This morning Mabel looks content, throwing straw over her back, first from the left and then the right. Sometimes she aims for Whitey’s face with the straw and he tells her to stop it, laughing all the time. It’s a game the two play. He’s a good man. The way he loves these animals is one of his major attractions to me.
“Hi, Jeri.” His face lights up with a smile. God, he’s gorgeous, with his blonde hair and bronzed skin, glistening from the sweat of his work.
“How are you feeling?” He looks me up and down but keeps on working. “You seem okay. I hope there’s no lasting damage. I’ve been looking for you when I could get away.
We’ve been pretty busy around here. It’s a shame about that knife thrower’s daughter. You never know what makes people do something like that.”
I don’t answer, feeling a large lump in my throat. He looks over, sees how it affects me and changes the subject.
“I ran into Margie a while ago. She told me you were feeling better.”
“A little stiff, a few scratches here and there, but otherwise, fine.” I force a smile and look at him.
He leans against the side of Mabel’s ribcage as if it’s a wall and stares at me. I stare back, wondering what’s on his mind.
“Jesus, you have such a beautiful face, Jeri. I like to think your face is what Helen of Troy’s must have looked like to Paris before he launched those thousand ships.”
The tent heats up a few degrees. I try to bring it down a little. “Well, thank you, kind sir. Most people tell me I look a lot like Hedy Lamarr, which is pretty good. But Helen of Troy, that’s even better.”
“Well, after almost getting you killed, I have to slather it on a bit thicker than most.” He forces a laugh.
“None of this is your fault, Whitey.”
“I let go of the harness. Plus I should have never let you climb up into the howdah. I knew Mabel was out of sorts.”
“I was up there before you knew what happened. I can be like that, you know, determined and stubborn. I like to win. It’s the American way.”
“You sound like you’re selling war bonds, Jeri.” He lets out an easier laugh and disappears behind Mabel’s massive backside. I can hear him scrubbing her butt. “If you are, I’m buying,” he shouts.
“Not today, but I’ll keep that in mind.”
I come closer to Mabel’s face and watch her ears flapping to keep cool. She seems very content. I reach out and touch the top of her trunk near her mouth, determined not to let what happened scare me off her.
I offer her an apple, having made sure to bring another one for Topsy, who stands right next to her. She and Mabel
are best friends, happiest when placed side by side. There is a ritual about who is placed where and who gets along with whom. You can’t have disharmony among the troupes, especially when each troupe member weighs as much as a boxcar.
Mabel takes the apple with her “finger,” the delicate and talented appendage at the end of her trunk and tosses the fruit into her mouth. With a noisy exhale, she touches my face with her finger tip, so gently it tickles. The finger is very flexible and sensitive. I’ve known them to pick up a dime with it.
I step closer to Mabel and she nuzzles my neck with her trunk, pulling me toward her, almost as if she’s apologizing for the night before. I forgive her on the spot and hug her big, grey face. She can be so sweet sometimes.
Topsy looks over to me for her apple and snorts. I pull
it from my pocket, show it to her and she gives out a little squeal of delight. Laughing, I free myself from Mable’s embrace. Outside of riding Mabel during the spec, all the tricks I do are with Topsy. She’s one of the most reliable and easy going of the elephants. I love her dearly. I stand back and admired my two performing pals, feeling the tension inside me ease a little. Animals can do that for you, even ones this big.
Elephants are one of the smartest animals I know. They have a good sense of humor and can be a lot of fun. They love to play games, like softball. They can hold a bat with their trunk and swing at a ball. They understand the concept of a game, especially team against team.
During off-season, we often play softball with them and their antics are hilarious. They’ll do anything to win; cheating is not beyond them. Sometimes, they’ll hide the ball by placing their foot on it when you’re not looking or meander from one base to the next thinking you can’t see them.
Whatever they do, they are extremely gentle in the doing of it, which makes their pranks all the funnier.
On the flip side, I've seen an elephant pick a handler up and fling him high across the arena. Another time, an elephant pulled a handler under her, and with her trunk, "kneed” him a few times, before he could be get free. He had to wear a body cast for ten months, but got very little sympathy. He was a rough man, and odds are, he’d asked for it. When this happens, elephants are never reprimanded too harshly, because it’s known there’s always a good reason for their behavior. The blame and the responsibility ultimately falls to the handler. If an incident happens more than once, a handler will be discharged on the spot. Whitey helps them pack.
I step to my left, coming face to face with my favorite Big Gal, Topsy, and hand the apple over. Sometimes I let her search my pockets with her truck for her treat but I don’t feel like it today. I look over to see if Whitey is done, but he’s still scouring Mabel.
“I understand you’ve got my hairbrush,” I say, reaching up and patting Topsy’s forehead.
“Let me finish Mabel’s bath, okay?” he says from somewhere behind her. I hear a bucket of water being thrown, and then more scrubbing. “We need to talk and I don’t want any distractions.”
“Sure.”
I move to the side of Topsy’s face and reach out to her eye. She has long lashes, over an inch long, soft and pliant. She loves to have them stroked, as all the elephants do, and I'm always happy to oblige. I look at her body, clean and slightly damp. She's been groomed earlier.
“Come over here, Jeri,” Whitey says after a time. “I want to show you something.”
I leave Topsy and go to the other side of Mabel, where Whitey waits, gazing up. “You can still see the red spot where the hairbrush was,” he says. “I’m sure it irritated the hell out
of her. I wanted you to see that, so you would know that Mabel’s not dangerous. Any one of them would have acted the same way.”
Whitey is defending Mabel’s position in the circus. She was mistreated several years ago by someone fired and long gone, but it has left her skittish. A skittish elephant is usually an invitation to danger. I am one of the few willing to ride Mabel. If there’s another incident she might be farmed out, left to live out her days without companionship or purpose. I’m sure that’s why Whitey showed Tony the hairbrush and I’m getting the lecture.
He throws the last bucket of water on Mabel and turns away, heading for a long wooden table filled with harnesses, chains, ropes and other paraphernalia. My silver hairbrush sits at the end, looking odd man out among the gear. Whitey picks it up and offers it to me.
“I told Tony what I think happened and now I’m going to tell you,” he says.
“Okay.” I take the brush from his hand.
“I can’t prove it but I think Rosie’s the one who did this.”
Knowing my run-in with her in the dressing room, she’s at the top of my list. However, why Whitey should think so, is another matter.
He goes on, “Jeri, Rosie and I were seeing each other about the time you joined the Big Top.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” he says, straightening up gear on the table. “I’m not sure why that should surprise me, given that everyone seems to know everything around here. Then I’m not being ungentlemanly to say she wanted something more and I plain didn’t. When I finally broke it off with her, she came at me with one of these eyehooks.”
“What?” I look down at one of the long handled, four-inch hooks sitting on the table.
“Then a couple of day
s later she set fire to my tack box. She’s got a bad temper. Sometimes I don’t think she’s quite right in the head. She does things without thinking them through. She could have burned the whole tent down, animals
and all, if I hadn’t smelled the smoke. Anyway, the next day I took her aside and told her that if she did one more thing, I would go to Tony and have her fired. I could have done it, you know. A couple of the boys saw her come at me with the hook. It missed slicing my face by inches.”
“Did you ever tell management about the run-in or the fire?”
“No. A man doesn’t like to think he can’t control an old flame, you know?”
“No pun intended,” I say. He doesn’t laugh.
“Now I wish I had. I didn’t date anyone after that and maybe she thought we’d get back together. She’d give me little notes or presents from time to time. I was sure she’d given up when you and I started seeing each other.”
He reflects for a moment. I don’t say anything and he continues. “I can’t prove it, Jeri, but this business with the cinch has her earmarks all over it. She knows how I feel about my bulls.” He hesitated. “And you. By putting the brush under Mabel’s cinch, she got two for one. That’s why I went to Tony. It’s something I should have done when Rosie first started this business. Because of me, you could have been killed. I’m sorry. I’m more than sorry; this is my fault.”
“Not really. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve given her plenty of reasons to put the brush under the cinch.” We smile at one another. “Did Tony say what he was going to do?”
“What can he do? There’s no proof it was Rosie, no matter how strongly I feel about it. I’ve been asking around. A performer in costume wandering around the Bull Tent isn’t going to attract a lot of attention. Once you get inside, too,
there are plenty of places to hide, if you want. That’s changed. As of this morning, I’ve got three guards patrolling twenty-four hours a day. No one’s allowed in unless I say so. Last night, none of my men saw her come in here, but that has to have been when it was done. The howdah goes on Mabel right after intermission and I checked it myself, so the brush had to have been added and the cinch cut after that.”
“I’ll ask if any of the girls saw her back in our section. Unfortunately, we don’t spend a lot of time in the dressing room. She could have taken it at almost any time.”
“I know it was her, Jeri, I know it. And she’s not through yet. I can feel it.”
“Woman’s intuition?” I ask with a smile, remembering I’d said a similar thing earlier to Tin. Whitey doesn’t smile back.
“I haven’t mentioned the dead rat I found in one of my boots. That was right before the fire. It had its throat cut. I think it was bled out into the boot, too, before it was thrown inside.”
While I reel from this bit of information, Whitey goes on, “There’s more. I found this outside my compartment door. That’s why I was trying to talk to you before the elephant ballet. But when I thought about it and saw you riding away on Topsy, I knew you couldn’t do anything like this.”
He crosses over to a large trash bin near one of the exits and retrieved his muddy jacket. Unfolding the bundle of clothing, he shakes it out. The jacket has been methodically shredded with a knife or scissors from the bottom up to the neckline. Even the sleeves are sliced. It looks like confetti attached to a string rather than a garment.
“Rosie must have taken it from outside the Virgin Car yesterday morning. She saw me leave it there.” I look at him, knowing my eyes reflect the horror I’m feeling. “Whitey, this woman’s lethal.”
“You’d better believe it.”
Running late to meet Margie and Doris, I take a short cut through a small, crooked path that runs in between a row of back-to-back tents for three or four hundred feet. It’s more like an obstacle course than a path but I’m hoping it will cut the time of getting to the waiting bus for town.
About half way through, I realize the folly of my ways. Wooden stakes stick up into the track on either side at different angles and heights. Attached to the stakes and overhead, loops of thick hemp are strung from the back of one tent to the other and across the path, almost like a midget’s clothesline, making it necessary to squat down to get through. Often the tent backs are so close to each other there’s no way I can avoid scraping my arms or shoulders against the ropes or tripping over pegs and stakes.
I sit down on my haunches, taking a breather. I hear footsteps coming up behind me from one of the turns.
“Hello?” I yell out with a laugh, trying to see who it is. “Who else is stupid enough to try to use this short cut?”
The movement stops and there is silence.
I stand up and wait, straining my ears for another sound on the far side of the crook.
“Hello?” I say again. “Anybody there?”
I feel my heart quicken, suddenly afraid. I push forward, picking my way over and under the low strung hemp, trying to avoid the stakes sticking up from the ground in some places like wooden blades of grass. The faster I go, the more I bang myself around. I twist my ankle, not enough to do any lasting damage, but enough to remind me to slow down.
There’s a slight rustle behind me and I wheel around, still unable to see anyone.
“All right,” I say. “Who’s there? Show yourself.”
Again silence.
Turning back around, I note it’s only another twenty or so feet to go before I’m clear of this maze. Stay calm and do this, I tell myself. I bend over to use a battered stake as a purchase, when I hear a ‘whoosh’ overhead, followed by the sound of sharp steel slicing into something solid. I look up and several feet in front of me a still quivering knife protrudes from a line of taut hemp.
Shocked, I lose my balance and stumble to the ground. Behind me there is the noise of fleeing footsteps, crashing into pegs and ropes. For one brief moment I consider trying to pursue him or her, but that moment of insanity passes. If somebody’s willing to throw a knife at you, they’re probably willing to do a lot more, should you catch up with them.
I near the knife jutting out from the dense rope, its sharp blade glittering in the morning sun from the other side. The closer I get, the more familiar it looks to me. When I waggle it out of the hemp, I see for sure it’s Tin Foot’s whittling knife.
Somebody has a sense of humor. Or I’m the worst judge of character since Julius Caesar called out to his good pal, Brutus.
Chapter Seventeen
11:15 a.m., Monday
The bus ride into town is uneventful, but reminders of the war are everywhere. Bulletin boards alongside the road are plastered with posters in red, white and blue, large print screaming Uncle Sam Wants You. The only thing competing with the sheer volume of them is billboards advertising the Big Top. It seems like either or both are attached to any tree, electrical or telephone pole, and sign post that can’t run away.
Trips like this are always a reminder of how much circus people are removed. Rationing is not as severe. With radios and time being scarce, we don’t hear what’s happening on a daily basis. The only ones we talk to are each other. You could say our world is very circumspect.
But the war is out there, always looming. The image of Lillian pacing in the lot, waiting for a letter that has yet to arrive rushes back at me. This damned war.
I find myself thinking about Eddie. It’s hard to believe he was killed only a little more than twenty-four hours ago. I shake my head with sadness and wonder, not for the first time, why? The unknown motive hangs around me like no-see-ums on a hot day. Why would anybody want to kill such a sweet kid? Or was he so sweet? I just learned about his gambling habit, his impregnating Catalena and his friendship or possible affair with Rosie. Who or what else is out there?
You would think that given our isolation, there would be a dearth of suspects. Not true. The circus has nineteen-hundred occupants, more than many of the small towns we pass through. Eddie got around a lot more in our little world
tha
n I thought he did. And in the getting, he seems to have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
He owed most of the other clowns money – some a lot, some a little - meaning it could be any one of them. Or was this a joint effort on their part, payback mob style? Not likely but possible. I need to talk to a few of the clowns.
Then there’s Vince, owed two hundred dollars by the kid. Two hundred bucks is a lot of money, two months’ salary for me. People have been known to kill for a lot less. Maybe Vince knew Eddie was taking off, going back to Salt Lake City, and sought revenge. Vince has a dicey past or, at least, that’s what the rumor mongers say.
Rosie keeps popping up in this. If she did cut the cinch--and it’s not for certain she did, I have to remind myself--she may have done it either because of my involvement with Whitey or my investigation into Eddie’s death. Maybe she was seriously involved with Eddie, even if only in her mind, a mind whose lucidity I am questioning more and more by the minute. If she came at one ex-lover with an eyehook, she might come at another with a wire, especially if he was leaving the circus with another woman.
Then there’s Tony. He sure is anxious to pin this on Catalena, but why? Is it to protect the circus or himself? I’d hate for it to be him, because of Doris, but he does have access to everything imaginable within the circus. He could have strangled Eddie, opened the lion’s cage and dragged the boy up the stairs of the wagon and left him on the platform. He has the strength. Yes, but does he have the motive?
Ah, back to the no-see-ums. Maybe Eddie owed Tony money. I know Tony plays cards with the guys every now or then. I’ll have to check on that.
Enter Constantin, a fairly volatile man. I’m trying not to be swayed by what Doris told us about him slapping around his youngest daughter. Yes, it’s wrong, but some of his tricks
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