He stood still for a moment, the strong but not entirely unpleasant smells taking him back through the years to a sunnier, happier time. Nor was the wonder gone even now. The elephants waved graceful, snaky trunks at him, hinting at peanuts. On the opposite side in their barred cage the great bears stood on their hind legs and pantomimed for apples, looking about as fierce as stuffed animals in some department-store Christmas window. A lioness with two cubs flicked wary eyes at him, and a magnificent Bengal tiger arose and padded over to the bars on silent paws; it seemed interested and not at all unfriendly. Howie Rook began to realize, as had many others before him, the difference between being one of a gaping crowd of people pouring through a menagerie and being there comparatively alone. The beasts took flattering notice of him; they were interested and curious.
The monkeys, the hyenas, and all the rest of them were more alert and alive than he had ever seen them in the past, whether in circus or zoo. But it was not until the last cage that Howie Rook really fell in love.
Like most love affairs, this one had a stormy beginning. Rook leaned against the guard ropes, perhaps four feet from the bars of the last cage-wagon, and stared delightedly at a small orangutan with carroty hair and a faintly Hibernian expression on its face. The engaging creature sat in the middle of the cage on a pile of straw, wearing an old piece of burlap around its head like a shawl. Somehow it reminded him so much of Chief of Police Parkman that he chuckled.
Mirth between primates is often infectious. The orang leaped high into the air, squealed, and then came over to the bars, cocking its head in a puzzled, questioning manner as if trying to place his face.
“Hi there, fella,” said Rook.
The little ape made sounds vaguely suggestive of speech. They played that game for a while. Then the orang, in sheer ecstasy of spirit, did a couple of turns on the flying rings which none of the acrobats in the show could have accomplished in a thousand years, hurtled itself next into a heap of straw in the corner as if seeking something, paused for a moment by its water bucket and then came back, walking on two feet and the knuckles of one hand.
Rook felt in his pocket. “You like candy mints, fella?” he asked.
He was hardly prepared to have the innocent-appearing creature whip out a toy water pistol, take careful aim, and let him have it right in the face. “Yipes!” Rook gasped. And then at the beatific expression on the apelet’s face, the smug look of a consciousness of duty well done, he suddenly had to bend over in howls of laughter.
“Biddy!” came a feminine voice from behind him. “You should be ashamed!” Biddy, obviously unashamed, chattered and skirled and grinned with unholy glee.
When Howie Rook could stop laughing, and had mopped the water from his eyes and face, he turned to see that standing now at his elbow was a girl almost as tall as himself. His first startled impression was that she was in September morn undress, and then he realized that she wore a minimum of skin-tight, flesh-colored Bikini bathing suit.
“Hello,” she said cheerily. “So you’re initiated, huh?”
Howie Rook smiled vaguely, not thinking of anything to say. This burgeoning, raven-haired, young female had the impact of a medium-sized bomb, and he was, for a moment, in a state of shock. In his active newspaper days he had interviewed most of the fabled professional beauties of stage and screen and café society, but he had never run across anyone quite like this. Her body was beyond anything he had ever dreamed of, even back in the days when he dreamed more often along these interesting lines. She reminded him of the exaggerated pin-up girls that Petty and Varga used to draw for Esquire Magazine; her features were too perfect, like those hewn in marble for the statue of some minor Grecian goddess. She was almost too beautiful, as a color can be too bright or candy too sweet. She was overwhelming.
And her smile was like the turning on of a light. “You mustn’t mind Biddy, mister,” she was saying. “The kids used to squirt her through the bars, so her trainer got her a toy pistol and spent all winter teaching her how to use it in self-defense. Only sometimes she gets carried away with the gag. She usually likes to take a shot at anybody who’s all dressed up like you are, because, you see, she’s used to seeing her friends in work clothes. Most of us drop in for a chat with her when it’s quiet. She’s the sweetheart of the circus—aren’t you, Biddy?”
The little orang chattered again and then erupted into a tumult, bounding around her cage, climbing up the bars, and finally doing an encore on the flying-ring stunts with the added handicap of a heavy automobile tire gripped in her toes. Rook felt like applauding, and did. “Does she do all that in the show?”
The girl shook her head. “Biddy hates crowds. She’ll only do her stunts for her friends; when the crowd is in here she usually crawls into a corner and pulls her shawl over her head, showing her bare little behind to them.”
“I have often felt that way about crowds myself,” confessed Rook. “Are you an acrobat, young lady?”
“I do a single trap act,” she corrected. “Billed as Mademoiselle du Mond, born Mary Kelly in Ashtabula. I balance on the high trapeze, center ring, no net. Oh, I go over big—they’re all waiting to see if I’ll fall and break my damn neck.”
“Pssst!” came an interruption from the gap leading into the main arena, where a tanned young man in a dirty sweat shirt and blue jeans was beckoning. “All rigged and ready,” he said. Rook disliked him on sight; he was a Muscle Beach type, right out of the pictures in some physical-culture magazine, with high biceps and a low forehead.
The girl casually waved him away. “Later, Gordo,” she said. “Blow.”
The man hesitated, scowled, and reluctantly withdrew. “Your partner?” asked Rook.
She laughed. “I told you, I work solo. Gordo’s my mattress—if I miss and drop fifty feet he’s supposed to be there to break my fall. He’s also a nuisance sometimes.” Mary Kelly produced an apple and tossed it to the orang, who fielded it deftly and then happily retired to her corner with it. The girl turned to Rook. “How come you’re here?” she asked. “Friend of the management or something?”
“You could say that. I—I think I’m going to work out with the clowns for a few days.”
Brightening, she said, “Oh, you’re going to be with it? Swell! You’ll just love every minute. I suppose you’ll be with dear old Hap Hammett in his dog act, the way that other nice gentleman was last week?”
Rook decided to play it cagey. “Oh, yes. I heard about him—a Mr.—?”
“McFarley, James McFarley,” Mary Kelly prompted quickly. “A wonderful gentleman, so democratic you wouldn’t dream he was a millionaire. He went everywhere on the lot and got to know everybody; he was mad for the circus and circus people.” She paused, and then said almost wistfully, “I thought he was coming back Thursday for another day or so, but he didn’t show. He was going to bring me a book he’d written. Maybe he sent it to me; our mail sometimes doesn’t catch up to us right away.”
“Maybe he did,” Rook said.
“I think he was gathering material for another book, because he was always asking all sorts of questions and writing things down in a little black notebook. Are you a writer too, Mr.—?”
“Rook, Howard J. Rook,” he said. “I’m retired now, but I used to be in the gas business. About this McFarley—”
But then the hulking Gordo suddenly reappeared. “Look, kiddo, you going to rehearse while we got the ring, or not?”
“In a minute!” she said, and there was the faint touch of the whiplash in her voice. She turned back to Rook, with a flutter of incredible eyelashes. “So you’re a utility magnate, huh? How interesting! I sure hope we see a lot of each other while you’re with it. I gotta go now, or that Gordo will sulk for days. Bye, Biddy.”
The orangutan leaped over to the bars and pressed a vast pantomimed kiss between them. The girl blew one back, gave Rook another portion of her dazzling smile, and then ran lightly out toward the entrance of the arena; she moved, he thought, as if she were buil
t on springs instead of just bones.
Rook stood awhile in thought. So McFarley had given the impression that he was a millionaire, eh? He made some notes on a sheaf of folded yellow copy paper. Then he wandered on, trying to keep out of the way and not always succeeding. He went outside again, and found that the dust storm had lessened, either through the valiant efforts of the men with the water trucks and the sawdust or because now a stiff fresh breeze was blowing in from the sea. For a time he paused to watch the black gang tightening the guy ropes which would hold the Big Top rigid in anything short of a hurricane; they worked with an unbelievable dexterity and without one wasted move, but Rook was most impressed with the enormous dark Adonis who led them, who gave them the cadence in a weirdly compelling chant that must have come down almost unchanged from the jungles of Basutoland or the plains of Nairobi. It was a raw, primeval beat, with the overtone of drums in it. “Heave it, weave it, take it, shake it, break it, make it, mo-o-ove along!”
He went on, pausing to admire a full-fledged electric power plant large enough for a good-sized city, then coming up to a wagon-cage drawn off by itself in a corner of the “back yard.” Inside were seven great black-and-yellow-striped tigers. Six of them sat quietly and stared at him with alien, implacable yellow eyes. The seventh was different; she came closer to the bars when he chirped at her.
“Don’t get too close to Gladys, mister,” said a voice behind him. It was one of the uniformed circus attendants, carrying a scraper on a pole and evidently planning a bit of housecleaning on the cage.
“I certainly shan’t,” said Howie Rook hastily. “But why? I mean, is she the dangerous one?”
“Yeah. You get too close to her and she’ll lick your hand and take the hide off. She’s the star of Captain Larsen’s cat act that opens the show. Thinks she’s a pussycat, and lets him slap her and wrestle with her and put funny hats on her head.”
Rook prided himself on already getting wise to the ways of the circus. “Brought up as a kitten in captivity in someone’s home no doubt?”
The attendant laughed, and muttered something about “First o’ May.” “Mister, you are so wrong. The ones bred in captivity are the dangerous ones, because they aren’t afraid of men. The ones caught wild are the ones you can trust, as much as you can trust any of the wily bastards. Move over, you!”
Rook moved hastily, but the man was talking to the tigers, who snarled at him somewhat apathetically and then huddled in a group at one end of the cage. Gladys sat somewhat apart, engaged in washing her face.
Rook wandered on around the outside of the Big Top, past the hundreds of dressing rooms with their iron stairways and the dressing areas between the tracks. Some of them were already occupied, trunks set in place and opened, camp chairs outside under the canvas flaps and water buckets filled and standing ready, each stenciled with the name of its owner. Some of them bore very famous names indeed.
Outside one dressing room a small dark girl of perhaps eleven was gravely doing turns on a homemade trapeze over and over again. “Hello, sister,” said Rook cheerily.
He got barely a glance from sloe eyes. “Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, hello, mister, sixty-nine…” Rook went on, slightly abashed. Finally on his aimless peregrinations he found himself in the vicinity of the first tent to be erected that morning, the largest spread of canvas on the lot apart from the Big Top itself. There was no doubt as to its function; the smells emanating from it reminded Howie Rook very forcibly that he had had only a cup of coffee today. He ventured inside, where a few others were already trickling, and sat down on a bench before one of the hundred or so rough pine tables. Waiters were congregated at the other end of the room, but none of them came near him. He waited. Finally he took out one of his dollar cigars—
A steward materialized from out of nowhere. “Don’t light that in here!” he yelped.
Rook hastily made the cigar disappear. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just—”
“Well, whatever you were doing you better do it somewhere else. We’ll have a thousand or so men roaring in here in about five minutes, and you’ll get trampled in the rush.” He glanced at the magic card with the emblazoned elephants. “Oh, you’re with it. Mr. Timken should have told you where to sit. Performers and guests on the other side.” The man pointed, and Rook got hastily up, feeling slightly abashed, and went out to the entrance and in again past the canvas division. This end of the big tent was a duplicate of the other, except that acrobats and other performers were straggling in. At the farther end, partially hidden by a canvas flat, he could see that the freaks, the Strange People, were eating at a special table, the Armless Wonder dexterously scooping up soup with a tablespoon held in his toes next to the Fat Lady with a well-heaped plate. He chose a place in a quiet corner and sat down.
A waiter came up to him immediately, gave him a peculiar look, and then said in a singsong voice, “Veg soup, beef stew or fried fish?” Rook settled for stew, which appeared in a matter of seconds, along with the soup, coffee, a quart container of milk, half a loaf of sliced bread, and pie. It was a meal that would have staggered a lumberjack, but he did his best with the hunks of meat, the almost whole potatoes and onions. He was almost through when he became conscious that somebody was practically breathing down the back of his neck. He turned to look into the cold, unfriendly eyes of a spare, swarthy, beak-nosed character sporting a large waxed mustache and whipcord breeches with shiny black boots, who demanded, “And what are you doing here?”
“Finishing my lunch, obviously,” said Howie Rook.
The man said something under his breath in a foreign tongue, shook his head, then went around the table and plunked himself down in the opposite seat. A waiter appeared and took his order, after which they had a whispered conclave. The waiter went away and came back with the food—and also with a head steward, who approached Rook. “And just what are you doing here, mister?”
“Eating my pie,” explained Rook. He showed the card. “Mr. Timken—”
The steward relaxed, but only just a little. “One of those, eh? Well, you should have got a table assignment. Our seats are all reserved, and you’ve taken Captain Larsen’s place. Next time come to me and I’ll seat you somewhere.” He went away.
The man across the table was soaking bread in his soup and washing it down with copious drafts of milk out of the container, crouched over his food like one of his own great cats. He ate swiftly, efficiently, and noisily.
“Sorry I took your seat, Captain,” Rook apologized, anxious to make a friend. “You see, I’m new here.”
“Yes, you are,” said the other through a mouthful. He barely looked up, but Rook caught a glimpse of dark, pinpointed eyes that blinked about once every second from beneath the shadow of the sola topee the man affected.
“These are magnificent tigers you have; I was just admiring them.”
This time the glance was purely baleful. “I’ll thank you and everybody else to keep strictly the hell away from my cats,” said Captain Larsen. He rose abruptly, his meal half finished, and stalked out of the cook tent.
“Don’t mind him,” spoke up a tall, round-faced man with sideburns, who had just sat himself down nearby, “The Captain is always touchy just before a performance; maybe you’d feel the same if you had to go in and wrestle seven tigers.”
“Completely understandable,” nodded Rook. He noticed that his neighbor wore a silk shirt and bright blue uniform trousers with a red stripe down the sides. “Do you work with the animals?” he asked, still hopeful of making friends.
“I do—with human animals. I’m boss windjammer, bandmaster to you.” His name turned out to be Leo Dawes; a serene, friendly seeming sort. But his manner changed perceptibly when Howie Rook proudly explained the ostensible reason for his presence here among them. “A guest clown, eh?” Dawes said rather thoughtfully, including the others around the rapidly filling table in his remark. “I thought there wasn’t supposed to be any more of that sort of thing after last week?”
“Last week?” prompted Rook. Here perhaps was his first real lead.
“The less said about last week, the better,” spoke up a slight, muscular-looking man in a white terry-cloth bathrobe who had just appeared and taken a place across the table. With him was an exotically pretty Latin woman in street clothes, who wore her right arm in a sling, also the little girl Rook had seen earlier doing practice turns outside the dressing rooms.
The conversation died, and Rook poked at his pie. “How’s the shoulder, Gina?” asked the bandmaster after a moment.
“Stinking.” She spoke in a heavy Italian accent. “What do you expect? I’m grounded for two weeks, maybe more.”
“Mama mia,” spoke up the little girl, “if you can’t fly for a while why don’t papa work out some sort of a fill-in act with du Mond? She’d be willing—”
“Eat and be silent, small one,” said Gina. “Drink your milk.”
They all continued eating in a heavy silence. Howie Rook felt more baffled than ever; the circus and its people seemed to have taboos well beyond his ken. At any rate, he reminded himself, James McFarley must have made some of the same mistakes, and trodden on some of the same toes. All he could do was to try to retrace the other’s footsteps, to walk that same shadowed path that had led eventually to the discovery of that painted, bewigged corpse in the locked apartment. Without, of course, walking it too far. Rook was a prudent man.
4
Clowns are pegs, used to hang circuses on.
—P. T. Barnum
IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK NOW, and Howie Rook hastily wound his way through the maze of tents and machinery and trucks, looking for the domain of the clowns, the place called Clown Alley. He tried to take what he thought was a short cut—and found himself in the horse-top. Here he rashly decided to go straight on through, noting as he passed that the magnificent Percherons and Clydesdales of the circuses he remembered had disappeared forever; all of the great draft horses that once had drawn the gaily painted wagons through the streets were gone with the parade itself. Here were only a hundred or so thoroughbreds, pure-bred Arabians, and white-and-gray resin-backs with stubby legs. Some of them turned to whicker at him, then noticed his formal apparel or his clean smell and wisely turned back, certain that he had brought them nothing to eat.
Unhappy Hooligan Page 5
