be a conflagration in his invisible kitchen. He was a man pulled by a large dog through a series of adventures and pratfalls, he was riding a bicycle over a bumpy road, a knock-kneed man climbing a mountain with unfortunate results. He seemed tireless, rubber-legged, double-jointed, he seemed twenty-two. He went on for ten minutes and when he was finished, this audience of unschooled white people wanted to take him home.

  Lewis smiled at Shirley. “I always thought a show couldn’t be complete without a long clown, people used to expect it: a clown that could come out by himself and put on his own show, every eye in the tent on him.”

  He shook his head and looked back out where Roy Green had a tentful of people standing and clapping for him. “Too quiet for the big shows. They put an end to all this, the Ringlings and the others did: their loss, not mine.”

  Sam Jeanette appeared at Lewis’s shoulder. He patted Shirley.

  “So that old man’s not finished yet, huh?”

  “Not entirely.”

  Lewis turned to Sam. “How’s young Caesar?”

  “Oh, he’s calling for a priest, he’s asking for paper and pen, he wants his momma. ’Bout what you’d expect from Caesar.”

  “Always liked that boy. Fine sense of drama, just the thing you want in a circus performer. Leg broken?”

  “Sprained knee, Doc says. And maybe a little crack in the rib from landing on his brother.”

  “They’ve worked through that before.”

  In the ring, Roy Green took off his hat and made a deep bow, then hobbled off on swollen joints made worse by what he’d just put them through. The crowd clapped, whistled, and called out long after he had left the ring.

  Lewis strode out to announce Captain Walling and his Rough Riders. He met Roy Green a few feet from the back door. The clown’s eyes were alive with excitement, and he tried to say something to Lewis but gave it up.

  As he passed Roy, Lewis said, “Lost art, being a long clown.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Autobiography of Lewis A. Tully

  Lewis sat up late and paged idly through one of Helen’s newspapers. This one was fairly recent, April 21, 1926, and full of odd news from a world that seemed another planet.

  The legendary Sergeant York, hero of the Great War, was starting a school for impoverished children.

  “Glad you’re staying out of trouble, Alvin,” he muttered.

  Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth had flown a dirigible over the North Pole.

  “Couple fellows with time on their hands.”

  A bumper wheat crop and a fair fruit crop were expected in the Middle West after the wet spring.

  “Glad it brought some good to somebody.”

  The Germans were complaining to all who would listen that their neighbors hadn’t fully disarmed yet from the Great War.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Billy Sunday urged American men, “Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first.”

  Lewis chuckled over that one. There was a picture of Mrs. Coolidge and a group from the White House in a private box at John Ringling’s Circus.

  “So wh
ere was the President? Too high and mighty for the biggest circus in the world?”

  He realized he was talking to himself and missed Shelby. He never minded a little privacy, the rarest luxury for a man on the road with a company of people, but at times like this, when he was too exhilarated to sleep, he was always thankful for the steady chatter and dry sense of humor of his oldest friend. Had Shelby seen old Roy Green perform, he wouldn’t be sleeping either.

  He shook his head and looked back at the old paper. Ten-year-old children had been discovered working twelve-hour days in tobacco barns.

  Children nobody gives a good goddamn about, he told himself, then cast a guilty glance in the direction of the boy’s cot.

  As though summoned from sleep, Charlie moved, his head popped up, hooded under the blanket so that only his eyes showed.

  Large wondering eyes, blinking in the light of Lewis’s lantern.

  “Did I wake you up with my nonsense?”

  “No. I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Well, if you did, I apologize. I kinda talk to myself when I read the paper. Old habit. Something I do when Shelby’s here. He either answers me or tells me to shut up.” Lewis chuckled and felt self-conscious in the face of the boy’s stare.

  “Will he come back soon?”

  “Any day now. You like Shelby, don’t you?”

  Hesitation, then a quick nod.

  “That’s good. He’s a very good man, smart fellow too. I know he’s patient with you, a lot more patient than I am.”

  “He’s your best friend,” the boy said. He slipped the blanket back and smiled shyly, proud of his knowledge but unsure whether he should have it.

  “He is. Known him since we were children.”

  “You were together in that house you told me about, with the bad man. Shelby said you’re like his brother.”

  Lewis blinked for a moment and then nodded uncertainly.

  “That’s…that’s not far off the mark. We’ve been through some hard places together. That old house, for one.”

  “And you got shot together.”

  Lewis laughed aloud, and his own mirth surprised him. “You make it sound like a lark, like we went out and had a high old time finding somebody willing to shoot us. Shelby told you about all this?”

  The boy nodded. “He said you got shot and he got hit with a piece of a rock…”

  “A rock splinter from a Spanish bullet.” He smiled at the boy. “And we both thought we were finished. Us and the poor Spaniard that shot me, the three of us setting there on that hilltop and bleeding and trying real hard not to cry.”

  “’Cause it hurt bad?”

  “No, ’cause we all three of us thought we were gonna die. I thought sure Shelby was finished: his was a scalp wound, they bleed like nothing else in the world, you couldn’t see his face for the blood. And I was trying to hold mine in, and of course, the poor Spaniard, he was praying and shaking his head, and all around us men were charging up the hill and dying—I saw two men, one from my own troop and one of the Rough Riders, both of ’em killed right in front of me by fire from up on the crest.”

  “What happened then?” The boy was completely out of the bedclothes now, his mouth agape and eyes bright.

  “Two things: first, a squad of Spaniards started down our way and their officer spotted us and pointed with his sword and I thought they’d take us prisoner—that is, if we didn’t die first. Then the Spaniards had a change of heart, they saw something to make ’em think twice about coming down on us. I looked up and saw…”

  “More Americans.”

  “Yes, that’s what I saw: Americans. I saw the men of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry. I looked up and saw black faces all around me, colored men, the Tenth was a Negro regiment, and they were there to save our bacon. That afternoon the Ninth and Tenth Negro regiments saved us and a whole lot more besides, including most of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous Rough Riders. You can ask Captain Walling, he was there, too, though we didn’t know him yet. Hard boys those colored soldiers were, too, this was regular cavalry, not volunteers out for an adventure like some of Teddy’s boys—don’t tell Captain Walling I said that, he was a professional soldier himself—but these colored men were veterans of the Indian Wars and a lot more besides. Their sergeant detailed four of his men to take us on down the hill, then he give me a little wink, said, ‘We’ll get you out of this, son, you and your friend. ’Less you had your heart set on dying.’

  “I wanted to say something clever but I was feeling sick just then, so I just nodded. That sergeant just stood there, bullets flying around his head and whacking at the trees behind us, and he never flinched. He watched his men pick us up, had a couple of his boys bring the poor Spaniard down as well, then he rejoined his men and went on up the hill.”

  “Did he get killed? The sergeant?”

  “No, he sure did not. In fact—he’s here.” Lewis smiled at the boy’s surprise. “That sergeant was Sam Jeanette. It was years before I saw him again, but eventually I got a chance to thank him when I sold some horses to Ephraim Williams for his circus—an all-Negro circus that was, Eph Williams ran a dandy show. Sam Jeanette handled all his horses and trained his riders.”

  “Are all the people in your circus your friends?”

  Lewis thought for a moment. “While they’re in my circus, they’re my…my people, my folks. A few of them I don’t even know well, like the Dostoevskis and the Perez boys—I care about all of them, though. But yes, I tend to collect folks around me that I’ve known a long time. It seems to me that the Almighty or fate—I don’t know whether you’re a religious fella or not, Alma never went into that—but something sends people your way, and I just think some of them are supposed to be a part of your life. Some of the people in my life have come back into it long after I stopped expecting ever to see them again. Like Sam Jeanette, and Harley, who I first met when I was helping break horses in the Dan Gustafsen Circus when I was eighteen. And Helen—Mrs. Larsen. I’ve known her longer’n I’ve known any of them, except for Shelby.”

  Lewis stared off in the distance. The boy said nothing for a time, then asked, “Did you ever have a wife?”

  “No, no time for a wife and family. I almost got…I thought I was close to marrying once, but that was, oh, Lord, that was a long time ago, and I think it’s time we both hit the hay. We’ll talk like this again some night,” Lewis said, feeling vaguely foolish.

  “Okay,” the boy said, and Lewis heard the note of excitement in his voice.

  As Lewis pulled off his boots, he admitted to himself that he had enjoyed answering the boy’s questions.

  You just like talking about yourself, Tully. That’s all that is.

  He settled onto his bunk and stared at the ceiling of the tent. As he thought about the things he’d just shared with Charlie, it occurred to Lewis that he knew almost nothing about the child beyond the few things Alma had told him.

  Lewis looked over at the child, now the familiar restless lump under an old blanket, and fished for something to say.

  “Say, Charlie…”

  The boy popped up on the cot again, expectant.

  “I was just thinking—” Lewis began.

  What, Tully? What were you thinking?

  Then a new idea came to him, and he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  “I know you like to draw. I’ve seen some of your, uh, creations.”

  The boy managed to look pleased and embarrassed at the same time.

  “I got something for you to do, next town we play. You’ve seen the ape’s cart—Rex’s cart? Well, I’m not sure Mr. McKeon really captured Rex.”

  “He looks like a bear.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought. Wonder if you could do a better job for old Rex. What do you think?”

  “I never used paints.”

  “Emmett can show you ho
w to use ’em, and you can try your hand on a painting of Rex the Red Ape. And then,” Lewis said, warming to his topic, “a couple of our trucks got a little scratched up back there when we were going through that rough grade. Maybe you could touch ’em up.”

  The boy was nodding before Lewis was finished. “Sure, I could, Lewis.”

  “I thought so,” Lewis said. “Now you go on back to sleep.”

  For a while, the boy was nearly trembling with excitement. He saw himself repainting trucks, wagons, drawing posters for the show, dazzling friend and stranger alike with his talent. And it was with breathless amazement that he told himself, over and over until sleep came, that he was a member of the Blue Moon Circus.

  “I work for old Lewis Tully,” he said quietly to himself.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mexican Standoff

  In the morning Lewis woke the boy gently and sent him off to the cookhouse for breakfast, then threw himself into the tear-down. By 7:30 they were finished and on the road. As Lewis drove, he found himself stealing quick looks at the child.

  When they’d been driving for forty minutes, Lewis nodded toward a small wooden sign that said WELCOME TO COLORADO.

  “State line. Say good-bye to Kansas, Charlie.”

  The boy looked out the window and then back at Lewis, a shy half-smile on his face.

  “But this don’t look any different from Kansas.”

  Lewis smiled and nodded. “It will, soon enough. You’re gonna see the mountains.”

  Eight miles into Colorado, one of the lead trucks broke an axle and it took Emmett McKeon and his men two hours to get it up on makeshift blocks and replace the axle. An hour later, the truck carrying the tent and poles went up to the top of its front wheels into a muddy ditch. The wheel somehow wedged between submerged rocks, and they were unable to tow the truck out. Lewis told them to hitch Jupiter to it.