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

by Robert Hough

  "It was somethin', governor. Somethin' fo' sure."

  "He's right, Kentucky. You're a natural-born performer."

  "Natural-born, Miss Stark."

  Here I looked at the both of them, and when I'd finally caught enough breath to form a sentence it came out as "Al G., we have to talk."

  Once I'd done a few more Slides for Life it began to sink in that just so long as I held on I'd survive, a rule I'd always subscribed to in life anyway. After a week or so I learned to style the act, bowing and curtseying on the platform, smiling through the plunge, pointing my arms over my head as I jetted airborne and then waving and smiling after I crawled from the net. Truth be known, it got to be sort of fun, like flying, which allowed me to concentrate on disliking my goat act and my riding act all the more intently. Meanwhile, the circus headed south.

  So. Lithe little blond thing. Twenty-three years old and nary a scar, bone break or concussion under her belt (though the same couldn't be said about a sordid past). In the menage tent, near the cat cages, in the off-hours before the matinee, a time of day the monkeys stop chattering and the mules stop braying and the elephants stop trumpeting and the hyenas stop cackling. Even the horses and elephants close their eyes, not so much sleeping but enjoying the lack of commotion that part of the afternoon brings. My head on a rolled-up coat and that rolled-up coat on a pallet. I'm dreaming, almost certainly, for I've suffered from doozers all my life, so I don't even hear him march up and position those tall black leather boots beside my little blond head.

  He waited a few seconds before impatiently rapping the heels of said boots against the floorboards. This caused me to open my right eye, blinking against the light filtering into the menage, before realizing I was staring at a man's shin. I rotated that same eye upward, and took my first look at Louis Roth, who'd been on loan to Hagenbeck-Wallace for the past half year.

  This initial impression moulded my opinion of Louis's size, for from where I lay he looked to be about eight feet tall, with a huge ladleshaped jaw and hair as thick and well groomed as Al G.'s. He was dressed in jodhpurs, black waistcoat and epaulettes, riding whip in one hand. As I lay there, coming awake, a thought passed through my head: Whoever he is, he ought to wear a monocle.

  I got to my feet and discovered he was actually quite small, not much taller than five foot six, which is average on a woman but veering toward puny on a man.

  "You are Mabel Stark?" he asked.

  I said I was. At the same time I was noticing the smell of liquor. And I'm not talking about the smell of a man who'd had a quick midday bracer, something common on circus midways and in corporate boardrooms alike, but the smell of an odour on low ebb, dull but settled in, like grain and sweat on easy ferment. As he talked, the muscles in his face darted. It reminded me of the movements of a fly.

  "You are ze vooman interested in tigers? In vorking viss them?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I see."

  Pause.

  "Ver are you from?"

  "Kentucky."

  "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-three."

  Another pause, though longer this time and reading higher on the intimidation meter.

  "I vill say this once. Forget about tigers. Go back to your horses or your goats or whatever it is you do. Go back to your free act. I vill never half a vooman trainer again."

  He stood there for another few seconds, letting me digest the news. Then he spun on his heel and marched off, his footfalls so heavy they kicked up tanbark and caused a general stir among the animals. Seeing red, I marched out of the menage to the connection and strode toward Al G.'s tent. I was no more than ten feet away when Dan somehow stepped between me and the flap of Al G.'s office, all of which was an amazing trick for it seemed as though he'd stepped out of thin air to do so.

  "Well hello, Miss Stark."

  "Hello, Dan."

  "Some weather we're having."

  "Nice."

  "What do you figure it looks like tonight?"

  "Full house, I'd say."

  "Full house fo' sure."

  "Uh, Dan..."

  "And it's a good town, too. You been in? Pretty square. Two barbershops."

  "No, Dan I was wondering..."

  "Plus a place to go for collard greens. Can you imagine, this far west? My, I do love collard greens. My momma made them all the time when I was little, fried 'em in pork fat for flavour, which of course made `em salty but if you take your greens that way why it's sheer heaven...."

  The whole time Dan was keeping his body between me and Al G.'s tent. Course, I knew what this was a sign for. Everybody did. It meant Al G. was inside, womanizing. I didn't know exactly with who, as I wasn't the sort who kept up with rumours, though I did know since Dollie Barnes had up and left him a few weeks prior he'd been busier than ever in the goat-like-behaviour department, which is saying something as he'd been pretty busy in that department even when she was around.

  I thanked Dan for the pleasant conversation. Was a ladling of sarcasm in my voice, which seemed to hurt him and which I regretted immediately after, the upshot being I walked off with a soreness in my throat. See, cat training was supposed to be the thing that was going to give me purpose and options, two things you need plenty of at any age but most particularly when you're young. After a few minutes of walking around aimlessly, I figured I might as well head back to the menage, if only to give myself something to do before the evening show.

  To make a long story short I kept on helping the menage boys with the tigers, no cherry pie asked for and none received, though it's true I'd lost a little of my vim now I was doing it just to kill time during lulls. Whenever I saw Louis I'd say good-morning or goodafternoon and then get out of his way pronto (though surely he must've noticed how the tigers purred every time I got near the cage? How they'd come over to me and rub their sides against the bars? How they hardly ever tried to hook their claws in my arm and pull?) The most I ever got out of Louis was a terse nod, and then the sound made by those knee-high leather boots stomping away from me.

  When I next spoke with Al G., he told me to pay Louis no mind, that he had a sharpness about him and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to change that. Only time would bring him around.

  This went on for weeks: my doing my goat act and my highschool riding act and my Slide for Life and in my off-hours hanging around the cats (while generally feeling logy and on the neurasthenic end of things). It might've even been months. Then one day I was in my corner, opposite King and Queen and Toby, reading a book though finding it hard to concentrate for I was thinking maybe I'd quit and try to worm my way onto another menage show. Louis came tramping down the aisle between the cages. The ground was damp that day, and his heels hit the earth so hard he kicked up divets.

  He stopped in front of me and held out a twisted willow whip.

  "Here."

  Was the first whip I'd ever held, a long piece of leather smooth and comfortable and with a smell halfway between worn wood and Louis Roth. He led me outside, through the backyard, and into an empty stretch of dirt beyond the lot. It was a hot day, sun blazing. Louis was wearing his meat belt, and he reached in and grabbed a hunk of horse and dropped it on the ground. Then he walked me a dozen feet back and said, "Wait for ze flies to come and when zay do start flicking zem off. When you can flick off one fly so zat another is not disturbed, vee can haff a talk. Are you understanding me?"

  I nodded yes and he walked off. I stood there, alone, with a whip and a piece of meat fixing to turn rank, which in the noon sun wasn't going to be a long process. After a bit I started contemplating the thing in my hand, impressed mostly by how it managed to be so smooth and rigid at the same time. I shifted hands and noticed how my sweat had seeped colour out of the handle, leaving a copper smear running diagonal over my palm. I put it back in my right hand and squeezed, and by God its firmness reminded me of Dimitri the day I sponge bathed him, by which I mean dead stiff though with a hint of sponginess.

  By
this point, the meat was starting to turn a dull grey green and a trio of flies were doing a zigzag dance in the air above it; it looked like they were deciding which one got the honour of being the first to make a landing. I waited, it being a measure of my desire to follow Louis's directions to a T. I didn't even think of practising until those flies were on the meat. One landed, and another. I raised my right hand, circled the whip dramatically over my head and let loose, snapping my wrist at what I figured was the perfect moment for wrist snapping, the idea being the force of that snap would travel down the length of the braid and translate so hard into the popper it'd make a snap could be heard on the far side of the lot. Instead, that long, long whip unrolled like a carpet on a hill. By the time my wrist snap wound its way to the tip it'd pretty much worn itself out, the popper flopping silent into the dust, a full ten feet from the target. It didn't disturb the flies' business one iota.

  I cursed that nervous little Hungarian, for it occurred to me he'd given me the biggest whip in the business and the last thing someone would ever learn on. Basically he was putting me off, thinking I'd get discouraged and forget the tigers. Had this not occurred to me it might've even worked, but the plain fact was I was mad, and anger's always motivated me about as well as anything else. I spent all afternoon trying to make that damn thing snap, quitting only when I had to go eat and then get ready for the evening show.

  That night we jumped over the Colorado border to New Mexico. When everyone was bunking down for a midday nap, I found Louis polishing his boots in the menage tent. A pint of Tennessee sipping whisky was beside him.

  "Can I get another piece of horsemeat?"

  Naturally I could've gotten my own piece of horsemeat- could've borrowed a slab from a cage boy or bugged the cookhouse staff or visited the butcher in town, for that matter. The point was, I wanted him to know I hadn't given up yet. He looked at me, surprised I was going to miss my sleep a second day in a row, and sighed.

  "All right," he finally said. "Tell Red I said it vass okay."

  Around the end of that day's whipping session, the meat gamey and green and so ridden with flies it hummed, I started to get that popper to snap. Not powerfully, mind you, not the way Louis could, but a snap nonetheless. I'd been thinking a lack of strength in my arms was the problem when in fact it was my technique: the arm-circling has to be tight and purposeful, the wrist snap coming at the exact moment the power generated by all that arm circling is at its maximum (and not a tenth of a second earlier or a tenth of a second later, a mistake not difficult to make). The first time the popper actually popped I practically jumped out of my boots-I thought some rubes with pistols had wandered on the lot looking for trouble (which was something that happened all the time back then, especially if the workingmen had been out stealing shirts off clotheslines the night before). When I realized what had really happened, I grinned.

  I made the whip crack a few more times before having to quit. Next day, I was at it again, forgoing my sleep, giving Louis the may-Ihave-another-piece-of-horsemeat? act, spending a hot two hours twirling a whip over my head and yelling, "Yah!" That day I figured out a good way to get the popper to go off more ferociously was to jerk the whip back just as it was about to snap. While this certainly did add a zing, it was also a little dangerous; midway through the session I misfired and the whip end rebounded and caught me on the cheek, leaving a red welt that burned for days. Was lucky I didn't put my eye out.

  My main problem now was accuracy: I couldn't get close enough to those flies so they'd so much as get nervous, never mind leave their supper. Season ended and we came back to Venice and I got myself a room at the St. Mark's, and like many of the women who didn't get jobs over the winter I danced a little burlesque in town to keep myself fed. But only a little. During the day I devoted myself to whip training and staying near the three tigers I hoped to work. Day after day after day, I practised. If Al G. was interested in what I was doing, he didn't show it-in fact, he never once came round to check my progress or offer encouragement or tell me what I was doing wrong, something I attributed to his being so busy with skirt-chasing and running a circus.

  Instead he sent Dan. One day, with no warning or footfalls approaching, he was there, watching me, mouth parted, till finally I lost my composure and said, "You got something to say, Dan, then say it."

  His hands got lost quick in his pockets and his shoulders shrugged up and he watched his own foot make a pattern in the dirt, until finally he upped and outed with "I knows what you doin' wrong, Miss Stark."

  "Well then Dan why don't you tell me what that is?"

  "Gots to aim two feet behind the piece of meat. Gots to pretend like its in the way. Gots to whip through the target, ma'am. Not at it."

  "Is that a fact?"

  "Natural-born fact. I seen Al G. do it. Back on the dog-andpony. He may not look it now, but that man he's got the gift too."

  We looked at each other.

  "Was that all, Dan?"

  "Yes ma'am," he said before walking off.

  Standing alone with my whip and my stinking meat I saw a little red, for Dan's advice sounded so ridiculous I wondered if it was something Al G. had told him to say so as to put me even further off track. Still, I wasn't having much luck my own way, which was to stare at that putrid meat for a good five seconds before letting fly. So I gave it a whirl Dan's way. Didn't even really try, seeing as I had no confidence in his suggestion, just delivered the whip in that general direction, wrist snapping at some imaginery spot of dirt maybe two feet behind.

  The meat bounced skyward and set the flies to buzzing.

  After that, it was a matter of me wanting to hit that piece of meat every time and therefore not being able to do so, no way nohow, and wasting three more days before realizing the secret of doing anything artful is to try as hard as you can while at the same time not trying at all. With this bit of swami knowledge under my belt, I soon got so eight times out of ten I could send those flies into a commotion, though I'd long figured out that no one, and that included Louis Roth, could ever hit one specific fly while leaving another be.

  So I went and got Louis. Rapped on the door of his parked Pullman car and told him I had something he needed to see. Immediately I knew he'd been drinking, for his accent was thicker than usual, almost to the point I couldn't understand him: "Vell yell yell, ze girl she bass somessing to show ze boss, mmmmmmm?" We headed through the backyard, Louis walking stiff and rapid-fire as always though with the occasional off-course sidestep. Every few feet, I had to skip a little just to keep up. We reached my training space, out in an empty yard behind the menage tent. There he watched as I picked up the whip and aimed and not-aimed at the same time. After a quick arm twirl, I let loose a wrist snap that was a millisecond tardy. A dozen feet away, a pair of flies were sniffing and dancing over the target. One was way over on the left, one was way over on the right, and the fact my slightly off-course lashing got close enough to scare the right-side fly only I put down to sheer fluke.

  Louis's mouth went to hang open, though he stopped himself just as his lower lip cleared his teeth. I watched his jaw muscles grind beneath tight skin as he looked at that day's meat being bothered by a single silent fly. just kept looking at it, he did, until finally he turned to me and barked, "Come."

  So what did I, twenty-four-year-old Mary Haynie of West Kentucky slash Mary Aganosticus of Louisville slash Mary Williams from East Texas slash Mabel Stark of the St. Mark's Hotel do? Followed him, best as I was able, for Louis practically bolted through the backyard, across the midway and into the training barn. Without benefit of a cage boy, he started shifting cages so his two best lions, Humpy and Bill, connected to the tunnel leading into the steel arena. This exertion made him sweat, and this caused him to give off the scent of alcohol gone sweet with exertion: was like camphor lozenges, though stronger. He yanked the tunnel door rope and the lions filed into the tunnel. He opened the second tunnel door and they entered the ring. Then he brushed by me-not so much as an e
xcuse me-and stepped inside. Humpy roared and Bill flopped on his side and Louis barked, "Children! Seats!"

  Humpy took the pedestal to the left and Bill the pedestal to the right. Louis stood between them, dropping his whip on the floor. Then he reached out and pressed a hand against each lion's throat, both arms disappearing to their elbows in tawny mane. With this, the lions lifted their heads and placed their chins on Louis's shoulders. Louis turned to his right and pressed his lips up against Bill's mouth and he kissed the lion for five or ten seconds. Then he turned to Humpy and kissed him even harder than he'd kissed Bill, his hand furrowing through Humpy's mane to the back of Humpy's head before grabbing up a handful of cat hair and pulling, so that Humpy's gums and lips and tongue were forced over the lower half of Louis Roth's face, smearing it with saliva and hay bits and fragments of horse. Then, as man and animal kissed, Louis slipped his hands into the sides of the animal's mouth and, with a steady pressure, craned it wide open. Head then followed hands, Louis now inside a lion from the neck up, the tips of Humpy's incisors making pointy-shaped impressions in the skin of Louis's neck.

  In a second Louis was out, not a hair mussed though his face was dampened and speckled with mouth debris. He walked out of the ring and stood beside me, smelling of cat and whisky. We were both silent. His jaw muscles worked and he folded his arms tight over his stomach. The things that man could say without speaking.

  I opened the cage door and stepped inside and walked to the point between the pedestals. I was shaking inside, half from fear and half from wanting to do this so bad. Humpy grinned and Bill growled, a deep distant-thunder rumble that got inside and roped up and down my spine and got turned into my own voice once it reached the inside of my head. Go back, was what it said.

  Instead I craned my neck and kissed the lion as he was still growling and maybe thinking of having himself a kill, though he calmed with my lips against his and my hand tickling his neck. When his growling stopped I turned and put my lips to Humpy and kissed him too, the big cat lolling his tongue out of his mouth so it lathered my tongue and teeth and gums before parting his jaws a little to signal he expected hands to slip inside. Taking this cue I pulled his jaws apart and put my head in the animal's mouth, and it was while inside Humpy's head I felt myself go dead calm, for at that moment there was no question what was going to get me-was going to be the jaws of a lion, reeking of tartar and animal flesh going to rot between molars, and in this certainty there was a warmth difficult to describe. Fact was, I didn't even want to pull my head back out.