Unhappy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  At the farther end of the tent were a pair of fat little striped zebras, gay sport-model jackasses. Rook had never seen a zebra this close, and he came up behind them and chirped pleasantly. He was surprised, to say the least, when both animals whirled as one and slashed out at him with neat little hind feet which came inches from his brisket. He leaped back and swore under his breath, not as much at them as at himself.

  There was a rumble of laughter from the near-by exit, and he looked up to see Gordo, the Muscle Man human mattress, looking very amused and not at all sympathetic. “I didn’t know they were loaded,” Rook said wryly.

  Gordo, in Cossack uniform now and evidently whiling away the time by throwing knives at an improvised target affixed to a tent pole, slammed a knife into the bull’s-eye and said, “A lot of things are loaded around the circus, mister. The show grounds is a bad place for an ammytoor to wander around in. People can even get theirselves hurt. You hell-bent to be a clown, you go be one. But you leave the animals—and the performers—strictly alone if you’re smart, see?” He came closer. “Don’t make the same mistakes as that smooth-talking guy who was around here last week with his little black notebook and his silly questions.”

  Gordo turned and walked away, just as Howie Rook was about to ask a sensible question. There might be the makings of trouble here, he decided. The Muscle Man evidently had a sort of proprietary interest in Mary Kelly. It would stand looking into. He made more notes on his pad of yellow paper. The trouble seemed to be that nobody would tell him anything! So far only the animals had shown any friendly interest, and not all of them. Now he could hear the beginning roar and bustle of the incoming crowd, the amplified voices of the “talkers” along the Midway, and all at once the band inside the Big Top burst into the overture, the famous “Here Comes the Circus.” He hurried on, not knowing whether he was headed right or wrong. Finally he came face to face with a small figure wearing police-clown uniform, and seized his arm. “Sonny, can you tell me where to find Hap Hammett, the clown?”

  The tiny face, under its heavy grease paint, twisted into a sneer of undisguised loathing. “You know where you can go with that sonny stuff?” he exploded. “I’m older than you are, see?” He flounced off, and there was a titter of laughter from the nearest dressing room, which did nothing for Rook’s offended dignity.

  He finally chose the scientific method of cruising around the outside of the Big Top, past dressing room after dressing room, until he found the right name stenciled on a water bucket. He was outside a little raised cubicle in which four big men and half a dozen trunks were somehow crowded; they were all in various halfway stages of putting on make-up, smearing their faces with white and with bright reds and greens and blues. “Mr. Hammett?” he tried hopefully. “Mr. Timken said I was to see you about being a clown.”

  They had all turned as one, and somebody in the rear of the dressing room said softly, “My dear God, not another of them!” But the burly man nearest the door put down his can of grease paint.

  “I’m Hap,” he said. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Rook.” His painted grin was too wide for the newcomer to see whether or not there was a real smile underneath, but the clown wiped off his hand and extended it. “Yes, the boss said you’d be with us. I can take it if you can.” He looked Rook up and down appraisingly. “Well, don’t just stand there; we go on in twelve minutes. Get out of that Sunday suit; you’ll ruin it.” He handed Rook a spare hanger for his clothes, and turned to one of the others, a cadaverous man almost seven feet tall. “Bozo, you’re about ready. Would you run over to wardrobe and get that outfit we keep for company?”

  Bozo said something under his breath, but he came lightly down the steps and hurried off. Next Hap Hammett hailed a passing midget dressed as a clown baby, complete with bonnet and bottle. “Max, will you be a good guy and make up our friend here in a hurry? Use white-face—and try to paint out the mustache if you can.”

  “Why not?” said little Max amiably. The next few minutes were pure bedlam. Max stood on a chair and began to sling white goo at his victim’s face, then smoothed it out and added wild eyebrows and a great risus grin. He showed Rook a mirror, and the neophyte shuddered. He looked like all circus clowns rolled into one; he also looked fearfully like the last photos of James McFarley.

  He was swiftly helped into a flaringly striped jersey, triple-sized corduroy pants, and a flaming Tartan frock coat heavy as a mackinaw; he donned a pair of red shoes the size of watermelons and the weight of anchors. And last Hap Hammett himself, now wearing his famous padded fat-lady drag costume, came down the steps to add a red rubber nose, a carroty fright-wig and sailor hat, and to hand him a pair of white gloves. Then Hap stood back to survey the results.

  “Joe Grimaldi is probably turning over in his grave,” he said. “But come on, clown! Hear the band? That’s the finale for the cat act we follow.” From inside the Big Top, Rook could hear the sharp crack of blank cartridges and the muffled roaring of the tigers. Hap Hammett beckoned to him and trotted away.

  Rook took two steps—and almost fell flat on his face. There were howls of unsympathetic glee from the few clowns remaining in the Alley. “Walk duck-footed, like I do,” counseled Hap over his shoulder. They came to the side entrance, and Rook could see that the show was now on in full blast. Captain Larsen was marshaling his seven great tigers out of the working cage and into their traveling wagon, with much snarling on their part and much show of obvious bravery on the part of their trainer, who slapped their behinds contemptuously as they passed one by one into the chute. The end rings were filled with trained bears gravely riding on roller skates, a sea-lion act playing horns, and overhead the aerialists whirled back and forth in perfect time with the music of the band.

  Suddenly a black mongrel dog, wearing a silly hat like her master’s, appeared out of nowhere. “Meet Cordelia,” said Hap Hammett. “She won’t bite you, unless you crab her act or ruin her laughs.”

  “But what do I do in there?” Rook asked a little feebly.

  “Just follow us, about ten feet behind. I’ll cue you as we go—nobody can hear us over the din of the crowd. Sometimes during the World Series I even wear a little portable radio under my costume.” The band now broke into the clown promenade—the fast galop, “High Riding.”

  “Let’s get with it, clown!” cried Hap, and they burst out onto the Hippodrome at a stumbling run, pausing before the first tier of reserved seats. A uniformed attendant handed Hap a big paper hoop; Cordelia three times refused to leap through it, and then, after deftly tripping up her master by running between his legs, she plunged—and was rewarded with a bit of biscuit. Hap turned, and politely offered one to Howie Rook. “Grab for it like you’re starving,” he ordered in a low tone. Rook obediently grabbed—and then Hap indignantly snatched it back and gave it to the dog.

  They were rewarded with howls of juvenile laughter, and raced on to repeat the act before the next section. This time Cordelia refused the jump entirely, in spite of Hap’s frenzied gestures. He turned, and offered the hoop invitingly to Howie Rook, with a wicked leer. And somehow, to his own surprise, Rook found himself jumping through it, weighted shoes and all. He was rewarded with a bit of dog biscuit, while Cordelia growled at him and worried his trousers in mock jealousy.

  They repeated that simple slapstick act half a dozen more times around the vast oval at breakneck pace; Rook began to feel muscles complaining in his legs and ankles that had never complained before. Somehow he was able to keep up most of the time; once he was almost run down when he lagged in the way of six evil-looking camels who were making a swift entrance. The cause of that one lapse was that he had recognized a certain face in the front row of the last section of reserved seats—he couldn’t be exactly sure, having seen the girl only once and for a few minutes in Chief Parkman’s outer office, but he could have sworn that girl was angel-faced, pouting-lipped Yvonne McFarley!

  Belatedly he sprinted to make up the gap and get back into the act, but his mind was full
of new wanderings. What in the world was Yvonne doing here, at this time?

  He caught up with Hap and Cordelia, managed to leap through the hoop once more, and then somehow they had made the full circle and out the exit. Rook leaned against a tent pole, too out of breath to speak. “You weren’t as bad as I expected,” said Hap. Both he and the dog seemed rather amused. “I didn’t really think you’d take the hoops; I thought you’d freeze and then Cordelia would show you how. But we’ll keep it in.”

  “Th-thanks,” muttered Howie Rook, his mouth dry from dog biscuits.

  “Our next walkaround you can—wait, look at this!” Hap pointed, and Rook looked up to where Mademoiselle Marie du Mond (as flamboyantly ballyhooed now by the loud-speaker system) was working her way hand over hand up a rope leading to the high trapeze in the center ring. She seized it, looked provocatively at the crowd and somewhat carefully at Gordo directly beneath her, and then went into a balancing act which Howie Rook would rather not have watched, but from which he could not tear his eyes away. She started by standing upright on the wildly swinging trapeze, then stood on her hands, and finally on the crown of her head, cushioned only by her mop of black curls, arms and legs extended wide.

  “Wonderful!” gasped Howie Rook.

  “Oh, du Mond isn’t bad at her work,” said Hap judicially. “But watch Dawes there on the bandstand.” The big bandmaster—leading the thirty musicians with his left hand and playing with his right one of the loudest and most blaring cornets in history—never took his eyes from that gyrating girl high up in the lonely air. He was really something to watch; he was as much of a performer as anybody in the circus. “She’s not balancing on the trap,” explained the veteran clown. “She’s balancing on the music.”

  Now Mary Kelly, still on her head alone, was eating a banana and tossing the peels to Gordo down below. He was resplendent in a new white-and-gold Tartar uniform, but nobody had eyes for him. He was looking up and waiting, his face moving jerkily from side to side as if watching an aerial tennis match. The girl was reading a comic book now, and laughing—laughing at the comics and at death.

  “Oh, no!” gasped Rook.

  Hap Hammett was amused. “Ever wonder why all the aerialists are young, mister? They don’t live long enough to get middle-aged. Look at Lillian Leitzel, best of them all. She got it over in Europe. That’s her tune Leo is playing—‘Crimson Petal.’ He’ll only play it for du Mond nowadays.”

  “I should think he’d be gray with all that responsibility.”

  “Him? He’s a trouper. They say it’s his lifetime ambition to straighten out that cornet into an Aida horn just by blowing. Come on, I gotta throw a change.”

  The rest of that performance was a walking—no, a running nightmare for Howie Rook. He clumped after Hap Hammett and Cordelia on two more walkarounds (and why they called them that he would never know); he was tripped up incessantly by the dog and occasionally by the leaden shoes. He gave away the bride at a clown wedding and was rescued from a burning house in a clown fire, mostly to the music of “The Anvil Chorus”—he wondered if Leo Dawes had chosen that in honor of his footwear. There were brief respites in between, but they seemed to grow shorter and shorter.

  Most of the show itself was a kaleidoscope of color and motion, a brilliant blur of beautiful horses and beautiful harem queens and walking vegetables and midgets and dwarfs wearing Mother Goose and Disneyland masks larger than themselves—of giraffes wearing collars and ties, and hippos with red ribbons around their necks. Everything was charming and ridiculous and fast—incredibly fast.

  Aerialists swung to and fro overhead like mechanical birds; whole families balanced on a bicycle high on a taut wire, And the band played on, a succession of galops and marches and waltzes and fanfares, one seguing into the other, cuing each act, never stopping for breath. Leo Dawes, somehow managing while chewing popcorn to blow a cornet louder than a steam calliope, ruled it all from the high podium, never missing a beat…

  Sometimes the music dramatically stopped, except for a long roll of drums as the end rings went dark and fill the spotlights focused on some very special feat by a human or animal performer. It all became a blur to Howie Rook. After the last walk-around, which involved certain shenanigans with toy balloons, he sat down on a box in the clown entrance, feeling that he would never rise again. “Time for the finale, the last big spec number,” Hap Hammett announced. “This time you get to rest your feet—you ride in state.”

  He beckoned, and Rook obediently followed his mentor around to the other entrance, where the line was forming. He found himself suddenly hoisted up on the broad back of an elephant, with nothing to hang on to but a spangled collar. The great pachyderm gave him a decidedly fishy eye, touched his knee with an inquiring trunk, and shimmied a little. “How do I steer it?” Rook inquired.

  “Just sit tight,” Hap advised from below, with an odd grin. “Myrtle knows what to do.” Myrtle knew what to do and did it; when the music changed into “Caesar’s Triumphal March,” she grabbed the tail of the beast ahead of her and waltzed out onto the Hippodrome track, her rider more uncomfortable than he had ever been in his life. Around they went, with Howie Rook trying valiantly not to disgrace himself by sliding off, trying to smile and wave cheerily at the children in the bleachers. But he did have time to turn his head for a look at the girl he had thought he recognized as Vonny McFarley—she was gone. The elephants and the rest of the parade swung around the Hippodrome, and then finally his performance was over. The attendants helped him down, and he staggered back to Clown Alley and collapsed on the steps of the dressing room.

  Hap Hammett was already out of costume and was scrubbing off his make-up in a pail of cold water. “You’ll have to use my pail and soap,” Hap told him. “This stuff comes off hard until you get the knack of it. Some use an electric sander.”

  Rook had a vague feeling that he was being kidded. The feeling grew stronger as Bozo, the dyspeptic beanpole clown, leaned out of the dressing room and said, “Well, mister, how do you enjoy making a bloody fool of yourself?”

  “It’s not the first time,” Rook told him. He turned to Hap. “Do I have to change? Can’t I stay this way until the evening show?”

  Hammett looked at him. “You mean you haven’t had enough yet?” He seemed almost surprised. “Sure you can stay in your make-up—the guy we had with us last week wore it from noon until lights out. You’re not supposed to go into the cookhouse in costume, though. Me, I’m off to scout this town of whatever it is and see if I can find me a tall drink and a thick steak.” He hesitated, as if about to ask Rook to come along, then turned to busy himself with getting into his street clothes, emerging as what might have been a prosperous retired farmer or businessman. His last act was to open a can of dog food. “Cordelia won’t take her rations from anybody else but me,” he explained. “See you later, then.” He hurried off.

  Howie Rook found himself rather in the way on the steps as the other clowns were going and coming, talking about who won the fifth race and where was the best place to eat in town and if there was any chance for surf fishing off the rocks tomorrow morning. Only little Maxie paid any attention, and that was only to remark on the pad of yellow paper on which Rook had been making a few more notes. “You too?” asked Max. “Writing your diary?”

  “I’m writing a murder mystery,” Rook told him. But the fateful word seemed to bring no reaction at all; Maxie simply shrugged and moved away smoking a big cigar. Rook got out of the way and sat himself down wearily in Hap Hammett’s camp chair. Then he saw that he had company. Vonny McFarley, guided by a uniformed attendant, was approaching.

  “Can you tell me where to find a man named Rook?” she demanded.

  “I am a man named Rook, or what’s left of him.”

  “You?” The soft, sulky mouth dropped open. “I didn’t dream—” She passed the attendant something, and he withdrew. She came closer to Rook. “Is there some place we can talk—where we’ll be alone?”

  Du
ty called, and Rook nodded. He hauled himself out of the chair and led the girl over farther into the back lot, all the way over to the corner behind the trained tigers’ cage. “Here,” he said, “we will be alone—except for Gladys and her pals. What’s on your mind?”

  Gladys had her whiskers against the bars, obviously listening, but Vonny didn’t seem to mind. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Rook’s painted face. “So this is what Mavis talked you into doing! I swear, she can certainly wind men around her finger…”

  “Yes?” Rook wanted more than ever to take her over his knee, upside down. “Did you come all the way down here to check up on me and my activities?”

  “N-no,” said the girl. “Not exactly. I just had to see you. You said to phone if I had anything to contribute, only you weren’t home and then I remembered what you said about the circus, so I had Benny drive me down.” He could easily see that this was a very different Vonny from the sullen child he had met in Chief Parkman’s outer office; her voice was tremulous and her eyes were moist.

  “Well?” He waited.

  “I just thought of something this morning that might be important. I’m sorry I was rude to you the other day, honest. You see, I believe you when you say all you want to do is to find out who killed my father. Well, I wouldn’t say anything about Mavis behind her back—”

  “Not much you wouldn’t!” muttered Rook.

  “—that I wouldn’t say to her face. But she did have boy friends; when we were all living there in the apartment together I used to answer the phone sometimes when she was out, and just for the hell of it I used to imitate her voice in the way I answered, and two or three times the man at the other end said ‘Darling!’!”