by Lisa Fiedler
Gideon’s voice is dull and gravelly. “El Paso.”
Right. I’d forgotten. A king is in agony, and we have sent the man with the rifle on an errand.
As the tears spill down my cheeks, a windswept echo comes rippling into my thoughts. It is a zephyr of a voice that has put an end to misery once before.
My mother’s voice. Go, Catherine, it says.
And I obey, rushing to the roustabout’s car, where I bang on the door. No one answers, so I barge in, only to find Shaw’s roommate, Derrick, having a tumble with some willingly nameless woman from town.
He sits up and gives me a look that is more curious than startled.
“The rifle,” I bark. “Where does he keep it?”
“Behind there.” Derrick motions with his tousled head to a shabby footlocker shoved against the wall near Shaw’s empty cot. “It’s not loaded. Ammo’s in the trunk.” He hesitates. “Is it Boo?”
I nod, yanking the weapon from its hiding place. Then I throw myself at the trunk, fling it open, and fumble among old work boots and girly magazines until I am grasping a cardboard box of bullets. I tear into it, and because my hands are shaking, most of the cartridges spill out onto the floor. They sound like hail. They sound like death.
“Load it for me,” I command shrilly.
Derrick springs out of bed to do what I’ve asked. Then he hands me the rifle. “Tell him g’bye for me, huh?”
I nod again, heading for the door. “And Derrick . . .”
“Huh?”
“That better not be the sheriff’s fucking wife.”
I leap out into the night and sprint back across the grounds. When Gideon sees me toting the rifle, he looks surprised and then not surprised at all. He opens the cage for me. It isn’t locked. The lion is no longer a predator. The lion is no longer a lion. He is nothing but pain and softness and a big cat’s memories of a million astounding shows performed before a million astounded children.
I don’t know when the crowd began to gather, but everyone is there. Myrtle is crying and Evangeline is crying and Gus and Hasty Pudding are holding each other and weeping almost as hard as they wept this morning when Valerie left. The roustabouts who bothered to put on hats when they came scrambling from sleep take them off now in a show of respect.
I step up into the cage to deliver the rifle.
“Victoria . . .” Cornelius’s voice, as always, is musical; tonight it is a dirge. “Victoria, my girl, be careful.”
With enormous effort Boo lifts his head.
James doesn’t.
I offer Boo a smile, as if a pleasing countenance could mask the fact that I’m holding a weapon. “Hey there, you beautiful boy,” I sing. “Hey there, you star of the circus.”
It’s anyone’s guess which of the two I’m addressing. Both, I suppose. But James has gone deaf and Boo is in no mood for compliments. He knows exactly why I’ve come. His topaz eyes are pleading with me to hurry. And in them, I see a distant reflection—my mother, sitting on the porch in Brooksvale, a jewelled brooch glinting in her hand.
I’m dying, my love, my darling girl. We both know it.
“James?”
He doesn’t answer, just gives the slightest shake of his head against Baraboo’s fur. I take a deep breath and try again, offering him the rifle. “James, please . . . you have to.”
Again he shakes his head, and this time his whole body shakes with it as he draws himself up on his knees, burrowing his face deeper into the lion’s mane. The soft sound of his sobs wrecks me. It wrecks Boo, too. A hollow whine escapes him.
“James!” I say more sternly.
He utters two words into Boo’s fur. “I can’t.”
“You have to. James . . . you have to.”
“I know I do. I know it. I know I have to . . .” His voice is broken, his heart is broken, and he looks at me with swollen eyes. “But I can’t. Victoria, I can’t do it.” The crack in his voice gives way to a sob as he presses himself and all his uselessness into the lion’s frail rib cage. Boo lets him, because Boo will wait. He will wait until James is ready. And all I can do is stand there, forgetting how to breathe, forgetting how to think, holding the rifle that has become like a paralyzed limb.
When I feel movement behind me, I realize Gideon has climbed into the cage. He walks past me like a ghost, then bends down and kisses the lion on his forehead, between and just above his eyes.
Aim for the brain. Instantaneous. Humane.
Then he takes hold of his shivering brother, his arms encircling James’s midsection. He helps him stand, and as James stumbles out, his hands continue to reach for the cat, even when Cornelius guides him down the steps. Together, father and brother entrust James to the two burliest roustabouts, and then Gideon returns to the cage. He holds out his hand for the rifle and I surrender it to him. As I lift it into his grasp, it no longer feels heavy. It seems to have lost all substance. In this moment and this moment only, it has ceased to be a thing of violence and has transformed into a weightless instrument of mercy.
I exit the cage in a fog and join the roustabouts who continue to support James.
“Take him away from here,” Cornelius instructs. “He needn’t see this . . . He shouldn’t see . . .”
Like angels singing Hamlet to his rest, they usher the lion tamer away from the cage, and I follow, with my hand reaching out for James, with James’s hands reaching out for Boo.
James spares one last look over his shoulder. “Goodbye, buddy,” he whispers, his voice a hoarse rasp. “Goodbye, Boo.”
As we move further into the darkness, I hear Cornelius’s voice: “Long live the king.”
A moment later, a single gunshot rings through the night.
* * *
• • •
I don’t know what becomes of the lion’s body; I don’t think I want to know.
I don’t know what’s become of James either. The roustabouts carried him into his car. When they were gone, I tried to curl next to him on the bed, but he rolled away and pressed himself against the wall where an intricate map of Spain spanned half the length of his room.
It was as though he wished he could be there, or anywhere, instead of here.
So I went back to my own car, and fell asleep just as the sun was rising.
* * *
• • •
That night, VanDrexel’s Family Circus pays tribute to a fallen friend.
Gideon performs with the tiger triplets in a ring scattered with rose petals while the band plays “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” at half tempo, and it sounds like a lullaby mixed with a hymn. The notes chiming from the xylophone and the glockenspiel sound like happy tears and fond farewells.
Cornelius skips the show—for the first time since he became Ringmaster, I’m told—to sit with James. Together they mourn Boo, making good use of that silver flask.
Before the crew dismantles the rings, I go in and collect every last rose petal from the dusty floor. Then I go to Shaw’s car, knowing it will be empty since both he and Derrick have work to do before the jump to Arkansas.
The ammunition box sits on the lid of the trunk, empty; the gold-toned cartridges still lie scattered and shining on the floor. I tear off one of the box’s end flaps, a yellow-and-red rectangle of thin cardboard.
Back in my room, the marker hovers above the piece of the ammo box, as I try to settle on one of the many lessons I learned last night from Boo. In the end, I choose to leave this scrap blank, to remind myself that there are some things that can’t be, and perhaps need not be, put into words.
I place this in the jewelry box, climb into my double cot alone, and cry myself to sleep.
Arkansas, 1965
Our next stop is just outside Little Rock. We do three shows in two days and James stays in his car for all of them.
After the second show, I knock on h
is door.
“James?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Then: “I’m okay.”
“Can I come in?”
Another flash of silence, a fault line between us.
“James?”
“Just . . . I need a little more time, okay?” He is speaking from the other side of the door but it feels like he’s sending smoke signals from the moon. “Can you just give me a little more time?”
“Sure. Of course.” I swallow hard. “How much time?”
I wait, hoping for an answer, for another word through the door, another wisp of smoke.
But no word comes, so I turn and walk away.
Pennsylvania, 1965
In the Keystone State, I emerge as a star of the circus beyond any measure of doubt.
The resounding ovation bestowed upon me by the Allentown crowd fills the Big Top and shows no sign of stopping. For this reason I become the first ever VanDrexel’s performer in the circus’s illustrious history to return to the ring for an encore.
The next day, new posters are printed up in full color, featuring the “Vibrant Victoria” posed on the wire wearing a multicolored leotard fashioned from four hand-me-down costumes from a friend. Cornelius’s off-the-cuff epithet—“dainty and death-defying, brave but beautiful”—is printed in a bold arc across the top.
I knock on James’s door to show him.
This time he opens it. I hand him the rolled-up poster.
“Look!” I say, beaming at him. “I’m wearing Frankenstein.”
He unrolls the glossy sheet, eyes the photo. He looks thin, pale. I doubt he’s even seeing the poster at all.
I throw my arms around his neck. He lets me kiss his cheeks, his hair. Then he pulls back and I see the tightness around his mouth, the dark circles under his eyes.
I let go and he steps back into the car, gently closing the door.
I hate the thought of sleeping without him again tonight; I’ve discovered that waking up next to the boy you love is something you grow used to very quickly. The urgency I felt to devour him back in Oklahoma, back in Texas, was nothing compared to the need I’m feeling now, the need to not lose him.
But somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach, I’m starting to fear that I may already have.
Connecticut, 1965
In Bridgeport, before Vince and his crew even start laying out the tent poles, Cornelius suggests that he, the boys, and I go downtown together to walk in the footsteps of the “Prince of Humbugs.” We’ll stroll around town, he says, and perhaps even visit the building that was once called the Barnum Institute of Science and History and was constructed under the auspices of Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum himself.
Gideon and I are happy to indulge the Ringmaster. Gus will drive and Hasty will come too, as will Myrtle, making ours a slightly motley and boisterous band of true believers, setting out on a short pilgrimage to one of the closest things the American circus has to a holy land.
After much prodding from Cornelius, James agrees to join us. He walks several steps behind the group as we make our way to the edge of the fairgrounds where Gus’s pickup waits. Determined to keep the mood of this outing light, I run for the passenger door, crying out, “Shotgun!”
As soon as the phrase leaves my lips, I want to die, just drop dead right where I’m standing. Gideon freezes in his tracks. Myrtle and Hasty keep walking, pretending they didn’t hear. Cornelius throws his shoulders back and waits.
I’m staring at James, whose face has gone pale. But then, that sweet, sweet mouth of his curls up ever so slightly and he laughs. Thank God, he laughs.
And there it is. The fog has lifted, the spell is broken. Quite by accident, I’ve wrestled his grief from him and turned it into something else, something bearable:
A memory.
As I climb into the pickup’s front seat Cornelius leans close to me and whispers, “Well done, my girl. The show must go on. And now, it shall.”
We enjoy our afternoon in the Park City, and when we arrive at the red-toned Byzantine building at 820 Main Street, we find that it is undergoing a remodel of sorts.
It is going to be reimagined into a museum where the legacy of the man who brought Earth its Greatest Show will be forever honored.
Again . . . Memory.
On the ride home, Myrtle recounts in somber tones the horrific Hartford circus fire of 1944. James and Gideon know the story, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of it, which is surprising because it occurred only two decades ago and remains one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, the circus goes on, because joy trumps tragedy every time. Loss is absorbed and stored in the heart, and the lights come up and the show goes on.
Myrtle finishes the story just as we pull back onto the lot, where the Big Top has bloomed in our absence. The circus has taken shape like some hardy perennial plant, some evergreen blossoming thing supported by the strongest and deepest of roots, bearing flowers that are as resilient as they are beautiful.
Which, I suppose, is exactly what the circus is.
That night, James joins Gideon and the tigers in the ring. After his act, just before mine, he slips into the tent—I know he’s there without even looking down. This walk is for him, for James, and when it’s over I am so eager to get to him that I don’t even take the ladder, I simply drop from the wire and into the net. There is a shriek from the audience that spins into one great cheer when they realize the fall was on purpose.
Later, James and I shake Hank out of a sound sleep and badger and beg until we’ve talked him into rustling up a feast of cheeseburgers and french fries and leftover lamb stew and butterscotch pudding with whipped cream. I gobble it all down, putting away twice as much as James, which he finds in equal parts astonishing and adorable.
“I can’t help it,” I say, poking out my lower lip in a pout. “Applause just makes me feel . . .” I choose my word carefully and deliver it with a wink. “Insatiable.”
“Well, in that case . . .” James leans back in the booth, and with a silky half smile toying at the corner of his mouth, he begins a slow, steady clap. Applause.
We race back to my room and fall into bed, laughing and joking suggestively about “encores” and “standing ovations,” which turn out not to be jokes at all.
The next morning I sleep in.
James is gone when I wake up, a good thing since last night’s after-hours smorgasbord has me running to the bathroom to vomit.
New York, 1965
In Poughkeepsie, I have trouble zipping Frankenstein all the way up. It seems those late-night pie-car binges that have become our custom have finally caught up with me. I notice, while leaning close to my vanity mirror to apply the silver-blue eye shadow Sharon chose for me at Woolworth’s, that my face looks fuller. And my breasts . . . well, let’s just say Evangeline’s yellow baton twirling dress wouldn’t stand a chance.
I muse that it’s love that’s making me plump—the love of James, Cornelius, of everyone in this colorful talented family I was meant to be a part of. Before VanDrexel’s, I was undernourished in that regard but now I’m feasting on helping after helping of kindness and camaraderie every single day. The roundness becomes me, slight as it is.
There is only one small dark cloud hanging over me and it’s this:
In three weeks, we return to Boston.
* * *
• • •
The fine citizens of Albany turn out in droves for VanDrexel’s Family Circus. Cornelius credits the posters of me wearing Frankenstein because from what he’s heard they’ve come almost exclusively to see Victoria, the prettiest tightrope walker in the business.
I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but on the chance that it is, I plan to reward them all with something new I began teaching myself back in Arkansas: a backward somersault while lying on the wire
.
The clowns are in particularly good form, as are the jugglers and the trapeze aerialists, who spin and flip like sequined hurricanes across the tent.
When Cornelius announces me, the band plays my usual drumroll, and I pose on my ledge to raucous applause. Then the hush . . . there is always that hush, and it is in that hush that the magic begins.
With the whispers of the awed spectators swirling beneath me, like the rush of water at the base of Niagara Falls, I lower myself to a reclining position so that the wire is pressed against my backbone, like a shiver running up and down my spine. I curl one leg up to my chest, then use the strength of my legs and hips to roll backward into a somersault.
The world begins to swirl. Suddenly the Big Top ceiling is where the floor should be, and the bleachers seem to be leaping back and forth across my wire like it’s some child-giant’s jump rope. For a second, I think I’m falling.
But I’m not falling; I’m safe on the wire. Dizzy. That’s all, just dizzy.
I rise from the crouch the somersault has left me in and invoke the power of my center of gravity—knees bent, arms out. The spectators are pleased, and this pleases me.
But I do nothing more. The crowd seems satisfied, so I call my own John Robinson, skipping the final three stunts of my routine and exiting the spotlight.
I’ve never been dizzy in the sky. Then again, I’ve never done a backward roll under the lights before, so maybe that’s what my equilibrium is objecting to.
Or maybe . . .
As I climb down the ladder to shouts and whistles and thunderous applause, the dizziness subsides, only to be replaced by a flood of wonderment, panic, euphoria, terror, and joy.
I’m not dizzy. And I’m not plump.
I’m pregnant.
TWENTY-SEVEN
BAYLOR WAS A LONG way from VanDrexel in the alphabet, which meant that Callie was going to be late for homeroom.
Gliding into room 103 as though she were walking across a Big Top, she planted herself purposefully in front of Kristi’s desk. Jacob, seated at the desk next to her, let out a low whistle. “Hot girl on a mission. This oughta be good.”
