“They broke our hearts,” answered Ted, and he smiled. “We hurried in case you were leaving town.”
“There’s really nothing for you here,” said Fritz.
“You don’t know us that well,” said Rosa.
“I know what’s appropriate given what happened this morning.”
Rosa’s glare dared Fritz to insult her again. “We’re not cruel or stupid,” she said. “We could have watched TV in our hotel room and drunk our own whiskey.”
Fritz swirled the ice in his glass and grinned. He liked that this woman could say something harsh and make it sound like a compliment. Maybe it was a southern thing. Or a lawyer thing. Meanwhile, her husband studied old photos on the trailer’s walls—of Fritz as a roustabout, then as a performer juggling fiery torches. Ted studied it a while, said, “I’ve always wondered what kind of person joins the circus.”
“Some are born into it,” Fritz said. “Mostly, everybody’s got a different reason.”
On one of the networks the hour scheduled for the president’s first public address crawled across the screen. Another network showed a map of where everything had happened. Fritz said, “Folks, I’m sorry if I insulted you. I’m just surprised you’re here.”
Ted flipped the checker piece as if it were a coin, heads or tails. “I haven’t been to a show since I was a toddler,” he said. “But you could almost say I was born into the circus.” He unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve and pushed it back to show skin embossed over every inch with scars. Some scars were lavender and others gray and some were pigmentless as teeth.
Fritz called a meeting: performers, roustabouts, everybody. We gathered near the animal cages, the black plastic sheeting rustling beneath our feet, the bears pacing on their leashes and a lion licking the mesh of its cage. Ursula sat on a straw bale, her daughter in her lap. Schmautz had tied a knot in Betty’s arms and hung her around his neck. She lay against his back, head lolling to the left, glass eyes sightless.
Ted, Fritz told us, had last visited a circus in 1944.
We know circus history, and word of Ted’s scars had spread fast, so we understood. His last circus had been a famous one, when the Ringling big top burned right there in Hartford. It’s a tale every circus performer with a few years on the road has heard, a story that for us distinguishes Hartford from a Morgantown or a Schenectady or Terre Haute. It begins with a matinee and a tent waterproofed with paraffin. Wartime. July’s worst heat. Hundreds of women and children panting and sticky in folding chairs in the bleachers. Then the tent catches fire. No one knows why. A lot of people die. Some sixty years later, we still try for a better performance in Hartford. We don’t take the blame for history. We’re not Ringling. We’re a chicken-dinner outfit from Bran-son hired for county fairs and Shriner shows. We feel no responsibility for a gas-soaked rag of a tent that collapsed on a crowd decades before most of us were born. But we’re not heartless. So Hartford always gets a little extra.
“But not today, right?” said Chico, his tongue flicking through the gap in his teeth. “My people ain’t done setting up. Give history a rain check.”
“No rain checks,” said Fritz. “I’ve been on the phone. Home office wants us to cancel the whole Hartford run. Pick up again in Rutland, maybe. For these two, it’s today or not at all.”
Renato, the father in our family of aerialists, said no, absolutely not, but Schmautz the Clown wanted to. Chico insisted his crew get its regular take for a full house. “This is charity,” said Schmautz. Chico said, “Charity is when they bring the crippled kids. This is nuts.” And Ursula suggested that if we did charity, we should do it where people were suffering right now.
That got everyone quiet. Then someone said, “People suffer everywhere all the time. It’s all pain, right? How does a little clowning make anything worse?”
The argument lasted awhile. It was strange. Ted and Rosa hadn’t asked for the whole circus; they hadn’t asked for all three rings. But we chewed on each other as if this decision mattered more than any we’d ever made. Maybe we were asking each other for permission to go ahead or to refuse. In the end, Hezekiah said he’d bring out his bears, and Ursula agreed to let Violetta perform her hula-hoop dance. That would have been enough, but Schmautz said he’d go, too, and so did Mad Dog the Daredevil Cyclist and Nabeela the Stilt Walker.
Fritz offered the roustabouts half pay, and Chico said “not enough to blaspheme this day,” but in the circus everyone works as an independent contractor, and in this circus everyone works for Fritz. Some roustabouts took the money. Mad Dog assembled his Death Sphere, and Hezekiah and Marcus erected the animal cage around the center ring. Roustabouts tested the sound system and lights, and others climbed into the stands to run the spots. Watching, you’d think the preparations were the usual. Ursula helped her daughter stretch while the girl listened to hip-hop on tiny headphones; Hezekiah brushed wood shavings from his bears’ fur; Schmautz and the clowns painted their faces; Fritz pomaded his mustache. But that day, as the arena echoed with the clanging of cage doors and the now-and-then roar of a beast, we kept a religious silence. Whatever performance we were about to give would be governed by new rules. We dressed in our leotards and sequins, clown wigs and capes. Fritz visited us one by one. “Forget the day,” he told us. “Or remember it. Whichever helps.”
The house lights darkened. Spotlights blinded us as they always blind us. The speakers shuddered with our thunder-and-electronics fanfare, less Sousa than video-game theme. Out of habit, we expected applause. We listened for it. Who knows why Ted and Rosa didn’t clap. But the absence of applause was the first flaw.
That late afternoon, each of us who stepped in the rings felt a new and desperate need to nail every handspring, to catch every juggled plate. No one spoke of this, but we saw it in each other, the ways we attacked our performances. That morning the world had been reborn—in grief and violence, yes—but we knew we stood at the beginning of something. Whatever that new thing was to become, we wanted to get our part right. We wanted to be as good as the Bolshoi or the Ziegfeld Follies, and somehow trusted we could. But Nabeela tumbled from his stilts. Marcus couldn’t get the lions to do anything but run circles around the caged ring. Roustabouts dialed up the wrong music, playing the aerialists’ melody during the clowns’ bank-robbery skit and the bank-robbery tune during Mad Dog’s dirt-bike ride inside the Sphere of Death. We were jinxed. Miriam the Acrobatic Scarf Dancer became tangled in her knots. Schmautz, who was to enter the ring after her, slipped away and closed himself in the men’s room. It sounded vicious, his kicking the doors of the stalls and shouting, kicking and shouting, the doors crashing against their frames. At that moment, Fritz was calling into the P.A., announcing Hezekiah and his bears.
From the deepest backwoods and piney hollows of Arkansas, The Ozark Mountain Bear Devils!
Dressed in hillbilly garb, accompanied by Hezekiah in his coon-skin cap and fringed buckskin, Ma, Pa, and Daisy Mae Bear waddled into the ring. With the long stock of his whip, Hezekiah prodded the bears to walk on barrels and stand on their heads. When one bear performed, Hezekiah sent the other two to sit in rocking chairs where roustabouts kept them occupied with dog biscuits. Hillbilly saws and fiddles played over the speakers, and Hezekiah signaled thumbs up to the roustabout running the soundboard.
The bears cavorted along a balance beam, Pa and Ma dismounting through a hoop at one end. Then Hezekiah twisted open the propane tank under the hoop and with a wand-lighter ignited the hoop’s gas jets into a halo of flame. Now, the recorded drum roll. Black smoke roiled; fire snapped. Daisy Mae Bear hesitated. Hezekiah jerked his head toward the hoop. Fritz pleaded, Let’s give Daisy Mae some encouragement, ladies and gentlemen! But Ted and Rosa said nothing. The fire made shadows that fluttered across their bodies. We hadn’t thought things through. Ted crouched forward, head bowed, resting his elbows on his knees. Rosa leaned into her husband, one hand stroking the length of his back. But Hezekiah didn’t see this. He concentrated on his bear. H
e wanted to get things right. Daisy Mae barked her fear. Hezekiah poked with his whip stock at Daisy Mae’s hind legs, then gave her a bite from the lash. Daisy Mae—morose, chagrined—leaped sideways off the beam, away from the fiery hoop, but bumped it with her rump so the hoop teetered and fell. The hoop kept burning, and roustabouts ran into the ring to save the carpet. Those who stood near could smell the bear’s singed, acrid fur.
Intermission! Fritz growled into his microphone.
We watched Ted walk his wife to the ladies’ room, steering her with an arm around her shoulders. We left him alone while he waited for her, let him roam places we wouldn’t usually allow ticket holders. He fingered the spot where fire had fallen and the ring carpet melted.
Ursula did not want to watch him, as some of us were doing. Her insides felt awful, as though stuffed with something gritty and poisonous, and watching Ted she felt sicker. She followed Rosa into the ladies’ room where Rosa stood before a mirror, and Ursula thought she might be crying. When Rosa finally spoke, what she said sounded like an accusation.
She said, “There’s no comfort in this.”
“It’s not much of a show,” said Ursula. She stepped near and dipped her hands into a sink basin. Its automatic faucet ran cold water. “Is he all right?”
“Pulse racing. Skin clammy. Soul sick. The fire took us by surprise.”
“We use lots of fire. It’s in the juggling act, the motorcycle act …”
Rosa waved an end to the list. “He’s never had problems as long as I’ve known him. Campfires. Gas-burning stoves. Bonfires on the beach. It was his birthday last week. Sixty candles all aflame. No trouble.”
“This is different.”
“Apparently.” Rosa dabbed a tissue against a faucet’s mouth, then wiped around the rims of her red eyes; she had been crying. “He’s always loved this city—for no reason I understand. ‘It’s my birthday,’ he said. ‘What the heck,’ he said, like he was invulnerable. ‘Let’s go to the circus.’”
“Then today happened,” Ursula said. She blinked to check her own tears.
“He wanted to see the aerialists. ‘I can do without the animal tricks,’ he said. ‘I want to see the man on the flying trapeze.’ Does that sound strange? I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s the mother in me. I want to beat up the bully and hug the child.”
“We’re not bullies.”
“The circus hurt him. That confuses the issue.”
“My name’s Ursula,” said Ursula. She reached for Rosa’s hands, which felt cool. “My daughter is Violetta. She’s the hula-hoop dancer.”
Rosa paused as if deciding something. “It’s my pleasure to meet you,” she said.
“You have kids?” Ursula asked.
“In North Carolina. They’re scared. We talked by telephone. That’s all.”
“I wish they had come with you. It’s not much of a circus without children.”
“Ours are too old for the circus, and not yet old enough.”
When the women emerged, Ted met them and touched Rosa’s hand, the touch brief, as if sufficient to confirm what years of marriage gave them to understand. Then Ursula asked Violetta to show Ted and Rosa around, to name for them each lion and chimpanzee, to show how Mad Dog’s two-stroke motocross cycle stayed on the high wire and how so many clowns could fit into such a picayune car. “If we can’t give you a good show,” said Ursula, “at least we can pull the curtain back.”
Violetta wore a blue terry-cloth bathrobe over her outfit, and fishnet stockings and high heels that clicked on the concrete. At the lion cages, she warned Ted and Rosa to stand a good three feet away. “That’s what we tell everyone,” she said. She used her hands to emphasize each word. “A good three feet. But I’ve petted the lions before. I sneak up when they aren’t looking.” Then she asked, “Can I see your burns?”
Ted turned to face the girl. “Aren’t you brave,” he said.
“Show her, honey,” said Rosa.
He unbuttoned his sleeves and pushed them high as if preparing for a blood pressure exam. Then he stretched his exposed arms forward. He extended his palms and his fingers, and he turned his wrists over and back so Violetta could see the skin’s stitchings. “This is only some,” he said. “I have scars all on my legs and chest and belly and back.” Violetta walked nearer. Ted nodded, and she traced lines on his arms with a small finger.
“They’re not so bad anymore,” Ted told her. “It’s hard to tell old man skin from old scars. When I was your age, that’s when I looked like a lizard.”
“They’re pretty,” said Violetta.
“Lifelong friends.” He waved an arm once more as he finished buttoning.
“The fire scared you, didn’t it?”
“I suppose it did. I was a boy. I can’t remember.”
“The fire scared you today.”
“Oh. Not so much. I knew I was safe. Apparently my body remembers what I can’t.”
The three came to the room we’d turned into a mess hall, where Chico had plugged in his electric coffeepot and where he kept a bottle of jalapeño-salted peanuts no one else could touch. We had a box of cold-cut subs, too, sandwiches we’d picked up frozen from a caterer in Albany. A few of us were eating and talking: about the day, and about Ted, and about how everything had gone so awry. We stopped when our guests arrived. Fritz invited them to sit, asked if they’d like a soggy sandwich. We made the smallest of small talk amidst long silences, and now and then someone would leave the room and come back with a report from the TV.
A moment came when we all were quiet, and Ted cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have come today,” he said. “It was selfish.” The fluorescent bulbs above him flickered, brightening, then darkening, then brightening his tan face. Rosa whispered to him, but he shook his head, chasing away her suggestion.
Schmautz said, “We’re not done. Give us a chance. We’ll figure it out.”
“It won’t get better,” said Chico. “You got no sense of decency. Y’all are dancing on graves.”
“Shut up,” said Schmautz. “Shut up. Shut. Up.”
A roustabout put hands on Schmautz’s shoulders to keep him in his seat. It was a kindness. Chico would have torn the old clown apart.
“I don’t know what’s decent,” said Hezekiah.
“Nothing’s decent,” said Fritz. “Everything’s decent.”
The fup-fup of pigeon wings in the rafters startled us. Once we decided the pigeon didn’t belong to the clowns, Chico chucked a wad of tinfoil its way. The pigeon chased the foil ball to the floor in a corner of the room and pecked at it.
Hezekiah asked Ted, “What was it like the day of the fire?”
Ted wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Not like today,” he said. “The country didn’t much notice. There was no cable TV. And there was a war going on.”
“But lots of people died,” someone protested.
“Almost a hundred and seventy. Not so many, when you consider.”
“You can’t make those comparisons,” said Rosa.
“We compare every day,” said Chico. “People die all the time, but it’s some days that who dies or how or how many makes the whole country notice. Other days not. That’s truth.”
Ted said, “The fire mattered in Hartford—the deaths and the survivors, at least—for a few years. The nuns at school let me get away with more mischief than other kids. Now it’s an old story, and who cares?”
Fritz folded his sandwich wrapper. “Intermission’s over. We’ve got a performance to finish. No fire in the second act.”
“We’ve caused enough trouble,” said Ted.
“I want a show,” said Fritz. “A show needs an audience.”
Ted studied Fritz, and it seemed he was contemplating the consequences of crossing a man that large who had shared his whiskey. “We owe you that,” Ted said. Then he and Rosa walked with Hezekiah back to the exhibition hall. The rest of us gathered our garbage, which smelled of salami and mustard, and tossed it into pails near th
e door. Fritz, apropos of nothing, said, “Bloody hell,” and kicked a table leg so hard Chico’s coffeemaker tumbled. Schmautz lifted Betty and looked into her face. He covered her glass eyes with his hand. Schmautz said, “I once met a Chinese man on a bus who told me he lived through Tiananmen Square. He talked too much, and after a while I changed seats.” He shook his head at himself. The pigeon had returned to the heights of air ducts and fluorescent lights, and it cooed. Schmautz dropped his garbage into the can, then swung Betty by the arms as he walked from the room. Violetta asked Fritz, “What’s Tinmen Square?”
Ladies! Gentlemen! Boys and girls! Children of every age! Welcome back to a world of marvels and imagination, wrought by devils and angels, kings and fools!
Dancers and acrobats flashed through the center ring in bright-shining leotards, and for the first time Ted and Rosa acknowledged us. Elephants lifted into handstands, and our tiny audience clapped. A monkey played “Ode to Joy” on a squeaky violin, and Ted and Rosa cheered. Their praise echoed in the hall, and it sounded as if there were dozens of Teds and Rosas. They banged the metal legs of their folding chairs on the concrete floor. They stepped into the stands and stomped their feet. They clapped so hard their palms must have stung. We’ve known louder audiences and larger ones, too, but none more enthusiastic. They offered us honest appreciation, the sort that keeps us roaming from city to city. That applause changed us, and yes, we nailed our performances. Even that day when events had shoved in our faces that circus work was trivial and measly and low, Ted and Rosa’s applause helped us embrace the optimism of our craft. One after another we stood clarified in the spotlight, feeling important once again and perhaps even necessary.
And now, Fritz’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers, repeating what we’d heard—with slight variations—hundreds of times before …
Please watch carefully
(because Ted, this is for you!)
As we present
Our Grand Finale
Unbound by the physical laws of nature
The Greatest Show Page 17