by H. V. Elkin
She looked resplendent in her costume, a light blue ballet outfit and tights that complemented her shapely body and her dark complexion and her black hair that, in the light, had dark blue highlights. Her face shone with happiness and fulfillment, and her dark blue eyes took on a brightness that shone her love back to the audience that loved her.
But now she wore a faded nightgown and robe. Now her pretty face was clouded, two small lines deepening above her straight nose from days of worry. As the tiger sounded again, Molly’s mouth twitched in despair. She made herself yawn quietly, so anyone still awake would know she was sleepy or simply bored with this nightly routine. She sighed for the benefit of the others and got up. She quietly picked her way among the other bodies until her bare feet felt the moistness of the ground. Then she moved softly toward the tent opening that led to the connecting menagerie tent. Inside, in the darkness, the animals were shadows that moved and threatened. She heard a sound of metal on metal and the tiger snarled again. She shivered and backed away from the tent opening and thought she heard steps, soft prowling pads on the ground. Should she sound an alarm? Might there really be a wild animal loose now after so many nights that only cried wolf? She had to be certain.
Usually a lantern was waiting nearby, and she found it. She lit a match, covering the flame with her body so it would be less likely to disturb the sleepers behind her. She lit the lantern, then blew out the match and stuck the stick down into the ground so it would be sure to be completely snuffed out. Then, holding the lantern up in front of her face, she moved slowly into the menagerie tent.
The lantern lit up the face of a lion in one of the colorful carved wagons to the right of the entrance. The lion blinked at her, then closed its eyes. His partner near him was asleep. At least these cats were not disturbed.
But in the center of the tent where the elephant was chained and the lead stock were picketed, there was a movement like waves. Molly moved toward them until the lantern lit up her horses. They looked at her as if they were asking questions. One horse, the white one, pawed the ground and snorted.
“What is it?” Molly asked them. But they could not answer her question any more than she could answer theirs.”I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. Oh, if only you could talk.”
She heard steps moving out the front entrance and away. She moved quickly about counting the animals, and they were all there. Her six horses. The elephant swaying from side to side in a dance that was comically graceful for such a huge beast. The zebra. The camel. Any one of them could have been dangerous if free and he decided to forget his training and where his next meal was coming from.
The giraffe craned its head down and licked her hand. Then she felt better. That was a sign of good luck to circus people, and Molly decided it was a sign that whatever was wrong would go away soon. She smiled at the animal and whispered, “Thank you.”
There was a heavy stillness now. If those were steps she had heard, they were gone. Even the animals had quieted down. But she had to be certain they were all there.
She went back to the entrance to the main tent and walked around the perimeter, looking into each of the cages. Both lions were asleep now and did not react to the beam from her lantern. The gorilla stared back at her but did not move. Then the two cages, each with a tiger. The first one—a Bengal like the other—snarled when Molly shone her light through the bars. But then it turned away.
When Molly got to the last cage, having become more certain that everything was back to normal now, she was not prepared for the reaction from the Bengal called Anna. As soon as the light appeared outside the bars, the tiger went mad, and gave out a loud whine that made Molly’s skin crawl. The tiger crouched toward the flame, then leapt at the bars with a snarl, making the cage rattle. Molly moved quickly backward, tripped on something and fell to the ground. She quickly stood up again and shone the lantern in front of her. The tiger stared back at her in a waiting attitude, its mouth open and the lips curled back to show more teeth, but it made no noise. Molly kept the lantern high and her eyes on the tiger as she knelt to feel what she had tripped over. She felt a wooden handle, then glanced down to discover it was one of the feeding forks. Someone had been very careless leaving it there. Its metal tines might just as easily have gone through one of Molly’s bare feet. She shivered at the thought of it, not just at the pain that might have been, but more at the thought that her feet were probably the most important parts of her body in her horse act, and such an injury could put her out of commission as far as her act was concerned. She picked up the fork to put it where it would not be dangerous.
Then the tiger went wild again, snarling viciously, backing away to the corner of the cage, crouching to jump and hissing. Molly let the fork fall back to the ground. And Anna went silent, her golden, lamplit eyes staring hatefully at Molly.
Something touched Molly’s shoulder. With an instantaneous reaction like a recoil, Molly crouched away from the touch, spun around with the lantern upheld in one hand and picking up the fork with the other, pointing its tines toward whatever touched her. The tiger jumped against the bars of the cage when the fork appeared in view, then crouched back into the corner again. Molly lowered the fork back down when she saw Maroney standing there, the palms of his hands held out toward her in a restraining gesture.
“It is fine, Molly,” he reassured her. “It is only the boss.”
Molly rubbed her forehead as if to smooth the deepening lines between her nose. “I’m sorry, Fred. You scared me.”
Frederick Maroney smiled back at her, that great warm smile of his beneath his black mustache, the smile you could always depend on in good times and bad, the one you needed during the bad times. Maroney was only a little taller than Molly. His black hair curled like an ocean of waves flowing over his head and falling in a waterfall behind. He had light blue eyes that, unlike his mouth, did not know how to smile always. Still, no matter what the situation, he could always make you laugh. It was, in fact, the warmth of his personality that held the circus together through hard times, simply because he was the kind of man that people liked to work for, even on those few occasions when wages had been postponed. Everyone knew he would, as a last resort, sell his beloved circus before he would let a single member of the troupe go hungry.
His smile broke into a gentle laugh. “I did not know I could scare . . . what do they say? ... a flea!” He started toward her.
“No!” She stopped him.
“What?” He froze still. Could she really be that frightened of him? “Molly!”
“The fork,” she said. “Be careful not to step on the fork.”
“Oh!” he laughed and reached down to pick it up.
“No!” she said again.
He looked up from a crouch, surprised.
“It makes Anna mad to see it,” Molly explained. “Here, let me.” She handed him the lantern, then knelt down and took the handle and slid the fork along the ground over to a side post where she sat it up. Then she walked back into the lantern light. “I think someone’s been antagonizing her with the fork.”
“But, Molly! We are the same people we were last year. Who would do such a thing?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head in frustration. “Was there anyone in the audience today we had trouble with?”
“No, no one that I am aware of. You?”
“No, no one.”
Maroney shrugged broadly. “Everyone loves the circus here. They wait for it. The look forward to it for months. Why, Molly, in this same spot last year, there was a woman who traveled thirty miles so her children could see the circus.”
“That isn’t unusual. They sometimes come much farther than that, don’t they?”
“Yes, Molly, but this woman’s husband had committed suicide that very day. Well, the man was dead. There was nothing that could be done to fix that. The woman saw no sense in making matters worse by keeping her children from the circus they had been looking forward to for so long.
First they had a good time at the show, then they went home and buried the husband.”
Molly was surprised to hear herself giggling.
“After all,” Maroney went on. “the husband would wait for them. But the circus would not. It was the only sensible thing to do.” He looked at her with his eyes bugging out, fascinated by the astounding truth of it, with an astonished admiration for the common sense the newly-widowed lady had demonstrated.
Molly broke into laughter in spite of herself. Maroney laughed, too, and now without the fork between them he went to her and gave her a big, fatherly hug. “It is always best to laugh,” he said. “That, too, is the only sensible thing,”
She put her arms around him and hugged him back. “It just doesn’t seem right to be laughing right now.” She stood back and looked into his eyes, ashamed that she had broken an unwritten law. “I didn’t mean that. Forget I said it.”
“It is forgotten.” He put a thumb on her forehead and pressed as though to push away the worry lines he saw there. “You should laugh more. It keeps you looking young. The lines, they do not then show here on your head.” He traced with his thumb down to the edge of her mouth. “But here they would show from smiling. You are . . . how old? Twenty-seven?”
She nodded.
His face took on the comical sadness of the clown. “You look twenty-eight.”
She laughed again. “Thank you, Fred. Oh, thank you so much!”
“Come, let us walk.” He took her arm with one hand and the lantern in the other and led her out of the menagerie tent into the moonlight. As they walked, he said, “You do not mind a stroll with an old man, do you?”
“You’re not old.”
“Older than I look, old enough to be your grandfather. It is from all the laughing that I look younger. To run a show like this, it is important to laugh always or, sometimes, you would cry.”
“Like now?”
He ignored the question. “You know, in my parents’ clothes and walk around the town square. A promenade. It was a ritual. People would come to look at other people and to be seen themselves. All the cares at other people and to be seen themselves. All the cares of the week were put aside for a while and everyone let themselves feel beautiful and rich and successful. And so we walk, too, eh?”
Somewhere, far off, a coyote howled at the moon.
Maroney gestured to the sound. “Someone wishes to communicate.”
Then, closer to them, they heard another coyote responding with a series of short yips and then a howl, long and high in the air.
“I have heard,” Maroney said, “they are sometimes called song dogs. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“It is difficult to tell why, is it not? Not very pretty, is it?”
She smiled. “I suppose it is to another coyote.”
He laughed. “Yes! I suppose you have to be a coyote to appreciate it. How do you feel now, Molly?”
“I’m fine now. I was worried before, but I’m fine now.”
“Good. I am fine now, too. Now let us think a little bit, not from the depth of worry but from the height of happiness. The only way to view problems is from an enlightened point of view. Now tell me, Molly, have you any idea what has been happening lately?”
“No, only that something is.”
“And from what you said about the feeding fork and Anna . . . Am I to assume from that that you think we have a saboteur in our midst?”
“I hate to think it, Fred.” She hung her head in thought.
He put his hand under her chin and tilted it back up. “Uh uh! From the height of happiness, remember?”
She smiled. “Sorry. But it’s the only answer I’ve got, that someone has been antagonizing the tiger.”
“Some negative element rearing its head in our happy band.”
“Yes. And animals are sensitive to things like that. And people who work with animals are, too.”
“Have you any idea who it might be?”
“No. That’s the problem. It makes no sense for any of us to be doing it. We’ve all been together before. We’re a family. If there’s trouble anywhere in the circus, it hurts everyone somehow. That’s why I was wondering if we had any enemies on the outside. It’s hard to believe it could be anyone inside.”
“I will ask Eric.”
“Why Eric?”
“If the tiger is being antagonized, who is in the most danger from this? I tell you frankly, I thought his act was in great trouble today. Did you not see? The tigers, they were restless, not the same. And not the restless they are trained to be in the ring, but something more.”
“Yes, Eric is in the most danger. But he has no enemies that I know of. We’re never in one place long enough for any of us to make enemies.”
“Except, perhaps, among each other.”
“Is it possible?”
Maroney was silent a moment. He considered telling her it was possible, even though it was true what she suggested, that for one member of the circus family to hurt another was really a form of suicide. If you hurt one member of the family, you hurt the circus. And if you hurt the circus, you hurt yourself. That was all true. But Molly had not accounted for the possibility of madness, for one man to act against another because he had lost the reason that would otherwise make him consider his acts as they affected the community of which he was a part. If a man had gone mad, the rules would not apply. He could act senselessly, be a threat to everyone including himself, without caring. Maroney saw no reason to trouble Molly any more than she was already. He could see no purpose in that.
Nor was there any point in mentioning that if anyone in the circus could provoke an enemy, it was Eric Hansen. Hansen had been with the Maroney Circus for four years now, starting as an apprentice of an older animal trainer. When the blond young man first appeared on the scene, he immediately inspired confidence in others, and in the animals he learned to train. But then things began to happen which made Maroney uneasy. First, the veteran trainer was supposed to continue for one more full season until Hansen knew all the ropes, but he left halfway through the season.
“Why?” Maroney had demanded of him that day outside the cookhouse. “We had an agreement, one whole season.”
“Personal reasons, Fred. I hope you won’t hold me to my promise. Don’t worry, the kid can handle it.”
Maroney could not be sure. Did he detect a trace of cynicism in the old trainer’s voice? It had never been there before, not in all the years they had worked together.
“Are you sure?” Maroney asked him.
“Don’t worry about Eric. He can take care of himself. He can and he will.”
Maroney was more certain now that the old trainer was being cynical about the prospects of Hansen taking his place with the circus. The trainer was trying to tell Maroney something, maybe even warn him.
“Joe,” Maroney said, “do you think Eric’s going to be a good circus man?”
“You’ve seen him with the animals, Fred.”
“Joe!” Maroney was certain the old man was being evasive. “I asked you if he would be a good circus man.”
“Well, you never know.”
“Do you know?”
Joe hesitated. “No, I don’t. I can’t tell.” He was still being evasive.
Maroney, out of respect for the old employee, out of respect for the old tradition of loyalty among circus folk, did not pursue it. He knew he could probably not get Joe to say what was troubling him, why he was leaving early, what he really thought of Hansen. Joe was in a painful quandary, torn between his loyalty to the circus and his loyalty to each of its members. He was disturbed about Hansen, certainly, but could not voice his concern because Hansen had become a member of the circus and therefore deserved a chance to work out his own problems. And yet the problems, whatever they were, were bad enough to make a man who had spent his whole life in love with the circus want to leave it sooner than necessary.
“Never mind Eric then,” Maroney said. “For old t
imes’ sake, Joe, I’m asking you to please stay with us through the season.”
“I’d like to, Fred. But the fact is I’ve lost heart. The kid’s even been able to show me things I’m doing wrong in the ring. Now when I go in there, I’m scared again, the way I used to be when I was a kid and just starting.”
“Well, you damned well ought to be, Joe. Nobody ever said you shouldn’t be. Now just remember, what was it you used to tell me about that?”
Joe shook his head. “I know. I know.”
“What was it, Joe?”
The words came out slowly, as though Joe was pulling them out of the long-buried past. “Don’t expect to get rid of your own fear. Your job is to get rid of the cat’s fear.”
“Well,” Maroney said, “don’t you believe that anymore?”
“Yes, I still believe it.”
“Then what’s wrong with being scared now?”
“I’ve lost my nerve, Fred. I can’t cut it anymore. I see Eric working with the cats, and I know I should’ve retired sooner. I want to leave this business alive. That’s all. I’m sorry, but try to see it my way.”
The only thing left Maroney was to shake Joe’s hand and reassure the man that there were no hard feelings. He did that, and they threw a big party for Joe before he left. Maroney remembered a part of a little speech Eric made then.
“It’s a mark of Joe’s professionalism,” Hansen had said, “that he has been able to teach me everything he knows in such a short time.” It was a strange thing to say at a time like that, a compliment or an insult, depending on how you looked at it. The crowd was silent a moment, then turned it into a compliment by applauding. Hansen should have sat down and let it go at that, but he went on. “It is my intention to take the act Joe has developed and carry on from there, just as he must have done when he learned the act from someone else. In this way, as a tradition is passed down from one trainer to another, the art develops and grows. I’m sure that when our sort of act began ninety years ago, the men who were the pioneers would never have dared to dream of the things we are doing now. I feel I will have profited from Joe’s training if I develop an act he never dreamed of, and I’m sure that’s what he would want.”