The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  Food seemed to be everywhere, water plentiful, and there was much to see: rock formations and other animals, and in truth she took a malicious delight in seeing the cattle and sheep turn tail and gallop off at her approach.

  Five hours after her escape, she found herself staring at a small compound of three buildings encircled by a low wall. In the center of this wall, a tall gate beckoned. Just beyond the gate she could see green things growing in a meticulous garden, and after a moment’s consideration, she invited herself in.

  ***

  If he was lucky, Lewis thought, they’d be in the next town before the locals could compare grievances and start to put a dollar amount on each real or imagined injury. A local sheriff now led them all in an odd caravan to the beast’s final refuge on what would come to be known in Tully’s circus as “Jupiter’s Lark,” and in that part of Colorado as “The Elephant’s Romp.”

  Lewis got out of the car and looked at the sign over the tall gate.

  “Greenwood Home for American Veterans,” Shelby said.

  “I can read,” Lewis muttered.

  Inside the compound they found a startling tableaux of battle. Nothing moved. The courtyard held a little knot of old men wielding brooms and rakes and rolling pins and all the other potentially murderous household items. Gray heads filled every window, and two dozen more ancient warriors lined the long narrow porch that wrapped around the building. They were all grinning, sweating, panting, flushed with the thrill of confrontation.

  Twenty feet from the picket line of old soldiers stood Jupiter, managing to look both guilty and foolish. The blue bedsheet had slipped down her head and now covered one eye. She’d apparently played havoc with the Home’s laundry as well, and a towel hung limp from her single tusk. Her front forelegs were splashed with white, as though someone had tried to paint her, and there were dark stains at the tip of her trunk.

  “Goddarn troublesome animal,” Lewis muttered.

  He looked behind him and motioned Zheng and Aiello into the courtyard. Tony carried the bullhook, Zheng the shackles for her legs.

  A small man in a dark suit emerged from the building. From a distance he appeared to be the very type of the officious small-town businessman sure to give a circus owner fits. Up closer he had a ruddy face and a certain cast to the eye that put Lewis in mind of a child looking for something to laugh at. When he was a few feet from Lewis, he broke into a smile. The man opened his mouth to speak and Lewis held up one hand to silence him.

  “Before you even get started, let me tell you how sorry I am about all this.”

  “All what?” the man asked, looking puzzled.

  “Well, any damages she’s done, any trouble she’s caused your, ah, your wards there.”

  The man looked at the old faces around him. “My residents? Trouble? Good God, sir, they’ve had the time of their lives.”

  “Well, I just hope…”

  “She made that trumpeting sound and I thought I might lose a couple of them, but it was a fine moment. And my goodness, you should have been here when she was charging around our yard.”

  “I’m sure I should have. Looks like she’s been in your laundry.”

  “We have five hundred towels like that, sir. One won’t be missed.”

  “And she’s stepped in something, that’s clear.”

  “She found a bucket of whitewash we were using for the back fence. There was a tense moment when she couldn’t get her foot out. I thought they were supposed to be smart,” the man said, dropping his voice.

  “They are. She’s just old. I’m sure you understand.”

  The little man nodded. “She’s having trouble keeping her head up. Think she’s sick?”

  “No, she’s embarrassed. And she’s trying to see under that bedsheet or whatever it is. That brown stuff on her trunk…”

  “Chocolate. She leaned in the back window of the kitchen and helped herself to the cook’s cake batter.”

  “She’s fond of chocolate,” Shelby said.

  “Yes, she seemed to like it.”

  One of the old men stepped forward and leaned on the mop he’d been carrying for the skirmish.

  “You said ‘she.’ This is a female?”

  “Yes,” Lewis said. He saw the disappointment in the old man’s eyes and added, “but it’s the female you got to worry about. They both have tusks, but she’s the fighter, not the male. Mr. Shelby here will tell you how she contrived to lose that tusk.” He winked at Shelby and motioned Aiello and Zheng to help him with the elephant while Shelby spun gold for the old men.

  Up close, Jupiter was all capitulation, plainly mortified. Lewis gave her a gentle slap on her leg.

  “You look ridiculous. If we had other elephants, you’d never live this down.”

  Jupiter snorted and pawed at the dry ground, and refused to meet his eye. She allowed her trainers to shackle her and lead her to the truck. As her gray backside filled the gate, a hoarse cheer went up from the ravaged voices in the compound, and this seemed to lift her spirits.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Women and Other Concerns

  A red sunset, and Lewis stared toward the southwest, where he was certain Preston Crowe would appear to cover the bigger towns with the greatest motorized caravan of them all. Lewis thought about the weather and the roads and supplies and animals dying, and he was shaking his head when he realized he was being watched. He turned and saw Irina studying him with a sad look.

  “Evening, ma’am,” he said, and felt embarrassed. “Just wool-gathering.”

  She frowned at the word. “It means to worry?”

  “No, no, just daydreaming.”

  “I think you were worrying.”

  He smiled at the way all Irina’s “w’s” became “v’s.”

  “Just thinking about business, is all I was really doing.”

  “A man who brings circus to people, he worries all the time. This is strange, I think.”

  “It’s the way of things in a circus. I’m sure it’s the same where you come from.”

  “Maybe so. But I think it is strange. You need wife. Then two can worry and it seems not so terrible.”

  He laughed. “A wife? That’s all I’d need.”

  “I think everyone needs wife. Or husband or…someone for such times.”

  “There’s lots of people—half the people in my show don’t have a spouse.”

  “Some. Mr. Coates, yes, but he does not like it.”

  “Mr. Shelby…”

  “Mr. Shelby has woman in state of Kansas, I hear him speak of this lady.” She smiled and invited him to argue further.

  “The Perez Brothers—” he began, and her laughter stopped him cold.

  “Mr. Tully, the Perez Brothers are not brothers.” She shook her head and shut her eyes in laughter. “We have word for this in Russian, I don’t know word for this in English, but it is not ‘brothers,’ I think. They love each other, I think. But not like brothers,” and the brilliant blue eyes showed her amusement. A dark red had come into her cheeks, and Lewis found himself looking away.

  “What they do in their private lives is no business of mine. I learned long ago, this is a strange world and a lot of it is beyond Lewis Tully’s ken.”

  She brushed at a stray hair and shrugged. “Strange world, yes. But full of women,” she said, and then bid him good morning.

  He watched her walk away, and when she passed Helen’s tent, she shot him a pointed look over her shoulder.

  For twenty-six days and thirty-four matinee and evening shows they traveled north through Colorado without major incident. The high point was a Fourth of July show in Little Dublin, complete with fireworks that Lewis purchased through Zheng’s Chinese connections in the town.

  “There are Chinese people in this little town, Zheng?” Lewis had asked.

  Zheng smil
ed. “There are Chinese people everywhere. We are inevitable.”

  They were nearing a couple of the more remote mining towns in Colorado toward mid-July when they ran into rain, and the Canty Road became a swamp. In half a dozen places the mud caught hold of the trucks and held on, and they were forced to hitch the horses, mules, and finally Jupiter to the vehicles to pull them out. Lewis even tried to use Sheba in this capacity, but the camel simply regarded them all with contempt and sat down in the mud.

  Lewis pulled his truck off to one side and watched his company go by, a sodden, threadbare column that put him in mind of an outmatched army. The grueling terrain was wearing down his trucks, and they were spending more and more time now fixing them. Not that all his truck troubles were from wear-and-tear: he had had visitors again, presumably from the obsessive Hector Blaney, and though his men had run them off, this time they had managed to toss sand into the gas tanks of two of the trucks.

  By now, Preston Crowe had outdistanced them on the bigger Godfrey Road to the west, and his riders now reported the Blaney show zigzagging across Colorado to the east in a mad attempt to get ahead of the others.

  Lewis wondered if this were the point when both his rivals left him in their dust, and uttered a silent prayer that his trucks would make Wyoming. As he pulled in behind the last one, he wondered how long the animals would be able to take the cold damp nights.

  The first monkey went down two days later. Doc Morin took him into his truck but told Lewis the animal would be dead by morning, an assessment that proved accurate. Lewis had the monkey buried by the roadside.

  “Why did he die?” Charlie asked. He didn’t look at Lewis, but Lewis understood the question was for him.

  “Got sick. This weather is no good for any of us, chilly and wet, cold at night, and it’s hell on monkeys. They’re not real robust little beasts, they get colds and such, and this one got pneumonia. And if one can catch it, they all can.”

  “Can’t they sleep with us at night?”

  Lewis gave the boy an amused look. “No, son, we can’t have eleven monkeys sleeping in our tent, they’d drive us crazy inside of an hour. No, we’ll just have to figure out ways to keep ’em warm. While we’re at it, we ought to pray for Jupiter: elephants don’t like the cold, either.”

  The boy was about to ask another question but saw the preoccupied look on Lewis’s face and sensed it was time to leave him alone. That night, he thought about the dead monkey, then about Roy Green and the ancient Harley, and wondered if they could all die around him, everyone, and leave him stranded in the middle of nowhere.

  The following day, Lewis ordered the work crew to line the monkey cage with all the extra blankets in the camp, so that the monkeys now had something approaching insulated quarters: it wasn’t perfect but it might be enough till the cold spell passed. As for Jupiter, Lewis had another remedy.

  The boy watched as Lewis pulled fat white onions from a burlap sack and the elephant thrust each one into her mouth, munching as if this were a genuine treat. Lewis looked at him.

  “Saw her shiver a bit. When an elephant starts to shiver, she can take sick. You have to warm her up. No better way than to give her a sackful of onions. Warm you up, too, a nice mouthful of raw onion.”

  Charlie made a face, and Lewis grinned and went back to stuffing the big onions into his elephant.

  The cool weather broke as they neared Wyoming and was replaced immediately by soaring temperatures and windless days, and the boy learned that hot weather brought its own troubles: the trucks and cars became ovens, water became a prize, and the suffering of some of the animals was obvious. The llamas were the newest problem, for they did not endure heat well, and when the caravan stopped for water, Lewis made certain the llamas were allowed to wallow for a while in the stream. Eventually the heat spell broke and Lewis lost no stock. They made camp ten miles south of the state line, and Lewis held a conference in his tent with Shelby, Harley Fitzroy, Helen Larsen, and Sam Jeanette.

  “Well, we made Kansas and Colorado and we’ll be into Wyoming in a couple of days. Gonna play one more of these mining towns, place called Sickles’ Mill, then we say good-bye to Colorado.”

  “Looked like a tough place when we put up our bills, Lewis. They shut down the mine there a couple months back. Lot of unhappy folks.”

  “Then they’ll need a circus. We just won’t spend a whole lot of time in town. Anyhow, we’re almost into Wyoming. The big towns will be few and far between, and we’ll leave ’em to Preston. He’ll play Laramie and Cheyenne and then I hope he goes on up to Casper. We’ll stick to the Canty Road and the little towns.”

  “What about Hector Blaney?” Shelby asked.

  “No telling. It’s likely he’d want some of that money from the big places but he knows he can’t compete with Preston, and I can’t see him being interested in these little places.”

  “Little towns are better than no towns at all.”

  “Yes, they are, but you put our bills up in all those towns and that makes ’em ours.”

  Shelby squinted at him. “That might be enough to get him interested in ’em. And we can’t stop him from taking our bills down, or maybe putting up ‘wait sheets.’ Lying about the size of his show so’s people will wait for his to come through.”

  “We just have to make good time, beat him to these places and make people set up and take notice.”

  Helen was smiling at him and he tried to ignore her.

  “Still hoping to make Sheridan, Lewis? Montana and parts north, I believe someone said?”

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘parts north.’ Just once I’d like to make Sheridan, that’s certain. And maybe go on all the way into Montana. Why not?”

  “Why not Canada?” Harley wondered aloud. “Why not the North Pole? Keep on going over the top till we reach Mongolia, show the Mongolian tribes a Tully Circus?”

  “You getting tired, old man?”

  “Old? Listen, Mr. Tully, by the time George Washington was my age…”

  “Yeah?”

  “…he’d been dead for some time,” Harley finished. “Go on.”

  “I’m finished.”

  The others got up and left the tent. At the entrance, Helen stopped and gave him an amused look.

  “You’ve paid everybody on time so far—have you made a Yankee dollar yet, Lewis?”

  “Oh, I’m doing just fine,” he said, unable to meet her eyes.

  “You’re breaking even, you mean.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I’ve never had money my whole life. Why start now?”

  She said nothing, and eventually he was forced to look at her. She held his gaze for a moment, gave him that old look he remembered from so many years ago, a look that had, then as now, rendered him inarticulate. Lewis paused, startled at the range of possibilities in that look. For a moment it seemed as though he could turn back the years if he said just the right thing, right at this moment, and he admitted that he wanted to.

  Helen peered out through the tent flaps into the night, and Lewis couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was about to mutter something about money being unimportant when she looked back at him. She wasn’t quite smiling, but there was something in her eyes that made him certain she was laughing at him.

  Lewis wet his lips and opened his mouth to speak, but she beat him to it.

  “Come by some night and I’ll make you a cup of tea, and you can explain those strange ideas of yours about business.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lewis said, but she was already out of the tent.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Preston

  The third week in July they did an afternoon show in Sickles’ Mill in an empty field a few yards outside of the town limits, gave away more than a hundred tickets to impoverished families and stray children, and wound up playing to a straw house full of hot, sweaty people. In the early evening L
ewis and Shelby drove into town to make arrangements for supplies and refill the water truck from the town hydrant. Afterwards they stopped by the local saloon, a low, flat building with a large sign in the window that said, CLOSED FOREVER. THE PROPRIETOR.

  Lewis bought drinks for the people in the saloon, bargained for a couple more loads of hay and grain, and then had a whiskey with Shelby.

  He was about to order a second when the door opened and people in the room fell silent. Without turning, he scanned the faces in the room to see if this was trouble, local law or a bad drunk. What he saw in these faces was curiosity and amusement and a certain amount of respect. Then a large shadow fell across his section of the bar, and even before he heard the deep rich voice he understood who had just come into the room.

  “Hello, Lewis.”

  Lewis exchanged a rueful look with Shelby, said, “Hello, Preston,” and turned.

  Preston Crowe loomed over him, beaming. It was easy to see why the people in the room were impressed: as always, Preston Crowe was pure showman. He was dressed in a beautiful blue suit and a straw hat—Lewis told himself no one else could get away with riding into a western town in a straw boater, no one but Preston. A heavy gold watch chain draped his big stomach, and he filled the blue suit to bursting with his girth. He weighed almost two hundred and eighty pounds, but what would have been fat on anyone else’s frame was mere prosperity on Preston’s. His face was ruddy and clean-shaven, he smelled of expensive toilet water, and his eyes sparkled as though he’d just heard a good joke.

  Lewis held out his hand and they shook, then Preston shook hands with Shelby and called him “J.M.” He doffed his straw hat and revealed the marvelous shining dome of his enormous head. Lewis had always thought that Preston had to be fat just to support a head that size.

  “Didn’t know you were in these parts, Preston,” Lewis said.

  Preston laughed at the lie and ordered drinks for the house. As always, he was polite, soft-spoken, generous, and supremely confident.

  He took a spot at the bar beside Lewis and sipped a whiskey.