At the door to her tent he looked back at her. He wondered if this could be truly what it seemed, one final chance, and he wondered what there was to be done about it.
I can’t let things go haywire again, he told himself.
FORTY-THREE
The Oldest Foe
They watched the fire for hours as they made their way north: high thick plumes of smoke that hung over the mountains like black rain and tongues of flame consuming the trees along the crests. The fire hadn’t made its way down onto the plain, and with luck it would do most of its damage on the far side of the mountain wall.
Charlie rode with Lewis and Shelby, and saw them eyeing the fire, but they said nothing.
Eventually Shelby muttered, “Too dry. Need some rain bad.”
“The kind of rain it needs would bring lightning, maybe set a fire off one place while it’s putting one out somewheres else.”
When they fell silent again, the boy blurted out, “Will it come down from the mountains? The fire, I mean?”
“Could,” Lewis said without taking his eyes from the road.
Charlie held his tongue, from time to time stealing a glance at them to see if they were worried. Something in Lewis’s eyes told him fire was worth worrying about.
They played two shows in Sheridan, just outside the rodeo grounds. The smell of horse was everywhere, the ground pounded soft by hundreds of hooves. The shows went off without incident, and Charlie could sense something new in Lewis Tully, though he could not have named it.
For his part, Lewis felt himself relax for the first time since Jasper. After the second show, they took on gasoline, fresh water, and supplies, and Lewis took the boy for a walk along the far end of town, where the railroad had built a station directly across from a huge white wooden building with hundreds of tall windows.
“That’s the Sheridan Inn,” Lewis said. “Teddy Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill, visiting dignitaries, and the crowned heads of Europe all stayed there. Finest hotel in the West, in my estimation.”
Charlie couldn’t remember ever seeing anything so stately and elegant, and had no trouble imagining royalty staying here, nor did it seem that the West could hold another hotel to rival it.
“Did you ever stay in it?”
Lewis laughed. “Circus men don’t require such fine lodgings. I will admit to having lunch there once, and a whiskey at their bar. A fine bar,” he added. He studied the Sheridan Inn and made a little shrug, looked down at Charlie.
“Come on, son, we got to make it to the next stand. ’Cause the next stand is Montana.” After a moment, he added, “Finally,” in a quiet voice.
“The next stand” was the town of Fort Cousins, just a mile or so across the Montana state line, and they reached it by mid-morning. They set up just beyond the northern town limits, at the foot of a hill covered with withered grass. Beyond was a larger hill gone brown in the dry heat, and beyond that a line of trees that rose to a wall of mountain.
Lewis searched the craggy bald top of the mountain and the thick treeline for signs of smoke, saw none. Overhead the sky was darkening, moving from a dull gray to a dense dark mass of thunderheads that threatened a storm at any moment.
“I don’t like that sky, Lewis,” Shelby said.
“I don’t either, but I don’t see what we can do about it. We’re not gonna blow the town without a show.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a circus blew a stand,” Shelby said quietly, but Lewis knew he wasn’t arguing.
The show was winding down to Lucy’s act when Lewis heard the thunder above them and felt the hard knot grow in his chest. The thunder grew louder, took on weight, and if he shut his eyes he could picture it as a huge ball of force and anger that rolled across the heavens toward them. A few minutes passed and then he heard the rain slapping against the old red canvas of the top, and people began to murmur. Lucy was leaving the ring to the fervid cheers of the crowd when Lewis heard the great crack, like the surface of the world splitting.
He looked around and saw Shelby watching him. Lewis nodded toward the center pole and Shelby disappeared outside the tent. A moment later he reappeared, shaking his head. Five minutes later Lewis heard the crack again and gritted his teeth. He left the top and made a quick circuit of the tent and scanned the darkening camp for any signs of trouble. The rain had stopped for the time but he could smell it. Lewis studied the sky and then returned to close out his show. He hadn’t reached the tent when he heard a second sharp crack and then moments later, a bone-jarring spike that lit the sky. He looked around at the night and then went into the tent.
They finished the show, and most of the crowd had already cleared the tent when Lewis heard what he’d been waiting to hear all night, the single dread-laden word: fire.
“Lord,” he sighed, and shouted for Shelby.
Outside the big top the crowd was scattering: he saw them running in near panic from the north, telling him where his fire was. He could smell the smoke and hear some of the animals as the terror gripped them, and people were beginning to scream. Over it all he could hear the fearful trumpeting of Jupiter.
“I can’t see it, Lewis!” Shelby was saying. “I can smell it but I can’t see where it’s at.”
Lewis ran toward his trouble, and saw Sam Jeanette running toward him and gesturing back toward the wagons and trucks.
“The hay!” Lewis said. “Goddamnit all to hell, the hay. All right, Sam, let’s round ’em up.”
Shelby and Sam ran through the camp shouting for help, and Lewis headed for the wagons. He saw the flames before he could make out the wagons, tight flames that hadn’t gotten out of control yet, though one sudden burst of light told him another wagon had just gone up.
He kept running, and then he was surrounded by his people, shouting commands to them.
“Move those trucks out, get the animals away from here.”
Emmett McKeon and his crew hit the trucks, and the air was filled with the harsh grinding noise of two dozen chain drives starting together and moving out. Lewis and the others reached the burning vehicles at almost the same time, and a moment later Foley pulled up in the water truck.
For a time it seemed that they’d beaten it, confined it to two trucks and two wagons, and Lewis thought if the rain resumed they’d have it out. Then the fire jumped, whether on wind or along the dry grassy ground he couldn’t tell, but it caught hold of the canvas top of another truck, raced along the dry wood of the corrals and leapt beyond them.
Lewis stopped short and watched the flames catch on the withered grass and spurt off on either side behind them, and realized the fire might encircle them all.
“Leave ’em! Leave ’em, we’re clearing out, move back, all the way. Sam, see to your animals.”
Sam Jeanette gave him a questioning look and Lewis said, “Do what you have to do, Sam.” The old man nodded and ran off to free the stock.
They abandoned the burning vehicles. Lewis looked at the spreading flames, then shot a quick glance at the big top.
“The top, let’s try to save the top.” He ran toward it, calling for the water truck and hoses and a bucket brigade, and it seemed that he was hearing himself from far away, listening to a man calling for water for a fire he knew couldn’t be stopped.
He saw the first sparks land before they even reached the top, saw bits of flaming ash and canvas blow across the camp from the burning trucks and wagons, saw them settling on the tent in half a dozen places and then he saw one catch.
They tried to direct water onto the tent but couldn’t reach the roof, and in minutes the upper part of the tent was in flames and the fire began to dance along the sides. Lewis watched the fire move in golden lines along the seams, saw some of the big patchwork pieces erupt in squares of flame and he knew they’d lost.
A heavy bell asserted itself over the shouts and screams and the noises from the animals, a
nd the town fire truck showed up. In a moment the volunteers manning the truck had directed a heavy spray at the top but the fire had already taken control.
I’m gonna lose my tent, he said to himself. I’m gonna lose my show.
The man directing the fire crew turned to Lewis and shook his head. Lewis nodded. He turned to tell Shelby, saw that there was no need.
Lewis gazed around him for a moment at his people, his friends all sweat-and-spray-soaked and gasping for breath, and he knew they’d fight this fire for him until it killed some of them. He saw the ancient Harley Fitzroy in the bucket brigade and old man Royce and Doc Morin with a look on his face that said, “I told you so,” and Helen and Lucy, all of them, and he stepped back and waved one arm.
“It’s over. J.M., tell ’em to get on out of here. Move ’em out, tell them to get their things, we’ll save what we can and see what we got when it’s over.”
Lewis Tully watched them drop the fight and move off in a hurry to gather children and possessions. He heard Shelby yelling instructions in a voice that made no allowance for fear, urging them to get ready to leave camp. He gazed around to make sure they were moving off to safety and saw that some had stopped just a few yards away to stare up at the burning tent. In the flames their faces were reddish-gold and hopeful, and he thought they looked like children. Lewis folded his arms and watched his tent.
The whole center of the big top burned now and sent out tendrils of flame that seemed to claw at the night sky. He saw the red canvas roof begin to sag, saw the center pole flaming, and watched the fire scurry down the long taut ropes.
Shelby came up behind him, said, “Come on with us, Lewis.”
“Pretty soon.”
He felt Shelby’s hand rest briefly on his shoulder and then he heard the other man walking toward the rest of the camp. Lewis watched his big tent become a great canvas torch, felt the heat across his body and on his face, and then rain, a few drops at first and then a steady patter that grew in sound and strength and would probably put the fire out sometime during the night. He took one last look at his burning top and turned.
Helen was standing a few feet behind him, arms folded across her breast, watching the tent burn. Beyond her he could see his people breaking down the camp and moving beyond the reach of the fire, and further on the people of the town staring in wonder at the disaster.
Lewis walked toward Helen. She faced him dry-eyed, her eyes searching his face.
Lewis gestured to the townspeople gathering at the perimeter of his camp.
“Think we can convince these folks it was part of the show?”
She smiled and came forward and hugged him. He put his face in her hair and felt her warmth through her clothes, and for a moment he wished he could just crawl into her bed and sleep. Then he pushed himself away. Something nagged at the back of his consciousness, more trouble.
He scanned the camp and the crowd, met her gaze, and said, “I haven’t seen the boy.”
“Oh, Lord,” she said quietly.
***
The child had stood off to one side and watched the fire devour the Blue Moon Circus and his world, had prayed to God to stop the fire, and then the flames had leapt through space to kill the big tent, Lewis’s big top, and the boy thought his heart would burst.
He ran to put distance between his life and this nightmare, and he did not stop until he was in a small stand of poplars and cottonwoods down along the river. He staggered and tripped over the big tree roots and the underbrush, and finally stopped when the red-and-black shadows of the fire could no longer be seen against the trunks. In the angle between the roots of a huge tree he sank down and buried his face in his hands and wept.
He cried not for himself but for all of them, for Lewis Tully who would lose his circus and Shelby who was kind to him and for Helen who would have no job, and for Harley Fitzroy who would once more become an old man dying on a bench in a small town. He cried for Roy Green and old Dugan who would both surely die now, and for the loss of the big top that meant the end of his life here. But most of all he cried for Lewis Tully, for he had glimpsed Lewis’s face just as the fire had begun to dance on the tops of the wagons and had seen the future in Lewis’s haunted eyes, that this circus and these people were finished.
***
They hurried through the rainy chaos of the camp and Harley yelled, “He’s not in there!” when Lewis stopped to peer into his tent. Harley nodded toward the edge of camp, toward the trees.
“He’ll be down there if he’s anywhere.”
“I don’t know where else to look if he’s not,” Lewis said.
When they reached the line of trees just beyond the town, the old man took a few steps toward the wood. He peered into the darkness though it seemed to Lewis that he was listening rather than looking, and then Harley nodded.
“He’s in there. Want me to go in?”
“No. It’s all right. I think I’m the one he needs to hear from right now. I might need you to talk to him later.”
“I’m not planning to go anywheres, Lewis.”
Lewis entered the wood and waited until his eyes adjusted to the dark. The rain pecked at the upper leaves. He made his way toward the heart of the wood and then began calling to the boy in a calm voice.
Lewis found him sitting against the trunk of the cottonwood, arms tight around his knees. In the faint light, the boy was wet-eyed, his skinny frame shaking with the spasms of weeping.
Lewis just said, “You all right, Charlie?”
When the boy refused to look up, Lewis settled onto the dirt beside him, and for several minutes the silence was broken only by the boy’s convulsive sobs as he calmed himself.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You crying because the fire kinda scared you?”
“No,” the boy said, making the word two syllables, and his tone said that the question was stupid.
“Why then?”
“Because I think everybody’s gonna die now.”
“Who’s gonna die?”
The boy looked up accusingly. “Roy Green, and Mr. Dugan, and Harley and…”
“Son, those first two are kinda sick, all right, but Harley’s probably gonna outlive the both of us.”
“And you.”
“I’m not fixing to die just yet. I have a few more nights like this one, though, and I’ll sure consider it.”
The boy peered at him in the darkness. “The circus is gone, isn’t it?”
“A lot of it. But the people are all right, every one of ’em. Only one we were worried about was Charlie Barth. And we probably lost some of the beasts, though I think most of ’em will turn up. It’s not pretty but it could’ve been a damn sight worse.”
Lewis looked off into the trees and the boy stole a glance.
“I have money. If you need money for a new show.”
“You do? How much money?”
“A dollar and a nickel.”
Lewis nodded. “You’re a regular Croesus. How did you come by your wealth?”
The boy shrugged. “I found it on the floor in the cooktent.” After a moment, he added, “I think it’s yours. It was where you were sitting. You can have it, though.”
“Were you saving it to buy yourself something in town?”
“No. For later. For when the circus was over and I didn’t have a place no more. I wanted to make sure I could take care of myself. Like you and Shelby did when you didn’t have no place.”
Lewis looked around at the wood and remembered spending a night in a stand of trees much like this one, himself and a smaller boy huddling together and lying to one another that they feared nothing the world could send their way. And here, now, was another boy who thought he’d lost his place in the world.
“Whatever happens, you’ll have a place. Nobody’s gonna let you
go off by yourself, son.” He looked down at the boy, a boy who seemed smaller and more fragile each time Lewis looked at him. “But just in case—you can keep the money.”
The boy shot him a quick sidelong glance, then looked straight ahead. He kept his arms around his knees and rocked back and forth, and Lewis realized how all this chaos and destruction must seem to this vagabond of a child. He put his hand on Charlie’s wet hair, then put his arm around the boy’s shoulder.
“Things will work out. And you’ll be fine.”
The boy nodded and said, “All right,” clearly unconvinced. A moment later he asked, “What’s gonna happen to you?”
“Me? Well…” He shrugged and then looked at the boy and saw that the child was genuinely worried about him.
“I been through this before, Charlie. It didn’t kill me then, won’t kill me now.”
“Will you have another circus?”
“I expect I will,” he said, and realized how little he believed that.
Lewis got to his feet, a tired man in a clammy wet shirt, and looked down to where the boy was still rocking back and forth, a small package of nerves and unhappiness. His feet were crossed at the ankles and Lewis noted the scuffed shoes and the ill-fitting pants, castoffs from one of the Count’s children. Every other child of the Tully Circus was huddled with family at this moment. Only this child had run off to the woods. Lewis wondered if he himself had ever looked so forlorn. He studied the boy and then it was clear to him what he would do.
“Whatever happens, circus or no, you’ll stay with me, Charlie.”
The boy looked up, unsure how to answer, then said, “Yes, sir.”
“Call other folks ‘sir,’ they’ll think you were brought up properly. Just call me Lewis.”
Lewis held out a hand to help the boy up.
The Blue Moon Circus Page 34