“Not so well. I guess you heard we had a little trouble.”
Hector nodded and could not conceal the little light of happiness that came into his face. “Heard something about a fire. Didn’t have nothing to do with that though.” Hector looked off into space with a small frown, and Lewis was certain Hector was wondering why he hadn’t thought of fire himself.
“We know that, Hector. Fire’s not your style, takes cleverness. By the way I was sorry to hear about your personal misfortune, with that little girl in—Gillette, was it?”
“Wasn’t nothing to that. I wasn’t the father.”
“Course not. Who’d expect you to be able to father a child?”
Hector Blaney stiffened and took a quick look to see if his men had heard.
“Now, we didn’t come here for a clem, Hector. Came to tell you we’re through. We’re finished, the fire killed us. My top is gone, my poles, my seats, I’ve lost trucks and wagons.”
“I can give you a fair price for some of your stock.”
“Hector, you’re a lying sack of shit. I’d get a better price from a bandit. No, I didn’t come here to sell you things or fight with you, I just came to lighten my load a little bit. Got a couple animals I want to get rid of.”
“Oh, yeah?” Hector brightened and then immediately frowned. “What kind? You wouldn’t give me no horses, I know that.”
“No, the horses I got to keep, in case we do a pony show of some sort next year.”
“Your elephant?” Hector asked, wide-eyed and hopeful.
“Wanted to, Hector, but we lost her. She’s gone. Might be with Preston.”
Hector frowned at the mention of his unbeatable adversary.
“What then?”
Lewis turned and waved, and his crew moved aside to allow the passage of a hairy, four-legged spectacle.
Sam Jeanette brought Sheba through the crowd, holding tightly to the heavy reins. As Lewis watched her, he shook his head at the costume they’d thrown together: a Bedouin’s dream in red-and-gold, Sheba wore a heavy Moroccan-style blanket and saddle, and a flat matching cap that made her look somehow scholarly. A hundred golden tassels bounced, and dozens of tiny bells jangled when she moved, red ribbons waved in the warm air, and Lewis thought she looked proud of her appearance.
“That’s a big one,” Hector said.
“I expect you’ve already got a bunch of camels.”
“Nope, not a one. Mine died on me. And I never seen one this big.” He squinted at Lewis. “Do I get the saddle and the, you know, the trappings?”
“Sure. What do I need with a camel saddle if I don’t have a camel?”
Hector nodded and studied Sheba, obviously hearing the clink of coins into a cashbox. “She trained?”
“You bet. All kindsa tricks, she does.”
“Well, I got a trainer, anyways,” Hector said. “Where’s Davis?”
“Drunk,” someone said. “Sleeping it off.”
“Used to train camels,” Hector said.
“Seemed like a capable fellow,” Lewis offered.
“He’s a top man. Why, he’ll have this camel doing a little dance before he’s through with her.”
Lewis looked at Sheba and tried in vain to imagine her dancing. The camel regarded her new surroundings with something that looked suspiciously like amusement.
“Take her off to the small corral,” Hector told his men. He turned back to Lewis.
“This is mighty handsome, Lewis. A camel brings an exotic touch to a show. Of course, you won’t be needing exotic touches if you’re just doing dog-and-pony shows,” he said innocently, and some of his men chuckled.
“I guess you’re right, Hector. And I have something else. This is a little personal thing, more a gift for you than something for your circus. Mr. Zheng?”
Lewis moved aside as Zheng, dressed in a green and gold silk tunic, moved in mincing steps to the front. Bowing to Hector, Zheng set down a small covered cage, then pulled off the cloth. He looked at Lewis and wiped an imaginary tear from his eye.
Don’t overdo it, Zheng, Lewis thought.
“Well, look here now!” Hector said, and stooped down to put his face next to the cage.
The little monkey was dressed at least as grandly as Sheba: he wore a blue-and-gold shirt and short pants, and a tiny matching cap that made him look like a hairy bellhop. As they watched, he struggled with the cap, pulled it off, and slammed it on the floor of his cage. Then he leapt onto the bars and shrieked at them all in as clear a display of madness as Lewis had ever seen, but it was lost on Hector.
Hector pulled the cage closer and beamed at Lewis’s gift. His long, hard face was suffused with childlike joy, as he studied the one thing in the world he was known to love besides money and other people’s troubles: a monkey, the smaller the better.
“He’s a beauty,” Hector breathed.
“Had more of ’em but they were just regular monkeys. This was the star of the act, my gift to you.”
Hector nodded and put his face closer to the bars, and the monkey tried to claw his eye out.
“See, he likes you, Hector. Didn’t warm to me at all.”
“He’s a dandy,” Hector murmured. He grinned and made strange, gurgling noises at the psychotic monkey.
God’s own pairing, Lewis thought.
“Well, we’ll be on our way, Hector.”
“Good-bye, Lewis,” Hector said and didn’t bother to get up.
Lewis led his people through the crowd of puzzled Blaney men and smiled at them all. When he reached the edge of Hector’s camp, he had a final inspiration.
“Hector? He likes to play with the other animals sometimes.”
“Gregarious, eh? Thanks, Lewis.”
“Don’t mention it.”
They left and got into their vehicles. As Lewis lifted himself into his truck, Shelby and Harley Fitzroy clambered in on the other side, and the magician smiled at him.
“You’re a hard man, Tully.”
“Hard road makes a hard man,” Lewis said, and then grinned at Shelby and Harley as he started his truck.
Epilogue
Lewis could hear Shelby outside putting something into the truck. A November wind had come down smelling wet and dropping the night air thirty degrees. It would be snowing up there in Montana already.
He glanced again at the month-old paper that he’d saved for its mixed news: twin shocks from the world of sport, the great Dempsey had fallen to a marine named Tunney, and the Cardinals had beaten Babe Ruth’s Yankees.
Not all the news was so troubling, though: a circus owner was being held in Helena, Montana, on charges of “vandalism, reckless endangerment of the public, and disturbing the peace,” after a circus truck had run wild in the streets, wrecking half a dozen vehicles and one store before plowing into a bank, utterly destroying its facade. The circus man, identified as Hector C. Blaney, had enraged local authorities with his insistence that a deranged monkey had been at the wheel. This circus man’s reputation had already been damaged, first by troubles involving an escaped camel and its resultant and ultimately unsuccessful pursuit by circus workers and a posse, then further by the circus owner’s repeated assertion that the camel was “possessed by unspecified evil spirits.”
Lewis smiled as Helen set a pot of coffee in the center of the table and sat across from him. He turned and stared at the corner where the boy slept in the makeshift room Lewis and Shelby had built onto Lewis’s quarters.
***
Lewis sold off some of the horses to another breeder, bought a string of young stallions and broke them and sold them at a profit, hired himself and Shelby and the men out to a county road project, then to a local rancher. He worked fifteen hours a day and watched his herd grow and helped Sam Jeanette feed the zebras and llamas, and at night he played cards with Helen or they just sat and listened to the
Tulsa radio station. Some nights he played a few hands of poker or just talked with the small group who remained in camp, Zheng and Harley, Sam Jeanette and the McKeons, Joseph Coates and Shelby. He said nothing of his plans, would have admitted to having none. One night he went into town and spoke by telephone with Alma, who allowed that he had finally “shown some sense, however late in coming.”
He admitted to himself that he was in some ways happier than he’d ever been, but on certain mornings when he went out to help Sam feed the stock, the wind came down through the trees and just for a moment he’d smell a circus. At such moments the old longing nearly made him wince, and he’d shake his head at the passing of his old life.
They were playing cards, Charlie could hear the low mutter as someone—Emmett McKeon, probably—complained about his hand. The boy lay on his back and listened to the endless cold wind that rattled his window. On certain nights he forced himself to stay awake like this and listen to the sounds of the grown-ups. He eavesdropped on Lewis and Helen most of all, especially since so much of it was about him. But he liked the evenings like this one, when Shelby and Harley stayed around and they all played poker. He argued with himself about whether he could consider them all his family and in the end decided he could. All of them.
As the wind clawed at the walls of the small house, he drifted off and soon an odd dream came. In his dream, a tall, tired-looking man was coming over a ridge leading an animal, an elephant. The elephant was poking the man in back of his head with its trunk.
***
Shelby tossed Lewis three cards for the ones he’d discarded and then put down the deck with an irritated slap.
“So what are we gonna do, Lewis?”
“Play a few more hands.”
“No, you know what I mean. First of the year, what are we gonna be putting together?”
“I don’t exactly know yet. But that’s got nothing to do with you and old Betty tying the knot.”
“I ain’t worried about that. I just want to know.”
From somewhere in the room behind him, Lewis heard Helen say, “He’s right. What are you planning to do, Lewis?”
“Well, we got a pretty good little herd now…”
Shelby was already shaking his head. “Cut that out, Lewis. You’re no dog-and-pony man. Horse acts,” he snorted.
Lewis stared at his cards—bad cards, wretched cards, he hadn’t had a good card all night, he wouldn’t have been surprised if Shelby was cheating him just for spite.
“I know what you want me to say, and it’s silly. Things are different now.”
“Things can be worked out if they have to be,” Helen said.
Lewis opened his mouth, then closed it immediately. He’d expected none of this.
“I wouldn’t be interested in doing anything that wasn’t a real show. Anything else would be a waste of time. Mine and everybody else’s.”
“That’s a fact,” Shelby agreed.
“And you can’t get up any kind of show without certain fundamental elements. Money, for one.” He looked doggedly down at the cards in his hands, conscious of Helen’s eyes on him.
“Never let that stop you before,” she said.
“Need acts…”
“Always found ’em before.”
“Need your pachyderm, for another thing.”
“Plenty of good shows without elephants,” Shelby said.
“Name one.”
Shelby said nothing. They played for another thirty minutes, and finally Shelby said he’d had enough cards for the night. He said good-night and prepared to head on down to the hut they’d built for him when Helen moved in. The old magician, who hadn’t said much all evening, excused himself and shuffled off to his little tent and his cat and the finches. Shelby followed him to the door.
Lewis was moving the card table to one side of the room and then he felt it, a rumbling outside the cabin. He frowned. “Storm coming now? Musta just blew up.”
“Been clear all night, a million stars,” Shelby said.
At the door to the shack, Harley Fitzroy paused and peered out into the Oklahoma darkness. The rumbling came again, an uneven sound, not loud enough to be close but close enough to be felt, and the others turned to look at Harley.
“What’s it want to do out there, Harley? Rain?”
The magician shook his head. “No.”
“What do you see?” Helen asked.
The old man gave Lewis the look of a man enjoying a private joke. “A visitor, Lewis.”
Lewis paused in the act of removing his boots, got up with one boot on, and hobbled to the door. Over Harley’s shoulder he could see nothing, as though clouds had come down to the very ground to block out the night sky. He heard a plaintive trumpeting and then the darkness moved, and the great gray shape in front of his shack shuffled from one leg to another as if embarrassed.
Lewis Tully looked out and laughed. “You’re pitiful,” he told his visitor.
But it’s a start, he told himself, and reached out to stroke her trunk.
About the Author
Michael Raleigh teaches writing, literature, and history at Truman College in Chicago, where he has taught for twenty-two years. He also teaches fiction workshops at the Newberry Library. He is the author of six previous novels, most recently In the Castle of the Flynns, and has received four Illinois Arts Council grants for fiction. He lives in Chicago with his family.
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