Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Part 4

I heard a variety of reasons why gauchos should not be allowed on the show. First, gauchos don't know how to play a crowd, I was told. Moreover, they complain a lot. "They will not perform with a hangnail," Dawnita Bale told me, "while a circus person would perform with a broken hand. A gaucho almost closed the show several years ago after complaining to OSHA that the beds were too short." But the biggest fear of all is that a gaucho will commit a blunder and cost a performer his or her career. The rain and cold of South Carolina, coming so early in the season, only heightened this alarm. "You just watch," Dawnita told me at the end of that first day of mud as we waited to wade into the finale. "Something is bound to happen this week. Outsiders always make mistakes."

That something happened in Rock Hill. The occasion was Easter weekend.

The rain continued throughout the week as the show moved down the South Carolina coast to Ladson before heading north again. Now three weeks into the season, I was struck by how each town took on its own narrative. Even though we might stay in one place for only two days, or three days, or even one day, a small story would develop in each location. In Waycross, Georgia, the story centered on a Chinese restaurant. On Sunday night sixty members of the circus crowded the eight-table restaurant for an all-you-can-eat buffet; the next day at lunch Kris Kristo returned with Danny and the two of them ate so much they got sick in the bathroom. In the morning everyone was talking about the previous night's dinner; in the afternoon everyone was talking about that day's lunch; that night we moved on to Hinesville.

The narrative was usually driven by one or more factors: the place we played, the people we met, or the weather we encountered. In Ladson, South Carolina, the show played an oyster-sh.e.l.l lot adjacent to a flea market, just up the road from a strip shopping mall. For three days, the workingmen went back and forth to the liquor store; the clowns went back and forth to the Laundromat; the Americans went back and forth to Burger King; and the Mexicans went back and forth to Taco Bell. As for people, Kris met a lingerie model named Angie during the first show who proceeded to drag him, Sean, and me on an elaborate three-day scavenger hunt/striptease that resulted in little but frustration and a crossed-off name in Kris's spiral-bound black book.

But the big story was weather, "weather" being the circus euphemism for bad weather. Rain is tolerable in this worldview; wind is not. We heard both were coming. Doug was worried about Rock Hill. The first time I met him he had told me that certain lots were dangerous and Rock Hill was one of them. Located behind a mall, it was a clay lot two hundred feet by six hundred feet: plenty of room, but long and thin, and "unable to take rain." All week long people were speculating. Kris was hoping we would have two extra days and he could continue chasing Angie. Angel Quiros, the wirewalker, wished for the ultimate fantasy-a day off. But by early evening on Good Friday, when we knew we were going to Rock Hill anyway, the talk had s.h.i.+fted from if the "weather" would come to when it would come, what it would be like, and how much it would affect the next lot. As it happened, a drizzle came during the final show in Ladson, but the downpour held off until just after the finale. As we moved northwest, along 1-26, then 1-20 and 1-77, from the southeast corner of the state to the lip of the North Carolina border, the weather reports became more ominous-steady showers overnight, tapering off the following morning, acc.u.mulation of several inches. The narrative was under way.

By morning the rain had stopped, but the lot was unplayable. The mall, however, refused to let the show move onto its new asphalt parking area. Doug was furious: the ads had run on the radio, free kids' coupons had been distributed, the newspaper had run several promotional stories, including one inviting farmers out to the lot to receive free all-you-can-haul elephant manure for their gardens. At the final moment a compromise was reached. The show could play on the asphalt, but we could drive only a limited number of stakes into the blacktop. This meant the show would be done without the tent. It would be an open-air show, known colloquially as a sidewall, in which the four center poles would be raised, limited rigging hung from them, and the rings, seats, and side-walls laid out as normal.

An open-air show was a rare occasion and added a certain amount of stress to the weekend. The clown tent was not pitched and we clowns had to dress, prepare our props, and put on our makeup in the back of a crowded semi. The juggling act was cut from four jugglers to one, and the high-wire act didn't perform at all, forcing the clowns to move the second gag to the end of the show. All of this confusion meant the clowns didn't have time to change costumes before the finale, and since I was the announcer for the gag, I would have to lead the parade of performers who ushered in the world's largest cannon for the final bang. This was not my normal spot.

Waiting behind the curtain, I was cutting up a little, and when the flaps opened for the cast to enter, I went shooting onto the track and started lifting my hand to wave at the audience. My hand never made it. As soon as I stepped onto the track I felt the elongated legs of Barrie Sloan, the veteran stilt walker and surrogate G.o.dfather to the show, brush against my side. Before I could free myself from his towering green silk leggings, Barrie, a virtual tree of life, was falling fifteen feet toward the pavement, clutching his arms around his knees and crying out in terror. As soon as he hit the asphalt several people rushed to his side. I reached for his top hat, which had spilled from his head and was wobbling drearily on the ground like a penny in a mournful spiral. Jimmy James came hurrying to the scene and urged us all to go on with the show. I felt sick to my stomach, a swell of fear in my throat. At the moment I didn't know how hurt he was: I knew he had undergone two knee operations in the past and had recently survived a heart attack. I didn't know if I had caused him to fall. What I did know was that I felt responsible.

After the show the performers rushed to the cabin of Barrie's truck, where he was lying on his back cradled in the arms of his wife, Shelagh. The long legs of his costume trousers dangled helplessly off the back of the truck. His face was covered in perspiration and his nose was already starting to bruise. He was all right, he said, nothing broken; I felt a surge of relief. He didn't know what had happened, he added, though Shelagh said she thought someone had run into him. I took a step backward and hurried to my camper. I didn't bother to take off my makeup and just locked myself in the one place on the lot I knew I could be alone. At that moment I was ready to quit. My joining the show seemed like a horrible conceit. These people were professionals; this world was dangerous; I clearly did not belong. I had confirmed what Dawnita had said: I was an outsider, I had made a mistake.

Fifteen minutes later I stepped out of my camper. The first person I saw was Guillaume, Fred Logan's teenage grandson, who worked in the elephant department.

"Hey, I heard you pushed Barrie Sloan over," he said.

"You did?"

"Marcos told me."

I closed my eyes in despair. I had seen gossip fly around the lot, but never this quickly. The ring of rumor proved even more powerful than I could have antic.i.p.ated. Shaken, I had two immediate concerns: first, dealing with what might or might not have happened in the tent; second, coping with everyone blaming me. I wandered around the asphalt for several moments in a daze. The lot was ominously empty, the water mirrored on the pavement. After a moment I knocked on Dawnita's door. A longtime friend of Barrie's who had known him since their days in England, she seemed shocked when I told her what people were saying. She told me to knock on Barrie's door immediately and talk to him directly. I went to do as she said.

The Sloans were remarkably cordial under the circ.u.mstances. Barrie was lying on the sofa in their dimly lit Holiday Rambler wrapped in a blanket with a wet towel over his head. When he fell he hurt his elbow and bruised his chest, he said, but he would never truly know what had happened. I told them I had been upset by seeing the cliche "The Show Must Go On" come to life so vividly, so uncaringly. Barrie said he was once knocked over during spec on the Ringling show and they just dragged him out of the way so the elephants could pa.s.s. After several minutes Shelagh announced she was serving dinner and I turned to go, feeling better but still slightly queasy. She came over and put her hand on my arm. "Just let them talk," she said. "They always will. Whatever happened, it was an accident. Barrie will be okay. It was n.o.body's fault." It was less than half an hour after showtime. I was still wearing my face.

Outside I ran into Kris. He came over to my place to have a gla.s.s of milk and some ginger snaps. He told me he had heard somebody knocked Barrie over, but he didn't know whom. I knew he was lying to protect me. He told me I couldn't possibly feel worse than he did when one of his girlfriends the previous year was accused of stealing a hundred dollars from Sean's trailer. He made me take off my makeup and dragged me to the movies, where, one after another, various performers shared their versions of the episode with me. That night was the first time I felt the power of the circus community in all its intensity. Some people reached to embrace me-Dawnita, Kris, ironically even Shelagh-while others seemed willing to let me remain outside and feel the cold slap of the group on my face. Walking back home, I stopped by the back door to look at the open-air skeleton of the tent. With no big top to contain them, all the colors, smells, and illusions of the circus seemed to evaporate into the sky high above the rings.

Swings of Fate Like lightning, a spangled burst of bright pink tights ignites the blue-and-white-striped tent as two troupes of warriors, close to twenty in all, come blazing into rings one and three. All available light floods the sky. The bra.s.s ensemble erupts into a flare, a polka caliente. The ladies shake their hips and dance on the floor. The men slap their hands and pirouette in the air. An older man with graying mustache even turns a flip for show. Out of pure exhilaration the ma.s.ses applaud as the great red-coated ringmaster himself steps forward and erupts with a n.o.ble call.

"On the Russian swings, the Rodrinovich Flyers, the Romanoff Aaaacrobats..."

The combatants bow and gesture toward the swings-two enormous pivoting platforms that slice forebodingly through the air. Soon daring young men will fly into the sky from these three-hundred-pound planks, gravity's foe. The whole scene seems thrilling, grandiose, even mythic, yet one detail in the picture still vexes the mind. Rodrinovich Flyers? Romanoff Acrobats? These costumes aren't Tartar, they're cancan at best. And these warriors aren't Russians, they're Mexicans for sure-just dressed in Slavic headbands.

"To tell you the truth, I think the name is stupid," said Pablo Rodrguez, one of three people in the pseudonymous Rodrinovich Flyers with the same first and last names. There were his father, whom everyone called Papa Pablo; his younger brother, whom everyone called Little Pablo; and him, whom everyone called Big Pablo. Though not the oldest, Big Pablo was the largest of the siblings (175 pounds), his mouth was the loudest (not to mention the dirtiest), and his trailer was the longest (over thirty-five feet). When his father retired from performing several years earlier, the twenty-seven-year-old Pablo had seized control of the family in an unspoken, bloodless coup.

"Just because the apparatus is called a Russian swing doesn't mean you have to be Russian to do it," he scoffed. "They wanted us to dance Russian, to use Russian music. That's where we drew the line. Let's face it, you can't turn a Mexican into a Russian. Do they think people are that stupid...?"

The answer to that query was probably yes, but sitting one afternoon with Pablo, his wife, and their four-year-old son, none of us wanted to affirm it. One hundred years (and fifty million minutes) after he probably didn't say it, Barnum's theory of the birth of suckers was alive and well.

"Actually, I've grown sort of fond of it," said Pablo's wife, Mary Chris. Originally from a Spanish circus family, Mary Chris had married into the Rodrguez troupe a little over eight years ago. At the time of their engagement, she owned sixty bottles of fingernail polish, she told me; now married, she was down to five. "Johnny Pugh said he wanted a Russian name, and we thought it wasn't a big deal to argue about it. Some things you do for the sake of the circus, because as far as we're concerned, right now, if it's good for this circus it's good for our family."

In truth, if it was part of this circus it was probably part of their family. The presence of the Rodrguezes in ring one and their cousins the Estradas (a.k.a. Romanoffs) in ring three was just a hint of the blood connections that flowed throughout the tent. Indeed, one of the most surprising things about the show was this exhaustive, truly labyrinthine family network that links nearly everyone in the circus business to everyone else. On our lot, for example, Big Pablo and Mary Chris often parked next to Mich.e.l.le and Angel Quiros. Mich.e.l.le hung by her hair in the first half of the show, while Angel walked the high wire in the second. In real life, Mich.e.l.le's grandmother and Pablo's father were siblings, while in the business, Mary Chris's mother and Mich.e.l.le's mother were working on the same show. Also, while Pablo's second cousin Mich.e.l.le was married to Angel, Angel's sister Mary was married to Pablo's half brother, Little Pablo, making Big Pablo and Angel half brothers-in-law, if there is such a creation. To make matters even more complicated, Little Pablo performed not only in the Russian swing act with his family but also in a cradle act with his wife, in the flying act with his brothers and sister-in-law, and in the wire act with his brother-in-law, his wife, and his brother-in-law's wife, who, for the record, was also his cousin-that, of course, being Mich.e.l.le.

After several weeks of trying to untangle these offshoots, I decided to attempt a family tree of the show. What I discovered was that, leaving aside the clowns, seventy-five percent of the people who set foot in the ring were related to one another. Considering that these people hailed from thirteen different countries, this common lineage was stunning. It also had unexpected consequences. On the positive side, families that fly together, well, fly. The interdependence that families enjoyed almost seemed to make up for many of the hards.h.i.+ps of life on the road. Papa Rodrguez's wife agreed to drive their trailer on jump nights, for example, so her husband could pull a separate trailer for his two daughters by a previous marriage. Big Pablo was excused from carrying any rigging and in return carried a generator for his sisters to use at night. Little Pablo and his wife, meanwhile, agreed to caravan with Angel and Mich.e.l.le, and the four of them went so far as to buy CBs so they could pa.s.s the time during long jumps playing "Name That Tune" in Spanish.

This closeness, of course, comes at a cost. Nothing is secret on a circus lot-no act of lovemaking, no intramarital squabble, no extramarital affair. Danny Rodrguez would learn this lesson well. Others had learned it already. The previous year, one performer, whose father was a disciplinarian and whose mother was a Jehovah's Witness, became unexpectedly pregnant. Afraid of offending her parents, the woman, who, it must be said, had a slightly rotund figure that ran in her family, actually kept her pregnancy secret and continued to perform twice a day on the back of an elephant until five days before her baby was due. When she could hide it no longer, the mother-to-be told her parents she had appendicitis, checked into the hospital, and had her baby. While horrifying to the community, her exploit was a brilliant sleight of hand, for faced with the baby instead of a scandal, her parents overlooked their instinctive outrage and embraced the newborn child.

As for me, I kept b.u.mping up against this juggernaut of invasiveness and gossip that shadows everybody on the show. My brush with ill will after Rock Hill pa.s.sed as soon as Barrie recovered, but it was followed by a series of speculative stories that worked their way around the lot-rumors I was leaving, rumors I was fired, rumors I was spying for the Bureau of Naturalization and would try to deport some of the performers. I could mark my adjustment to circus life by the gradual decline in how much these rumors bothered me. One incident in particular finally thrust me over the top into a nirvana of indifference, at which point I gave up any hopes of privacy. It happened the first day in Hagerstown, Maryland, about two months into the season. During the previous night's jump I had stopped to eat a Whopper and a carton of Burger King onion rings, which over the course of my night's sleep had given me a bad case of gas. The gas was so bad, in fact, that in the middle of the night I actually set off the propane gas detector inside my RV. This was pretty funny, I thought: yet another private moment of bonding between me and my Winnebago.

But the incident was hardly private. After lunch the next day I walked up to the ticket wagon to say h.e.l.lo to Mary Jo, a usually gentle and generous woman who is Fred Logan's oldest daughter. "Are you parked next door to me?" asked Mary Jo. "Yes," I said. "I believe so." "Well, in that case," she said, "no more loud farting." Dumbfounded, I tried to ignore her comment: all of my years learning manners in j.a.pan were not enough to prepare me for this situation. But Mary Jo was not to be denied. "Did you hear me?" she repeated. "No more loud farting." And so I learned my lesson that day: in the circus even one's privy behavior is part of the public domain.

Once the flyers complete their opening style, the act is ready to begin. In ring one, the Rodrguezes' anchor man, Antonio, hops on the back of the swing, pushes off from the ground, and begins building a gradual momentum. With a triangular structure eight feet tall suspending a platform five feet long, a Russian swing looks like a cross between a giant medieval battering ram and an oversized version of one of those 1970s coffee-table souvenirs with a row of suspended silver b.a.l.l.s that spring outward when boinked on the opposite end. In the act, the silver b.a.l.l.s are the Rodrguezes themselves, and when one of the boys is boinked from the platform, he soars into the air and turns a series of somersaults, layouts, pikes, and pirouettes before landing in a vertical blue nylon net and sliding to the ground.

"With a Russian swing you can land your tricks in one of three ways," Pablo explained in his definitive, slightly bombastic big-brother style of speech. "On someone's shoulders, on a mat, or in a net. As high as we're going, shoulders are out of the question. With a mat you risk ruining your legs. Let's face it, you can come turning two somersaults from thirty feet high, but how many times are you going to land perfectly? Your ankles just aren't meant to do that. Look at those guys in the Olympics, and they don't even go that high. When Johnny told us he wanted a Russian swing, we said sure but we're going to use a net."

After an initial thrill in which Antonio rotates the swing 360 degrees around the central bar, the family is ready for the first trick of the act. The honor falls to Pablo the Big.

"Of all my brothers I am the one who knows how to turn the best somersaults. It's really very simple. First of all, I concentrate on the height of the swing. When that's set, I bend down in a crouched position so I'll be able to shoot myself into the air. When the time comes I push off with my legs and try to create a tunnel, focusing only on where I'm going to land. I never look at the air, only the net, and if I concentrate correctly it just clicks, it comes to me. Let's say I'm doing a forward somersault with a one-and-a-half pirouette. I do my forward somersault and as soon as I come out of it I'm already judging how high I am. If I feel I have to hurry my pirouettes I tuck my arms tighter, but if I feel like the trick is going okay I can go slow so the people can enjoy it."

"And all you think about is the net? Not the audience, not your wife?"

"Nothing. I think only that I'm going to land right there, and if I do land right there I'll have no problem. There's no emotion, no anxiety. Just concentration."

"Do you get dizzy?"

"Sometimes I get lost. But that doesn't bother me. When I'm actually doing my somersaults my eyes are closed; it's all feeling. If you close your eyes, the feeling never changes, but once you open your eyes-well, what if the lights go out, what if somebody throws a balloon, what if somebody moves and your eyes go with them?"

What if? Indeed. Talking to an acrobat is like talking to a pilot-either one can have his craft totally under control but lose it in an instant with an internal glitch or an external gust of fate. For Big Pablo, the c.o.c.ky one, the number one son, this brush of fate happened in practice. He was trying to do a double. The push wasn't right. He came out too soon and landed short. By the time he came to a stop at the bottom of the net the weight of his body had completely squashed his foot. "The bone was twisted all around," Mary Chris remembered. "His toes were pointing back and his heel was in the front. It was New Year's Eve, our first week of practice. We didn't have any insurance to pay for an operation."

"We knew at that moment we had to change the act," Pablo said. "Even after I recovered, someone else had to do most of the jumps. We decided Danny was the one with the best timing. Little Pablo could do a few tricks he always did on the trampoline, but we looked at him on the swing and it was obvious that Danny had more technique. But you have to remember what I said: technique is not the only thing. Concentration is also important. Danny has never had that."

The accident took place in Frederick, Maryland, on one of the prettiest, flattest lots of the year. The gra.s.s was smooth and green-a baseball paradise. The crowds were thick and loud-a grand-slam house. The rain didn't begin until after the show started, and even then the spring shower was unable to soil the colorful grandeur underneath the tent. Danny climbed onto the swing for the second trick: a backward double somersault into the net. He had already done it perfectly over one hundred times since the start of the year. But unlike on the diamond, percentages don't count for much in the ring. When you walk a high wire, or set foot in a cage with tigers, or jump off a Russian swing, you can't afford to have a bad day.

With all eyes on his slender, well-toned body, Danny hung on to the front of the platform as it knifed relentlessly through the air.

"Take it easy," he said to his siblings; the cue to prepare.

Danny bent his knees into the takeoff position as a wisp of ponytail swung behind his neck and distracted attention ever so slightly from his deep-set stare and slight overbite.

"Ready," he called; the next time was the launch.

As the swing rose to its zenith for the final a.s.sault, his brothers and sisters pushed the swing on command and were readying to exclaim their traditional "Hurrah!" when suddenly..."Danny? Daniel! Mira.Cuidado!"

"As soon as my foot slipped off I blanked out," he said. "My right foot went first, then my whole body followed. My legs lifted up like I had stepped on a banana peel and I went hurling through the air. When I came down I landed on my neck. It happened so quick all I could think about was moving out of the way so the swing wouldn't hit me when it came back. Everyone was screaming at me, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. I rolled toward the seats and closed my eyes. I knew something was wrong."

Compared with his brothers', Danny's English is nearly perfect. Born in America during a family tour, he was raised in the lap of a Mexican family who had made it in the seat of gringo luxury. As proof of his upbringing, he liked to wear a uniquely American wardrobe: Deion Sanders high-tops, Michael Jordan T-s.h.i.+rts, a.r.s.enio Hall baseball caps. He was only twelve when his family spent a year as pampered stars at Walt Disney's EPCOT Center; his personal hero was Marvin the Martian from The Bugs Bunny Show.

"By the time I came to, my dad was there. He helped pull me out of the way. He tried to pick me up, but I told them not to move me. I knew something was broken. My body was all hot. I felt a lot of pain. He asked me if I heard something pop or break. I told him I didn't hear anything at all."

Danny looked limp lying on the ground. His slender body was writhing in pain. His fingers twitched at his side.

"It was just about then that I started losing control. I could hear everyone talking to me, but I couldn't concentrate. My mom was holding my head. My dad was holding my legs. I opened my eyes once and it was all blurry. I couldn't see straight. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I couldn't feel my fingers, or my toes. That's when the doctor came from the audience."

To the ringmaster, the doctor was hardly a welcome sight. "As soon as the doctor came from the audience I knew we were in trouble," said Jimmy James. "Real doctors don't do things like that anymore. It's a new ball game out there. These days you can't say, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' Because they won't touch you for insurance reasons. As a result, you don't know what's coming out of the audience. You have to be very careful."

In a maelstrom of European and Latin excess, Jimmy James, from Columbus, Georgia, was a paragon of Southern gentility. Between phrases he paused to let his vowels stretch out to their full magnolia glory. Between shows he hung his tailcoat on a seat wagon so his tails wouldn't sully themselves in the mud. Between sentences he thought before he spoke.

"At the time, I was standing in ring three. I saw the accident right away. The first thing I did was signal Willie to have him kill the lights. The second thing I did was make sure the next act was up and ready to go. In this case we had a few minutes while the Estradas finished their act, but unfortunately the act after them was the bears. The bears couldn't work because of where Danny was still lying, but the bear man didn't tell me that until he was in the ring, which made it worse. I considered going to a clown walk-around. If I had really gotten into a jam I would have just called for a blackout and introduced the band to play a march. But in this case I got lucky; the Ivanovs were ready. I announced the cradle act and they went up in the center ring. At that point I could turn my attention back to the ground."

While Jimmy was struggling to rearrange the show, Danny was being swarmed by a growing number of family and friends. His sister Elizabeth started to cry. His mother stroked his cheek. The emergency personnel had to push their way through the a.s.sembled crowd.

"When the paramedics came they asked me if I could move my fingers, my arms," Danny said. "They pushed particular places around my head and asked if it hurt-my neck, my back, my spine. One dude knew right away, but he wasn't allowed to say. They couldn't move me until they got me on a stretcher with a neck brace. At the hospital I waited for about an hour. The brace was pinching my nerves. I asked them if they could please take it off, and they said the only way I could take it off was to sign a paper saying they weren't responsible. I decided to leave it on....

"All that time I kept telling my mom how stupid I was. It was my fault and I could have prevented it. What happened was there was Sno-Kone juice on the swing. After the act they shove the swings back into the corner, and someone must have dropped some Sno-Kone on the part where we stand. By the time I noticed it I was already swinging. I lifted my foot and mentioned it to my brothers. While I was talking to them it was time for me to go off but I wasn't paying attention. That's when they knocked me off. s.h.i.+t happens. But I still could have prevented it. That's why it upsets me more. The truth is, I f.u.c.ked up."

A little over an hour later the X rays arrived and confirmed what the paramedics had suspected all along: when Danny flew off the Russian swing and landed on his neck he snapped his collarbone. It would take eight to ten weeks to heal, the doctors said. After that he should be okay. But after that he wasn't, for Danny, it turns out, might have fallen off the swing for reasons other than the one he confessed to.

Meanwhile the act must continue. With Danny disabled the family was forced, at least for a few months, to shuffle its lineup again. Little Pablo started doing a straight jump along with his brandy in, back somersault out. Mary Chris even considered doing a trick or two herself. But most of the slack was taken up by Big Pablo, who returned to jumping despite his still crippled foot and now aching knee. Because he was twenty pounds overweight and difficult to push, the family had to recruit Kris Kristo to join their act for added weight. He donned a black Howard Stern-like wig, slipped into Danny's old costume, and learned to dance the mambo. Now the Rodrinovich Flyers were not only Mexican but part Bulgarian as well.

For the finale, Papa Rodrguez, who up to now has been holding the net, hands it off to a prop man and fetches two twelve-foot-high aluminum poles connected at the top by a slender cable wrapped in bright pink towels. He douses the towels with lighter fluid and sets the wire ablaze. The crowd breathes an audible "ahhhh." Jimmy James responds on cue.

"From the Russian swings, a backward somersault, bliiindfolded..."

Big Pablo slips a black cotton pillowcase over his head, squeezing his arms through two narrow holes and pulling the remainder almost to his chest. His brothers and sisters start clapping their hands until the entire tent catches on. The bra.s.s flare gives way to a tympani roll.

"The last trick is always a safe trick," Pablo explained. "You can't afford to end with a miss. But you want something that the people are going to enjoy. That's what the fire is for. It's not a threat. You can see fairly good with that blindfold anyway. But people like it. It makes them go 'ahhh.'"

"So how do you know what makes people go 'ah.'"

"Fire makes people go 'ah.' Darkness makes people go 'ah.' Somebody jumping over something high makes people go 'ah.' Our last trick has all of that. It's the perfect ending."

After four swings the platform reaches the ultimate height and Pablo tells his pushers he is ready to fly. On the next rotation he pushes off with his legs and vaults his body into the air, searching for that elusive nirvana, that tunnel of air, which will carry him to his destination. With a cymbal crash for flourish and a communal 'Hey!' for effect, his back is sucked into the vacuum of the net and he comes sliding down the blue nylon chute and lands upright on his feet. He peels off the blindfold and beams at the crowd. He looks confident. He looks poised. Deep inside, he wants more.

"At first I feel pretty good, like I just hit a home run. It's like after a big ride at a carnival you say, 'd.a.m.n, that was cool.' It's a feeling of, well, accomplishment. I have done something right. I have done something good.... But after a moment that high goes away. That's when I realize I'm not satisfied. The act could be better. The swing needs to be two feet taller. I need to be fifteen pounds lighter. The way the act is now I would not want anybody I think is somebody to see it. Not in my business, which is somersaults. As soon as it's over I'm thinking, I want to do more, I want to give more. I want to shout out to the audience, 'Just wait until the flying act. That's when I know we'll show you something. That's when we'll really show you how to fly.'"

5.

This Is When They Become Real "I woke up at seven this morning, just as I do every day. I looked around the room for a moment. I hadn't moved any of my clothes. I hadn't even changed the sheets. It seemed strange to be in her bed. We hadn't slept together for several months. And now, well, she's gone."

Khris Allen sat upright in a blue director's chair and stared at a pile of bullwhips and kangaroo crops on the futon sofa of Kathleen's trailer. Only now the futon was empty and the trailer belonged to him.

"Kathleen really didn't do housework," he said. "She dusted every now and then. She could cook. But just smell this place: it's all dog hair and tiger urine. I don't know how Josip stood it. I don't know how I stood it..."

Khris rubbed his hands across his face. He was dressed in a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and black canvas slippers. He wore no s.h.i.+rt, revealing a taut, wiry torso made strong from practicing jujitsu for the previous ten years and from pus.h.i.+ng tiger cages for the previous two. He was roughly the same size and shape as Sean. "They look exactly the same," commented one friend of mine. "They're both hillbillies with good bodies."

"I decided I should try and clean up a bit, but everything still reminds me of her. Those are her tiger pictures on the wall. That's her calendar. Even the cats still remind me of her." He reached toward an overturned wall lamp and pulled down an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Not far away on another sideways lamp hung a cap from the year the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets shared the national champions.h.i.+p in football. Above it was a comic strip showing a man standing in front of a tiger. "Fellow Animal," the man proclaims, "I am Hugo Flealover, Animal Rights crusader, come to free you from bondage." In the next frame the tiger is eating the man.

"Come on," Khris said. "Let's go feed the cats."

Outside the trailer the late-afternoon sun was just dipping behind the Shenandoah Mountains. The air was still warm with the faint blush of spring. The sound of squealing laughter from children leaving the early show still lingered in the valley around Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Was.h.i.+ngton, Madison, and Jefferson once traveled. The tent was quiet in its chameleon pose as it gave up the bright stripes of afternoon sun to its silhouette before the stars. The season was now in full bloom. After the Easter rains in South Carolina the show had trekked north into a cold snap in the coastal plains of North Carolina. In Henderson, Sean almost missed the bag. The air was cold, the mud nearly frozen. He turned on the heater inside the barrel to 70 degrees. Checking his logbook, he adjusted his power level (its true function, like the rest of the cannon, still a secret to me, but less so every day) to what he thought was the correct level to get him to the middle of the air bag. Still, it wasn't far enough, and he barely caught the front lip of the bag and skidded to the ground. "You can mark my words," he said after limping out of the finale. "If the weather stays this cold I'm going to land on the pavement before the year's out."

In Virginia the weather got warm again, and by the time we crossed the Appalachians it was almost ideal. Yet somehow all these changes were maddening, like a case of schizophrenia shared by two hundred people at once. On certain days, when the sun was s.h.i.+ning brightly, the breeze was blowing softly, and the temperature was just this side of perfect, when the boys walked to a nearby field to play baseball, the girls sat under a veranda having a baby shower, and the cookhouse was serving meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, followed by chocolate cream pie for dessert, nothing seemed more ideal than the circus. But a day later, when the rain started falling, the mud began rising, and the temperature was just this side of freezing, when the men complained about their shoulders being bruised, the women griped about their husbands losing money at poker, and the cooks in the cookhouse were so busy frying crack in the pans that they ran out of spaghetti for dinner, nothing seemed more miserable than the circus. Often both these days would happen at once. In Harrisonburg, I was having the former kind of day; Khris was having the latter.

"I hope you don't mind a little smell," Khris called as we wandered over to a wheelbarrow near the twin lines of cages where fifteen servings of meat were thawing out on an open board. Each portion was about the size of a fire-starter log and the consistency of leftover meat loaf. Little starlights of ice still glistened in the center of the meat, and a virtual road map of dark red blood dripped from the plywood board onto the gra.s.s. The entire compound smelled like rancid hamburger meat.

"It's a combination of beef, chicken, and beef by-products," he explained, "fortified with vitamins A, E, and B." He slid on a pair of bright yellow dishwas.h.i.+ng gloves and began transferring the meat from the board into the wheelbarrow. "It's what they call Grade B meat, not for human consumption. We order about forty thousand pounds a year. It's actually made for racing dogs."

"Forty thousand pounds," I said. "That sounds expensive."

"Last year we spent thirty-two thousand dollars on food alone."

"And what does this meat taste like?"

"Well, it's not tenderloin or sirloin. It's basically fatty meat mixed with bonemeal to give it marrow. The USDA makes us put charcoal in it so we can't sell it to humans."

"And what happens if you eat it?"

He smiled. "Let's just say it gave me the runs."

Laughing, he rocked the wheelbarrow onto its wheel and headed toward the cages. Laurie, now the last-remaining groom, was just clearing the final remnants of sawdust from the cages with the help of an electric leaf blower. As soon as she finished, the two of them went to work. Their routine was precise. Laurie would slide open the small door on the seven-and-a-half-foot-long steel cage that was five feet high and four feet wide, while Khris would toss in the meat. If Laurie opened the door too early or kept it open too long, the tiger would have time to swat at Khris's body.

"You always have to be careful with the cats," he said. "You get a false sense of security around them. Whenever they go after you, they're probably playing. But sometimes that develops into maliciousness. You can't let them see you scared."

As soon as Khris rolled toward the cats all nine of them sprang to their feet and started pacing excitedly in their cages-rocking back and forth, panting with their tongues, growling in a bloodthirsty way that no doubt came from their grumbling stomachs but made my own stomach churn.

"This is when they become real tigers!" Khris shouted over the roar. "This is when I love it the most."

Laurie put a metal hook on top of the first door, opened the slot, and counted slowly to three. By the time she finished and dropped the door, Khris had already tossed the meat onto the plywood floor and t.i.to had already devoured his first log. Being the biggest, t.i.to got the most: twelve and a half pounds. Orissa got seven and Zeus ten. "He was getting chubby, so I just put him on a diet," Khris explained. Down the line he went. Taras, ten pounds. Fatima and Simba. seven. As each tiger was fed, the noise level declined. Tos.h.i.+ba received only five pounds because she had just had a hysterectomy and had begun to gain weight, while Barisal received a hefty eight and a half pounds because she was thought to be pregnant. Before Kathleen departed she had left explicit instructions on what to do should Barisal give birth to a litter.

For now, other concerns were more immediate. As Khris approached Tobruk in the last cage, he was slightly distracted by another tiger and wasn't looking when Laurie opened the door. When Khris finally did turn around, Tobruk flung himself against the cage and thrust his outstretched paw through the door, missing the sagging loaf of meat but snagging instead the back of Khris's hand. Almost immediately Tobruk's curved claw slid deep into the tendon behind Khris's index finger. Khris winced in pain, but didn't shout. Laurie dropped the door. I instinctively reached out to help, but Khris merely waved me away. He dropped the log of meat on the ground and with remarkable composure grabbed the back of Tobruk's paw and carefully pulled the claw from his hand in the same direction the nail had entered. With blood pouring from his wound and his jaw tightly clenched, Khris calmly picked up the meat from the ground, waited for Laurie to reopen the door, and continued feeding the cats as if nothing had transpired. "You can never let them see you scared," he had said. His manifesto come to life.

When the feeding was done Khris walked slowly back to his trailer and asked me to help him wrap his hand. His face was pale by the time he sat down. His leg was stained with blood. The second show was scheduled to start in less than an hour.

"To be frank with you," he said after several moments of silence, "Kathleen was the first woman I ever had s.e.x with. She wasn't beautiful, but she had an aura about her. She was s.e.xual-sensual even; I was extremely attracted to her. She was a little confused. But of course I knew that when I came down here. I had just broken up with my college girlfriend, Kim. I had considered getting married, doing the picket-fence-and-children thing. But still I had this secret part of me that wanted a little adventure."

Outside, the cats were busy licking their paws and clearing their throats with low, guttural cries. Laurie had finished giving them water and had wandered off to her camper. Khris was tugging at his hair.

"On my first night in Florida the flame reignited and I knew I could never leave her. Then we went on the road. Everything was good for a while. We became friends, in addition to the physical thing. But then problems started happening. We are different people. Kathleen is fiercely independent. She doesn't like to talk about her problems. I'm the opposite. If I have a problem I want to sit down and talk about it right away. Let's put it this way: If Kathleen wanted something from the mall right now, she would just go and get it. If I needed something, I would ask somebody to go with me."

He put his cap back on the lamp and slid off his Chinese slippers. It was now totally dark outside, and a small light over the stove produced the only shadows.

"Over the last few months, when we knew she was going to leave, we were on friendly terms, but it didn't take long for the daggers to start flying. The last few weeks she started blaming me. She wanted to leave, to go to school, to grow, she said, yet she still didn't want to leave the cats. I wanted to stay. If you had asked her last night why she was leaving, she probably would have said I pushed her."

"Did she say goodbye?"

"Sure. It never got so bad that she would walk away and never talk with me again. In our greatest time we would call each other sweetheart and baby. Yesterday when I went to give her the final hug she got emotional. I choked up. I'm choking up now just remembering it. I said to her, 'Kathleen, I'll always love you.' She said to me, 'I'll always love you too, baby.' I told her I would take care of all this for her, and she said, 'Take care of it for you now.'"

Tears coated Khris's light blue eyes. For a moment he couldn't speak, until he was coldly brought back to the present by a crisp metal bang and a growl from his front yard. "Fatima!" he shouted, swinging open his screen door. "Fatima. Be quiet!" The door slammed back into place.