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

by Robert Hough

  I made it through the day, tired as usual, just wishing something would happen for anything'd be better than this infernal waiting game. On my way home, I stopped at the pharmacy and got myself a vial of red-and-white capsules. I washed two down with a Hamm's right after Gilligan's Island and put myself under the covers. Next thing I knew, morning had come, and though it took a cold shower and an extra cup of coffee before the cobwebs started to clear I had to admit I felt better, by which I mean rested and less raw, the only side effect a mild fuzziness on the tongue.

  So now my pills sit on my bedside table. They're next to a silver hairbrush, a glass of water, a .38 calibre pistol bought years ago in Kansas and a silver frame holding a photo more than forty years old. Was taken on our wedding day, my last wedding day, thank you very much, which explains why Art's wearing a tuxedo and pink frills. The smile that man had-there are smiles born from manners and there are smiles born from an understanding of how bad things can get, and by now I hope I don't have to tell you which one I consider the most attractive. Hell, I'd show you what I mean except his picture's in my bedroom and no one other than myself has set foot in that room in the thirty-six years I've lived here. I'd probably die from the shock of it.

  But if I did show you the photo, you'd see a man, handsome in a well-worn sort of way, smiling, eyes grey blue, skin reddish, moustache bushy but not ridiculously so, and I guarantee the first thing you'd say to yourself is, "Jesus Murphy. That mascara?"

  CHAPTER 8

  THE HANDSOME BIGAMIST

  I DIDN'T SEE OR HEAR FROM Louis ROTH FOR THREE YEARS. Even then it was out of the blue, a letter arriving from the Great Wortham Carnival, a tiny grift show with a menage I'd thought had up and died years earlier. He wanted a divorce. With three husbands to my name I had no qualms thinning the crowd a little.

  The letter went on to propose we sign the papers on May 20, 1920, in Portland, a date coinciding with the arrival of the Barnes show. We'd do it around eleven in the morning, between set-up and matinee, before the crowds.

  I cabled him back, agreeing to everything.

  That morning I awoke early (nerves) and gave Rajah a kiss on the head and squeezed the folds of his ears together, a gesture that tickled him and made him generally agreeable. When he came awake I scratched the downy fur of his underbelly and told him Mama was busy that day and he'd have to go to his c-a-g-e; was a word he understood even when spelled, so he arfed and made himself sad-eyed and limp in the tail.

  "Shoo," I said, reinforcing the point, "you just shoo," and here he lifted his head off his forepaws and moved off the bed hind end first.

  After leashing him I walked him all the way to the lot where he ran around while waiting for the workingmen to set up the menage. When he'd had enough, I treated him to some brisket and brushed him and gave him a big kiss on the snout before putting him in his cage. Around ten o'clock, Al G. told a gilly driver to take us into town. Ten minutes later, we stepped out in front of the address Louis had given me. It was on the wrong side of town, the buildings dirty and the sewers open and a pair of ragamuffins already tugging on Al G.'s arm and bugging him for pennies. He handed them quarters and said, "Well, Kentucky, good luck."

  "You're not coming?"

  His face widened into a grin.

  "People to see, Kentucky. People to see...." which was a statement that shouldn't've surprised me for he was without Dan or Miss Speeks and Portland was a town he knew well (it being a source of cheap hay and all). He wandered off, whistling, a tall-backed man in a nice suit sauntering into a coal-black tenement and if you want an image summing up Al G. Barnes that's about as good as I can do.

  I went inside. The steps were rickety and one of the vestibule lights was burnt out. I was afraid to touch anything, for dirt was everywhere and back then there were some pretty misguided rumours concerning the way you get diseases common among the poor. (Scabies, for one thing, and conditions that make going to the bathroom a horror.) After a bit of poking about I found the office I was hunting for, on the second floor just down from the stairwell. Here I opened a door and found a waiting room that was surprisingly clean and well lit.

  I also found Louis Roth, flipping through a paper.

  He gave me the thinnest of smiles. In three years his face had gotten wrinklier and slim to the point of gauntness, gauntness being something that looked bad on a man like Louis: the skin on his face had to stretch to accommodate his pail-shaped jaw, the effect being skulllike and a little eerie. His thick dark hair had thinned a little and gone grey at the temples, something that must've bothered him for he'd always been so vain about it.

  "Mabel," he said.

  "Louis."

  He stood, took my hand and shook it like we were about to sign a land deal; he even brought his heels together in a click before retaking his chair. Frankly, I wished he'd kissed me. It would've made the whole thing less weird.

  Instead, we sat, staring at the door to the lawyer's office, listening to the dull hum of a ceiling fan. If Louis was thinking what I was thinking it had to do with the way one minute two people can be close enough to clean the inside of each other's animal wounds and the next minute be worse than strangers. It was a maudlin thought, so I passed the time dwelling on it, for I've always considered maudlin to be one of the truer ways of feeling.

  After a few minutes the door opened and a rumpled little bowling pin of a man with muttonchops invited us in and handed us the papers. I'd seen a copy already, Louis having sent one with his letter, and I was fine with the stipulation we both just walk away with whatever we'd brought to the marriage, no money or property or ill will changing hands.

  "Any questions?"

  We both said no by moving our chins. Louis then asked, "Iss zer anysing else?"

  The lawyer shook his head. Louis put his fountain pen back in his jacket pocket and stood and straightened his jacket and said, "Goodbye, Mabel. It vas nice to see you again."

  He marched out. The sentimental fool in me felt a twinge at the sound of Louis's boots smacking the floorboards; I suppose I was thinking if his boots still had the sound of authority there was a better than even chance Louis still carried it around somewhere inside him as well.

  After a few seconds, there was nothing left to do but shake the lawyer's hand and thank him for his time. I did so, and he informed me I owed half the fee, which seemed fair so I paid it and thanked him again and left. When I made it to the street, Louis was nowhere in sight.

  The whole thing had taken about five minutes. Both Al G. and I had figured it would take a whole lot longer, so we'd told the gilly driver to come back in an hour and a half. With time to kill, I caught a taxi across the railway tracks and had myself a soda float in a nice department store. When I finished my soda I ordered another, my weight or lack thereof having always been a problem. After that I browsed through magazines and talked to people who recognized me from my picture on the posters the advance agents had put up all over town. Then I left the store and walked for a bit, feeling happy, for I was discovering that a feeling of freedom sets in after a divorce that's not in any way unpleasant. If only I'd had the same opportunity with hubbies one and two.

  Was a nice warm day with a nice warm breeze. I took my kerchief off and let my blond hair ruffle up, and when I passed a store with a bright blue dress I liked in the window I went in and it fitted perfectly. Because the shop owner was a circus fan he insisted I take it free, so long as I'd let him put a picture of myself in the window along with a sign saying "Mabel Stark the Tiger Queen Shops Here."

  In other words, I was feeling good, something that normally makes me nervous but for some reason didn't that day. I walked until the town started to turn seedy, at which point I hailed a cab and took it back to the meeting place, where Al G. and the gilly were both waiting. Al G. was in a good mood, and by this I mean a genuine good mood and not the good mood he conjured when trying to get what he wanted from others-he was whistling and smiling and talking sports with the driver and teasing me
about being a free woman. He even told me I ought to smile more often, on account of how pretty I looked when I was happy. To emphasize this sentiment he put his hand on my knee and gave me a quick little fresh-bread squeeze, which was the first time he'd tried something forward with me in ages. I laughed it off and pushed it away and wasn't the least bothered.

  "Mabel," he said, "why is it you and me have never been together? It's unnatural."

  "It's not unnatural," I said. "It's just plain sanity."

  This made him laugh hard enough his eyes went into slits, the wrinkles caused by countless hours of midway sun popping up like desert crevices. We were both feeling mirthful and younger than our actual ages-me about thirty, Al G. maybe forty-five-when we pulled into the lot and Dan came running.

  He didn't say a thing. Just gave Al G. his something's-wrong face, a face Dan wore at the best of times but was particularly pronounced that day. Al G. jumped from the car and went off with him. Ten minutes later, Dan was marching up and down the midway with his hands cupped over his mouth calling "John Robinson, John Robinson" which is circus slang for blowdown weather's on the way so we better get the show over with quick.

  Strangest thing, though. I looked up, and there wasn't a grey cloud in sight.

  Still, orders are orders, the circus being more like an army than most troupers care to admit (albeit one that doesn't discriminate against felons, drug takers, dwarves, communists and arse lusters). "The Conquest of Nyanza" was cut to shorter than ten minutes, just a quick circle around the hippodrome and we were all back through the blue curtain. The clown segment was reduced to one pie in the face and one tiny car sprouting three dozen chubby arms and legs. We omitted the aerial monkeys and the rube parade and the fabulous bucking mules. Al G. also killed the spec in the middle of the show-an African hunt with Spanish stallions and Indian elephants and brown-skinned girls with jewels in their navels and red dots pasted to the middle of their foreheads. Lotus the hippo, the Blood-Sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ, rode a cart instead of doing his normal lumbering walk around the tent. No doubt there were other cuts too, though I forget what they were. I only know when it came to the show's finale I stayed under Rajah for just as long as it took him to do his business, my having substituted a white leather uniform for a black leather uniform so as to avoid the embarrassment I suffered the first night Rajah started using me as a rubbing post.

  After a quick announcement, the after-show was cancelled and we were done. Two hours and twenty minutes packed into less than one and a half. By the time I got Rajah back to the train, the workingmen had taken down the cookhouse and pie car and had made good headway with the big top. Still there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and as the gillies started getting poled onto the train, we all stood around speculating that the real problem was probably some woman trouble Al G. had got himself into. Maybe a pregnancy or another wife we didn't know about, Al G.'s weakness being not so much his love of women as his love of marrying them as a means of being accommodating.

  We left Portland before four in the afternoon, a day early, in a state of high confusion. To fill time before the Tacoma date we made an unscheduled stop in a place called Cape Disappointment, Washington, where we did an impromptu night in a field about eight miles from town-without sponsors or paper up or newspapermen lured with free barbecue there were no more than four or five hundred in the crowd. In fact, there were so few people the start was delayed twenty minutes, all the troupers walking around scratching their heads and saying, "What's it look like tonight?" when the answer was as plain as egg on toast. It looked bad.

  Was lunacy, this, lunacy pure and bug-eyed and top-of-thelungs raving. The only explanation was we were hiding out, an explanation supported by the fact no one had seen Al G. or Dan. Even the stars were disguised by a sky thick with grey, mashed-potato clouds, making everything look shadowy. After the performance we loaded the gillies like normal. In the middle of the night, with everyone asleep and my arm thrown over Rajah's shoulders and Rajah snoring weakly, the train sailed right through Tacoma, a town known for having good crowds and reasonable cops and nice restaurants besides. Imagine our consternation when we all opened our eyes and threw open our Pullman curtains and instead of seeing buildings and lights and the offerings of a city we looked into drizzle and low shitbrown mountains dotted with settlers' cabins. That was looking out the left side of the train. When we looked out of the right side we saw potatoes. Saw them for miles and miles and miles, which would've been fine except a potato field's about as interesting to look at as a potato itself.

  The place was called Sandpoint, Idaho. Though I never saw the actual town, I heard it was one of those places that isn't a really a place, just a name given to a naked intersection so folks could get mail. We played to exactly 180 rubes that afternoon. Each and every one of them, children included, was chewing tobacco. Afterwards a team of workingmen earned cherry pie by cleaning spittle off the stringers.

  We were there two more days, a Sunday and a Monday besides, the words unscheduled holiday circulating through the cookhouse and pie car and blue car. Was around then a rumour started that Al G. had gone mad with either syphilis or stress or a combination of the two. It wasn't hard to believe, for Al G. was still holing up in his car, seeing nobody and keeping his mouth shut, behaviour that was normally against his nature. Dan, meanwhile, turned away any and all visitors. The closest I ever came to Al G. in those weird two days was seeing Miss Leonora Speeks strolling down the connection, hips swaying and cheeks ablaze with colour. She was smiling too, suggesting what she and Al G. were up to in that fancy rail car wasn't pinochle.

  I said, "Let's go," to Rajah and tugged on his leash and we caught up to her. We all walked side by side for a few seconds, Leonora not looking at us, until finally I said, "Well what is it, Miss Speeks. Why are we parked in the middle of this drizzly nowhere?"

  She stopped and peered at me through the white veil hanging from her chapeau. In the process I noticed her eyes for the first time. orange, like a marmalade cat's, with flecks of black to spice them up. Even I had to admit they were something.

  "Quarantine, Mabel," she said, saying the word like I was slow. "Quar ... ann ... teen."

  Then she gave me a smile suggesting she didn't care whether I believed her or not and jiggled herself off, humming.

  There was a possibility she was telling the truth: during a twomonth stretch in 1918 when influenza broke out in the northwest, the show rerouted itself so as to avoid places where it might be seized and shut down till the panic was over. Yet there was no good reason Al G. wouldn't have announced this, staying one step ahead of health inspectors being a time-honoured circus tradition. That night, with the train idling on the tracks, a few of the groomers hooked a radio to a generator and listened for news of influenza or red death or a water-borne menace. If there was one it wasn't mentioned that night, the only news being from Europe and how they were making progress clearing bombed-out buildings.

  In the middle of the night we started moving again. Though this normally wouldn't have woken me, I must've been pretty anxious to feel some motion again, for my eyes opened and I felt as alert as a gal who'd slept well. Rajah's eyes opened too, and he murmured and turned to me and yawned, his meaty breath wafting into my face.

  He rolled over and fell back asleep with his face against my neck. As the train rumbled east, I stayed awake, waiting for a change of direction, hoping against hope we'd head toward civilization instead of vast western Canada emptiness. No such luck. After fifteen or twenty minutes a whistle blew and I felt the train taking a slow turn, straightening out so we were heading more north than anywhere else.

  We didn't travel long that night, maybe an hour, and when we stopped we were in some dinky station, a single light illuminating the words "Grand Forks." Beyond that was a blackness interrupted only by firefly light.

  The sun came up on a misty cool day, like every day we'd seen over the past week. The transport wagons took us past little homesteader shacks to a fie
ld laid to fallow in the middle of nowhere. It had the feel of weirdness, this place, for it was completely deserted, no evidence whatsoever of stores or saloons or meeting halls, only a big clapboard church with Russian letters across the steeple base. We didn't bother with a parade, so we didn't see the townsfolk until the hour before the matinee, when they began straggling toward the main entrance. They were like ghosts, appearing in the mist, wearing long white robes sashed at the waist, the men wearing beards that obviously hadn't been trimmed for years, the women looking plain and tired and hooded.

  After a lot of milling about and head scratching, the robe wearers began to filter in; within a few minutes it became clear that in addition to their strange sartorial sense, the other defining quality of Doukhobors was they were way on the frugal end of things. There wasn't one rigged game of skill played that day. Not one drop of tincture, elixir or nostrum was sold by the cure-all vendors. Not a single sideshow ticket was sold, despite the efforts of both the outside talker and the free act, a guy named Jorge who could swallow a fistful of swords and still sing the Honduran national anthem. I did see one little white-robed girl buy a live chameleon from one of the bug men, though when her father found out he opened the matchbox and overturned it. The squishy sound of him stomping it made the girl go teary.

  Finally, it was showtime, "The Conquest of Nyanza" spilling onto the hippodrome in a trumpet of sound and colour, and I remember thinking this would break them out of their stupor. It didn't; we all stood outside the performers' tent, listening to the silence, one of the spec riders breaking the tension by saying, "Maybe they're sitting on their hands to keep them warm." Nor did things get any better, each act finishing to not so much as a cough (though the clowns did get the odd laugh from the children). During my twelve-tiger act, an act so exciting the audience was usually standing by the end, there wasn't so much as a peep; throughout, I couldn't stop myself from taking little sidelong glances, if only to try to figure out why they'd bothered coming in the first place. The cats were doing the same thing. With pupils shifted to the corners of their eyes, they did their sit-ups and ball rolls and hoop jumping nervously, as though worried that something was being thought up in all that quiet. When we got to our finale, poor Rajah was so upset he crawled off his pedestal, limped over and stood on his hind legs, more hugging me than pretending to attack. I had to ham it up, pulling him down on top of me and reaching behind me to scratch his pleasure spot in order to get his blood up. I even wiggled my exposed arms and legs to suggest I was in trouble.