“What was that all about?” I asked as he led the way across the field.
“Sorry, Mr. Peters,” he whispered. “I don’t know if what I think is happening is happening, and I’m not putting my neck out till I know.” As we walked, stepping around shadows and footprints of mud, he told me about the circus.
The Rose and Elder Circus was a thin idea held together by favors, hope, and a few dollars from the hardware empire of Joshua R. Rosenbaum, the Rose and the angel. His investment was on the verge of nightmare, which is somewhere between Palm Springs and Mirador. It was an after-the-season show put together from acts, crew, and equipment rented from the big shows that had ended their seasons. Rose and Elder’s biggest attractions were Kelly the clown and Gargantua the gorilla from Ringling. Kelly had gone along for the one-month run as a favor to Elder, an old friend.
The show was a patchwork of acts on the way up and on the way down, grifters and grafters, refugees and runaways. The doctor for the show was over eighty, some of the acts couldn’t speak English, and about half of the crew had never seen a circus before.
In spite of this, Elder, whose idea the whole thing was, had managed to put on a circus, three rings, popcorn, peanuts, elephants, and sideshows. He had a dozen trailers, seven trucks, and fifteen railroad cars.
“In here,” Kelly said, pointing the way with his lantern, and in I went.
The elephant lay in a corner, and we simply looked at him in silence for a few minutes.
“What makes you think someone killed him?” I said.
“Her; this bull’s a female,” he said.
“Bull?”
“All elephants are called bulls in the circus,” he explained. “She was a good one. Two years ago, ten Ringling elephants died of arsenic poisoning in Atlanta. Police said it was an accident. Last year, there was a fire in the elephant tent when we were in Kansas. Lost another dozen.”
“But …” I tried.
“Look,” he said and walked behind the dead animal where he lifted a piece of canvas. I followed him and found myself looking into a gray dead eye of the elephant. It was hard to force my eyes away to the sight under the canvas.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Wires, rigging for tent lights. All attached to that pole where this bull was tied with a metal chain. Someone just touched the two wires together, and she went down. I was in here when it happened, and I saw a little spark. So I went over when they called the doc. Someone had gotten to the pole and pulled the wire off. Must have seen me coming and backed off before they could hide it. I couldn’t prove anything, so I just shut up when the doc said the elephant had a heart attack.”
I looked down at the mass of wire, which meant nothing to me, and then at the man who held the lantern.
“It’s more than the elephants,” I said.
“More than the elephants,” he said. “Whoever did this saw me coming to check the wires. I think they know I’m thinking more than they want me to think. Truck went wild yesterday, almost ran me down. Driver was off having a sandwich when it happened. It might have been an accident.”
“OK, but why would anyone want to kill the elephants?” I asked, keeping my eyes from those of the bull behind me.
“We’ve got maybe forty elephants in this circus,” he said, the lantern light sending shadows to his face that suggested the face of a clown or a skull. “An elephant normally costs fifty thousand dollars. Something like that. Kill off the elephants and you haven’t got much of a circus. Damn, you can’t even replace elephants with the war on.”
We both looked at the dead elephant for a few more seconds and headed toward the entrance to the tent.
“What do they do with a dead elephant?” I said.
“Don’t know,” sighed Kelly, stepping into the night. “Don’t want to know. What I want to know is who is trying to ruin this circus and maybe kill me.”
“In reverse order,” I said.
“Together,” he corrected. “It’s too late to meet people. You can start in the morning. What can you do?”
He stopped and looked at me.
“I can start asking questions and try to find someone with a motive for trying to …”
“No, I mean what can you do that would fit in a circus?”
I thought about it for a minute. I could fire a pistol, but not very well. I could take a punch but had already taken too many of them. I … “Nothing I can think of,” I said.
“I’ll think of something in the morning,” Kelly said. “Don’t talk in front of Tiny. Tiny’s a good enough guy, not a bad clown, but he’s a talker. I’ll get you some cherry pie when we get up.”
“Cherry pie?” I said, following him up the stairs of the train car.
“Circus for easy work,” he said.
“Right,” I said, following him up the three metal steps.
Our footsteps clanged across the field and echoed back at us from the nearby railroad cars. Kelly stopped at the top and looked back.
“I like it at night like this,” he said. “You look out and know what’s under those tents and in those wagons, and you can’t believe that tomorrow it’s all gonna be moving and that you’re going to be out in front of thousands of people, well, maybe hundreds. It’s like another world you know is there and can’t believe will come out.” He shrugged and stepped into the railroad car.
Tiny was still there. There was an extra mattress in the wagon. Kelly wanted to sleep on it, but I told him a hard mattress on the floor was good for my bad back.
The two clowns played rummy under a small, yellow-bulbed lamp, and I took off my jacket and shirt, scratched my stomach and felt my stubbly face. Kelly told me where to find soap, water, and a towel. It had been a light day. I had done some driving, laid out a drunk in a tavern, met a clown or two, and examined a murdered elephant. I expected the days to get busier and was bothered by the fact that I felt tired. Somewhere in my battered suitcase back in my battered car was a toothbrush whose bristles sagged like a forgotten Christmas tree and a can of Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder that would have done me no harm, but I wasn’t up to it. I lay back on the mattress with my arms under the thin pillow and looked at the wooden ceiling. Tiny asked me a question, which I answered with a lie before I fell asleep.
Dreams, I’ve discovered, come in threes. I can usually remember the first two, and I always feel that it is the third one, the one I can’t remember, that will really tell me something. In my first dream, I was wandering through the streets of Cincinnati. Everything was red, bright red, not the red of blood but the red of good-smelling new bricks. Even the cars were red. As usual in my dreams, there were no people in Cincinnati but me. I walked into a row house and closed the door behind me, suddenly scared, not of what was inside, but of something outside. Then someone or something knocked at the door. I didn’t want to open it. I knew what was on the other side. A clown would be on the other side. Not my old friend Koko, but a six-foot clown with a grinning face. Who needs a clown at your door? Nothing’s funny about a clown.
“Who’s there?” I said, holding one foot against the door.
“I have a message,” came the high voice from the other side of the door.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to make it sound tough.
“Life is a circus,” came the high voice.
“A circus?”
“Yes,” he said. “Usually that means living is fun. But a circus is hard work, blisters to make a few minutes look funny, dangerous, or interesting.”
“Then life is a circus?” I asked, looking around for someplace to hide.
He didn’t answer. I knew he was looking for another way in.
In my nightmare I told myself I was having a nightmare, but that didn’t make it better. I told myself to wake up, but I couldn’t. I think I whimpered, and then I was in another dream, a dream I’d rather not talk about. Then the third dream I can’t remember. But when I was safely in dream number three, I found myself back in Cincinnati, back in the house with the door. “Wait,” I said or thought, “this isn’t fair.”
