Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  Out pirouetted a beautiful young woman. Wholesomely she flaunted her shapely bare legs below a tiny tulle skirt. Her leotard rode high on her hips, and featured a neckline scooped down to the upper slopes of her small breasts. Hair like a puffy golden corona, face heart-shaped with a chin like a tiny apple; eyes the amazing color of melted purple popsicles, and tiny mouth.

  Rory thought her the prettiest, most elfin creature he had ever seen.

  After making a bow she proceeded to one of the big poles that upheld the tent. She ascended hand over hand up a rope ladder to a tiny platform thirty feet in the air. Waiting for her, a long striped pole in its clamp detached easily under her confident hand. Balancing the long rod she stepped unhesitatingly out onto the wire.

  Rory realized only in that moment that no net stretched accommodatingly below her.

  Katie Stearns act featured the following routines: a Chuck-Berry-style duckwalk; a handstand with the pole supported by the soles of her feet; a few seconds of the dance once known as the “bunny hug”; a crane-like pose on one foot only; a “shuffle off to Buffalo” sequence; an imitation of napping on her back.

  Old ladies were fainting in the stands. Grown men were crying. Mothers clutched their children, and sweethearts likewise embraced, more out of sheer terror than any fondness. Rory suspected he would never breathe again.

  After an eternity, the aerialist reached the far platform. She descended, bowed and made her exit, all to utter silence. Thirty seconds later the crowd regained enough composure to trumpet its approval wildly. Katie Stearn returned, smiling like a beacon.

  Rory had no notion how Lispenard could possibly top this.

  The portly ringmaster reappeared. “I confess that Miss Stearns act is the one portion of my own show I cannot bring myself to watch! Youth and beauty in peril of its very existence! Yet, Miss Stearn insists that only these very conditions redeem her maneuvers. In such a fashion is life exalted, through dramatization of its fragility! But now, good people, if all your organs of sense and sympathy are fully recovered, I will now present Mister Jacky Ray, the most accomplished member of that small band known as “enterologists.” You all know, I am sure, the feats of those magicians from Houdini onward who claim no sealed apparatus can defeat their escape, however well secured. Mister Ray makes the same claim—in reverse! He will enter anything! No locks or barriers offer proof against his ingress! But words convey the merest shadow of reality. Witness for yourselves!”

  Two glamorous showgirls wheeled out a cylindrical frame bearing a black velvet curtain, much like some portable shower stall. Following it came the man who had halted Rory for trespassing. The sour face of the Peeping Tom seemed to radiate the message that he performed only reluctantly, and before his social inferiors.

  Roustabouts brought out a big coffin-sized chest, which they positioned in the center of the shower stall, curtain pulled back for unhindered display. The lid of the chest was opened to reveal its empty interior. The box was wrapped with chains and ropes, then festooned with padlocks, knots and wax seals. Jacky Ray stood next to the box with his hand resting lightly upon it. The girls drew the curtain around the whole tableau. They counted sweetly to fifteen, then whisked back the curtain on clattering rings. Only the box remained in view. Working expediently, the girls broke the seals, undid the knots and locks, coiled up the chains and ropes. It took them ninety seconds. Inside the unlidded box rested a smug Jacky Ray.

  The Enterologist entered several more sealed containers, each progressively smaller: a refrigerator, a safe, a footlocker. Each container, unsealed, revealed his increasingly contorted yet unmistakably supercilious form. Finally the assistants carried out what appeared to be the large glass jug of a conventional office watercooler, although admittedly the uncapped mouth of the bottle appeared enlarged beyond the norm. The audience laughed heartily when the curtain whooshed closed around bottle and performer. Rory joined in. Surely this improbable finale would bring the act to a close with a comic touch.

  Under the girls’ hands the curtain clinked back on its rings.

  Jacky Ray’s clothing caused most of the bottle to appear to contain a dark liquid. But inside, up near the lip, distorted facial features pressed in a pink smear against the interior of the jug—

  A frightened uproar arose. The girls jerked the curtain shut, then just as quickly opened it. Mister Jacky Ray stood outside the empty bottle with arms upraised in a gesture of victory. The cheers that followed seemed never to end.

  Lispenard, too, offered profuse praise for the Enterologist “A lifetime of practice with Oriental adepts of serpentine flexibility, all for your enjoyment! Think on the inconceivable stress and torture his all-too-frail human flesh and bones is subject to, when you climb into your comfortable automobiles on your way home tonight! Rest well, Mister Ray! And now, friends, our grand finish! Citizens, sit up straight and pay heed! Without further ado or needless puffery, I introduce you to the Baroness Von Hammer-Purgstall! The only mare ever to graduate Vienna’s famed Spanish Riding Academy, and the globe’s most famous diving equine!”

  Clowns occupied the crowd’s attention while preparations were underway. A mobile steel tower approximately two stories tall made its wobbly appearance. Affixed to the tower’s spine, a large elevator cage drew apparent power from a small engine. Burly men anchored the tower with guy wires pegged into the earth, rendering it stalwart. They next erected a big collapsible pool at the tower’s base and filled it by employing a fire hose. The clowns formed a mock bucket brigade and succeeded only in soaking each other. Once the pool brimmed full, the star appeared.

  The Baroness Von Hammer-Purgstall—a gleaming white, barrel-chested Lipizzaner mare—cavorted with proud insouciance. Utterly unlike old Axel of beloved memory, Rory’s childhood steed, she yet somehow reminded him of that river-vanished horse.

  The Baroness stepped blithely into the elevator cage, sans trainer or guide. The engine roared into fumy life. The horse ascended into the air of the tent, an unnatural sight akin to spotting a whale in the streets.

  The elevator stopped. Without nervous fidgeting or chivvying, the Baroness stepped out on the platform, which creaked and bowed under the hundredweights of horseflesh.

  The next moment she jumped.

  Pegasus soared. Rory felt nailed to his seat.

  When she landed in the pool, her impact, as planned, flattened the tub in a cushioning effect, spraying hundreds of gallons of water in a circle with a twenty-foot radius.

  Rory got drenched. By the time he had wiped his face and opened his eyes, the Baroness was trotting off, the band was playing a fare-thee-well fanfare, and the audience was filing out. Apparently Lispenard had the good sense to realize that any comment of his would sound anticlimactic.

  Possessed by a notion so spontaneous and extravagant that he could only regard it as divinely inspired, Rory jumped the small barrier before him and raced after the horse.

  He encountered Lispenard just outside the tent, unknotting his tie and swigging directly from a cold quart of beer.

  “Mister, I can ride that horse!”

  Lispenard regarded Rory shrewdly but not ill-naturedly. “Why, so can I, boy!”

  “No, I mean going down.”

  Lispenard laughed, sensing a joke, then moved to turn away. Rory grabbed him by the arm. Hurriedly he explained about himself, his past career and current predicament. At the end of Rory’s capsule biography the circus owner still looked dubious.

  “Listen,” Rory pleaded. “Just give me one chance, okay? Tomorrow night. C’mon, please. What have you got to lose?”

  “And what if you break your fool neck?”

  “I’ll sign a waiver. Anything you want. But I’ve got to ride her.”

  “Why?”

  The simple question stumped Rory. He stroked his beard, squeezing a pint of water out of it like a sponge. Why indeed?

  “I—I don’t rightly know. I just have to. Something in her calls out to me.”

  Lispenard consid
ered before answering. “A plummeting horse commands all eyes already. Yet even repeated miracles pall. Perhaps the addition of a rider would flame the public’s appetite for novelty, our lifeblood. All right. You may attempt your foolish feat tomorrow night.”

  “You won’t regret this, sir.”

  Lispenard guzzled some more beer. “Such a guiltless decision would represent a first in my career.”

  Early the next morning Rory arrived at the somnolent grounds of the Pantechnicon, carrying his duffel. He had checked out of the YMCA, burning his bridges decisively behind him. The room where he had spent a moribund year and a half held no nostalgic allure for him, and he had closed the door upon it with pleasure.

  In the harsh light of day the previous night’s glamour had fled. The paths threading the booths slopped muddy from an early morning shower. The booths themselves stood revealed as knockabout affairs of thin wood and painted canvas, patched and pierced, alluring scenes in crack-crazed tempera now somber and dim-witted. The main tent called to Rory’s mind a bloated mushroom that had pushed up overnight from the moist earth.

  Rory wondered dismally what he was doing here. His whole inspiration of the night before seemed like the last desperate ploy of a washed-up has-been, someone eager to clutch at any scrap of past triumphs.

  He almost turned back to the bus stop. But in the end some fragment of hope impelled his footsteps forward.

  The silent residential trailers exhibited no activity, no Peeping Toms or carousing roustabouts, no exercising performers or prowling beavers. The air hung as still as that at the bottom of a deep well. From what appeared to be a mess wagon drifted the aroma of brewing coffee. Perhaps, Rory imagined with growling stomach, he could wrangle an invitation to breakfast on the strength of his upcoming participation in the show. Maybe Lispenard would offer him a chit of some sort if he presented himself.…

  The trailer bearing the legend manager was hitched to a big-finned Cadillac pocked with rust. Pondering whether the hour was too early or not, Rory nonetheless knocked on the trailer’s door. A groggy, irascible voice called out. “Shatterer of sleep! Come in, then, and curse your unknown father’s hide!”

  Lispenard lay on a tatty couch, a coverless pillow supporting his heavy head, a blanket bunched at his bare feet. A couple of empty quart bottles rested on the floor. The circus owner wore a ripped red union suit that stretched to its limits over his stomach but bagged at his skinny calves. The trailers furnishings included a rolltop desk stuffed to overflowing with papers; a bureau whose top was a collage of framed photos, loose change, handbills, crumpled Kleenexes, and dirty drinking glasses (and one alarming item, a massive, antique, but disturbingly functional Colt pistol). In one corner of the room bulked a big antique safe.

  Rubbing his eyes, Lispenard said, “So, you showed up after all. I had considered that such a foolhardy young man appearing so precipitously out of the night might signal only the concerted failure of assorted brain cells on my part. Well, take a seat— “

  Rory tentatively dropped down atop a vinyl hassock. Lispenard swung his feet to the floor and sat up. The circus owner’s face now confronted Rory’s own across an uncomfortably narrow chasm. Without warning, Lispenard began to bellow in a voice trained to fill a noisy tent.

  “Now listen to me, you young daredevil! I know I agreed to let you ride the Baroness. But if your insane scheme results in so much as a single hair out of place on her noble hide, I’ll have your guts for garters! Do I make myself clear?”

  Rory recovered slowly from the astonishing tirade. “Yes, of course, sir. I—I think she’s wonderful myself. I wouldn’t do anything that I thought would hurt her.”

  Lispenard sat wearily back against his sleeping couch and held his head in his hands. “My skull is not as impervious to my own voice as it once was. Or perhaps someone has shortened the hours of the night, robbing me of my wonted rest. Well, these problems are not yours, boy.” Lispenard shot forth his hand, and Rory shook it. “I accept your word as your bond, lad. I hope you credit my concern with its true degree of selflessness. Although the Baroness indeed brings profit to the Pantechnicon, she enjoys a uniqueness of being that merits all protection. The Baroness reigns supreme o’er all her tribe. Not since the heyday of New Jersey’s Steel Pier has the world enjoyed such diving abilities combined with such equine grace. If I didn’t have a good feeling about you, I’d not let you within an inch of her withers.”

  While dressing—not in his showtime tuxedo, but in capacious coveralls—Lispenard proceeded to tell Rory a bit more about the Baroness.

  The Baroness’s Austrian owner since her birth had been a second-string breeder from a faltering farm who went by the name of Hugo Gürl. Unable ever to place one of his mediocre Lipizzaner stallions at the prestigious Spanish Riding Academy, Gürl had conceived a grudge against the elite organization. Nursing his resentment, Gürl had recognized in the young Baroness a chance to have his revenge. This horse, phenomenal in her intelligence and abilities even at a young age, would surely have gained entrance had she only been born a male. Gürl contrived to make it so. A discredited plastic surgeon was called upon to fashion a remarkably lifelike prosthesis-dam arrangement, to be secured with surgical glue during business hours. (The Baroness proved uncannily tractable.) A few well-placed bribes greased the plot further. The Baroness gained admission to the Academy, with Gürl constantly at her side to manage the deception round the clock.

  For the next two years the Baroness Von Hammer-Purgstall trained, learning her caprioles and corbettes, earning honors and praise from unsuspecting masters. At last came the graduation ceremony. Gürl waited patiently until its conclusion, then triumphantly exposed his own fraud, partially ripping away the prosthesis, which this crucial morning had been affixed with mere spirit gum.

  “You have trained a mare, you blind fools! Not since Pope Joan have so many ‘high priests’ looked so foolish!”

  The Baroness and Hugo Gürl experienced an unceremonious and rude ejection. Suddenly, Gürl’s victory tasted like ashes in his mouth. He had nothing left to live for.

  Wandering dejectedly by the banks of the Danube, Gürl had had to fight an inexplicable tendency of the Baroness to lunge toward the water. What could be causing this behavior? Suddenly the horse bolted, hurling herself off an unfenced promenade and into the river.

  The mock stallion pizzle floated to the top of the waters, beside the paddling mare. That explained it! Chafing under the prosthesis, the Baroness had sought to remove it her own way.

  Her expert, self-prompted dive, however, had additional consequences she could not have foreseen.

  Gürl embarked on a gypsy life throughout Europe. He and the Baroness sustained themselves through the money earned from impromptu diving performances. It was a hard life, but a rewarding one. The pair became inseparable, the welfare of each linked to the other.

  One day on a whim while in Liverpool (Gürl later maintained to Lispenard that he and the Baroness had swum the English Channel), Gürl approached a United States sailor down by the docks. The year was 1964, and the sailor was one John “Wolfie” Erlkonig. For a quickly arranged fee, Erlkonig agreed to smuggle the horse and man aboard his ship for a trip to America. The fee seemed less important to Erlkonig than the chance to thumb his nose so outrageously at the officers of his ship.

  A cloistered trans-Atlantic passage in the deepest recesses of the naval vessel, their presence an open yet protected secret among the lower ranks, soon landed Gürl and the Baroness on Americas shores.

  Lispenard had encountered the extraordinary pair in Tampa, Florida, where the Pantechnicon traditionally wintered from December to March. Recognizing the value of the act, Lispenard had easily prevailed upon an aging Hugo Gürl to abandon his loner ways and toss his lot in with the circus. Ever since, they had been an integral part of the Pantechnicon.

  Lispenard hitched up his overall buckles more securely and scratched his butt. “Have you eaten yet, boy?”

  “No, sir.”<
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  Lispenard clapped a meaty hand on Rory’s shoulder. “You exhibit a commendably old-fashioned sense of manners, lad. What did you say your name was?”

  “Rory Honeyman, sir.”

  “Well, Rory, let’s get some sustenance in us first. Then you can meet my whole mad family, including Hugo and the Baroness.”

  Outside under a broad canopy nearly the entire complement of performers and workers sat on backless benches flanking long tables. Lispenard made Rory stand at the head of the assemblage. The circus folk regarded him with a courteous coolness and a calm disinterestedness which plainly implied that Rory would have to do something quite exceptional in their line before they would take more than token notice of him. Jacky Ray represented the only exception to this genial neutrality. The contortionist and enterologist glared vindictively at the newcomer.

  Lispenard explained Rory’s tentative admission to the circus. Everyone listened cordially enough except Ray, who manifested a facial malleability entirely compatible with the ductility of his torso.

  Lispenard next subjected Rory to a barrage of introductions. Most of the names slipped through his mental grasp. But he needed no mnemonic to hold onto Katie Stearns name. The petite rope-walker flashed him a dazzling smile that left his head spinning.

  The flippered boy from the ticket booth, Lothar by name, stood out for obvious reasons also. Rory would soon learn that Lothar had been born a thalidomide baby, and deaf-mute to boot.

  The legendary Hugo Gürl proved to be a short, uncommunicative, graying man of indeterminate middle-age. His watery yet whimsical eyes floated behind round wire-rimmed glasses, lending him the air of a lesser Kafka protagonist. Rory instantly read in Gürl a certain Teutonic stolidity familiar to Rory from childhood. He shook the hand of the Baroness’s owner firmly, and was rewarded with a curt nod.

  After a gargantuan breakfast Lispenard instructed Rory to stow his duffel in Gürl’s trailer, as they would thenceforth bunk together, should Rory’s performance that night prove up to snuff. And for the rest of that day, Rory had only to become intimate with his co-star.