The Blue Moon Circus

by Michael Raleigh

  Then word came of Preston Crowe as well, from one of Lewis’s scouts, that the big circus was finding its share of trouble, this time illness among some of his stock and a burnt-out generator.

  Driving toward their next stand, Lewis felt his entire body relax for the first time. Gradually, uncomfortably, he allowed himself to ask whether his luck had finally turned after four months on the road. His mood grew lighter and he was talkative, dredging up old stories with Shelby. Charlie was sitting with them again, and Lewis enjoyed seeing the boy’s eyes shine with the excitement of these old tales of fabled performers and unlikely adventures. He found himself stretching these stories, amending and exaggerating for the boy’s sake, and at one point Lewis caught Shelby’s look and they shared a smile.

  They stopped to take on water from a narrow creek, and Charlie watched Lewis joking with Sam Jeanette, more animated than the boy had yet seen him.

  Shelby was nearby and the boy approached him. “Why is Lewis happy? Did something good happen?”

  Shelby smiled to himself. “You might say that. It’s a couple things, really. He’s finally admitting to hisself that we left those other two shows behind us.”

  “Will they go home now?”

  Shelby chuckled. “Life’s never that simple, son. We’ll see Preston before you and me get much older. Old Hector, though, it seems he’s got enough on his hands for now. But the other thing is we’re here, this far into Wyoming, and it don’t look like nothing will stop us going further. And we never made it this far before. Not with our own show. This is the furthest Lewis ever made it. We’re gonna make Sheridan. And we’re gonna make it before those other shows.”

  Shelby shot a quick look over at Lewis, then winked at Charlie and walked off, smiling to himself.

  It’s gonna happen, Shelby thought, for once it’s gonna happen just the way we planned it, all of it. Just the way Lewis wanted it to.

  They had stopped to water the stock, and Lewis Tully looked up from his map and casually suggested an unplanned show in the town of Allanville.

  “Allanville,” Shelby said.

  “I know it’s half a day out of our way but it seems to me we got time,” Lewis said, though Shelby had raised no objection.

  “Just a short stop there,” Lewis went on, “give those folks a show, then get on our way.”

  Shelby gave a shrug as though it made little difference to him. “Allanville,” he repeated.

  “The way I figure it, we can…” and Lewis stopped because Shelby was grinning at him.

  “Soon as you told me back there in Jasper we were gonna be taking the Canty Road, I told myself you’d find a way to bring the Lewis Tully Circus to Allanville. Wasn’t ever a doubt in my mind.”

  “Well, it’s probably a stupid idea, just a waste of a day in a short season but…”

  “Exactly what I think,” Shelby said, and slapped him on the back. “Besides, we’ll still make Sheridan before those other shows.”

  “It’s starting to look that way, J.M. Didn’t think it would work out this way, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  So it was that in the afternoon of the first of September they halted atop a low ridge a few miles north of the Powder River and prepared to parade through the heart of a small sunburnt town. When the wagons were assembled, Shelby and Lewis stood together on the ridge. The air seared their lungs, and behind them, the poplars were alive with the high-pitched rattle of cicadas. They could smell the dry earth, the prairie grasses, and cedars from farther back up the hills behind them.

  Lewis breathed in the dry air and told himself if it were possible for heat to be a beautiful thing, then this was beautiful. He studied the town, scanned the low hills on either side of the valley and noted houses that had not been there forty years earlier and a number that were missing. Allanville itself, he now saw, was a lopsided town, as though years of a merciless sun had shriveled all but the far end. A tiny place of no importance, its color and life seemingly leached from it by the years.

  “Don’t look like much now, does it?” Shelby asked.

  “No. I remember it as a green place, lots of trees down at one end. Over there. Gone now.”

  “Gone for lumber maybe.”

  “It was a big, noisy place then. Seemed like.”

  Shelby nodded and said nothing, and Lewis put an arm over Shelby’s shoulder.

  For several minutes, Charlie sat in the car beside Helen, waiting for the parade to begin. He looked at the two men, then realized that Helen was watching them.

  “What are they looking at?”

  “They’re looking at the town. They haven’t seen it in many years. It’s off the beaten path, as they say.” After a moment, she became aware that the boy was looking at her, waiting for more. “It’s where they’re from, hon. This is the town where they both lived.”

  “It’s not a very big town,” he said after a while.

  “No, it’s not.” He heard her sigh. “Go ahead and have a look at it if you want. Then you go on back to the wagon with the other children for the parade.”

  He climbed out of car and walked over to the edge of the road where Lewis and Shelby stood. Feeling suddenly unwelcome, he stopped a few feet behind them. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out what was said. He was about to leave when Lewis turned suddenly.

  Lewis gazed at him for a moment with an odd softness in his face. He made a little gesture in the direction of the town and said, “That’s the town of Allanville. Come have a look.”

  Obediently, the boy moved between the two of them and stared at the little town.

  “It was a lot bigger back…back in the old days,” Lewis said as if arguing.

  “Three or four thousand people it had,” Shelby added.

  Charlie looked up and saw the two men staring wistfully at it and said, “Does it have a lot of people now?”

  “No,” Lewis said. “It’s just a little dried-up place. Fifty years from now there won’t be any town here at all. Towns are like people, they pass on when it’s time.” He pointed to the west. “Right over there on the other side of those hills, there was a ranch…”

  “The place where you lived?”

  He was conscious of Lewis studying him. “Yes, where we lived. Me and Mr. J.M. Shelby here. And first chance we got, we got out of here and put as many miles behind us as we could.”

  Shelby shuffled off muttering, “Couple of undersized hoboes,” and for several minutes Lewis said nothing. The boy bit back the questions, dozens of questions he could have asked, and watched Lewis Tully.

  “This was not a happy place for us,” Lewis said at last.

  “Why do you want to come here with your circus then?”

  “Because…well, because a man never forgets the places of childhood, for one. Even if it wasn’t much of a childhood. Your past is a magnet, for good or bad, you can’t forget it. And I always felt the way I left, the way me and Shelby left, there was unfinished business. Some of the folks around here were good to us, they were kind people, they knew what sort of a life we had on that ranch. Others just thought we were no better than tramps.” He looked down at the boy. “Enough people tell you you’re a tramp, you start to wonder if maybe they’re right. A lot of time has passed and I don’t even know who’s still alive from that time, but there’s a part of me that wants to show people I didn’t turn out to be any bum. But that’s not the real reason, I don’t think.”

  Charlie watched Lewis wrestle with his motives and then blurted out, “Is the bad man you lived with still here?”

  Lewis smiled for the first time. “No, he’s long gone, died of a heart attack back before the War. And he wasn’t a bad man.”

  “You said he was mean, you said he was a mean sonofab—”

  “Now watch that language, son,” Lewis said calmly. “He was mean. He was an unhappy man, a bit
ter man, disappointed in his life, and people carrying that kind of unhappiness can turn pretty mean. But he wasn’t really bad. Just hell to live with, especially for a bunch of little boys. He worked himself half to death and thought what was good for him was good enough for us, seeing as he was putting a roof over our heads and bread on our table. Just not a man that should have been around children.”

  Lewis Tully thought about the man of that house and the shared misery of the household, and made a little half-turn to look at the boy. Charlie was staring down at the town as if to see Lewis Tully and J.M. Shelby in it.

  Not a man that should have been around children, Lewis thought. Like Lewis Tully, maybe.

  As though reading his mind, the boy asked, “What’s gonna happen when the circus is over?”

  “Well, then we…a circus takes up its winter quarters when the season’s over and we’ll, you know…this show winters down there in Oklahoma.” He heard himself doing the jig all around the boy’s real question and then gave him a tentative pat on the shoulder.

  “Come on, we’ve got a parade to put on.”

  It seemed to the boy that Lewis Tully’s parade through Allanville was his longest and oddest. For one thing, the parade was longer than the town itself. For another, the residents of the town made very little noise, watching wide-eyed as Lewis threw his music and paint into their lives and shook their rickety buildings with the vibrations from his carillon. At first there were almost no children: it was a school day, and only the smallest toddlers were to be seen until the parade passed the orange brick school building at the end of Front Street.

  The teacher, a tall, serious-looking woman with gray hair, emptied her schoolroom so that the Allanville scholars would not miss this piece of the world outside.

  Gradually the reality of the Blue Moon Circus’s appearance made itself clear, and the taciturn folk of Allanville began to applaud, all of them.

  At the head of his parade, Lewis Tully, sitting a big paint mare, scanned the faces and recognized not a one. He rode a few paces back and beckoned Captain Walling.

  “Yes, Lewis?”

  “Marcus, ride through the crowd, if you will, and tell them the show will be free.”

  The Captain smiled and said, “Some business you run,” and rode off.

  ***

  A new tension had fallen on the camp, the boy could see it in all their faces: Sam Jeanette barked instructions out to him in what the boy thought of as his old sergeant’s voice and snarled at his beloved zebras. Helen sat tight-lipped in her tent and put last-second stitches in the Antoninis’ costumes, Shelby paced like an expectant father, and Lewis spoke not a word to anyone. When Sam needed him no longer, Charlie wandered through the camp, listening to the heavy cadences of the hammer crews pounding in the stakes that would anchor the big top.

  Rex the Red Ape sat in his long narrow cage amidst a pile of cabbages and carrots and apples. He appeared to be grinning at his food, and the boy was thankful for at least one member of the troupe who seemed to be himself. He was watching Rex sort through his meal and toss what he didn’t want out through the bars, when he heard someone speak.

  “Kind of a hard morning to be around big folks, isn’t it.”

  It was Lucy, and she had it too, the look around the eyes that said something was different about the day. She didn’t even look pretty to him today. He nodded.

  “Everybody’s mad.”

  She smiled. “No, honey, nobody’s mad. They’re all just nervous.”

  “Why? What are they nervous for?”

  “They just want this to be a perfect show because it means something special to Lewis. They want to do something even better than their best. If they’re like me, they wish they had something new to show the folks, something nobody’s ever seen before. You know about this place and Lewis, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you understand.” She squinted at him. “Maybe not entirely, but a little. He wants to do good here, and we need it to be a special show.”

  Sam and Foley came by leading Lucy’s mounts, and Charlie saw her sidelong glance at Foley. She seemed to smile at him, just with her eyes, but a smile nonetheless. Foley blinked at her nervously and tipped his hat. When she looked back at Charlie, she seemed more relaxed, and there was a little red in her cheeks.

  “Okay, sugar. Time for this old girl to get to work. Bye.”

  “Bye, Lucy,” he said.

  He found Harley Fitzroy behind his tent, sitting on a crate and staring off at the gray wall of mountains beyond the town. He looked alert, straight-backed, animated. In the past few days the boy had noted changes in the old man: his walk was brisk, his manner serious, his eyes distant. Right now, he did not seem to be breathing. At his feet, Xenophon lay like a discarded pelt. Unconsciously Charlie moved back a step, and he was wondering whether to leave when the old magician turned his head slowly and smiled.

  “Don’t just stand there like one of the lot lice. Pull up a chair,” he said, nodding to indicate another crate. Charlie moved it a few inches and sat on it, perching uneasily at the edge of it.

  There was something odd about Harley, just like all the others, but his difference was unnerving: he looked drunk.

  The boy blurted out, “Were you in a trance?”

  The old man laughed. “No, I was wool-gathering. I was remembering, actually.”

  “Are you from here, too?”

  “Not from Allanville, not like Lewis and Shelby. But I spent a good deal of my youth in those mountains there. Those are the Big Horns, and they are a magical place in their own way. I knew a fellow once, said he thought the Almighty lived in the mountains.”

  “Heaven’s in the sky.”

  “Seen it, have you?”

  “Alma told me.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t argue with the metaphysicians. But this gentleman was nearly as smart as Alma, and he thought that God could at times be found in His mountains. I think there’s something to it. And now that I’m back here, I’m…” He stopped, caught the hopeful look on the boy’s face and laughed. “No, I’m not young again, but I feel as though something has been restored to me or renewed. If I were more certain of my physical health, of the ability of these desiccated old bones to carry me through the world under my own steam, I’d be inclined to go on the road again and see if I could make myself useful, as I was once.”

  “Aren’t you useful now?”

  “Not like I was back then. But a little bit, to my friends. And I hope I can be a little more use to Lewis.”

  “Do you…” and then he stopped, unwilling in the face of the old man’s narrowed gaze to say anything stupid.

  “No, I don’t have any new magic, I don’t have new powers. But I think something has come back. At least I hope so.” He favored the boy with a lopsided smile that made him look slightly crazed.

  “I must seem pretty silly to you. Grown-up folk get a little silly when they’re confronted with things they haven’t seen since their youth. It’s the same way with Lewis right now, and J.M. But I expect what they’re feeling is a bit more complicated than what I’m feeling.”

  The cat stirred for the first time, and the old man looked down at it, frowning. “I thought you were dead,” he said, and he winked at the boy.

  FORTY-ONE

  Command Performance

  It was a small, nervous crowd that set up a low buzz as soon as they filed in for Lewis’s free show and acted as though they were afraid to make any louder noise. Lewis strode out in his scuffed boots and bright coat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, good evening and welcome to the Lewis Tully Blue Moon Circus. My name is Lewis Tully. I have been a circus man for thirty-seven years and I have played towns and cities all over the U.S., Canada and Mexico, too. In all that time, the one place I always wanted to play was Allanville. A long time ago, when I was
just a boy, I lived here. Not for very long, but it takes no time at all for a place to stay in a child’s memory. I hope what we show you tonight gives you pleasure, and I hope it stays with you.”

  Lewis paused and scanned the faces of Allanville, and it seemed to him that in some way he had completed a lost connection with his childhood.

  “An old circus man once told me he wanted a picture of his show to stay in a person’s heart. I’m not nearly so ambitious. I just hope you like what you see here and remember it—and us, the whole bunch of us, next time there’s a blue moon.”

  And Lewis Tully tipped his hat, made a sweeping bow, and stepped back to announce the first act.

  The performance was as close to circus perfection as Lewis could have hoped. Lucy Brown and the Perez Brothers performed feats they’d done only in practice. Lewis took a seat by himself and watched his own show. He scanned the audience for faces he might recognize but saw no one he knew. It occurred to him that more than his own life had passed in the forty years he’d been gone from Allanville, and he forced himself to admit that the town he truly wished to play now existed only in his heart. Still, he watched the tiny crowd and saw how they hung breathless on each feat performed for them, acted as though each of his acts was the damnedest thing ever seen in a circus tent.

  He saw his performers putting out their best for Allanville but knew this was all for Lewis Tully. When Lucy finished dazzling the Wyoming crowd, she winked at him and his stomach jumped, and after Captain Walling and his riders had recreated a mustang roundup with forty-five horses, Lewis stood. The Captain saluted with his saber, and Lewis tipped his hat.

  Finally the moment came to introduce Harley, whom he called, “The great marvel of the modern circus world, the non-pareil, the magician’s magician, the one that taught ’em all, Fitzroy the Great!”