The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Chief worked like an automaton, it seemed to Fiddler. He was patient. He didn’t hit the leopards. He let them get out of the way of the scraper. But he didn’t pet them or treat them like friends. He just raked out their cage and went to the next; and Fiddler took over with the broom.

  Fiddler avoided hitting the cats almost as well as Chief. Rajah, Sweetheart, and the panther, Taboo, were on their feet, prowling and sniffing. Minny was lying down but she’d get up when the broom nudged her and lie down somewhere else. Rita dashed at the bars if she felt threatened, and when she saw she couldn’t reach Fiddler she’d get out of the way. Sweetheart and Taboo stayed beside the bars, pacing fast in flowing, perpetual motions, one black, the other golden-yellow spotted black. They moved in opposite directions and never looked at each other, slipping by effortlessly. Rajah was master of the cage, so he wouldn’t exercise in any one line. He marched obliquely from front to back and along the walls and across his females’ paths. Rajah was unpredictable. Fiddler had to go slow to keep from hitting him with the broom.

  How’d you like to have one ‘uv them for a fur coat, Gin? —I’m sure I’d love it, dear, if you could ever buy it for me. I wonder if that bud ever gets in the cage with them damn’d things. When do they feed ’em? How dangerous are they in captivity? Those are what, panthers?—Leopards, silly.—One of them’s a panther. He’s black—. They’ve just painted him black—you can see his spots; look—you have to look carefully. Mister, when do they have the big tent up? Mister? I’d like to see him stick his hand in there.—Benny, you’ve seen more than enough. There are other things, Benny; come.

  “They’re beauties, aren’t they?” a kid said to his girl, and he put his hand on her shoulder, twined his fingers in her hair and tickled her so she giggled and wriggled. “But not like you. You’re prettier. You’re much better.” The lucky bastard!

  From the highway drifted a funnel of dust and in the middle, in the clear space, pranced the horses, ready to perform, proud and prancing, white and palomino, brown, black and calico.

  “The horses! The horses! Here comes the horses!” Fiddler shrieked sarcastically to watch the townies scuttle. He pointed and some of them did go, particularly the girls. They skipped away.

  “Mommy, the horses! The horses!”

  The leopards gyrated. The horse scent threaded in to them and they could catch a crack of a glimpse at the corner of the cage. They lay aquiver on their bellies, gorging on the sight. Their gulping eyes were brilliant. They shifted their feet to center the weight over the muscles—sprang! on-off the ledge above the door and caromed round and around and around the top of the cage eternally, never coming down. The leopards loop-the-looped, did edgewise figure eights across the cage from floor to ceiling. Fiddler snuck the broom in and out so cleverly it didn’t interfere. But when he grasped the handle tight his hands hurt him; the scars were stiff and painful, turning reddish.

  Some of the men on the horses were old, battered winos, who clung on through the kindness of the horses and who would have been much healthier not wearing clothes, their clothes were so filthy. Some were cowboys, who sat lackadaisically like burrs. And some were the ordinary stalwart, rough little half-pints who are always found around horses. The horses weren’t bothered. The horses didn’t care who or what was on them. They spraddled their legs or pussyfooted, clicked hooves, did tricks. They didn’t wear saddles. They ignored their riders and came preened and prancing, nodding, nipping each other in a drove like spangled gypsy horses, like low-slow-frisky-flying flashy-painted tropic birds, like no horses Iowa ever could have seen before.

  The crowd grew behind Fiddler. Newcomers more than replaced the horse enthusiasts and it would have required a staff of twenty expert sightseeing guides to answer all the questions. Fortunately one question drowned out another; all Fiddler heard was a babble. Most people seemed to get the idea that the big top was put up early in the morning. They would arrive far too soon for that great event. Others, intending to beat the first wagon to the lot and watch the first stake driven, would arrive much too late. In any case, flocks of townies appeared just when Fiddler was working and, whatever they had planned to see, they all hurried over to watch dirty straw being raked out of cages so dark the animals were sometimes mere shadows in them unless you were as close as Fiddler. The townies gathered and they yapped. Which is the most fierce? Are these animals used in the ring? I wish he’d show us his claws; I wish he’d make him show us his claws. Could you explain . . . keeper, oh keeper, could you explain . . .

  The wagon next to the leopards’ contained three separate cages. Three lion cubs were cramped into one, a cheetah was in another, and a barrel of a jaguar in the third.

  Round as a lapdog and nearly the weight of a tiger, the jaguar was strange. Nobody understood him. He’d been with the show, in that same cage narrower than the length of his body, for many years. But his face looked young, unformed, like the face of an overgrown, lowering boy—a school bully’s. Piggy eyes, eyebrows contracted. He was a riddle. He dreamed and dreamed all the time. He’d wake, whack the scraper, roar and chew the ornamentation on the bars, snap at somebody’s hand. Then he’d doze off again and be safe as a rug for a day, sprawled out with his eyes rolling in dreams, rising only to drink water prodigiously whenever it was offered. The jaguar rubbed his chin on the bars. The musty, pleasant, early sunlight made him blink. His head was square, his coat as short as the fur of a lion and a deeper yellow than a leopard’s coat, the bulls-eye spotted pattern more pronounced and striking. The most versatile of cats, with burly, wrestler lines, the bowed legs of a climber, the dense hair of a swimmer, and grizzly bear-sized teeth to fight an anaconda or a crocodile. The jaguar didn’t give any trouble while Fiddler worked. He kept out of the way.

  Beside the jaguar lived the cheetah. She was like a woman, nervous, light and slim. When she came in heat they would try to make love through the partition screening. It was ridiculous. She was shaped just the opposite from him. Her bones were long, quick, and the graceful muscles on her legs were for running, not clawing. She was dainty and cooperative, with nails and fur and flat flanks like a dog’s, and only the small cat face to remind you what she was.

  The cheetah’s cage was as easy as the jaguar’s and Fiddler was well started on it when there was a commotion between the wagons. A family straggled through. The mother had trouble getting over the wagon pole because of her skirts. “What’s this, the animals?” she wondered.

  “Do you see the rope, ma’am?”

  “Where?” piped up the little girl, peering into the jaguar cage for a rope.

  “Geez, he’s big, I’ll say, ain’t he?” said the son, shoving close to the bars beside his sister. The collars of their sailor suits were at the level of the cage floor.

  “Don’t get hurt!” the mother warned.

  “You see, ma’am, if you’d just stand behind the rope they wouldn’t get killed,” Fiddler explained with superhuman self-control. “The rest of the people are behind the rope and their children are safe.” The jaguar’s pudgy paws flexed unbelievingly. He edged forward. Fiddler decided not to let the lady “learn a lesson.” He yanked the two kids back and sleepily the jaguar half struck at him instead.

  “Oh! Help! Thank you very much!” the lady said.

  “See, if you’d stand behind the rope—”

  “Yes, we will, thank you; we were exploring. Come here, Joanie.”

  Fiddler’s anger was a sodden lump in his chest. It didn’t come out. He thrust his hand in the cheetah’s cage and up to her face. She hissed like steam with pink, wide-open mouth. Her eyes stared away until they forgot, and she forgot, still staring away at nothing. Fiddler petted her slowly, gently tugging her ears. The townies oohed as if he were a hero. He pushed the cheetah aside and continued working. Fiddler used the broom methodically and well. Chief and he were proud of their cages.

  Wasn’t that lucky! Doesn’t that man know his stuff, though, honey? What would happen if one of them things got loos
e! Huh? What would it do?—I can tell you what I’d do!

  The lion cubs were seven months old and the general size of springer spaniels, with forelegs thick as Fiddler’s arm and hard as blocks of wood. Their paws were swollen, immensely muscle-packed. The cubs had seen the horses briefly when the wagon was first opened. They’d bulled into each other scrambling for ways to get out and they’d kept it up because of the fresh air, the sudden flood of sunlight and moving, talking figures. Probably also the horse scent trailed across the lot from the Ringstock tops and kept them excited. But the moment the broom was in the cage they forgot everything else. The cubs were murder on the broom, piled on—40, 80, 120 pounds—took fat, chopping bites, clawed, and hung on. Fiddler sweated, even in the morning chill, and he was hungry and the cuts on his hands hurt from dragging the goddam broom out, jamming it in with them fighting it, pulling it out.

  “Look out how you’re doing, fool!” Something laid hold of the broom violently behind him. Trouble with the townies came in bunches.

  Fiddler exploded. “Leggo of that!” A man had clamped on to the end of the broom with both hands. “Leggo, you stupid sonofabitch! What in hell do you think you’re trying to do?”

  “Can you see the child? You almost hit the child!” There was a kid inside the rope, a girl around six.

  “Hit her! Can’t you keep your goddam kids out of our way? We’ve got to clean these cages. We’ve got to watch these cats. We can’t be watching what’s behind us all the time!”

  Chief was at the last cage in the line. He walked down, carrying his scraper high like a spear. “Listen, you mister, you keep your kids outa there! We ain’t got eyes in the back of our heads! You keep your kids outa there!” Chief was drunk and grim. He was as tall as the townie and about three times as broad. His hair bushed up wild and black. The eyes were wedged in his iron-red face like two stones.

  Ostentatiously the townie examined the kid’s head for injuries. “All right,” he said. Fiddler turned back to his work, making sure to be no more careful about what was getting in the way behind him than he’d been before.

  “I didn’t misbehave in a long time, Fiddle! When was the last time? Not for a long time till last night.”

  Always play along with a drunken Indian.

  “In Chicago you went to every cathouse on Eighteenth Street and scared the wits out of all the nigger girls, and then in Milwaukee you went and told the giant his mother was a giraffe. He was a ‘sonofagiraffe.’”

  “Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah! Yep! He wouldn’t get down off that stage. I told him, ‘Get down off there, you’—hah, hah, hah, hah— ‘sonofagiraffe! We’ll see who’s bigger!’ He wouldn’t do it. ‘Sober up, Chief! Sober up, Chief!’ he said—he squeaked! That guy, he wouldn’t get down. But that was in Wisconsin. Long time ago. I didn’t do anything wrong since Wisconsin, boy. That’s a long time.”

  “Yep.”

  Chief went back to the wagon he’d been working on, closed it, and left to fix the meat.

  The best method of cleaning the cubs’ cage seemed to be to pinch their tails and get them next to the bars and keep them frantic after one hand, pinching and snatching, while with the other you swept all the straw as near as possible, then really latch on to the broom and pull. Fiddler did. He finished with the cubs.

  It’s like a grab-bag! What’s next? I remember from the first man! This is better than the circus. I’m glad we didn’t sleep. Oh! Beautiful, tigers!

  Ajax was so tall that, sitting down, the whole top half of his body was out of sight in the upper recesses of the cage. Even Fiddler at the bars had to stoop to look at him. Let’s see you touch him, mister! Naah, he don’t dare.

  The lay-out cat spotted the elephant wagon, Number 31, just beyond the cages.

  “You’re late! Goddam to hell, you’re late!” Bull men popped out of the grass and went to work like crazy because the bulls would be along any minute now.

  “I’m late!” the driver gave it back. “The sonofabitchin’ truck was late! You bastards’d —” The cat spun so sharp it hurled dirt clods in the bull men’s faces and took off.

  Snippy, Ajax’s mate, watched, tentatively crouched down on her paws, her head cocked quizzically. She paced a quick circle in the cage and resumed her crouch.

  “You, Snippy. What did you do?” said Fiddler, feeling warm with affection. She looked at him. Her eyes had just a glint of pink in the usual tiger gray. She didn’t look at him for long. Her gaze streamed into the crowd and at the rhino, whose cage faced hers, and beyond. Her big body drew compact and then, instead of doing anything, she relaxed and looked at Fiddler idly. The gaze blurred; she looked past him. Ooooh, it’s scary! Lift me up! They could sure tear through a place, couldn’t they? Now is that a male and her a female? They must know him. He certainly isn’t afraid of them, is he? Henry, we need something like that to catch our mouse.

  Snippy got up and hurried in a tight circle and crouched lightly down again with the pink glint in her eyes that was not a color but a trick of light. But she was in the path of the broom. Fiddler tapped his fingers on her paw. Absent-mindedly she rose, circled the cage, came back, looked at him. The pupils of her eyes adjusted to the light. The black shrank and the gray replaced it, perfectly concentrically, as it transformed from black. Snippy looked over Fiddler’s shoulder, scanning the crowd. Her ears twitched back. Somehow, somewhere she’d developed such a hatred for certain people in the show—the sideshow impresarios with their tuxedos and sharpie, grease-slicked hair, for instance—that she’d pick them out of multitudes of people and keep a bead on them, roar and rage if they got near. “It’s too early, Snippy,” Fiddler told her. “They’re not here.” She padded in a circle, crouched softly and stared past him, not searching for anybody now, just staring.

  “Johnny! Say, Johnny! Johnny . . . Johnny!”

  From experience Fiddler had learned “Johnny” or “Jimmy-Mike-Bob-Harry” meant him, and that if he didn’t want to be shouted at for the rest of the morning he’d better answer this particular type of guy.

  “Yep?”

  “How do they catch a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Fiddler said to cut the conversation off.

  “They dig a hole in the jungle, don’t they? And cover it with stuff so’s something’ll fall in?”

  “If you know, why do you ask?”

  “’Cause that’s how I caught my wife!”

  “George!” squawked a woman. People snickered.

  Ajax sat peacefully while the cage was being cleaned. When Fiddler told him to change sides he did, pausing only to bend and look out at a dog which was barking. The dog yipped and ran. Ajax was so enormous the bars were actually no bigger than some of his stripes. When he sat down, again the upper half of his body was hidden from sight. Whew! Jesus Christ, I’d give a year’s pay to shoot something like that! Would he eat me? Poke him so he’ll get down so we can look at him. How much would that big feller weigh? How much do you feed him in a week?

  Frank, the rhino across the way, raised a rumpus when he saw Ajax. He aimed his horn and plunged at the bars. Some of the people were afraid he’d bust loose; they pushed back. Taylor was raking out the cage and he kept right on. When Frank calmed down the people began to throng in toward the cage again but then they stopped as if they’d come up against a brick wall. Taylor didn’t use bricks to make room to work in. He didn’t even need a rope.

  Taylor talked. “My penitentiary name, yaah, Taylor. I’m ex-con.” Fiddler could hear a smattering of words and he could read the lips; he knew the words from hours of listening to them. Naturally, today Taylor was discussing The Downfall of Heavy, the Porter: “He’s here some place, the guy wha’ killed ’um. He killed by beatin’—two did. They beat ’um —Heavy—he tol’ me to make him a suit, he used to tell me that. ‘I ain’t no tailor! Screw ya! That’s my penitentiary name! I ain’t no tailor! Lissen!’ I told ’um. He was askin’ for it. I coulda told ’um in Des Moines. He was a boob! He was
booby! He oughta huv’ been in the hatch! They oughta huv’ got ’um with the striped suits! ‘I’ll make ya a striped suit,’ I told ’um once time, ‘Striped!’—hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah, yaah! ‘Ya’re a boob!’ I told ’um.”

  People couldn’t stand to have that kind of thing spewed in their ear. The townies wavered back, gawking at Taylor as much as at the rhino. But every once in a while some new person would barge into the vacant space, dragging and lecturing children and not paying any attention. He’d get a load of Taylor in his ear, a real blast from behind, from ambush, and jump like a shot deer—” The guy wha’ killed ’um. He’s here some place.”—and peep around for Heavy’s murderers, for penitentiary guards, and wilt out of hearing. When one young man made the error of laughing! “Tee-hee, tee-hee all ya want!” Taylor gabbled, foaming. “Tee-hee, yaah, tee-hee! Tee-hee! Tee-hee! But they beat ’um. An’ oh they took ’um and beat ’um so the blood came out ‘uv his sides and in his ears. I saw it. They had ’um down. They took him and beat ’um. You c’n tee-hee!” Taylor threw himself on the ground, shielded his head with his arms, thrashed and struggled, made gushing motions in front of his mouth and ears. The people cleared out. They came to watch Fiddler. Taylor got up, continued working and talking to “’umself,” and Fiddler had double the crowd to cope with.

  The second tiger wagon was harder to clean. The male was almost as large as Ajax and he wasn’t sitting quietly. He pawed the female and she laced him with her pretty orange paws. He was panting. Saliva bubbles showed on his chin and the ruff of fur on the back of his neck was mussed. He couldn’t stay away—traipsing back and forth, every which way, all heated up, much too big for the cage, as big as four men in a bathroom. Beautifully she snarled with ivory teeth white as the fur on her face and lips as black as the blackest stripe. Her face was round like a prize pussycat’s—the fur stuck out in a collar. She was gorgeous. When the broom blundered too near she sprang, grabbed it seemed like a yard out of the cage at Fiddler, dropped a roar like a pile driver on him. She jumped back then and bounded across the broom, turned, snapped it up but let go instantly before Fiddler could even brace for a fight. And the male kept beside her step by step, sometimes with his tongue out to lick and sometimes with that hot mouth yawned and the four tusks like thumbs ready to catch her head and hold her still. The head bobbed and the jaws that could have enclosed it glided over, flexing. She boxed his ears. She stung his nose. With her starched, prim frills of creamy fur, her orange paws and black paint-stroked, yolk-yellow body, she boxed his ears.