The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  THIRTEEN

  The Return of the Red Ape

  “Foley,” Lewis said and curled his lip as though he smelled something foul on the wind.

  “Hello, Mr. Tully.” Foley nodded but was smart enough not to extend his hand. He looked from Lewis to Shelby, who just shook his head in wonder.

  “Just when I thought my luck was changing,” Lewis said.

  “I was hoping we could let bygones be bygones,” Foley said.

  “‘Fogerty,’ you said your name was.”

  “Didn’t think you’d do any kind of business with me if you knew it was me. Rex or no Rex.”

  “You were right. Where’d you come by him anyhow?”

  “Like I said in my letter. I bought him from that old Englishman that sold you Rex in the first place.”

  “He never told me Rex had offspring.”

  “Saving ’im for a rainy day.”

  Foley did his best to look like Jay Gould cornering the silver market. Lewis glared and tried to glean some small satisfaction from the fact that James Patrick Foley was no longer handsome.

  No more trouble from you on that score, he wanted to say.

  In seven years Foley had aged fifteen. The once-ruddy complexion was pale and the skin puckered at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His lower lip seemed chapped and split, and a recent scar made a little half-moon around one eye. He could still charm birds out of the trees with his smile, Lewis thought, but you had to overlook the gap where a tooth had been broken off.

  He scanned Foley’s clothes: carefully brushed dark suit and clean white shirt, then looked past first impressions—an old suit and a shirt cut for a bigger man. At least the fedora Foley was nervously clutching looked new: in the old days, Foley had always sported a new hat.

  “If this is any kind of trick, Foley, you’re gonna wish you never came back here.”

  “It’s no trick, Mr. Tully. I’ve got him.”

  “Why didn’t you sell him to somebody else, and stay outta my hair?”

  Foley frowned. “Nobody else would appreciate him.”

  “He’s got you there, Lewis,” Shelby said.

  “I don’t want to do business with you, Foley, not even this business.”

  Foley blinked, and Lewis experienced a short, sharp moment of triumph. He watched the hope leave Foley’s face and realized this was one possibility that had never occurred to Foley.

  “Besides, why are you still trying to do business with circuses? I thought you were gonna conquer the world with young Miss Kelly—isn’t that why you run off with her and left my show short two acts?”

  “She left me.” Foley tried to find something to look at besides the faces surrounding him. “I was drinking and I guess I gambled a bit…”

  “A bit?”

  “You know me, Mr. Tully.”

  “Yep, I do. You ruined one of my best acts, took a young girl away from her family and friends…”

  “And she gave me the gate. She’s back home, last I heard.”

  “How come you didn’t just take after her? A girl like that…”

  “I tried. I’m telling you she walked out on me.” Foley looked at his hat and tried to smooth out the brim. Then he shrugged and looked at Lewis. “Well, don’t you even want to look at him?”

  Lewis frowned and glanced at Shelby. He milked the moment for five seconds, then made a little dismissing wave of one hand.

  “Why the hell not? Yeah. Let’s go.”

  Lewis and Shelby followed him out to the road where he’d parked his dusty car. Attached to it was a converted horse trailer with barred windows cut high in the sides. Once out of Lewis’s office, Foley seemed to get his second wind and recall that he was a businessman. He slipped into a brisk walk, brushing off the front of his coat as he did so.

  As Lewis followed, he could see the something moving behind one of the windows. It had reddish brown fur and, judging from the small part visible through the window, it was very big. Lewis felt his chest start to pound. He began to walk faster. In a clearing a few yards away he saw Harley talking to Charlie and a couple of the Count’s children and beckoned. The magician frowned, and then Lewis could hold himself back no longer. He broke into a loping run and realized that Shelby was running behind him.

  Lewis pointed to the trailer, and Harley Fitzroy’s mouth opened as the realization dawned on him. The old man began his slow trot in Lewis’s direction.

  When their paths converged, Lewis nodded toward the trailer.

  “It’s him, it’s Rex,” he said in a harsh whisper.

  Foley was waiting at the trailer, having recovered his smile. He patted the trailer and nodded confidently.

  “Here’s your boy, Mr. Tully. Here’s the son of Rex.” Foley slipped three bolts out of their sockets and flung the door open with a flourish.

  The men crowded around the dark narrow opening and squinted into the cavelike trailer. A pair of very large yellow eyes stared back at them. Men and beast held their poses, held their breath, studied one another.

  Lewis Tully wondered if the animal could hear the pounding of his heart. He was about to say something to Shelby when he realized that the ape was moving.

  “He’s coming out, Foley.”

  “I got him restrained.”

  “Restrained by what? Grant’s Grand Army of the Potomac?”

  “The usual things, Mr. Tully, and besides he won’t…He doesn’t have his father’s agility,” Foley said with the air of a man digging himself a tunnel.

  Lewis was about to ask for clarification but the beast was almost at the door. He could make out the familiar face of old Rex the Red Ape, and he shot a foolish grin at Shelby and Harley Fitzroy. The ape dragged himself to the open door, blinked at his audience, and snorted.

  Behind him, Lewis could hear the others assembling, the children speaking in hushed, deliciously terrified voices, the men speaking in puzzled murmurs.

  And then, with a ponderous hop onto the ground, he was out.

  Rex the Red Ape—Junior—sank onto the damp ground and studied his latest audience. It would have been difficult to obtain a consensus on his most striking feature: some would have said his overall size, others his enormous head, and several were transfixed by the ape’s belly, a great tight sack of stomach that threatened to drag on the ground when he walked. But there was no way around the fact that he was, unlike any other gorilla on the planet, red, the bold red of an Irishman’s beard, the gleaming red of new pennies.

  Charlie made the silent observation that Rex had the same hair color as the beautiful Lucy Brown.

  Rex let them take in his various wonders and then smacked his big hairy hand on the ground and snorted, and half the people in the vicinity jumped.

  And Rex grinned.

  “I told you,” Lewis was saying to no one in particular. “I told you, personality like his father. A genuine character of the circus.”

  The ape slowly turned his head and looked each human directly in the eye, and almost any one of them would have said the ape had taken a liking to him.

  “It’s a gorilla,” one of the canvasmen said. “A red gorilla?”

  “Orangutans are red,” someone pointed out.

  Lewis heard and shook his head. “Any circus can find an orangutan. This is something else again.”

  “That creature is the biggest ape I have ever laid eyes on,” Emmett McKeon said.

  “You didn’t see his father,” Shelby said. “His father was bigger.”

  “And Gigantus, of course,” said Lewis. “With the Cullen & Godfrey Shows.”

  “Sure, but Gigantus was mean,” Shelby said.

  “But I’ll admit that this fellow here is the fattest ape I’ve ever seen. How much does he eat, Foley?”

  “Thirty pounds a day.”

  “Thirty?” Lewis stared in w
onder at the gorilla’s prodigious belly. “A full-grown male gorilla eats twenty. Twenty’s a lot of food.”

  “Sometimes he eats more. Sometimes a lot more.” A worried look came into Foley’s eyes. “Eats all day, sometimes.”

  Lewis nodded. “Could be he’s lonesome.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Thirty pounds,” Lewis said in a hoarse whisper. “God almighty.” To the gorilla he said, “Hello, Rex. I knew your old man.”

  And when Rex belched, Lewis nodded. “Now I know he’s the McCoy. The old man was fond of belching. Fond of his gas, too.”

  “He could clear out a room, could Rex,” Shelby offered.

  “Anything for attention.”

  “All right, Foley. Let’s go talk business.”

  Foley fetched a couple of badly bruised bananas from the car and tossed them into the trailer. Rex Junior heard the thud, turned his great head slightly and then, his girth notwithstanding, bounded in after his snack. Not quickly, but with a single-mindedness that was impressive.

  Without waiting for a response, Lewis strode back to his office. Foley walked a pace or two behind him and spoke to Lewis’s back.

  “I was hoping to stay on.”

  “And do what? Annoy the women? See if you can wreck another show?”

  “I could help with Rex.”

  “Don’t need help. Got Tony Aiello, who handled the Original Rex.”

  “I know there’s something I could do.”

  At the door to the office, Lewis stopped and turned slowly.

  “Can you still work a horse? Can you still ride?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “If you’re not too high and mighty to clean out the stables now and then, you can work with Mr. Jeanette. We’re running a pretty large herd this time around.”

  “All right, Mr. Tully. And I’m sorry about…”

  “Cut that out. I don’t even want to remember all that. You can bunk with the canvas crew. Now come inside and we’ll take care of this.” Lewis opened the door to his hut and ushered Foley in. A hand settled on Lewis’s shoulder, and he turned to find Harley smiling at him.

  “It’s good that you’re going to hire him.”

  “Good for who, Harley?”

  “Good for you because it is an act of kindness. Good for him, though, because he needs an act of kindness just now. There’s a sick soul in that boy.”

  “I don’t know a thing about his soul,” Lewis grumbled, and went on in.

  “The hell you don’t,” the old man said quietly.

  That night when the human contingent slept and the more sensible of the animals settled in, Lewis Tully slipped out of his quarters and made his way to the long trailer of Rex the Red Ape. He stood with hands in his pockets staring at it and grinning. Inside, he could hear the beast snoring—his father could keep the whole camp up with his nocturnal noises, could make a tentful of tough, cynical towners jump half out of their skins with one howl, one great thump of his huge hand against the wall of his cage.

  What a showman.

  “I knew your father, Rex. He was a great attraction and a gentle beast, for all his noise and fuss. I know you’re gonna be a big star with this show, and we’re gonna get you proper quarters. We’ll make you real comfortable.” He sighed. “Thirty pounds of food a day,” he muttered to himself. “Well, you’re a growing boy, anybody can see that. You’ll have a fine time with the Tully Circus, Rex.”

  Deep in the tubelike confines of the trailer, Rex Junior belched in his sleep. Lewis made a little salute in the direction of his new star and went back to his quarters.

  FOURTEEN

  Adventures and Explorations

  At some time soon after the arrival of the Red Ape, though no one could have said when, the circus was complete. A few people straggled up the dirt road, primarily with an eye toward selling Lewis Tully something—supplies, feed, tools, stock—but no new acts came forward.

  Gradually the boy noticed a change in the circus performers: they became preoccupied and kept more to themselves, moving off beyond the trees and staking out little areas where they spent hour upon hour practicing their routines and feats. He lost several of his playmates to this new phase, as they were called upon by their families to assist in the acts. Charlie was welcome to watch but soon felt awkward as a bystander, though he couldn’t have said why. Eventually he grew resentful, his frustration several times erupting in short, dusty fights with the Count’s son Laszlo or Sam Jeanette’s grandson Lucius.

  For a time he spent the better part of his enforced solitude watching the adults in their work, particularly Lewis and Shelby.

  He could see the new look in Lewis’s eye, sensed the change that had come over him, and woke up each morning wanting to follow Lewis around. He did his best to keep up with Lewis and force conversation, no matter what the subject, but it became clear to him that Lewis had little time for small talk, still less for dealing with his needs.

  “Are we gonna get any more acts?” the boy had asked.

  “Don’t think so. Got all we need already.”

  “Will we get any more animals?”

  Lewis gave the boy an annoyed look. “No. We got plenty of them, too. And I don’t have time to answer questions right now.”

  With that, Lewis strode off in the direction of a group of canvasmen at work. He stopped after a few paces and turned, as if to explain himself, but Charlie was gone, and Lewis went on, shaking his head.

  Soon afterward, the boy began to watch Lewis from a distance. From his various vantage points, he noticed new traits in Lewis Tully that were frankly puzzling. For one thing, he saw that Lewis never looked at Helen Larsen, even when they were so close they might collide. He never watched her, never made eye contact, at times spoke to people on both sides of her while seemingly unaware that the woman was in the middle. On the other hand, Lewis’s business brought him with increasing frequency into the vicinity of the woman’s quarters, where she busied herself with a series of meetings with the performers and filled her small tent with dozens of costumes and props.

  One morning as Lewis passed him in front of the corral, Charlie began asking about the horses, and Lewis walked on by without any sign that he’d noticed the boy.

  Charlie stared after him, his face hot and his throat constricted.

  “It don’t mean nothing,” a voice nearby said, Shelby’s voice, but the boy didn’t turn around. He nodded and looked up at the sky, afraid his eyes were tearing.

  “He’s busy and he’s worried, both.”

  When he could trust his voice, the boy asked, “What’s he worried about?”

  “Lotta things. We’re just about ready to take her out on the road and now he’s got real worries. How he’s gonna feed us all, the people as well as the beasts. Where we’ll find water along our route for the stock, where we’ll get supplies. He’s worried his circus won’t come together, and he’s worried if and when it does it’ll go bust, and he’s worried we’ll run into bad weather or bigger shows. He’s seen shows go under, son, a lot of them, and the last few of ’em were his shows. I was with him and it wasn’t any fun.

  “He’s worried about plenty of things, and it makes him difficult. You saw him yesterday after he hired that old hobo.”

  Charlie nodded, recalling the odd scene: a scrawny, filthy, sick-looking old man named Dugan had come in and pleaded with Lewis for a job. Lewis spoke with him, twice telling him he was through hiring. The man continued pleading, and in the end, Lewis had agreed to hire him, assigning him to the cook’s tent on the condition that he took a bath. For the remainder of the afternoon Lewis strode silent and scowling through his camp.

  “Lewis was mad at the man.”

  Shelby laughed. “No, he was mad at Lewis Tully for hiring him when we already had a full crew and he’s not sure how he’ll pay ’em all.
Anyhow, he’s mad a lot these days, and it’s mostly because he’s worried.”

  Charlie made a quick wipe of his eyes and asked, “Do you think the circus will go bust?”

  Shelby considered. “No, I don’t, not this time. But then, you never know. You always think this time it’s gonna be all right. I know we’ve got a good show this time, and we’re something a little different from the other shows we might run into. Lewis is a smart man, and there isn’t a whole lot he’s afraid of. But we’re a small show, and it don’t take much to wipe out a small show—you’d be surprised. A flood washed out Ben Wallace’s Show in a single night, a train wreck finished the Hagenbeck-Wallace Show, a blowdown stopped the Ringlings a month early—biggest show there is, and a windstorm put a cap to it.”

  Shelby pinched his lower lip between his thumb and finger, looking away. “A fire finished us in ’17. The next season, animals got sick, a bunch of ’em started dying on us and couldn’t nobody do a thing to help ’em. A flood wiped us out in 1919.” He paused a moment before continuing. “We were just across the state line into Wyoming that time. Took away the big top, killed forty-six animals, washed away our wagons. We were just lucky we didn’t lose no people. Not a one. But it was a long walk back home, I’ll tell you that. It rained on us all the way back, we felt like Lee’s Army after Gettysburg. Had to go through towns we’d already played in, and that was hard—although folks was kind about it. If I live to be a hundred and one, I’ll never forget that long walk home in the mud, looking at Lewis Tully’s back.”

  He looked at the boy. “And we had our hard times with other shows as well, and none of them was as chancy a business as this show is, all these people and animals and equipment going on trucks across the plains and the desert and the mountains. What he’s got planned is an awful long way to take a circus on trucks.

  “So that man has some things on his mind and he’s not used to having a young fella like you around. He don’t mean nothing by it. Now, you got to excuse me, I’m a busy man.” Shelby winked and gave Charlie a quick pat on the top of his head, then was gone.