Unhappy Hooligan (6 page)

“Yeah,” continued Timken. “They wanted to know if he seemed despondent or anything. As if anybody here could tell if he was or if he wasn’t—he wore his clown make-up all the time he was on the lot, like a kid with a new Davy Crockett cap.”

Rook said cautiously, “I suppose the policemen questioned everybody on the circus lot, and upset the show?”

“Not at all,” said Timken. “The cops didn’t seem to take it very seriously, and they didn’t talk to anybody but me.” He looked sideways. “Don’t
you
go committing suicide, while you’re with us at any rate.”

“I doubt if it’s contagious,” Howie Rook said.

Timken seemed about to say something more, and then evidently thought better of it. “Okay, so you go be a clown,” he conceded. “And have fun. Our people are used to having friends barging in. If there’s anything else I can do for you, you know where I am.”

Rook thanked him and asked what he was supposed to do first.

“You’re to report to Hap Hammett, the dean of our clowns, only he won’t be around Clown Alley till about one o’clock. You might wander around what we call the back yard and get the general feel of the place. Oh, one thing—” He took out a card gaudily emblazoned with red elephants and tigers, then scribbled on the back, “Okay for Mr. Rook to go anywhere on the lot,” and signed it. “That means anywhere except the lion’s cage and the women’s dressing rooms.” It was evidently one of his favorite pleasantries. “Good luck.” The interview was obviously over and Mr. Timken was obviously mystified. Rook would have liked to have told him all, but somehow he felt it unwise to show his hand too early.

And so Howie Rook was thus embarked on the most exciting adventure of his life. He came out of the silver wagon into a choking dust storm, churned up by the myriad wheels of trucks and tractors, the hoofs of beautiful prancing Arabians and of zebras and dromedaries and hippopotamuses—or was it
hippopotami?
He wasn’t sure. Sprinkling wagons were doing their best to lay the dust, and half a hundred men were frantically slinging fresh clean sawdust everywhere, but still the general effect was that of a Vermont snowstorm. Rook ruefully realized that his dark pin stripe and gray Homburg and English shoes were hardly the proper costume, after all. They picked up dust, and they set him apart as a dude. So he took refuge inside the main tent, the massive Big Top. It was quieter here and he could breathe more freely. Already the marvelously complicated grandstand and bleacher trucks, Rube Goldberg contraptions that opened up into tiers of seats and dividing aisles, and had dressing rooms tucked underneath, were being jockeyed into place, walling in the vast oval. In all three rings, acrobats were working; smallish, tense, heavily muscled men and women in practice costume were meticulously adjusting and testing the rigging on which, in a few hours, their lives would depend.

Twice, in his slow promenade around the track—no, he must remember to call it the Hippodrome—he was stopped by guards and had to show his magic card, his open-sesame. The circus, Rook realized, was far from the haphazard, happy-go-lucky world he had imagined. He had made almost a full circle, counterclockwise, and then came at last to a canvas-partitioned addition, a lane where the thirty great elephants, the camels, the giraffes, the hippos, and all the rest of the menagerie stood.

He stood still for a moment, the strong but not entirely unpleasant smells taking him back through the years to a sunnier, happier time. Nor was the wonder gone even now. The elephants waved graceful, snaky trunks at him, hinting at peanuts. On the opposite side in their barred cage the great bears stood on their hind legs and pantomimed for apples, looking about as fierce as stuffed animals in some department-store Christmas window. A lioness with two cubs flicked wary eyes at him, and a magnificent Bengal tiger arose and padded over to the bars on silent paws; it seemed interested and not at all unfriendly. Howie Rook began to realize, as had many others before him, the difference between being one of a gaping crowd of people pouring through a menagerie and being there comparatively alone. The beasts took flattering notice of him; they were interested and curious.

The monkeys, the hyenas, and all the rest of them were more alert and alive than he had ever seen them in the past, whether in circus or zoo. But it was not until the last cage that Howie Rook really fell in love.

Like most love affairs, this one had a stormy beginning. Rook leaned against the guard ropes, perhaps four feet from the bars of the last cage-wagon, and stared delightedly at a small orangutan with carroty hair and a faintly Hibernian expression on its face. The engaging creature sat in the middle of the cage on a pile of straw, wearing an old piece of burlap around its head like a shawl. Somehow it reminded him so much of Chief of Police Parkman that he chuckled.

Mirth between primates is often infectious. The orang leaped high into the air, squealed, and then came over to the bars, cocking its head in a puzzled, questioning manner as if trying to place his face.

“Hi there, fella,” said Rook.

The little ape made sounds vaguely suggestive of speech. They played that game for a while. Then the orang, in sheer ecstasy of spirit, did a couple of turns on the flying rings which none of the acrobats in the show could have accomplished in a thousand years, hurtled itself next into a heap of straw in the corner as if seeking something, paused for a moment by its water bucket and then came back, walking on two feet and the knuckles of one hand.

Rook felt in his pocket. “You like candy mints, fella?” he asked.

He was hardly prepared to have the innocent-appearing creature whip out a toy water pistol, take careful aim, and let him have it right in the face. “Yipes!” Rook gasped. And then at the beatific expression on the apelet’s face, the smug look of a consciousness of duty well done, he suddenly had to bend over in howls of laughter.

“Biddy!” came a feminine voice from behind him. “You should be
ashamed!”
Biddy, obviously unashamed, chattered and skirled and grinned with unholy glee.

When Howie Rook could stop laughing, and had mopped the water from his eyes and face, he turned to see that standing now at his elbow was a girl almost as tall as himself. His first startled impression was that she was in September morn undress, and then he realized that she wore a minimum of skin-tight, flesh-colored Bikini bathing suit.

“Hello,” she said cheerily. “So you’re initiated, huh?”

Howie Rook smiled vaguely, not thinking of anything to say. This burgeoning, raven-haired, young female had the impact of a medium-sized bomb, and he was, for a moment, in a state of shock. In his active newspaper days he had interviewed most of the fabled professional beauties of stage and screen and café society, but he had never run across anyone quite like this. Her body was beyond anything he had ever dreamed of, even back in the days when he dreamed more often along these interesting lines. She reminded him of the exaggerated pin-up girls that Petty and Varga used to draw for
Esquire Magazine;
her features were
too
perfect, like those hewn in marble for the statue of some minor Grecian goddess. She was almost
too
beautiful, as a color can be too bright or candy too sweet. She was overwhelming.

And her smile was like the turning on of a light. “You mustn’t mind Biddy, mister,” she was saying. “The kids used to squirt her through the bars, so her trainer got her a toy pistol and spent all winter teaching her how to use it in self-defense. Only sometimes she gets carried away with the gag. She usually likes to take a shot at anybody who’s all dressed up like you are, because, you see, she’s used to seeing her friends in work clothes. Most of us drop in for a chat with her when it’s quiet. She’s the sweetheart of the circus—aren’t you, Biddy?”

The little orang chattered again and then erupted into a tumult, bounding around her cage, climbing up the bars, and finally doing an encore on the flying-ring stunts with the added handicap of a heavy automobile tire gripped in her toes. Rook felt like applauding, and did. “Does she do all that in the show?”

The girl shook her head. “Biddy hates crowds. She’ll only do her stunts for her friends; when the crowd is in here she usually crawls into a corner and pulls her shawl over her head, showing her bare little behind to them.”

“I have often felt that way about crowds myself,” confessed Rook. “Are you an acrobat, young lady?”

“I do a single trap act,” she corrected. “Billed as Mademoiselle du Mond, born Mary Kelly in Ashtabula. I balance on the high trapeze, center ring, no net. Oh, I go over big—they’re all waiting to see if I’ll fall and break my damn neck.”

“Pssst!” came an interruption from the gap leading into the main arena, where a tanned young man in a dirty sweat shirt and blue jeans was beckoning. “All rigged and ready,” he said. Rook disliked him on sight; he was a Muscle Beach type, right out of the pictures in some physical-culture magazine, with high biceps and a low forehead.

The girl casually waved him away. “Later, Gordo,” she said.
“Blow.”

The man hesitated, scowled, and reluctantly withdrew. “Your partner?” asked Rook.

She laughed. “I told you, I work solo. Gordo’s my mattress—if I miss and drop fifty feet he’s supposed to be there to break my fall. He’s also a nuisance sometimes.” Mary Kelly produced an apple and tossed it to the orang, who fielded it deftly and then happily retired to her corner with it. The girl turned to Rook. “How come you’re here?” she asked. “Friend of the management or something?”

“You could say that. I—I think I’m going to work out with the clowns for a few days.”

Brightening, she said, “Oh, you’re going to be
with it?
Swell! You’ll just love every minute. I suppose you’ll be with dear old Hap Hammett in his dog act, the way that other nice gentleman was last week?”

Rook decided to play it cagey. “Oh, yes. I heard about him—a Mr.—?”

“McFarley, James McFarley,” Mary Kelly prompted quickly. “A wonderful gentleman, so democratic you wouldn’t dream he was a millionaire. He went everywhere on the lot and got to know everybody; he was mad for the circus and circus people.” She paused, and then said almost wistfully, “I thought he was coming back Thursday for another day or so, but he didn’t show. He was going to bring me a book he’d written. Maybe he sent it to me; our mail sometimes doesn’t catch up to us right away.”

“Maybe he did,” Rook said.

“I think he was gathering material for another book, because he was always asking all sorts of questions and writing things down in a little black notebook. Are you a writer too, Mr.—?”

“Rook, Howard J. Rook,” he said. “I’m retired now, but I used to be in the gas business. About this McFarley—”

But then the hulking Gordo suddenly reappeared. “Look, kiddo, you going to rehearse while we got the ring, or not?”

“In a
minute!”
she said, and there was the faint touch of the whiplash in her voice. She turned back to Rook, with a flutter of incredible eyelashes. “So you’re a utility magnate, huh? How interesting! I sure hope we see a lot of each other while you’re with it. I gotta go now, or that Gordo will sulk for days. Bye, Biddy.”

The orangutan leaped over to the bars and pressed a vast pantomimed kiss between them. The girl blew one back, gave Rook another portion of her dazzling smile, and then ran lightly out toward the entrance of the arena; she moved, he thought, as if she were built on springs instead of just bones.

Rook stood awhile in thought. So McFarley had given the impression that he was a millionaire, eh? He made some notes on a sheaf of folded yellow copy paper. Then he wandered on, trying to keep out of the way and not always succeeding. He went outside again, and found that the dust storm had lessened, either through the valiant efforts of the men with the water trucks and the sawdust or because now a stiff fresh breeze was blowing in from the sea. For a time he paused to watch the black gang tightening the guy ropes which would hold the Big Top rigid in anything short of a hurricane; they worked with an unbelievable dexterity and without one wasted move, but Rook was most impressed with the enormous dark Adonis who led them, who gave them the cadence in a weirdly compelling chant that must have come down almost unchanged from the jungles of Basutoland or the plains of Nairobi. It was a raw, primeval beat, with the overtone of drums in it. “
Heave
it,
weave
it,
take
it,
shake
it,
break
it,
make
it,
mo-o-ove
along!”

He went on, pausing to admire a full-fledged electric power plant large enough for a good-sized city, then coming up to a wagon-cage drawn off by itself in a corner of the “back yard.” Inside were seven great black-and-yellow-striped tigers. Six of them sat quietly and stared at him with alien, implacable yellow eyes. The seventh was different; she came closer to the bars when he chirped at her.

“Don’t get too close to Gladys, mister,” said a voice behind him. It was one of the uniformed circus attendants, carrying a scraper on a pole and evidently planning a bit of housecleaning on the cage.

“I certainly shan’t,” said Howie Rook hastily. “But why? I mean, is she the dangerous one?”

“Yeah. You get too close to her and she’ll lick your hand and take the hide off. She’s the star of Captain Larsen’s cat act that opens the show. Thinks she’s a pussycat, and lets him slap her and wrestle with her and put funny hats on her head.”

Rook prided himself on already getting wise to the ways of the circus. “Brought up as a kitten in captivity in someone’s home no doubt?”

The attendant laughed, and muttered something about “First o’ May.” “Mister, you are
so
wrong. The ones bred in captivity are the dangerous ones, because they aren’t afraid of men. The ones caught wild are the ones you can trust, as much as you can trust any of the wily bastards. Move over, you!”

Rook moved hastily, but the man was talking to the tigers, who snarled at him somewhat apathetically and then huddled in a group at one end of the cage. Gladys sat somewhat apart, engaged in washing her face.