by Paul Gallico
Joe Cotter, standing so near to the burning structure that the heat seared his lips and turned his face a lobster red, was close to being out of his mind with rage at being cheated of the victory he had thought he had won, and grief at the loss.
“Water! Water!” he shouted. “Jesus Saviour, where’s your bloody water?” He beat his fists against his skull, tears flowed from his eyes, and he continued to curse.
Sam Marvel came as close to finding sympathy for another human being as the gigantic ego of his small stature was capable of, and he put his hand on the shoulder of his foreman. “Take it easy, Joe,” he said. And then on behalf of himself, added once more, “Christ Almighty! She’s gone!”
Gone indeed was the tour, the season, and his grandiose attempt to beat the telly. There would be no profit that summer. True, the insurance companies would reimburse him for the loss of the tent and its gear and any further damage he might suffer through the storm, but there was no hope of continuing or playing out the schedule. His active mind was already assessing all the other consequences of the catastrophe—the logistics of freighting the animals and horses to a sea-port to get them back to England; the expense connected with transporting the troupe home in like manner; the necessity for finding them new jobs elsewhere—now that the season was advanced almost an impossibility—or paying them the amount of their contracts while they loafed out the summer. Endless trouble and endless headaches awaited him.
“Rain!” groaned Joe Cotter. “Where’s the bloody rain?”
Marvel’s thin lips parted in a curiously mirthless grin as he looked up from the contorted features of his tent boss into the splitting sky, and knew that this was what was the matter. It was the rain that was missing from his furious and demoniacal electrical storm, and which made every new fork of lightning so horrifying, lanced from the murky vault that appeared to have become a gigantic cyclotron of disintegrating atoms. It was this rainlessness, Marvel realised, that made it so appallingly venomous. In the sudden onslaught of the hail, they had all forgotten that here was a thunderstorm without rain; rain that would fall coolly upon parched skin; rain that could put out fires; rain that above all belonged to the thunderstorms of the past that one had known and could endure. Rain might still salvage something from this fearful fountain of fire mounting to the sky.
Touched by madness for a moment, Joe Cotter raised both his fists and shook them at the heavens. “Rain!” he bawled. “Christ, can’t you give us some bleeding rain?”
The rains fell then.
They poured down from the splitting blackness above, not in droplets or slanting needles, wind-blown gusts or a steady downpour, but in solid, breath-taking, drowning sheets.
The two ancient enemies, water and fire, met and before the astonished eyes of Sam Marvel, Joe Cotter, and the helpless tentmen and circus people watching, drenched, it was fire that triumphed. So hot was the blaze at the centre, so greedy the flames licking up the spars and racing up the canvas sides to envelop the roof in billowing tongues shooting a hundred feet into the air, that the deluge had no effect upon them whatsoever except to achieve a hissing of steam at the edges.
The downpour might as well have been petrol as water for all the help it was against the white-hot incandescence. So fierce was the internal heat that it dried the wetted portions and then burned them to a smouldering mass. It was an amazing sight to see the rain illuminated and descending in what seemed to be solid shafts, as though water was being poured out of a celestial bucket, and the flames and smoke shooting through them.
But the triumph of the fire was short-lived. The last ropes had been consumed; the flaming poles were no longer capable of support; and with one final, catastrophic crash the entire structure collapsed inwards, sending up a volcano of sparks in a last mocking gesture against the cloudburst.
The danger of the blaze reaching the horse tent or inflammable lorries, trailers, caravans, with their petrol supplies and equipment, or destroying the valuable menagerie, was now over for all these were thoroughly soaked, and the members of the circus company, dazed and stunned by the virulence and duration of the storm and its destructive powers, now gathered themselves to deal with the menace of the cloudburst. With Sam Marvel in the lead, they ran once again for their wagons.
By the light of the embers smouldering where the big tent had been, and the flaring lightning flashes, they fought a desperate and losing battle in and about their living quarters to keep the water from completing the job of havoc that had been initiated by the wind and hail.
There was no keeping out that kind of inundation from such loosely built structures, which had been subjected to deterioration over long miles of bumpy roads. Every crack or weakness in joist or join became an opening through which the water now streamed, seemingly in rivers, getting into closets and lockers, ruining clothes, costumes, food supplies. The rain beat in through the shattered windows, seeped under doorways, creating lakes on the floor and soaking to the skin anyone who tried to battle with it from without. It seemed almost as though the omnipresent water had pre-empted the space occupied by the very air needed to breathe, and left the struggling humans gasping and afraid to open their mouths lest it invade them too, and fill their lungs.
Only Judy rejoiced. The torrent cascading down upon her dry, sore hide was bliss. She had been aching for cool water, inside and out, and here it was. She had climbed to her feet and from a pool gathering around her she slaked her inner thirst and now stood waving her trunk, blinking her wet eyelids and wriggling her fat behind into the rain storm with pleasure like a gleeful puppy.
Mr. Albert, emerging from beneath the elephant, patted her soaked sides and, lifting one flap of an ear, shouted into it, “You stay here, old girl! You’ll be all right now!”
He splashed across the lot, which now was ankle-deep in water and mud, to the horse tent.
Here was a shambles of men working in the dark with nervous animals amidst floating straw, ordure, sodden plumes, and trappings; yet, strange to say, the horses were calmed rather than further excited by the water drumming down on the roof and entering through every crevice. Rain was a more accustomed phenomenon, and after the long days and nights of fetid heat they, too, appreciated the soaking they were getting.
At the far end of the horse tent, Harry Walters had joined the three boys in securing his rosin-backs and the two Arabs.
The big ring horses were stolid in temperament and the boys had them well under control, but the Arabs were more nervous and kept trying to rear. Harry Walters yanked them down roughly by their bridles and swore at them. He was not a man who treated his animals badly, but the storm and the succession of catastrophes had rattled him.
Toby said, “Here, let me loosen this, Dad. They’ll be all right in a minute.”
Walters said, “Shut up and get out! I don’t need you to tell me how to handle horses. Get over to the wagon and give the women a hand.”
Toby went out into the downpour. It seemed to have grown lighter, though there was no cessation in either the quality or the quantity of the rain teeming down. But the intervals between the crackling lightning flashes and the answering cannon fire of thunder seemed to have increased slightly, as though the centre of its attack was no longer directly over the heart of Zalano. At the end of the tober, beyond the now disorganised collection of wagons, the embers of the fire still glowed and hissed in a wide circle. The ground itself on which he stood was under water, and what had been once earth so hard baked that it was almost impossible to intrude an iron stake into its skin, was now soft mud into which his heels sank.
On the way to his caravan he passed the clown wagon, bedraggled and askew. He glanced within. The inmates, Gogo, Panache, and Janos, looked like painted Polynesian savages. Their make-up had run, daubing and striping their bodies. Janos had retired beneath a bunk with the two great Danes and the fox terrier to soothe them by the presence of his small, deformed body, and his grotesque, lumpy face, streaked with red, looked up anxiously at Toby.
The two clowns were sitting huddled on their berths.
Toby said, “I think it’s getting better,” which was followed immediately by a crackling bolt as the lightning struck once more somewhere nearby, and another deafening explosion of thunder.
Panache said, “Humorist!” and tried to spit, but he could not, as his mouth was too dry.
Toby went on. Their own great motorised caravan stood some little distance away towards the rear of the lot, and through the shattered windows he could see the girls and his mother panicking about inside. He did not go there but instead continued on to the edge of the field where Judy stamped her free foreleg, sending up great splashes of water and saluted him by raising her trunk.
Toby said, “All right, old girl?” and inspected the chains and the stakes that held her. They appeared to be still firm. And from there it was just a few yards to overlook the road where the wagons of Jackdaw Williams, Deeter, and the Birdsalos were parked.
The street was sunken at that point, a matter of six feet or so beneath the level of the field on which the Marvel Circus had pitched its tents. In all probability it had originally been the bed of a small river which had dried up or which had been diverted higher up and its meagre waters put to the use of the town which lay on slightly higher ground.
Toby became aware of a new noise other than the hissing and splashing of the deluge, the crackling of the dying fire, and the booming of the thunder. It was a steady roar, like the relentless movement of surf upon a coast line. The next lightning flash that illuminated the tober and the surrounding fields disclosed to him what it was. A three-foot wall of water and ochre mud was pouring down the road from the town. It was a flash flood of all the tons of rain collected, racing down-grade to discharge itself into the plain.
Toby began to shout at the top of his lungs, “Hoi, hoi! Hey! Get out of there! Come out of it! There’s a flood coming!” And then he leaped on to the roofs of the wagons and pounded them with his heels, and when their inmates emerged he pointed and yelled, “Get up here, there’s a flood!”
They all came tumbling out of their homes, the Birdsalos, Jackdaw Williams and Rose, Deeter, and Purvey, and when they saw the mass of water no more than a hundred yards away, roaring, frothing and churning up the yellow mud, they moved quickly enough, after only a moment’s counsel. There were not enough of them to shift the wagons, and no time. They would be well out of it to save themselves, and scrambling up on to the axles and shafts they gained the security of the higher ground, and stood there helplessly watching as the flood advanced down the sunken road.
There was now a kind of yellow sulphurous light, and through the thick curtain of descending rain Toby saw Rose, who had been standing next to Williams, the white shirt that she wore soaked and clinging to her so that the pink of her body and breasts showed through it, plunge back down into the sunken road in the path of the oncoming water. She fell to her hands and knees, scrambled to her feet and, with the first of the surge swirling about her legs and thighs, struggled towards her van.
Jackdaw Williams, standing on the field overlooking the scene, watched her imperturbably, but Toby shouted, “You bloody little fool!” and plunged in after her.
The water, swirling, tugging, pulling, and pushing at him like a thousand giants, tried to sweep him away from the slender figure which had gained a finger-hold upon her wagon. Kicking and splashing, he fought against it and himself managed to hold on the spokes of a wheel. “You idiot!” he shouted. “Hang on till I can get to you! What the hell are you trying to do?”
For a moment she looked dazed. Then she replied, “Jackdaw said to get the bird.”
It was a curiously anomalous situation. It was both dangerous and not, innocent and deadly. The water was no more than waist-high and, although it had force, one could manage to keep one’s footing, but if one lost it and was swept away to the centre of it where the flash current was running at high speed, one would have been ground to bits by the small boulders and bits of debris carried along.
One such object, the wreck of an ancient sofa, crashed against Rose and knocked her loose from the van. She screamed and was about to disappear beneath the yellow turbulence, when Toby grabbed wildly for her and secured a hold upon some portion of her soaked clothing near the waist, at the same time hooking a foot into the spoke of the wheel to which he had been holding.
He was young and strong enough to fight against the increasing power of the flood. He kept her head above water and pulled her towards him until both arms were about her, and he secured a grip on the side of the wagon and sufficient leverage to struggle to his feet with her clasped safely to him.
Her eyes closed. She folded her own arms tightly about his neck and pressed her mouth to his, and her lips and soft tongue clung to his in a kind of despairing sexual ecstasy that aroused in him an anger such as he had never experienced before and at the same time such desire for all of her, every nook and cranny, that it was an agony in his loins and a dizzying blindness before his eyes to be thus locked to her without consummation. He was shaken to the depths of his young person by the mystery of the ambivalence—unendurably to want her and at the same time the wish, almost beyond control, to kill her.
Somehow he managed to get his mouth away from hers and improve his footing to the point where the flood no longer plucked at them so persistently.
His face dark with fury, he cried, “What the hell did you do that for?”
She opened her eyes at this and they were as serene as those of a child. She said, “I thought we were going to die.”
Toby took her arms from about his neck and turned her about so that he could brace her against the pull of the water, and said, “Get out of it now.”
But she only murmured, “The bird.” And instead of crawling up onto the roof of the wagon she worked herself inside, climbing through a broken window, and appeared with the caged jackdaw which she held out to Toby.
The bird screamed vilenesses at him. Toby took the cage from her and thrust it onto the roof from whence Jackdaw Williams seized it and carried it to safety.
But the caravans were beginning to move now, swaying and shifting in the speeding current, as the flood with all the weight of the waters behind it was now in full spate.
Rose appeared at the window but did not know what to do, for the sudden movement of the vehicle had alarmed her again. Toby reached an arm inside and lifted her out, as though she had been no more than a doll, for the adrenalins of fear and sex discharged within him were making him tall and strong, a veritable giant.
He held her in his arms and with her clambered to the roof of the wagon, and then made a prodigious leap to the bank as hands stretched out to reach and catch them. The caravan, with its painted jackdaw and grotesque clown’s face and the golden curlicue of its owner’s name, drifted away from the bank, was overturned and carried down the gully by the swirling flood wave.
Toby went up to Jackdaw Williams, thrust the girl at him and said, “Here, take your slut. You bloody near got her killed!”
He then stalked off in the direction of his own trailer, but halfway there felt himself drained of every bit of strength, and as though his legs were robbed of all bone and sinew, they collapsed beneath him, and shaking and trembling, he found himself kneeling in the six-inch pool of mud and water topping the field. He felt that if he did not soon have a girl all of the way, a girl like Rose, who only a moment before had teased and inflamed him beyond endurance, he would go out of his mind. He put his hands to his face so that no one who came by would see that he was weeping tears of frustration, shame, and anger.
It grew lighter still, and the rain began to slacken; the lightning and the thunder had moved in the direction of the Sierra de Alcaraz to the south-east; and at the very edge of the western horizon whence the cloud had come appeared one bright spear of red. This was the last splinter of setting sun.
Soon after came nightfall, clear, cool, canopied by every star and nebula visible over the southern plain. The
exhausted members of Sam Marvel’s Marvel Circus, at Marvel’s behest, took stock and found all present and accounted for. There was nothing then but to make do until morning when daylight would help to expose the full extend of the disaster which had overwhelmed them.
They shared out hot tea and what food had been left undamaged, and doubled up on sleeping quarters.
The following morning they awoke to a bright day of washed world and sky, where visibility seemed unlimited, the world which likewise encompassed the total ruin of their circus over which still hung the characteristic after-conflagration stink, though the rain in the end had eventually effectually doused the embers and not even so much as a curl of smoke arose from the blackened, tangled mass of wreckage at the end of the tober.
The field itself was a quagmire of yellow-brown mud which seemed somehow to have got into everything. The broken glass made it dangerous to walk in, several of the performers suffering cuts until they learned to pick their way carefully. In the road the flash flood had spent its force, spilling out onto the plain in a vast, broad river of mud. Two of the wagons, one of them that of Jackdaw Williams, were half-buried. The third stood tilting crazily in the centre of the gully. But birds sang, chickens clucked nearby, and in the town itself bells and dogs came to life.
Sam Marvel appeared at the door of his caravan and looked out over the collapse of the Marvel Circus. There was no doubt as to his estimate and judgement of the night before. They were finished. There was not a hope of continuing. He had already satisfied his mind by rechecking his insurance policy to make certain there was no sneaking fine-print clause about acts of God or natural catastrophes, and had ascertained to his relief that he was well covered. Now, the quicker he could reach London, put in his claim, and get the insurance adjustor on the spot, the better. And once more, as he looked out over the debris, his acute showman’s mind was occupying itself with how to get out of the mess as cheaply as possible.
