The Pinch (42 page)

Of Lem Kelso’s leering after Jenny, Madame Hortense was distinctly aware, but she regarded him as harmless. Bonkers, however, with his marked-for-death demeanor and his distempered unicorn that even the lion tamer steered clear of, was another story. Though he was courtly in his manner toward the rope walker, no one would have mistaken his intentions as honorable. Kneeling beside her deck chair to help her with difficult words as she read, he practically singed her cheeks and throat with his hot absinthe breath, while Medea took unforbearing bites out of his pant legs. The Malay tumblers would cluck their tongues as they flip-flopped past, and even the india rubber man shook his attenuated head. No one, it seemed, trusted the dissolute clown with the delicate usage of a featured headliner.

Irrespective of the educational benefits, Jenny was amused by the boozy Bonkers, judging his overdone declamations—“The worm is in the fruit!” “Il pleure dans mon coeur!”—as mere affectation. She took his advances no more to heart than the scraps of news that now and then reached the Carnival of Fun. Pancho Villa’s insurgents might kill American passengers on a train in northern Mexico, German U-boats sink American merchant vessels, an anarchist take a potshot at J. P. Morgan—such things happened in places moored to history, whereas the
Yellow Wen
was adrift in time; it flowed with the river, having escaped the depredations that landlocked society was heir to.

Still, Jenny had her moods when she wondered if she’d only swapped one population of loose screws for another. And at night in her berth across from the volcanically snoring Female Hercules, she dreamed dreams that were an antidote to an excess of pageantry. Such as the recurring one in which the circus wintered in a decayed urban ghetto. Then she would wake to the strange sensation that the dream belonged not to her but someone else. She felt similarly remote from Madame Hortense’s relentless attempts at playing sibyl with her cards.

“The good news,” Madame H. had ruminated one morning over the current constellation, “you got Strength in your astral influence; that’s the card with Samson coldcocking a lion. But you got also Lightning in the place of your final outcome …”

Upon which Jenny clapped her hands over her ears. “Sweet mieskayt, enough! Please spare me your predictions. This is the circus: there’s no past or future, only the here and now. Anyhow, I’m not a child; I can take care of myself.”

But the stronglady was not appeased. Mother hen that she was, she warned her cabinmate, even as she massaged her instep, that her cavalier attitude in regard to the clown was driving him, well, bonkers; she was playing with fire.

“Fire,” pronounced Jenny, who’d learned the habit of uttering sphinxlike phrases from the clown, “is my element.”

Madame Hortense groaned and nearly pinched Jenny’s foot in two between her thumb and forefinger.

“Ouch!”

“You watch yourself, girlie,” admonished the stronglady, tucking her massive hands into her cavernous armpits, while outside their compartment the windjammers could be heard rehearsing “The Battle of Shiloh.” The music was augmented by a chorus of bleats, brays, and howls from the menagerie, the whole clamor muted in the shoosh of the paddle wheel.

To her list of worries on behalf of the equilibrist, Madame H. added her anxiety over Jenny’s unconcern for the superstitions that were de rigueur among the aerialists. (If someone patted you on the back, you must then be patted on the stomach; you must never place a costume on the bed …) As a consequence she made it her business to look out for the girl. In her helmet, brass bra, and leather girdle, Madame Hortense stood beneath the wire in the center ring, flanked by a pony act in one end ring and a human pyramid in the other. There she received the shabby clothes the drunk shed on his way to becoming La Funambula, clad in sequined lamé. The stronglady also endured, in the same ring, the presence of Bonkers the clown, seated astride his mock unicorn, and the lion tamer lurking at the margins.

But Jenny seldom faltered. She executed full gainers with flawless precision from the pedestal to the wire, threw herself backward through a crepe-papered hoop; she did a running forward somersault, the most perilous feat in the rope-walker’s playbook, because your feet must lead the arc over your head and find the wire before you can see where to place them. It was during such a leap on a particularly sultry evening that the rigging slipped, staggering La Funambula’s velocity, so that when her feet struck the wire, her momentum thrust her forward into the netless air.

Forty feet below, Madame Hortense was braced to receive the falling body in her arms, nor did the other watchers stand idly by. Goaded by a boot heel to her flank, Medea bolted forward with her rider as the lion tamer lunged from the ring curb. The stronglady, knocked from her formidable pins by the goat, toppled onto the clown, whose mount was then flattened beneath the combined weight of its rider, the doughty madame, and the madly scrambling Captain Cumberbund. Tucking in the nick of time, the plummeting equilibrist landed hard amid the scrum of her would-be rescuers, and rolled off into a balletic stance amazingly unharmed. She took a bow and made her exit with a spring in her limp, while the stunned crowd remained silent, uncertain as to whether the event called for laughter or cheers.

Risen to her buskined feet, Madame Hortense was enraged by the ineptitude of the rival spotters, whom she snatched up in either hand and flung into the stands. The goat, realizing that her single horn was no match for the pair on the stronglady’s helmet, retreated of her own accord.

The tale of La Funambula’s plunge became legend, increasing her popularity, which increased in kind the jealousy among her fellow artists. Although it had been an accident, they tended to view her tumble as a further attempt to grab the spotlight from her competition. Even Madame Hortense remained grumpy about the incident, as if Jenny were to blame for her public humiliation.

“It’s a good thing you got knocked over,” Jenny cajoled her, “or I’d’ve been spit on the tusks of your pointy cap.”

Unamused, the stronglady moped and began to spend more time in the company of her sometimes paramour Professor Hotspur, his gaunt frame reduced to skeletal from the pressures of their association. Her absence from Jenny’s side left the field open to the advances of the clown, who observed to her in his mellifluous voice, “So your giantess no longer discourages Bonkers’s oily solicitations?” He liked referring to himself in the third person.

Jenny was sitting with her feet propped up on the taffrail, while the clown leaned against it, the wind riffling his spiky hair, his wretched goat chewing peevishly at his bootlace. “It’s Marmaduke Armbrewster’s the oily one,” she replied, because she was fond of him in her fashion. “Bonkers is just a big bluffer.” Though on second thought: “Madame H. still thinks you’re a rat.”

Bonkers dug a hand in the pocket of his swallowtails and insisted he was misunderstood. “Doom knows no reprieve,” he declared, producing a cruet of laudanum from which—popping the cork—he stagily took a sip, “but love.”

“So tell me they ain’t stuck on you, Sasha Groszniak the foot juggler and Birdy Valentine of the revolving ladder …” For it was the case that a suite of ladies fawned over the world-weary clown, while Jenny remained the primary object of his affection.

“O Death,” he intoned, “pour your poison to revive my soul,” extending his tongue to catch the last drops from the cruet,
gulp
, “careless if hell or heaven is our goal …” When Jenny had to snicker at his high-sounding bathos, Bonkers mimed indignation. “Your mirth retards my evil designs,” he accused.

The girl issued an insincere apology.

“O Jenny,” rallied the clown, wringing his hands in their overlarge gloves, “your breasts against watered silk are like a gorgeous armoire …”

The girl tilted her head toward the barely convex bodice of her shirtwaist. “It’s percale,” she said, and snickered again. She did, however, remove her feet from the rail and rearrange her skirts, having become self-conscious of her exposed petticoat.

Not as tickled by Bonkers’s inveigling, however, was Captain Cumberbund, who eavesdropped from a nearby companionway. It was whispered about among those who heeded such things—and the
Wen
was a seething gossip mill—that the clown’s effrontery enflamed the Captain, not only for the liberties he took but also for the boldness he demonstrated in doing so. Because Lem Kelso’s own obsession with the wirewalker had yet to lend him the courage to confront her with his suit. This was the same lion tamer at the crack of whose whip four-hundred-pound jungle cats would rear up and walk on their hind legs, balance on mirror balls, and leap through flaming hoops. Kismet, Sennacherib, Carmen of the basilisk eye and brindled fur, they even made as if to maul him, which was all part of the act; and afterward, when they’d been rolled back in their cages down the ramp onto the menagerie scow, the Captain would hand-feed them gobs of beef heart, snuggling and confiding in them his devotion to the marvelous girl.

One afternoon, at a moment of what in his anguish he must have mistaken for clarity, Captain Cumberbund donned his predecessor’s ascot and removed one of Carmen’s suckling tiger cubs from its cage. With perhaps the intention of making a gift of it to the wirewalker, he carried the feisty little creature over the gangplanks that connected the scow to the
Palace
and the
Palace
to the
Yellow Wen.
Along the way the children of the Flying Saragossas and the Royal Stamboul Rola-Bolas, the alligator children from the ten-in-one, left off their marauding to follow him. All sought an opportunity to pet the infant tiger with its foxglove ears and outsize paws. By the time he arrived at the steamboat’s upper deck, the Captain’s progress had been slowed to a standstill, beset as he was by the sons and daughters of the circus. It was all he could do to hold on to the squirming whelp and keep it from being wrested from his hands.

Leaving her cabin on her way to rehearse, La Funambula caught sight of the lion tamer and paused. Tightening the cord at the waist of her robe, she spared him a curious glance—a sightly young man in a pith helmet festooned with children—and was rather touched; while he, in the midst of the mob, lifted the tiger cub like an offering above his head beyond the reach of the pawing brats.

At that instant the boat was passing a stand of liveoak on the riverbank. Perched in their moss-hung branches was a party of harpy eagles, one of which was moved to take flight. Swooping down between the smokestacks and over the hurricane deck, it snagged the cub by its nape with barbed talons and tore it from the upraised hand of Captain Cumberbund. There was total silence among the children and their elders standing in the shadow of the eagle’s wings—which flapped twice as the bird glided with its dangling prey above the trees on the shore. Not until it had shrunk to a spot against the sun then disappeared was the silence broken by Lem Kelso’s sobs.

There were portents besides the bird and the Burning Tower that turned up in Madame Hortense’s tarot readings. Awesome Arnold the human cannonball overshot the net and broke his neck. The surcingle came loose while Lady Equipoise was performing Mazeppa’s Ride and she slipped from the rump of her Arabian with her foot caught in a stirrup. The horse made five circuits of the ring with its rider’s cracked-open head throttling the curb before a shivaree of clowns were able to subdue it. The
Yellow Wen
docked at Rock Island, Buena Vista, and Prairie du Chien, and La Funambula continued to enthrall the spectators on her silver thread, thrilling them with near misses caused by the involuntary recollection of troubling dreams. In the interim Captain Cumberbund continued to eat his heart out over Jenny, its bitterness feeding his resentment of the degenerate clown.

Those who kept watch on the watcher said that the Captain’s ears steamed at the sight of Bonkers and Jenny together, though so far no open unpleasantness had transpired between them. The clown declaimed his verses, whose words (“O rancid night of the skin, you have kissed my buttocks in your covert conspiracy!”) may have sounded to the lion tamer like indecent proposals; and the fits of tittering those words provoked in the wirewalker were perhaps more galling than if they’d aroused her desire. There must have been times when the Captain came close to intervening. What a simple matter for a master of savage beasts to vanquish a mere buffoon. Was it an apprehension of how unwelcome his interference might be that stopped him? Or was it a morbid fear of Bonkers’s goat? With an Abyssinian lion you were more or less sure of where you stood, but who knew what contagions that one-horned deformity might carry? (Never mind that, in her petulant nudgings and bleatings, Medea appeared to view the liaison between the aerialist and the clown as unfavorably as did the lion tamer himself.)

Meanwhile Captain Cumberbund was looking much the worse for wear. From loss of sleep and appetite his cerulean eyes were sunken, his straw hair beginning to molt, flared trousers drooping from his spare flanks like hound dogs’ ears. In the cage his attitude alternated between recklessness and lethargy. Scarcely bothering to incite the cats to their sham aggression, he sometimes allowed them to nuzzle him like house pets, revealing the danger as only illusion. On those occasions the Captain was roundly booed by the crowd.

He watched the girl in the air, haloed in limelight, and saw an angel; watched the clown hanging on to the tail of a liberty horse while the goat rode the tails of his coat, and saw a devil that needed harrying back to the pit. “If I can’t have her,” he was heard to say to his cats, whose baritone growling may have echoed the Lord’s own approval, “can’t nobody else.” Then on a windy night somewhere between Wabasha and Winona, he came upon the two of them on the afterdeck; he heard the girl scream as the clown threw his coat over her head as if to abduct her, and something in him snapped.

They’d been reading a slender volume of poetry together, or rather Bonkers had been reading to Jenny in French. The book was an
en face
edition and the clown, in his absorption, seemed less concerned with seducing the equilibrist than refining her sensibilities. Bending over her chair, he invited her to follow on the left-hand in English the despondent lyric he was reading in the original on the right-hand page. Jenny, however, was paying scant attention to either the written or spoken words. She was fatigued after a trying week that had involved her oversight of the repair of the flying frame and the dead man’s rigging; she’d done double-duty, performing her matinee and evening turns then reappearing in the Babylonian-themed blow-off. So it was good to be voyaging again between stands; the brisk weather at this northernmost extremity of the Carnival of Fun’s circuit suited her. She enjoyed the rhythmic rocking of the packet over the choppy river, the way clouds slid across the face of the moon like gauzy tights pulled from the globe of a lamp. And the drone of the clown’s lugubrious voice in a foreign tongue was a fitting antithesis to the martial air of the brass band rehearsing “Billy Barlow” in the saloon.