I backed up, grabbing at canvas, and Paul came resolutely after me.
“Let’s talk,” I said, going higher and higher, feeling the night wind through my greasepaint. Yeah, I thought, let’s talk, one crazy clown to another on the night of a full moon, thirty or forty feet up in the air on a piece of canvas.
“My sister died in the circus,” he said, coming after me.
The people under the big top must have seen the billowing and wondered what hell demon or animal was leaping over them.
“My father, my brother, and my wife died in the circus. Only the two of us survived, and look what it did to me. My face and my brain. We fell. We fell. I remember my father dropping the balance pole and floating past me.”
We were moving steadily upward to the top of the tent, and he obviously had a better sense of balance than I did.
“And,” he said, “the circus just went on. That very next day, as if we had never existed. The show must go on. Why must the show go on? Why do those people have to watch near-death to enjoy their own lives? That world below us is a corrupt world.”
He stood holding the canvas with one hand and pointing downward with his other. The prod was his pointer, and he was God, and there was no reasoning with God.
“I tried to forget,” he said. “I didn’t want any part of it. I knew what he had done to the elephants, but I wanted to forget. Then this circus had to come here, to Mirador, the first circus to come here. They followed me, brought their corruption right to the place where I had retreated. They declared war. He was right. He told me and I tried to hide, but they followed me.”
He took a lunge toward me, and I moved up higher, but there wasn’t much higher to move, and his confession was doing me no good up here with no one but me to hear it and no one to save me.
“So it was his idea,” I said into the wind. A flag was flapping at the top of the tent, and I reached it and clung to it. A strong wind had come up. If I let go, I would probably slide down the tent and into the darkness below to hit the ground or something worse. The best act in the circus was going on where no one could see it.
Paul came puffing up after me. His green hat went flying with a gust of wind.
“Why kill me?” I said.
“Because you know who we are,” he shouted into the wind. “Because someone must be labeled killer if we are not to be.”
“They’ll catch you,” I said.
Paul laughed, a sincere Santa Claus laugh. “You don’t understand. We don’t care if they catch us as long as we destroy all this, make people realize what a sham this is, this thing that kills families for entertainment.”
It was not the time to reason with him. I could have compared the circus to boxing, which I liked, or the war going on in all directions, which I didn’t like.
“Let’s …” I started, and he made a wild lunge toward me, prod out. It went past my neck, and I swung my right arm at Paul’s face. My fist was weak and backhanded, but I had forgotten the severed handcuff that was still on my wrist. It hit him in the face. The prod dropped from his hand, seared through the top of the tent, and plunged down into the sudden light. I looked down to watch it bounce off the side of the ring and send a prancing white horse leaping in fear. I could see crowd faces looking up in our direction.
Paul wasn’t ready to give up. It was clear to me that he planned never to give up. He dug his fingers into the canvas and came back at me. I kept one hand on the flag, which flapped in my face, and tried to ward him off with my manacled hand.
“You’ll kill both of us,” I said reasonably.
Paul was still not listening. He lumbered forward and clamped his arms around my waist. I pounded at his head with my handcuff. He squeezed and tried to pry me loose from my perch. His arms were powerful, and I could feel my head going light. It was no time to meet Koko, plunging into unconsciousness. I’d never come out of the inkwell this time. I pounded at Paul’s head and yellow face as if at a bent nail refusing to go into hard wood.
I was getting nowhere one-handed. It was time to do something. I let go of the flag and threw a left into Paul’s neck. He groaned and let go for an instant. When he did, I kicked him in the chest and he tumbled backward, clutching at canvas. I grabbed the flagpole again as I felt myself starting to slide away.
Paul’s right leg was through the hole he had burned in the top of the tent. He was dangling, grabbing for the tearing canvas. We locked wrists and hands, and I held on, feeling the tear in the tent widen with Paul’s weight against it.
“You hear?” he said, dangling and looking up at me with that split yellow face. “They’re enjoying it. They’re waiting for us to fall so they can tell their aunts and sisters how they paid a few cents to see someone die.”
“We’ll disappoint them,” I said, trying to pull Paul up but feeling his weight increase with each slight tear of canvas and the perspiration of both our hands.
“No, we won’t,” he said. “You’ll never be able to pull me up. But I’ll be able to pull you down. We’ll give them a show. We’ll land right in the center ring laughing at them, you and I, two clowns of hell.”
He was right. My grip on the flag was giving way, and he was holding me in a death grip.
“Swing up,” I said. “Swing up, damn you, you lunatic.”
“Join me,” he said, looking down at the stunned crowd below. He bounced up and down, laughing. The socket of my left arm went sore and numb, and I let go of the flag, but we didn’t plunge through the hole. We slid forward, and Paul, convinced that I was following him into the bright air of the big top, let go of my hand. My leg hooked onto the rope holding the flag, and my head and shoulders went through the hole. I watched Paul, dressed all in green, spin over and over and land with a thud in the silence. It was all upside down and slow, and I felt sleepy. I hung for a second or two and realized that there was still silence, a silence of people expecting me to come plunging through the hole. I disappointed them, eased my way back up to the outside with my good hand, and sat for a long time clinging to the flag. The trip down was slow. My arm was sore, my back was sore again, and the chance of slipping in the wind great, but no one was chasing me with an elephant prod. I waved at the moon, and maybe he waved back.
I made it to the point where I had leaped from the wagon to the tent but didn’t have it in me to make the leap back. I hung down by one good arm and dropped to the ground.
There was still a lot to do. No one had heard Paul confess. As far as Nelson was concerned, I was still a killer. He might have some trouble figuring out why Paul was dressed like that and what he was doing on top of the tent, but that wouldn’t stop him. No, I had to give him a wrapped killer if I was going to get out of this, and luckily, there was still a killer left. Paul hadn’t confirmed much, but he had confirmed something about the second killer. My only fear was that there might be three killers or four or five. How many members of Paul’s family had survived that plunge from the high wire? I was pretty sure of one, but it was getting to the point where I would have to gather the suspects.