Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (24 page)

“It wasn’t a scream or anything,” he said, “just a loud crush. But it was jarring enough to jolt me out of bed. I had a feeling. It’s kind of weird. I knew something had happened with the elephants. I looked around for my pants. By the time I found my jacket and hurried outside I saw Mr. Holwadel running.

“‘Douglas,’ I said, ‘something bad has happened.’

“‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s by the elephants.’ I couldn’t believe what we found.”

At a little after one o’clock in the morning Christopher Ponte walked out of the Za Bar & Grill, a pool hall-cum-beer parlor inside the Dutchess Mall, and decided to have some fun at the circus. The tent was beautiful spread out before him. The parking-lot lights made the scene appear tame. Along with a friend, the twenty-two-year-old native of Wappingers Falls wandered down the quiet line of trailers, past the tigers, the bears, and the Arabian horses, past the world’s largest cannon, until he spotted the elephants in the rear parking lot.

“Let’s go pet the elephants,” Christopher said to his friend. His friend did not want to go and tried to stop him.

Undaunted, Christopher climbed over the four-foot-high orange plastic fence, the kind often used on ski slopes to keep reckless novices from careening out of control. Moving forward, he stepped into the pen where the elephants roam with loose chains around one foot, in a facility nicknamed the “Elephant Hotel.” A few of the elephants were lying on beds of hay; the others stood swaying silently side by side. A puddle still lingered on the mottled asphalt where the herd was bathed that afternoon with water from a nearby fire hydrant. All around the pen were hand-painted signs in bright red letters that said:
DANGER: KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PLEASE DON’T PET THE ELEPHANTS
.

“Hey, you!” the watchman called from his post. “You can’t be in here. Get back behind the fence!” Christopher’s friend tried to stop him as well.

Christopher, however, refused to stop and approached the end of the elephant line. He was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a white T-shirt that said:
TEQUILA: EAT ME!
with a picture of a worm. He walked up to Pete, alias Petunia, and decided he wanted to pet her trunk. He never made it. As soon as the young man approached Pete from behind, she spun around in startled defense and swung her head at the intruder, pushing him effortlessly against a nearby truck, where quickly and with stunning precision she crushed him against the steel side of the cab, Elephant Truck No. 60.

“By the time we got there the guy had stopped breathing,” said Khris. “He had taken a few steps, then fallen to the ground. His friend and I pulled him away. That’s when I realized: Hey, I know this guy. I had played pool with him earlier at the bar. He was there with a friend. They were nice guys, but they were wasted. The guy couldn’t even hit a straight shot. Now his friend was crying. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘I’ve known this guy my whole life. I tried to stop him, but…’ The friend was trained in CPR, so I helped him to go to work. We got his pulse to forty, but every time we stopped pumping his chest, it would disappear. We lifted his shirt and you could see the indentation on his skin. There was no blood, it was all internal injuries. Every time his lungs would fill with air you could see the oxygen just disappear into his stomach.”

“So that’s what happened?” I asked. “A punctured lung.”

“A punctured heart as well.”

Within fifteen minutes the local and county police were on hand. They interviewed Fred Logan, Doug, and the man’s friend, and decided the circus was not to blame. “The elephant was startled,” the detective pronounced. “You’d have been startled, too, if you were half asleep standing up and someone came up beside you.” The paramedics, meanwhile, examined the body and wasted little time before transporting it to the hospital. Finally, at a little after 1:30 in the morning on the first Saturday in June, Christopher Ponte was officially declared dead.

The season was two months old.

Standing in front of the elephant pen after Khris had gone, I watched in chilled silence as the circus continued to churn its never-ending grind—a trunk picked up hay and sprayed it in the air, a push broom spread puddles to dry on the ground, a shovel scooped dung and dumped it into a barrel. Somehow in the harsh midday light the sharp edges seemed more ominous—the open blade of the forklift grip, the jutting dagger of the tent’s main guy line, the deafening grumble of the tigers. Staring at this scene, I couldn’t help thinking that the circus, like any dream, is meant to be viewed in the dark, where you can’t see the wires, you can’t watch the preparation, and you can’t observe the pain. When the show is in the rings, one doesn’t presume to belong. It’s only when one steps outside that the dream seems accessible. With a circus, as with a Greek tragedy, hubris is the ultimate deadly sin.

“What was that man
thinking?
” a woman said to me later that day as she sold me a hot dog in the mall. “He had no business messing with the animals. He should know better than to try and touch one of those elephants.”

A death in the circus is everyone’s concern—it quickly pierces the illusion of the show—and walking through the mall, I overheard many similar remarks, each one gradually more inflated. “I heard he was drunk.” “I heard he was high.” “I heard he had a gun.” Around the circus, meanwhile, the performers were noticeably more subdued than normal, but still they went about their work with grim efficiency—quiet, determined, seemingly unshaken.

“Everybody seems to be doing the show as if nothing happened,” I said to Big Pablo as intermission in the first show approached. “Is everyone so jaded that they don’t care?”

“The truth is, nobody wants to talk about it,” he said. “It’s bad. You don’t hear me making jokes about it and I make jokes about everything. As far as I’m concerned, you mess with a three-ton animal you get what you deserve. It’s like playing chicken with a freight train. Sooner or later you’re going to get hurt. We have chains. We have signs. We have fences. Those little orange fences are not designed to keep the elephants
in
—they couldn’t if they wanted to. They’re designed to keep the people
out
. Look, it’s happened before, it will probably happen again.”

He nodded grimly and went off to work.

“What do you mean ‘Have I seen this kind of thing before?’ Hell, I saw it happen to me!”

Dawnita stood behind the back door of the tent wearing a yellow-and-black pantsuit with an elaborate sparkling paisley design that ran from her left shoulder to her right hip. Her left breast was almost completely exposed behind a see-through window of fishnet stocking. All day I had been hearing stories. Jimmy estimated that in the thirty years he had been with the show probably twenty-five people had died in elephant-related deaths, ten people had been killed in truck accidents, and half a dozen had been electrocuted. Even given his penchant for exaggeration, these figures were alarming. For those around it long enough, death and disaster seem to hover over the circus, to give it shape and definition like the tent itself. Elephants, to my surprise, have proven to be the worst.

Elmo, who came in Saturday for his birthday party that night, told me he was sleeping just feet from the elephant compound in New London, Connecticut, in 1984 when a naked woman was found dead in the pen. She had a clean slit across her stomach, he recalled, and her boyfriend, who was staying at a nearby hotel, claimed she had wanted to be photographed with the elephants. Since elephants are not known to kill with incisions to the abdomen, police suspected she had been murdered by her boyfriend and tossed to the elephants for cover. Papa Rodríguez told me he was on a show in France when an elephant got angry at his trainer in the center ring. The trainer was able to dodge the charging animal and escape into his trailer. The elephant, however, was smart enough to pick out the trainer’s trailer from the line. When she did, she promptly knocked it over and trampled the trailer—and the owner—to shreds.

But of all these stories Dawnita’s was the most painful to hear. In 1965, while still teenagers, she and Elvin were performing with a show in New England. Elvin was doing the single trapeze and Dawnita was working elephants. In the act there was a herd of elephants in the center ring and two solo elephants in rings one and three. Dawnita had been working one of the solo elephants. “She was tough,” Dawnita remembered, “but we got along fine.” The other solo elephant had been giving her handlers trouble all year. Finally she was separated from the herd and locked in an unlit stable. At the end of the season the owner asked Dawnita if she would work that elephant for several more months on the Steel Pier at Atlantic City.

“I told the guy the elephant was dangerous. She was half nuts, and she had already been separated from the herd. He asked me to work the elephant for one day and see how it went. I told him I would try, but I would do things differently from her previous trainers. I decided not to use a hook. I just used my whip. She had been with so many handlers, really anyone who was around. She was angry. One eye was swollen shut from being hit. During the first show we went into the ring and she tried to hit me with her trunk. It was just like what Pete did last night. When they’re upset they swing around and try to knock you over. I went back to the owner and said I really didn’t feel comfortable working that elephant. He asked me to do one more show.”

Dawnita took a drag from her pre-show cigarette. She was holding Douglas, one of the Arabian Thoroughbreds, whom she led in the opening parade. Douglas was chewing alfalfa into a slimy, pea-green mush. Dawnita was putting a silver feather into her black bouffant wig.

“That night we started doing out act. We had these elephant tubs that the bulls stood on to do their tricks. We had to hold the tubs while they stood on them. That was the most dangerous part of the act. When the time came I was ready for her. I was watching. But still I wasn’t prepared for the force of that elephant. With one swing of her trunk she knocked me to the ground. Then she jumped over that tub and thrust her whole body down on top of me, actually doing a headstand on my back. That’s how they kill you, you know—with their heads. I was screaming. Everyone came running to get her off me, but they couldn’t do it. There was no escape. She was pushing my knees into the ground. My legs were splaying outward. She ripped open the muscles of my arms with her tusks, and worst of all, she stripped all the flesh off my back. I was nothing but raw meat. I was delirious with pain.”

“So who finally saved you?”

“It was Elvin. He was hysterical. He was waiting to do his trapeze act just after the elephants. We were only nineteen at the time. He grabbed the bull hook out of the owner’s hands and hit the elephant so hard in the face that she pulled back long enough for them to drag me away. And then the elephant ran. She darted out of the tent and went running down the boardwalk in Atlantic City! She went on to kill several people in the next couple of years. So did the other one I was working that year. Eventually they both were destroyed.”

“And how long did you stay out of the show?”

“About a month. My knee was dislocated and my arms torn open. I had to take these painful saltwater baths for my back.” She winced in recollection and twisted her neck. “It’s easy to forget that circus animals are dangerous. Elephants especially. People look at them and say, ‘Look, Dumbo! How cute.’ But they’re not domesticated pets, they’re wild animals.”

“Is that what you think happened last night?”

“Listen, I look at it from the animal’s perspective. The elephant didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’m going to kill this guy.’ She was startled, that’s all. She might have been sleeping. They sleep standing up, you know. Or she might have been surprised. She was probably just trying to push him out of the way.”

“Do you think she knows what happened?”

“A little bit. She probably knew she had hurt someone. Elephants are very smart, you know. Smarter than many people.”

Jimmy blew the whistle for the overture to begin. The cast shuffled toward the back door. The elephants lumbered into place at the end of the parade. Pete was at the head of the line.

“And have you worked with elephants since then?”

Dawnita tossed her cigarette on the pavement and ground it out with her high-heeled shoe. “Never again,” she said with her painted smile, “and now you know why.” The curtain opened with its artful flourish and Dawnita Bale marched into the lights with Douglas at her side.

Nights with White Stallions

The ground seems to shake when the horses start to dance. The tent seems to smile when they finally arrive.

As soon as the hair hangers disappear from sight the spotlights pivot to the back door of the tent, the elegance succumbs to a royal “Fanfare,” and a line of ten Thoroughbreds parades into view, wrapped in bridles, breastplates, and surcingles, decked out in princely blue and white ostrich plumes, and led reins-in-hand by three upright grandes dames from a long line of circus royalty. The military echo is palpable. The regal allure is clear.

“
In the rich, grand tradition of the circus
…” Jimmy, as always, knows just what to say. “
An equestrian display of equine excellence…, presented by the Baaaaale Sisters
…”

Dawnita is the first to arrive in place, just in front of ring one. She is holding the reins of a rare black Frisian stallion, Surprisio—sixteen years old, weighing half a ton, and sporting a tantalizing black mane draped to one side of his head. Dawnita is matched in ring three by Bonnie, the youngest Bale, who is leading an equally striking white stallion, Afendi, great-grandson of Naborr, one of the richest blue bloods in history, who was once owned by Wayne Newton. Once in place the two sisters prepare to lead their black and white consorts in a precise display of footwork and dance steps that comprise a “high school” act, the deceivingly lowbrow American-sounding name that actually refers to the ultimate origin of highbrow, the
haute école
of France.