They shrug, mumble, and avert their gazes.
“Useless sons of bitches. Why do I even keep you? Okay, you—” He points his cane at me. “You’re on. Fix this horse. Nine bucks a week. You answer to August. Lose this horse and you’re out of here. In fact, first hint of trouble and you’re out of here.” He steps forward to Marlena and pats her shoulder. “There, there, my dear,” he says kindly. “Don’t fret. Jacob here will take good care of him. August, go get this little girl some breakfast, will you? We have to hit the road.”
August’s head jerks around. “What do you mean, ‘hit the road’?”
“We’re tearing down,” says Uncle Al, gesturing vaguely. “Moving along.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We just got here. We’re still setting up!”
“Change of plans, August. Change of plans.”
Uncle Al and his followers walk away. August stares after them, his mouth open wide.
RUMORS ABOUND IN THE COOKHOUSE.
In front of the hash browns:
“Carson Brothers got caught short-changing a few weeks ago. Burned the territory.”
“Ha,” snorts someone else. “That’s usually our job.
” In front of the scrambled eggs:
“They heard we was carrying booze. There’s gonna be a raid.”
“There’s gonna be a raid, all right,” comes the reply. “But it’s on account of the cooch tent, not the booze.”
In front of the oatmeaclass="underline"
“Uncle Al stiffed the sheriff on the lot fee last year. Cops say we got two hours before they run us out.”
Ezra is slouched in the same position as yesterday, his arms crossed and his chin pressed into his chest. He pays me no attention whatever.
“Whoa there, big fella,” says August as I head for the canvas divider. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the other side.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “You’re the show’s vet. Come with me. Although I must say, I’m tempted to send you over there just to find out what they’re saying.”
I follow August and Marlena to one of the nicely dressed tables. Kinko sits a few tables over, with three other dwarves and Queenie at his feet. She looks up hopefully, her tongue lolling off to the side. Kinko ignores her and everyone else at his table. He stares straight at me, his jaw moving grimly from side to side.
“Eat, darling,” says August, pushing a bowl of sugar toward Marlena’s porridge. “There’s no point fretting. We’ve got a bona fide veterinarian here.”
I open my mouth to protest, then shut it again.
A petite blonde approaches. “Marlena! Sweetie! You’ll never guess what I heard!”
“Hi, Lottie,” says Marlena. “I have no idea. What’s up?”
Lottie slides in beside Marlena and talks nonstop, almost without pausing for breath. She’s an aerialist and she got the straight scoop from a good authority—her spotter heard Uncle Al and the advance man exchanging heated words outside the big top. Before long a crowd surrounds our table, and between Lottie and the tidbits tossed out by her audience, I hear what amounts to a crash course on the history of Alan J. Bunkel and the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.
Uncle Al is a buzzard, a vulture, an eater of carrion. Fifteen years ago he was the manager of a mud show: a ragtag group of pellagra-riddled performers dragged from town to town by miserable thrush-hoofed horses.
In August of 1928, through no fault of Wall Street, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth collapsed. They simply ran out of money and couldn’t make the jump to the next town, never mind back to winter quarters. The general manager caught a train out of town and left everything behind—people, equipment, and animals.
Uncle Al had the good fortune to be in the vicinity and was able to score a sleeping car and two flats for a song from railroad officials desperate to free up their siding. Those two flats easily held his few decrepit wagons, and because the train cars were already emblazoned with BENZINI BROS MOST SPECTACULAR SHOW ON EARTH, Alan Bunkel retained the name and officially joined the ranks of train circuses.
When the Crash came, larger circuses started going down and Uncle Al could hardly believe his luck. It started with the Gentry Brothers and Buck Jones in 1929. The next year saw the end of the Cole Brothers, the Christy Brothers, and the mighty John Robinson. And every time a show closed, there was Uncle Al, sopping up the remains: a few train cars, a handful of stranded performers, a tiger, or a camel. He had scouts everywhere—the moment a larger circus showed signs of trouble, Uncle Al would get a telegram and race to the scene.
He grew fat off their carcasses. In Minneapolis, he picked up six parade wagons and a toothless lion. In Ohio, a sword swallower and a flat car. In Des Moines, a dressing tent, a hippopotamus and matching wagon, and the Lovely Lucinda. In Portland, eighteen draft horses, two zebras, and a smithy. In Seattle, two bunk cars and a bona fide freak—a bearded lady—and this made him happy, for what Uncle Al craves above all else, what Uncle Al dreams of at night, are freaks. Not made freaks: not men covered head to toe in tattoos, not women who regurgitate wallets and lightbulbs on command, not moss-haired girls or men who pound stakes into their sinus cavities. Uncle Al craves real freaks. Born freaks. And that is the reason for our detour to Joliet.
The Fox Brothers Circus has just collapsed, and Uncle Al is ecstatic because they employed the world-famous Charles Mansfield-Livingston, a handsome, dapper man with a parasitic twin growing out of his chest. He calls it Chaz. It looks like an infant with its head buried in his ribcage. He dresses it in miniature suits, with black patent shoes on its feet, and when Charles walks, he holds its little hands in his. Rumor has it that Chaz’s tiny penis even gets erections.
Uncle Al is desperate to get there before someone else snaps him up. And so, despite the fact that our posters are all over Saratoga Springs; despite the fact that it was supposed to be a two-day stop and we’ve just had 2,200 loaves of bread, 116 pounds of butter, 360 dozen eggs, 1,570 pounds of meat, 11 cases of sauerkraut, 105 pounds of sugar, 24 crates of oranges, 52 pounds of lard, 1,200 pounds of vegetables, and 212 cans of coffee delivered to the lot; despite the tons of hay and turnips and beets and other food for the animals that is piled out back of the menagerie tent; despite the hundreds of townspeople gathered at the edge of the lot right now, first in excitement, and then in bewilderment, and now in fast-growing anger; despite all this, we are tearing down and moving out.
The cook is apoplectic. The advance man is threatening to quit. The boss hostler is furious, whacking the beleaguered men of the Flying Squadron with flagrant abandon.
Everyone here has been down this route before. Mostly they’re worried they won’t be fed enough during the three-day journey to Joliet. The cookhouse crew are doing their best, scrabbling to haul as much food as they can back to the main train and promising to hand out dukeys—apparently some kind of boxed meal—at the first opportunity.
WHEN AUGUST LEARNS we have a three-day jump in front of us, he lets loose a string of curses, then strides back and forth, damning Uncle Al to hell and barking orders at the rest of us. While we haul food for the animals back to the train, August goes off to try to persuade—and if necessary, to bribe—the cookhouse steward into parting with some of the food meant for humans.
Diamond Joe and I carry buckets of offal from behind the menagerie to the main train. It’s from the local stockyards, and is repulsive—smelly, bloody, and charred. We put the buckets just inside the entrance of the stock cars. The inhabitants—camels, zebras, and other hay burners—kick and fuss and make all manner of protest, but they are going to have to travel with the meat because there is no other place to put it. The big cats travel on top of the flat cars in parade dens.