“No, Harry. I’m unloading my Owen stock and I’m buying a concession. The man who owns it wants to get off the road. He says I can make out. He’ll go along for the first month and get me going right. He’s got arthritis.”
“Have you lost your mind!”
“I’m just going into business for myself.”
He jumped up and began to pace. “What a business! Why don’t you get into buggy whips? How about the big new field that’s opening up making hoops for hoop skirts, kiddo? Circuses are in trouble! Haven’t you heard?”
I’d had no intention of explaining it all to him. But he was very agitated and, according to his own lights, he’d been fair to me. “That’s why I’m doing this, Harry.”
He sat down heavily and stared at me. “You’re suicidal. You need help.” “Harry, listen to me. Two years from now, five years from now or ten years from now, could I make a good living as a salesman?”
“Yes. Any time. When you go broke, come back here.”
“Harry, there is an old circus clan named Markava. They’ve been performers for generations. Now they have a twenty-year-old girl who might turn out to be the best they’ve ever had. But she has come along at the end of an era. The whole clan is proud of her. They want her to have the best possible life. Suppose she married another performer, and in three or four years there’s no more circus left. They’d be untrained for anything else. It might become a mean and squalid life for her, Harry.”
“What’s this got to do with you?”
“They’re a practical clan. They’ve been thinking about hedging their beautiful bet by finding her a civilian. She’d have no part of it until I happened along.”
“And she fell madly in love with you?” Harry said with great sarcasm.
“They’re practical people. She seems to like me. They have the old-world idea that you arrange a practical marriage, and then you fall in love afterward. I jumped the gun on that theory.”
He shook his head sadly. “A circus girl! Holy Maroney! When does the marriage get arranged anyhow?”
“We’ll go on the road. They’ve got to know if I can take that kind of a life. Some people can’t. If I can — and I can handle the concession — then we’ll get married, and they’ll set us up with our own deal, one of those house-trailer layouts on a flat-bed truck. It’s a truck show.”
“Very romantic,” he said. “Say, have you thought of this? If she’s real beautiful, it would be a slick way for them to unload sick concessions on suckers like you, Paul.”
“I thought of that. Maybe they’re all kidding me. I don’t think so.”
“You’ve got wonderful promise, Paul, and I hate to see you do this to your life. If the circuses don’t all fold, then you’re stuck in a nickle-dime operation all your life.”
I couldn’t avoid a smile of contentment. “With no quotas, no sales meetings and no expense accounts.”
“O.K., so what if it goes the other way? You get back into harness, and you’ve got a wife who won’t do you much good in a business-contact way.”
“Harry, she has absolutely no interest in functional kitchens, gracious living or social standings. She says that if it turns out that way, she wants to raise horses and kids.”
Harry had to make one last sly try. “Don’t those circus people have a kind of a loose moral way of living, boy?”
“I’ve spent three weeks with them, Harry. I’ve been learning all about one of the lost arts. It’s called self-respect.”
He found a man, and I broke him in, drew my final check and went back to Sarasota with all my worldly goods. The tempo of work was increasing. Wan was up to a comfortable three out of five on the triple. They never had any trouble thinking of things I could do.
One day, a week before we left, I was out behind the house on a chilly afternoon, all by myself, unbolting rows of folding seats, painting them and repairing them, bolting them back together and stenciling the numbers back on.
I didn’t know Wan was behind me until I heard her abrupt laugh. I stood up, straightening a weary back, and said, “What’s so hilarious?”
She sat on a stack of seats and looked blandly at me. “I was thinking that we never had such a rich man working for us.”
I put one foot up on the seats and looked down at her upturned face. “Does it give you a sense of power, Miss Markava?”
“I don’t think I like that, Paulfox. Anything we do, it is because we are willing to do it. Because the reasons are good, don’t you think?”
“I’m sorry. The reasons are very good. But… I don’t want you to feel trapped into anything.”
“How do you mean?”
“We have an arrangement. But if any time you should want to get out of it—”
I was stopped by the expression on her face. It had turned into a stubborn mask of contempt, her eyes narrow, dangerous and oddly Oriental.
“So sweet,” she purred. “So unselfish you are. So honorable. All I have to do is change my mind, eh, and you give me a nice little hurt smile and then perhaps we can shake hands or something like that?”
Never have I felt such a quick hot bursting of rage within myself. Forgetting that even after all my manual labor she could very probably toss me up into a pine tree, I snatched her wrist and yanked her up onto her feet and dug my hands into her shoulders and shook her until her face blurred.
“You can’t get out of it!” I yelled at her. “You made a deal! I sat up all one night yelling at all your weird relatives and drinking that plum brandy, and we made the arrangement, see? So don’t even think of trying to get out of it!”
I was suddenly aware of her complete lack of resistance. I let go of her. She looked up at me with an odd half-smile, docile, respectful, but with a kind of pride and gladness showing through. “O.K., Paul,” she said. “O.K., sweetie.”
I finished the folding seats in the late afternoon and went back to where they were practicing. I sat cross-legged on top of a gear box. Jenny brought me a cold beer. I lit my second cigarette of the day. I felt like a king as I watched her up there, my sweet sailing lady, my flying woman poised against the blue, blue sky, way up in the middle of the air.
