The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  “Now he’s probably worse.”

  “You were his woman once?”

  She opened her mouth and hesitated.

  But I was, once.

  “Yes. But so long ago it seems like it happened to someone else, someone who was young.”

  She looked away for a moment, and the Russian woman saw her face and felt sorry she had intruded.

  “I am nosy. Always Alexei says this. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s no matter.” She looked down at her sewing, feeling surprised at her own sudden melancholy. “You should have seen him at eighteen, though, Irina,” she said at last. “If you think he’s something now…”

  “Eighteen! You were children together, I think.”

  “Just about. I was sixteen and I’d never seen anyone like Lewis Tully. He’d been living by his wits for five or six years by that time and he was plenty sure of himself. He made it no secret that he thought I was just a farm girl who didn’t know much. But it was clear he liked me well enough,” she added. She smiled at Irina.

  “I was his girl that summer and everybody knew it. By the next season we had what folks call ‘an understanding’ between us, and I’ll tell you, Irina, those were some of the happiest days of my life. I know they were the most exciting days. Living with circus people, seeing ‘the world,’ as I thought of it then, and I had a beau who was somebody special, everybody liked and respected him. We kept company on and off for the next four years, from one show to the next, and even when we didn’t see each other for months, even when I didn’t hear from him, I wasn’t worried. It was probably obvious to anyone but me that his life was one adventure after another, and I was just one more adventure. But I had the notion that you are destined to be with one person in life and I’d found mine.

  “It never got beyond that, and eventually I think I realized I wasn’t so important to Lewis Tully. That season we started to fight, we fought often, never talking about what was really on our minds.”

  “You do this now, I think.”

  “He does, maybe. Anyway, near the end of that season I met a fellow named Will Larsen. He was funny and good-natured and he wasn’t quite as interested in traipsing around the country. I still saw Lewis for a while but all we did was fight. Pretty soon we were finished. He left the show we were with and I didn’t hear from him again for years. The next time I saw him, I was married and had a child. We got to be friends again, eventually, but it took a long, long time.”

  “And now you are together in circus again,” Irina said.

  “Now we’re just a couple of old friends.”

  Irina met her gaze and said nothing. Eventually she said, “Old friends. Very nice.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Simian Disturbance

  For the tail-end of July and the first week of August they snaked up through Wyoming by the Canty Road, skirting the Laramie mountains in a great backward question mark and playing in far-flung towns all along the southern half of the state.

  Charlie rode in the truck next to the silent Lewis, and was thankful for the garrulous Harley Fitzroy on his other side. Rain pelted the roof of the truck, and he could hear the mud sucking at the wheels. Once they fishtailed and he thought the truck might go over, and several times he heard Lewis curse under his breath.

  Lewis glanced at him as though just remembering his presence, then forced a small smile. “We get any more of this, we’ll have to get rid of our fleet and put old Jupiter and the horses and the mules back to work.”

  To the east and north loomed the mountains, closer now than the boy had seen them on their pass through Colorado. Once they made camp after dark, and the boy woke the following morning to find a great pine-covered monster of a mountain looming over them all like a wall at the end of the world, and for a moment he was terrified.

  Wyoming seemed to roll on forever, populated by small groups of antelope that grazed on tough short grass and then bolted off at the noise of the trucks. Once Lewis pulled the truck over for Charlie to look at a prairie dog town, and when they were leaving, the boy stared after the prairie dogs in wonder.

  Several times Charlie caught Lewis nodding at features in the landscape or animals bounding away from their noise and dust, and when Lewis noticed the boy watching him, he smiled.

  “Everybody’s got his favorite place. This is mine.” After a long pause, Lewis added, “Always saddened me that I had to leave it.”

  “Why did you have to leave it?”

  “Any place is a hard place for a twelve-year-old to make his way in the world, but Wyoming, back then at least, was as hard a place as I could think of for a kid without a family.”

  “You couldn’t find Alma?”

  “She was gone. We lost track of each other—the family I was with moved up here and the one she was with went on to South Dakota. I didn’t find her again till later. Years later. In Chicago.”

  Toward mid-August the flat plain gave way to a low, barely perceptible rise of land and then they were moving uphill constantly. In places, the outer skin of the earth had been worn through to the layers of the past, and Lewis and Shelby pointed out bones clearly visible in the rock. Lewis explained that they were fossils, the bones of giant reptiles long dead, and for the rest of that day the boy wrestled with the notion of a world populated by beasts larger than Jupiter.

  One day they saw a funnel cloud less than a mile away, and outside of Harriston they were pelted by a furious barrage of hailstones the size of marbles that cracked several of the windshields. In the show in Glennis one of the horses broke his leg and had to be put down. In Fort Baines a zebra got loose in the street to the undying joy and wonderment of the town’s children, in Pellastra a fight broke out in the grandstand between cowhands from two local ranches, and in the thriving town of Shoshone, Lewis was to relive an old nightmare, though not with mandrills this time.

  “They what?” Lewis blinked, looked from Zheng to Harley Fitzroy, who struggled to keep a straight face.

  Zheng stared at him without expression, but for once Lewis enjoyed the supreme satisfaction of seeing fear in his eyes.

  “They have escaped.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  Lewis forced himself to ask one more question. “Even the…the odd one?”

  “Especially that one. It was he who liberated the others.”

  “Liberated, Zheng? Goddamnit, these are not the oppressed serfs of Russia we’re talking about, these are monkeys.”

  “He escaped from his cage and opened other cage. They are all free. All eleven of them,” Zheng added, and now Lewis suspected that Zheng was enjoying himself.

  “It will not be as bad as the time with the mandrills, Lewis. They are small monkeys, they can do only limited damage.”

  “Zheng, the mandrills weren’t crazy, just rambunctious.” In his mind’s eye, Lewis Tully saw the adorable face of the monkey in question, the faint wild cast in the eye, the look that proclaimed a total absence of conscience. “That monkey is…” He searched for the appropriate words.

  “A simian criminal,” Harley helped.

  “Psychopathic,” Zheng offered. “Deeply disturbed.”

  “Oh, you both make me feel a whole lot better. I want every available person, man, woman, or child, out looking for these animals.”

  He gave Zheng a withering look and left the tent.

  They paused at the very head of Shoshone’s Main Street and gazed open-mouthed at the carnage.

  “Probably looked a little like this when the Visigoths sacked Rome,” Harley said, and Lewis told him to be quiet.

  In the next three hours, the entire Tully Circus company moved through the town like military police and picked up the offending primates. As they did, they were forced to see firsthand the path of destruction and hear tales of outrage from the populace.

  The main group
of six had invaded the greengrocer’s store and engaged first in an eating frenzy and then in a short fierce battle with the towners, pelting them with half-eaten fruit. Towers of canned goods collapsed, fruit splattered in gaudy gouts along the walls, and people huddled behind the long counter like troops in a crossfire. Lewis and his people came into the store and fanned out with nets, sheets, and ropes, and after a short sharp struggle had all of them. The monkeys chattered and screeched, especially an unfortunate one who had been knocked head-first into the pickle barrel and was traumatized.

  Three had found their way into the milliner’s and were captured while trying on hats and bonnets and grinning at their images in the mirror.

  One was found in a blind pig, where local men had exacerbated a troublesome situation by giving him beer. Deeply intoxicated and cackling maniacally, the monkey was apprehended while dancing along the piano keyboard.

  That left only one, and that one had left a trail of shock and wonder, not to mention actual damage, that spread from one end of the town to the other and fulfilled all Lewis Tully’s deepest fears about him. He had ripped open boxes and parcels, unrolled long bolts of cloth, upended containers of grain, scampered across the lunches of amazed diners in the local cafe, pulled the pages from books, pierced the silence in the tiny public library with his shrill screech of triumph, capered through the bank, somersaulted on the backs of a team of workhorses, terrorized a small herd of sheep, and finally, with Shelby and half a dozen men in angry pursuit, scampered up the steps of the local church and in through its open door.

  The men scrambled up after him shouting and muttering, and then halted in their pursuit, as they were met by a figure out of folk-tale or tribal myth.

  The Reverend Harold Block filled the doorway to his church.

  He was six feet four inches tall and weighed more than two hundred fifty pounds. His gray hair reached his collar, and his dark eyes seemed to be in a perpetual squint, the result of his annoyance with the spectacles recommended by a traveling ophthalmologist. In truth, the Reverend Block was gifted with a cat’s hearing and a voice like a siege gun, but couldn’t tell the porch light from the full moon.

  He stepped out now onto the little stairway of his church, just barely missed falling off, and righted himself. He leaned confidently on the whitewashed banister and nodded at the figures arrayed before him.

  There appeared to be somewhere between six and a hundred of them, and he thought he smelled liquor which might indicate the presence of Jeff Quinn, the town drunk. But it mattered not who they were, nor how great their numbers. He had faced crowds before, was in fact already a hero in another town where he’d faced down an angry mob bent on violence to a half-breed young man. His eyes had been better then, but the same crusader’s heart beat in his broad chest, and he smiled and held up one huge hand as the crowd arrived at his doorstep.

  “I think that’s far enough, friends.” He put just the faintest hint of menace on the last word and watched them draw back.

  “Morning, Reverend,” someone said.

  “So it is. A fine morning, even better if a man’s heart is free of violence.”

  “We weren’t planning any violence, Reverend,” Shelby said. He was uncertain about this minister, there was something wrong here that he couldn’t quite get the handle on.

  The monkey appeared in the doorway and someone yelled out “There he is, that little…”

  The Reverend Block turned and peered down at the small form sitting on the banister behind him.

  “Why he’s little more than a child!”

  “He’s older than he looks, Reverend,” Shelby said.

  “What has this man done that he cannot be forgiven?”

  “He’s not a man, your worship, he’s a monkey,” Emmett McKeon said.

  “Calling him names will do no one any good.” The reverend stared at the little creature behind him, attempting to focus and giving up almost immediately. From what little he could see, the poor fellow did look like a monkey but…

  “He’s with our circus,” Shelby said.

  “He tore up my shop,” an angry merchant said.

  “We’ll just take him out of here and…” Shelby offered, and the big minister straddled the porch.

  “No, sir. This man claims sanctuary!” He turned to the monkey. “You do, don’t you?”

  The monkey made frantic-sounding noises and bobbed his head.

  The Reverend Block paused. “You’re a foreigner, aren’t you, son? Irish, I’d guess. Well, you’re safe here.” To Shelby he said, “He may stay here as long as he wishes. Men like this,” he admonished, “built the railroads. If it is his wish to rejoin you, then I will not stand in his way. But it is his choice. Now please disperse, and go about your business.”

  Shelby studied the reverend, looked at the men around him and shrugged.

  “You heard the reverend, boys. Come on.” And he left, followed by the muttering men of the crowd. Behind them the monkey chattered and clapped his hands.

  When they were gone, Reverend Block ushered the monkey into his doorway, remarking to himself that his little charge was certainly a hairy fellow. As the reverend shut the door behind him, the monkey slipped out and headed up the street the way the circus men had gone.

  When they pulled out of Shoshone, monkeys and all, Lewis looked over his shoulder at the little plains town, then at Shelby and Harley.

  “I knew Wyoming was gonna be interesting.”

  ***

  When they reached Casper, they were met with the good news that Preston Crowe’s caravan had been sidelined once more by engine trouble.

  “We’ll make a three-day stand here,” Lewis told Shelby.

  “Good. We can take on decent supplies for once. Fuel, too, ’cause we’re running low and God knows where we’ll find gasoline between here and Sheridan.”

  They bought hay and grain and produce, took on gasoline, and were allowed by the town fathers to take on water from the hydrants. They played four shows, all to straw houses. The crowds in Casper decided they were in love with Lucy Brown, who chose to pull out tricks she hadn’t used anywhere else. After the second show, the suspense went out of Mr. Patel’s snake act, but the first crowd’s reaction was worth the whole stand: their lip-biting silence, the whoosh of relief, and the resulting ovation for the little Hindu made him strut out of the ring like a Grand Duke.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Strange Times, Strange Notions

  Sam Jeanette had just made the rounds of the stock and was settling in with a Casper newspaper in his tent when he heard Lucy’s big gray. He heard her start to trot as though recognizing someone she knew, then make the little snort she made in the presence of strangers. A moment later he thought he heard wood scraping on wood, and he froze. It came once more, and he heard the horse snort again and then he was out of his chair.

  ***

  The man in the corral had no love of horses, and the sight of Lewis Tully’s Percherons and the huge Belgians set his heart to thumping in his chest, but his terror of the equine family was nothing to his fear of the man who had given him his orders. And so he worked in a sweaty panic at the corral gate. The unfinished wood of the gate made an awful amount of noise, and it seemed to irritate the horses. Swallowing and hoping to be gone in seconds, he pulled the gate free and entered the corral.

  In the center of the little rectangle he was confronted by the big gray mare. She snorted and he jumped back. She came several paces closer and he gave in to all his terrors and ran from the corral. He made for the trees behind camp and was just beginning to relax a little when a man stepped out from behind a fence. The man was black, and he didn’t look like much, old and not very big, and the intruder was just pulling out a blackjack when Sam Jeanette laid him out with an ax handle.

  A few yards away, a second man paused in his work and listened, a burly graybeard with sho
rt arms and legs, a huge chest and a big hard stomach that defied gravity. He had heard his accomplice fumbling with the latch and then his noisy footsteps. The stocky man shook his head and cursed but did not hurry at his task or look around. He worked at the gate to the smaller zebra corral and threw it open, then went in and threw a handful of rocks at the animals, cursing at them in a hoarse whisper. Then he moved on to a small square corral. In the darkness he couldn’t make out what was in the far corner. Llamas, he thought. The pen was both latched and tied, and it was perhaps twenty seconds before he had it open. Then he swung the gate wide and strode into the pen, hands on his hips, sure of himself. When he saw what the animal was, he stopped short and felt a little surge of fear.

  It was a camel.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Aren’t you one ugly sonofabitch!”

  Now he smiled and allowed himself to move forward to get a better look at the animal. Even in the dark he could see it was an old one, and though it lay on the ground he could tell that this was as big a camel as he’d ever seen.

  Not that it made any difference: he’d broken camels before, come close to killing one in the old days. The man had broken many kinds of animals in his time and shown mercy to none, but the ones he hated most were camels. Like humans, they were spiteful and malicious, and learning that had cost him two fingers.

  In the background he heard something, a scuffling sound, and he wondered if his accomplice had run into trouble. It was time to get out, but just for a moment he lingered, looking at the great shaggy animal in the corner of the pen. Just for that splinter in time he remembered the camel from his past and something made him want to go closer, get a better look.

  He shook his head: tricks of old age and bad eyes. To the camel he said, “You’re fit for a rug but that’s about it,” and he turned to make his escape.

  ***

  In the cool dark corner of her pen, Sheba was experiencing something akin to ecstasy. She’d seen the profile when he’d begun fiddling at her gate, recognized the huge bearded head and fat body, the brazen walk, the stubby arms and legs. He carried no stick but something hung from his belt. Then she saw his hand.