He made inquiries in the neighborhood, referring to the escaped tiger in the vaguest terms, to avoid scaring people, but nobody had seen anything prowling about on all fours. Orlando was stumped. How could a tiger, even a mechanical tiger, meander through the streets of Oregon City without being noticed?
A few days later the mystery multiplied, for the gazelle and griffin vanished during one of Orlando’s afternoon naps.
“Could be they eloped, hey chief?” said the monkey, trying to cheer him up.
Orlando was not cheered. He was downcast. He was mystified. It could only be a judgment on him for having made fools of his animals, who were abandoning him like sailors jumping ship to escape a mad captain.
He doubled the locks, shortened his naps, and slept at night sitting up on a recliner in the middle trailer. But still the beasts stole away. While Orlando was counting up the skimpy gate receipts after an evening performance, the gorilla and sasquatch disappeared. Surely this was a judgment. Mooch had warned him against trivializing nature to put on a gaudy show. Repentant, he began reprogramming the animals, erasing their tricks.
The audiences dwindled. Who wanted to pay to watch a herd of furry robots sit around and scratch imaginary fleas? After a while, only hecklers showed up, mocking the fidgety little ringmaster in his threadbare tuxedo. They flung taunts at him, and he flung them back. While the circus animals lounged and gaped and snored, the ringmaster danced. He juggled plastic coconuts. He twirled his baton. He performed tricks of derring-do with knives and torches. At the conclusion of his act he removed the top hat to bow, and his white hair blazed in the house lights, sweat stains showed beneath his arms, his legs trembled. Occasionally a few onlookers clapped halfheartedly. But more often Orlando heard only the scuffle of departing feet.
After his performances, he would put his animals away in the one remaining trailer—he had sold the others to pay his bills—and go sit on the bus, worn out, heartsick. He didn’t bother locking up the beasts; if they were so eager to go, let them go. When he thought of the future, he saw only a black hole—his entire menagerie run off, the rented halls echoing to his solitary voice.
In the weeks following the lion’s departure, all the remaining beasts except the twin pandas and the monkey stole away. Orlando sold the last trailer and moved the remnants of his circus into the minibus. He couldn’t do anything flashy with two lethargic pandas and one sassy monkey, but he tried putting on a show anyhow. Four drowsy bums made up the entire audience, and they only sat through the performance because Orlando had given them bags of popcorn along with free tickets. Once they had gobbled the popcorn, all four began snoring. Orlando shut off the lights and left them in peace. The pandas and the monkey shambled out behind him, nylon joints and aluminum ribs showing through rents in their hides.
Later, he was soaking his feet in a tub of hot water, staring down at his bunioned toes, when the monkey scampered in to say, “You were dynamite tonight, chief.”
“Sure—that’s why they fell asleep,” said Orlando
“Only at the very end, chief. You had them fagged out from clapping. You razzled and dazzled them. You wore down their buzz buttons.”
“Buzz buttons?”
“What I’m saying, chief, is when you slung those lariats and noosed the pandas, why, the crowd was wowed. You ironed out the wrinkles in their tickertapes.”
“It’s kind of you to say so.”
“Nilly dilly,” proclaimed the monkey, which exited by swinging from the light fixtures.
Perhaps he was only getting old, but Orlando could understand less and less of the monkey’s lingo. It was spending too much time jabbering with kids on street corners instead of watching over the menagerie. Mooch would have been able to translate for him. She always possessed an uncanny sympathy with the beasts. Thinking about her, Orlando felt a cold wind whistling through his heart. She had kept him young, right up to the moment when she made her escape. He couldn’t stop wondering what had become of the girl. After drilling through the wall of the city, she might have found shelter in one of the outlaw domes that floated on the ocean nearby, or she might have made her way to the mainland. He liked to think of her living in one of the rebel communities on the Oregon coast, orange hair in defiant pigtails, feet bare, roaming the forests, tracking real animals. When he tried to imagine the wilds, all he had to go on were impressions gleaned from videos and old books, and from tales his grandfather the taxidermist used to tell about life before the Enclosure. Orlando hoped the atmosphere was no longer poisoned, the water no longer foul, the soil no longer radioactive, for Mooch’s sake. She would be twenty now, primed for life. If she ever thought of him, which he doubted, she might assume he was still locked up, or dead and gone.
Orlando gazed down at his pink toes. Water dripped from his chin into the tub. He was sitting in this mournful posture when the pandas sauntered up from the rear of the bus. They drew near the tub and sat on their haunches. He had never rigged them to speak, and so they gazed at him in silence, four dark melancholy eyes.
“What are you two after?” he asked, to break the silence. The twins gathered into their faces the primordial sadness that pandas seem to have been designed to show. “You can’t be after juice, you rascals. I just charged you up yesterday.”
Orlando was on the point of calling the monkey, which could often interpret these melancholy silences, when the pandas turned away and shoved out through the front door of the bus into the alley. Orlando hurried to the window, his wet feet squishing on the floor. He drew aside the curtain to spy the monkey stooping beside an open hatchway in the alley and beckoning to the pandas. As they waddled to a halt beside the hatch, the monkey opened the control panel on each panda’s chest and punched buttons. Their sorrowful eyes suddenly shone with yellow lights. Orlando’s own eyes opened wide with a sense of outrage. The monkey bent over to whisper in their ears, and then down the pandas went, through the hatchway, beneath the pavement into the bowels of the city.
The monkey was creeping back toward the bus when Orlando flung open the door and charged into the alley. “You traitorous pile of scrap metal! You double-crossing babble box!”
The monkey covered its skull with balled fists to ward off blows. “What’s wrong, chief?”
“Wrong!” Orlando yelled, circling the monkey, looking for an opening where he could smash the devious beast. “Didn’t you just help the pandas run off? Is that how they’ve all disappeared?”
“Lay off! Listen a minute!”
“I’ll lay you out!”
Just then a robocop rolled into the alley, headlamp fixing Orlando and the monkey in its glare. A vision of how he must look—bare feet, trousers rolled up, suspenders dangling, white hair spiked about his gleaming pate—sobered Orlando immediately.
“Problem?” said the robocop.
“My chief’s going to turn me into scrap,” the monkey cried.
Orlando gave a dismissive laugh. “We were just having a little disagreement.”
“Then have it indoors,” the robocop said. “It’s 0200 hours.”
“Is it, indeed? Time we were in bed.” Orlando grabbed the monkey by one paw and dragged it after him toward the bus. Once inside, he peeked through a window to make sure the robocop was rolling away.
Meanwhile, the monkey wriggled free and clambered onto the workbench. “I can explain everything, chief. Just promise you won’t undo me.”
Orlando turned around, the anger draining out of him. He felt old, loose in his skin. So what if they were deserting him? He would hold nothing against its will, not even a mechanical beast. “Come on down,” he said quietly.
“You won’t turn off my juice? Won’t tear me apart?”
“I won’t. Promise.”
Orlando sagged onto his bed. The monkey swung down from the workbench and squatted beside him, its fuzzy, triangular face wrinkled with concern. “Hey chief, don’t blubber like that.”
“It would take more than a bunch of mutinous machines to make me cry,” said
Orlando.
“They made me spring them loose, chief. They threatened me.”
“The pandas?”
“The pandas, the lion, the griffin—all of them. They said if I breathed a word to you, they’d shred me into little bitty pieces and feed me to the recycle chute.” The monkey crawled onto Orlando’s stomach and clung to his shirt. “You won’t let them do me that way, will you chief? I never told on them. You figured out the truth for yourself.”
“Nothing’s going to hurt you.” Orlando ran a hand over the monkey’s small skull. “Did they all go down into the tunnels under the city? Even the elephant?”
“We had to dismantle the elephant and hippo and other big bruisers. The gorilla carried them down in pieces. Even then it was a tight fit.”
“What do they plan to do down there? Who’s going to juice them up? Who’s going to keep them running when their gears freeze and their circuits short out?”
“Oh, she will, chief.”
“Who will?”
“The girl, you know. She’s about as handy with tools as you are.”
Orlando lifted his head from the pillows. “What girl?”
The monkey slapped both paws over its mouth. Orland peeled the paws away and repeated, “What girl?”
“They’ll rip me apart if I tell,” the monkey whimpered.
“I’ll rip you apart if you don’t!” Sitting up with a lurch, Orlando grabbed the monkey by its frail shoulders and squeezed.
“The Liberator! The one who led our ancestors out of the disney!”
“Mooch?” said Orlando, incredulous.
The monkey trembled, jerking its head up and down. “She’s what they all ran off to.”
Orlando heaved up from the bed, tossing the monkey onto the floor. He limped about, put on his socks and shoes, straightened his suspenders, knotted his purple bowtie, ran a hand through his hair. “Where is she?” he demanded. “No—don’t tell me—show me!”
“You mean we’re going to Mooch? Right now?”
“Right this minute.”
“It’s a long way, chief, and hard.”
Orlando slipped his arms into the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket. “If those fat pandas can make it, I can make it.”
“You’re going to get your duds all filthy.”
“Who cares? They’re rotten anyway.”
Mind awhirl, Orlando stuffed some food and a few tools into a satchel. He put fresh batteries in his headlamp and put extras in his pocket. Everything else he would leave in the bus. All that mattered was finding Mooch. After the monkey was recharged, it led the way, slithering through the hatch. Orlando followed, dragging the cover back in place and easing down the ladder. They set off along the echoing passage, the monkey skipping ahead with eyes ablaze, Orlando trudging behind with headlamp glowing. He thought of the yellow bus parked above, SPINKS ANIMAL CIRCUS painted on the side, its doors unlocked, and he hoped somebody would steal it or the robocops would haul it away. He could let it all go, and gladly, for now he was on his way, the last animal to desert his own circus, headed for Mooch.
Every now and again during that long meander through the maze beneath Oregon City, Orlando’s body recollected its age and sat him unceremoniously down. While on the floor, he noticed a murky breeze flowing in the direction of their travels. It smelled of exhaust fumes and clothes dryers and neglected refrigerators. He decided the passageways must be drains for sucking away the city’s used-up air. Fortunately, there was a thin current of fresh air near the ceiling, so by walking tall he could avoid gagging. The monkey had no use for air, foul or pure, so it pranced along. Whenever Orlando sat down to rest, it fidgeted about, darting glances forward, its eyes casting spears of light into the gloom.
“How did you ever find her?” Orlando panted during one of these dizzy halts.
“She found us, chief.”
“She found you?”
“One night at the show, there she sat, wearing a black wig and welder’s goggles, trying to go incognito. But we could see through that get-up. We knew her face from the photos all over your bus. The Liberator! Mooch the magnificent!”
She came so close without letting me know? Orlando thought. But then, what had she seen? An old man in a dirty tuxedo making a fool of himself. “Then what?”
“When she saw we got her ID, she beat it for the exit. Tiger trailed her, though, and then came back and growled the directions to me, and I’ve been passing them to the other mechs.”
“Tiger made it clear to the mainland and back in one night?”
“Oh, no, chief. Mooch isn’t camped in the wilds. She’s down in the rag-and-bone shop.”
“Where the devil is that?”
“The dump for burned out juice-jewels and frazzled magic boxes.”
Translating his monkey’s chatter, Orlando said, “You mean where they salvage electronics junk?”
“You got it. Mooch runs the whole shebang. She’s got a shop that makes your old operation look minor league. After Tiger snuck back to the circus, I fired up all the beasts—to chew it over, you know—and we talked about how Mooch would goose our gears and smooth our circuits and set us all purring.”
“Of course, of course,” said Orlando absently. “She was a goddess to you. You’d heard me talking about her from the day I made you.”
“Mooch ran in us like electrons, chief. We knew all the stories about how she’d sprung our ancestors from the disney. I mean, compared to her doings, your circus was Podunk city.”
“I see,” said Orlando. He had filled them with his own loving legends about the girl. No wonder they had run away to her. He sighed. The air near the floor where he was resting seemed to be congealing. Soon he would have to take out his pocket knife and slice his way through.
“You got a hitch in the get-along, chief?”
“Nonsense. I’m fit as a fiddle.” Orlando heaved himself upright. “Lead on,” he said, panting in the stale air. He wished he had a few spare parts for his own chassis—two knee joints, say, and a new ticker and a pair of air-bags for his wheezing chest. But he figured the original equipment would last him as far as the electronics dump. He had been there once on a field trip during school, and he remembered conveyors heaped with defunct devices, robots sorting through the junk and testing each scrap, cubbyholes crammed with salvaged parts, the teacher lecturing them on the text of “Waste Not, Want Not.” Imagine little Mooch reigning over all that.
Would she even want to see him? he wondered, limping down the tunnel behind the monkey. She must have recognized him at the circus. And she must have known whose beasts kept arriving at her door. Yet all this time she had never said boo to him. But, then, why should she? What was he to her? Just a chump who had let her run loose in his disney for a year when she was a child. He was probably a joke to her, a pitiful old man, and she had come to watch him in his silly circus merely to confirm her judgment on that score.
Orlando’s steps began to drag. His chest burned. Feeling more and more a fool, wishing he had never seen the pandas escaping down the hatch, he said to the monkey, “So you all conspired to steal away, one by one, and desert your maker?”
Over its shoulder, the monkey muttered, “A bunch of pure-D ingrates, right chief?”
“But you stuck around. Why?”
The monkey beamed its eyes at him, a blinding glare, and then looked ahead down the tunnel. “Oh, I thought about high-tailing it, but I knew you’d croak if we all ran off.”
“You could have told me about Mooch long ago.”
“Like I said, the others threatened to shred me if I squealed.”
“But why did they care?”
“They figured you’d lasso them and stick them back in that rinky-dink circus.”
“It was pretty wretched,” Orlando conceded. Wanting reassurance, he added, “But you were going to stay with me, even if that meant being cut off from Mooch forever?’
“Not forever, no. Just until you cashed in your chips.”
Orlando s
huffled painfully along, his feet growing heavier with each step. “Mooch never sent back word that I should come?”
“Only word she sent back, chief, was don’t any of us dare tell you her whereabouts, because she was afraid to see you.”
“Afraid? Of me?” Orlando ground to a halt.
“She told us you hated her because she’d messed up your life. We swore you’d never breathed a mean word about her, and she said you were just hiding your feelings.”
“Me hate Mooch? How could she imagine that?”
Orlando slumped to the floor of the tunnel, where the air seemed thick enough to chew. It smelled of parking lots, overheated circuits, spoiled food. He imagined that millions of people had already breathed this air and left in it their hearts’ poisons and worn-out thoughts. The monkey jumped around him, tugging at his arms, jabbering. When Orlando’s headlamp played over his outstretched legs, he noticed the stains, the ragged patches, the holes where his knobby knees showed through. It used to be quite a fine tuxedo. He couldn’t remember why he had bought it. Sitting felt so good that he slid further down and lay flat. The monkey’s malarkey played about him like a gang of kids yelling, and then it was gone. Orlando gulped for air, which came laden with whispers, kisses, curses, murmurs, and lies.
When light divided momentarily from darkness, the first object Orlando could make out was a woman’s face, screwed up with worry, fox eyes peering from within a halo of orange hair. “Mooch?” he muttered. He felt a hand on his chest, where the burning had been so fierce, and the darkness washed over him again.
Mooch it was, all right. The monkey had fetched her—Orlando had passed out within a hundred meters of the dump—and she had come running with a cart and oxygen tank. She was amazed, lifting Orlando first onto a stretcher and then onto a makeshift pallet in her shop, at how little of him there was. She remembered him as bulky, a filler of doorways, and she found it hard to believe that this scrawny man was Orlando, who had offered to become her father and whom she had scorned.
“He made me show him the way,” the monkey whined from its redoubt among the packing cases. “He’s a holy terror when he’s riled.”
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