Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (15 page)

“It was just about then that I started losing control. I could hear everyone talking to me, but I couldn’t concentrate. My mom was holding my head. My dad was holding my legs. I opened my eyes once and it was all blurry. I couldn’t see straight. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I couldn’t feel my fingers, or my toes. That’s when the doctor came from the audience.”

To the ringmaster, the doctor was hardly a welcome sight. “As soon as the doctor came from the audience I knew we were in trouble,” said Jimmy James. “Real doctors don’t do things like that anymore. It’s a new ball game out there. These days you can’t say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ Because they won’t touch you for insurance reasons. As a result, you don’t know what’s coming out of the audience. You have to be very careful.”

In a maelstrom of European and Latin excess, Jimmy James, from Columbus, Georgia, was a paragon of Southern gentility. Between phrases he paused to let his vowels stretch out to their full magnolia glory. Between shows he hung his tailcoat on a seat wagon so his tails wouldn’t sully themselves in the mud. Between sentences he thought before he spoke.

“At the time, I was standing in ring three. I saw the accident right away. The first thing I did was signal Willie to have him kill the lights. The second thing I did was make sure the next act was up and ready to go. In this case we had a few minutes while the Estradas finished their act, but unfortunately the act after them was the bears. The bears couldn’t work because of where Danny was still lying, but the bear man didn’t tell me that until he was in the ring, which made it worse. I considered going to a clown walk-around. If I had really gotten into a jam I would have just called for a blackout and introduced the band to play a march. But in this case I got lucky; the Ivanovs were ready. I announced the cradle act and they went up in the center ring. At that point I could turn my attention back to the ground.”

While Jimmy was struggling to rearrange the show, Danny was being swarmed by a growing number of family and friends. His sister Elizabeth started to cry. His mother stroked his cheek. The emergency personnel had to push their way through the assembled crowd.

“When the paramedics came they asked me if I could move my fingers, my arms,” Danny said. “They pushed particular places around my head and asked if it hurt—my neck, my back, my spine. One dude knew right away, but he wasn’t allowed to say. They couldn’t move me until they got me on a stretcher with a neck brace. At the hospital I waited for about an hour. The brace was pinching my nerves. I asked them if they could please take it off, and they said the only way I could take it off was to sign a paper saying they weren’t responsible. I decided to leave it on….

“All that time I kept telling my mom how stupid I was. It was my fault and I could have prevented it. What happened was there was Sno-Kone juice on the swing. After the act they shove the swings back into the corner, and someone must have dropped some Sno-Kone on the part where we stand. By the time I noticed it I was already swinging. I lifted my foot and mentioned it to my brothers. While I was talking to them it was time for me to go off but I wasn’t paying attention. That’s when they knocked me off. Shit happens. But I still could have prevented it. That’s why it upsets me more. The truth is, I fucked up.”

A little over an hour later the X rays arrived and confirmed what the paramedics had suspected all along: when Danny flew off the Russian swing and landed on his neck he snapped his collarbone. It would take eight to ten weeks to heal, the doctors said. After that he should be okay. But after that he wasn’t, for Danny, it turns out, might have fallen off the swing for reasons other than the one he confessed to.

Meanwhile the act must continue. With Danny disabled the family was forced, at least for a few months, to shuffle its lineup again. Little Pablo started doing a straight jump along with his brandy in, back somersault out. Mary Chris even considered doing a trick or two herself. But most of the slack was taken up by Big Pablo, who returned to jumping despite his still crippled foot and now aching knee. Because he was twenty pounds overweight and difficult to push, the family had to recruit Kris Kristo to join their act for added weight. He donned a black Howard Stern-like wig, slipped into Danny’s old costume, and learned to dance the mambo. Now the Rodrinovich Flyers were not only Mexican but part Bulgarian as well.

For the finale, Papa Rodríguez, who up to now has been holding the net, hands it off to a prop man and fetches two twelve-foot-high aluminum poles connected at the top by a slender cable wrapped in bright pink towels. He douses the towels with lighter fluid and sets the wire ablaze. The crowd breathes an audible “ahhhh.” Jimmy James responds on cue.

“
From the Russian swings, a backward somersault, bliiindfolded
…”

Big Pablo slips a black cotton pillowcase over his head, squeezing his arms through two narrow holes and pulling the remainder almost to his chest. His brothers and sisters start clapping their hands until the entire tent catches on. The brass flare gives way to a tympani roll.

“The last trick is always a safe trick,” Pablo explained. “You can’t afford to end with a miss. But you want something that the people are going to enjoy. That’s what the fire is for. It’s not a threat. You can see fairly good with that blindfold anyway. But people like it. It makes them go ‘ahhh.’”

“So how do you know what makes people go ‘ah.’”

“Fire makes people go ‘ah.’ Darkness makes people go ‘ah.’ Somebody jumping over something high makes people go ‘ah.’ Our last trick has all of that. It’s the perfect ending.”

After four swings the platform reaches the ultimate height and Pablo tells his pushers he is ready to fly. On the next rotation he pushes off with his legs and vaults his body into the air, searching for that elusive nirvana, that tunnel of air, which will carry him to his destination. With a cymbal crash for flourish and a communal ‘Hey!’ for effect, his back is sucked into the vacuum of the net and he comes sliding down the blue nylon chute and lands upright on his feet. He peels off the blindfold and beams at the crowd. He looks confident. He looks poised. Deep inside, he wants more.

“At first I feel pretty good, like I just hit a home run. It’s like after a big ride at a carnival you say, ‘Damn, that was cool.’ It’s a feeling of, well, accomplishment. I have done something right. I have done something good…. But after a moment that high goes away. That’s when I realize I’m not satisfied. The act could be better. The swing needs to be two feet taller. I need to be fifteen pounds lighter. The way the act is now I would not want anybody I think is somebody to see it. Not in my business, which is somersaults. As soon as it’s over I’m thinking, I want to do more, I want to give more. I want to shout out to the audience, ‘Just wait until the flying act. That’s when I know we’ll show you something. That’s when we’ll really show you how to fly.’”

5

This Is When They Become Real

“I woke up at seven this morning, just as I do every day. I looked around the room for a moment. I hadn’t moved any of my clothes. I hadn’t even changed the sheets. It seemed strange to be in her bed. We hadn’t slept together for several months. And now, well, she’s gone.”

Khris Allen sat upright in a blue director’s chair and stared at a pile of bullwhips and kangaroo crops on the futon sofa of Kathleen’s trailer. Only now the futon was empty and the trailer belonged to him.

“Kathleen really didn’t do housework,” he said. “She dusted every now and then. She could cook. But just smell this place: it’s all dog hair and tiger urine. I don’t know how Josip stood it. I don’t know how
I
stood it…”

Khris rubbed his hands across his face. He was dressed in a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and black canvas slippers. He wore no shirt, revealing a taut, wiry torso made strong from practicing jujitsu for the previous ten years and from pushing tiger cages for the previous two. He was roughly the same size and shape as Sean. “They look exactly the same,” commented one friend of mine. “They’re both hillbillies with good bodies.”

“I decided I should try and clean up a bit, but everything still reminds me of her. Those are her tiger pictures on the wall. That’s her calendar. Even the cats still remind me of her.” He reached toward an overturned wall lamp and pulled down an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Not far away on another sideways lamp hung a cap from the year the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets shared the national championship in football. Above it was a comic strip showing a man standing in front of a tiger. “Fellow Animal,” the man proclaims, “I am Hugo Flealover, Animal Rights crusader, come to free you from bondage.” In the next frame the tiger is eating the man.

“Come on,” Khris said. “Let’s go feed the cats.”

Outside the trailer the late-afternoon sun was just dipping behind the Shenandoah Mountains. The air was still warm with the faint blush of spring. The sound of squealing laughter from children leaving the early show still lingered in the valley around Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Washington, Madison, and Jefferson once traveled. The tent was quiet in its chameleon pose as it gave up the bright stripes of afternoon sun to its silhouette before the stars. The season was now in full bloom. After the Easter rains in South Carolina the show had trekked north into a cold snap in the coastal plains of North Carolina. In Henderson, Sean almost missed the bag. The air was cold, the mud nearly frozen. He turned on the heater inside the barrel to 70 degrees. Checking his logbook, he adjusted his power level (its true function, like the rest of the cannon, still a secret to me, but less so every day) to what he thought was the correct level to get him to the middle of the air bag. Still, it wasn’t far enough, and he barely caught the front lip of the bag and skidded to the ground. “You can mark my words,” he said after limping out of the finale. “If the weather stays this cold I’m going to land on the pavement before the year’s out.”

In Virginia the weather got warm again, and by the time we crossed the Appalachians it was almost ideal. Yet somehow all these changes were maddening, like a case of schizophrenia shared by two hundred people at once. On certain days, when the sun was shining brightly, the breeze was blowing softly, and the temperature was just this side of perfect, when the boys walked to a nearby field to play baseball, the girls sat under a veranda having a baby shower, and the cookhouse was serving meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, followed by chocolate cream pie for dessert, nothing seemed more ideal than the circus. But a day later, when the rain started falling, the mud began rising, and the temperature was just this side of freezing, when the men complained about their shoulders being bruised, the women griped about their husbands losing money at poker, and the cooks in the cookhouse were so busy frying crack in the pans that they ran out of spaghetti for dinner, nothing seemed more miserable than the circus. Often both these days would happen at once. In Harrisonburg, I was having the former kind of day; Khris was having the latter.

“I hope you don’t mind a little smell,” Khris called as we wandered over to a wheelbarrow near the twin lines of cages where fifteen servings of meat were thawing out on an open board. Each portion was about the size of a fire-starter log and the consistency of leftover meat loaf. Little starlights of ice still glistened in the center of the meat, and a virtual road map of dark red blood dripped from the plywood board onto the grass. The entire compound smelled like rancid hamburger meat.

“It’s a combination of beef, chicken, and beef by-products,” he explained, “fortified with vitamins A, E, and B.” He slid on a pair of bright yellow dishwashing gloves and began transferring the meat from the board into the wheelbarrow. “It’s what they call Grade B meat, not for human consumption. We order about forty thousand pounds a year. It’s actually made for racing dogs.”

“Forty thousand pounds,” I said. “That sounds expensive.”

“Last year we spent thirty-two thousand dollars on food alone.”

“And what does this meat taste like?”

“Well, it’s not tenderloin or sirloin. It’s basically fatty meat mixed with bonemeal to give it marrow. The USDA makes us put charcoal in it so we can’t sell it to humans.”

“And what happens if you eat it?”

He smiled. “Let’s just say it gave me the runs.”

Laughing, he rocked the wheelbarrow onto its wheel and headed toward the cages. Laurie, now the last-remaining groom, was just clearing the final remnants of sawdust from the cages with the help of an electric leaf blower. As soon as she finished, the two of them went to work. Their routine was precise. Laurie would slide open the small door on the seven-and-a-half-foot-long steel cage that was five feet high and four feet wide, while Khris would toss in the meat. If Laurie opened the door too early or kept it open too long, the tiger would have time to swat at Khris’s body.

“You always have to be careful with the cats,” he said. “You get a false sense of security around them. Whenever they go after you, they’re probably playing. But sometimes that develops into maliciousness. You can’t let them see you scared.”

As soon as Khris rolled toward the cats all nine of them sprang to their feet and started pacing excitedly in their cages—rocking back and forth, panting with their tongues, growling in a bloodthirsty way that no doubt came from their grumbling stomachs but made my own stomach churn.

“This is when they become real tigers!” Khris shouted over the roar. “This is when I love it the most.”

Laurie put a metal hook on top of the first door, opened the slot, and counted slowly to three. By the time she finished and dropped the door, Khris had already tossed the meat onto the plywood floor and Tito had already devoured his first log. Being the biggest, Tito got the most: twelve and a half pounds. Orissa got seven and Zeus ten. “He was getting chubby, so I just put him on a diet,” Khris explained. Down the line he went. Taras, ten pounds. Fatima and Simba. seven. As each tiger was fed, the noise level declined. Toshiba received only five pounds because she had just had a hysterectomy and had begun to gain weight, while Barisal received a hefty eight and a half pounds because she was thought to be pregnant. Before Kathleen departed she had left explicit instructions on what to do should Barisal give birth to a litter.