“Oh, we’ll give them a show,” the man said. “I’ll swallow swords if I have to. We’ll do something.”
“She’s got to dive,” the merchant said. “Or else you got a case of fraud on your hands.”
After that the two of them went into the tent. Inside the woman was sitting on an Army cot, wrapped up in a man’s bathrobe, and the little girl was beside her. It was cold and damp and foul in the tent. The merchant winced at the smell of it.
“Tell her she’s got to do it.”
The lame man waved his hands in deft code to her. She moved her hands slowly in reply and, smiling, shook her head. Outside the people had started to clap their hands in unison.
“She says it’s too dangerous. It’s dangerous anyhow, but on a night like this—”
“Come on,” the merchant said. “It can’t be that bad. There must be a trick to it.”
The lame man shook his head.
“No, sir,” he said. “It ain’t no trick to it. It’s the most dangerous activity in the world. She don’t like to do it one bit.”
“That’s a fine thing,” the merchant said. “Just fine and dandy. If she don’t like it, why the hell do you put up posters and build towers and sell tickets, that’s what I’d like to know.”
“Somebody’s got to do it. If it wasn’t us, it would just have to be somebody else.”
“Oh my God!” the merchant said, throwing up his hands. “Now you listen here. If you don’t get the show going in five minutes, I’ll have you all slapped right in the jail. Five minutes.”
He opened the flap of the tent and went out into the dark and the chill rain. He could hear the little girl crying and the lame man muttering to himself.
Almost at once the lame man followed him. He started up the truck and turned on all the lights. Then the woman appeared in her outsize bathrobe and wearing now a white bathing cap. She walked to the foot of the tower and leaned against it, one hand clutching a rung of the rope ladder, smiling.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the lame man said. “You are about to witness a performance that defies the laws of nature and science. This little lady you see before you is fixing to climb to the top of the tower. There, at that terrible altitude, she’s going to stand and dive into a flaming tank of water that’s barely six feet deep. You won’t believe your eyes. It’s a marvel of the modern world. ‘How does she do it?’ some of you will ask. Now some show people will give you all kinds of fancy reasons for how and why they do their work. They’ll tell you they learned it from the wise men of the East. They’ll tell you about magicians and dreams and the Secrets of the Ancient World. Not us. The way that Stella does this dive is skill, skill pure and simple. When Stella climbs that tower and dives into the flames she’s doing something anyone could do who has the heart and the skill and the nerve for it. That’s what’s different and special about our show. When Stella sails through the air and falls in the fire and comes up safe and smiling, she is the living and breathing proof of the boundless possibility of all mankind. It should make you happy. It should make you glad to be alive.”
“Let’s get on with it,” someone shouted, and the crowd hollered and whistled.
“All right, we won’t give you no special buildup,” the lame man continued in an even voice. “We just say, there it is. See for yourself. And without further ado I give you Stella, the high diver.”
He touched her. She removed the bathrobe and, opening her arms wide, showed herself, pale and stocky in the tight bathing suit with the winking sequins. Then she turned and began to climb the rope ladder. It was a perilous ascent and the ladder swung with the weight of her. When she reached the top, she rested, kneeling on the platform; then she stood up and unhitched the rope ladder and it fell away in a limp curve like a dead snake.
The crowd gasped.
“Do you see?” the lame man shouted. “Now there’s no other way to get down except by diving!”
He hobbled over to the tank and sloshed gasoline on top of the water. He stood back and looked up at her. She stood on the diving plank and looked down. The tower rattled and moved in the wind and she seemed very small and far away. She stood on the end of the plank looking down, then she signaled to the man. He lit the gasoline and jumped back awkwardly as the flames shot up. Just at that instant she dived. Soaring and graceful, her arms wide apart, she seemed for a breathless time to hang at that great height in the wind, caught in the brilliant snare of the searchlights. Then she seemed to fold into herself like a fan and straight and swift as a thrown spear she descended, plummeting into the tank with a great and sparkling flash of fire and water.
There was a hushed moment while the crowd waited to see if she was still alive, but then she emerged, climbed out of the tank smiling, and showed herself to them, damp and unscathed. She put on her bathrobe and hurried back to the tent. Some of the people began to leave, but many stood gazing at the tower and the vacant tank. The lame man switched off the lights and followed after her, disappearing into the tent.
The merchant entered the tent. The three of them, sitting in a row along the edge of the cot, were eating something out of a can. A red lantern glared at their feet.
“Is that all?” the merchant said. “I mean is that all there is to it?”
The man nodded.
“Kind of brief, don’t you think, for two bits a head?”
“That’s all there is to it,” the man said. “She could have killed herself. Ain’t that enough for one evening? They ought to be glad.”
The merchant looked at her. She was eating from the can and seemed as happy as could be.
“Can’t you swallow some swords or something? We want everybody to feel they got their money’s worth.”
“Goddamnit, they did!” the lame man said. “They got all they’re going to.”
The merchant tried to persuade him to do something more, but he continued to refuse. So the merchant took his share of the money and left them. Soon the rest of the people left too.
The next morning the three of them were gone. The tower was gone, the truck, the tent, and they might never have been there at all, for all the trace they left. Except for the dark spots on the grass where the flaming water had splashed, except for a few posters remaining (and they were not true to fact or life), there was no trace of them.
But if the evening performance had been brief, it remained with them, haunting, a long time afterwards. Some of the preachers continued to denounce it as the work of the devil himself. The drunkards and tellers of tall tales embroidered on it and exaggerated it and preserved it until the legend of that high dive was like a beautiful tapestry before which they might act out their lives, strangely dwarfed and shamed. The children pestered and fidgeted and wanted to know when the three would come again.
A wise man said it had been a terrible thing.
“It made us all sophisticated,” he said. “We can’t be pleased by any ordinary marvels anymore—tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, pretty girls being fired out of cannons. It’s going to take a regular apocalypse to make us raise our eyebrows again.”
He was almost right, as nearly correct as a man could hope to be. How could he even imagine that more than one aging, loveless woman slept better ever after, smiled as she dreamed herself gloriously descending for all the world to see from a topless tower into a lake of flame?
Non loquimur magna sed vivimus.
MINUCIUS FELIX
—Octavius
KING OF THE MOUNTAIN
THE TIME IS the heart of the Depression and the place is Florida. Not the one you know about with white beaches and palm trees, orange-juice stands and motels, shuffleboards and striptease, amateur and professional, for young and old, all the neon glare and gilt of a carnival. This is at the center of the state where you might as well be a thousand miles from the unlikely ocean in long hot summer days, where in those days truck farmers and small-time ranchers grubbed for a living from the sandy earth or maybe planted and tended orange trees and hope
d and sweated through the year for enough rain and, especially in winter, for warm weather, no frost.
Ask me why I pick that time and I’ll tell you. There’s a whole generation of us now, conceived in that anxious time, and if we’re fat now, flash wide advertisement grins at the cockeyed careless world, we know still, deeply as you know the struggles of blood on the long pilgrimage of flesh, the old feel and smell of fear, the gray dimensions of despair, and, too, some of us, the memory of the tug and gnaw of being hungry.
As for the place, it’s a place I know. I know the weather, the sights and smells. I have a child’s view of it. I know what’s happening down at the roots of the grass among the worms and crawlers and I know how a jaybird looks flying in a feathered flash of blue and white like a swift piece of the sky. Thinking about it, time and place, over years and miles, I can still wince with being there. I can see the faces of people who are dead. I know what some of them loved. And I love it still, that time and place, believe it or not, because where you suffered first, acquired your first wounds and scars, is where you’ve hung your heart once and for all and called it home.…
They beat the hell out of him. It was the Fourth of July and the band was playing to the crowd in the heat-stricken park; so loud and near it blared that it drowned out the fury of white shirtsleeves around him. The boy’s mother screamed, but he could only see her mouth open and her whole face and lips quivering tautly as if her flesh were elastic. He couldn’t hear a sound of her anguish. Some women held her back, but nobody was holding the boy. He saw his father go down amid that flailing of white like a man thrashing in the surf and bobbing under. He came up gasping for air, scattering them every which way, his own white shirt shredded now and his crude, powerful body tense with heavy muscles, using his fists like hammers, his great bald head shining like a polished stone. He went down in the middle of them again, surged up bloody and terrible, roaring above the sound of the band. And, as if in a dance, they came in closer around him, forcing him to earth by the sheer weight of them. Then they kicked and beat him almost to death. When he had stopped moving, twitching, they stepped back in a ragged circle and looked at him silently like a ring of hunters around a fallen beast. Then they scattered into the crowd and the band still played march music.
The women released his mother, and she ran and bent over his fallen father in the long bright curve of her summer holiday dress, fanning him with one of those paper fans that undertakers put out for the ladies on public occasions, for advertising. She just bent over him fanning and nobody paid any attention. He was too big a man for her to move out of the sun by herself. After a little while a Negro came from across the street and together they dragged him under a shade tree. The Negro had a tin cup in his lunch pail and he got some water from the old stone horse trough at the edge of the park and sloshed it over the boy’s father. When the water hit him he shook his head and tried to sit up. He tried to say something through the bloody bubbles of his mouth, couldn’t, laid his head back on the ground gently, slowly, like a man settling on a soft pillow to sleep. Then the woman saw her son. She called to the policeman who had been watching from a little distance.
“Take the boy home, Ernie,” she said. “At least you can do that.”
The policeman took the boy’s hand in his own, as if the boy were a little child, and the boy felt the strange sweaty chill of it, but clung to his hand, wouldn’t turn loose. He clung to the policeman and kept looking at his mother fanning the fallen man.
“You want a ice-cream cone?” the policeman said. “Sure you do, boy. And I’m going to buy you one.”
That sounded like a fine idea, and they turned and walked away from the park together, hand in hand.
Those were bad times then with so little money and people having to claw and wrestle each other for the little there was. It was the time of the Ku Klux Klan in that place. Not those men in sheets, crackpot fanatics, you can joke about now or piously deplore, but a ruthless political machine, a club for the lost and lonely, the embittered and the discontented. They had the county and a lot of the state and they meant to keep what they had. They didn’t hate the man. Nothing personal. They were afraid of him. They knew him. He was one of their own, a hard farm boy who had read the law and now was a lawyer in the town, and, being self-educated, he believed in some few things with an unsophisticated tenacity. He had said in public that they were going to have law and order in the county and that the Klan must be swept out of office and authority. He had said they are few and we are the many and we have the vote. So when he went to say it again in a formal speech on the Fourth of July, they met him at the edge of the park and they made a cripple of him. Always after that he had a limp and a cane and the hurt face of a prizefighter.
When he finally came home from the hospital, still bandaged, using his cane, the boy stood shy in the living room next to the upright piano his mother played and watched his father move awkwardly among familiar objects like a stranger.
“What’s this?” his father hollered. He was bent over the desk, looking through the drawers.
“What is it?” his mother said from the kitchen.
“I say what’s this you’ve got in the desk drawer?”
And he pulled out of the drawer a shiny pistol and held it loosely in his left hand like a dead thing. His mother came from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. As soon as she saw his father standing there with the pistol in his hand she started to cry.
“They almost killed you,” she said. “They’re liable to kill you next time.”
He started to stamp out of the room past her but she snatched at the gun. He pushed her away.
“It’s mine,” she said. “Let the blame fall on me. I bought it with my own money. I have the right. They might try to do something to me or the boy.”
“You know I don’t allow no firearms in this house,” his father said. “If it wasn’t for the boy I’d beat you with my cane.”
His mother turned away, hiding her face in the crook of her arm, and he heard his father stamping through the kitchen and, slowly, down the back steps and he heard the banging lid of the garbage can. After that it was very quiet for a moment, so quiet the boy could hear a mockingbird in the backyard, probably in the mulberry tree, making a sound like a cat, and even behind that sound, the hum, not much louder than the sound of a bumblebee, of the colored washwoman in the house next door who always sang and hummed when she ironed. He heard his father then begin to mount the back stairs like a clumsy creature on three legs. When his father spoke in the kitchen his voice was so soft and controlled he might have been the Episcopal minister giving the benediction.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m home now and you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
And she saying, “It’s too much to ask. I can’t go through it again. The women held me and I could have scratched my eyes out of my head rather than to watch anymore.”
“And what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to be? God knows I am not a little boy anymore.”
“They hurt you,” she said. “My God, how they hurt you.”
“They only confirmed me,” he said. “You could call it the laying on of hands.”
“We can go,” she said. “Let’s move up to Jacksonville. You can practice law there. You can make a good living in Jacksonville and we’ll be safe there.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m going upstairs and lie down for a few days and get a hold of myself. Then I’m going back out on the street and hold up my head.”
“I believe in you,” she said. “I know you have the strength. But it’s so futile, like Samson pulling the roof down on the Philistines.”
“If I have to I’ll pull the house down on their heads,” he answered, laughing the big outdoor laugh that sounded like a wild animal in the dark. “Whoever heard,” he said, still laughing, “whoever heard of a baldheaded Samson?”
After his father went up to the bedroom, climbed the flight of
stairs painfully, his mother came in from the kitchen and sat down at the piano. She played a couple of little waltz tunes. He knew them, but he liked “The Washington and Lee March” better. She was in the mood for little waltz tunes. She had never liked it in this raw town. She was a lady and her people were different. They had been to Waycross, Georgia, to visit; and he remembered his grandfather, a kind man with a soft voice who always smelled warmly of whiskey and cigars. He stayed in the house, padding about as light-footed as a cat in his bedroom slippers, and he had opened his leather-bound history books and showed the pictures to the boy. He knew how ashamed his mother must feel in this town, remembering the big house and the people there, especially his grandfather.
“All right,” he remembered his father shouting at her one night after they had returned. “Make a hero out of him. But just remember this. They would all be in the poorhouse if it wasn’t for me. There wouldn’t be any big house for you to go and visit and show off to the boy. Oh, he’s a fine old gentleman and I do dearly love him, but bear in mind sometimes when he’s sitting in his armchair by the fire and talking so well behind the smoke of a twenty-five-cent cigar, so gracefully, that it’s my cigar he’s smoking. He’s a fine old gentleman by grace of me.”
“What’s the matter, honey?” his mother said, looking away from the bright slick piano keys, stopping in the middle of a tune. “You look so sad, honey boy. Don’t you be sad. Everything is going to be all right.”
Then she lay her face on the piano keys and started to cry, noiselessly, only her body shaking as if she had fever and chills, and the tears rolling down her cheeks. The boy went outside in the backyard and picked up a stone to make that mockingbird be quiet, but the mockingbird was gone. He climbed up into the mulberry tree and looked all around, as high and proud and lonely as the king of the mountain, and nobody, nobody would dare to come and pull him from his perch.
They had a little dog in those days, a Boston bull, as cute as he was ugly, and smart. He could do all the ordinary tricks like begging, rolling over, and playing dead, but they had taught him a very special one. In the afternoon they’d turn him loose and he’d run all the way downtown to the post office. The clerk would put the mail in his mouth and he’d run straight home to stand at the screen door scratching with his paw until somebody let him in. He never messed up one of the letters. It was called a mighty fine trick and the people around town knew all about it and talked about it. You might find it hard to believe a dog could learn a trick like that. Don’t doubt it; I know myself of a dog that a grocer uses to deliver packages in a dogcart.
Evening Performance Page 2
