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

by Robert Hough

  Now. The Hagenbeck-Wallace circus was an old outfit started in America by a German animal breeder named Karl Hagenbeck. For years, the Hagenbeck circus had been a respected and honest menage show, which is of course why it went broke. In a public auction it was bought by a man named Ben Wallace, one of the sleaziest two-bit grift operators in a business crammed with sleazy two-bit grift operators. For PR reasons, he kept the Hagenbeck name, a decision causing old Karl Hagenbeck so much grief he sued to get his name taken off, the judge deciding the name of his circus was part of the sale and that Ben Wallace could do with it what he liked. Hagenbeck moved back to Germany and shortly thereafter died of heart problems no doubt brought on by extreme humiliation.

  By 1923 Wallace was dead, too, and his circus had become about as reputable as any of the second-tier circuses in America, by which I mean sort of. About the same size as Barnes and Sells-Floto and John Robinson and Cole Brothers, it had four rings and a decent menage and, with straw down, seating for maybe eight thousand. When Al and I got to the ticket wagon I was recognized and taken in as a special guest of the circus and placed in the front row of seats with stars painted on the backs.

  A few seconds later the lights went down. An Oriental-style spec was followed by the aerial display, neither of which were as big as the Ringling counterparts but at the same time not in any way shameful. Then the tent went dark and the ringmaster bellowed, "All eyes on the center ring steel arena ..." for by then everyone was following the Ringling idea of putting the cat display third. With that, the centre ring lit up and three male lions were fed into the arena. Heaven knows I'm no fan of lions but these ones were so lopey and unbarbered even I felt embarrassed for them, a sensation heightened when two snarly, bedraggled tigers were fed in next. All five cats took their seats slowly, and even just sitting there they looked growly and uncomfortable, taking little air swipes at one another. Every few seconds a lion would roar, and I noticed both tigers had gone completely quiet and still, a sign they hadn't been mixed or seat-trained properly.

  Truth be told, I was relieved, for I'd been hearing the Hagenbeck-Wallace show had itself a mixed act that had to be seen to be believed. But the moment I saw how irritable and poorly groomed the cats were, I knew the whole thing was a press agent concoction and something the crowd would see through in a second.

  A spotlight followed Clyde Beatty across the big top. He was a handsome kid, maybe twenty-five years old, with a strong jaw and wavy dark hair though like all male big-cat trainers he was a short son of a gun. He wore a white shirt and jodhpurs and tall black leather boots, and he carried a whip in his right hand. In his left hand he somehow gripped both a pistol and a wooden kitchen chair, the peculiarity of which was yet another sure indication of how bad his act was going to be. Yet the thing that amazed me was just how bad it was; no sooner had he beckoned one of the lions from his seat than the lion was roaring and taking air swings and generally not doing anything close to what he was told. Beatty started yelling, and to get the cat moving he swung his whip over his head and cracked it somewhere around the cat's shoulder, which got him moving, all right-got him charging straight at Beatty. Would've eaten him, too, had Beatty not jammed one of the chair legs down the cat's throat, making the lion gurgle and choke in a way made me sick. The cat chewed on it for a second and when he was finished just sat looking cowed and bitter while the other cats growled and swiped and generally looked pissed off. Beatty indicated for a rollover and again the cat balked and again Beatty cracked the whip and jabbed at him with the chair leg until finally he did a single sloppy half-hearted rollover, from which he came up swinging and taking jabs and roaring. (By contrast, I could send eight tigers through the cleanest simultaneous rollover you ever saw in your life and I could do it with a single motion of my chin.)

  After the rollover, Beatty tried to get another of the lions to come sit beside the sore-headed lion on the arena floor, which he did by yelling and snapping his whip on the cat until finally the cat had no choice but to come roaring off that pedestal and have a blank pistol cartridge fired in his face. In this way Beatty got two lions to not so much sit side by side as occupy the same general area of floor space though when it came time for them both to sit up he had to flick the whip in their eyes and kick at their paws and fight them off with his chair before they sort of teetered back and lifted their front paws for maybe a half second and not at all simultaneous. At this point all hell broke loose, for though tigers hate lions I suppose one of them figured out what she had in store, for she came flying off the pedestal with an intention to kill, getting so close to Beatty he had no choice but to stick the pistol in her face and fire and singe her with powder. She screamed, a sound makes the blood run cold, and then the tiger and the lion on the pedestals started fighting and the two lions left on arena floor started fighting though taking turns heading for Beatty, who kept yelling, "SEAT! SEAT! SEAT!" though it was difficult to say who exactly he was yelling this at for he'd completely lost control of his cats and was only staying alive by firing his pistol and flicking his whip and jamming his chair leg down the throat of any cat that came within striking distance. Beatty was sweating so much his skin showed wet and pink through his drenched shirt, a situation that wasn't improved when he tried to move down the final male lion, who to that point hadn't done anything worse than fight with the tiger seated beside him. His name was Bongo, and when Beatty yelled his name and whipped him and tried to bring him off his seat he just sat there, getting madder and madder, finally coming off his pedestal in a way indicating that nothing short of a bazooka was going to stop him. Was then Beatty ran. Just turned tail and raced across the ring and ducked into a little safety cage he'd attached to one side, the lion pinning him to the back of the safety cage by taking swipe after swipe through the bars, the whole time roaring at the top of his lungs, Beatty pressed against the bars and looking like he'd wet himself.

  Ten minutes this anarchy had gone on, and in that time Beatty had managed one flopping rollover and a two-lion sit-up so poor it barely even counted. The cats heard the tunnel boy rattle the door and they all raced out, though not without stopping and fighting each other at the bottleneck, the cage boys prodding the cats out by poking sticks through the bars of the cage and jabbing at their haunches.

  The lights went out, coming back as a spotlight on centre ring. Meanwhile, Beatty had let himself out of the safety cage. I turned to Albert and covered my mouth and tried not to laugh, even though I did feel sorry for Beatty, who hadn't had enough sense to stick with polar bears. I also felt sorry for Hagenbeck-Wallace; must've been mighty slim pickings for the press agents to splash Beatty's act all over new paper. Most of all, I felt sorry for the cats themselves, having to work with a man who felt no compunction about provoking them instead of training them properly. Was no wonder the Jack Londoners were getting themselves worked into a lather.

  I intended to comment on Beatty's pitiful excuse for an act, and I suppose it was something in Albert's expression that caused me to notice something I for some reason hadn't noticed before. There was applause happening in that big top, applause that wasn't in any way subtle or soft or reserved. I turned from Albert's sallow expression toward centre ring. Beatty was standing in the middle of the steel arena, his costume turned pink by a blue flood. He took bow after bow after bow, waving and smiling and then crossing his arm over his waist like a Spaniard and doubling over. He had to. The cheering wouldn't stop. It just wouldn't. It simply refused. It would've gone on forever and ever had a midget-clown interlude not taken it and turned it into laughter and then general enthusiasm for the act next to come.

  On the way home, Albert and I had an argument that'd been brewing for well over a year: was about gambling and babies and my supposedly unwholesome attachment to tigers and how I was stupid gentling them, though after a bit it wasn't so much about arguing as about spearing each other with words and seeing who could stick the spear in deepest. I can't even blame Albert totally, for it's a game I'll gladly
play when riled. When our throats got sore we stopped haranguing each other and rode the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the Ringling lot we parked in front of the Pullman. First thing Albert did was come inside and change and then go out. Rajah was asleep on the bed, though the sound of the door slamming caused him to lift his head and cock his ears and gurgle. As Albert changed I sat not watching, though when he finally left I put on my night things and poured myself a drink of Tennessee's finest and, not feeling the least bit tired, crawled into bed and held Rajah close.

  The next day, I got up early and went to the cookhouse and instead of eating breakfast I asked the Nicaraguan food doler to give me a leaned-on fried egg sandwich and a thermos of black coffee. Take-out in hand, I headed out to the training barn. There I met my cage boy, Bailey, who helped me shift cages so the Bengals were let into the practise arena. I didn't even feed them first, hoping this'd make 'em a little testy. Got my whip and training stick and strapped a pistol loaded with blanks onto my waist. Then I joined them.

  Their names were Zoo, Queen, Princess, Dolly, Rowdy, Ruggles, Pasha the Himalayan, plus the twolings Boston and Beauty. You couldn't've named a more beautiful outfit of tigers in all of America, and until then this was a fact that'd always made me happy to wake each day with the dawn. That morning their beauty didn't impress me in the least, and in fact made me a little irked, each one zipping like a mechanical rabbit to his or her pedestal and sitting there looking ramrod straight and beautiful and awaiting instruction.

  The biggest of the lot, and the only one with anything approaching a mean streak, was Zoo, for he'd reached that year before a tiger normally goes rogue and was starting to show signs of crankiness. He was about as big as a Bengal's going to get, as big even as Rajah, and owing to the size of his paws and the thickness of his shoulders he wasn't particularly good in the tricks department. Mostly what I used him for was topping the pyramid at the end of the display, though this alone earned him his keep for he was regal and beautiful and as big as a Siberian, though with the handsome form of a Bengal. He enjoyed it too, for like most males (tiger or human, if you ask me) he was vain and fond of being gawked at.

  That morning, I decided he was my next ball roller.

  "Zoo," I barked. "Come."

  He rumbled to the middle of the ring and sat, chin held high. I stepped outside the cage and fetched the big red Indian rubber ball and put it a foot away from him. He looked at the ball by shifting his pupils to the sides of his eyes. His brow furrowed.

  "Zoo," I barked again, for no specific reason other than to display the sharpness in my voice and to indicate things were going to be different from then on. I slipped a piece of horsemeat onto the training stick and placed the point of the training stick on top the ball. All of this was sheer foolishness, the best way to ruin a well-trained tiger being to give him conflicting messages: he knew he was the pyramid topper and that Pasha was the ball roller, the weirdness of my request making him rumble deep in his chest.

  "Zoo!" I shouted again and for added effect I snapped the whip about six inches behind him. Was a noise didn't frighten him in the least, Zoo being on the taciturn end of things and not quick to startle. After a minute of thinking he put both paws on the ball but before that he did something couldn't have pissed me off more and by this I mean he yawned. Just opened up that big tiger mouth of his and lolled his tongue and released a cloud of meat breath so as to indicate he was indulging me and that was all. Then he licked his chops and let his eyes go sleepy.

  I didn't reward him, a betrayal that made his eyes go narrow with complaint. Then I gave a signal he'd seen a hundred times when I was training Pasha: I tapped his hind end with the training stick, a signal I wanted his hind paws to go where his front paws were. He looked at me, expressionless, before calmly raising the right half of his upper lip and showing me one of his eye teeth. This made me mad so I hollered, "Zoo!" and tapped his hind end. He showed me his eye tooth again, though this time he added a low rumbling growl.

  Good, I thought, now we're getting somewhere. To show him I meant business I hollered "Zoo! Ball!" and tapped his hind end in a way was more a slap than a tap, all of which had the net effect of causing Zoo to pull his front paws off the ball and put them back down where he liked them. He turned and faced me and sat rumbling, cheesing me off for he should've been mad enough already to take a run at me.

  Was then I did it. I twirled that whip and for the first time in my entire career touched an animal for no fair reason, the popper smacking Zoo right on his ass, my plan being to either stick the training stick down his throat or fire the pistol once he charged. But instead of meeting me with a full tiger rage he did something even crueller, something that let me know he was tiger and nothing but and in his own way would always be the one in charge.

  He sat there. Didn't even sway his tail. The message in his eyes was, I could tear you into little tiny bits in a second but I won't because I don't care to. You're too puny. You don't deserve the nobility of my tiger rage, not with the way you're acting today.

  You're the animal. Not me.

  With that, Zoo turned, and to show he wasn't scared of any whip he walked as slowly as was possible to his pedestal and took it. Once he was on it he looked at me and sighed. I skittered out of the arena with my head down so Bailey couldn't see I was crying.

  Next day I gentled Zoo like he'd never been gentled, buying him hippo chunks with my own money and telling him over and over he was the (second) most beautiful cat I'd ever seen. Then I more or less did the same with the others. If I had myself a picture act, so be it, I was bound and determined to make it the best one in the country, the thrills provided by my wrestler. I worked a precision and a grace into the act that'd never been seen. Plus I kept my front to the audience as much as possible, cueing the cats with hand movements done behind my back, seeing as from a distance I was still blond and I was still lithe and I was still more or less young. In other words, I figured I could still style an act in a way Beatty would never be able.

  So, I worked. You feel things slipping and that's what you do: you put your head down and you get at it. I'd work through siesta, something that was unreasonable for my cage boy so I started tipping Bailey each time he helped out. Even with giving him a little bit extra he started showing up later and later and grumbling louder and louder, which I understood, for he was a workingman and with that came a lack of understanding of how a little extra money can help out in the future. I'm sure he was spending it all in the poker games the Negros held each night in the flat cars anyway, so after a while he probably figured, why bother?

  One morning he didn't come, and I shifted that cage on my lonesome. I got used to working alone, and before long it got so those two hours were my favourite, as it's quiet before the rubes come and I've always found things look simpler and peaceful when there's not a lot of noise going on.

  I started training my best jumpers, Boston and Beauty, to leap through not one but two burning hoops. Then I got the wagon superintendent to build a see-saw with tiger-sized seats, for I was thinking it'd be a sight to see a pair of adult Bengals-I had Ruggles and Rowdy in mind-frolic like children in a playground. Plus around this time it first hit me that with Pasha's sense of balance I might be able to tempt her to walk across a pair of thick ropes held off the ground. And if that went well, who knows, I might even be able to take one of those ropes away.

  What I'm saying is for the next month I did nothing but eat, sleep and breathe my act. The tricks were progressing at a snail's pace, though given how difficult they were the fact they were progressing at all made me feel like maybe I was on to some new kind of training. Was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Course, there was no denying all that work had the added benefit of keeping my mind off my other problem, that being my husband. One night, when my mind wasn't off it, I sat down and wrote letters to the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League and that lunatic Henry Ford, complaining how they were to blame for my mis
ery: goddamn prohibition, I wrote, has made salooning so profitable you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting one and God knows how weak men are when confronted by temptation. The next morning I woke up and saw how desperation had warped my logic. I ripped the letters up and worked twice as hard that day with the tigers as I'd worked the day before. Was my way of promising myself I wasn't going to think about my latest in a long list of husband problems till season end, a promise I was more or less successful at keeping.

  Until.

  Here I'll put the circus in Denver, for I remember there were mountain peaks in the distance and a freshness of air found in no place other than the Rockies. I also seem to remember seeing women as well as men dressed in flannel shirts, a sure sign you're either in Colorado, Wyoming or Utah. Shortly after set-up, I was walking along the backyard thinking I'd put Rajah on a leash and take him for a walk and then get him back to the car early enough so I'd have some time with the Bengals before the show, the whole time making sure I stayed clear of the red car where my good-for-nothing husband stared at books all day. I had a whole stew of things simmering in my mind, so that when I heard my name called it was like being sucked through a tube.