so it goes, ten inches at a time. I stop occasionally to gauge my progress. It’s slow but steady. The magenta and white tent is a little bigger each time I look up.
It takes me half an hour and I have to stop twice, but I’m practically there and already feeling the thrill of victory. I’m huffing a little, but my legs are still steady. There was that one woman I thought might make trouble, but I managed to get rid of her. I’m not proud of it—I don’t normally speak to people in that manner, and especially women—but damned if I was going to let some busybody do-gooder foil my outing. I’m not setting foot in that facility again until I’ve seen what’s left of the show, and woe to the person who tries to make me. Even if the nurses catch up with me right now, I’ll make a scene. I’ll make noise. I’ll embarrass them in public and make them fetch Rosemary. When she realizes how determined I am, she’ll take me to the show. Even if she misses the rest of her shift, she’ll take me—it is her last shift, after all.
Oh Lord. How am I going to survive that place when she’s gone? The remembrance of her imminent departure wracks my old body with grief, but it’s quickly displaced by joy—I am now close enough to hear the music thumping from the big top. Oh, the sweet, sweet sound of circus music. I lodge my tongue in the corner of my mouth and hurry. I’m almost there now. Just a few yards farther—
“Yo, Gramps. Where do you think you’re going?”
I stop, startled. I look up. A kid sits behind the ticket wicket, his face framed by bags of pink and blue cotton candy. Flashing toys blink from the glass counter under his arms. There’s a ring through his eyebrow, a stud through his bottom lip, a large tattoo on each shoulder. His hands are tipped with black nails.
“Where does it look like I’m going?” I say querulously. I don’t have time for this. I’ve missed enough of the show as it is.
“Tickets are twelve bucks.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Then you can’t go in.”
I am flabbergasted, still struggling for words when a man comes up beside me. He’s older, clean-shaven, well dressed. The manager, I’m willing to bet.
“What’s going on here, Russ?”
The kid jerks his thumb at me. “I caught this old guy trying to sneak in.”
“Sneak!” I exclaim in righteous indignation.
The man takes one look at me and turns back to the kid. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
Russ scowls and looks down.
The manager stands in front of me, smiling graciously. “Sir, I’d be happy to show you in. Would it be easier if you had a wheelchair? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about finding you a good seat.”
“That would be nice. Thank you,” I say, ready to weep with relief. My altercation with Russ left me shaking— the idea that I could make it this far only to be turned away by a teenager with a pierced lip was horrifying. But all is okay. Not only have I made it, but I think maybe I’m going to get a ringside seat.
The manager goes around the side of the big top and returns with a standard hospital-issue wheelchair. I let him help me into it and then relax my aching muscles as he pushes me toward the entrance.
“Don’t mind Russ,” he says. “He’s a good kid underneath all those holes, although it’s a wonder he doesn’t spring a leak when he drinks.”
“In my day they put the old fellows in the ticket booth. Kind of the end of the road.”
“You were on a show?” the man asks. “Which one?”
“I was on two. The first was the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth,” I say proudly, rolling each syllable off my tongue. “The second was Ringling.”
The chair stops. The man’s face suddenly appears in front of mine. “You were with the Benzini Brothers? What years?”
“The summer of 1931.”
“You were there for the stampede?”
“Sure was!” I exclaim. “Hell, I was in the thick of it. In the menagerie itself. I was the show’s vet.”
He stares at me, incredulous. “I don’t believe this! After the Hartford fire and Hagenbeck-Wallace wreck, that’s probably the most famous circus disaster of all time.”
“It was something, all right. I remember it like yesterday. Hell, I remember it
The man blinks and sticks his hand out. “Charlie O’Brien the third.”
“Jacob Jankowski,” I say, taking his hand. “The first.”
Charlie O’Brien stares at me for a very long time, his hand spread on his chest as though he were pledging an oath. “Mr. Jankowski, I’m going to get you into the show now before there’s nothing left to see, but it would be an honor and a privilege if you would join me for a drink in my trailer after the show. You’re a living piece of history, and I’d surely love to hear about that collapse firsthand. I’d be happy to see you home afterward.”
“I’d be delighted,” I say.
He snaps to, and moves around to the back of the chair. “All righty then. I hope you enjoy our show.”
An honor and a privilege.
I smile serenely as he wheels me right up to the ring curb.
It’s after the show—a damn good show, too, although not of the magnitude of either the Benzini Brothers or Ringling, but how could it be? For that you need a train.
I’m sitting at a Formica table in the back of an impressively appointed RV sipping an equally impressive single malt—Laphroaig, if I’m not mistaken—and singing like a canary. I tell Charlie everything: about my parents, my affair with Marlena, and the deaths of Camel and Walter. I tell him about crawling across the train in the night with a knife in my teeth and murder on my mind. I tell him about the redlighted men, and the stampede, and about Uncle Al being strangled. And finally I tell him what Rosie did. I don’t even think about it. I just open my mouth and the words tumble out.
The relief is instant and palpable. All these years it’s been pent up inside me. I thought I’d feel guilty, like I betrayed her, but what I feel—particularly in light of Charlie’s sympathetic nodding—is more like absolution. Redemption, even.
I was never entirely sure whether Marlena knew—there was so much going on in the menagerie at that moment that I have no idea what she saw, and I never brought it up. I couldn’t, because I couldn’t risk changing how she felt about Rosie—or, if it comes right down to it, how she felt about me. Rosie may have been the one who killed August, but I also wanted him dead.
At first, I stayed silent to protect Rosie—and there was no question she needed protecting, in those days elephant executions were not uncommon—but there was never any excuse for keeping it from Marlena. Even if it caused her to harden toward Rosie, she’d never have caused her harm. In the entire history of our marriage, it was the only secret I kept from her, and eventually it became impossible to fix. With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.
Having heard my story, Charlie looks not in the least bit shocked or judgmental, and my relief is so great that when I finish telling him about the stampede, I keep going. I tell him about our years with Ringling and how we left after the birth of our third child. Marlena had simply had enough of being on the road—kind of a nesting thing, I figure—and besides, Rosie was getting on in years. Fortunately, the staff veterinarian at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago chose that spring to drop dead, and I was a shoo-in—not only did I have seven years of experience with exotics and a damned good degree, but I also came with an elephant.
We bought a rural property far enough from the zoo that we could keep the horses but close enough that the drive to work wasn’t that bad. The horses more or less retired, although Marlena and the kids still rode them occasionally. They grew fat and happy—the horses, not the children, or Marlena for that matter. Bobo came with us, of course. He got into more trouble over the years than all the kids put together, but we loved him just the same.
Those were the salad days, the halcyon years! The sleepless nights, the wailing babies; the days the interior of the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane; the times I had five kids, a chimpanzee, and a wife in bed with fever. Even when the fourth glass of milk got spilled in a single night, or the shrill screeching threatened to
