But it wasn't going to be easy.
Besides, the fact of the matter was that Luther was magnificent. He appeared to be about six feet, a hundred and seventy or eighty pounds, all muscle. He had firm, sculpted features, a shaved bullet head, strong chin and mouth, glacial blue eyes that glinted in the yellow spotlight that was tightly focused on him as he passed in front of and above us on his mount's journey around the sawdust track. The man exuded charisma and control. I strongly doubted that the "world's greatest animal trainer" was a man I'd never heard of, performing in a third-tier road show, but I suspected he was certainly good, and maybe more than just good. Any successful animal act is a partnership, a collaboration, between beasts and trainer, and it takes a special kind of person, with a very special gift; watching Luther balanced atop Curly's head, I suspected he had it.
It didn't surprise me that Mabel wasn't in the Grand Procession. By default, I had become Mabel's "mahout" when she was a very sick baby, after Phil had bought her from a carnival owner who had mistreated her-and I had never, in the years I'd cared for, fed, and worked with her, felt sufficiently confident of her good behavior to take her out with the other animals at the beginning of the show. It appeared Luther had the same misgivings. Mabel was an African elephant, not Asian, and the difference can be described as relatively the same as between a pit bull and a spaniel. About the only things they have in common are color and those incredibly versatile appendages called trunks, living columns of flesh comprised of more than a hundred thousand muscles that can hold more than two gallons of water. From a scientific viewpoint, taxonomists do not even consider the two species closely related, although they obviously evolved from the same ancestor. African elephants, distinguished from Asians by their larger, floppier ears, are also bigger in overall size. In the African species, both sexes have tusks. The last time I saw Mabel, her tusks measured eight feet and had been permanently capped with stainless-steel hemispheres bolted to the ivory. African elephants are highly intelligent and-when they are in a cooperative mood-can be taught to do some amazing tricks. The problem is that you can never predict when an African elephant is going to feel in a cooperative mood; a misjudgment can get you killed. Africans are rarely trainable, always unpredictable, and potentially dangerous.
Both species are long-lived-the record, in captivity, being an eighty-six-year-old Asian elephant in Ceylon which was used to carry the sacred tooth of Buddha on ceremonial occasions. After twenty years, I thought, Mabel and I were growing old together, but-the stories about elephants having exceptionally long memories notwithstanding-I doubted very much that she would remember me. The reason I knew she was still alive and with the circus was the fact that the program listed a special act featuring the "monster elephant." That would be Mabel; even more than most Africans, Mabel had always been a prima donna. I was most curious to see just what Luther was coaxing her to do to earn her considerable keep-besides using her as a living crane to raise and lower the Big Top, which she'd always enjoyed doing anyway.
The elephants looked well cared for, as did the six horses that followed diem in the processional. The program listed a bear act and, of course, Bengal tigers; these animals would have to be well taken care of, or they simply wouldn't perform. It also meant World Circus had a good veterinarian traveling with them, not one that existed only on paper, as was the case with so many third-tier road shows and carnivals. The healthy look of the animals, and the generally robust feel of the operation, could mean that the owner really cared about his or her acquisition, which could make my mission that much more difficult.
The show started off with an equestrian act. Harper's friends in Palmetto Grove had mentioned the quality of the performers, and now I could see what they meant. The horses, all white bays, were expertly trained, the performers who jumped on and off their backs and raced with them around the ring, daring and skilled. This, I thought, was a circus in the European and Russian tradition-one ring instead of three, but with acts that deserved and got undivided attention to what was happening in that one ring.
Incredibly, every act that followed seemed even better than the one that preceded it-bears, jugglers, dogs, tumblers, aerialists. If anything, I thought, they were almost too good to be performing in a relatively small road show like World Circus, virtually unheralded, traveling in broken-down campers and semis over bumpy roads, going from one rural town to another. All of these performers could be with Ringling Brothers, Cole, or Beatty-the big boys-traveling in much greater comfort and presumably making more money, perhaps working fewer hours.
It was true that I'd stayed with Statler Brothers Circus even after receiving far better offers, but I'd stayed out of a sense of loyalty to Phil Statler. It was difficult for me to believe that all of the fine performers I was watching remained with World Circus out of loyalty to an owner who was, if the ticket taker could be believed, an absentee landlord. Then there was the question of where these people had come from, where they had learned and polished their skills. The world of the circus is a small one and should have included the performers in World Circus; word of exceptional talent spreads from show to show, people move from show to show, get to know each other, hang out in the same bars, vacation in the same places, or-especially in the case of freaks- retire to towns like Palmetto Grove in order to avoid the stares of the curious or simply to have neighbors with whom to relive old memories. None of Harper's friends had purported to know any of the World Circus performers or to have heard of them previously; it was almost as if World Circus had hired its people from another planet. I found it all quite curious and knew it was something I was going to have to try to look into; if our budding corporation was to make a successful bid to buy the circus, I would have to know the details of the operation, including the terms of the contracts held by all the performers.
Harper nudged me. I glanced at her, then looked in the direction where she was pointing, at a spot high up in the bleacher section to our right. I could see nothing but darkness.
"What is it?"
"It's a who. Your admirer, Dr. Button. Wait until the lights pass over that area again."
I waited. An animal act was in progress, with spotlights anchored at ground level sweeping back and forth across a woman and her dogs, and incidentally illuminating various groups in the audience. Suddenly a cone of white light swept across the top of the bleacher section where Harper had been pointing and I could indeed see Nate Button in the very top row, still breathing with his mouth open and still wearing his khaki safari jacket. However, he wasn't watching the action in the ring; he was staring off into space, absently tapping the right side of his head with a rolled-up piece of paper that was the same color as the handbills we had seen announcing the schedule of the circus for the next six weeks. I started to wave to him, but then the light passed, and he was once again lost to sight.
"He's come a long way for a little excitement," I said. "It must be better than four hundred miles from Lambeaux to here."
Harper shrugged. "Who can resist a circus?"
After the dogs came a trapeze act, and then a company of clowns took over, working the sawdust track and the aisles as a gang of roustabouts proceeded to throw up a huge, double-walled steel cage that would contain the Bengal tigers listed as the next act in the program. The double-walled cage was the same one Phil had used, but it now had a curious modification: an extra set of doors had been cut into the enclosure, and they extended all the way to the top of the cage, twenty-five feet in the air. I wondered what they were for.