“Now just a damn minute, there. Now you come after me you just know what you’re gonna git…” But he was moving backwards as he spoke, and then he was running—quite nimbly, they would have said—and the Ship of the Desert bore down on him like bad luck, and it was clear to her audience that she would have run up his back and trampled him into a stain on the red earth if he hadn’t hit upon the expedient of diving through his own front window with a great explosion of breaking glass. The camel slowed to a trot and then peered in through the broken window like a curious shopper. Whatever she saw within seemed to satisfy her, for she wheeled about and cantered over to Lewis like a prize racehorse expecting sugar.
Gingerly, he put a hand on her neck, then began to stroke her.
“If you’ve got all that out of your system, darlin’, can we get in the truck?”
The camel regarded him with interest and then made a little gravelly noise deep in her throat.
A look of horror came into Lewis’s face and he muttered “Oh, God,” but he had no time to run. With a slurping sound the camel sent a huge wet missile at Lewis. He turned and held up his hands and said “Sweet Jesus” as the camel bathed him in saliva.
“Oh, no,” Shelby said.
“And they spit,” Harley said, looking down at the boy. “They spit, with great malice and an accuracy that would be admirable under other circumstances. Wicked-smelling concoction, worse than being stomped, some say.” He eyed Lewis with interest and amusement. “Llamas do it, too, but they’re not as clever.”
Lewis Tully stood with his arms stiffly at his sides and glared at the camel. He had taken most of it along the side of his head and his shoulder, and it oozed down him and made a dark brown pool at his feet.
For perhaps ten seconds he and the camel regarded one another without expression. Then the camel snorted and without further fuss ran up the little ramp into her temporary quarters. She spent a few moments stomping and kicking at the walls, but it was clear that she was play-acting, and when the noise subsided, Lewis could hear her champing at the fresh hay piled in the back of the trailer.
Lewis glared at them, looked for any sign of laughter, and the boy noted how the magician fought for a somber expression.
“I need to walk back to that creek we passed,” Lewis said in a dull voice, and strode off, still dripping.
“I got a shirt you can borrow,” the old man said, struggling to keep the mirth out of his voice. He glanced at Shelby, who was turning red with the same effort.
Ten minutes later they were off, Lewis now clad in Harley’s threadbare shirt. No one spoke to him, and as he drove they could hear him sniffing at the odor of camel saliva that now occupied the truck.
“The life of a circus man is not an easy one,” Harley said quietly.
Charlie sat on the little makeshift chair behind the three men. The cat crawled onto his lap, and eyed the delicate cage full of finches on the floor.
Behind them, the camel made an occasional expression of her boredom or displeasure with her accommodations, kicking and stomping till the walls of the truck rang like church bells.
“Doesn’t sound like a real happy camel,” Shelby said.
“I’ve never known a happy camel,” Lewis pointed out. “I suppose if I was covered with fur and grew up in a desert, it would affect my disposition, too.” He sniffed at his hand and muttered, “Disgusting, that’s what they are, disgusting.”
It was warm in the truck, dusty too, and Lewis had no illusions about how he smelled at the moment, but his heart grew light. He was coming back to his camp with a camel, albeit a wondrously ugly one, and his magician. On the other hand, he also had a boy that he didn’t know what to do with. Stealing a quick look at the child, he told himself that this boy was the least of his worries, but he didn’t believe it.
FIVE
Camp
Charlie woke at dusk when the truck moved suddenly onto an unpaved road. Thick clouds of dust rose around them as though conjured out of the air, and then they pulled to a stop. The truck went through a series of grinding noises, and Lewis looked down at him.
“We’re there.”
“Home sweet home,” Shelby muttered, shouldering open his door and sliding down.
Lewis helped the boy out on his side, and Charlie found himself standing in a small clearing surrounded by small trees. He looked around but could see no other signs of life, and for a heartbeat he thought they had wound up in the same clearing in Oklahoma, having traveled in a circle all night. He blinked and tried to hide his panic.
This was where he would live?
“It’s over there a ways, son,” Lewis said. “This is just where I keep the trucks. It’s a pecan orchard.”
Charlie followed the two men through the little orchard and down a gentle slope. They came out onto a grassy field and the boy stopped short.
In the distance he could see lights and small fires, but his attention was riveted instead on the great hulking shapes that ringed the outer edge of the saucer-shaped field: trucks and cars of nearly every size he could imagine, all of them looking old and tired.
Spent, Lewis Tully would have said. He looked from the boy to the trucks. Spent and all played out. In the cold light of day Lewis forced himself to appraise his “fleet” and thought it looked like the aftermath of a great battle, seen from the loser’s vantage point. Two cars were entirely on blocks, one truck no longer had a bed; a Nash Light Six sedan had survived a Montana landslide, its entire front end flattened so that it seemed to be pursing its lips. Two of Lewis’s trucks still wore the white “U.S.” of army issue and another bore a red cross and a streak of .30 caliber holes in its wooden slats. At the far end, he could see his most dubious purchase: a pair of buses he’d bought from a Chicago junk dealer on Maxwell Street for a hundred dollars. He had to supply wheels and tires before he could get them off the lot.
Seven of the trucks had participated in his last, disastrous show and still bore the legend The Lewis Tully Grand Circus and Menagerie. Three were trucks from other circuses: the rest he had collected from front yards and cornfields and alleyways across half the continent.
The fleet was a smorgasbord of the young and uncertain automobile industry: Fords and Chryslers, Oldsmobiles and Hudsons, a Willys Knight and a Cleveland Six and a Pierce-Arrow marked by machine-gun fire in a “gentleman’s disagreement” in Chicago.
He looked down at the boy. “What do you think?”
The boy stared at the long line of rusting hulks.
“Do any of ’em work?”
“Well, sure they work. Some of them, at least.”
“Better than half,” Shelby offered.
“A somewhat sanguine estimate, J.M., but I wouldn’t be surprised,” Lewis admitted. To the boy he said, “This is our transport. We have what you’d call a ‘motorized’ circus. The big shows use trains, but in my opinion the motorized show is the circus of the future.”
“Are all them trucks yours?” the boy asked.
“They are. Some of them we more or less use for parts, to keep the others fit for their work. Takes a great effort to keep a motorized circus on the move.”
The boy stared at the vehicles in silence. Try as he would, he could not sort out the vehicles in use from the ones kept for parts: they were all wrecks, as far as he was concerned. And now he remembered something his mother had read him once from a library book, about the secret place in Africa where the elephants go to die. It was one of his favorite memories of his young life, a moment when all the world seemed a peaceful place, governed benevolently by the pale, dark-haired woman who read him exotic stories and would never die. When he thought of his mother, he usually thought of that time. The Elephants’ Graveyard, this place was called, and it was in the heart of Africa, in the darkest, most secret place on the continent, and no one had ever seen it. Now, looking at the long bruised line of trucks and a
utomobiles, Charlie thought there might be a secret graveyard for old trucks, too, and if so, he had a pretty fair idea where it was.
In the growing dark the boy could make out a second row of vehicles behind the trucks and automobiles. He walked between the two nearest trucks and made a little gasp. He found himself in the middle of a row of wagons, wooden circus wagons, ten in all, most of them in far worse shape than the battered line of trucks.
But they were circus wagons, once brightly painted, some of them still carrying their cages and adorned with angels and fanciful beasts, and he’d never seen their like except in the pages of a book. He stopped as though caught by a fence, and Lewis Tully came up behind him.
“Go on, boy. You can touch ’em. They’ve seen about all the trouble that can happen to ’em.”
“Are they yours, too? Are they part of your circus?”
Lewis stared at the wagons and nodded slowly. “They’re the ghosts of other circuses long gone. That one there, that was a cage wagon for Dan Rice back in the 1860s, and…and many others. Built by the Moeller Brothers Wagonworks in Baraboo, Wisconsin. And now it’s part of my show, they all are.” He looked at the boy with a strange look in his eye, and the child thought for a moment that Lewis Tully had suddenly grown younger.
“These wagons carried animals for Rice & Forepaugh, and Sells-Floto and Barkley and Sieman’s and Sanger’s Great European Circus and Al G. Barnes and the Ringlings. There’s people that saw these wagons when they were children and now they’re grown old, or in the grave, some of them, and the wagons are still here. I’m going to fix those wagons up and carry ’em,” and he swung around to point at his trucks, “on these trucks. And when I’m done, it’ll be an old-time circus fit to parade in any town. Come here, I want to show you something.”
The boy followed, with Harley Fitzroy and Shelby a few paces behind. When they reached the end of the row, Lewis pointed to the final wagon. It was longer than any of the others, its top covered by a heavy piece of canvas, but he could see that it was something special. The canvas hid whatever was on top but did little to conceal the audacious carvings along the side, wooden sculptures of cherubs and cupids playing half a dozen musical instruments. In gaily colored letters were the words The Lewis Tully Blue Moon Circus, and a tiny picture of a moon painted blue.
“Know what that is?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s a carillon,” Lewis said, and his voice caressed the word.
“Oh,” the boy said.
“A carillon,” he repeated, “is a wagon full of bells, so people can hear our circus coming from miles away. Can’t be a dozen left in the world, and this here is mine. This one here…” Lewis began, and then let his sentence fade into the wind as he looked fondly at his wagon full of bells and angels, convinced that English could do no justice to it.
“It’s big. How do you get the big wagons on the trucks?”
“Good question, son,” Harley said.
“Yeah, it’s a good question. ’Cause everything we do, every single thing we have, goes on a truck. We carry our tent on a truck, and the big poles, we’ll carry our seats, all our supplies, the food we eat, the grain and hay for the stock, our water, the gasoline for the trucks, the animals, the people, these wagons. Everything.”
Lewis glanced from the boy to the magician and looked smug. “But I don’t have to worry about it. Mr. Shelby here is taking care of that. If a truck’s not big enough, he’ll convert it, just like he did those two over there.” Lewis pointed to a pair of trucks carrying enormous flat beds.
Shelby tried on a preoccupied frown. The boy looked at him in mute wonder and Lewis read his gaze.
“Don’t be fooled by his looks and his idle ways. Mr. Shelby here is what they call ‘a man of parts.’ No end to his usefulness. No end to his nonsense either,” Lewis muttered as he walked away.
“Where’s the tent?” Charlie heard himself ask, then looked around in mortification.
Lewis caught himself in mid-stride and turned slowly.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
Shelby shot Lewis a happy look. “Wants to know where your Big Top is, Mr. Barnum.”
Lewis shot Shelby an irritated glance, then looked at the boy. “It’s here, son. You just can’t see it yet, it’s not ready to be set up. Needs a few more panels and then it…” He made a little sweep of one arm and the boy followed the gesture to see if there was a tent at the end of it.
“What he means,” Harley said, “is that the tent currently exists under another guise. In another form. That is to say, it’s not a tent at this present time but it will be eventually.”
“That’s it exactly,” Lewis said, and strode off purposefully with Shelby a pace behind.
Harley put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and spoke in a low voice. “Like many of the other aspects of this oddest of circuses, my boy, the tent currently exists only in Lewis Tully’s fertile and occasionally troubled brain.”
“Are we gonna see it ever?”
“Oh, yes, I have no doubt on that score. And when we do, it will be as unique as everything else Lewis does.”
“Come on,” Lewis called, and they trotted after him.
Past the trees, the field sloped toward its center, where Charlie could see a little huddle of a half dozen shacks and small houses and tents, seemingly dozens of tents. It reminded him of a picture in a book of the Mongol invaders in their little city of tents. He could see people moving about, and as he and Lewis and Shelby drew near, these people stopped what they were doing and watched them.
Beside him, Lewis waved and yelled, “Hello to camp!” and as the people in the camp waved, Charlie heard answering calls: the high-pitched whinny of horses, a big dog’s throaty bark, and then a great bell of sound, a trumpeting that seemed to come from the far side of the field and hover over everything. It was like nothing the boy had ever heard and it stopped him in mid-stride. He opened his mouth but could say nothing.
Lewis laughed. “That big brass horn you just heard, that’s Jupiter.”
“Jupiter?”
“Jupiter is an African elephant. Biggest elephant in the entire world. Second in size only to the late Jumbo.” Lewis looked down at him, frowning. “I expect you heard of Jumbo.”
The boy nodded. “Jumbo was the biggest. He’s dead.”
“Yeah, he’s gone, all right, him and Mr. Barnum himself and Tom Thumb and all the rest of them from that show. What a show that was, the best of them all. P.T. and Mr. Bailey, the perfect combination. Everything else is just second-best to that one, it’s the one gives all the rest of us something to aim at.”
Charlie wanted to ask if Lewis had ever seen Jumbo, but something new claimed his attention.
From the small half-circle of dwellings, people emerged, several dozen of them, and the boy was excited to see children. Most of the people were white, but some were black, and he saw a little family, an old man, a young one with a woman and three children, who looked Chinese.
Lewis was already half a dozen paces ahead, waving to people and calling out names. He grinned and yelled over his shoulder, “They’re coming in, J.M. I told you so. End of the month, they’ll all be here, you watch. We’ll make May 1, or close to it.”
Lewis moved on to embrace an old black man. A moment later an even older white man came forward holding out his hand.
Beside him, the boy heard Shelby laugh. “Sam Jeanette and Old Man Royce. Got Old Zheng already and of course Harley. If the Count’s daddy hasn’t gone on to his reward this past winter, we’re gonna be hip-deep in old men,” he muttered, then seemed to recollect his youthful audience. He looked down at the boy. “Don’t get me wrong. They’re all good, the best. Lewis got himself the best people. Samuel Jeanette knows horses better than Lewis, even, though you don’t want to go telling Lewis I said that. And Old Zheng and his son who we cal
l Mr. Zheng, they got a way with animals. And Mr. Royce, ’course he’s the most important man in the circus.”
“Why?”
Shelby winked. “He’s the cook. Cooked for Admiral Dewey in our late war with Spain. You heard of Admiral Dewey?”
“No.”
“Before your time.”
He pointed to a long narrow tent with red stripes. “That’s the most popular place in the camp, right there. That’s the cook’s top.”
They were standing a few feet behind Lewis now, and Shelby was nodding and waving to the others, calling some by name.
“The DePerczels are here. That’s good. Wasn’t sure they’d make it.”
“The what?”
Shelby looked down at him. “DePerczels. That’s their name. The Count’s people, Hungarian nobility. They’re wirewalkers. The high-wire, low-wire, slack-wire, bicycles, you name it. They’re right up there with the best. The tall one, that’s the Count. It’s said his daddy knew Blondin, who of course was the greatest of all wire-walkers.” The boy nodded as though this were common knowledge.
He looked in the direction Shelby’s crooked finger pointed and saw a tall silver-haired man with incredibly wide shoulders and decided that the man did indeed look like a count, whatever a count was.
Off to one side, as though they were somehow not part of the proceedings, stood a little knot of tough-looking, sunburnt men.
“And that’s the hammer gang, the canvasmen. Our work crew.”
Shelby scanned the workers and made a little shake of his head. “Couple new faces,” he said quietly. “Don’t look like much, but they come to the right place. Lewis Tully won’t turn ’em away.”
The camp smelled: woodsmoke fought with the odors of grease and gasoline and kerosene and the acrid smells of the animals. The boy shrank back into himself and tried to remain in the shadow of the two men. He fought his curiosity and kept his eyes down, aware that he was the object of considerable scrutiny. One man in particular seemed to find him fascinating, if not troubling: he was a skeletal figure in a black suit who chewed on a cigar and squinted through the smoke at the boy. Charlie wondered if the man were sick.
The Blue Moon Circus Page 6
