THEY PITCHFORKED OLD GRAY ON account of his sleeping in the dark part of the barn.
Don’t blame them. I would’ve thought it was a lion too.
News like that makes the telephone here worthwhile. I was over at the Tickles’ last yesterday, the Tickle Tickles, not Avery’s bunch, when I heard that the lion was loose. Mabel Tickle tried to hush the operator but it was no good, she screeched and screeched, like the lion was on her lap.
Creeping through the jungle like a golden track, boomalaya, boomalaya, boomalaya, boom.
I don’t care for poetry but Vachel Lindsay has it beat.
The boom makes all the little kids scream for mercy.
Likely. They got a posse making noise in the cornfield now. They’ll find the lion and make mincemeat out of him, you’ll see.
Mmmmm, lion sandwiches. I’ll bet you could make a good-looking lion purse with what’s left over from a rug. You know the governor’s going to want the rug.
I paid twenty-five cents to see that circus show and they went on without the lion. They didn’t give us a penny back. I guess the tamer had better look for a new job.
He better look for his old one.
Maybe it actually is a man-eater like what it says on the poster is what the lion tamer is thinking. The little ladies who hardly even scream Oh! go to church to see lions curled up with lambs, they never had a pig as nice as pie turn on them and try to bite off their hands. But the lion-tamer’s lion was as nice as pie. The tamer whacks at the cornstalks with the gun barrel, trying to scare it out. It’s still too light to see the fires inside the houses over which such nice pie might be cooking, the settlements being close to the fields because a man can’t farm much farther than he can keep going with the plow. Which is a blessing because it’s not much farther than a person could call out Lion!
Over eight feet tall is what he shouted out when the lion stood on its legs in the show to dance with him, husband to wife. He said maybe the townspeople should play the show music to get the lion to stand up again and somebody volunteered to hitch up a mare to lug the gramophone over rather than walk the field with the rest of them. Cowards. Why it was only two shows ago sticking his head inside the lion’s mouth that he’d seen that bad tooth, black and yellow, going green.
Aunt Flo’s second boy, supposed to be home for supper, gets shot first off. Hardly grazed him, but still. Then Hanrahan’s hat fills with holes—it was dangling from the end of his rifle, thank God. A right jittery bunch, most of them. Colonel Horst the worst, the Civil War on his shoulder, each of the leaves on the cornstalk like a flag to him if there’s any blow at all. He claims he surprised the lion and shot it in the leg but nobody saw him do it, but nobody goes into the field or the brush adjacent to look.
The circus says they want the lion back alive and the townsfolk too. They hire horses so they can see over the tops of the corn, and bring in the aerialist’s nets so as to flush the lion out into them. But after a week they pack up and move on.
The tamer stays put, out of a job without an animal, and boards with some woman known as Aunt Flo for the time being. He says the other circus was getting too close to theirs in the revenue department and there is nothing like a loose lion for publicity. Good? Flo asks, or bad? Listen to me, he says, last year six circus trains got wrecked and the animals all ran off. Now how would six of them wreck? No other kind of train wrecks so easy as that. It’s just part of the act. He just says he would have switched to contortionist if he’d known about the racket, or trained up a horse. A loose lion!
A week after the first search is called off, a horse goes missing, and parts of another.
I’m going to leave what’s left out for bait, says the fuming owner. He lays it, bleeding, on a circle of hay. It’s not fresh but maybe the lion isn’t so fussy.
Not far away lie two lovers, one of them against the killing of the lion enough that she keeps the other away from “the hunt of your life,” as advertised for two weeks in the local newspaper, keeps him away by the oldest means possible. These two lovers are not married except to other people so each spouse assumed the other’s elsewhere. They have found the McHenrys’ good for them, a farmhouse abandoned in a battle between heirs. Since she is one of the heirs, she can keep the battle going. No one from either side is allowed entrance until it’s settled. She has her alibis and since she is still so young and so newlywed, she hardly has to use them, and since he’s a man he has places to go whereas his bride doesn’t. He is beating his way back to his own homestead, tra-la.
The bait is took is the news of the week.
The lion isn’t that big sitting down. The lover steps closer. It’s not like a snake is what he thinks, you want to put out your hand and call it. He doesn’t yell or they’ll know where he is and why he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he doesn’t turn his back to it in a run. It’s been shot in the leg, it doesn’t move when it sees him, its eyes narrow. He stares, he thinks he’s casting his power over it, that it is paralyzed by his might. He has been drinking.
The lion wrangles its head and a halo of dust rises, then it limps off.
He tells everybody it sat somewhere else.
The Summers’ boy out calling their good trained dog that is running in the dark drops his torch too close to a hay bale and it catches. Volunteers take all night to put out the fire. After it’s over they find big bones all burnt. They say they saw the lion raise itself up and jump through the fire like at a circus hoop but that the fire jumped higher.
The tamer isn’t so sure about the bones. Could be a big badger or a cow’s, he says. Did you find teeth?
Nobody finds teeth.
Does the lion eat underwear since Mame lost two skivvies from the line? is the kind of question they pepper the tamer with. He doesn’t tell them how the lion scares the bejesus out of him, always has. He never could figure out, he swears, how the lion got past the bars of its cage, must’ve been some voodoo. In fact he was drunk when the first alarm got out, then he closed the cage quick where he had forgotten the latch. He had sung to the lion all week giving it its dinner, making it turn its head where he put down its food, a bit short that week. The revenues had slipped since he’d been refusing to put his head inside on account of that rotting tooth. But he did put his head inside that last time. He had to or lose his job. People would come back again and again to see his head inside that lion. Maybe he left that door open because he was finished even thinking about his head inside that lion.
He is swinging a hammer for Kolste on the days the Kolste boy has to help at the post office.
She married into the region, leaving Chicago and Papa behind as most girls do. Church-held suppers, as innocent as that, is where the new wives did the dishes while the new husbands dried. That’s how the two lovers met when it didn’t seem that she would ever meet anyone ever again. For her loneliness, her father had bought her a radio. Sometimes it picked up the Chicago symphony, which she sits and listens to without moving or else dances with her broom to the melodies. It is hardly dance music, and she weeps. Not so anyone can see, not in the open but in the kitchen just after the broadcast when she is making her new husband coffee. Sometimes her husband does see and catches her by the arm and asks if the floor is that dirty.
A new fellow feeling sweeps the town in its fame of having a lion lost in its whereabouts: Beers are raised in toasts to the town’s bravery, a newborn is named Tiger despite its being a lion that is lost, and the women’s auxiliary draws up a coat of arms with the lion as a sort of human.
He is dolling himself up for her again, even a tinch of that scented talcum the city boys wear, and he is putting on his best shoes—Off to church? asks Ellie, his wife, bending over laundry she’s been refusing to do unless he makes peace with her in the bedroom way, which he has, he has done his duty, as hard as it is with her so pregnant, he is taking the shortcut to the McHenrys’ about a mile out of the way of his stated destination, he is passing the slate fall and the ashy quarter section and the fence nobody yet fixed at the bottom because there’s a washout so close, a kind of natural fence the way he looked at it, he is leaning hard into the door where it is warped from no woman to look after it properly, he hears her moving in the back room where they like to go and he stops in the foyer, adjusts his wardrobe in anticipation, his face showing red in the ratty old mirror, he pulls the bedroom door toward him.
She’s in the corner in the half-light of the old curtains rotted and torn, she’s in the corner lying there with someone else.
No.
The man steps forward the way he didn’t before. The lion rises, an arm falling to one side. Because of its hurt leg, it doesn’t lunge, the man lunges, and the powerful stench of the lion’s mouth and its paw flatten him. Scrabbling up, he pulls at her body, which is not the thing to do.
Afterward, the lion jumps out the window they left open.
What is left over of the woman her husband has a hole dug for and weeps beside her radio. How did Ellie’s fella know where to look? And in his best clothes? The telephone operator knows why and says so.
When a moose wanders into town the very next year, someone shoots it right off. They are not going to wait for trouble.
The tamer runs for sheriff. Vote for me, he says. I’ll protect you. Nobody else wants the job, too dangerous, and having him stay on means that if the cat comes back, they can put him out as bait. What he does is take all that he saves from sheriffing and puts it into stocks. Everybody else who has two cents to his name is doing that, never mind paying for a new planter. The Roaring Twenties may be just about over but this time he’s not going to be left behind.