He sneaked into the hall closet, wrestling on boots, overcoat, cap, and gloves; then, already winded, rushed out the door where jarring, silent cold enveloped him. Snow melted on his cheeks as he stood in the quiet, admiring the bruised face of the moon that peeked through a clearing in the clouds, and the great frozen spread that had shut down all of Hartford. A city truck plowed past, scraping asphalt and wrecking the snow. From the driveway he watched it, then looked around wondering what it was had brought him out into the cold. Not to shovel. Not to toboggan. Across the street in the Putnams’ yard, he saw, were four snowmen, and he remembered Tommy Duncan, and he shook out his arms. Hitting something, he thought. That would feel good. Maybe that’s why I came out here.
He crossed his yard, then climbed the bank the plow had pushed against the roadside, snow sticking to his boots in such hefty clumps that even this short walk fatigued him. Panting, he climbed the opposite snowbank and reached the Putnams’ with his undershirt dampened by sweat, chilling him to shivers. The snowmen had no eyes that he could see, their hats were crowned with white, and each carrot nose bore an inch of the stuff along its length. He flicked one with his finger. The carrot popped out and landed, sank, vanished.
“You think I’m old, don’t ya?” he said. “I got enough for you, Frosty.”
Frosty held his ground.
“Some kinda tough bastard, huh?”
Nick cocked his left shoulder, pulled back for the big roundhouse, the punch he almost never used, but he wanted it now, wanted to throw everything he had, empty it all so he’d feel spent and not just weary, leave himself scattered like Frosty’s head across the Putnams’ front yard. He connected, but there was no explosion of white. The head was heavy with wet—it felt like he’d punched a concrete slab—and the head cracked in two, falling off the body.
Nick kept the pain tight, wouldn’t shout even though his left hung loose in its glove like peanuts in a bag, even though his legs shuddered beneath him, his lungs couldn’t find enough air, and his head reeled like a carnival ride.
But the roundhouse. The roundhouse had worked.
Yeah, if the target’s a stiff.
He needed a corner. So he sat. Right there in the Putnams’ front yard at the foot of the snowman he had decapitated. He sank into the pillow of snow, which welcomed him warm and cozy. From the sky it alighted around him, on him, sprinkling before his eyes like confetti, filling his head.
Nick was not in his chair. Don’t go chasing, she told herself, not like last time. But two buttons later, he hadn’t returned. “Nick?” she yelled, loud enough to carry through the house, in a tone to which he always responded. Only the radiator knocked in answer. A moment later she called down to the cellar. She started then to pray her “Please God” prayer before hurrying to each room in a house suddenly too large. Nick was not dead in their bedroom, or in the pantry, or on the back porch. Then, passing the living room window, she saw him near the body of a snowman in the Putnams’ front yard. She watched him struggle to stand and foresaw every consequence of his effort: a broken hip or concussion, or a clot pumped furiously toward a narrow vein.
She ran—no shawl, no coat—in house slippers that soaked up the cold and the wet so that her feet ached before she reached him. Her arms surrounded him, tried to crush him, and he felt so cold, so cold.
“Damn you,” she said, crying through clenched jaws. “Damn you, Nick DiFiore.”
“Lena,” he said. “I got tired is all.”
She heard a door open, then shouting—the Putnams—and she knew that in moments they’d surround her and Nick, and they would see how she had failed him, how nearly she had lost him. No, she would protest, arms clamped around his body, her bone-cold fingers seeking him beneath the layers of coat, sweater, shirt, needing again to hold too tightly. You’re wrong, she would say. You’re wrong. I love him better than this.
The Greatest Show
NO CIRCUS TODAY.
That’s what we wrote on sheets of scratch paper. We used square-tipped marking pens that squeaked on the slick poster board and gave off fumes. We wrote in red and purple and blue. We knew the circus couldn’t happen. Not that day.
Violetta was twelve then, a pixie in star-embroidered bell-bottoms and threadbare ballet slippers, pit-patting on concrete floors, through tunnels and concourses and the exhibition hall, whispering at everybody to hurry. We’d only begun to set up for that night’s show, the first of a three-day stand. Ring carpets needed mopping, and the trapeze was a half-erected tangle of cables and pulleys and ropes. But we stopped everything to gather around television sets—in the dressing room, in Fritz’s trailer office—and watch. We covered our mouths with our hands or pressed fists against our eyes, just as people did everywhere, and in the dressing room Schmautz demanded we turn it off, but we didn’t turn it off.
No circus today. Postponed. New Dates and Times TBA.
On with the show means something to us, it really does, but times come when what matters doesn’t. Carrying our signs and tape, we crisscrossed the downtown of that week’s stop—Hartford, the capital of Connecticut—and we posted the announcements that our show would not go on. The pointless paperwork of bystanders.
In the arena, the bears ate dried fruit, and the lions tore at deer carcasses—roadkill Marcus had bought from New York’s highway department. Fritz watched the news in his trailer office. Fritz is our ring-master. It’s difficult to guess his age because he shaves his head twice each day. Fritz carries such girth that he leans back when he walks; his chest holds lungs you’d swear could inflate truck tires. Fritz wrestled in college until he broke a man’s back. They had been opponents since high school and competed with the fierceness of brothers. The man lived, but neither he nor Fritz ever wrestled again. Fritz flunked out of school because it was the easiest way to leave, and he picked up as a roustabout with a show that came through Iowa City.
That afternoon, after we finished posting signs, Fritz wandered alone through Hartford’s downtown. On an overpass, he leaned into the chain-link meant to keep suicides off the interstate below, and he bird’s-eyed the traffic, loud and hot. He looked hard to see people, it mattered to him that he see people and not just cars, and he picked up flashes of a woman’s long hair, of an elbow propped where the driver’s window had been lowered, of a hand that tossed a cigarette butt. He imagined a heart attack, onset of diabetic coma, a lunge for a ringing cell phone dropped too near the brake pedal, and he pictured cars spinning into each other and past each other, steel tearing, horns wailing, asphalt gouged, a work boot detached from a body lying on its side near a painted white line. He saw this so clearly that he was surprised, now, to notice traffic traveling unimpeded. He let go of the fence links, and his skin had creased where he’d gripped too hard.
In front of a closed and caged store stocked with athletic shoes and imitation Rolex watches, he met a fellow with a West Indian lilt who sold electronics from the back of a white and rusted van. Fritz dickered because Fritz always dickers. The electronics salesman smoothed his Old Testament beard and said, “None of this haggling, mister. Not today. It’s not right. Take the price or leave it,” and Fritz felt a prick of shame that turned his ears hot and, he felt certain, red. He decided to buy two portable TVs instead of just one, as if twice the purchase could atone for his mistake. But walking away with two TVs he didn’t need, he just felt stupid. In his trailer office he moved aside his checkerboard and his portable whiskey bar to make room for the extra sets. A couple of roustabouts helped him rewire the satellite connections, and he was pleased to find his new TVs worked. He watched his old set and his two new ones at the same time, a different news network on each. The electronics salesman, he decided, was a cynic but clever in how he got his asking price. What people won’t do on the worst days. He dialed his mother’s number in Des Moines, but her line was busy.
Most of us stayed that afternoon in the bowels of the arena. We lay on cots or watched updates on the news. We’d hired the day laborers, so
they still worked, draping black plastic sheets over the walls and floors where we planned to keep the animals. Blackness filled that wide hallway, blanketed the walls as high as the ceilings, and the blackness shifted as people walked on it, whispered with each footfall, reflected pinpricks of fluorescent light as if the midnight sky had collapsed and settled in that spot. “Today, like mourning cloth,” said Hezekiah as he swept piss-soaked wood shavings out of his bear cages and onto the black plastic, then spread fresh bedding. We all paid more attention to the animals, especially the ponies, scratching their ears, gazing into the bottomless liquid of their eyes. A lion’s roar echoed through the tunnels, redundant and hollow, something we’d usually ignore but sounding that day like a desperate, repeated shout of the same word, a word that came close to explaining how we all felt, but then the lion grew tired and huffed a while, then quieted.
Violetta gravitated from television set to television set, staring at the screens, in tears. Her mother pulled her away and pulled her away again, but Violetta always returned. Violetta’s romance with suffering and disaster was probably normal in a girl her age, but it troubled her mother, who had no other child and had always lived for her daughter’s happiness. When Violetta was an infant and resisted breast-feeding, Ursula paid a man to tattoo Violetta’s name and a thornless red rose onto Ursula’s right breast. The pain from the needles shot through to her knees and toes and crotch, but all suffering went away when her daughter started to nurse.
So on this day, Ursula kissed Violetta’s pale forehead, took her hand, and led the girl out of the arena’s gloom. Ursula recalled a stop in Hartford a few years earlier when she and Violetta had enjoyed a carousel ride in a downtown park. She remembered the horses as grotesque and beautiful, aberrations of action, their lips and teeth gargantuan, manes lacquered and glossy, each horse ornamented with reins and saddles of silver and cherry. She remembered Violetta talking of the horses for days.
The park’s grass was September worn. Though a sign announced open hours on Tuesdays, mother and daughter found the carousel shut inside its pavilion, dark and without music. Ursula pressed her face to the glass to see the motionless shadows inside. When finally she turned away from the pavilion and her own disappointment, she saw her daughter crouched nearby at the edge of a tiny park pond. The water’s surface sat stagnant, coated with pollen and pigeon down, dotted with soda cups. “I can ride real ponies anytime I want,” Violetta said. She fingered bottle caps and paper clips and the broken tines of plastic forks, and she tossed them one by one into the water, the pollen so thick the surface showed no ripples. Violetta waited to see whether each thing she’d thrown would sink or float, then she tossed something else. She told her mother she wanted everything to sink. After a while her mother wanted that, too.
No one ever figured out how Ted and Rosa got into the building, which was supposed to be locked. Schmautz the Clown met them in a concourse. He told us later that he’d been practicing his greeting routine, the one he uses to welcome kids as they scramble into the exhibition hall. He’d put on his polka-dot costume, but not his makeup or cone-head cap, and he pantomimed greetings to pretend children, waving his monkey puppet. He told us that a man and a woman walked down the tunnel toward him.
“No circus today, folks,” he told them.
The man nodded toward the monkey dangling from Schmautz’s hand. “How about a smidgen more of that puppet?” he said. “What we saw looked pretty good.”
What’s Schmautz going to do? He worked the monkey so it blew kisses to the strangers. “Say hello to Betty,” said Schmautz.
“Hello, Betty,” said the man. The puppet shook hands with the strangers. The woman stood an inch taller than the man in her black sandals with slight heel, and she looked younger, even discounting hair coloring. Trim, she was dressed in black linen slacks and a white sleeveless blouse, collar upturned, hair spiked as if she meant to intimidate other country-club wives but not alienate them. He wore clean white sneakers, pressed slacks and work shirt, sleeve cuffs buttoned at the wrist, very un-circus. Dime-store eyeglasses poked from his breast pocket, and the skin at his throat pimpled as if he had shaved with a played-out razor. The man and woman looked like each other in that way married couples do because time and happenstance have beaten and fed and comforted them in similar ways.
The man studied Schmautz’s face, but if he was looking for something in particular he didn’t say, and Schmautz felt unfinished and wished he had put on makeup after all. The woman said, “We had planned to come today. We’re from out of town.” She spoke with one of those honeysuckle drawls that makes you crave red velvet cake if you’ve ever been south.
The man said, “I was born here, in Hartford,” which showed he understood us. Sometimes we forget where we are.
They explained that they’d bought tickets online. They’d come from North Carolina. Not just for the circus, no. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “Crazy as that might sound.” She corrected him. “Whimsical,” she said. “Not crazy.”
But then they had found themselves alone that morning in a hotel room watching it all on television, and they hated that, hated the packets of coffee and the inoffensive wallpaper and the fifth-floor windows that didn’t open. The man said, “We couldn’t sit in the room all day. We can’t fly home. We didn’t know what else to do.” He handed their tickets to Schmautz.
Schmautz didn’t know what to do, either. The show had been scheduled for eight, and it was hours earlier than that. Besides, there was no show. He gave the tickets back, but waved the couple toward the exhibition hall. “We never finished setting up,” he told them. He smoothed the nylon fur of Betty’s head. “Might be a juggler or a hula-hoop dancer running through a routine. Ask Hezekiah to show you a bear.”
The woman started toward the exhibition hall, but the man lingered, and Schmautz again wished he’d worn makeup. He raised the monkey puppet in front of his face, had Betty wave good-bye to the man, who reached out to scratch under Betty’s chin. Then the man laid a hand on Schmautz’s padded shoulder. “Must be hot in that outfit,” he said. Said Schmautz: “You know it, brother.” The woman reached back for her husband’s hand, and they slow-stepped down the tunnel, the squeak of his sneakers repeating off the bright walls. Schmautz kept on with his Betty routine, greeting kids who weren’t there.
In the arena, roustabouts wiped dirt from the ring curves and stuck light poles into tripods. Chico, the crew chief, had decided to work himself and his crew extra hard, as if the president himself had deemed a fully assembled circus as necessary to national morale. Z, a Yaqui from Mexico who was our newest hire, couldn’t get the lights right, and Chico yelled at him, “Damn, Z! This ain’t no reservation. It’s a plantation, motherfucker. Get the work done or I’ll trade you in, get me another.” Z said nothing, just plugged together a different combination of cords and when the bulbs lit moved on to another set.
Our roustabouts come from everywhere, and they are cruel to each other, and they defend each other like family, and some nights would cut each other’s throats. They know better than any of us that a circus is a heavy thing. They push lions’ steel cages into the arenas and push them out. They unroll the ring carpets, then roll them up again and heave them onto carts. In non-union towns, which is most everywhere, they drive forklifts to haul equipment canisters from our trucks into the arenas and back again. They carry the shovels and the pulleys and cable spools, and they lift and assemble the platforms that allow four-year-olds to climb onto the backs of elephants at five dollars a ride. When the show starts, crowds see tapestries and light, airy trapezes, an ephemerality that arrives and vanishes with a clap of thunder or burst of smoke. If people understood the full weight of the show they watch, they would be crushed. The roustabouts bear it piece by muscle-tearing piece. They raise it in a day. They dismantle it in a few hours, leaving no sign that it ever was.
It’s hard to say how long the man and woman sat that afternoon watching Chico’s people work. Eventually they steppe
d out of the stands and approached Z.
“We apologize for the intrusion …,” said the man.
“Will anyone perform?” asked the woman. “The clown said someone might.”
Z rose off his knees. He tucked a screwdriver into his baggy blue-jeans pocket, then straightened his dark sweatshirt with a tug. Arenas are cold even in summer. The woman had goosebumps on her tanned arms. Z nodded politely.
“Hey, people,” called Chico, who had stepped near. “Y’all have to go. We’re shut down.”
“A juggler or something,” said the woman as if she were championing the last wish of a dying child. “The clown said—”
“I don’t care about the clown,” Chico said. “Today’s too real, is all. Circus ain’t right.”
“We bought tickets,” said the woman.
Chico wiggled his tongue through the gap where he had no front teeth. He did not need the last word. He trusted Fritz to do the right thing.
Fritz had been sitting in his trailer office in the dark, miniblinds drawn to cut screen glare as he watched the news on three TVs and sipped whiskey. Now he tugged a string and let bright sun in on the couch where the man and woman sat. Daylight washed colors out of the pictures on the TVs. Fritz offered his bottle, then poured the shots. He felt glad for the company. The woman said their names: Ted and Rosa Liszak of Raleigh, North Carolina. She practiced law. He had just sold a regional magazine business and was starting an early retirement. As the three talked, Ted worried a red checker piece between his forefinger and thumb.
“Didn’t you see the signs?” asked Fritz.
The Greatest Show Page 16