The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (16 page)

I made the whip crack a few more times before having to quit.
Next day, I was at it again, forgoing my sleep, giving Louis the may-Ihave-another-piece-of-horsemeat? act, spending a hot two hours
twirling a whip over my head and yelling, "Yah!" That day I figured
out a good way to get the popper to go off more ferociously was to jerk
the whip back just as it was about to snap. While this certainly did add
a zing, it was also a little dangerous; midway through the session I misfired and the whip end rebounded and caught me on the cheek, leaving
a red welt that burned for days. Was lucky I didn't put my eye out.

My main problem now was accuracy: I couldn't get close enough
to those flies so they'd so much as get nervous, never mind leave their
supper. Season ended and we came back to Venice and I got myself a
room at the St. Mark's, and like many of the women who didn't get jobs
over the winter I danced a little burlesque in town to keep myself fed.
But only a little. During the day I devoted myself to whip training
and staying near the three tigers I hoped to work. Day after day after
day, I practised. If Al G. was interested in what I was doing, he didn't
show it-in fact, he never once came round to check my progress or
offer encouragement or tell me what I was doing wrong, something I
attributed to his being so busy with skirt-chasing and running a circus.

Instead he sent Dan. One day, with no warning or footfalls
approaching, he was there, watching me, mouth parted, till finally I lost
my composure and said, "You got something to say, Dan, then say it."

His hands got lost quick in his pockets and his shoulders shrugged
up and he watched his own foot make a pattern in the dirt, until finally
he upped and outed with "I knows what you doin' wrong, Miss Stark."

"Well then Dan why don't you tell me what that is?"

"Gots to aim two feet behind the piece of meat. Gots to pretend
like its in the way. Gots to whip through the target, ma'am. Not at it."

"Is that a fact?"

"Natural-born fact. I seen Al G. do it. Back on the dog-andpony. He may not look it now, but that man he's got the gift too."

We looked at each other.

"Was that all, Dan?"

"Yes ma'am," he said before walking off.

Standing alone with my whip and my stinking meat I saw a little
red, for Dan's advice sounded so ridiculous I wondered if it was something Al G. had told him to say so as to put me even further off track.
Still, I wasn't having much luck my own way, which was to stare at that
putrid meat for a good five seconds before letting fly. So I gave it a
whirl Dan's way. Didn't even really try, seeing as I had no confidence
in his suggestion, just delivered the whip in that general direction, wrist
snapping at some imaginery spot of dirt maybe two feet behind.

The meat bounced skyward and set the flies to buzzing.

After that, it was a matter of me wanting to hit that piece of meat
every time and therefore not being able to do so, no way nohow, and
wasting three more days before realizing the secret of doing anything
artful is to try as hard as you can while at the same time not trying at
all. With this bit of swami knowledge under my belt, I soon got so eight
times out of ten I could send those flies into a commotion, though I'd
long figured out that no one, and that included Louis Roth, could ever
hit one specific fly while leaving another be.

So I went and got Louis. Rapped on the door of his parked
Pullman car and told him I had something he needed to see.
Immediately I knew he'd been drinking, for his accent was thicker than
usual, almost to the point I couldn't understand him: "Vell yell yell, ze
girl she bass somessing to show ze boss, mmmmmmm?" We headed
through the backyard, Louis walking stiff and rapid-fire as always
though with the occasional off-course sidestep. Every few feet, I had to
skip a little just to keep up. We reached my training space, out in an
empty yard behind the menage tent. There he watched as I picked up
the whip and aimed and not-aimed at the same time. After a quick arm
twirl, I let loose a wrist snap that was a millisecond tardy. A dozen feet
away, a pair of flies were sniffing and dancing over the target. One was way over on the left, one was way over on the right, and the fact my
slightly off-course lashing got close enough to scare the right-side fly
only I put down to sheer fluke.

Louis's mouth went to hang open, though he stopped himself just
as his lower lip cleared his teeth. I watched his jaw muscles grind
beneath tight skin as he looked at that day's meat being bothered by a
single silent fly. just kept looking at it, he did, until finally he turned to
me and barked, "Come."

So what did I, twenty-four-year-old Mary Haynie of West
Kentucky slash Mary Aganosticus of Louisville slash Mary Williams
from East Texas slash Mabel Stark of the St. Mark's Hotel do? Followed
him, best as I was able, for Louis practically bolted through the backyard, across the midway and into the training barn. Without benefit of
a cage boy, he started shifting cages so his two best lions, Humpy and
Bill, connected to the tunnel leading into the steel arena. This exertion
made him sweat, and this caused him to give off the scent of alcohol
gone sweet with exertion: was like camphor lozenges, though stronger.
He yanked the tunnel door rope and the lions filed into the tunnel. He
opened the second tunnel door and they entered the ring. Then he
brushed by me-not so much as an excuse me-and stepped inside.
Humpy roared and Bill flopped on his side and Louis barked,
"Children! Seats!"

Humpy took the pedestal to the left and Bill the pedestal to the
right. Louis stood between them, dropping his whip on the floor. Then
he reached out and pressed a hand against each lion's throat, both arms
disappearing to their elbows in tawny mane. With this, the lions lifted
their heads and placed their chins on Louis's shoulders. Louis turned to
his right and pressed his lips up against Bill's mouth and he kissed the
lion for five or ten seconds. Then he turned to Humpy and kissed him
even harder than he'd kissed Bill, his hand furrowing through Humpy's
mane to the back of Humpy's head before grabbing up a handful of cat
hair and pulling, so that Humpy's gums and lips and tongue were forced over the lower half of Louis Roth's face, smearing it with saliva
and hay bits and fragments of horse. Then, as man and animal kissed,
Louis slipped his hands into the sides of the animal's mouth and, with a
steady pressure, craned it wide open. Head then followed hands, Louis
now inside a lion from the neck up, the tips of Humpy's incisors making pointy-shaped impressions in the skin of Louis's neck.

In a second Louis was out, not a hair mussed though his face was
dampened and speckled with mouth debris. He walked out of the ring
and stood beside me, smelling of cat and whisky. We were both silent.
His jaw muscles worked and he folded his arms tight over his stomach.
The things that man could say without speaking.

I opened the cage door and stepped inside and walked to the point
between the pedestals. I was shaking inside, half from fear and half
from wanting to do this so bad. Humpy grinned and Bill growled, a
deep distant-thunder rumble that got inside and roped up and down my
spine and got turned into my own voice once it reached the inside of
my head. Go back, was what it said.

Instead I craned my neck and kissed the lion as he was still growling and maybe thinking of having himself a kill, though he calmed with
my lips against his and my hand tickling his neck. When his growling
stopped I turned and put my lips to Humpy and kissed him too, the big
cat lolling his tongue out of his mouth so it lathered my tongue and teeth
and gums before parting his jaws a little to signal he expected hands to
slip inside. Taking this cue I pulled his jaws apart and put my head in the
animal's mouth, and it was while inside Humpy's head I felt myself go
dead calm, for at that moment there was no question what was going to
get me-was going to be the jaws of a lion, reeking of tartar and animal
flesh going to rot between molars, and in this certainty there was a
warmth difficult to describe. Fact was, I didn't even want to pull my
head back out.

After a bit Humpy widened his jaws. When I felt the point of his
teeth leave my neck I pulled out. I left the cage and stood beside Louis, and for the next thirty or forty seconds we had ourselves a conversation
without one word being passed. Humpy and Bill had both flopped and
were flicking at flies with their tails. When Louis finally spoke, was for
the record only.

"All right," he said. "Tomorrow vee start."

That night I went back to my room and did a curious thing. I'd kept
some mementoes from my pre-Stark life, cards and letters and even
a menu from the Continental in San Francisco. I was sitting on my
cot, looking at them, when a hopeful feeling came over me and the
next thing you know I had out scissors and was cutting and cutting
and cutting.

Next morning, I met Louis bright and early. He had huge grey
wells under his eyes and wrinkles in his face that weren't ordinarily
there, but otherwise he looked impeccable: hair combed and boots polished and training suit pressed. The cage boy, Red, met us too, the three
of us shifting tiger cages until they connected with the steel arena. Red
went inside and shifted three pedestals so they were in a row, calling
"Props ready!" when finished.

Louis darted off, back bobbing ramrod stiff. I looked to Red for an
explanation, and he shrugged. A minute later, Louis returned with a pair
of overalls on his arm. "Here," he said, "put ziss on. If zey catch a nail in
your skirt zey will keep on tearing. Zey luff the sound of things tearing."

I ducked behind a tool shed to change, and while I was doing so
Red and Louis released the tunnel doors. The tigers slunk into the ring,
looking shaggy and consternated. Toby roared, and I trembled, for it
wasn't the roar of a lion showing off but of a tiger indicating displeasure, and there's a world of seriousness separating the two. This roar
bothered King, who took a swipe at Toby, and in a second the two tigers
were at each other, on their hind legs and exchanging a flurry of quick
clawless blows before crankily taking steps backward. Queen peered at
Louis and me, her gaze slowly taking it all in.

I slipped into the ring with a buggy whip and stayed close to the
bars. The tigers had seen me outside the ring for the past six months,
and I had to give them a chance to get used to the idea of bars no longer
separating us. Queen stayed still, watching me, while the other two
paced around the far side of the ring. After a minute, King flopped on
his belly and Queen rolled on him and it was only Toby who was still
fixed on figuring out what I was doing in there. So he came close. Came
within four feet and then stopped and peered at me through green slits.
He was panting loudly enough the liquid gurgling in the back of his
throat sounded like its own deep voice. He could've been thinking
about killing me or he could've been thinking about that day's weather, for all he showed.

It was then I focused my gaze on his eyes and time froze and
I knew. I knew exactly what that animal was thinking, would've mistaken it for my own thoughts had I not seen it written across his
kelp-green pupils.

I'll test her, that tiger was thinking. I'll just see.

So he came forward another foot. The crowd gathered outside
the steel arena hushed. I cracked my whip and my voice rang clear in
the silence of the menage-"Seat!"

Toby stood his ground and I cracked the whip again and issued
the command again, until finally he slunk back toward the pedestal but
to show he couldn't be cowed he lay beside the pedestal instead of taking his seat, all of which is tiger for Fuck you. Still, I was encouraged
he hadn't taken a swipe and that he was even halfway near where he
should be. I called Queen's name, followed by the seat command, and
was surprised when she actually did it, looking happy with the activity.
I did the same with King, only he got serious-looking and he came
toward me. Again, I looked into a tiger's mind like it was a shelf in a
grocery store, and again I knew exactly what it was he was planning.
Which was, Think I'll act as if nothing's concerning me and then rip her
stomach clear out, just to see the look of surprise on her face.

In other words, I jumped before that forepaw shot out, sprang
clear out of its path and watched it sail by. I could see muscles reticulating beneath the surface, like a fit man's, only it was covered in
orange-and-black fur and ended in a fluffy white dangerousness. Then
it was my turn for surprises, so I brought the whip down hard on his
nose. This froze him-not the pain of the whip but the shock caused by
my being able to read his thoughts, which is the only real way to get the
word vulnerable rumbling through the head of a tiger. I hit him again,
this time harder because he was still and I had more opportunity to
wind up. He hissed and swiped the air one more time and with a rumble of disgust slunk to his pedestal and took his seat.

By this point, I had two cats seated and one sprawled on the arena
floor, which is more than anyone expected I'd get done, seeing as how
the cats had gone half rogue since killing their trainer a year and a half
previous. As for me, I was bathed in sweat and trembling from having
tensed my muscles too hard, so I nodded to Red and he roped open the
tunnel door. Each cat rushed toward the exit, and after some nasty pawing at the gummed-up opening they left in the following order: King,
Toby, Queen.

On the outside I towelled off. Truth was, I felt like I'd taken a
Chinaman bottle, meaning numb and euphoric and seeing stars. Louis
could do nothing but shake his head, not believing. Around us people
were chattering, workingmen mostly, and though their words bedspreaded all over one another I knew they were talking about what
they'd just seen.