The Circus in Winter (9 page)

When Chicky went to take a leak, Marty said, "You know what I heard. Chicky hangs out up at the park at night. In the
restrooms.
"Rumor had it the gray cinder block bathrooms at Winnesaw Park were queer hangouts.

"That's bullshit, Marty," Buddy said, wiping the bar with a mildewy rag.

Marty crossed his arms. "At my parole meeting, a deputy told me they picked him up in there during a drug bust." His story was a complete fabrication, but Marty figured no one would willingly approach Johnny Law to check. "Mark my words," Marty said, "Chicky's a swisher."

When Chicky emerged from the bathroom, Marty yelled, "Jesus Chick, took you long enough. You keepin' company in there or what?" Everyone laughed uncomfortably and returned to their drinks, casting sideways glances at Chicky when they thought he wasn't looking. He laughed, but didn't get the joke. For the rest of the night, no one asked him to do the Chicky Dance or put anything on his head, so he went home early, a little deflated.

The next night, a winter storm warning was in effect, more than ten inches predicted. The first flakes floated down like dandelion fluff. When Chicky walked into Snake Eyes, the temperature inside was warm, but the reception was ice cold, nothing but turned backs and hard stares. Undaunted, Chicky clambered up onto a barstool, plunked down a dollar bill, and asked Buddy for a draft. The bartender stood with folded arms and didn't move.

"Hey. Can I get a drink or what?"

"Depends," Buddy said, finally walking over. "Are you gonna fix what you done. Or what?"

Chicky looked around. Everyone was staring at him, except for Marty Cutter whose eyes were fixed on the black-and-white above the bar. "I don't know what you're talking about, Buddy."

"Lemme show you then." He walked around the bar, yanked Chicky off his barstool, and shoved him outside onto the sidewalk. They walked into the alley that ran alongside Snake Eyes. Buddy was in shirtsleeves, his arms and nose flushed red in the cold. "What the hell do you think you're doing writing shit like this on my place?"

There on the brick wall. Spray painted. GAY POWER. A foot and a half off the ground.

"I didn't do this, man." Chicky looked around nervously. A few guys had followed them into the alley.

"Don't give me that shit, Chick. It's a perfect match." Buddy thrust him toward the wall. The graffiti just met him at chest level. "I don't want to see you around here anymore. Got me?"

Marty came out, mug in hand. "Probably has AIDS or something." He started to take a drink, then seemed to think better of it and threw his mug at the words behind Chicky. Shattered glass settled on Chicky's shoulders like icy snow. "Like that kid over in Kokomo trying to go to school and spread it all over."

"Ryan White," someone said.

Marty nodded. "Yeah."

A Son of KY pulled a knife from his boot. Chicky scanned the cold, hard faces of the men surrounding him. They stood shifting on their feet, crunching the frozen earth beneath them. Clouds of warm breath spilled into the sky. Chicky felt tears coming and ran out of the alley.

"Don't y'all come back now, ya hear?" Marty said.

For the rest of the night, the snow fell thickly, coating the streets and sidewalks that Chicky roamed. Last call in Lima was at one, so he stood across the street from Snake Eyes, hidden in shadows, to watch them all stumble into their cars and fishtail it home. Then, Lima was silent but for the buzz of streetlights. Stop signs shook in the increasing wind, and stoplights swayed pendulously, their green, yellow, and red faces clotted with snow. Chicky turned toward home, his heart so despondent he doubted his ability to put one foot in front of the other.

Two blocks later, he passed the Lima County Historical Museum. He'd toured its contents on numerous school field trips, passed it almost every day without noticing it really. Tonight though, Chicky saw that they'd moved the elephant skull from its pedestal and placed it in the display window. They'd framed the 1901 newspaper article, and for the first time, he stopped to read it, starting with the bold headline:

ELEPHANT IS KILLED
CAESAR IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
Pays the Penalty for the Murder
of Hans Hofstadter with his Life
Elephant Jack Pursues the Beast
to the Fields and Shoots Him

Chicky stared into Caesar's eye sockets, empty for almost ninety years. There was no picture accompanying the framed story, but Chicky could see it anyway: a posse of men full of drunken self-importance surrounding the wounded animal, taking potshots. How many people had read this clipping and believed it, he wondered. Caesar wasn't a murdering beast any more than he was what Buddy and Marty thought he was. His great-grandfather hadn't been a Boela Man, or even been a real pinhead! Lies, he thought. The world was a web of lies—written on walls and in newspapers, sitting under museum glass, and worst of all, lodged deep inside people's heads, impossible to remove.

But maybe not, Chicky thought. He took off at a run toward home, but returned dragging his old Flexible Flyer, a blue saucer sled. In a nearby alley, he found a brick and flung it through the plate glass window of the museum. There was no alarm, no one around to hear the glass shattering or Chicky's grunts as he scooted all that remained of Caesar onto his sled, no one there to watch a black dwarf dragging a sled laden with an elephant skull down Broadway toward the Winnesaw River.

At the riverbank, he gave the sled a shove. It skimmed over the ice until it reached the still-flowing middle. The weight of the skull sank the sled like a bowl in dishwater, and in a second or two, Caesar was gone. Chicky knew the museum would still try to tell the story, repeating all the same inaccuracies, but without the skull, fewer people would stop to listen. Maybe in another ninety years, no one would remember at all. He could paint over the words in the alley, but not the rumor, and Chicky had no intention of waiting around ninety years for it to go away.

 

IN THE NEXT
day's paper, the theft of Caesar's skull made the front page:

CIRCUS ARTIFACT NABBED
FROM LOCAL MUSEUM

No suspects were reported, and the curator said: "It's an unfortunate loss, but not that unfortunate. We acquired the skull from the Indianapolis Zoo in 1955 to provide a historical display to accompany the story of Hans Hofstadter. The stolen skull actually belonged to a much smaller female elephant. We've contacted the zoo, and another skull should arrive within the next few months."

But by the time the paper hit the stands, Chicky was already headed South. He'd hitched a ride on a snowplow out to the truckstop on the highway. There he found a trucker heading to Florida. Interstate 65 from Indianapolis to Louisville was down to one lane, and the herd of semi trucks inched along single file at barely thirty miles per hour, but Chicky didn't care. He was too busy picturing himself in the Gibsonton post office, stepping up to the window for midgets and dwarfs, and mailing Verna a Sunshine State postcard.
Dear Mama, You'd love it here. Love, Chicky.
When he walked down the street, he'd say good morning to the Alligator Man and Monkey Lady and Lobster Boy, and they'd say, "There goes Chicky Bowles, the Last Member of the Boela Tribe."

—
or
The Prettiest Little Thing
in the Whole Goddamn Place

WHY DID SHE
fall in love with Colonel Ford? This is what Mrs. Colonel thought: It was the War Between the States. It was nothing but boys and old men to look at for months at a time. It was his uniform. It was his orders to report back to the front and the subtle way her people encouraged quick marriages to keep up morale. It was being fifteen.

But this is how she told the story: She was only fifteen the first time she saw him—at a cotillion to raise money for the cause. He was only a captain then, dashing in his gray uniform and muttonchop whiskers, galloping up the shaded drive. All the other girls wanted to dance with him, but he followed her with his eyes the whole night. He knew when her cup of punch was empty, and a new one appeared in her hand, like magic. When he finally asked her to dance, she refused, but he persisted. And so she danced with him, and he whirled her away. After a week-long courtship, they married.

There you have it. The good part anyway.

In 1900, Wallace Porter, proprietor of the Great Porter Circus & Menagerie, hired the Colonel out from under P. T. Barnum's nose, but the Colonel took the job as general agent with Porter only on the condition that his wife, Mrs. Colonel, would have a decent roof over her head. For twenty years, she'd accompanied her husband on the road, spending her days cooped up in hotel rooms and her nights trying to sleep in Pullman cars. "I'm tired of traipsing around like a gypsy," she'd complained. A week later, a telegram arrived from Wallace Porter that read, "
MADAM
YOU WILL HAVE YOUR HOUSE STOP".

On a hill overlooking the winter quarters was Wallace Porter's mansion, two-storied and four-pillared. But once, he'd lived at the bottom of the hill in a clapboard farmhouse. It had stood empty for sixteen years, abandoned to the wind and rain. Sparrows nested under the eaves; at dusk, they rose from the trees like a wave against the sky and descended on the house for the night.

Porter ordered a group of roustabouts to fix the house and drive the birds away. The men knocked down the nests under the eaves with long-handled brooms. Inside, they cleared away the cobwebs draping the doorways and the piles of mouse droppings. The milky light filtering through the clouded windows lit up a universe of floating dust motes. For days, the roustabouts wore bandannas like masks, lifting them to their eyes to rub away dirty tears. While Colonel Ford tended to his business in the barns or in Porter's mansion, Mrs. Colonel flitted through the house in her black lace dresses, shaking her black parasol at the roustabouts like an angry señorita.

 

ONCE THE HOUSE
was restored to order, Mrs. Colonel spent her days strolling through the winter quarters, paying visits to the circus people. All those years alone, she'd dreamed of a home to furnish, a porch where she could sit on hot summer nights, a landscape that changed only with the seasons, and most of all, a circle of intimates to entertain and amuse. This was the life Mrs. Colonel had been raised to lead. She decided,
My husband mostly runs this circus, and that makes me First Lady, of sorts.
She knew the duties this role required: entertaining, taking up causes, providing a woman's influence, softening the circus's rougher edges by genteel example.

Each day on her stroll through the winter quarters, she brought with her a loaf of bread, a cake, a plate of cookies, and one by one, Mrs. Colonel visited the bunkhouses of the performers. "Now that we're to be neighbors," she'd say, "we'll want to get acquainted." Startled by her cordiality, the circus people scrambled to serve her tea in chipped cups. The Hobzini Sisters, Bareback Riders and Equestrienne Beauties, were still lounging around in their nightgowns well after noon. They took turns escaping to dress, put up their hair, and dot their cheeks with rouge. The Fukino Imperial Japanese Acrobatic Troupe smiled and nodded their heads in appreciation when Mrs. Colonel spoke, although they understood no English, a fact Mrs. Colonel chose not to notice.

After the elephant trainer Hans Hofstadter was killed by one of his bull elephants, Mrs. Colonel asked her husband what was to become of his widow. "I suppose we should keep her on in some way," he said, "after what happened." A few days later, Mrs. Colonel paid a condolence call. She found Nettie Hofstadter half dressed, nursing her newborn son, Ollie. Mrs. Colonel asked, "Would you like to work for me? I could use the help." Nettie looked up then, her eyes blank. Mrs. Colonel leaned in closer. "It'll be better than working in the cookhouse or sewing. The Colonel and I weren't so blessed, so it will be nice to have a child around." Mrs. Colonel touched the down on the child's head. Nettie said without enthusiasm, "Yah. I work for you." Mrs. Colonel hugged her. "We have to take care of one another, don't we?"

The next day Mrs. Colonel visited Jennie Dixianna. The acrobat answered the door in a red satin robe, hair snarled, eyes puffy and bruised. Mrs. Colonel was going to apologize for disturbing her until she smelled the sour whiskey on the acrobat's breath. A ruby bracelet hung around Jennie's wrist, and Mrs. Colonel bent slightly to get a better look, but found that it wasn't a bracelet at all, but an open wound with jewels of blood. "I wanted to pay you a call, but I see you're indisposed at the moment. I'll be on my way then."

That night in bed, she asked the Colonel about Jennie's wrist. He described her aerial act, the Spin of Death: "She spins herself around in a blur of red, white, and blue for the finale. Chronic rope burn on the wrist, and I can't get her to wear a glove. Doctor says she'll die of gangrene eventually, but I don't believe it myself." He rolled over, his back to his wife, and a few minutes later began to snore. Mrs. Colonel considered sending over a salve, but decided against it, remembering the loud slam of Jennie's bunkhouse door.