Hibbler nodded, slowly at first, but then with more determination. “I could work with that flea,” he said. “It would be easy.”
“I’ll have the clowns collect as many as they can from the carcass of this worthless pile before I have it burned.”
There came a day in early spring when the caravan finally lurched forward toward the rising sun. To be moving, to be caught up in a day’s work, I found preferable to the purgatory of wintering. After the Dust Demon had been burned down to its bones and Ichbon had retrieved the skull and claws, the aroma lingered in camp till the day we departed. Despite the dust storms, everyone breathed easier on the plains out of reach of the tentacles of that stench.
I brushed up on my act, which beside cheap tricks like inhaling a cigarette with one mouth and expelling the smoke out the other, took the form of an argument with myself. The Maestro always warned me, “Don’t leave the audience for too long with your other face. It’s too strange, too hungry. When it licks its lips, the customers walk away.” I’d only viewed my other face once, in a room of mirrors, but the sight of me struck me unconscious on the spot. I was left with amnesia of the incident, unable to picture me. Whenever I tried, the hair would rise on the backs of my arms and the saliva would leave my mouth. I rewrote the script of the argument so that my other face had half as much dialogue. It meant fewer times I would have to turn completely around to answer myself, and that was fine with me as the act was exhausting.
The Maestro was right: the crowds that March were so dejected, they pretended we were good. By the time we made it to Muskogee, Professor Dunce had shed his graduation gown for a tuxedo and top hat and been reborn as Hibbler, Master of Minions. He sat with me and the Maestro and Maybell one evening. We passed the smoke and the bottle and he explained, “These are no ordinary fleas. They’re disproportionately large with enormous heads. I can see their eyes watching for my commands. Under the jeweler’s loupe I have discovered they don’t have insect limbs, insignificant sticks, but muscular arms and legs with feet and hand-like grippers.”
“But will they perform?” asked Ichbon, taking a toke.
“I daresay they’re smarter than dogs,” said Hibbler. “I don’t even have to bind them and they willingly perform the feats I require.”
“They feed on your blood?” asked the Rubber Lady.
“They don’t touch me. When I doze off at night, they leave the trailer and go hunting. I think they must be into the animals, but I knew it was right to let them find their own diet. How much could they take? There are only six of them.”
“The peacock is looking a little peaked,” said Ichbon.
“When we open in Muskogee and you see the act and the money it brings, you won’t care if they’re feasting on your balls, Maestro.”
“There’s a lady present,” said the face at the back of my head.
I saw the first show of the new flea circus, and Hibbler’s Minions was the hit the old man had promised. Every night after the first, it was packed for his performance in the back left corner of the tent. The crowd could readily see the fleas and were astonished at what they’d been trained to do. Incredible lifting, pulling, acrobatics, tightrope walking, leaping, and all without a harness, all initiated by voice command from Hibbler. Laid out on a board was a three-ring circus, and in each ring a different flea performed a different feat. One lifted a silver cigarette lighter over its head, the next juggled caraway seeds, the third tumbled and leaped high into the air. Above them one crossed on a high wire. All six of them enacted a chariot race with two tiny chariots going around the circumference of the center ring. Word spread far and wide about the minions. And when their act drew to a close the damn things would line up in a row and bow to applause.
Hibbler was back in old form and there was actually a spring in his step. He’d become the star attraction of the Caravan and was relishing it. “I rule them with an iron fist,” he told me. “They know they’d better listen.” But he dismissed me when I mentioned the fact that both the peacock and Brutus, the orangutan, had recently passed on. Both animals were withered and lethargic in their final days.
“Do you really believe that fleas could drain an orangutan of its life? Please, Janus.”
“There are only six,” I admitted.
“There were only six,” he said. “Now there are ten. But still, ten fleas?”
I lost my skepticism for a while in the success of the show. All the acts were doing well, what with the crowd Hibbler drew. Instead of being pleased with the money that flowed in, though, the Maestro seemed anxious. Sometimes he didn’t even wait for nightfall to start on the Old Overholt. “A tenuous thing, a flea,” he was overheard to say. When the Falling Angel asked him what he meant, Ichbon whispered, “It’s not the fleas I’m worried about in that act.” Then the anteater was taken by an acute malaise and in a matter of a week, became depleted and died. It was noted that the creature’s eyes were missing at the discovery of its death. With this my skepticism returned, and I feared the minions were behind it. Mirchland had the same idea, and we discussed it one night, standing under a full moon behind the mess wagon when neither of us could sleep for the phantom itching brought on by our knowledge of what was happening to the menagerie.
“All that’s left is the albino skunk,” he said. “Then what?”
By the next morning, the albino skunk had also gone the way of all splendors, and the Caravan was for the first time since its inception without a menagerie of any sort, save fleas. The burial of the poor creature was pathetic. Everyone was there but no one had anything to say. Finally, Ichbon took his hat off, cleared his throat, and spoke. “I, for one, have no regrets seeing this overgrown rat pass on. It bit me once. In fact, I celebrate the passing of the entire menagerie. Good riddance to the damn beasts. The whole thing was a crime I’ll now wash my hands of.” When he was finished, the fleas dragged a dandelion onto the grave. Hibbler said, “Now say your prayers.” I swear I saw them kneel all in a row and bow their heads. Mirchland looked up at me from the other side of the grave and carefully nodded. Beside me, I noticed the Falling Angel was looking pale, his once-skintight lavender outfit now sagging with wrinkles.
Performers on the circuit agreed, the Falling Angel, Walter Hupsh, had an act so simple it was beautiful. He took a ladder to a platform at the peak of the big top, twenty feet in the air. Then he bent cautiously forward, grimaced, and fell. He was tall and lanky and not well built for it, plummeting like a bird forgetting its gift. Granted, there were two old mattresses buried in the packed dirt beneath the ladder where he hit. They were covered over with sawdust, and the public never knew. But still, with each performance there was an impact. Hupsh was head rattled from a life of falling, that we knew, but a strange lethargy overtook him as we left Tulsa for Wichita. His trips up the ladder had become pathetic, his flights, as he called them, tragic. Mirchland and I kept tabs on him.
One afternoon, out of design, I sat next to him at lunch. “You look tired, Walter,” I said. “Not been sleeping well?”
“I think I busted my ribs,” he said, and a little drool of oatmeal issued from the corner of his lips. “And I got the itches something fierce. I wake up with the itches.”
“Are you being bitten by a bug, maybe?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said and went back to his oatmeal.
In the days that followed, Walter came to rival Jack Sprat for most emaciated, and Sprat challenged the Falling Angel to a duel for sole ownership of the title. Cooler heads prevailed. The Maestro took me aside and said, “The falling guy looks like shit. Reminds me of the peacock.”