Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Part 8

Standing in front of the elephant pen after Khris had gone, I watched in chilled silence as the circus continued to churn its never-ending grind-a trunk picked up hay and sprayed it in the air, a push broom spread puddles to dry on the ground, a shovel scooped dung and dumped it into a barrel. Somehow in the harsh midday light the sharp edges seemed more ominous-the open blade of the forklift grip, the jutting dagger of the tent's main guy line, the deafening grumble of the tigers. Staring at this scene, I couldn't help thinking that the circus, like any dream, is meant to be viewed in the dark, where you can't see the wires, you can't watch the preparation, and you can't observe the pain. When the show is in the rings, one doesn't presume to belong. It's only when one steps outside that the dream seems accessible. With a circus, as with a Greek tragedy, hubris is the ultimate deadly sin.

"What was that man thinking?" a woman said to me later that day as she sold me a hot dog in the mall. "He had no business messing with the animals. He should know better than to try and touch one of those elephants."

A death in the circus is everyone's concern-it quickly pierces the illusion of the show-and walking through the mall, I overheard many similar remarks, each one gradually more inflated. "I heard he was drunk." "I heard he was high." "I heard he had a gun." Around the circus, meanwhile, the performers were noticeably more subdued than normal, but still they went about their work with grim efficiency-quiet, determined, seemingly unshaken.

"Everybody seems to be doing the show as if nothing happened," I said to Big Pablo as intermission in the first show approached. "Is everyone so jaded that they don't care?"

"The truth is, n.o.body wants to talk about it," he said. "It's bad. You don't hear me making jokes about it and I make jokes about everything. As far as I'm concerned, you mess with a three-ton animal you get what you deserve. It's like playing chicken with a freight train. Sooner or later you're going to get hurt. We have chains. We have signs. We have fences. Those little orange fences are not designed to keep the elephants in-they couldn't if they wanted to. They're designed to keep the people out. Look, it's happened before, it will probably happen again."

He nodded grimly and went off to work.

"What do you mean 'Have I seen this kind of thing before?' h.e.l.l, I saw it happen to me!"

Dawnita stood behind the back door of the tent wearing a yellow-and-black pantsuit with an elaborate sparkling paisley design that ran from her left shoulder to her right hip. Her left breast was almost completely exposed behind a see-through window of fishnet stocking. All day I had been hearing stories. Jimmy estimated that in the thirty years he had been with the show probably twenty-five people had died in elephant-related deaths, ten people had been killed in truck accidents, and half a dozen had been electrocuted. Even given his penchant for exaggeration, these figures were alarming. For those around it long enough, death and disaster seem to hover over the circus, to give it shape and definition like the tent itself. Elephants, to my surprise, have proven to be the worst.

Elmo, who came in Sat.u.r.day for his birthday party that night, told me he was sleeping just feet from the elephant compound in New London, Connecticut, in 1984 when a naked woman was found dead in the pen. She had a clean slit across her stomach, he recalled, and her boyfriend, who was staying at a nearby hotel, claimed she had wanted to be photographed with the elephants. Since elephants are not known to kill with incisions to the abdomen, police suspected she had been murdered by her boyfriend and tossed to the elephants for cover. Papa Rodrguez told me he was on a show in France when an elephant got angry at his trainer in the center ring. The trainer was able to dodge the charging animal and escape into his trailer. The elephant, however, was smart enough to pick out the trainer's trailer from the line. When she did, she promptly knocked it over and trampled the trailer-and the owner-to shreds.

But of all these stories Dawnita's was the most painful to hear. In 1965, while still teenagers, she and Elvin were performing with a show in New England. Elvin was doing the single trapeze and Dawnita was working elephants. In the act there was a herd of elephants in the center ring and two solo elephants in rings one and three. Dawnita had been working one of the solo elephants. "She was tough," Dawnita remembered, "but we got along fine." The other solo elephant had been giving her handlers trouble all year. Finally she was separated from the herd and locked in an unlit stable. At the end of the season the owner asked Dawnita if she would work that elephant for several more months on the Steel Pier at Atlantic City.

"I told the guy the elephant was dangerous. She was half nuts, and she had already been separated from the herd. He asked me to work the elephant for one day and see how it went. I told him I would try, but I would do things differently from her previous trainers. I decided not to use a hook. I just used my whip. She had been with so many handlers, really anyone who was around. She was angry. One eye was swollen shut from being hit. During the first show we went into the ring and she tried to hit me with her trunk. It was just like what Pete did last night. When they're upset they swing around and try to knock you over. I went back to the owner and said I really didn't feel comfortable working that elephant. He asked me to do one more show."

Dawnita took a drag from her pre-show cigarette. She was holding Douglas, one of the Arabian Thoroughbreds, whom she led in the opening parade. Douglas was chewing alfalfa into a slimy, pea-green mush. Dawnita was putting a silver feather into her black bouffant wig.

"That night we started doing out act. We had these elephant tubs that the bulls stood on to do their tricks. We had to hold the tubs while they stood on them. That was the most dangerous part of the act. When the time came I was ready for her. I was watching. But still I wasn't prepared for the force of that elephant. With one swing of her trunk she knocked me to the ground. Then she jumped over that tub and thrust her whole body down on top of me, actually doing a headstand on my back. That's how they kill you, you know-with their heads. I was screaming. Everyone came running to get her off me, but they couldn't do it. There was no escape. She was pus.h.i.+ng my knees into the ground. My legs were splaying outward. She ripped open the muscles of my arms with her tusks, and worst of all, she stripped all the flesh off my back. I was nothing but raw meat. I was delirious with pain."

"So who finally saved you?"

"It was Elvin. He was hysterical. He was waiting to do his trapeze act just after the elephants. We were only nineteen at the time. He grabbed the bull hook out of the owner's hands and hit the elephant so hard in the face that she pulled back long enough for them to drag me away. And then the elephant ran. She darted out of the tent and went running down the boardwalk in Atlantic City! She went on to kill several people in the next couple of years. So did the other one I was working that year. Eventually they both were destroyed."

"And how long did you stay out of the show?"

"About a month. My knee was dislocated and my arms torn open. I had to take these painful salt.w.a.ter baths for my back." She winced in recollection and twisted her neck. "It's easy to forget that circus animals are dangerous. Elephants especially. People look at them and say, 'Look, Dumbo! How cute.' But they're not domesticated pets, they're wild animals."

"Is that what you think happened last night?"

"Listen, I look at it from the animal's perspective. The elephant didn't say, 'Hey, I'm going to kill this guy.' She was startled, that's all. She might have been sleeping. They sleep standing up, you know. Or she might have been surprised. She was probably just trying to push him out of the way."

"Do you think she knows what happened?"

"A little bit. She probably knew she had hurt someone. Elephants are very smart, you know. Smarter than many people."

Jimmy blew the whistle for the overture to begin. The cast shuffled toward the back door. The elephants lumbered into place at the end of the parade. Pete was at the head of the line.

"And have you worked with elephants since then?"

Dawnita tossed her cigarette on the pavement and ground it out with her high-heeled shoe. "Never again," she said with her painted smile, "and now you know why." The curtain opened with its artful flourish and Dawnita Bale marched into the lights with Douglas at her side.

Nights with White Stallions The ground seems to shake when the horses start to dance. The tent seems to smile when they finally arrive.

As soon as the hair hangers disappear from sight the spotlights pivot to the back door of the tent, the elegance succ.u.mbs to a royal "Fanfare," and a line of ten Thoroughbreds parades into view, wrapped in bridles, breastplates, and surcingles, decked out in princely blue and white ostrich plumes, and led reins-in-hand by three upright grandes dames from a long line of circus royalty. The military echo is palpable. The regal allure is clear.

"In the rich, grand tradition of the circus..." Jimmy, as always, knows just what to say. "An equestrian display of equine excellence..., presented by the Baaaaale Sisters..."

Dawnita is the first to arrive in place, just in front of ring one. She is holding the reins of a rare black Frisian stallion, Surprisio-sixteen years old, weighing half a ton, and sporting a tantalizing black mane draped to one side of his head. Dawnita is matched in ring three by Bonnie, the youngest Bale, who is leading an equally striking white stallion, Afendi, great-grandson of Naborr, one of the richest blue bloods in history, who was once owned by Wayne Newton. Once in place the two sisters prepare to lead their black and white consorts in a precise display of footwork and dance steps that comprise a "high school" act, the deceivingly lowbrow American-sounding name that actually refers to the ultimate origin of highbrow, the haute ecole of France.

In between the two siblings is their older sister, Gloria, who instead of a single high school horse controls eight Arabian Thoroughbreds, ranging in color from liver chestnut to bay and looking in their excited primped-up appearance like a restless collegiate marching band. As if to emphasize this theme, Gloria, like her sisters, is dressed in majorette-like wear that actually descends from the Spanish Riding School: ballroom shoes with knee-high spats; white-breasted leotard with a matching dinner jacket; and a nifty little folding hat such as nurses and female naval officers wear. Dawnita's and Bonnie's outfits are vermilion; Gloria's, like her eyes, is royal blue.

"A lot of people switch to animal acts when they grow older," said Gloria, herself clinging to her last days of middle age, her voice still carrying a hint of English propriety. "Their bodies need the break. As for me, I grew up loving them. As a girl, I loved ballet. I loved dance. I even loved to work in the air. But horses were my dream. I first did a liberty act when I was fourteen; I've been doing one ever since."

In contrast to high school, where a single horse performs a standard set of steps, a liberty act involves a group of horses performing a wide variety of tricks. The act is termed "liberty" because the horses are free to roam untethered. With no reins and no longes, the presenter must communicate with the herd through voice signals and hand gestures. The biggest liberty act in history, trained by Edouard Wulff in the nineteenth century, had one hundred and twenty horses. Gloria's, like many today, has eight.

"When I first arrive in the ring I'm a little nervous," she told me. "I have so much to worry about. In hot weather they run a little slower. In mud they might get stuck. They especially have trouble in sand because they have to work harder to get their feet out. Also I have to think about their mood. I try to keep them calm by giving them carrots, but noises bother them-popping balloons, squeaky pulleys, clanking poles. The biggest problem is the butchers who spin their empty c.o.ke trays as they take them out of the tent. A horse's natural defense is to bite and kick. If that happens, I'm the one in the way."

Once the horses arrive in the ring Gloria sends them off to their first trick with the simple command "Partez!" She uses French because her father used it to train the act and because, as in ballet, the movements that horses do, from "croupade" and "ballotade" to "piaffe" and "pirouette," all have French names. With "Partez!" the horses sprint from their spot and begin prancing around the ring in a single-file line to the musical whimsy of "Radetsky," a Johann Strauss two-beat march. Within seconds the sleepy ring is transformed into a frolicking carousel with the horses bobbing and bouncing in a never-ending cycle of heads and tails. At one moment they seem to be burrowing into the ground like the tigers who turned to b.u.t.ter in the children's story; at the next they all but rise into the air like the heirs of Pegasus. This ring, so s.h.i.+mmering, is the sacred icon of the circus. These horses, so animated, are the source for that ring.

"Horses, you know, started the circus," she said. The Romans used to have chariot races with horses, she explained, while in Europe, much later, showmen organized enormous riding expeditions for recreation. It was Philip Astley who invented the first circus in England in 1768 when he combined bareback riding with equestrian clowning. Astley found it easier to ride in a ring and have people sitting in a circle around it to watch the show. The term "circus," from the Latin word for "circle," comes from those early rings.

As long as there have been horses in circuses, Gloria went on to say, there have been Arabians. First bred by bedouins who went to extraordinary lengths to keep the line pure-including killing foals that were not considered worthy-Arabians were eventually imported into Europe, then America. George Was.h.i.+ngton's white horse, the same one he sold to American circus founder John Bill Ricketts (himself a disciple of Astley), was believed to be an Arabian. Today, Arabians are still considered to be the purest breed of all horses, with shorter, stronger bones, wider chests, and one fewer rib and vertebra than other horses. As a result, they command prices ranging from $1,200 to $3,000 apiece-expensive for horses, but still a bargain when compared with $75,000 for an elephant or twice that for a rare white tiger.

After Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. bought eight of these Arabians from a horse farm near Ocala, Doug and Johnny named them after their families (Doug and his daughters; Johnny, his wife, his father, and-the ultimate honor of all-his wife's prized poodle, Schatzye). Once christened, the two-year-old Thoroughbreds were handed over to Trevor Bale to be trained. Father of the Bale sisters and Elvin, Trevor has been a renowned animal trainer for almost sixty years since he first stepped into a ring with lions and tigers at age twelve. Since that time he has trained, or "broken," as circus people say, elephants, horses, bears, lions, tigers, hippos, zebras, camels, llamas, dogs, donkeys, pigeons, giraffes, and geese. Along the way, he was the first to put lions on swings, one of the best at putting tigers on horses, and the only person ever to work black bears and polar bears in the same ring.

"My dad has some kind of attachment to animals," Gloria remembered. "For some reason they love him. He could come here today after three years of being away and they would just go nuts for him. He has that strong a connection. He's like Dr. Doolittle."

Unfortunately, he wasn't a magician, and from the beginning he encountered problems with these horses. First, there was the problem of time. In order to break eight horses properly he needed a year. The show had only six months. Second, there was the problem of gender: an ideal liberty act should have only one gender, Gloria said; this act had two. That created various difficulties. In the act, after the horses run around the ring in single file, Gloria issues a new call, "En deux!," and the horses double up along the ring curb and continue to trot in tandem. After several minutes she announces, "En quatre!," and they double up again. Here the s.e.xual politics begin.

"They're like oil and water," Gloria complained. "I have four geldings and four mares. I've got four guys who are big, tall, and have more energy. They work in fast-forward. Meanwhile I've got four girls in first gear. They think differently." She rolled her eyes. "I feel like a therapist. Sometimes they simply drive me crazy. At other times they're almost perfect."

Gloria was not the only one who shared this sentiment. Despite their occasional fussiness, when the horses finally do reach their stride the beauty of their hallowed blood ripples through every muscle and tendon in their well-toned legs. Children are mesmerized by their beauty. Even performers get carried away. "I'm not much for animals," Arpeggio once told me, "but those horses sure are cute." Perhaps it was inevitable that one worker would find this beauty too much to resist.

When I decided to join a circus, I viewed it as a life on the road, as a way to discover the backyard of America from the back lot of a traveling neighborhood. After almost four months on the show I had begun to revise my view. While each stop along our nine-month route reflected the area around it, I found that I was encountering the true variety of American life not in the various communities that lived near the tent but in the one community that lived underneath it-the circus itself. With its two hundred employees from all corners of the globe, holding all manner of religious and political beliefs, the circus represented a true melting pot. There were no educational requirements to keep you out of this company, no skyrocketing property values to keep you out of this neighborhood. In addition, there were no random drug tests to weed out misfits and no reviews of credit history to exclude miscreants.

This notion of the circus as a microcosm of America helped me answer one nagging question I had about the show: how is it that circus people, who by all accounts live on the fringes of American life, manage to perform every day to acclaim from an audience of thousands of "mainstream" Americans? The answer, I came to believe, is that the people in the circus and those in the audience ultimately want the same things-security, success, a new car, a way out. The people who come to see the show have a host of worries-they fight with their spouses, they argue with their children, they struggle with their bills-but when they step into the big top they agree to leave their problems behind. The people who put on the show have the same wealth of worries, but when they step into the big top they also agree to leave their problems behind. This is the magic of the circus: the shared illusion of escape.

But ultimately the circus is just that: an illusion, a fantasy, a myth brought to life. The horses that trot around Gloria in the center ring don't actually float, they just seem to. The bears that bounce on the trampoline aren't really docile, they just appear to be. Catastrophe most often occurs when nonperformers try to continue the fantasy long past the time it has ended for the show people. Sometimes, as in Fishkill, these outsiders are townies. Other times they are workers from the show itself. With so many men coming and going, the show could not always control the behavior of everyone on its payroll. "What are the minimum qualifications for being hired as a worker?" I once asked Doug. "Minimum qualifications?" he mocked. "Breathe." It was one of these men whom Dawnita discovered one chilly night in June.

"I got this sudden urge to get up in the middle of the night," she remembered. "It doesn't happen to me often, so I knew something was wrong." She threw on her clothes and went running toward the horse truck. Since the night was abnormally cold, the horses were sleeping inside to keep warm. As usual, the mares were on one end and the geldings on the other. The black and white stallions were closest to the door. "As soon as I approached the truck I saw clothes on the ground. I thought something had fallen from the roof. I got closer, waving my flashlight all around, and then I saw the man on the ground. His head was directly underneath the crotch of our largest stallion. He was naked except for a bandanna around his neck. He was a hippy. He was a drunk. If nothing else he was a pervert."

But how did she know this for sure? I wondered. Maybe he was just sleeping through the night. Perhaps he was trying to stay out of the cold.

"I hate to say this," Dawnita said, "but a horse's p.e.n.i.s is dirty. When it's clean we know something has happened. Either they've been mating with the mares or they've been played with. We know they haven't been mating with the mares."

She raised her eyebrows.

"As soon as I realized what had happened I dragged him out of there as fast as I could and beat the s.h.i.+t out of him with a rubber whip. I would have beat him to death if someone hadn't pulled me away. Luckily the guy was gone by the next morning. I told him I would kill him if he ever stepped foot on the lot again. And do you know why? Because if he would do that to an animal, he would do that to a child..."

Circus people will tolerate a lot in private-drinking, drugs, even profligate s.e.x were all part of the daily life of the show-but if somebody either inside or outside the community threatens to spoil the public face of the show-the basic elements of the dream-reaction is swift and lethal. The circus, at its core, is a fantasy: you can look but you cannot touch.

As the act nears its end, Gloria calls all the horses to the center of the ring with the simple command "Chez!" With a giant sweeping gesture of her arms she signals for all eight of her horses to stand on their hind legs. The first attempt is valiant, but short. The second lasts a little longer. It is not until the third try at the trick that her full platoon of Thoroughbreds rears back on its sixteen hind legs, punches the air with its line of hooves, and holds its pose for an impossible span that seems to defy not only gravity but time.

"The truth is, not all of the horses like to do that trick. It's hard, and they're getting old. These animals are around seven. If they're taken care of they can work for another few years. But then they'll get tired; they'll lose weight. They're like old people. Sometimes they just don't want to go out and perform anymore."

Sitting behind her trailer between shows, with the wind skipping up from the early-evening sky and the lights first appearing on the top of the tent, Gloria realized the irony of what she was saying. All good acts must come to an end. All performers have their time. In his book Wild Tigers and Tame Fleas, famed clown Bill Ballantine writes about living on the Ringling train in the 1950s next door to the newly arrived Trevor Bale and his family. In the book Gloria (age eleven) and Elvin and Dawnita (age eight) are seen giggling around the circus lot until they are beckoned back by the commanding call of their father: "EL-VIN! DAWN-NITA! GLOO-O-O-RIA!" "Try to imagine an ocean liner whistle at six feet," Ballantine writes, "a diesel locomotive at a crossing, and you approximate father Bale's call of the wild." Almost forty years later these names were still being bellowed around circus tents and their glory was just as strong. Still, hints of retirement were just beginning to be heard. Bonnie, who was a newborn at that time, had already retired once. Dawnita maintained that the Beatty show would be the last place she performed. Gloria, meanwhile, who since her days as a child on Ringling had performed in over eight different acts on at least ten different shows, insisted she wasn't quite ready to quit.

"Sure, I've done what I wanted to do: I've worked with horses, I've done the trapeze, I've traveled all over the world. But it's in my blood. I'll do it until I feel like I don't look good enough and I don't feel as if I can perform well. Then I won't do it anymore. Then I'll know it's time to leave."

Tired, the horses are ready for their exit dance. Gloria sends them back into their original single-file trot around the ring, this time to the timely gallop "Homestretch." When the last horse in the line gets to the front of the ring, the horse turns a complete 360-degree revolution and obediently steps out of the ring into the outstretched grasp of a handler. The process is repeated-eight, seven, six, five, four, three, and two-until horse number one, Blair, appears to sprint unexpectedly past the gate. "You forgot to turn," Gloria calls in a public rebuke reminiscent of her father. Blair slowly backs up as if he were going to turn, then steps abruptly into the ring and, with Gloria at his side, bows his head to the audience. The simple gesture brings "aaaah"s from the house. The trick has worked to perfection. The horses have worked their charm.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Gloria Louise...".

The first half is coming to a close.

8.

A Streak of Blood Douglas Holwadel walked alongside the tent and rehea.r.s.ed the remarks he would soon have to make on the cellular phone in his rented motor home. In the twelve years he and Johnny had owned the circus, Doug had never had to make a call like this. His anxiety was intense. His face contorted. The air was thick around him with the dense odor of pine. He decided in the s.p.a.ce between the office and his trailer that the best course would be to be direct.

"Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l, I'm calling about your son. I'm afraid I have some bad news..."

Natick, Ma.s.sachusetts, is a small community of 30,000 people on Route 135 west of Boston, full of deserted red-brick buildings placed around a central square and with several shallow lakes ringed around its outer core. With its rich evergreens, stone sidewalks, and gentle hills, the town is perfect for sleigh rides in winter and pickup baseball games in summer. Indeed, for years the circus used to play the baseball diamond behind Natick High School every year on July 4. The town loved the circus, for it provided a focal point for its Independence Day celebration. The circus loved the town because the lot was gra.s.sy, there was a basketball court nearby and just beyond that a rare treat, Dug Pond.

This year, because business had been slow in recent seasons, the circus decided to move its date from July 4 to the last weekend in June. From the beginning the change caused concern. The people in town were upset that they had no place to go for July 4. The people on the show were disturbed because they had no fixed date around which to imagine their summers-a simple act of surprising importance in a traveling community. In short, the narrative of Natick was off to a bad start even weeks before we arrived.

The morning of setup everything proceeded smoothly. The tent was up early, the rigging soon followed, and by lunchtime a gaggle of performers claiming to be Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal moved to the basketball court for the thrice-weekly exercise in miscoordination, self-deception, and Spanish verbal a.s.sault tactics that pa.s.sed for sport on the lot. The start of the semiofficial circus basketball season in June brought a new level of intensity to the show. Personalities previously constrained by the ring were allowed to run unenc.u.mbered on the court. Sean, whose shortness hampered his ability to s.h.i.+ne, would throw himself around like a giant pinball and regularly tackle people who drove past him with ease. Danny, who certainly looked the part of a basketball star in his NBA team jerseys, would glide through the air with unparalleled grace but usually manage to miss his shot (his shoulder, though better, was a convenient excuse). Big Pablo, hobbled with a b.u.m knee, didn't bother to run at all and relied on a nonstop barrage of abuse to keep himself in the game. In this ragam.u.f.fin ensemble I became something of a desired teammate, not because of any particular prowess on my part but because (a) I was six inches taller than everyone else and (b) I didn't understand a word of the Spanish insults continually hurled at me. "I can't believe it," I said to Julin Estrada. "I've gotten more compliments for several blocked shots than for anything I've done in the ring." His response was unhesitating. "That's because you suck in the ring."

In Natick some of the working guys wandered over to the court to scout out the compet.i.tion for the much ballyhooed Big Top vs. Performers game that was slated for the following day. One man in particular, William, was laughing on the sidelines. He was new, having arrived with Bill Lane earlier in the week while the show was in Medfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, on the grounds of a mental inst.i.tution. He was so new, in fact, that he didn't even have a nickname. After the game, when a few of the performers announced they were going for a swim, William and several other workers decided to join them and trekked off toward No. 63 to retrieve their swimwear.

"How is the water?" William asked Danny as he was emerging from the pond twenty minutes later.

"It's nice," Danny said.

"Is it cold?" William asked. "I don't like cold water. For me it has to be perfect."

"Nothing is perfect in this world," Danny said. "Only G.o.d."

"Well," William replied, "G.o.d made the water, so it must be perfect."

They both laughed and walked in their separate directions. William removed his s.h.i.+rt, stepped down the incline, and waded tentatively into the water. The water was chilly and smooth as gla.s.s. The level stayed shallow for about twenty-five yards, but then dropped off precipitously.

"I heard him cry," New York remembered. "I was just preparing to go into the water. By the time I located the sound all I could see was his arms flapping in the water and his head bobbing up and down."

New York and several of his men went running into the pond. Luke, one of the few white men on the big-top crew, ran to get a rope. Darryl, from props, hopped a nearby fence and ran to call the police.

"By the time I got out there he was struggling real bad," New York recalled. "His arms were slapping against the surface and he was screaming. Oh, Lord, I can never forget that scream. We tried to calm him down, but he didn't listen. I put my arms around him but he pushed me off. I finally grabbed him around the chest but he just slid through my arms. Before I knew it he had sunk to the bottom of the lake."

By that time a rescue team had arrived. Several divers put on their tanks and plunged back-first into the water. For several tense moments the circus held its breath. The performers, most of the crew, and several of the women from the office waited anxiously on the bank. An ambulance crew made its way to the water's edge. Finally, at eight minutes after two, forty minutes after it first disappeared underwater, the body of William Mitch.e.l.l reappeared in the arms of the divers. Moving quickly, they pulled the body headfirst to the sh.o.r.e and lifted it onto the crisp white sheets of the stretcher. His hands were purple; his lips white. Several paramedics began pumping his stomach. For a moment there was a surge of hope.

But that moment quickly pa.s.sed. After several minutes with only the faintest pulse from the body, most of the performers turned toward home. A few people started to cry. At half past two the stretcher was placed in an ambulance and driven to Metro West Medical Center. At 3:22 P.M. on the last Sat.u.r.day in June, William Mitch.e.l.l was officially declared dead. An hour later Doug placed his call.

"Before I called his mother," he recalled, "I decided to call the police department in his hometown. They said they have a chaplain who helps with these duties. He went out in a squad car, checking back into the switchboard. I called several times trying to coordinate with him. I waited until he was in front of the house and then I told the family."

The shows went on as scheduled that afternoon. Kris Kristo, Danny, and a few other performers placed black tape around their wrists. Some women in the front office started up a collection. That afternoon his remaining clothes were packed in a box, along with a check for six days' work made out to the estate of William Mitch.e.l.l, and forwarded to his family in central Florida, not far from DeLand.

The moon should have been full in Abington. Jimmy had the gout. Dawnita had a headache. And just two days after the incident in Natick a tornado came out of nowhere and hit nearby Boston in the middle of the high wire, thereby prompting Doug to run around frantically looking for Sean, provoking Jimmy to blow the whistle too early, and causing Willie to turn off the lights while Mari Quiros Rodrguez was performing a split on the wire, an action that sent Rodrguezes of every shape and size raging at the electrician, the ringmaster, and even the owner himself. No sooner had the cannon fired than Jimmy said, "Please exit the big top as quickly as possible," and a torrential downpour dumped several inches of rain on the abandoned field behind Abington Junior High and on the uncovered heads of several thousand patrons who had just exited the big top as quickly as they could.

A little over an hour later I walked out of my trailer and found Kris Kristo slos.h.i.+ng through the mud. "Hey, where's the party?" I asked. "I gave Danny five dollars." He gestured for me to follow him and headed toward Sean's, a true honeymoon on wheels. About the size of a small dormitory room, Sean's trailer had a small bed in the back, a small table in the front, and a distinctly malodorous brown s.h.a.g carpet on the floor. Once relentlessly gloomy with artificial paneling on the walls and a beleaguered screen door in front that never quite opened or closed, the room had been undergoing a domestic revolution of sorts. First, in Pennsylvania, Sean had purchased a set of frames so he could mount numerous photos of himself on every blank wall in his room. Next, in Connecticut, he had purchased an economy-sized bag of potpourri and sprinkled it around the room. Finally, in southern Ma.s.sachusetts, in a sure sign that he might be falling in love, Sean went to a Kmart and purchased an a.s.sortment of pillows ("They're mauve," he corrected, "not pink"), which he carefully distributed on every surface of his room, so that it was impossible for him or anyone else to lie down, drink beer, or exchange s.e.xual fantasies without being covered in lace.

As long as Sean was still a bachelor, though, his trailer was still the location of choice for parties on the lot. When we arrived a soiree was underway. Half-open bottles of Amaretto, Bacardi, and Rumpelminze were strewn across the floor. Muddy shoes were piled beside the door. Kris offered to fix me a rum and c.o.ke, a process that involved picking up a mostly empty can of c.o.ke from the floor, pouring it mostly full with rum, and urging me to drink it more quickly. All the usual suspects were present-my friends the circus hunks. Danny was lounging around on the floor asking people to go to the cookhouse with him to fix a peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich. Marcos, his cousin, was dancing the samba in front of one of Sean's three full-sized mirrors. Kris was soon dancing as well, but also pouring the drinks, directing the party, and pressing the b.u.t.ton on the CD player so that we heard only the first few notes of every song, followed by the first few discordant lyrics as sung by Sean.

The last person in the room was Guillaume, a sc.r.a.ppy fifteen-year-old with a ponytail on his head, a scar on his cheek, and a chip on his shoulder. Since the beginning of the year I had been having minor run-ins with Guillaume, who was Mary Jo's son, Fred Logan's grandson, and a member of the elephant department. In Ladson, South Carolina, he poured taco sauce into my root beer. In Havelock, North Carolina, he tripped me when I went to catch a fly ball during a softball game. And in what seemed like every other town he hara.s.sed me with another juvenile trivia question. While the others at the party were dancing or joking, Guillaume was lying back on the bed, complaining about the music, and periodically whacking me on the head with a plastic sword he had picked up from one of the circus novelty stands.

After about an hour of low-grade malaise, Danny announced he was going to the cookhouse to fix his sandwich. Guillaume stood up and said he would follow. But before he did, he bent over to grab his sneakers, pivoted his rear end toward my head, and with a dreary manly grunt let forth a blast of vile-smelling gas directly into my face.

Instinctively I shoved him out of the way. "Get out of here," I said. "And grow up." Guillaume did not take this suggestion to heart. Instead he threw down his hat, leapt onto my back, and began shaking my neck as hard as he could. "Take it back!" he demanded. "Take it back."

This certainly caught me by surprise. Here I was, at a little before midnight on a rainy summer night in Abington, Ma.s.sachusetts, with a rum and c.o.ke in my hand, a plate of leftover Chinese spareribs in my stomach, and a raving mad, underage, totally inebriated elephant handler on my back, gripping my neck and pounding his fist into my face. My first impulse was to turn around and smash his head against one of Sean's many pictures of himself on the wall. But at the risk of seeming like a weak-kneed writer, I thought better of this. Instead I pulled his hands from my throat as Danny yanked at his s.h.i.+rt, and the two of them stumbled out the door.

As soon as they left I was dumbstruck. Then confused. It was the kind of feeling I felt often in the circus when my own book-learned beliefs conflicted with the culture around me. This happened on my first day on the lot in DeLand. During practice for the firehouse gag, Marty suggested that it would be hysterically funny if Jerry, the dwarf, would disappear into the house for a moment and emerge wearing a kimono, slanting his eyes, sticking out his teeth, and pretending to be a demented j.a.panese. They all laughed uproariously at this idea. I winced at all the stereotypes it would be perpetuating. Luckily the idea was dropped.

Later I ran into the same problem with Sean when he referred to some of the workingmen as n.i.g.g.e.rs. I told him I thought that word had gone out of favor some time ago. "You've been in school too long," he said. "In the South everyone still uses that word." I'm from the South, I told him, and I don't use that word. "Well you're just a wuss," he said, thereby drawing the circle to a close. A "wuss" would naturally defend a "n.i.g.g.e.r"; anyone would know that. The circus, I realized, for better or worse, is the embodiment of the politically incorrect.

This realization cut to the heart of the chief dilemma I felt about the show. In some ways our circus was a remarkably open-minded and tolerant place. Where else could people of such varying backgrounds-Mexican, Bulgarian, Moroccan, Native American, African American, Redneck American, not to mention Catholic, Jew, and Pentecostal, as well as drunkard, dope addict, missionary, teetotaler, carnivore, and anorexic-all work and live together in such an intense environment, two shows a day, seven days a week, six inches from their closest friend and their gravest enemy? On the other hand, many of the people in the show were remarkably bigoted. People's actions were invariably attributed to their most distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic-race, religion, or waist size. The bookkeeper was good with money: he must be a Jew. Marcos made a misstatement: he must be a stupid Mexican. Admittedly, coming from the highly charged world of political correctness, I found this directness to be liberating. People on the circus don't run around talking about others behind their backs: they do it right in front of their faces. While they are often uncaring and unsympathetic, at least they're up-front about it.

Still this openness was not enough to balance my doubts, particularly about the macho climate that prevailed among the single men on the show.

"Don't worry about it," Sean said after Guillaume had left. "If you have to, you'll just beat his face. He doesn't attack me because he knows I'll punch him in the nose."

"But I'm not going to beat him up," I said. "What will that prove?"

"It will prove you're a man."

As he was saying this, Guillaume appeared at the door. With Danny hovering over his shoulder and poking him in the back, Guillaume uttered a brief apology and the two of us shook hands. At that moment this simple gesture came as a great relief: some things I didn't have to give up just to be a part of the show.

Jimmy was still in a bad mood from the gout. He was sitting behind the bandstand the following day in his hideaway ringmaster's station when I arrived, as I usually did, just as the flying act was nearing its end, "the Flying Rodrguez Faaaamily..." As soon as he finished, he handed me the microphone and I sprinted toward the center ring.

When the stomach-pump gag started in DeLand it had a simple premise: various clowns dressed as sideshow performers would wander into a doctor's office with a string of maladies, a doctor would put each patient into a giant stomach pump, and an a.s.sortment of funny objects would be exhumed from their bellies. An announcer would narrate the scene and give a name to each disease. Because of a feud between Elmo and Jimmy, I was chosen to be the announcer. "Hurry, hurry, hurry," I would bark. "Step right up and see the circus sideshow..." In fact, I had to hurry myself in order to make it into the ring for the start of the gag. As I grabbed the microphone that second afternoon in Abington, I was a little behind schedule, arriving at the center ring just as the lights came up for the gag. At this point, with all eyes in the tent now focused on me since I was the only person in sight, I opened my mouth to begin my pitch when-twannggg-I suddenly collided face-first into a wire that was supporting the flying net. Crunch. The collision sent my feet into the air and my head cras.h.i.+ng toward the ground. Dazed, all I could sense when I regained my wits was a booming outburst of laughter from the audience-the biggest I had gotten all year. Realizing I had made the fall of my life and satisfied that I still had my teeth in place, I hopped to my feet, did an Elvin-like style to make the fall seem well planned, and headed for the elephant tub in the center ring.

The next five minutes were the longest of my so-far short career. It took as much concentration as I could muster to narrate my way through the gag. When Arpeggio, who was playing the mad nurse, started to hound me, I tried to cut him off, but he jumped on me anyway, knocking off my hat for the second time in a minute and rendering me bald to the world.

At the end of the number I trotted back to the bandstand, handed Jimmy the microphone, and headed for a nearby fire truck to examine myself in the mirror. I was shocked: blood was streaming down my face from an open wound on my left cheek that ran from my eye to my upper lip. With all the red on my face perhaps the audience hadn't noticed this. I hurried back to my trailer, took a swab of baby oil, and cleaned a path across my cheek where the wire had slashed my face. When I finished I lay back on my bed and nearly pa.s.sed out from the ringing pain that stretched from my ear to the roots of my teeth. Then I waited for the rush of people who would want to see what was wrong. n.o.body came. The second half of the show pa.s.sed. Still n.o.body came. Finally, ten minutes after the close of the first show, Jimmy knocked on my door. I was still in my makeup except for the wound. My costume was strewn across the floor. I still expected to do the second show. Performers are relentless in teasing people who miss performances, especially for minor injuries. There's plenty of pain on a circus lot, but little sympathy.

"Good G.o.d!" Jimmy exclaimed when he looked at my face. Glancing at my reflection in the window I saw that the previous shallow mark on my cheek had already swollen into a red puffy sore like a slice of slightly discolored peach on my otherwise pale white face. "Did you put ice on it?"

"It didn't occur to me." I was beginning to feel weak.