The old elephant gave Lewis a look of plain disgust and refused to move. People gathered and offered suggestions. Tony Aiello and Zheng each attempted to goad her into movement. Aiello prodded her with the bull-hook and muttered Italian profanities. Jupiter appeared unmoved. She shook her heavy head, stiffened her tree-like legs, and looked off into the distance as though seeking the Serengeti.
“I will try,” Zheng said. He put his hands on his hips, studied the immovable pachyderm, and proceeded to prod her leg muscles with brisk movements that put Lewis in mind of a Swedish masseuse in St. Paul he’d once taken a fancy to.
Jupiter gave Zheng a baleful look and sat with a cloud of red dust.
“Well, that was real effective, fellas.” Lewis looked up at the high Colorado sun and cursed under his breath. He looked at Harley Fitzroy and shrugged.
“Fine morning we’re having. First we lose an axle, now a truck that’s gone stuck and an elephant thinks she’s the Queen of Egypt.” He moved directly into Jupiter’s line of vision.
“If I had a gun, I’d shoot you,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Now, she knows you don’t mean that,” Harley Fitzroy said.
“She knows you have a gun, Lewis,” Sam Jeanette pointed out.
Lewis glared at them. “Weren’t there three of you? Always thought there was three wise men. So, you great thinkers have any ideas?”
“Reason with her,” Harley suggested.
“Appeal to her vanity,” Sam offered. “Tell her how she’s important to the show, people won’t come to see a show without elephants.”
Lewis gave Sam Jeanette a long slow look to see if he were being ridiculed. Harley Fitzroy was making no effort to hide his amusement.
“They’re intelligent beasts,” Harley said. “Hell, Lewis, you know Jupiter’s smart. She’s gotten by all these years being the laziest, most untalented elephant in the history of circuses.”
The old man became conscious of a huge brown eye fixing itself on him. “Meaning no disrespect, ma’am, but you don’t exactly pull your weight.” He backed away a few feet.
Lewis sighed. “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said quietly. He looked down at his feet for a moment and then strode slowly over to the elephant, aware that a crowd had now formed. The kids were all straight ahead of him on Jupiter’s far side, and from the corner of his eye he could see several of the women. Exactly who he didn’t want here.
Lewis put one foot on a rock and leaned with an elbow on his knee, less than a foot from the beast’s ear. He cleared his throat, bent his head, and spoke in a voice that he hoped would be audible only to the elephant.
“Look here, madam, you’ve got us over a barrel. We need this truck out of the ditch, and you’re the only one can do that. I need your help.” A big wrinkled eyelid shut and opened again, clearly unimpressed.
“Another thing you might wanta consider there, your Majesty, is what will happen if you don’t help us with this truck. Now I appreciate that your, uh, dignity is offended, being tied up to this smelly truck, and spoken to in harsh language, especially in Italian, and prodded and poked all manner of ways, but if you don’t help me get this damn truck out of the ditch, I’m not gonna unhitch you, not ever. We’ll have what we used to call a ‘Mexican standoff’—though what standoffs have to do with Mexico I’ve never figured out—but that’s what we’ll have: a Mexican standoff, with this truck stuck here in the muck till the end of time, and a lone elephant, setting here on her rump getting old and wrinkled in the Colorado sun. Lonely, unappreciated, hungry,” he said.
“And you got to remember what folk are like here. This is not Kansas, no ma’am, not by a long shot. These are wild folk, your Coloradans, and quite frankly they’re poor, not enough food in the best of harvests and I hear they had a bad one this last time. It’s common knowledge that one good-sized elephant could feed an entire county. Now, you set here long enough, you’re gonna start looking mighty good to some of these hungry people, and that’s a fact. Folks are gonna start picturing you with an apple in your mouth.
“Well, I’ve said what I came to say. You think about what’s to your advantage. Ask yourself, what would be best for an elephant in this particular situation? What are my best interests here? That’s what I’d do.”
Lewis leaned over and gave her a friendly pat, then walked away. Behind him, he heard a low rumbling grunt, the scrape of thick, ancient knees on dry earth, and she was up. She made a little trumpeting noise, and then he heard the truck begin to move. She had the vehicle out of the ditch in six seconds. He shot her a quick look over his shoulder and nodded. The circle of people around him burst into applause, and Lewis Tully kept on walking, as though he didn’t notice. As he climbed into his truck, he thought about these two sudden problems they’d had as soon as they crossed into Colorado, and wondered whether they were omens.
An hour later and, by Lewis’s reckoning, five miles short of their first stand in Colorado, they met Shelby. He was waiting with his crew at a small crossroads, leaning against the hood of his automobile and squinting in the sun.
Lewis stopped the truck and jumped out. Charlie watched the men walk toward one another. They said nothing in greeting, but Lewis clapped Shelby once on the shoulder and Shelby made his little nod, and he heard Shelby say, “Thought you decided to skip Colorado.”
“We’re right on schedule. If you’d come in to help with the tear-down you wouldn’t be sitting out here being bored.” Lewis waved to the other men. “Glad you’re back, boys.” To Shelby, he said, “How does it look?”
Shelby squinted at him in the glare of a rising sun. “Now it’s gonna get exciting.”
“Cowboys and miners and what else?”
“Bad roads, two missing bridges, couple towns look like they up and died since last time we come through here. And a pair of circuses.” Shelby watched Lewis for his reaction.
Lewis looked off into Colorado as though seeking a simple solution. “Hector Blaney and Preston Crowe, both?”
“Yes. Had another unfortunate ‘discussion’ with Mr. Blaney’s people, I expect a couple of ’em are gonna have to learn to do things left-handed. Saw Preston’s people, too, but we didn’t have trouble with them.”
“You wouldn’t. Preston wouldn’t put his bills over ours, he’d think it was dishonorable. So we’re gonna run into both of ’em.”
“Yeah, but they can’t play every town, and I made a couple detours that ought to keep us out of each other’s hair.” Shelby grinned. “Some of the time we’re gonna be on parallel courses. And there’s a couple towns we should just plain skip.”
“We’ll leapfrog over ’em.”
“I miss anything interesting?” Shelby asked as they walked toward Lewis’s truck.
“Nope,” Lewis said.
Harley Fitzroy appeared from the far side of the truck.
“Lewis is being modest. In your absence, he has begun to talk to elephants.”
Shelby laughed, and Lewis Tully looked off over his shoulder to the west, where the ground would gradually begin to rise until it ended in mountains, and where the terrain and the weather and two other circuses now promised to complicate his life.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Adventures in Colorado
The Perez Brothers were five minutes into their act when the heckler began loudly wondering whether there were any real Americans in this show. He was at the very end of the top row, a beefy redhead with a certain look that Lewis knew well. The red-haired man’s tongue got a little more aggressive with each act, his voice grew louder, carrying easily over the crowd noises and the accompaniment from the band. The men on either side of him seemed to be ignoring him or feigning deafness. He repeated his remark about Americans and Juvenal, the older of the Perez brothers, turned to look at him. The redhead grinned, elbowed his two companions, and stood up so that he could be seen.
�
��I wanna see some Americans right now!” the man bellowed and put his hands on his hips.
An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd, part apprehension, part excitement at the prospect of violence, and the big man had the attention of the entire tent, just as he’d wanted. Lewis looked back behind the curtain and saw that Captain Walling’s men were ready to go on. He motioned to Walling, and the Captain led his mount over.
“What we got here, Lewis? Towners looking for a little trouble?”
“No, nobody in the stands seems to know ’em. I’ve gotten suspicious in my old age: I think we’ve got a war-party from Hector Blaney.”
The big man repeated his challenge to show him some Americans, and Lewis looked at Captain Walling. The Captain gave him a sly smile and motioned to his riders. He mounted, touched the brim of his old army hat, and rode out into the tent, followed by his men. In the center of the ring, Lewis saw Juvenal Perez shoot a quick glance at the heckler and go on with his routine.
Over on the high benches, the big man stopped in mid-sentence as the four riders rode around the ring, stopping when they were just below him.
Captain Walling leaned on the pommel of his saddle and squinted up at the big man for a moment. One of the man’s associates moved down a couple of benches and squeezed between a woman and her daughter, a decision which earned him shocked stares. The Captain pointed to the man and said, “Butch, that fella appears to be bothering the ladies. Remove him, if you please.”
“Yes, Captain.” Butch dismounted, clambered up the benches, and pulled the cowering man out by his collar. Captain Walling watched with a look of mild interest and then turned his attention back to the big heckler.
“I believe you said you wanted to see Americans.”
The man wet his lips. “I got no quarrel with you, it’s just that I see all these foreigners…”
“You mean my friends here?” The Captain looked incredulous.
“Well, maybe not these particular boys, but there’s foreigners making a Yankee dollar all over the country while good men…”
“They’re not good men?” The Captain pointed with his little leather quirt toward the Perez brothers and seemed puzzled.
“Oh, now I ain’t saying these fellas ain’t good men or anything.”
“Just what point were you trying to make?”
The man’s shoulders now had a slight slump to them and he was wetting his lips again. “I just don’t like all these foreigners coming around here…”
“I believe you’re with Mr. Hector Blaney. Am I right?”
“I do a little work for Hector now and then, sure.”
“For the Blaney Circus. You came here to cause trouble with our show and bother all these people.”
The big man looked into the Captain’s unblinking blue eyes and shook his head. “No, sir, you got me wrong.”
“You were looking for Americans.” The Captain tapped himself with the quirt. “Here’s one. Now get out or we’ll have to drag you out in front of all these fine people.”
The heckler saw that all eyes were on him, that anyone could see he had many pounds and a few inches on the uniformed man. He stiffened and balled his fists. “If you give me a chance at a fair fight, I’ll…”
Captain Walling leaned forward until he was almost within quirt’s reach of the man.
“No one’s speaking of a fistfight, Mister. You came in here for trouble, not the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Trouble’s what you wanted, and now you’ve got it.” He dropped his voice and put a false note of friendliness to it. “Now, you slink on out of here before you meet with a bad end.”
The Captain gave him a cold smile, and after a moment the other man began climbing down the stands. Captain Walling watched until he left the tent, then doffed his hat to the ladies in the audience and rode on back to await his spot in the evening’s performance.
That night the boy couldn’t sleep. He watched Lewis and Shelby and Harley playing cards and listened to their talk, and when he heard Hector Blaney’s name mentioned, he sat up on one elbow.
“Is he gonna send more men to bother us?”
Three heads turned his way. Lewis stared at him for a moment and then said, “You heard us talking about that fella tonight, I guess.”
“Hector Blaney sent him, you said. To cause us trouble.”
“That’s about the size of it. And he’ll try again. Those other times when we were getting our show together, he was just trying to discourage us. Now he knows we’ve got a show and what kind of show it is. From here on in, he’ll be trying to slow us down, cause us problems in some of these towns.”
Charlie said nothing for a moment, and Lewis saw that he was worried.
Lewis smiled. “Don’t you be worried about Hector Blaney. We can take care of him. Now, bad weather, that’s another matter, and if you could use your influence with the Almighty, we’d appreciate it.”
Lewis noticed the paint on the child’s wrist and changed the subject.
“How’s your masterpiece coming along?”
“I just got the outline done.”
“I saw it,” Shelby said. “It’s already better than that old picture of Rex we had. The boy’s a regular Michelangelo.”
“Who’s he?”
“Italian fellow,” Lewis said. “Painted church ceilings and whatnot. He’s dead, though, so you’ve got no competition.”
“I don’t think I could paint church ceilings,” the boy said.
“No call for it now,” Harley Fitzroy said. “More money in circuses. Right, Lewis?”
“Sure, just look at us, Charlie,” Lewis said, and smiled at the boy. “What would you call all this, Harley?”
“Opulence,” the old man said without looking up from his cards.
***
In half a dozen places the Canty Road crossed bigger roadways carving up Colorado, and Lewis planned to follow Shelby’s paper away from the towns that sprouted up at these junctions. In his tent, he drew out their serpentine course on his map, then lay the map on the table where Shelby, Harley, Sam Jeanette, Helen, and Lucy were playing poker. Across the room, Charlie sat on the edge of his cot and sipped a root beer.
“This is what we have to do. Straight line takes us right into Preston Crowe’s path, or Hector Blaney’s. They’re following the bigger roads to the north and south of us, they’ll be hitting the larger towns, and I have no doubt that Preston at least can move faster than we can, with all those brand-new Macks of his.”
“Always did go top of the line, did Preston,” Shelby said.
“So these are the towns we’ll be playing: Capville, Harvey’s Corners, Ft. Fess, Brierly, Ida, Little Egypt, Hoyt’s Mill, Bad News, Ophelia, a few more along those lines.”
“They’re not the biggest towns in the country, but even so, we’ve got plenty of competition for them. Trouble is, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew where these other two outfits were gonna be. And sooner or later Hector will feel the squeeze from Preston and he’ll be horning in on us.”
“Damn poor planning, if you ask me, three circuses in one state,” Harley said.
“It’s not the first time it’s happened. If we were playing the east, might be four or five shows competing for the same towns.”
Sam Jeanette was shaking his head. “You’re not thinking like an old cavalry man, Lewis.”
“How’s that, Sam?”
“Send out scouts, put pickets up ahead. Use cars for the road and mounted men to go off it. Find out where they at and be someplace else.”
Lewis met his gaze and began to smile. “Scouts and pickets. I feel like J.E.B Stuart. Next thing you’re gonna have us making a cavalry charge.”
“We could charge Hector,” Sam Jeanette said in a musing tone.
So it was that between shows Lewis sent an automobile on ahead while two of Captain Walli
ng’s men went on horseback to search out the rival shows and fill up on the local gossip.
The very first day, Lewis’s scouts brought the best of news: both of their competitors were stalled. One of Preston’s big Mack Bulldogs had blown its engine and it would take more than a day to fix. Five miles to the south of the Canty Road, the news was even better: Hector Blaney, almost as widely known in the circus world for his miserly habits as he was for his larcenous heart, had resorted to his cost-saving custom of feeding his troupers old meat. Captain Walling’s man Butch brought in word that more than half Hector’s people were reported ill. This alone wouldn’t have stopped Hector from pushing his show on in the endless and insatiable quest to squeeze another nickel from the dry earth, but Hector himself had fallen victim to his own green beefsteak. The entire Blaney circus was down with the quickstep.
“I heard Hector himself is dying, Lewis,” Butch said.
Lewis shook his head slowly. “He’d never die this early in the season.”
“I heard it from one of his men, who heard it from Hector Blaney’s own lips.”
“Just being dramatic. You gotta understand Hector. He needs attention like flowers need the sun.”
“He’s pretty sick, Lewis. I think he’s finished.”
“We couldn’t get that lucky.”
Thus freed from worries about rival shows, the Tully Circus sailed into the vacuum in eastern Colorado and gave the simple folk a circus. In return, the simple folk gave them adventures, complications, challenges and the odd threat of murder.
***
In Harvey’s Corners, the high point of the show was neither Captain Walling’s marvelous equine choreography nor Lucy Brown’s dazzling mounted acrobatics, but Mr. Patel’s unhappy struggle with his cobra. As Lewis had long suspected, there was more of the showman in Mr. Patel than anyone knew, and his performances grew more dramatic, more intense. He milked his heart-pounding vignette of its last morsel of terror until screams of fright could be heard from the stands. He developed the skill of holding his large eyes unnaturally wide so that his face was a mask of dread, even to the spectators in the Ultima Thule of the back row. He learned to jerk his skinny body back each time the viper lunged, and developed his off-key style of flute-playing so that his songs were haunting despite their discordance. He played like a lost boy whistling in the darkness.
The Blue Moon Circus Page 24