The Fear in Yesterday's Rings

by George C. Chesbro

  The elephants looked well cared for, as did the six horses that followed them in the processional. The program listed a bear act and, of course, Bengal tigers; these animals would have to be well taken care of, or they simply wouldn’t perform. It also meant World Circus had a good veterinarian traveling with them, not one that existed only on paper, as was the case with so many third-tier road shows and carnivals. The healthy look of the animals, and the generally robust feel of the operation, could mean that the owner really cared about his or her acquisition, which could make my mission that much more difficult.

  The show started off with an equestrian act. Harper’s friends in Palmetto Grove had mentioned the quality of the performers, and now I could see what they meant. The horses, all white bays, were expertly trained, the performers who jumped on and off their backs and raced with them around the ring, daring and skilled. This, I thought, was a circus in the European and Russian tradition—one ring instead of three, but with acts that deserved and got undivided attention to what was happening in that one ring.

  Incredibly, every act that followed seemed even better than the one that preceded it—bears, jugglers, dogs, tumblers, aerialists. If anything, I thought, they were almost too good to be performing in a relatively small road show like World Circus, virtually unheralded, traveling in broken-down campers and semis over bumpy roads, going from one rural town to another. All of these performers could be with Ringling Brothers, Cole, or Beatty—the big boys—traveling in much greater comfort and presumably making more money, perhaps working fewer hours.

  It was true that I’d stayed with Statler Brothers Circus even after receiving far better offers, but I’d stayed out of a sense of loyalty to Phil Statler. It was difficult for me to believe that all of the fine performers I was watching remained with World Circus out of loyalty to an owner who was, if the ticket taker could be believed, an absentee landlord. Then there was the question of where these people had come from, where they had learned and polished their skills. The world of the circus is a small one and should have included the performers in World Circus; word of exceptional talent spreads from show to show, people move from show to show, get to know each other, hang out in the same bars, vacation in the same places, or—especially in the case of freaks—retire to towns like Palmetto Grove in order to avoid the stares of the curious or simply to have neighbors with whom to relive old memories. None of Harper’s friends had purported to know any of the World Circus performers or to have heard of them previously; it was almost as if World Circus had hired its people from another planet. I found it all quite curious and knew it was something I was going to have to try to look into; if our budding corporation was to make a successful bid to buy the circus, I would have to know the details of the operation, including the terms of the contracts held by all the performers.

  Harper nudged me. I glanced at her, then looked in the direction where she was pointing, at a spot high up in the bleacher section to our right. I could see nothing but darkness.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a who. Your admirer, Dr. Button. Wait until the lights pass over that area again.”

  I waited. An animal act was in progress, with spotlights anchored at ground level sweeping back and forth across a woman and her dogs, and incidentally illuminating various groups in the audience. Suddenly a cone of white light swept across the top of the bleacher section where Harper had been pointing and I could indeed see Nate Button in the very top row, still breathing with his mouth open and still wearing his khaki safari jacket. However, he wasn’t watching the action in the ring; he was staring off into space, absently tapping the right side of his head with a rolled-up piece of paper that was the same color as the handbills we had seen announcing the schedule of the circus for the next six weeks. I started to wave to him, but then the light passed, and he was once again lost to sight.

  “He’s come a long way for a little excitement,” I said. “It must be better than four hundred miles from Lambeaux to here.”

  Harper shrugged. “Who can resist a circus?”

  After the dogs came a trapeze act, and then a company of clowns took over, working the sawdust track and the aisles as a gang of roustabouts, proceeded to throw up a huge, double-walled steel cage that would contain the Bengal tigers listed as the next act in the program. The double-walled cage was the same one Phil had used, but it now had a curious modification: an extra set of doors had been cut into the enclosure, and they extended all the way to the top of the cage, twenty-five feet in the air. I wondered what they were for.

  The rigging completed, the small band struck up another fanfare; Luther, dressed now in black leather pants with matching vest and black boots, came bounding into the caged-in ring out of the mouth of the tunnel leading back to the penning area. As the music abruptly ended and the applause died down, Luther turned back toward the dark tunnel and casually clapped his hands together once. Instantly, a huge, sleek Bengal tiger emerged from the tunnel as if shot from the mouth of a cannon and raced toward the man standing in the center of the ring with his hands at his sides.

  My initial reaction was that a critical mistake had been made—a missed cue or a mistake in timing by the handlers working the tiger cages backstage at the other end of the tunnel—and I sat bolt upright in my seat, sucking in my breath. Animal trainers rarely used blank-loaded guns any longer, but Luther had nothing in his hands, no whip, chair, or cane baton, and no sane man faced a grown tiger with nothing but his bare hands. Luther had absolutely nothing to interpose between himself and the savage missile of fangs, muscle, and claws hurtling toward him. The tiger bunched its hind legs beneath it and leaped at Luther’s head as it extended its great paws.

  At the very last moment, Luther put his hands on his hips and bowed slightly, no more than five or six inches. The tiger sailed through the air over him, its furred belly actually seeming to brush against Luther’s shaved head, and landed on the padded platform directly behind the trainer. It immediately leaped down to a slightly lower platform to the left, sat on its haunches. Even a slight flick of the tiger’s paws during its flight could have torn Luther’s head from his shoulders, and then these few hundred people inside a circus tent in a desolate area of the Midwest would certainly have seen a lot more for their money than they’d bargained for.

  Even as the first tiger was settling onto its perch, a second tiger burst from the dark mouth of the tunnel, and then a third. Each of the tigers executed the same maneuver, leaping through the air only millimeters over Luther’s slightly bowed head to land on the platform behind him. As the tigers reared up on their haunches and pawed the air, Luther turned around to bow to them, then raised his arms to acknowledge the applause of the crowd.

  Neither Harper—who, like me, knew more than a little about the difficulties and dangers of working with tigers—nor I was clapping. We’d both half risen from our seats in expectation of grisly tragedy, and only now, as the applause began to fade, did I realize that I had been holding my breath. “Jesus H. Christ,” I said as I exhaled and slowly lowered myself back down onto my seat. “That is one fucking crazy animal trainer.”

  Harper said nothing as she too sank back into her seat. She didn’t have to. When I glanced sideways at her, I could see that her face was flushed, her maroon, gold-flecked eyes gleaming. I wondered whether it was Luther himself that so excited her, or his masterful handling of the cats, and decided that it was probably both.

  Spellbound, I watched Luther work his tigers, using only voice and hand signals. Damned if the man might not actually be the world’s greatest animal trainer after all, I thought. Up to that point, the greatest I had ever seen was the justly celebrated Gunther Goebbel-Williams, now retired from Ringling Brothers, who’d worked with an elephant and up to a dozen tigers in a ring. Statler Brothers Circus hadn’t had that kind of a livestock budget, nor did this one. Luther might only have three cats, but one tiger can kill you just as easily as a dozen, and I had never, ever, heard of a trainer going
into a cage with tigers empty-handed. A whip or a baton might be a puny defense against a Bengal tiger, but the point was that the tiger didn’t know that. The whip, chair, or baton was an important psychological barrier between man and beast, the man’s scepter of authority. Luther managed to work without anything.

  To the unpracticed eye, the tricks Luther did with his tigers would appear simple. In fact, they were anything but. He worked them very slowly, in elegant routines requiring perfect control and concentration on his part, and absolute cooperation and split-second timing on the tigers’ part. It was the group equivalent of a top expert skier “walking,” virtually in slow motion, down a precipitous mountainside while athletes of lesser abilities schussed past him to the plaudits of onlookers who did not understand that slow can be much more difficult than fast—in skiing, in working animals, and in life. It struck me that, alone among the World Circus performers, Luther would probably have the most difficult time being accepted by a larger circus—at least this particular animal act. The act was simply not sufficiently flamboyant to excite audiences used to faster routines. Luther had opted to turn animal training to an art form that could only be appreciated fully by the cognoscenti.

  When he finished, he casually waved his cats, one by one, back into the tunnel leading to the penning area. There was only a smattering of applause by now, but I knew that Luther was the greatest animal trainer I had ever seen, and I found that I was deeply moved by this display of skill, courage, and absolute rapport between man and animal.

  Now, standing alone in the center of the large ring, Luther produced a tiny whistle from a pocket in his black leather vest. He raised the whistle to his lips, blew into it. The resulting sound was inaudible to human ears, but the immediate response was the great, trumpeting bellow of an elephant somewhere backstage; the sound seemed to fill the tent with an almost physical presence, making the bleacher platforms vibrate. Luther spun around, then ran across the ring and disappeared into the tunnel.

  “And now …” the announcer intoned over the public address system, “… the monster elephant!”

  There was another trumpeting bellow from backstage.

  “Neat,” Harper whispered in my ear. “He’s taught Mabel to speak.”

  I agreed that it was neat; getting Mabel to do anything on command, with consistency, was neat.

  A few moments later, Mabel, outfitted in full, clanging “war elephant” regalia of steel-studded leather harnesses, marched regally through the parted curtains of the entranceway, with Luther riding atop her, while the band enthusiastically blatted out a souped-up version of the Triumphal March from Aida.

  Whether or not Mabel was fully earning her keep, she was certainly looking real good; obviously putting away her vitamins and truckload of hay a day and getting her beauty rest. I felt a surge of emotion as I gazed up at the magnificent, multi-ton beast that I had nursed back to health and started to train when she weighed barely three hundred pounds. My little baby had made good. I felt like a proud parent, and I found I had tears in my eyes.

  Luther stopped her when she was in front of the first bleacher section and she immediately began to turn in a circle, lifting her knees high as she did a kind of elephant prance I had never seen before. I could see that he was controlling her with a mahout stick, a mahogany pole with a steel hook at the end, prodding and goading her behind the ears to get her to go forward or to turn. As with Luther’s performance with the tigers, I was more than a little impressed by his control of Mabel. The proper function of a mahout stick, despite its nasty hook, is not to hurt, for it’s never a good idea to get an elephant angry at you, but to more or less focus the animal’s attention on what it is you do or don’t want it to do. I’d had an aversion to the mahout stick, so I’d used a baseball bat—a Louisville Slugger, Henry Aaron model. After Mabel had started to put on weight and pose a very real threat to my life and limb, I’d found it quite effective to get her attention by whacking her on the tusks with the bat if I was on the ground, or around the head if I was on top of her. Luther, however, seemed to be doing just fine with the hooked mahout stick—but I comforted myself with the thought that Luther was bigger than me.

  Mabel finished her curiously dignified pachyderm pirouette. She obviously knew—and accepted—the routine, for with no further prompting from Luther she straightened out and came down the sawdust track, heading for the next bleacher section, opposite Harper and me. As the animal and her rider came abreast of the box, I raised my hands above my head and applauded. This was not a good idea. I’d no sooner raised my arms than Mabel’s incredibly powerful yet delicate, sinuous trunk whipped around under my arms, encircling my chest, and plucked me straight up out of my seat.

  “Sheeit!” I screamed as I was lifted high in the air and then deposited unceremoniously on my stomach, arms and legs splayed to the sides, in the valley between Mabel’s two huge skull mounds, virtually in Luther’s lap. The trainer looked even more startled than I was. “Jeeesus Christ!”

  So much for my skepticism regarding the acuity of an elephant’s long-term memory.

  The fact that Mabel had decided to shanghai an old friend during the course of her performance obviously wasn’t going to keep her from completing her star turn. Without missing a step, and with me bouncing around and with only a precarious grip on a strap of her head harness to keep me from falling to the ground, she reached the next bleacher section and immediately went into another pirouette.

  The people, naturally assuming that this hilarious spectacle of the plucked-up dwarf dangling from Mabel’s head harness was all part of the act, were out of their seats, screaming, stomping their feet, and clapping with wild enthusiasm. Mabel, of course, was loving it too, and she proceeded to raise her feet even higher as she “pranced.” I could feel my fingers beginning to ache as I held on for dear life.

  “Hey, look!” I said to Luther, shouting to be heard over the roaring cheers of the crowd. “I’m really sorry about this!”

  Luther had gotten over his initial shock, and was studying me, his glacial blue eyes bright with amusement. “Frederickson!” he shouted back in a voice laced with a heavy German accent. “Mabel’s first mahout! Obviously, you imprinted her! She loves you! You are her only true master! I must say I’m quite jealous!”

  I looked into the hard features of his face to try to see if that was his idea of a joke, decided he was at least half serious. “Yeah, that’s great!” I yelled, tightening my grip on the harness with my left hand and extending my right. “How about helping me get up in the saddle?”

  He grinned, then reached out and gripped my right wrist with fingers that felt as strong as steel cables. He effortlessly dragged me on board, then helped me turn around so that I was sitting cross-legged, just in front of him, with a secure grip on Mabel’s harness.

  “Are you okay, Frederickson?”

  “Yeah,” I replied over my shoulder. “It’s been some time since I’ve taken an elephant ride, but I think I can manage not to fall off. What happens now?”

  The crowd noise was beginning to subside as people settled back in their seats to enjoy the spectacle of the “world’s greatest animal trainer” and a foolish-looking dwarf sitting atop the “monster elephant,” and Luther was able to speak in a normal voice.

  “I’ll let her finish the routine,” he said evenly, “and then I’ll take her back so that you can dismount with some dignity. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Frederickson. I’ve heard and read a good deal about you. I regret that we never had a chance to work with each other. I understand you’re now well known as a private investigator, but I must say I was most impressed with what you managed to achieve with Mabel here. People also told me you worked with Bengals when you were with the circus.”

  Mabel had reached another bleacher section and was going into her curiously dainty pirouette. I half turned so that I could look into Luther’s face, his startlingly blue eyes. He still had a look and air of amusement about him; despite his compliments, I had
the feeling that he still couldn’t quite believe there was a dwarf riding along with him on Mabel.

  I said, “I never got in a cage with any Bengals, Luther. I just played with them. I used to like to help raise them from the time they were cubs.”

  “Always the best way.”

  “With me, working with animals was always just a hobby. Strictly amateur hour.” I paused, added: “There was a time in my life when I pretty much preferred animals to people—most people.”

  “Oh, I still feel that way,” Luther said easily. “Did you ever think about working tigers in the ring?”

  “No. I never felt like getting eaten.”

  Luther grunted. “I believe you would have made a very good professional animal trainer.”

  Mabel, still running on automatic pilot, finished her dance, moved on to the last bleacher section, started turning once again.

  “I was having enough trouble getting people to take me seriously as a tumbler and aerialist, Luther. I just don’t think too many people would have taken to a dwarf tiger tamer.”

  “The tigers must have taken you seriously. That’s all that counts.”

  “What about you, Luther? Why is it that nobody ever heard of you until you came to work for World Circus? And why do you stay when you’re so obviously ready for bigger things?”

  He paused a few seconds before answering. “I’m quite happy with World Circus, Frederickson.”

  “Are you? Now that Goebbel-Williams has retired, you’d have top billing at Ringling, or with Clyde Beatty. Here you’re just another act listed in fuzzy print in a cheap program. As a matter of fact, that’s true of every performer with World Circus, and you’ve got top-drawer acts. It’s almost as if the owner wants to keep the circus going—but just barely, without too much publicity. What’s going on here, Luther?”