The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (36 page)

After the rollover, Beatty tried to get another of the lions to
come sit beside the sore-headed lion on the arena floor, which he did
by yelling and snapping his whip on the cat until finally the cat had no
choice but to come roaring off that pedestal and have a blank pistol
cartridge fired in his face. In this way Beatty got two lions to not so
much sit side by side as occupy the same general area of floor space
though when it came time for them both to sit up he had to flick the
whip in their eyes and kick at their paws and fight them off with his chair before they sort of teetered back and lifted their front paws for
maybe a half second and not at all simultaneous. At this point all hell
broke loose, for though tigers hate lions I suppose one of them figured
out what she had in store, for she came flying off the pedestal with an
intention to kill, getting so close to Beatty he had no choice but to stick
the pistol in her face and fire and singe her with powder. She screamed,
a sound makes the blood run cold, and then the tiger and the lion on
the pedestals started fighting and the two lions left on arena floor started fighting though taking turns heading for Beatty, who kept yelling,
"SEAT! SEAT! SEAT!" though it was difficult to say who exactly he
was yelling this at for he'd completely lost control of his cats and was
only staying alive by firing his pistol and flicking his whip and jamming his chair leg down the throat of any cat that came within striking
distance. Beatty was sweating so much his skin showed wet and pink
through his drenched shirt, a situation that wasn't improved when he
tried to move down the final male lion, who to that point hadn't done
anything worse than fight with the tiger seated beside him. His name
was Bongo, and when Beatty yelled his name and whipped him and
tried to bring him off his seat he just sat there, getting madder and
madder, finally coming off his pedestal in a way indicating that nothing short of a bazooka was going to stop him. Was then Beatty ran.
Just turned tail and raced across the ring and ducked into a little safety cage he'd attached to one side, the lion pinning him to the back of
the safety cage by taking swipe after swipe through the bars, the whole
time roaring at the top of his lungs, Beatty pressed against the bars and
looking like he'd wet himself.

Ten minutes this anarchy had gone on, and in that time Beatty
had managed one flopping rollover and a two-lion sit-up so poor it
barely even counted. The cats heard the tunnel boy rattle the door and
they all raced out, though not without stopping and fighting each other
at the bottleneck, the cage boys prodding the cats out by poking sticks
through the bars of the cage and jabbing at their haunches.

The lights went out, coming back as a spotlight on centre ring.
Meanwhile, Beatty had let himself out of the safety cage. I turned to
Albert and covered my mouth and tried not to laugh, even though I did
feel sorry for Beatty, who hadn't had enough sense to stick with polar
bears. I also felt sorry for Hagenbeck-Wallace; must've been mighty
slim pickings for the press agents to splash Beatty's act all over new
paper. Most of all, I felt sorry for the cats themselves, having to work
with a man who felt no compunction about provoking them instead of
training them properly. Was no wonder the Jack Londoners were getting themselves worked into a lather.

I intended to comment on Beatty's pitiful excuse for an act, and I
suppose it was something in Albert's expression that caused me to
notice something I for some reason hadn't noticed before. There was
applause happening in that big top, applause that wasn't in any way
subtle or soft or reserved. I turned from Albert's sallow expression
toward centre ring. Beatty was standing in the middle of the steel arena,
his costume turned pink by a blue flood. He took bow after bow after
bow, waving and smiling and then crossing his arm over his waist like
a Spaniard and doubling over. He had to. The cheering wouldn't stop.
It just wouldn't. It simply refused. It would've gone on forever and ever
had a midget-clown interlude not taken it and turned it into laughter
and then general enthusiasm for the act next to come.

On the way home, Albert and I had an argument that'd been brewing
for well over a year: was about gambling and babies and my supposedly unwholesome attachment to tigers and how I was stupid gentling
them, though after a bit it wasn't so much about arguing as about spearing each other with words and seeing who could stick the spear in deepest. I can't even blame Albert totally, for it's a game I'll gladly play
when riled. When our throats got sore we stopped haranguing each
other and rode the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the
Ringling lot we parked in front of the Pullman. First thing Albert did was come inside and change and then go out. Rajah was asleep on the
bed, though the sound of the door slamming caused him to lift his head
and cock his ears and gurgle. As Albert changed I sat not watching,
though when he finally left I put on my night things and poured myself
a drink of Tennessee's finest and, not feeling the least bit tired, crawled
into bed and held Rajah close.

The next day, I got up early and went to the cookhouse and
instead of eating breakfast I asked the Nicaraguan food doler to give
me a leaned-on fried egg sandwich and a thermos of black coffee.
Take-out in hand, I headed out to the training barn. There I met my
cage boy, Bailey, who helped me shift cages so the Bengals were let into
the practise arena. I didn't even feed them first, hoping this'd make 'em
a little testy. Got my whip and training stick and strapped a pistol
loaded with blanks onto my waist. Then I joined them.

Their names were Zoo, Queen, Princess, Dolly, Rowdy, Ruggles,
Pasha the Himalayan, plus the twolings Boston and Beauty. You couldn't've named a more beautiful outfit of tigers in all of America, and
until then this was a fact that'd always made me happy to wake each day
with the dawn. That morning their beauty didn't impress me in the
least, and in fact made me a little irked, each one zipping like a mechanical rabbit to his or her pedestal and sitting there looking ramrod
straight and beautiful and awaiting instruction.

The biggest of the lot, and the only one with anything approaching
a mean streak, was Zoo, for he'd reached that year before a tiger normally
goes rogue and was starting to show signs of crankiness. He was about as
big as a Bengal's going to get, as big even as Rajah, and owing to the size
of his paws and the thickness of his shoulders he wasn't particularly good
in the tricks department. Mostly what I used him for was topping the pyramid at the end of the display, though this alone earned him his keep for he
was regal and beautiful and as big as a Siberian, though with the handsome form of a Bengal. He enjoyed it too, for like most males (tiger or
human, if you ask me) he was vain and fond of being gawked at.

That morning, I decided he was my next ball roller.

"Zoo," I barked. "Come."

He rumbled to the middle of the ring and sat, chin held high. I
stepped outside the cage and fetched the big red Indian rubber ball and
put it a foot away from him. He looked at the ball by shifting his pupils
to the sides of his eyes. His brow furrowed.

"Zoo," I barked again, for no specific reason other than to display
the sharpness in my voice and to indicate things were going to be different from then on. I slipped a piece of horsemeat onto the training
stick and placed the point of the training stick on top the ball. All of this
was sheer foolishness, the best way to ruin a well-trained tiger being to
give him conflicting messages: he knew he was the pyramid topper and
that Pasha was the ball roller, the weirdness of my request making him
rumble deep in his chest.

"Zoo!" I shouted again and for added effect I snapped the whip
about six inches behind him. Was a noise didn't frighten him in the
least, Zoo being on the taciturn end of things and not quick to startle.
After a minute of thinking he put both paws on the ball but before that
he did something couldn't have pissed me off more and by this I mean
he yawned. Just opened up that big tiger mouth of his and lolled his
tongue and released a cloud of meat breath so as to indicate he was
indulging me and that was all. Then he licked his chops and let his eyes
go sleepy.

I didn't reward him, a betrayal that made his eyes go narrow with
complaint. Then I gave a signal he'd seen a hundred times when I was
training Pasha: I tapped his hind end with the training stick, a signal I
wanted his hind paws to go where his front paws were. He looked at
me, expressionless, before calmly raising the right half of his upper lip
and showing me one of his eye teeth. This made me mad so I hollered,
"Zoo!" and tapped his hind end. He showed me his eye tooth again,
though this time he added a low rumbling growl.

Good, I thought, now we're getting somewhere. To show him I meant business I hollered "Zoo! Ball!" and tapped his hind end in a way
was more a slap than a tap, all of which had the net effect of causing
Zoo to pull his front paws off the ball and put them back down where
he liked them. He turned and faced me and sat rumbling, cheesing me
off for he should've been mad enough already to take a run at me.

Was then I did it. I twirled that whip and for the first time in my
entire career touched an animal for no fair reason, the popper smacking
Zoo right on his ass, my plan being to either stick the training stick
down his throat or fire the pistol once he charged. But instead of meeting me with a full tiger rage he did something even crueller, something
that let me know he was tiger and nothing but and in his own way
would always be the one in charge.

He sat there. Didn't even sway his tail. The message in his eyes
was, I could tear you into little tiny bits in a second but I won't because I
don't care to. You're too puny. You don't deserve the nobility of my tiger
rage, not with the way you're acting today.

You're the animal. Not me.

With that, Zoo turned, and to show he wasn't scared of any whip
he walked as slowly as was possible to his pedestal and took it. Once he
was on it he looked at me and sighed. I skittered out of the arena with
my head down so Bailey couldn't see I was crying.

Next day I gentled Zoo like he'd never been gentled, buying him
hippo chunks with my own money and telling him over and over he was
the (second) most beautiful cat I'd ever seen. Then I more or less did
the same with the others. If I had myself a picture act, so be it, I was
bound and determined to make it the best one in the country, the thrills
provided by my wrestler. I worked a precision and a grace into the act
that'd never been seen. Plus I kept my front to the audience as much as
possible, cueing the cats with hand movements done behind my back,
seeing as from a distance I was still blond and I was still lithe and I was
still more or less young. In other words, I figured I could still style an
act in a way Beatty would never be able.

So, I worked. You feel things slipping and that's what you do:
you put your head down and you get at it. I'd work through siesta,
something that was unreasonable for my cage boy so I started tipping
Bailey each time he helped out. Even with giving him a little bit extra
he started showing up later and later and grumbling louder and louder,
which I understood, for he was a workingman and with that came a
lack of understanding of how a little extra money can help out in the
future. I'm sure he was spending it all in the poker games the Negros
held each night in the flat cars anyway, so after a while he probably
figured, why bother?

One morning he didn't come, and I shifted that cage on my lonesome. I got used to working alone, and before long it got so those two
hours were my favourite, as it's quiet before the rubes come and I've
always found things look simpler and peaceful when there's not a lot of
noise going on.

I started training my best jumpers, Boston and Beauty, to leap
through not one but two burning hoops. Then I got the wagon superintendent to build a see-saw with tiger-sized seats, for I was thinking
it'd be a sight to see a pair of adult Bengals-I had Ruggles and
Rowdy in mind-frolic like children in a playground. Plus around this
time it first hit me that with Pasha's sense of balance I might be able to
tempt her to walk across a pair of thick ropes held off the ground. And
if that went well, who knows, I might even be able to take one of those
ropes away.

What I'm saying is for the next month I did nothing but eat, sleep
and breathe my act. The tricks were progressing at a snail's pace,
though given how difficult they were the fact they were progressing at
all made me feel like maybe I was on to some new kind of training. Was
exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Course, there was no
denying all that work had the added benefit of keeping my mind off my
other problem, that being my husband. One night, when my mind
wasn't off it, I sat down and wrote letters to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League and that lunatic Henry
Ford, complaining how they were to blame for my misery: goddamn
prohibition, I wrote, has made salooning so profitable you couldn't
swing a dead cat without hitting one and God knows how weak men are
when confronted by temptation. The next morning I woke up and saw
how desperation had warped my logic. I ripped the letters up and
worked twice as hard that day with the tigers as I'd worked the day
before. Was my way of promising myself I wasn't going to think about
my latest in a long list of husband problems till season end, a promise I
was more or less successful at keeping.

Until.

Here I'll put the circus in Denver, for I remember there were
mountain peaks in the distance and a freshness of air found in no
place other than the Rockies. I also seem to remember seeing women
as well as men dressed in flannel shirts, a sure sign you're either in
Colorado, Wyoming or Utah. Shortly after set-up, I was walking
along the backyard thinking I'd put Rajah on a leash and take him for
a walk and then get him back to the car early enough so I'd have
some time with the Bengals before the show, the whole time making
sure I stayed clear of the red car where my good-for-nothing husband stared at books all day. I had a whole stew of things simmering
in my mind, so that when I heard my name called it was like being
sucked through a tube.