Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  In 1947, three years before Rory’s birth, Claire Stearn became pregnant at age eighteen by her cousin, Francis. A hasty marriage ensued, with the young couple choosing to remain in the home of their parents.

  Seven months later Katie Stearn entered the world.

  “My folks were weird,” Katie told Rory as she tooled expertly down the highway, wind slipping around the windshield and ruffling her hair.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So was I, for a long time. Like, until I went to school,” Katie continued to a wide-eyed Rory, “I thought everyone had twin sets of grandparents. You know, like some kind of evolutionary thing. You can’t imagine my shock when I learned differently.”

  “No, I sure can’t,” Rory admitted.

  In their later years the Stearns became junk dealers, earning just enough to maintain their rudimentary lifestyle. They maintained a shop below their living quarters. (Katie’s father drove a milk truck, rising early and napping afternoons.) Despite protests from Dora and Dolores, the stock from the rag and bone shop began to creep into the upstairs rooms, turning the household into a warren and firetrap.

  On a glorious spring day in 1963 Katie returned home from high school to an inferno. In the unquenchable blaze she lost all four grandparents and both mother and father.

  Placed in a foster home, Katie stayed only six months before running away. She drifted south, to Tampa. Hitched up with the winter-quiescent Lispenard as a mere animal-tender, the very same month Gürl and the Baroness joined. Learned rope-walking from her predecessor, who eagerly awaited retirement at the advanced age of thirty-six.

  End of story.

  “Wow,” summarized Rory, Hours had passed like minutes. The caravan neared its new encampment.

  “I don’t think much about my past,” said Katie. “Everybody’s got a crazy story, if you can just drag it out of them.”

  Rory considered his own past, and had to agree. He felt a deep bond with Katie, especially where lost grandparents were concerned.

  The lead semis wheeled onto a vast vacant lot. Katie deftly steered her car and trailer to a halt on the fringes of the grounds. She turned the key and the persistent, almost subliminal growl of the big engine died away to sudden silence. Katie looked into Rory’s eyes. They sat unmoving for a slowly unfolding eternity.

  “Want to come in for awhile?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  The dusky interior of Katie’s pint-sized trailer did not strike Rory as particularly feminine or overly individualized. Only a small collection of souvenir paperweights from places the Pantechnicon had visited made a small personal display. The bed wore a worn blue chenille spread.

  “Let me change into something fresh,” said Katie. She walked to her bureau and moved to open a deep bottom drawer. The drawer did not respond to her one-handed tug, and she frowned, switching to a more forceful two-handed grip. Peering into the yanked-open drawer, Katie screamed and slammed it shut.

  “Rory, you—you have to leave right now. Please don’t ask me why. It’s nothing personal, nothing you’ve done. I— I just have to be alone now.”

  Rory stood, disappointed but eager to please. “Sure, I understand,” he said, although of course he didn’t.

  He left the trailer. Outside he paused. He heard Katie banging on the bureau. Then she began to yell. Rory had trouble making out her words. He thought he heard her invoke the name of someone he had good cause to detest. At this point he understood.

  The next day after breakfast Rory cornered Katie alone.

  “Kate, I have to know what’s going on between you and Jacky Ray.”

  Katie slumped against the bars of an empty cage. She brought her left arm across her midriff below her breasts, gripped her right elbow and dropped her forehead into the support of her right palm.

  “There’s nothing going on any longer. At least from my end. But Jacky obviously thinks differently.”

  Rory felt awful interrogating Katie like this, but his heart demanded he probe for a clearer picture of her love life, to gauge what chance he himself might ever have with her.

  “Were you two an item once?”

  Katie straightened bravely. “Yes. Jacky joined the show about two years ago. Six months after that we became lovers. Our affair lasted another six months before I broke it off. But for the last year he hasn’t been willing to let me go. He keeps haunting me.”

  Rory suddenly realized whose trailer Jacky Ray had been peeping into all those nights ago. He recounted the chance encounter to Katie.

  Katie chuckled grimly. “Oh, I realize he’s out there. But there’s no point in my pulling the shades. If I frustrate him, he’ll just creep inside. And I’d rather have him outside looking in than inside looking out, if that makes any sense.”

  Rory tried imagining what had ever attracted Katie to the mean-spirited and spider-limbed contortionist, but failed. As if divining his thoughts, Katie explained.

  “You have to talk to Ray quite a bit before you can develop any sympathy for him. But once you know his story you start to pity him—and in my case pity turned somehow to having sex. He was beaten and abused very badly as a child. He started to develop his special talents then in response to the torture. He used to hide anywhere he could to escape his drunken parents, his father only slightly more brutal than his mother. Jacky’s limbs were broken and reset several times, and often he literally starved. When the state finally took him away from his folks he underwent some kind of crazy rehabilitative therapy from a quack who had wrangled a state contract. The doc dosed Jacky with this herbal patent medicine which Jacky claims permanently softened his bones. His joints still pain him greatly, and his act only aggravates his discomfort. But performing is all he knows how to do.

  “When I learned all this I felt so sad for him that I wanted to take care of him, ease his pain a little. But I found you can’t love someone you’re always feeling sorry for. I tried to let him down gently, but he freaked. He still imagines I’ll take him back if he’s persistent enough,”

  This account stunned Rory. He suddenly saw Ray in a different light. “Gee, now you’ve got me pitying him, and I never thought I would. But all that trouble still doesn’t give him the right to bug you.”

  “I figure he’ll snap out of his obsession before too much longer. But he has made life rough for me this past year. I haven’t even dared get romantically involved with anyone else.” Katie regarded Rory earnestly. “Not that I had any strong feeling for anyone else. Until you showed up.”

  Rory felt some kind of jagged obstruction in his throat. “Kate, I— I really like you too.”

  Katie pressed herself against Rory, her chin digging into his chest, and hugged him. “Show me.”

  Technically speaking, Rory had lost his virginity during a 1966 diving meet in Los Angeles, after a frustratingly brief and slippery locker-room tussle with a French girl-diver who spoke no English. But the maneuvers through which Katie now shepherded him made him realize he knew next to nothing about sex.

  Several hours later they lay quietly atop rumpled sheets. The interior of Katie’s trailer resembled the aftermath of a twister. All the bureau drawers jutted open; the little shower stall gaped curtainless; open suitcases rested upside down; the door of a tiny fridge swung ajar. None of the chaos had resulted from savage lovemaking, but rather spoke of a thorough pre-foreplay investigation of likely places where the coiled Jacky Ray might have been hiding.

  Katie’s fingers traced invisible paths through Rory’s chest hair. “Mmmm, that was sweet. I think we have possibilities.”

  “I know so. Gosh, your pillows sure are lumpy— Rory sat half up and tried to punch his pillow into more accommodating shape.

  Jacky Ray’s malign face popped out of the pillowcase, and the jealous Enterologist emitted an insane growl.

  Rory yelped and leaped from the bed. Katie made distressed noises, as if she had been walloped in the stomach.

  Suddenly, without either of the lovers quite seeing how he accompli
shed the feat, Ray unpacked himself from the pillowcase and attained his feet in the center of the room. Rory lunged for him, but clasped only air. Jacky Ray had disappeared. Where—?

  A noise of strained metal caused Rory to look up. Ray clung to the cord of a dangling light fixture, curled up on the glass bowl that formed the shade. His face protruded only a vertical foot away from Rory’s.

  “You stole my girl,” said Ray.

  “Katie’s not your girl,” said Rory. He menaced Ray with his fist. “Come down and fight fair.”

  “Let her tell me we’re through forever.”

  Katie looked up, her face wet with tears. “Jacky, whatever we had is over. Please, believe me, it’ll never be like it once was.”

  Ray stood beside them, a grim look on his melancholic face. “You’ll both be sorry,” he said, before leaving in a human fashion, on foot and out the door.

  Katie began to cry in earnest now. Rory abruptly realized that the whole confrontation had occurred while he and Katie were both stark naked. Not the best defensive costume. Nonetheless, he thought he had done well enough. Taking Katie in his arms, he comforted her as best he could.

  Later that day Rory went to Lispenard to solicit his help in squaring the love triangle. The rotund manager offered only a gruff practicality.

  “Let the dead past bury the dead past. Ray must apprehend reality on his own. No other person can make the requisite mental adjustments for him. Neither blows nor words will cause the knowledge to sink in any faster. However, as owner of this zoo it is incumbent upon me to speak to him. And I will make plain the salient fact that I will dock his pay in direct proportion to any further trouble he causes.”

  “Thanks, Lenny.”

  “No thanks necessary. I am quite used by now to functioning as midwife, psychologist, marriage counselor, elderly aunt, policeman, and sounding-board to a heterogeneous collection of maladjusted misfits.”

  After that incident Ray—although no one would have called him congenial or even civil—exhibited marginally better behavior toward his rival and toward his ex-lover. Gradually Katie and Rory dared to believe that he would leave them alone.

  Rory moved out of Gild’s trailer and in with Katie. They adjusted to living together with remarkably few kinks. Rory knew he was in love, and hoped Katie felt the same.

  The Pantechnicon made its traditional circuit of Canada, heading north with the summer then looping back south as autumn advanced. Rory began to lose his initial distorted perception of the country, enjoying its scenic abundance.

  Each night Rory and the Baroness dived, Katie danced the wire, and Jacky Ray stuffed himself into various containers like so much ketchup. His life contented Rory. Everything seemed to have settled into a comfortable groove.

  Early November, 1970. The Pantechnicon had encamped outside the Canadian town of Niagara Falls. They would cross the border soon, journeying toward winter quarters in Tampa. Lispenard had not yet revealed how he intended to smuggle Rory over the border. From time to time Rory worried about the deception, but always managed to put the matter aside.

  On their last day in town a handful of the performers decided to play tourist by making an expedition to the Falls itself. As they laughingly piled into several cars Katie, sitting on Rory’s lap, spotted Jacky Ray watching morosely from across the yard.

  “Hey, Jacky! Come with us!”

  The Enterologist seemed particularly somber and despondent that day. Now hailed so blithely by his former paramour he only grew more fierce-looking.

  “No, thank you,” he replied dourly. Then, with a note of inappropriate finality that cast a pall over the merrymakers, he uttered a sepulchral “Goodbye.”

  “Jeez, what a vulture,” said one of the clowns.

  “He’s got his share of troubles,” Rory said defensively.

  Once on their way the group soon forgot the incident. After arriving at the Falls, they purchased snacks and drinks and began to amble along the promenade, enjoying the role of spectators for a change. They ended up at the observation platform that gave a panoramic view of the noisy, majestic, roiling cascade and the riverine approach. Katie linked her arm through Rory’s and snuggled up against him.

  “Look!” someone shouted. All eyes followed a pointing finger to focus on a sizable object bobbing in the water some yards upstream of the Falls. As the current carried the object nearer its nature became apparent. At least to the circus people.

  Jacky Ray must have brought his prop jug right to the water’s edge. Once inside he had somehow managed to roll himself into the river.

  “Christ,” said the clown who had derided Ray, a new note of admiration in his voice. “He even managed to put a cork in it.”

  As the bottle drew closer and closer to the head of the Falls increasing consternation and confusion arose among the witnesses to the impending tragedy.

  “Someone do something!” “What, what?” “Too late now!” “He’s a goner!”

  Picking up speed, the bottle whirled toward the watery precipice. For one brief moment it hung on the lip of the drop against all laws of physics—like a bead of water clinging to a branch before its very heaviness causes it to fall—as if some frantic, superhuman effort of the person inside had reversed the momentum.

  Rory swore he could detect Ray’s face across the impossible distance in that moment. The doomed serenity of the distorted, glass-smeared features burned themselves into his memory. Then the bottle leapt forward, as if eager for destruction, falling out of sight.

  Katie’s sobs racked her small frame. Rory hugged her closer,

  Frankie Burnes spoke up. “Maybe—maybe he made it.”

  “Jesus Christ, I hope not,” said the clown. “Then Lispenard will wanna put the act in the show.”

  Search boats found no trace of the bottle or its human contents after hours spent examining the banks below the Falls. Despondently the expedition returned to the Pantechnicon, conscious of the approach of showtime.

  As if in unspoken tribute to their departed peer, the show-folk sparkled that night as never before. When Ray’s scheduled slot rolled around, everyone hesitated for a breath or two, half-expecting the skinny rubberman to emerge from the shadows and proclaim his death a hoax. But he never did.

  In place of his standard introduction at this point, Lispenard gave a moving eulogy. The phrase that stuck in Rory’s mind was “met his end like a true son of the bigtop.” An actual tear came to Rory’s eye. He hoped he himself would someday merit such an epitaph.

  The following day Rory approached Lispenard to learn what ruse the circus owner had contrived for Rory’s imminent passage into the land of his birth, the country that had exiled him.

  “To speak truth, son, I had not until this moment developed a detailed plan. However, fate strikes in the form of a posthumous document! Ray’s legacy to you, as outlined in this paper I found among his effects, involves the adoption of his identity. He makes the point that your beard, conjoined with a clown’s baldhead cap, will essentially becloud the minds of the inspectors when they compare your living face to the headshot on his license.”

  Rory grabbed the apparent Last Will and Testament of Jacky Ray out of Lispenard’s hands. He read it with amazement. All true. Rory would not have believed Ray capable of such magnanimous behavior, but the man had revealed hidden depths.

  When he conveyed this news to Katie she began to cry all over again.

  No stretch of time in the following six years contained as many dramatic incidents as Rory’s first month with the Pantechnicon.

  Circus routines filled Rory’s days, which passed in immutable seasons, smaller cycles spinning within larger ones. The Pantechnicon acquired a new contortionist, one with merely human abilities. Two of the clowns got married in their working clothes, Lispenard giving the bride away. A motorcyclist who rode his battered bike around and around the inner wall of a huge wooden cylinder joined the Pantechnicon, lasted three years, then departed.

  The two females in R
ory’s life—Katie and the Baroness—provided all the emotional richness any man could demand. (From time to time there flared up moments of jealousy between his two mistresses. Katie occasionally complained that Rory spent too much time helping Hugo Gürl groom “v.H-P,” as the aerialist abbreviatedly referred to her. And the Baroness gave Katie an awful nip on the soft flesh of the ropewalker’s bare arm one day, after which relations between the two frosted over even more arctically.)

  After this incident Rory, in an attempt to placate Katie and forge deeper bonds between them, attempted to learn wire-walking from her (practicing first at a lower height, and wearing a pulley-secured safety harness). He eventually attained sufficient proficiency to cross from one platform to another at full height, unsecured, with reasonable unwaveringness. But all the more showy examples of Katie’s immense talents remained forever beyond his reach.

  These six years constituted the most serene period of Rory’s life to date. Even the Dzubas era had carried its share of tension and anxiety to counterbalance the many satisfactions. He felt himself slowly maturing, coming closer to a full apprehension of his own identity.

  If queried, Rory would not have responded during these years that he never imagined his circus days could ever end. He simply had learned not to think beyond the end of a single day.

  But one random day in November of 1976 brought an end much bigger than its diurnal self.

  The caravan was heading south once more. In the Impala Rory propped his feet up on the dashboard, cap over his eyes to facilitate a snooze, while Katie drove. The roads stretched out dry and inviting, the sunlight pouring through the windshield warmed him.

  Rory felt the car stop momentarily for what presumably was a stop sign. Then the car continued.

  A few seconds later an enormous sound issuing from behind them filled the universe: rending metal, screaming breaks, the wail of a living being in immense pain.

  Katie slammed on her own brakes. She and Rory jacked open the doors and tumbled out.