Now Laurel pulls on Dad’s hand again.
“What’s the opposite of a sin, Daddy? Even in first grade Sister Carmelina talks a lot about sins to us but nobody’s ever said anything about the opposite of sin. Opposite means the other side, doesn’t it?”
Dad looks over at Mom. He has a big smile on his face just at the edge of a laugh, but he knows Laurel’s serious. Laurel’s much more serious than I can ever be.
Mom straightens Laurel’s collar over the top of her sweater.
“Laurel, don’t you worry your head about sin. I think the opposite of sin is good deeds or maybe it’s ‘grace.’ You can ask Sister Carmelina when we get back home.”
She looks at Dad again and they don’t smile. I think the idea of going back isn’t something they’re looking forward to either.
Really, we should just up and move here to Wildwood. Imagine living all your life next to an ocean. It’d make your life seem important. At home, there’s nothing but streets, pavements, houses, and lawns; only the alleys are any fun. There’s nothing big and natural. I’ve never even seen a mountain in my life except pictures in books. It’s terrible not seeing lakes or mountains or oceans. The only thing big I ever get to see is the sky and that’s big but it’s not enough; you can’t touch it. I grab hold of Dad’s other hand. I have Cannibal in one hand and Dad’s hand in the other. He gives my hand a little squeeze.
“Daddy, do you mean that lion there never lived in a jungle with other lions; he’s always been by himself in a cage like Cannibal in her box?”
“I don’t know, but probably. Lions don’t live in jungles anyway, Dickie; they live on grassy plains called savannahs.”
“In Tarzan they live in the jungle.”
“That’s only in movies. I think tigers live in jungles but not lions. I could be wrong, though.”
PART 6
Cap decides to keep Jimmy on for a while, anyway, until he’s learned how to put up the wall, take it down himself, mostly how to run a motorcycle up the wall and keep it there.
The next morning they remount the wall on the same spot. Chuck and Jimmy had been scheduled to go on to Point Pleasant, but Cap can’t do that until he’s mastered the wall. Cap and Chuck drive into Freehold and fill out the papers transferring ownership. When they come back, Chuck shakes hands with Jimmy, Cap, and Sally. Then he drives off with the truck and car.
It doesn’t take Cap long to catch on to the skills necessary for riding a motorcycle on the wall. It’s a question of getting up speed quickly and feeling for the relationship of gravity and centrifugal force. With Cap’s skills and his sense of balance he is swinging around that first day. It takes some adjusting to the tilt, looking over his left shoulder and seeing the bottom of the pit below.
Cap soon finds out that you have to keep up the acceleration, and if for some reason you lose speed, you turn quickly toward the bottom. He takes a few spills but it’s more like learning a new trick than taking real racing risks. It’s just you and the wall; you don’t have to depend on anyone else.
Jimmy shows him that about twenty of the two-by-six, tongue-in-groove timbers forming the wall are splintered and need replacing. Cap has had enough experience with board-track splinters racing, so he makes the investment and replaces the boards. But, even with that, the entire wall rattles and rocks under the weight of the motorcycles, especially when Jimmy and Cap are up on the wall together.
Cap first practices his stunts on the rollers in the platform before he tries them on the wall. He learns to stand on the seat and do the handlebar handstand while on the rollers, but can’t quite manage it up on the wall. Jimmy gets a kick out of this and keeps egging him on.
In some ways Jimmy reminds Cap of himself at that age, before he went off to war. But Cap also feels there’s something completely different. Jimmy has a deep mean streak in him: he likes to hurt; he’ll do almost anything to dominate, get on top. He sees everything in competitive terms: life is one long battle for survival. For him, winning is all that counts, and he’s a sore loser.
But worst of all he fears and hates Tuffy. From the very beginning he taunts him. For the first time, Tuffy manifests hostility to a human, strikes out at his tormentor. Cap’s afraid something bad can happen.
Jimmy also keeps after Sally. He makes no bones about it; there’s nothing subtle in his approach. He’s accustomed to taking what he wants and he has the male notion that he can physically get a woman by constant touching, rubbing, grabbing, pinching, stroking. Sally’s scared and wants Cap to fire Jimmy.
But Cap’s beginning to realize he needs Jimmy—for a while anyway. Together they work out an act where they pretend to race on the wall. Cap takes an early lead and Jimmy gradually catches him just before the end of the race. Jimmy follows this up by doing a few laps, stunting, standing on the seat, handstands, one-leg-stands on the seat. Cap knows if he’s going to fire Jimmy he has to get Tuffy into the act somehow.
Jimmy is constantly trying to corner Sally, and she sticks closer to Cap. Whenever Sally is there to watch them practice, Jimmy goes through the wildest stunts, hanging out sideways and slowing down until he’s right at the point of falling off, then shooting down at a sharp angle to the bottom.
Everything has to be exciting for Jimmy and at the same time he’s basically afraid. He’s superstitious, wears a crucifix and an amulet he claims has rhinoceros-tusk dust in it. He’s deathly afraid of the dark. It’s almost as if he’s afraid to close his eyes even to sleep. He’s better than a watchdog because he wakes at the slightest noise around their camp.
He insists that what annoys him more about Tuffy than anything is when Tuffy roars in the night, or even when he gets up and paces, as lions sometimes do. Jimmy is awake immediately, then can’t sleep.
The only thing Cap gets out of Jimmy about his background is he grew up in the panhandle of Texas and ran away from home at fourteen because his old man beat him so bad. He won’t tell his last name, so Cap figures there must be something more to it than that. He never reads, and Cap isn’t sure Jimmy can write, even his name. He’s as close to a natural animal as you’ll find inside civilization and outside jail or a mental institution.
Cap buys a sidecar near Uniontown and trains Tuffy to ride in it. He strengthens the shocks and springs so they can handle Tuffy’s four hundred pounds.
It isn’t easy getting Tuffy up on the wall. At first he’s willing to sit in the sidecar and let himself be strapped in. He’s even willing to let Cap ride him around on the level without making too much fuss. But when Cap tries him on the wall, mounting higher bit by bit, Tuffy struggles to free himself. He roars, coughs, and grunts. Cap tries to comfort him but it’s months of training before Tuffy submits to this indignity.
The problem is a cat automatically twists to balance itself. It does this, using information piped into its brain by an internal gyroscope in the middle ear. At the same time, it uses its eyes to make adjustments in space. Poor Tuffy’s getting two different sets of information. One, from his eyes, says, Twist, you’re out there sideways and you have to land on your feet. The other, from his gyroscope, which is being fooled by the centrifugal effect of the motorcycle on the wall, is saying, You’re O.K., the gravity pressures are all in the right direction, you don’t have to do anything. So Tuffy is confused.
He never closes his eyes while he’s in the sidecar. He’s upset and roars all the way around, not looking down into the pit, but looking, staring up out of the bowl. It’s all so unnatural, so hard for a simple lion to understand.
But Tuffy finally succumbs. He succumbs out of his love for Cap, who wants him to do it, and, probably something of his feelings for pride. This is what his pride seems to be doing now, riding sideways on walls.
Cap is lucky and gets a regular concession in Wildwood right on the boardwalk. This is mostly because the concessionnaire in charge of making these assignments is one of those people who live a war over and over again long after it’s finished. He’s a member of the American Le
gion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The aftermath and reconstruction of those brief months of involvement by the AEF have become the center of his life. From his reading he knows about the 32nd Division, “the Powerhouse Division,” and also about Cap Modig, one of the few drafted enlisted men who reached the temporary rank of captain, who won a bronze star, a distinguished service cross, and two purple hearts.
It’s one of those lucky breaks that make life. Cap takes advantage of it, immediately, though he refuses to join the Legion or the VFW. With this Wildwood concession alone, in normal times, they can make a living.
During the next three years, the act gradually changes. Cap finds it hard both to race Jimmy and ride the lion around in the sidecar. Sally, who’s dressed in a purple sequined costume to show off her beautiful legs and her generally fine figure, has done only the announcing of the acts, the come-on spiel from the platform. She’s now enlisted to ride Tuffy around on the motorcycle. For the act, they also change Tuffy’s name. He becomes Satan, the Dare-Devil Lion.
She, like Tuffy, doesn’t like it, but agrees. It takes a long time before she can get the motorcycle with the sidecar empty up on the wall. Finally after much practice, she can develop the speed to climb up the wall with Tuffy. Tuffy now weighs over four hundred pounds.
A part of the problem is Sally is scared of Tuffy. But she isn’t scared of Jimmy any more. Jimmy’s theory about women has been proven out for him once more. He’s got her on her back, legs up, whenever he wants her.
The first time, it was rape. Jimmy trapped Sally in the pit while Cap was out buying meat for Tuffy. He closed and locked the trap door. There was no escape. Then he began pressing himself on her, first undressing himself, baring his hard, magnificent body, the ample evidence of his passion for her. He then pushed her against the blackened wall, violently ripping off her clothes, pressing his hand over her mouth, wrestling her down the tilted edge of the wall to the bottom of the pit, where she finally succumbed in unsummoned abandon.
Whenever, after that, she tried to refuse him, he threatened to tell Cap and she surrendered again. Then the surrendering became easier, until she realized, strangely enough, she enjoyed Jimmy’s rough, eager ways. Something in her responded to being taken, without love, with violence, transported in torrents of animal passion. She began waiting for, anticipating, Jimmy’s degrading attentions.
Sally feels guilty in her relationship to Cap; Cap with his gentleness, respect for her as a woman, as a person. She knows Cap loves her, needs her, feels deeply married to her, and she knows in some way she still loves him. Sally is up against another wall, another crossroads in the conflict between her basic goodness, sensitivity, awareness, and her yearning for excitement, anything to make the day-to-day, momentary quality of her life more meaningful, something left over in many humans from the millions of years lived before agriculture, cities, law, ethics.
And she withdraws from Cap more and more, not just physically, sexually, but in her mind. She begins to see him as the outside world perceives him, a broken-down ex-soldier, shell-shock victim, ex—race driver who’s lost his nerve, a beaten man, playing nurse to a lion; a forty-year-old loser racing motorcycles around a wall. He’s bald, crippled, and sometimes has trouble chewing because so many of his teeth are missing and his plate is loose.
Still, she loves him, knows she’ll never be loved as totally, without reservations, as Cap loves her. Also Sally is feeling trapped. Here she is almost thirty with no children and no sign there ever will be any. Cap always takes care, just as he faithfully sends money to her mother every week, no matter how bad things have been. She feels guilty about that now. She also knows her mother considers her a whore for not getting married in the church. And Sally knows she can’t really ever go back. She hasn’t worked a switchboard for almost ten years and jobs are hard to find.
Cap is sensitive. He’s known what’s going on, almost since the beginning. Sally’s starting to smoke again, at the beginning surreptitiously, then openly, first tipped him off. Jimmy smokes all the time. He knows Cap’s vulnerability and blows smoke in his direction to start him coughing, then laughs, coughing himself in exaggeration.
But Cap’s so in love with Sally, so dependent on her for meaning in what is beginning to look more and more like a meaningless life, he can’t face up to it. So, as with many others before him, he reverts to the familiar formula: I love her; Jimmy seems to make her happy; if I love her then I want her to be happy. So let her have Jimmy if she wants.
But the difficulty is that something in Sally, something probably related to her convent years, and her basic honesty, goodness, can’t let her have the same easy mental, personal, spiritual relationship with Cap they’ve always had. More and more she doesn’t want to be with him, share with him. She feels guilty.
Cap is missing intensely this big part of his life, his closeness with Sally, his once-in-a-lifetime love. He depends heavily on Tuffy to fill the hole of loneliness he’s found in the core of his being. Sally, irrationally, is jealous of Cap’s time with, affection for, Tuffy.
The lion is now full-grown, practically aged; ten years old. He has a dark thick mane falling across his muzzle and over his shoulders. There’s a long furrow between his eyes going down to his snout. His nose is black and shining. When he opens his mouth he shows an impressive set of strong, slightly yellow teeth with canines more than two inches long. Below his chin is a beard that blends with his mane.
When he stands and walks, muscles ripple over his entire body. Even with the slightest twist of his tail a wave of muscle writhes and twitches.
Often Cap goes into Tuffy’s cage to play with him or lets him into the pit of the Wall when Sally and Jimmy aren’t there. Cap rubs Tuffy’s chest or digs his fingers up into the shoulder muscles behind the mane. Tuffy flops on his back and lets Cap rub his stomach. Sometimes they still wrestle, Tuffy entering into the game and trying to be tender, careful with his claws, teeth, great weight, and enormous strength.
Cap is confused, he doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes he’s tempted to talk it out with Sally, tell her the way he feels, but she senses this in him, is afraid, resists. Other times he wants to have it out with Jimmy. He knows he can’t beat him up, Cap is still strong but because of his lungs has no endurance at all. Jimmy is young, knows his advantage. Cap is sure if he gets rid of Jimmy, Sally will leave, he’s afraid Jimmy won’t take care of her, protect her in any way.
Toward the end of summer, Cap discovers that the transmission on his truck is shot. It’s the year 1938, and they’re still in Wildwood. The truck is old; it’s hard to find parts. The year has been a poor one as have been the past five years. People don’t have much money to spend watching two men, a woman, and a lion spin around inside a wooden bowl. Most people are barely earning money enough to feed themselves.
So Cap finds himself with no money and the season over. They can go on the road, head south as they’ve done before and probably stay alive; make enough to eat and feed Tuffy. But although he’s got the truck fixed, he needs to sock away money for gas and food until they can get down to Florida. Cap’s already a month behind in Jimmy’s salary. Jimmy’s never going to quit, he really has no other place to go, but he keeps threatening.
Cap can’t help but wonder if he has any control over his life. Maybe it’s all some kind of crazy accident, slowly unfolding, in which everybody loses.
PART 7
Probably most of what Dick Kettleson thought about lions was wrong. At that time, in 1938, not much was known about the lives of lions in their natural state, at least, not by non-Africans. It is very difficult for us to observe lions in nature.
Because Tuffy is a major character in our tale, perhaps it would be best if we consider briefly the life he might have lived if he had not been taken at such an early age from his home environment. Since a lion is primarily an instinctual animal, some of the ensuing events will be better understood if we contrast the life he’s living with the one he should have lived.
Tuffy was one of two cubs born to a lioness, part of a small lion grouping, not a pride. She cubbed in a fissure of rock on the Serengeti Plain, about twenty kilometers from a pride territory and a hundred kilometers or so from the sea. She, the lioness, was killed by local hunters and the cubs brought to the port where they were sold to the sailor we’ve already met in the San Diego bar.
Lions in their natural habitat are no more dangerous to humans than automobiles. As with automobiles, they can be dangerous if you get in their way under the wrong conditions; but by nature, lions will avoid humans and do not consider them natural prey as they do, for example, the gazelle or giraffe.
As far as is known, there seem to have been ten races of lions, two of which are recently extinct. The bulk of the existing lion population now resides in Africa, although a small subculture remains in a limited part of India. Earlier, lions were spread over the entire Mediterranean basin. At one time, it’s been calculated, there were as many lions as men on this planet, about six million of each. Man has gradually destroyed the lion population, while he himself has proliferated. Perhaps this explains lions’ fear and avoidance of man. Man’s irrational fear of lions is not so easily explained.
Usually, lions will tolerate coexistence with man in a prescribed area. For reasons not directly ascertainable, perhaps genetic, although man, unarmed, is easy prey for lions he is rarely hunted by them. However, older, failed, non-pride lions or lionesses might, when no longer capable of catching and killing ordinary prey, become maneaters.
It is difficult to determine exactly, but probably less than fifty percent of lions and lionesses live in a pride. The rest are “vagrant.” Although these vagrant lions and lionesses might form groupings for social reasons—to hunt, or for reproduction and mutual protection against other lions or hyenas—they have no determined protected territory and therefore do not constitute a pride. This seemingly large percentage of vagrant lions could be the result of man’s depredations on lion territory.
Pride Page 18
