The trucks towed the first series of floats, each neatly draped with canvas, onto the lot. The flags went up the cookhouse poles, Old Glory and the “Hotel” flag which meant it was time to eat. A hundred bums and winos began pulling themselves out of hibernation in the grass. Fiddler could see at least a hundred. It was amazing how huge a personnel the circus had at mealtimes. Chief appeared down at the leopard cage with the meat. The winos were making cracks about “breakfast” as they passed the wheelbarrow on their way to eat. Fiddler finished with the tigers in a hurry. He did very well, considering what was going on in the wagon. What’s the scoop? Is the big tiger trying to eat the little one? Do these animals become tame for you when you take care of them? Is it true that a lion is the king of beasts? We’ve made a bet.
The coarse sand-and-turpentine lion smell gave the last wagon away. It smelled as good as any perfume to Fiddler. He loved it. Big Joe was lying right by the bars and Fiddler sunk his hands in the handsome red mane, hiding even his wrists in it. “You Joe!” he said. Joe grimaced and bit the air irritably but couldn’t turn for Fiddler without some effort because Fiddler had caught him sideways to the bars. Before Joe decided to make the effort Fiddler had him enjoying it, squinting, rubbing his ear on Fiddler’s arm and groaning with the pleasure of being scratched deep under his mane.
Far across the lot the elephants came gallumphing, bugling split-off noises. The bull men rode, some on the necks and some on the heads, holding on to a corner of an ear and letting their boots dangle down between the eyes—in the circus, all the “bulls” were females. The best bulls briskly wore their men like hats and gallumphed so rhythmically the men went up and down like sailors and could sit with no hands and their eyes closed. Bingo, in fact, rode with no hands. He only had one and he probably had fleas; his hand was busy. The lead bull, Ruth, the queen bull, carried Bingo. She pretended she was going to toss him off. She trumpeted and flapped her ears in preparation. Bingo wasn’t a bit disturbed. He called her bluff.
The elephant boss rode a gray horse which kept the bulls in line by butting and bullying them—a real swashbuckling horse. On the highway that horse not only bullied the bulls but also the townspeople’s cars, cleared them out of the way, and on the lot its job was forcing paths through the mobs of people. It was the toughest, cockiest horse in the world.
The bulls had been traveling fast from the crossing—the horse had made them—but now they eased up and shouldered through the clustered wagons. Their trunks swept above the grass and wrenched out clumps as people flick a finger. They held their heads steady so the bull men wouldn’t be thrown off but let their snake trunks play and curve and snuffle up Black-eyed Susans in the grass, empty Crackerjack boxes. Today the bulls were brown. Elephants were supposed to be gray—everyone knew that; zoo elephants were gray. Even the bull boss’s horse was a pachydermous gray. But the bulls themselves only looked gray when the town they happened to be in had gray dust. They were covered with dust. They blew it on themselves, they collected it, they prided themselves on it, grew bristles on their backs especially to catch it. Like chameleons, they changed color as they moved from place to place. If a freak town had red dust or white dust the bulls were red or white that day. Iowa’s dust made them brown and they chugged along, swaying from foot to foot. The horse lined them up in the high grass where they would be out of the way of the rest of the circus and the bull boss dismounted, uncoiled his black whip, laid the lash on the ground. The men grabbed hold of an ear and slid off or clung to a trunk and were lifted down.
There was an Indian on bulls. Daisy, his elephant, was the tallest of the herd and he took advantage of her height by standing on the crest of her head and shouting, “Chief! Hey Wampus!” Daisy cradled him with her trunk and set him down.
The bull boss cracked and slithered his whip, holding the bulls in a row and not minding at all if an occasional backlash kept the townies out of his hair. More than half Fiddler’s audience had left to see the elephants. From every part of the lot the townies were running—kids and fathers and older sisters and mothers, strung out in that order. The poor bull men, trundling bales of hay, were having a hell of a time in the traffic.
“Rope them off!” Fiddler laughed, secure behind his stakes, when three kids tumbled under the lion wagon screeching “El’-phants” and just about rollblocked his legs from under him. People dashed for the elephants as if for the end of a rainbow. Hallelujah! But the bull boss kept an incompressible zone of fifty-one feet between the bulls and the townies. He was in the center. His whip was twenty-five feet long.
The bulls rocked backward and forward like pitchers winding up, tossed their trunks up and down. Finally the hay was brought. The bulls broke the wire binding of the bales for themselves. They stepped on the bales and let their weight crush down, all the time solemnly waving their trunks like massive wands. Then the trunks plunked down, furled mouthfuls of hay. The elephants ate.
In the lion wagon Bessie growled, sounding like gears stripping. Joe would get up for the broom but not Bessie. She made a terrible, crinkled-up face and glared like a child in the quiet stage of a temper tantrum. Fiddler aimed the broom to hit her in the soft spot behind the elbow on the side. Bessie blocked it, jerking her elbow back with a grinding, crotchety growl. The tigers would have been hopping and roaring, they were so nervous, but Bessie chewed the broom lazily, lying down. Something on it must have tasted very bad, because her lips drew up; she let go and acted as if she were going to sneeze. Her lips scrunched up so high Fiddler could see every one of her teeth, even the molars. She got up, gave up, and stood out of the way. She scraped her tongue between her teeth and growled to herself a scratchy, feathery growl.
Chief-on-Bulls came under the rope to escape the crowd. He was going to see Chief. “How’s your Chief, kid?”
“He’ll be fine if we can get him sober.”
“Where was you last night, Bullfrog?” Chief demanded loud as a bull from where he was feeding the jaguar. The three of them, Little Chief, Chief-on-Bulls, and Fiddler’s own Chief, had traveled together in 127 car and been buddies since Chicago; but Chief-on-Bulls hadn’t been there last night.
“Nooky! Nooky, you cat-taming sonofabitch! We had a girl on the flats! We took a girl out’uv Sioux City. They must’uv had the alarms ringin’ last night. We had her in the Columbus Discovers America float, with the canvas over—cozy, dark, plenty of space.”
“What is this story?” blurted a shocked matron.
“You got a daughter, lady? You keep her home tonight, unless you want her Discovering America!”
Chief made the animals work to get their meat. He made them pull it through the bars. The jaguar’s arm was far out of the cage, fastened on to a piece. “Git it! Git it!” shouted Chief-on-Bulls, punching one hand into the other and strolling down toward Chief. He was tall and raw-boned, with a Roman nose. He was Alaskan. He’d sailed south on a fishing boat to Seattle and started bumming east to see “the States.” But by the time he’d reached Chicago he was ready to turn right around, join the show, and head west again to go back home.
“You brave?” Chief challenged, loud so everyone could hear.
“I can tar the daylights out of you!”
“You see them cubs? You feed them baby cubs, let’s see you. Fiddle’ll teach you how. Come here, Fiddler!”
Fiddler came.
The bull man took a couple of chunks of meat and the lion cubs struck at them so fast reflexes saved him from a scratching, nothing else. He jumped. “Wow, Devils!”
Chief grinned and bent next to the cheetah’s cage with a tongue-shaped, bloody piece of liver. “Whatcha gonna do, Cheet?” Cheetah crept to the bars with mouth stretched full-open, dribbling, hissing, eyes insane. Chief, delighted, hissed back, dangled the meat close to the bars, where Cheetah jabbed at it with helpless dog-feet. She stamped on his hands as they snuck in the cage and teased her feet. Chief laughed and hissed. Cheetah dripped saliva on the floor and hunched in desperation, mewed. Chief
mimicked the mew and finally let her snatch away the meat.
Fiddler didn’t know whether he thought that kind of thing was right to do. He went back to the big lions’ wagon.
Chief fed the cubs and moved to the tigers. Chief held the meat on the end of a prong and the orange paws swiped at it, making a wind that ruffled his hair.
The lion, Joe, nosed the bars. He was hungry. Dots seethed in the brown of his eyes and the colorless drool from his mouth wet his paws. He stared at the ground, the people, Fiddler, through everything as through air. He grunted once with gruff impatience and then once at Bessie, turning his head, to keep her back. In his eyes the pupils were perfectly round and fixed, like celluloid disks, but the brown seethed with floating lines and dots.
“Here’s this fella’s!” said Chief, bringing Joe a dripping hunk of meat and bone. It wouldn’t go under the bars. It got stuck. Joe tugged with his claws dug like fingers into the bone and his teeth grappling, growls rumbling out of him like breakers. Chief drove the prongs at the meat again and again. It took both Joe and Chief to get the meat into the cage, there was so much of it. Joe’s mouth was smeared with blood and he was excited, swishing his tail.
“You ain’t got none of them fellas in Alaska!”
“No,” the bull man admitted, “but we’ve got bears that ’ud make them circus bears piss in their britches!”
Chief told Fiddler, “You eat. I’ll take the crap back.”
“That’s all right. I’ll help you.”
“Eat! You eat, boy!”
“Okay.”
Fiddler felt just as hungry as Joe or the cheetah. At three-thirty the previous afternoon the circus had given him supper. If anybody had tried to stop him now as he walked to the cookhouse, there would have been blood on the Iowa grass.
The Witness
I HAD BEEN TRAINED as a hospital technician in the army, and instead of the gleaming lab job uptown by which I had hoped to pay for graduate school, I was working in a defunct office building on the edge of the Lower East Side. It was a lab job, but what a lab! My cornflakes-and-cream face began to thin. I lived in a hair-raising rooming house, wondering what my BA was going to be worth and what would become of me. At the same time, however, life down there seemed bracingly rich. The pigeons of Venice wheeled over the roofs and the fountains of Rome spouted up from the hydrants. Churches in eight languages. You could buy diamondback terrapins and whole sheepskins, octopuses and sackfuls of beans. I still think somebody who lived near me could have traveled all over the world without seeing a face which really surprised him. The streets had the spicing of danger a young man likes—“Count Draculer” ruled in the block. Next door to my room was a death’s-head guy who wept more than most people laugh. “My wife, my poor wife.” I used to smile when we met on the stairs, being polite and supposing that he was laughing, until finally I distinguished the words. The family across the backyard kept roosters which woke me up in the morning.
Where I worked was a bleaker, Chicago-like district of factories, empty at night. It had been bustly about 1900 and was full of April-fool structures with gargoyles that goggled down. A fop stood on the edge of the roof of a perfume warehouse looking into an oval mirror. A large Christ close to him held a cross, and our wild-faced, collapsing building had MARY along its front in archaic lettering between wreaths of stone. My boss was a man named Darwin Hanes, forty-five. He wore a Purple Heart pin, and ties that announced that he was probably a fruit. He was earnest, kind-natured, a flurrier at work, and rather the pure scientist in his intentions, except that he’d flunked out of medical school and dieted on nothing but personal bloody noses in the twenty years since. Anyway, he kept a room for projects of his own, with tubes of Tb and guinea pigs sneezing—we mopped down the floor with iodine. He was round-faced, pouch-eyed, and he made his acquaintances uncomfortable by staring at them for long, long stretches when he talked to them. Alone in the world, he was in that state seen commonly in New York where you give the person about five more years before he goes into a mental ward.
His cronies were Puerto Ricans, flattered to have an American friend. Darwin had learned Spanish during one of his self-improvement spates, and blew hot and cold on them, both sexually and just as chums. Hot and cold otherwise, he was touching answering the phone, full of belief and civilization, and had a scientist’s pride; then the choked pain in his voice (the doctors thought him a nut) when the man on the other end said he was sending a couple of patients over for tests and expected a kickback. He’d start shivering slightly, almost as though exhilarated. The world was all black, and, bastard of bastards, he’d make his way! If the girl in question came in with starched sleeves she preferred not to roll up for her blood test but took off the blouse instead, Darwin insisted on coughing until, despite my embarrassment, I pushed in to watch. He had a blackboard on which he did gene transposition equations, patterning himself on J. Robert Oppenheimer, perhaps. He’d put on a mystical stare and brush at the chalk on his hands absently, living the life of a genius as far as he could. He would come in in the morning having “seen the whole thing in front of me” just before falling to sleep, and would sit half the day at his desk muttering over the records he made of experiments, without much result—he’d “lost it.”
A great man’s life was variety, so he never stinted on phone calls or shopping around for equipment. He was interested in immense centrifuges, in the newest of sterilizers, and barrels of culture media. He believed busy men picked up the phone on the first ring—“Yes, yes, this is he”—taking notes on the margins of whatever was close. He had a soft voice that strung the salesmen along.
There wasn’t much work, although enough not to pass the day reading, and I looked out on Lafayette Street a good deal, which was a large brutal one-way thoroughfare, always a drama in progress. At my window I got to be sort of a fixture. The drivers sped by, keeping up with the lights, and under the traffic’s roar it was hard to distinguish other sounds, only the most frantic yells. More than once, happening to glance outside, I noticed everybody on the street had stopped and faced in our direction because of some appalling thing which had been going on underneath us for several minutes. A cross-section of business people came into the area, along with the garment workers, but the neighborhood acquired its peculiar tone from the bums wandering in from the Bowery a few blocks away. Though they were only a handful at a time, because of them nobody could ask for a drink of water at the soda fountain, get a car pushed, or ask any favor whatsoever. When the traffic light went kerflooey, we must have had six or eight accidents before it was fixed, since everybody assumed someone else had called up about it. They were shoeless and bloodied bums, heaving, gasping, and threshing bums. One never knew what might be wrong with them and never investigated. Once during the summer I remember a woman sat on the sidewalk from lunchtime on, apparently making different sounds. Several men stopped and peeked up her skirts but didn’t do anything for her. A telephone company driver talked with her awhile from his truck; and a lady and a friend did busy themselves, except that they hurried on all the more hastily for their distress when three cabs refused to carry the woman anywhere.
It wasn’t possible to watch, just as it wasn’t possible for me to be very effective in helping without that becoming a full-time job. No one else did any more, not the priests or the nuns walking through, not the cops, though the cops did whatever eventually was done. The station house soon knew my voice as a crank’s. It seemed I was running downstairs all the time—feeling pulses, dragging bums who passed out out of the road. I considered myself a kind of a last resort. The group at the gas station across from us would boot a man in the seat of the pants and bait him into “insulting” them so that they could grab their billy clubs, wrenches, and tire tools and give him the run of his life. I shouted as loud as I could; I’d point from my window, establishing that I was witnessing it. Darwin never looked out, even when nothing was happening, and if he saw me hunch up from what I was watching, he left the room in
a blaze of exasperation with the street and with savagery and with his own tender heart. He was sometimes hysterically harsh when he found a derelict trying to get warm in the hall but then was unhappy the rest of the day.
I was the laughing, skinny young man full of “minority” sympathy. I’d laughed at fraternity life, laughed at the army, and now in uncertainty I laughed at the city here, although it was the thinnest defense. In the bazaar-like streets around where I lived I began to flinch at the richness, not that it didn’t delight me but because I was living amidst it too; nobody was going to come get me out. I had a girlfriend in the building named Ida with a preschool son and a husband long gone. We shopped from exotic market stalls or ate in great Chinese restaurants or went to the Statue of Liberty. She had nice black hair when she looked after it but malnourished skin—an eager, vulnerable girl scalded as tough as a cat. Her eyes were marvelously brown and big, a very light, shining brown. We used to joke that she polished them, and, without contradicting the skepticism which had got knocked into them, they fluttered with accessibility. The lids constantly closed as if holding them in when I turned on my little charm, such as it was. Since she was the first person who’d ever been specially taken with it, I turned it on as hard as I could.
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