The Fear in Yesterday's Rings

by George C. Chesbro

  “Jacques,” I said, drawing myself up and taking a deep breath, “I want this man transferred to me first private or semiprivate room that becomes available; I want him out of this corridor, off this ward. I also want the best specialists available to take care of him. I’ll cover all me expenses. Who do I see to make the arrangements?”

  Jacques grunted. “The cashier downstairs, man. What you want is going to cost you some shekels.”

  “It doesn’t matter. When he’s well enough to leave here, I want him moved to my place. With Garth married and living up in Cairn, his apartment in the brownstone is empty. When it’s time to move him, I’d appreciate a recommendation from you for a private nursing service.”

  “You got it, Mongo,” the Haitian said quietly. “You really love this man, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “I guess I never realized just how much until I saw him lying here.”

  “You make the financial arrangements downstairs, and as soon as I get the okay I’ll take care of things up here. I’ll keep an eye on your friend, man. Leave it to me. Don’t worry. And I’ll get word to you as soon as he comes around.”

  “Thanks, Jacques,” I mumbled, then turned and headed back down the corridor as tears once again began streaming from my eyes.

  Chapter Two

  Phil regained consciousness a day later, but he wasn’t talking—not to his doctors, not to Jacques, and not to me. The first time I walked into his room his recognition of me was clearly reflected in his pale blue, watery eyes, but then he quickly averted his gaze and wouldn’t look at me again. It was the same the next day, and the day after that.

  They released him from the hospital on the sixth day, into my care. The doctors had cleared up his pneumonia and a half dozen other infections on and inside his body with antibiotics, but he was still very weak. They estimated he would need a minimum of two or three weeks of rest before he would be strong enough to be on his own—presumably to return to his life on the streets. I was strongly advised to keep him away from booze. I’d contracted with a private nursing service for Phil’s at-home care, and I had him transported by private ambulance from the hospital to my brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street, where I put him to bed in Garth’s apartment on the third floor.

  He still hadn’t spoken, and he still wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  Fearing that brain damage, Alzheimer’s, or some other condition had robbed him of reason or speech, I checked once again with the doctors and was told once again what I had been told before—brain scans had indicated no organic damage, and there was nothing to indicate his mental faculties and vocal cords were not intact. Their suspicion was that Phil’s muteness was caused by the same bone-deep depression that might have prompted him to take to the streets in the first place. Antidepressant drugs were contraindicated for the present time because of the other medications which had been administered to him.

  And so I was just going to have to wait. Each day I popped up at frequent intervals from the offices downstairs to check with the nurse on duty to see how Phil was doing. I’d sit next to his bed and talk about anything that came to mind, but he would always turn his head away and remain silent. The plastic bag containing the circus posters I’d returned to him lay unopened on the night table next to his bed. I’d anticipated—dreaded—having him ask for a drink, but he didn’t even do that.

  On Thursday, four days after I’d brought my former boss home, I was in my office working on a report for a corporate client when the day nurse stuck his head in the door.

  “Dr. Frederickson, I think you’d better go upstairs to see Mr. Statler. He just told me I was fired.”

  I paid the nurse for the rest of his shift, then bounded up the stairs to the third floor, fearing that the reason for Phil’s sudden burst of animation was that he’d caught a glimpse of the well-stocked bar in the living room of the apartment. But Phil wasn’t at the bar. I found him sitting up on the edge of the bed; he’d found the clothes I’d bought for him. He’d managed to pull on a pair of corduroy pants and was trying, with badly trembling fingers, to take the pins from a new shirt.

  “I can’t afford nurses,” he said in a low, hoarse voice as I entered the room and approached the bed. He didn’t look up but simply kept talking very rapidly, occasionally shaking his head from side to side for emphasis. “I can’t afford that private room you put me in at the hospital, and I can’t afford those fancy doctors you sent around. I wanted to walk out of there, but I was just too goddamned weak. If you think Phil Statler needs the goddamned dwarf he plucked off a farm in Nebraska to take care of him in his dotage, you’ve got another think coming. I don’t know how right now, but I’m going to pay you back every goddamned cent you’ve spent on me.”

  It was the terribly injured pride of a terribly proud man speaking. I just let it go on. When he paused for breath, I stepped close to him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and hugged him to me.

  “Oh, God, Mongo,” he sobbed into my chest, encircling my waist with his arms. “I’m so ashamed to have you see me like this.”

  “Be quiet, Phil,” I said softly, rocking him back and forth like a child. “Finish putting your clothes on, and I’ll show you around the offices of Frederickson and Frederickson. Even though my brother’s my partner, I insisted on having my name listed first.”

  “Where’s your big brother?” Phil asked in a slightly less hoarse voice as he sipped his third cup of coffee.

  We were sitting at Garth’s kitchen table, close to a window where the sound of heavy rain splattering against the glass almost drowned out his weak voice. I judged that Phil was at least forty pounds lighter than when I’d last seen him, and Garth’s bathrobe hung around his now-frail body like a shroud. My former boss was going to need a lot of tender loving care, some fattening up, and something else I had no idea how to give him.

  “He got married, and he’s happy as a clam in a mud bank. He married a woman by the name of Mary Tree. They’re living in her place, in a town called Cairn; it’s about fifty miles north of here, on the Hudson. He quit the force a few years back and came into partnership with me.”

  “Mary Tree the folk singer?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Antiwar activist? Pacifist?”

  “Ex-pacifist.”

  “Good-looking woman.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Phil sipped at his coffee, holding the cup with two trembling hands. Then he set the cup down, stared into its depths. “I lost the circus about two and a half years ago, Mongo,” he said to the cup. “After that I lost myself; things just kind of got out of control. Now it’s all sort of an alcohol blur to me.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it, Phil,” I said quietly. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

  “I want to explain.”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, go ahead. But, like I said, you don’t owe me anything.”

  Now he glanced up from his coffee cup, and his pale blue eyes glinted with what might have been anger. It was the strongest hint of any feeling but depression I’d seen in him yet, and I decided it was a healthy sign. “I appreciate what you’ve done—what you’re doing—for me, Mongo. The kindness you’ve shown to me is the kind of debt a man can’t repay, but I’m telling you that I’m going to find a way to pay back every penny you’ve spent on me.”

  “Sure,” I said evenly.

  He stiffened. “You don’t think I mean it? You don’t think I can work and pay you back?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Then don’t ‘sure’ me like that. I’m no welfare case. I may have lived on the streets and eaten out of garbage cans, but nobody ever had to support me. There’s no way you could know this, but this is the longest I’ve been sober in a lot of years. I don’t even want a drink. The reason I don’t want a drink is that the minute I woke up in the hospital and saw you, I knew you’d been taking care of me. I’m too used to having people depend on me, Mongo, and I can’t stand to be dependent
on anyone; I’d rather starve or freeze to death. When I realized what you’d done, I knew I was going to have to find a way to earn enough money to pay you back. That’s more important to me than booze.”

  Phil Statler, I could see, was going to be a problem; there’s nothing more difficult to nurse than someone else’s wounded pride. “Phil, you mentioned kindness, and how difficult it can be to repay. Well, think of all the kindness you showed to me, the skills you nurtured in me, and then the fame and fortune that those skills brought me. But the greatest gift you gave a certain defiant, defensive, and decidedly self-conscious young dwarf was an opportunity to live with dignity and self-respect. I wouldn’t be where I am now, Phil, and I certainly wouldn’t be anywhere near as comfortable with myself as I am, if not for you. As far as I’m concerned, this is at most simply payback time.”

  Phil sighed, once again looked down at his coffee cup. “I appreciate it more than I can ever say, Mongo,” he murmured.

  “I’m well aware of that, Phil. No problem.”

  “And I’m going to find a way to pay you back.”

  “Whatever you say, Phil. In the meantime, I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d think of this place as your home. It’s a big house, as you can see, and I’ve been kind of clanking around in it since Garth moved out. I’d like you to keep me company, at least until you get your strength back and your plans in order. When it comes time to reimburse me for medical expenses, or whatever, I’ll give you an itemized bill, if it’ll make you happy. I’ll always think of you not only as my mentor but as a second father. Now I’m asking you to let me be your friend. Please accept my help, Phil, until you’re back on your feet.”

  He looked up, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again when tears welled in his eyes. He nodded, then rose and retrieved the coffee pot from the warmer on the stove. He refilled both of our cups, then sat down again. “What do you know about the circus business these days, Mongo?”

  “Well, there’s the Big Apple Circus, and Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey still comes into Madison Square Garden for a few weeks every year. Aside from that, I don’t know much. To tell you the truth, I always had mixed feelings about being in the circus. Despite the fact that you’d made me a headliner, I still felt that being in a circus was somehow just too common for a dwarf.”

  Phil shook his head impatiently. “I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “People expect to find dwarfs in a circus; it’s like going to see The Wizard of Oz.”

  “I still don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s the same as I could never understand why you quit the circus to take a job as a college professor after you got that doctor’s degree. You were at the top when you quit, and I know you were making a hell of a lot more money than you were ever going to make as a professor. Hell, the world has college professors up the ass, but there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of circus performers who could do the stuff you did.”

  “There weren’t—aren’t—that many dwarf college professors. There are a hell of a lot fewer dwarf college professors than there are circus performers.”

  He stared at me for some time, and I could see pale shadows move in his pale eyes as he struggled to understand. “Ah,” he said at last, raising his gray eyebrows slightly. “You mean it’s the same thing as saying there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of dwarf private investigators?”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  He shook his head slightly, brushed a strand of gray hair back from his eyes. “You’re a pisser, Mongo. Always were.”

  I grinned. “Garth always says I have a tendency to overcompensate. But it all started with you.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess maybe you got out at the right time—even if you did just about break poor Mabel’s heart and leave me with an elephant nearly nobody else could handle. The days of the real Big Top were about over, and everybody knew it but me. Ringling had already started developing into the mechanized arena show it is now, and it wasn’t long before the Cole and Clyde Beatty people started going down the same road, booking up all the largest indoor arenas along their routes and cutting back on everything that wouldn’t fit into one ring inside some goddamn armory.

  “At first I was delighted to see Cole and Clyde Beatty going that way. Hell, our circuits had always overlapped, and we’d always been fighting tooth and claw to be at the top of the second-tier circuses, behind Ringling. Now, the way I had it figured, my competition had written themselves off by going into the indoor arenas. Statler Brothers Circus was the only genuine Big Top left in the whole goddamn country, not counting the little mud shows, and I couldn’t imagine that parents and their kids would be content to sit inside some air-conditioned warehouse for two or three hours to watch what amounted to a vaudeville show when they could spend a day at a real circus, in real tents pitched in a field where they could wander around the midway or through the sideshows as long as they wanted, and then go inside a real Big Top to watch a real circus.”

  “And you were wrong,” I said quietly.

  The old man grunted, took another sip of coffee, said: “Yeah, I was wrong. I still don’t understand it, Mongo. I kept doing everything the way I had been doing it, the way I’d been taught by my father and uncles. I got the best performers I could find and paid them well, kept a large stable of good animals and kept them in peak condition. I had the most interesting freaks, I made sure that the food at all the concessions was quality stuff, and I made damn sure that none of the carny barkers ripped off the rubes. But attendance just kept dropping off. Each year it got worse. I tried upping the advertising budget, but that was like pouring money down a rat hole. Toward the end we’d be playing matinees outside some town and we’d get maybe fifty people inside the tent. And damned if the other shows weren’t packing people into the indoor arenas.”

  “There may be no place left in this country for real circuses anymore, Phil,” I said evenly. “People just don’t have the time, or maybe the patience, to spend walking around circus grounds. They’re not interested in watching animals being fed. They want packaging, shows they know will start and end at a certain time; they want to be able to get reserved seats, and they want to be comfortable. Once you saw that you weren’t getting the people to come out anymore, why didn’t you follow along after the other big players and book indoor arenas?”

  He shrugged. “Even if I’d wanted to, by that time it was too late. The other shows were already in place in the arenas, and they had exclusive contracts—as far as circuses were concerned—with all the best sites. Besides, it would have meant cutting loose the freaks and getting rid of more than half the animals.”

  “And you wouldn’t cut back on operations.”

  Phil glanced at me sharply, smiled without humor. “Cut back on operations? Is that what you’d call it, Mongo?”

  “Phil, I know—”

  “What was I supposed to do with people like Roger, Harry, and Lisa? Give them a pink slip? Where were they going to find work? Some of those freaks had been with me since they were teenagers, just like you; they weren’t just employees, they were family. You know freaks can’t just go out and find some other job. I wouldn’t go on welfare myself, and I wasn’t going to put any of my family on welfare; cutting them loose would have meant just that for a lot of them. And what about the animals? Zoos don’t like circus animals, even when they have room for them, because circus animals don’t do well in zoos. Hell, put Mabel in a zoo, and she’d end up killing some keeper. Sell them off cheap to some mud show or carny operator? I’d rather shoot them myself and save them the misery. We took in Mabel from a carny man, Mongo, remember? You remember what kind of shape she was in?”

  “I remember, Phil. So the bottom line was that you couldn’t bring yourself to lay off anyone, or cut loose a single animal, if you weren’t sure they’d be well taken care of. But there was no other place for them, as you saw
it, so you had no choice but to try and keep going.”

  “That’s right; I had to try and keep going. It was a bust, but I don’t regret it even now. I’m a circus man, Mongo. I don’t know anything else—and, to me, those shows you see sitting in a steel shed in the middle of some goddamn city aren’t really circuses. I sank everything I’d saved over the years into the circus to try to keep it together. It took everything I had. Then I started losing my best acts, because I no longer had the money to pay them what they could get elsewhere—with Cole, Clyde Beatty, or Ringling. Finally, in the last couple of years, we became just another mud show, although I hated to admit it.”

  “Some mud show,” I said, and sighed. “It had to be the only mud show with a full complement of freaks, a herd of animals no other show would take, and enough acts to fill three rings.”

  He spent a few minutes idly stirring the ounce or so of coffee left in his cup, finally said: “I’d always been a pretty hard driver, Mongo, as I’m sure you recall, and a heavy drinker. Now, when the troubles began coming down, I really started hitting the sauce. It was the only way I could find to fight the worry and the pain. I couldn’t stand to see what was happening to the circus, or think about what was going to happen to my people and animals if it folded. I ended up drunk most of the time. Toward the end I got an offer from somebody to buy it. It was a good offer—more, really, than the circus was worth. But the buyer wouldn’t agree to keep all the freaks. I was told they had no interest in sideshows and that they’d bring in all their own acts. All they wanted from me was the equipment, the animals, and the rights to our permits around the circuit we did.”