by Bruce Feiler
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.
For now, other concerns were more immediate. As Khris approached Tobruk in the last cage, he was slightly distracted by another tiger and wasn’t looking when Laurie opened the door. When Khris finally did turn around, Tobruk flung himself against the cage and thrust his outstretched paw through the door, missing the sagging loaf of meat but snagging instead the back of Khris’s hand. Almost immediately Tobruk’s curved claw slid deep into the tendon behind Khris’s index finger. Khris winced in pain, but didn’t shout. Laurie dropped the door. I instinctively reached out to help, but Khris merely waved me away. He dropped the log of meat on the ground and with remarkable composure grabbed the back of Tobruk’s paw and carefully pulled the claw from his hand in the same direction the nail had entered. With blood pouring from his wound and his jaw tightly clenched, Khris calmly picked up the meat from the ground, waited for Laurie to reopen the door, and continued feeding the cats as if nothing had transpired. “You can never let them see you scared,” he had said. His manifesto come to life.
When the feeding was d
one Khris walked slowly back to his trailer and asked me to help him wrap his hand. His face was pale by the time he sat down. His leg was stained with blood. The second show was scheduled to start in less than an hour.
“To be frank with you,” he said after several moments of silence, “Kathleen was the first woman I ever had sex with. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had an aura about her. She was sexual—sensual even; I was extremely attracted to her. She was a little confused. But of course I knew that when I came down here. I had just broken up with my college girlfriend, Kim. I had considered getting married, doing the picket-fence-and-children thing. But still I had this secret part of me that wanted a little adventure.”
Outside, the cats were busy licking their paws and clearing their throats with low, guttural cries. Laurie had finished giving them water and had wandered off to her camper. Khris was tugging at his hair.
“On my first night in Florida the flame reignited and I knew I could never leave her. Then we went on the road. Everything was good for a while. We became friends, in addition to the physical thing. But then problems started happening. We are different people. Kathleen is fiercely independent. She doesn’t like to talk about her problems. I’m the opposite. If I have a problem I want to sit down and talk about it right away. Let’s put it this way: If Kathleen wanted something from the mall right now, she would just go and get it. If I needed something, I would ask somebody to go with me.”
He put his cap back on the lamp and slid off his Chinese slippers. It was now totally dark outside, and a small light over the stove produced the only shadows.
“Over the last few months, when we knew she was going to leave, we were on friendly terms, but it didn’t take long for the daggers to start flying. The last few weeks she started blaming me. She wanted to leave, to go to school, to grow, she said, yet she still didn’t want to leave the cats. I wanted to stay. If you had asked her last night why she was leaving, she probably would have said I pushed her.”
“Did she say goodbye?”
“Sure. It never got so bad that she would walk away and never talk with me again. In our greatest time we would call each other sweetheart and baby. Yesterday when I went to give her the final hug she got emotional. I choked up. I’m choking up now just remembering it. I said to her, ‘Kathleen, I’ll always love you.’ She said to me, ‘I’ll always love you too, baby.’ I told her I would take care of all this for her, and she said, ‘Take care of it for you now.’”
Tears coated Khris’s light blue eyes. For a moment he couldn’t speak, until he was coldly brought back to the present by a crisp metal bang and a growl from his front yard. “Fatima!” he shouted, swinging open his screen door. “Fatima. Be quiet!” The door slammed back into place.
“What makes me the saddest,” he said, his voice turning more Southern as his story went along, “is that the people in this circus don’t realize how much she did for these cats. How she trained them. How she loved them. I remember last year Mr. Pugh and Mr. Holwadel came to see me practice in DeLand. I had only practiced the act once or twice. I was scared shitless. I took a deep breath and went into the cage. To my surprise everything went perfectly. They applauded after every trick. Kathleen got so upset watching them approve of me that she ran into the trailer and hid. Later I had dinner with Mr. Holwadel in a restaurant in DeLand. He said, ‘Khris, I’ll be honest with you. I think we’ll have a better cat act this year.’ Outside I was very proud. I said, ‘I’ll do my best for you. I’ll try not to let you down.’ But inside I felt so bad for Kathleen. She trained these animals. She raised many of them by hand. She had been with them for six years. And still no one ever respected her.”
“Do you think they’ll ever respect you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I’m a man. Just the other day Mr. Holwadel stopped me in front of the tent and asked how things were going. I told him they were going okay. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now that you’re a member of the team I want you to do me a favor.’ I said, ‘Sure, Mr. Holwadel, what’s that?’ ‘Start calling me Douglas.’”
Buck knocked at my door at a little after eight.
“Get up,” he said. “We’re going shopping.”
“But the mall’s not open for another two hours,” I protested.
“We’re not going to the mall,” he said. “This is Hanover, Pennsylvania: Thrift Town, U.S.A.”
The show crossed the Mason-Dixon Line at the end of April and for many it wasn’t a day too soon. To landowners before the Civil War the famed surveying line may have been a divider between slave and non-slave states, to officers during World War II it may have been a warning of when to segregate their troops, but to butchers on the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus nearly fifty years later the line was the signal that for the first time all year they could raise the price of popcorn. Popcorn wasn’t the only thing. The coloring books that the clowns sold during intermission jumped from one dollar to two, programs went from two dollars to three, and Cokes, cotton candy, and hot dogs all surged fifty cents to two dollars apiece. Look out, Yankees, one almost wanted to shout, a herd of carpetbaggers from Dixie are coming to cart your money away.
Moving north also heralded other changes—first among them, the crowds. All through Georgia, the Carolinas, and southern Virginia we had seen mostly all-white audiences with few blacks and even fewer Hispanics. In addition, Southern audiences tended to sit in the general admission bleacher seats in the corners, which cost nine dollars for adults and six for kids, instead of paying two dollars more and receiving a reserved chair alongside the three rings. Moreover, they would sit quietly, without much emotion, and during the Ivanovs’ balletic hand-balancing act late in the second act many would hurriedly exit the tent. As we headed north, through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, before the climax of the summer in New York City itself, the audiences began to diversify. Crowds were more ethnic and much wealthier; they purchased better seats, bought more concessions, made more noise, and stayed until the very end. This made everyone happy, especially Sean, because with fewer people leaving after the spaceship act more people would see him fly.
While the shows became better, daily life became worse. The roads deteriorated (Jimmy insisted Pennsylvania had the worst roads in the country: “They ought to pay us to travel on them,” he said), gasoline became more expensive, and the building inspectors started forcing performers to move their trailers in the morning to add a few inches to the fire lane. It made some veteran performers long for the days of simple bribes. Karen Rodríguez even complained that in the ritzy suburbs around Washington, D.C., she had to drive thirty miles to find a Laundromat. One person who particularly dreaded going north was Buck, because once we headed into New England there were fewer flea markets where he could buy or sell his wares. Hanover, Pennsylvania, was his last chance to stock up, and he didn’t intend to let it pass.
“Now there are two things you have to remember about the flea-market business,” he said as we sat down for a breakfast of biscuits and orange juice at a Roy Rogers across the street from the tent. “First, you can never have too much of a good thing.” The previous day, Buck said, he had driven one hundred miles to a library sale in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where he had purchased thirty-four books for a total of three dollars, which he would later resell for six dollars apiece. “The second thing is, you should always use psychology. Every flea market I go to I put up a sign saying since it is my first visit I’ll sell all my books at half price. It works like a charm. Everybody just stops to talk.”
In truth, there were probably other reasons everybody wanted to talk to Buck. Even without his makeup on he looked like an alien—a quaint, rather awkward alien that had stepped out of a B-grade 1950s science fiction film. Everything about him seemed to accentuate his height. His black hair with streaks of gray on the side was always standing on its end from where he slept on the eight-foot foam mattress that occupied most of the back of his van. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses that looked as if
they were hand-me-downs from a comic-book science teacher. Plus his neck, shoulders, and even his waist all slumped continually from crouching every day for half a century under doorways and signboards in six-feet-and-under America. Whether it was an optical illusion or not, I don’t know, but even though Buck was well over seven feet tall, his hands always seemed to drag on the ground.
Beyond his appearance, there was something a little unnerving about Buck. As a clown, he was definitely a relic. He didn’t move much or particularly make faces. Instead he liked to make fun of children, play tug-of-war with their arms, or shock them with his personal brand of bathroom humor. His favorite walk-around was to carry a large piece of granite and a roll of toilet paper with a sign that said: “Old-Fashioned Rock and Roll.” It was hardly clean family fun, some complained. Around the lot his behavior got him into even more trouble. Perhaps as a result of having people gawk at him his whole life, Buck had become something of an exhibitionist. Without access to a shower, he regularly bathed out of a bucket directly in front of Clown Alley. Also, he had a well-known and mostly disapproved-of habit of sunning himself nude up and down the East Coast. He also urinated at will in public. As a result, many of the performers thought him perverted and kept their children away. They even complained to management. They feared that one day a paying customer would as well.
Finished with breakfast, we headed into town on Route 94, a typical congested semiurban highway with strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food playgrounds all clamoring for the best frontage and median cut. But here there was a difference: many of the signs were local in nature. According to the neon vernacular, Hanover was the home of Snyder’s Pretzels, Utz Potato Chips, Hanover Shoes. Stores touted discount clothing, discount auto parts, even discount beer. Arrows beckoned drivers into darkened streets promising cheap thrills. It all seemed like bargain heaven for Buck. “I like to drive in alleys,” he said, finally pulling off the main drag closer to town. “People throw out all sorts of interesting stuff in alleys.” Sure enough, a few minutes later he pulled over behind an abandoned hotel. “Why, look at that.” He stretched his arm through the driver’s window, reached into the top of a dark green Dumpster, and pulled a mangled object out of the pile. “It’s a CB radio!” he exclaimed, tinkering with the buttons and putting it up to his ear as if he really was a science teacher. “You can hear it, but you can’t talk. I’d say it’s worth about five bucks.”
