The Circus in Winter (8 page)

Gordon dismissed her with a waved hand. "She don't care. The truth ain't nothing but a lie that folks learn to live with."

 

GORDON DIED
when Verna was nineteen. She inherited the family fortune: her mother's Victrola and red tap shoes, the mortgage on her father's house, the unpaid loan on his car. To help her out, Mr. Ollie gave Verna a job at Clown Alley Cleaners doing alterations and working the steam-iron press. For a short time, Verna became known in Lima for her generosity—she gave freely of her food and whiskey and cigarettes and bed and breasts—and some men took what she offered. It wasn't a bad life, considering what she had to work with, but secretly Verna mourned. She dreamed of the old circus days, longing for the steam locomotive and the romance of cinder, for the sweet promise of escape. Sometimes, she wished it was a hundred years earlier and old Hollenbach was still around to save her. For the time being though, she'd have to make do in a world without sideshows.

How Chicky Bowles Avenged Caesar
and Found His Place in the World

 

VERNA NAMED
her son Charles Bowles, but his teachers insisted on calling him Chuck. In grade school, the kids called him
Up Chuck
and
Num Chuck,
which inevitably led to
Dumb Chuck.
The girls called him
Chuck Chuck Goose
and flapped their arms and honked. The boys called him
Fuck Chuck
and
Chuck Sucks,
until one boy stumbled upon
Chucky,
which started a new theme:
Yucky Chucky, Sucky Chucky, Chuckman, Duckman, Fuckman.
When they ran out of rhymes, they just called him
nigger.
Nothing much rhymed with it—bigger, jigger, digger—so they left the word alone, all by itself.

Verna hated the name Chuck. She called her son Chicky, because he was such a tiny baby, her little baby chick. But year after year, he stayed small, his body refusing to grow. In fairy tales, Chicky saw others like him: fairies, elves, goblins, gremlins, gnomes, and hobbits. When he was ten, the doctors gave him a name:
achondroplastic
dwarf.
The kids at school would find other words:
Shrimp, Teeny, Tiny, Lucky the Leprechaun, Munchkin, Shorty, Shortstuff, Pee Wee, Pipsqueak, Tattoo, Baby, Itsy Bitsy, Runt, Half-pint, Junior, Mighty Mite,
and
Gary Coleman.

Over dinner, Verna told her sometime boyfriend Reggie (Chicky's father) about the doctors' diagnosis. Despite Verna's reassurances that Chicky's size wasn't his fault any more than hers, Reggie shoved himself back from the table and slammed out the screen door. Standing in the backyard in the fading summer light, he threw up his arms and screamed, "What do you expect from a family of freak-show niggers?" From the bedroom window, Chicky watched his father sitting in the backyard, smoking cigarettes one after the other, flicking them like fireflies into the air. In the small hours, he heard the screen door squeak, footsteps coming up the stairs. He closed his eyes and waited for his father to come rub his back—sometimes, once in a while, Reggie put Chicky to sleep like this—but he fell asleep waiting. In the morning, Verna awoke to a half-empty closet and her grocery money gone. They cried for a while, then went downstairs to make pancakes.

 

IN THE TENTH
grade, Chicky wrote an essay for school about the history of dwarfdom. All of his findings were true, albeit somewhat monstrous and bizarre. His teacher, Mr. Flowers, suspected the entire paper was fabricated, but because he'd always felt sorry for the little guy, and because he didn't feel like checking Chicky's sources, he decided to "let it slide." Mr. Flowers gave the paper an A and felt better about himself for having done so.

The Pros and Cons of Being a Dwarf
by Charles Bowles

There are many cons to being a dwarf. In ancient times, dwarfs were left outside to die, either from exposure to the cold and heat or from being torn apart by wolves. Sometimes they were sacrificed to the gods so the tribe could get rid of its sins. In some parts of the Orient and South America, small children were captured and placed in small crates—their heads free outside the boxes, their bodies crouched inside. For years, the makers fed the children's mouths and emptied their wastes through small trapdoors. Over time, the children became like root-bound plants. When fully grown, the children were freed and taken away to some faraway land, "found" in the woods by their own makers, who displayed them in freak shows as an ancient race of being never before seen on Earth. Once in ancient Rome, the dwarf population decreased. A ruler who loved to be entertained by dwarfs decreed that a small percentage of newborn children should be deprived of vital nutrients to stunt their growth.

Things didn't get much better as time went on. In the Middle Ages, monkeys and dwarfs were both considered subhuman and were kept chained at the sides of rich noblemen to provide amusement for the court. Peter the Great and Catherine de Médicis bred dwarfs in barns, like dogs in kennels, trying to find the perfect strain of dwarf playmates for the royal family. Adolf Hitler exterminated, dwarfs to rid German society of their tainted genes. Before they were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Hitler hired artists to sketch dwarf bodies. The drawings were categorized as scientific findings and filed at the Bureau of Race. Also, dwarfs die in the womb from therapeutic abortions.

On the bright side, there are some pros to being a dwarf. An old story says that dwarfs were formed by God's hand from the leftover clay molded around Adam's rib to make Eve. In ancient Egypt, dwarfs were honored: the gods Ptah and Bes were dwarfs. A wealthy Egyptian dwarf, Seneb, and his normal-sized wife and children were buried in the famous tomb at Giza. The cult of Isis associated dwarfs with fertility, depicting them with large phalluses!

There were many famous dwarfs in Europe, such as Jeffrey Hudson who was presented to Queen Henrietta, wife of Charles I, inside a cold pie. Hudson dueled normal-sized men over beautiful ladies, carried important messages for the queen, and advised the king on matters of state. During the French Revolution, a dwarf spy named Richebourg let himself be carried around like a baby in order to smuggle messages back and forth between aristocrats. It is rumored that the classic baby face—the Gerber baby—is actually a drawing of a midget named Franz Ebert. Throughout time, there have been lots of famous little people, such as Aesop, Attila the Hun, Charles III of Italy, Toulouse-Lautrec, the Lollipop Guild, Billy Barty, Herve Villachez, Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful, and Doc.

Maybe the most famous little people in American history are General Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren. Invitations to their wedding were very popular in 1863. On their honeymoon tour, the couple visited the White House as the guests of Abraham Lincoln, who couldn't take his eyes off Lavinia because she looked just like Mary Todd, only shorter. When the president asked the general his opinion of the Civil War, Tom Thumb replied, "My opinion is that my friend Barnum could settle the whole affair in a month!" Midgets and dwarfs aren't allowed to join circuses anymore, so many of them have retired to Gibsonton, Florida. The local post office there has installed a "Little People Only" line with steps leading up to the window.

In conclusion, I have shown that while there are some drawbacks to being a dwarf, history shows that if given the chance, dwarfs can contribute greatly to society.

Because his legs were too small to climb steps easily, Chicky rode the short bus, the one for kids with disabilities. Painted on the side was L
IMA
C
OMMUNITY
S
CHOOLS
, N
O
. 5, but Chicky wished they'd just write R
ETARD
B
US
since that's what everyone called it anyway. Each morning and afternoon, he joined his fellow passengers: Three-Fingered Louise with a shriveled-up hand like a claw; wheelchair-bound Aaron the Always Crying Boy, whose mechanized elevation into the bus—a long and noisy procedure—never failed to attract passersby; and Lonnie the Masturbator, with crossed eyes, red pimples, and a hand that wouldn't quit. Sometimes Chicky wanted to tell the bus driver, "Just keep driving." The Retard Bus could travel cross-country, just like the trains that once carried his grandfather and great-grandfather. They'd stop in some podunk town, parade down Main Street, and in the evening, display themselves in all their imperfect glory under canvas and harsh lights.

But Chicky knew this would never happen. Times had changed. People still looked at freaks, but not like they once had, with amazement and mirth and awe, but with something worse—the quickly averted gaze of shame, the teary-eyed glance of pity. When he stood waiting for the Retard Bus, when he walked down the street with his mother, when he paid for gum at the B&B Grocery—Chicky felt Lima watching him. Instead of court jester, he was the poor, poor poster boy.

Chicky got off the Retard Bus at Clown Alley Cleaners to wait for his mother, but mostly he went to sit on the counter and listen to Mr. Ollie's circus stories. Like the time Annie Oakley shot a quarter from between his fingers at forty paces. The time Lima made the front page of the
New York Times
because Rasputin's daughter was mauled by a lion out at the winter quarters—she'd escaped Russia by joining the circus after the Mad Monk's assassination. As Chicky got older, Mr. Ollie's stories got bawdier, full of genitalia and deformities. The severed finger floating in cloudy formaldehyde Wallace Porter passed off as Napoleon's pecker. The drag queen named Monte Alto who danced the hoochie-coochie dressed as "Monsieur et Madame," a fake hermaphrodite. The Four-Legged Woman named Trixie with the legs and lower torso of her parasitic Siamese twin sticking out of her stomach. Mr. Ollie looked to make sure Verna was out of earshot. "Trixie and her sister was both fully operational," he said, chucking Chicky on the shoulder, "if you know what I mean."

Chicky did—sort of. He was a very innocent sixteen.

One day, Mr. Ollie hustled Chicky back to his private office. An old daguerreotype hung on the wall—a skinny fellow walking next to an elephant during a city street parade. "This here is my pop," he said. "He died when I was only a wee babe."

"My dad left when I was ten," Chicky said, remembering the screen door slamming.

Mr. Ollie touched his shoulder and told the story of his father's death, the version he'd heard from Chicky's grandfather Gordon while they rocked on the front porch all those years ago. Chicky had never heard it before.

"I don't tell many people that story," Ollie said, looking at the floor.

"That's the skull down at the museum." Chicky pointed to the elephant in the photograph.

Mr. Ollie nodded. "I heard they did that. Never been able to bring myself to go down there and see it myself." Opening his desk drawer, he pulled out a leather drawstring pouch and withdrew a sliver of yellowish bone. "I do have this though. Ivory. A piece of that elephant's tusk. Elephant Jack gave it to me when I was a little boy. A memento, he said. Something to remember things by."

On the slow walk home, Chicky told his mother about the mean bull elephant that killed Hans Hofstadter and the tusk in the pouch, but she stopped him midway and told him the real story, the one her father had told her that night in the kitchen, so long ago. "My dad told me Elephant Jack cut off that poor animal's pecker intending to make purses and wallets with the leather." She shook her head. "I'll bet that pouch ain't rawhide."

"I touched it," Chicky said, stunned.

"Well, now you know not to."

Chicky looked up. "Mama, should we tell Mr. Ollie?" He meant the pouch, everything. Verna stroked his head. "Sometimes the truth don't set you free, honey. Sometimes it's the very worst thing."

 

AFTER HIGH SCHOOL
graduation, Chicky started collecting disability. He gave Verna most of his check and spent the rest at Snake Eyes, a downtown bar. The clientele consisted mostly of laid-off railroaders, bankrupt farmers, and members of the Sons of KY, a biker gang who wore the Confederate battle flag emblazoned on their hogs and jean jackets. Chicky shouldn't have been allowed in the door—he was underage, not to mention black—but he'd become a permanent fixture of the place, its mascot and inventor of the Chicky Dance, a variation of the Chicken Dance he performed atop the pool tables. Marty Cutter, a regular, said it was a good-luck dance—IU usually won if Chicky danced before Big Ten games.

Sometimes Marty offered Chicky ten bucks to be his human ashtray—follow him around all night with a beanbag ashtray plopped on his head. Other times, Buddy the bartender gave Chicky free beers if he'd circulate during happy hour with baskets of french fries and onion rings on his head. Business boomed, and Chicky was in bliss. He basked in the spotlight, proud to be known as a funny guy, a useful guy. If one night he failed to show up, people called him at home, begging him to get his ass down to Snake Eyes.

At Chicky's twenty-first birthday celebration, Marty Cutter asked Chicky if he could balance a mug of beer on his head. Chicky did it, no problem. As he retrieved his drink, Marty looked down at Chicky's head, which was directly at crotch level. "Damn Chicky, too bad you ain't female. And white. Or I'd have to marry you."

A Son of KY clapped Marty on the back. "You got that right, man."

Someone called out, "Who says you gotta marry someone who holds your beer and sucks your dick?"

Laughter.

Buddy leaned over the bar. "Way I heard it, Marty don't even care if it's white. Or female."

Marty went red. Everyone knew he'd served five years at Pendleton for breaking and entering—a fairly long stretch. They laughed uncomfortably and returned to their drinks, casting sideways glances at Marty when they thought he wasn't looking.