The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  As he neared the door, Harley passed Lewis, striding forth to send the crowd back out onto the plains with their newly acquired visions. Lewis patted him on the shoulder and said, “And here we thought you were all washed up.”

  Harley looked at him and Lewis could see the magician straining to suppress a childlike grin. An odd light shone from the pale blue eyes, and Lewis stared after him for a long moment before reentering the ring to send his audience home.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Something to Think About

  Helen took Charlie back to the old army tent where he would bunk with Lewis and Shelby. On the way, they encountered the Count’s children, and Helen moved ahead a few paces to allow the boy to talk with his friends. At the door to the tent, he glanced at her quickly and opened the tent flap. Lewis had left a lantern on.

  “Let’s get you settled in.”

  She went in ahead of him, made up his bed, and laid out the man’s flannel shirt that served him as pajamas. The boy stood just inside the door, eyes wide with what he’d just seen.

  “Don’t feel much like sleeping, I expect.”

  He shook his head and the ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  “You think you’re going to be sick?”

  He blinked, puzzled, then shook his head.

  “You just ate a whole bag of candy and a bag of peanuts and you drank two glasses of lemonade and spent two hours in the company of a grownup lady that you don’t like. I just thought you might be feeling a bit poorly.”

  He blushed and looked away as he said. “No. I’m fine.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to whatever it is young boys do at bedtime. One of the men will be coming soon. Good-night.”

  “’Night,” he mumbled, then got ready for bed.

  For a long time he lay on his cot, the blanket pulled over his head, listening to his heart race. He went over the circus in every detail, describing each act to himself in a nervous whisper, and deciding that the strange little cats were his favorite, except maybe for Lucy Brown who was the prettiest woman in the entire universe, and of course Harley was the greatest magician he’d ever seen, even though, truth told, he’d only seen one other, maybe two.

  Shelby threw back the flap and entered the tent, then peered through the dim light at the boy.

  “Still awake, huh, boss? Don’t surprise me. I have trouble sleeping after a show and I’ve seen about three thousand of ’em.”

  He crossed the room to the little card table and sat down.

  The boy saw that Shelby had a large bottle of beer and what looked like chicken in waxed paper. He opened his parcel, popped open the beer bottle with a high-pitched hiss.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Sure you are, you just can’t feel it ’cause of all the commotion. But come on out and set here with me if you want.”

  The boy slid out of his bed and took a seat across from Shelby. For a moment he sat with his face propped up on one hand and watched Shelby eat his chicken.

  Shelby took a bite and then looked up. “You want some?”

  “No. Is everybody in bed except us?”

  “Oh, some are, some aren’t. The ones with sense know we got to be up at first light. Tear-down is a lot of work and there’s just a few dozen of us, so we need an early start. Next town’s Praeger and that’s forty-five miles away. We’ve got to make Praeger by noon, set her up again and give ’em a show in the late afternoon or evening. When we get to the bigger towns, we’ll be doing two shows a day sometimes, and then we’ll be working, believe me.”

  He studied Shelby for a moment, scars, hair, broken nose and all, and decided that Shelby wasn’t nearly as ugly as some men he’d seen.

  “You staring at me or my chicken?”

  Embarrassed, the boy found himself giggling. He shook his head, and Shelby got up. From a steel cooler in the back of the tent he came up with a bottle of soda.

  “Here.” He pried off the cap with his big thumbnail and handed the bottle to the boy, then raised his beer bottle in a little salute.

  “Is Lewis your best friend?”

  Shelby paused in mid-chew and smiled at him. “You kinda jump around from one thing to another, don’t you? Yes, he is. We go way back. Thirty-nine years, I believe it is.”

  “Did you come from Chicago too?”

  “No. I come from St. Louis. I met Lewis in Wyoming. We lived in the same house. He ever talk to you about that place?”

  “The bad place.”

  “Yep, that’s the one. So you know about that?”

  The boy shrugged and then shook his head. “Just that it was a bad place.”

  “It certainly was that. I was the youngest, so Lewis took to looking after me like a big brother. When he left—run off, actually—he took me with him and we been together ever since. So we’re pretty good friends, to answer your question. Sometimes it feels to me like we’re brothers. He starts some new thing, some new idea, there’s never a question but that I’ll go along with him.”

  “I wish I had a brother.”

  Shelby nodded. “I had one when I was small, but he died.”

  He remembered the exact night, as he would until the end of his days, one of a small handful of such memories along with the night he ran off into the plains of Wyoming behind Lewis Tully and the hot afternoon when he watched a frightened young Spanish officer shoot Lewis at point-blank range. He saw the room again, small and close, the floor all but taken up with the beds. He was in the room again, rolling over in the night and feeling the body next to him. He had touched his brother in the darkness and felt the cold limbs, the stiffness, and begun to cry. They had come in then to remove his brother.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Which time?” Shelby asked, and wondered, not for the first time, if this boy could read minds.

  “When you and Lewis ran away.”

  “Not much. I was with Lewis. He was getting to be thirteen, and twice my size. I was eight years old and thought he was the bravest and the smartest thing in boots.”

  And now all these years later it’s me taking care of Lewis, Shelby thought, ’cause while he’s looking after all these other people, he needs somebody to look after him. And Lewis don’t even know.

  The thought made him smile.

  “Where did you get your scar?”

  “I have a scar?” Shelby feigned shock and felt along his forehead. Charlie smiled.

  “Cuba. Same place Lewis got the one on his stomach. Just about the same time, too.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “From a piece of rock that a bullet broke off.”

  “You and Lewis were soldiers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you in Cuba?”

  Shelby sighed. “There was a war. A short war. Just a trumped-up thing started by politicians but at the time we thought it was a grand patriotic affair and we were proud to be in it. We were already in the Army. I was nineteen and my natural common sense hadn’t taken root yet. It’s a small world, though: Captain Walling and his boys were there too, same day, same hilltop, same fight as Lewis and I were in. We didn’t know them yet, you understand. And Mr…”

  “Were you Rough Riders? With Teddy Roosevelt?”

  “You heard of Teddy Roosevelt?”

  “I read about him in a book.”

  “Well, no, we weren’t Rough Riders. The Captain and his fellas, were, though. The Rough Riders were volunteers. Least I can say I didn’t volunteer for that craziness. We were sent. Lewis and I were in the 3rd U.S. Cavalry. Just one of many strange things I got myself involved in because of Lewis. But that’s another story.”

  Shelby looked down at the tabletop and saw himself on San Juan Hill, holding his bloody face as Lewis wheeled to face the young Spanish officer. He saw himself shout to Lewis, and the young Spa
niard fire his pistol, and Lewis’s legs go to rubber. And as Lewis was going down, he shot the Spaniard. As it turned out, neither Lewis nor the Spaniard could shoot a duck out of a bathtub.

  He shivered slightly. “God Almighty. You got me thinking about some fairly unpleasant moments here, boy. Maybe Lewis can tell you about that time. I don’t much like to think about it.”

  He smiled and the child grinned, showing a slightly crooked tooth, and he told himself that it was true that the child gave him much to think about. Shelby had always been fond of children, but this needy boy, and the time Shelby spent with him, had reminded him of some of life’s other possibilities, possibilities that had come to nag at him of late.

  He thought of the small log house of Betty Ostertag and his last visit there, and the inevitable question that she’d finally given voice to.

  How long?

  Fair question and she’d asked him calmly, no hysterics, but the note in her voice said, You need to answer me this, I need to know this.

  For a moment Shelby had thought he couldn’t give her an honest answer, and then he heard himself speaking.

  “Till Lewis knows it’s time to quit, or till he gets himself going and he don’t need me around anymore.”

  “You ever think he won’t want you around anymore, J.M.?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said when he don’t need me around anymore. That probably don’t seem fair to you.”

  She gave him a frank look. “I’m not going anywheres. If you’re saying you’ll come right here,” and she pointed her finger at the floor of her small tidy house, “right back here, then I expect I can wait.”

  Now Shelby thought of Betty and her tidy house, a life that grew more appealing every year. He glanced at Charlie: it would be a fine thing to have a boy like this.

  He looked at Charlie. “How’s your soda?”

  “It’s fine. Where’s Lewis?”

  “Oh, he could be anywhere after the first show of a season, maybe went on into town for a little drink.”

  Maybe, he said to himself, but I think he’s still there.

  ***

  Something else was with him in the top, a field mouse, probably—Lewis could hear it scurrying along the scarred surface of his benches. From the inner pocket of his jacket he took a pint bottle of Oscar Pepper and worked at the cork until it came loose. He took a long pull, replaced the cork, and put the bottle back in his pocket. The risen moon shone through the red cloth top of his tent and cast silvered pink shadows on everything below. He felt the whiskey burn its way down and let himself relax for the first time in many weeks. Outside he could make out a few voices in the distance, his people settling in for the night, perhaps even a few towners still clinging to the evening as if to hold onto his show, to the one night in their lives when something out of the ordinary happened.

  His show. Lewis got to his feet and surveyed the empty tent, the barren benches, the dirt floor.

  The tent still smelled of the animals, of horse and zebra and old Jupiter, of six hundred sweaty plains folk shoulder to shoulder on the benches, of circus food, and mildewed canvas and wet straw on damp ground. It smelled exactly as Dan Gustafsen’s tent had on a wet spring night in 1892.

  I did it. I’ve got a circus again and I’m going to bring it all over the plains and I don’t much care if I ever make another dollar. I’ve got a show again.

  Lewis Tully looked up through the moonlit roof of his big top and made a little salute.

  ***

  She sat reading a month-old newspaper she’d found in town and lowered the paper when she heard the scuffling sound of his walk. Helen Larsen shook her head, irritated at her own foolishness: thirty-four years later and her heart quickened when she heard his step, she could pick out his voice in a crowd at twenty yards, she could spot him in a knot of men just like him. No, not “just like him,” there wasn’t anybody, for better or worse, who was “just like him.”

  He was coming this way, making his slow walk back to his tent, the last one to turn in. She had no doubt he’d been looking at his animals or standing outside his big top and staring at it—no, he had probably gone in to sit in the darkness and dream about his circus. Helen Larsen folded her newspaper and put it on the table beside her bed. Quietly she put on her robe and went to the entrance to her tent, and when his pace slowed just before he got there, she pulled the flap back a few inches and looked out.

  “Lewis?”

  He stopped and put his hands in his back pockets in an old nervous mannerism she knew he was unaware of. She stepped out of her tent and pulled the collar of her robe tighter, a gesture more from habit than from need.

  “Hello,” he said, as though they hadn’t seen one another just two hours earlier.

  “What have you been up to, Lewis? Counting your money?”

  He smiled shyly and shook his head. “No, I’ll leave that to you and Lucy.” He looked around at the darkened camp and said quietly, “And I don’t much care what we made.”

  “I know. It was a joke.”

  Lewis nodded. “If it was money, I’d probably be doing something else.”

  “I don’t think so.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the front pole of her tent. “You’d still do this. A bigger show, maybe. But you’d still be a circus man.”

  He gave her a long slow look that told her he wasn’t sure how to take this.

  “No shame in that,” she added.

  Lewis nodded. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, studied his boots and looked at the sky and gave every indication of aimlessness.

  “Well,” Lewis said and waited for a sentence to compose itself. He was surprised at how much he wanted to talk to her.

  “Tear-down at first light?”

  He nodded. “If I had any sense I’d be sleeping but…hard to sleep after the first show.”

  First show of your own in years, she would have said, the one you thought would never come to pass. She met his eyes for a second, then broke off, conscious of him studying her.

  “I don’t hardly know what to do with all my energy. Seems it takes forever to put a show together, then it comes by like a freight train making up time, and then I’m staring out at an empty tent.”

  She studied him in silhouette and remembered other times long past when she’d stood outside her tent and listened to him talk. Lewis muttered something about the weather holding, and she looked off into the black plains night and saw herself, just a girl, and a lanky young Lewis Tully standing together outside her tent, the boy talking on into the night about the shows he would someday put together and the girl wondering if this was the young man that she’d be paired with in life.

  Helen shook herself free of the moment and saw the fifty-two year-old circus man and wished for one moment she could be that girl again, not to change a single thing, just to be young and in love with life and seeing promise in everything.

  A hundred years ago, she thought.

  “Well,” he was saying again, “daybreak’s gonna be here whether I’m ready for it or not.” He shuffled his feet and met her eyes.

  “Good-night, Lewis.”

  “’Night.”

  She went back inside and listened to his footsteps moving off in the direction of his tent, the only sounds in the camp.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Last of the Long Clowns

  Lewis Tully’s Blue Moon Circus took most of May and the first part of June to visit the handful of Oklahoma towns and then cross Kansas on a long diagonal, keeping always to the meandering highway called the Canty Road. In Kansas they bypassed the bigger places and swung out as far as possible from Wichita, playing instead in towns with names like Buhler and Inman, Ness City, Dighton, and Leoti. In twenty-two stands, the circus did twenty-eight shows, most of them without incident. The performers avoided injury, the beasts remained fre
e of sickness, small-town people crowded the patchwork big top and cheered all Lewis Tully’s acts. On June 3, Shelby went on ahead with two cars and a mountain of circus paper to announce the coming of the Blue Moon Circus. Lewis brought his show into a string of small farming communities. The last was a town near the state line called Goode’s Crossing.

  By this time, Charlie found himself with a growing collection of what he’d come to regard as his “duties.” He assisted Lucy Brown setting up the ticket window in the Red Wagon—Lewis once having explained that the ticket wagon in any circus was called the Red Wagon, regardless of its color, wagon or not. He took orders from Mr. Zheng and Mr. Aiello, acting as “cage boy” for the monkeys and Rex the Red Ape, fetching food, holding his breath, and cleaning the mess that collected with amazing rapidity at the bottom of the gorilla’s cage. He would have been disgusted had he not been so captivated by his nearness to the animals.

  Sam Jeanette latched onto the boy as well, and Charlie learned that the feeding and watering of just the horses in Lewis Tully’s circus was enough to keep half a dozen people busy for several hours. Occasionally he ran errands for Helen Larsen: these were infrequent, for the woman went to great lengths to guard the fragile truce she’d earned with the boy. She sent him only to people she knew he liked, asked him to do things that would not embarrass him. Women’s costumes she delivered herself.

  The boy watched Lewis whenever he could, making a great grunting show of his tasks if he thought Lewis might be in the vicinity. Now and then he would pause in the midst of a job or errand to find Lewis watching him. At such moments Lewis would give him a curt nod and look away quickly, and the boy would hurry off, suddenly consumed by embarrassment.

  On one occasion Lewis came upon the boy forking hay into the corral, his shirt stuck to his skinny back with sweat. Lewis stood for a moment watching, and when Charlie turned and saw him, said, “Good job, real good.” The boy’s face went a dark red and he made a nervous nod, then began tossing the hay madly into the corral. Lewis tried to think of something to say but gave it up, moving off quickly to his business on the far side of the corral and feeling as though he’d done something cowardly.