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

by Robert Hough

  I answered with a robe wrapped around me. A Ringling porter told me he had a delivery from Mr. John Ringling, and when I moved out of the road a second porter who'd been standing to the side carried in the largest bouquet of red roses I'd ever seen in my life, each one long stemmed and prickly as yours truly. I could barely even see the second porter for the foliage, the bouquet looking as though it'd sprung a pair of legs and was using them to walk in on. I spent the next ten minutes counting them, giving up around the hundred mark, though I suspected I was looking at a gross of flowers, poking out in every angle conceivable from a brass vase the size of a saloon tub. It took up most of the back half of my stateroom.

  "Look, Rajah," I squealed, and he jumped off the bed and came over and bit at one of the flowers, whimpering and jumping back when a thorn caught his lip. Seeing this, I laughed and suggested we get some air, though I was thinking more that I had to get outside and prove to myself this was really happening. I got dressed and leashed up Rajah and went to the corner newspaper box and there it was: a front-page article in the New York World saying how a girl weighing one hundred pounds wet had provided the greatest thrills during the opening show of the Ringling Brothers Circus, 1921 season. Note: it hadn't been Cadona or Con Colleano or Emil Pallenberg or May Wirth or Bird Millman or Luciano Christiani or Poodles Hannaford or that prima donna Lillian Leitzel. It'd been me.

  Later that week, Liberty magazine caught up with the show and did an article on Mabel Stark. This got followed up by bits in Collier's and Saturday Evening Post and Harper's and local papers by the score. I did radio interviews too, dulling down my hick accent as much as was possible. In every one I promised I'd be working a wrestler by mid-season, which of course they believed as they'd all heard about Rajah from my Barnes days. One day, about a week after we left New York City, the train got adjusted and I found my suite had been moved, so I was up near the wire walker Bird Millman and the trick rider May Wirth, though way back from the entire cars occupied by John and Charles Ringling. Hacks started coming around, wanting to write my life story, promising best-sellers and maybe even a movie. Was fame, this, all because I'd sweet-talked a fierce-tempered jaguar into taking a pedestal. Once I got Rajah wrestling again I figured I'd get even more of it, a possibility that made me so excited I had to force myself to breathe deep every time I thought about it.

  Now, the funny thing about fame is you start believing you're the cause of it and not the press agents. You read the articles and you believe every word, especially if it drowns out suspicions you've been trying to drown out as long as you care to remember. Believe me. The flip side of having your insides moulded by sadness is that with a minimum of encouragement you start considering yourself the second coming, someone they're probably going to invent an antidote to old age for. Here's an example of how skewed and wonky this celebrity business makes your thinking, particularly if it sneaks up and bushwhacks you the way it bushwhacked me: not once did it occur to me that having my face plastered in every newspaper in the country might not be such a good idea, seeing as I was a woman with a past and still considered a fugitive in certain parts of that country.

  From New York City we started acting like a circus, packing up after every evening show and travelling through the night, cherry-picking our way through Pennsylvania and Maryland and the Virginias. We stayed in towns with fine lots and populations sufficient to pack a big top that held twelve thousand people, more with straw bundles down. We headed southwest, sleeping on good mattresses and eating good food off tables set with linen, china and fresh-cut flowers. (Course, in the workingmen's cookhouse things weren't quite so civilized.) By March we slipped into Kentucky, doing one show in Lexington before moving on to Louisville, and if that bony-arsed old aunt of mine was in the audience she sure wasn't carrying a sign to let me know about it. From there we jumped to Bowling Green, which is in the middle of the state though slightly off to the west side and near the Tennessee border. We played two straw houses there, people needing something to spend their money on now that liquor wasn't an option (or leastways a legal one). The draft, war, prohibition-back then it seemed like everything, bad or good or somewhere in between, worked out well for the circus.

  After my evening performance I was feeling a little tired and a little worried about Rajah, who was still foraging through my underwear drawer when I wasn't with him, ripping and tearing and shredding whatever he got his paws on. I'd tried washing them in bleach, thinking maybe his nose picked up a scent not removed by normal laundering. When this hadn't worked I'd finally resorted to bagging them and slinging them between two hooks I'd screwed into the ceiling of the car. Often I'd come home and find Rajah on his hind legs, taking swipes while breathing hard.

  With the idea of saving my undies I decided to leave shortly after the intermission, before Bird Millman's wire walk and May Wirth's backward somersault from one moving horse to the next and Lillian Leitzel's left-handed planges and Alfred Cadona's triple somersault. Because I left early, the midget brigade wasn't ready to escort single ladies back to the train so I set out alone. It was a short walk, through a neighbourhood of rickety low-standing wood buildings lit by naked light bulbs, in a part of town deserted and therefore quiet, which I suppose had a lot to do with it being circus night.

  I could hear my heels clacking against the pavement, steam escaping from pavement grates and tabby cats mewing. After walking a couple of blocks, I reached the point where I could continue on the main street, taking a left after a couple of blocks and then doubling back so as to reach the rail yard using the major streets. This would take another twenty minutes. My other option was to sneak through an alleyway running into a long, thin, dark space separating a box factory and a tenement. This route would take two minutes and we'd been warned by the lot manager not to use it. Everybody did anyway.

  I entered the alley. To my left was the sound of people talking and arguing and laughing and being randy. To my right was clanking. I walked quickly, having great confidence in my own surefootedness, and as I walked I was conscious of the grime existing on the walls inches from my shoulders. The alleyway jogged slightly and I passed through a pitch-black courtyard, picking up the alley on the other side. In the distance I saw a rectangle of light and the rail cars beyond. I think I slowed my walking a titch, though I can't say for sure. What I do remember is the smell of the hand that darted from an alcove and smothered the lower half of my face, the crook between thumb and forefinger clamped beneath my nose. In moments like these the senses sharpen, and I could pick out sweat and leather and tobacco and dirt and the salt of male seed. The hand was big, too, meaty and plump and no stranger to rough work. The other hand grabbed my right wrist and bent it around back until the muscles in my upper arm screamed. Without a word, only rough breathing, he turned me around and frogmarched me in the direction I'd come. A tear dribbled out of my left eye and dampened his hand and I wondered if I could soften his resolve with the wetness of it.

  He marched me toward the courtyard but instead of picking up the other half of the alleyway he turned me right into the gloom and after a few steps I made out a parked jalopy. He stepped me up to the hood of the car and moved his hand away from my mouth and put it on the back of my head and slammed the side of my face into the hood. I was silent despite the pain for I figured probably my life depended on it. Was never a word spoken, just him roughly grabbing the top of my skirt and panties and yanking them straight to my ankles, exposing my ass to the night air, me suddenly knowing what this was all about and wanting to die because of it.

  Then the man lifted his right hand in the air and brought it down hard on my buttock, making a slap would've been heard a full block away were it not for the clanking sounds of the factory. I yelped, and was preparing for Sodom-like humiliations when he reached down and seized the waist of my skirt and panties and with a single violent jerk pulled them back into place. Then my arm was forced behind my back and the other arm was forced to meet it, and when my wrists were crossed I
felt a rope binding them together in a tight, scratchy knot. He pulled out a long red bandana and twirled it in the air so it went into a tube. When this was done he pushed it against my mouth, the force of it parting my teeth and chafing against the corners of my mouth. My tongue was forced to the back of my mouth and I started gagging. Was this in combination with pure dog fear that made tears skitter down my cheeks and jawline and by the time they'd dribbled down my neck they'd gone cool. He pulled at my collar and spun me around. He was breathing heavily, and while he caught his breath I took my first look at his unshaven face through eyes gone so wide I couldn't've shut them if I'd tried. I could feel a welt coming up on the side of my face and a palm-shaped bruise on my buttock, and it was the understanding this violence was really happening that made my nose get so snotty I could barely breathe through it. His arm shot out, and I prepared to be hit, though instead what he did was seize the back of my collar and spin me around again and march me to the passenger side door.

  He opened the door and pushed my head down and shoved me into the car and ordered me to stay there or next time I'd get myself a spanking that'd leave my ass as raw as the Dakotas in winter. One of my feet was still a little ways out of the car, the man kicking at it until I pulled it inside. He slammed the door behind me and locked it.

  He got in himself and started the engine, and when it came to life it belched and farted and generally sounded like an old man sputtering at the end of a nap. He backed it up and took a lane bisecting the blackness in the other direction. I didn't know what my survival would or wouldn't depend on, so I blinked away tears and forced myself to look hard at everything. I figured I was being driven to another grey tenement, or maybe a farmhouse way in the country, where I'd be held, barely fed and subjected to round-the-clock buggery until the life was gone from me. In other words, I was on the lookout for avenues of escape. Being trussed up like hog bound for slaughter made it difficult to imagine one, so I was visited with a single overriding thought: Why in Sam Hill didn't you bring Rajah? I spent the rest of the car ride imagining what Rajah would've done to the driver and believe me it was as bloody as bloody gets.

  We drove through streets with broken lights. I kept hoping we'd pull up beside a cop on the beat and he'd notice that the woman in the passenger side was gagged with a bandana turning wet with gob, snot and tears. Course, it didn't happen, there never being a cop around when you need one (and cops back then tending to work on a user-fee system anyway). I kept taking quick glances at the driver, who was dark and hairy at the neck. He wore an overcoat in need of repair, which I mention to show how crazy the brain goes in moments of extreme stress: I saw that frayed brown fabric and for a moment felt sorry for him and the circumstances that could make a boy grow up as foul and bad-smelling as he was. Meanwhile, I watched where we went, hunting for information that might be useful should escape present itself. Was impossible. The car kept taking turn after turn after turn, the steering wheel big and plastic and grooved and grey and tilted forward like a bus's.

  When we stopped in front of a police station everything finally started making sense.

  He shut off the motor and, as he walked around the back of the car, it clanked and sputtered and caused the car to shudder. After flinging open the side door he grabbed hold of my right upper arm and pulled hard, saying the second thing he'd ever say to me: "Out."

  With that, I was on my feet and getting marched into the precinct. It seemed to me I wasn't the first person to ever get this brand of treatment, for when we came bursting through the doors not a single head turned. The man pushed me up to the desk sergeant, and once again I was flung forward, the front of me hitting the wooden desk.

  "Here," he barked, and walked out.

  They'd been expecting me. The desk sergeant, a jowly owlshaped man with no hair and considerable midriff, nodded and came around and took my arm and double-timed me to the back of the station where the cells were. We passed the lock-up holding that evening's allotment of drunks and reprobates, and of course seeing a women with her hands bound sent them to hollering whatever lewdnesses came to mind. I glanced over and recognized a few of the workingmen in there and was glad they were paying me the honour of not yelling out vile, venal things like the others.

  We finally stopped in front of a small cell holding one other woman. The sergeant told me to turn around, and when I did he untied the gag and the rope binding my wrists. My jaw ached and my wrists came away chafed and sore. The sergeant then opened the cell door and I considered it a small measure of kindness when he more guided me than shoved me inside. He locked the door with a clang and walked away, hollering, "Pack it in!" when the lock-ups started yelling how he was fat as a pig and smelled like one besides.

  The jail fell silent. I sat on the bunk not occupied by the woman, who'd obviously been working the same streets we'd driven through to get there: the heaviness of her makeup spoke volumes. Now that the immediate danger was over, my heart leapt into overdrive, and the nerves in my head started firing so fast the cell filled with shards of colour. It took a minute of slow, even breathing to get me in a state one ratchet down from panic. I closed my eyes and tried to moisten my lips. I also thought about saying hello to the woman but could see she wasn't in the mood for chatter as she hadn't so much as glanced in my direction. Impatient, was the way she looked, for she was loudly chewing her gum and bouncing a foot in the air.

  The long and short of it is I was there all night, not a phone call offered or a word spoken or bread and water brought. I was too revved up to sleep, the sense of boredom and containment soon getting harder to tolerate than what I was going to have to face come morning. Sometime in the middle of the night, with the men in lock-up snoring like wood splitters, two guards approached the cell. I kept still, hoping whatever they were there for had nothing to do with me. My cellmate took the gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the metal cot and approached the bars. There was whispering between the two guards before one sort of stood aside while the other crowded the bars.

  Even though I was on the far side of thirty and spent my days working side by side with workingmen, there were still ways I was a little naive. As the woman sauntered toward the bars, I honestly thought her time was up and she was about to be released, the only thing striking me as odd was them doing it in the middle of the night.

  Next thing I knew the woman had dropped to her knees and I could hear the sound of a zipper being pulled and I realized what was happening was the same thing I'd seen in that sepia photo of Dimitri's so long ago. The slurping sound lasted maybe a minute, the guard throwing his head back and emitting a noise like an after-meal burp. He zipped up, and a second later the other guard was pushed against the bars and helping himself to the sepia treatment as well; he finished pretty much like the first, after which the woman stood and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The first guard then detached a key ring about as big around as a dinner plate from his belt. He opened the cell and let the woman out. The three walked off, and that was the last company I had till daybreak, when another guard brought a red wooden tray holding a bowl of cold oatmeal and toast and chicory coffee as thick and tasty as gravel.

  I sat glumly chewing. Once I finished eating what I wanted, which wasn't much, I put the tray on the other bed and sat with my hands folded in my lap, desperately missing trains, rubes, cats, Rajah, applause, the smell of elephants, anything circus. Meanwhile, the place was getting loud. People were screaming they had to get out and they needed to call their lawyer and they were innocent and they knew their rights. Some of the others were screaming for dope, which was worse, for they added a layer of racket that was high-pitched and frenzied and that worked at your nerves like a fork. Every ten minutes or so a guard would come walking down the hallway clacking his billy club against the cages and shouting, "Pack it in goddammit, pack it in!" and the noise would stop for two, maybe three, minutes. Then it'd start up again, a murmur at first then growing into a roar. Was like cycles, and I occupied those early hours
listening to it flood and recede, flood and recede. Outside, the sun was barely above the horizon.

  As the morning progressed it got hot and airless in the station, which added smell to the whole equation; after a time I got so bored and anxious I thought I might even do some yelling myself and probably would have had I not still been clinging to the whispery notion I was a circus queen and had to act as such. Was then a pair of guards came walking down the hallway accompanied by a man with mussed hair and the pissed-off expression of someone who'd been woken early. He wore a suit and carried driving gloves in his hand, which he waved around as though he was directing traffic.

  All three stopped in front of my cage. I looked up and immediately felt like I recognized the man who wasn't a guard-was the thinning sand-coloured hair, the wire spectacles, the jowliness of the bottom half of the face. In fact, it looked like a face I'd spent a goodly amount of time trying to forget, and as soon as this thought passed through my head I knew who it was. I was looking up at Horace B. Sights, Superintendent, Western State Hospital for the Mentally Insane, Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

  That son of a horse's ass just eyed me, stretching the moment out, for it was clear he'd been waiting for this a long time and was delighted it was finally happening. He even made a show of taking off his glasses and wiping them on a starched white handkerchief before perching them back on his nose; was as though he was saying 1 wouldn't want to make a mistake, Officers, no I wouldn't want that.... Then his beady, raincloud-coloured eyes roved up and down my body, and it wouldn't've surprised me if I'd found out he was picturing me nude, specifically those parts of me he'd poked and prodded every time he'd inspected me for female irregularity. He even stroked his chin, as though he had a thoughtful side he wanted to put on display.