A drunk in a shabby mackintosh stumbles from the audience into the sand-and-sawdust ring. The ringmaster, attired in white jodphurs and scarlet tailcoat, is announcing through his bullhorn the high-wire act of Mademoiselle La Funambula. He’s visibly disturbed by the intrusion of an inebriated member of the audience, who’s pantomiming his desire to perform. The crowd of nearly a thousand in the floating amphitheater is confused but entertained by the unscripted trespass. The ringmaster tries to shoo him away, but the drunk lingers on the margin, leaning against then grabbing hold of a guy wire attached to a platform high above the ring. As the ringmaster continues his spiel, the intuder swings onto the cable and manages by clumsy degrees to mount it, wobbling and lurching in a bungling attempt to maintain his balance. Alerted by the laughter of the audience, the ringmaster turns about and blows his whistle. A pair of burly roustabouts come running in to grab the drunk before he does himself an injury. They bob for his ankles, but kicking and squirming, the man evades his would-be captors and continues his lubberly progress beyond their reach. Ringmaster, roustabouts, and audience are helpless to do anything but watch the fool in his reckless ascent up the inclined cable. There’s a universal intake of breath as the man pitches frantically to and fro, losing items of his wardrobe—the mackintosh, the porkpie hat—in the process. Then somehow he’s managed to gain the platform some forty feet above the ring, where he sheds the rest of his garments and shakes out a head of crow-black hair to reveal the lithe form of La Funambula in spangled tights. The crowd goes wild.
She proceeds to cavort on the wire, returning to the platform for various props—a unicycle, a pair of stilts—while far beneath her two men and a gargantuan lady position themselves to spot her in case she falls. The three of them compete for the ideal placement, though no one pays them much attention, all eyes riveted on the girl prancing in the amber followspot.
She skipped rope, turned cartwheels, and somersaulted through a tasseled hoop. Children gawked and women covered their eyes, peeping through parted fingers; godly men expressed shock at the briefness of her costume, then surrendered to fantasies. Journalists penned tired bromides—“she’s more a creature of the air than the earth”—and cited the dramatic contrast between the grace of her aerial daring and the limp she exhibited as she plodded out of the ring. And it was true that, capering above the upturned faces, she was beyond the reach of memory and heartbreak, always just a giant circle away from a total liberation from the terrestrial sphere. But Jenny Bashrig had no wish to liberate herself. Like the poet that the sad clown had read aloud to her, she was less in love with the products of eternity than of time.
Not that the circus had much in common with ordinary time. Plying the river from Dubuque to New Orleans, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun weighed anchor at towns fixed to the regular calendar. But after a run of no more than three days in any designated port of call, the circus was launched again like the Flying Dutchman in a perpetual navigation of the Mississippi. The river flowed and the towns stood still along its banks, where time passed, while the river remained impervious to its passage. For Jenny, the equilibrist, this was a fine arrangement, the balance between rolling river and stationary shore, a state of affairs much more preferable than, say, a North Main Street stuck in its everlasting chronological rut. She’d become adept at observing the bluff reefs, falling chutes, and shoals, and could interpret what lay beneath dangerous dimples on the surface of the water as well as the roustabouts that doubled as deckhands. Her fondness for riding the river was rivaled only by her excitement on disembarking at the cities and towns, when the entire company, mounted on horses, elephants, velocipedes, and a thundering calliope, paraded through streets thronged with rubbernecking locals. She liked sampling the bazaars of places with names like Festus and Andalusia, places not always welcoming to circus folk. Over time her sea legs had become steadier than were her same halting limbs on dry land, and the wire was never so compliant as when she felt the slap and sway of the Palace in its watery berth.
Of course the great floating extravaganza had seen better days. The old packet boat that towed the barge and menagerie behind it was in a constant state of disrepair; its kingposts, hogchains, and stern wheel had been replaced so many times that the vessel could no longer qualify as the original Yellow Wren. (Defaced by weather or wags, the name painted across its bow now read Yellow W en.) While it still maintained a few showy staterooms for its principals, the Yellow Wen seemed to anticipate its own wreckage: the plush banquettes had long since given up their stuffing, the gingerbread trim broken off to feed the high-pressure engine when fuel ran low. The ancient boiler pulsed like a dilated heart; pistons sputtered and would have come to a shuddering halt were it not for the occasional nudge from a passing bum boat. The grand saloon was converted to a mess hall, where performers practiced their juggling and the less carnivorous beasts—the ones not confined to the trailing menagerie scow—roamed free. Excluding the bedlam, however, when viewed from a levee at night, the moonlit Carnival of Fun in its musical progress constituted a siren-like tableau, luring small-town boys to swim out after it and sometimes drown.
Jenny had never meant to outshine her partners. After all, the Piccolomini Brothers—not really brothers but comrades involved with one another in a way Jenny didn’t at first understand—had voluntarily taken her under their wing. Impressed with her natural ability, they helped develop her talents until she was equally proficient on the bounding wire and the tightrope. Dubbing her Mimi Piccolomini, they broadened their repertoire to accommodate her, introducing various properties: unicycles and stilts. But Jenny, a quick study and already accomplished after her years of self-taught endeavor, soon surpassed the skill of her mentors and, without trying, upstaged them. Finally the Piccolominis, complaining of chronic seasickness, took their injured vanity and left the Carnival of Fun at Vidalia for a spot in a circus that thankfully traveled overland.
After that Jenny retired Mimi and, graduated now to center ring, carried on solo as La Funambula, Mistress of the Air. There were other mistresses of the air: Rosa Bunch in her hourglass corset, spinning like a whirligig from her swivel loop, and Yvette, who hung from a single trap by her fuchsia hair. Each regarded herself as a prima in her own right and in that capacity snubbed all other claimants to the title. La Funambula was snubbed as a matter of course, but never wholly integrated into the circus community, she was spared much of the usual venom. In any event, so preoccupied was Jenny with the demands of her midair ballet that she scarcely noticed the cold shoulders she received on the ground.
Marital status notwithstanding, the lordly ladies of the floating circus each had her circle of admirers, sometimes several at a single destination. The sons of senators and cotton barons showered their favorites with flowers and bonbons after every show. Heated competition among these young gallants sometimes moved them to fistfights and even duels, outrages that translated into boasting rights for the ladies in question. Naturally the young men gave their offerings in the hope of receiving favors in return, and while a few of the ladies did reciprocate amorously, all were deft at keeping their suitors at bay. Such artful teasing, however, only increased the tensions that stoked the disorderly atmosphere of the Yellow Wen, and many an embarkation was marked by jealous husbands flinging bouquets and bijouterie overboard.
Jenny, who shared tight quarters with Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, had no room for housing her own gifts, the loving cups and potted viburnums she gave away to the sideshow performers. She had no more need of tchotchkes than of romance, the pain of which she had not the least wish to repeat. Besides, Madame Hortense (whose weightlifting apparatus increased the steamboat’s draft by a foot) had conceived a maternal fondness for the wirewalker, and as Jenny’s self-appointed protector kept the predators at arm’s length.
It was the last of its kind, the Carnival of Fun, a relic from the days when showboats featured canebrake troupers in temperance comedies like Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. While nearly every other touring company or tent show had taken to the rails, Forepaugh and Broadway persisted in the novelty of their riverborne spectacle. With hyperbolic publicity and the promise of shared profits they’d lured a boatload of bally broads, kinkers, and clowns on board the Wen and the Palace that followed in its wake. Later on, as the carnival evolved into an authentic circus, first-class animal and aerial acts were added to the ranks. But in the end, for all its variety the floating “argosy of wonders” was a losing proposition. Salaries aside, the maintenance of the porous packet absorbed the lion’s share (sometimes literally) of the season’s revenue, and even the draw of a loop-the-looping automobile could barely compensate for the cost of steam-heating the amphitheater. To say nothing of the repairs to damage caused by the river itself—the fogs that led to collisions with driftwood, the runnings aground on islands and sandbars. There were medical bills due to accidents and injuries incurred in attacks by the natives of the towns where they played. No matter that the circus went to excessive lengths to convince the yokels of the show’s inherent morality, going so far as to label the menagerie living relics from biblical times: the hippopotamus was “the blood-sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ,” and so forth. Let there be a rumor of godless fornicators among the troupe, and the citizens, under the influence of sanctimony and drink, would rise up to punish the heathen. This was especially the case south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the show people were often assumed to be of a debased Yankee persuasion. Then pitched battles would ensue, when the company had to defend themselves with guy stakes against knives and firearms.
Nor were the townspeople always satisfied with directing their malevolence toward the human performers. There were the boys that threw pepper between the bars of the gorilla’s cage or fed plug tobacco to the black bear. There was the time in Morganza, Louisiana, when Celeste the elephant, spooked by urchins who poked a broom in her hindquarters, bolted from the parade and crushed an alderman’s wife underfoot. When the town demanded vengeance, the circus had no recourse but to bow to public sentiment. Perfectly tractable now, Celeste was led by the bull handlers to the railyard, where a seven-eighth-inch chain was wrapped round her neck and she was hoisted into the air from a railroad derrick. The chain snapped and Celeste fell to earth in a stupor but made no resistance as a second chain was secured. When she was raised again, she sighed, died, and in keeping with the age-old protocol of lynchings, was dismembered, her bones and tusks displayed as trophies in the courthouse and barbershop.
As a first-of-May performer (and a Jew), Jenny was no stranger to the role of intruder. What bothered her more was the clamorous adoration of her fans, which could throw off her timing. For even a run-down riverboat exhibition was hailed by the rustics, starved as they were for entertainment, as heaven-sent. (Never mind that its artists might be judged pariahs from hell.) As La Funambula, who danced on a rope woven from a witch’s hair in the caverns of the djinn—or so claimed the ringmaster, Mr. Ephraim Peavey—she was viewed as a magical creature, and courted acordingly by hayseeds and gentry alike. What jerkwater Galahad wouldn’t want to pluck the sylph in her chiffon kilt out of the air and fetch her back to terra firma for a souvenir? (Even if on earth she was a bit of a klutz.) But Jenny had no truck with magic: the wire was the wire, the earth the earth, or anyway the promenade deck of a coal-belching steamboat. Unlike the ethereal La Bunch and Yvette of the iron jaw, who held court in their staterooms, she was content to hobnob with Madame Hortense in their stuffy cabin. There the lightly mustachioed strongwoman would read her tarot cards and massage her feet, which were always sore. (The thin doeskin pumps that allowed her toes to grope and steer along the cold-drawn steel left her soles sensitive to the sharpness of the wire.) At home with marginal types, she cultivated the company of various ten-in-one oddities, some with topknots and plates in their lips, a fraternization that consolidated her outlier status.
So Jenny enjoyed the best of two worlds. Though Mr. Peavey might assure the audience that the upper atmosphere was her exclusive element, it wasn’t. True, there was nothing quite like a romp on the wire; few planetary pleasures matched the rapture of executing a midair flifus or one-wing crab. But Jenny took similar solace in reclining in a canvas deck chair watching the children and diapered chimps swarming over the boat. She liked observing the kingfishers perched on a floating bough: how they scattered like roof shingles flung by the wind when the paddle wheel walked over their perch with a crunching racket. During nights that the rousters said were dark as the inside of a cow, they passed timber rafts and coal barges, vessels visible only by the light of their bull’s-eye lanterns, and by lantern light Jenny conned the poetry that Bonkers the clown was teaching her to read. Above the ring she suffered the yearning of her admirers below, though she remained proof against their overtures even when they belonged to her own touring caste.
He had christened himself Bonkers in an ironic counterpoint to his melancholy mien. During the specs, when the clowns disported themselves about the ring en masse, he wore a chimney-pot hat and tattered swallowtails like some ruined aristocrat, which in point of fact he was. His original name was Marmaduke Fortinbras Armbrewster the Somethingth, black sheep offspring of the potted meat Armbrewsters of Davenport, Iowa. Cut off without a sou after his expulsion from Princeton, he’d discovered in himself a talent for confidence swindles; but when his face became too familiar to the local constabularies in the river towns where he plied his trade, he boarded a steamboat hauling a cargo of gaudy misrule. He exaggerated his decadent pallor with greasepaint, accentuated the soot-gray bags under his eyes (from one of which leaked a diamond tear), and donned a sponge rubber nose. While his detractors (and there were many) claimed he’d merely swapped one bogus identity for another, the more sympathetic believed that in Bonkers the young wastrel had found his true nature.
As it turned out, he had an aptitude for clowning. Athletic despite his dissipation, he incorporated complicated pratfalls into his gags; he climbed ladders that leaned against invisible walls and, during the walkarounds, carried a board on his head that remained fixed even as he reversed direction. But what made him a favorite with the crowds was his acquisition of a mangy goat he’d won in a crap game from a farmer in Vicksburg who’d already forfeited his shirt. He called the goat Medea and claimed she was a sorceress transformed by a rival into a unicorn. (She had, projecting from her shaggy forehead, a single off-center horn.) Bonkers was seldom seen without Medea, who nipped at his backside during his act and employed her horn in rude ways to impede his progress—this to the shock and delight of the audience. But outside the ring the goat was as brooding and aloof as her master. There was even something menacing about her that caused the circus folk to keep their distance and the big cats to recoil in their cages. Tethered to the pipes on the boiler deck, Medea would bleat disconsolately throughout Bonkers’s all-night larks ashore, from which he returned in the mornings weak-kneed and ruddy-eyed.
Perhaps it was her own detachment in the midst of such knockabout company that drew Bonkers to Jenny Bashrig. Or was it the challenge of breaching her self-possession? Owing to his doleful eyes and buttery tongue, he was accustomed to easy conquests, but Jenny seemed immune to his charms. When he learned she was unlettered, however, the clown may have thought he’d hit upon a source of vulnerability and offered to school her. Jenny’s watchdog, Madame Hortense, was skeptical, having lately seen ominous signs in her tarot spread.
“Your Star, which is among the greater secrets, is crossed by your Magician card (sometimes called the Juggler), and the Wheel of Fortune is in opposition to your trump card, known as the Fool …”
“What are you talking about?” asked Jenny, who’d already advanced from the Whiskers and Wagtail Primer to a poem that Bonkers had translated himself. It was written, he alleged, by a French poet under the influence of opium.
In answer to Jenny’s question Madame Hortense, whose relation to cartomancy was purely instinctual, had to admit that she really hadn’t a clue.
Nevertheless, when she wasn’t playing footsie with Professor Hotspur (whose pygmy elephants she lifted above her head in her act), the stronglady kept a weather eye out for anyone or thing that might endanger the equilibrist. This included the danger of falling from the wire, beneath which she took up her self-assigned station during Jenny’s cynosure turns. Still wearing the full Wagnerian regalia from her own act, she would stand in the darkened ring far below the girl in the dancing amber spot. She was often joined there by a loitering Bonkers and his goat, though the latter was clearly impatient with her master’s vigils. To this unallied company was eventually added another, a more furtive figure in top boots and flared trousers, who—while he lingered on the ring’s perimeter—was nonetheless braced for any mishap.
The third party was Lem Kelso, whose nom de guerre was Captain Cumberbund, though he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t any kind of a captain. A trainer of wild animals who could face down a Burmese panther with perfect aplomb, he was pathologically shy of the ladies. In consequence the ladies took every opportunity to tease the tow-haired lion “tamer” (who would assure you the beasts could be trained but never tamed), flaunting their attractions in ways guaranteed to raise a cardinal blush on the young man’s cheeks. The blush would persist like hives for days, embarrassing him so that he kept to his berth on the menagerie scow. He was in any case more comfortable in the company of his cats and beyond the allure of the women, who were to his thinking a puffed up and immodest lot. Then Jenny Bashrig arrived with her infernal blend of earth and air, and the lion tamer was entranced; while for her part, Jenny, a connoisseur of every variety of daredevil, was largely indifferent to the animal acts.
He’d hired on to the Carnival of Fun as a candy butcher and might have remained content in that role, such a far cry from digging potatoes on a dirt farm. But always fond of animals, he offered his assistance to Giacomo Bondi, the cat man, and quickly progressed from being useful to indispensable. Bondi styled himself a member of the school of “bring ’em back alive” white hunters, whose every encounter with jungle beasts was staged as a life-and-death conflict. He was liberal in his use of the bullwhip and viewed his act as a demonstration of the power of his will over that of the brutes in his charge. He was also a drunk whose cruelty extended beyond the ring, so that his sullen animals smoldered in their resentment. Then it wasn’t wholly unexpected when, audaciously sticking his head for the thousandth time between the jaws of a Bengal tiger, he emerged without it.
In the succeeding mayhem young Lemuel presented himself as not only prepared to take over the care and feeding of the cats, but ready to exhibit them in a caged act as well. He’d closely observed his mentor’s methods and learned from his example everything that one ought not to do. Given the go-ahead—as what choice did management have?—he set about culling the broken animals from the spirited, overseeing the sale of the “seat warmers” to zoos. Having picked the brain and plundered the medicine chest of the resident vet, he ministered to the ailing and abused: he dosed Oliver the costive Nubian lion with an aloes physic, then borrowed a shovel from an elephant handler to remove the results, and he nearly lost a finger rubbing cocaine on Ethelred the tiger’s toothachey gums. In teaching them tricks he substituted reward for punishment, and was sensitive to his critters’ mercurial moods. He nursed their offspring with warmed bottles when a mother’s milk ran dry. For having turned a brood of sulky and unpredictable felines into a pride of obedient beasts, Lem Kelso was dubbed Lancelot Cumberbund by Ringmaster Peavey, and promoted from fairy floss peddler to captain of the cats. He still carried the whip and pistol into the circular cage, but an occasional flick of the wrist was sufficient to signal a lion to fake an assault, and the blanks in the revolver (which the animals were used to) made a crowd-pleasing bang. Such confidence did Captain Cumberbund demonstrate in the cage that his bashful countenance outside it made him something of a figure of fun. That and the general suspicion that he was a virgin.
Of Lem Kelso’s leering after Jenny, Madame Hortense was distinctly aware, but she regarded him as harmless. Bonkers, however, with his marked-for-death demeanor and his distempered unicorn that even the lion tamer steered clear of, was another story. Though he was courtly in his manner toward the rope walker, no one would have mistaken his intentions as honorable. Kneeling beside her deck chair to help her with difficult words as she read, he practically singed her cheeks and throat with his hot absinthe breath, while Medea took unforbearing bites out of his pant legs. The Malay tumblers would cluck their tongues as they flip-flopped past, and even the india rubber man shook his attenuated head. No one, it seemed, trusted the dissolute clown with the delicate usage of a featured headliner.
Irrespective of the educational benefits, Jenny was amused by the boozy Bonkers, judging his overdone declamations—“The worm is in the fruit!” “Il pleure dans mon coeur!”—as mere affectation. She took his advances no more to heart than the scraps of news that now and then reached the Carnival of Fun. Pancho Villa’s insurgents might kill American passengers on a train in northern Mexico, German U-boats sink American merchant vessels, an anarchist take a potshot at J. P. Morgan—such things happened in places moored to history, whereas the Yellow Wen was adrift in time; it flowed with the river, having escaped the depredations that landlocked society was heir to.
Still, Jenny had her moods when she wondered if she’d only swapped one population of loose screws for another. And at night in her berth across from the volcanically snoring Female Hercules, she dreamed dreams that were an antidote to an excess of pageantry. Such as the recurring one in which the circus wintered in a decayed urban ghetto. Then she would wake to the strange sensation that the dream belonged not to her but someone else. She felt similarly remote from Madame Hortense’s relentless attempts at playing sibyl with her cards.
“The good news,” Madame H. had ruminated one morning over the current constellation, “you got Strength in your astral influence; that’s the card with Samson coldcocking a lion. But you got also Lightning in the place of your final outcome …”
Upon which Jenny clapped her hands over her ears. “Sweet mieskayt, enough! Please spare me your predictions. This is the circus: there’s no past or future, only the here and now. Anyhow, I’m not a child; I can take care of myself.”
But the stronglady was not appeased. Mother hen that she was, she warned her cabinmate, even as she massaged her instep, that her cavalier attitude in regard to the clown was driving him, well, bonkers; she was playing with fire.
“Fire,” pronounced Jenny, who’d learned the habit of uttering sphinxlike phrases from the clown, “is my element.”
Madame Hortense groaned and nearly pinched Jenny’s foot in two between her thumb and forefinger.
“Ouch!”
“You watch yourself, girlie,” admonished the stronglady, tucking her massive hands into her cavernous armpits, while outside their compartment the windjammers could be heard rehearsing “The Battle of Shiloh.” The music was augmented by a chorus of bleats, brays, and howls from the menagerie, the whole clamor muted in the shoosh of the paddle wheel.
To her list of worries on behalf of the equilibrist, Madame H. added her anxiety over Jenny’s unconcern for the superstitions that were de rigueur among the aerialists. (If someone patted you on the back, you must then be patted on the stomach; you must never place a costume on the bed …) As a consequence she made it her business to look out for the girl. In her helmet, brass bra, and leather girdle, Madame Hortense stood beneath the wire in the center ring, flanked by a pony act in one end ring and a human pyramid in the other. There she received the shabby clothes the drunk shed on his way to becoming La Funambula, clad in sequined lamé. The stronglady also endured, in the same ring, the presence of Bonkers the clown, seated astride his mock unicorn, and the lion tamer lurking at the margins.
But Jenny seldom faltered. She executed full gainers with flawless precision from the pedestal to the wire, threw herself backward through a crepe-papered hoop; she did a running forward somersault, the most perilous feat in the rope-walker’s playbook, because your feet must lead the arc over your head and find the wire before you can see where to place them. It was during such a leap on a particularly sultry evening that the rigging slipped, staggering La Funambula’s velocity, so that when her feet struck the wire, her momentum thrust her forward into the netless air.
Forty feet below, Madame Hortense was braced to receive the falling body in her arms, nor did the other watchers stand idly by. Goaded by a boot heel to her flank, Medea bolted forward with her rider as the lion tamer lunged from the ring curb. The stronglady, knocked from her formidable pins by the goat, toppled onto the clown, whose mount was then flattened beneath the combined weight of its rider, the doughty madame, and the madly scrambling Captain Cumberbund. Tucking in the nick of time, the plummeting equilibrist landed hard amid the scrum of her would-be rescuers, and rolled off into a balletic stance amazingly unharmed. She took a bow and made her exit with a spring in her limp, while the stunned crowd remained silent, uncertain as to whether the event called for laughter or cheers.
Risen to her buskined feet, Madame Hortense was enraged by the ineptitude of the rival spotters, whom she snatched up in either hand and flung into the stands. The goat, realizing that her single horn was no match for the pair on the stronglady’s helmet, retreated of her own accord.
The tale of La Funambula’s plunge became legend, increasing her popularity, which increased in kind the jealousy among her fellow artists. Although it had been an accident, they tended to view her tumble as a further attempt to grab the spotlight from her competition. Even Madame Hortense remained grumpy about the incident, as if Jenny were to blame for her public humiliation.
“It’s a good thing you got knocked over,” Jenny cajoled her, “or I’d’ve been spit on the tusks of your pointy cap.”
Unamused, the stronglady moped and began to spend more time in the company of her sometimes paramour Professor Hotspur, his gaunt frame reduced to skeletal from the pressures of their association. Her absence from Jenny’s side left the field open to the advances of the clown, who observed to her in his mellifluous voice, “So your giantess no longer discourages Bonkers’s oily solicitations?” He liked referring to himself in the third person.
Jenny was sitting with her feet propped up on the taffrail, while the clown leaned against it, the wind riffling his spiky hair, his wretched goat chewing peevishly at his bootlace. “It’s Marmaduke Armbrewster’s the oily one,” she replied, because she was fond of him in her fashion. “Bonkers is just a big bluffer.” Though on second thought: “Madame H. still thinks you’re a rat.”
Bonkers dug a hand in the pocket of his swallowtails and insisted he was misunderstood. “Doom knows no reprieve,” he declared, producing a cruet of laudanum from which—popping the cork—he stagily took a sip, “but love.”
“So tell me they ain’t stuck on you, Sasha Groszniak the foot juggler and Birdy Valentine of the revolving ladder …” For it was the case that a suite of ladies fawned over the world-weary clown, while Jenny remained the primary object of his affection.
“O Death,” he intoned, “pour your poison to revive my soul,” extending his tongue to catch the last drops from the cruet, gulp, “careless if hell or heaven is our goal …” When Jenny had to snicker at his high-sounding bathos, Bonkers mimed indignation. “Your mirth retards my evil designs,” he accused.
The girl issued an insincere apology.
“O Jenny,” rallied the clown, wringing his hands in their overlarge gloves, “your breasts against watered silk are like a gorgeous armoire …”
The girl tilted her head toward the barely convex bodice of her shirtwaist. “It’s percale,” she said, and snickered again. She did, however, remove her feet from the rail and rearrange her skirts, having become self-conscious of her exposed petticoat.
Not as tickled by Bonkers’s inveigling, however, was Captain Cumberbund, who eavesdropped from a nearby companionway. It was whispered about among those who heeded such things—and the Wen was a seething gossip mill—that the clown’s effrontery enflamed the Captain, not only for the liberties he took but also for the boldness he demonstrated in doing so. Because Lem Kelso’s own obsession with the wirewalker had yet to lend him the courage to confront her with his suit. This was the same lion tamer at the crack of whose whip four-hundred-pound jungle cats would rear up and walk on their hind legs, balance on mirror balls, and leap through flaming hoops. Kismet, Sennacherib, Carmen of the basilisk eye and brindled fur, they even made as if to maul him, which was all part of the act; and afterward, when they’d been rolled back in their cages down the ramp onto the menagerie scow, the Captain would hand-feed them gobs of beef heart, snuggling and confiding in them his devotion to the marvelous girl.
One afternoon, at a moment of what in his anguish he must have mistaken for clarity, Captain Cumberbund donned his predecessor’s ascot and removed one of Carmen’s suckling tiger cubs from its cage. With perhaps the intention of making a gift of it to the wirewalker, he carried the feisty little creature over the gangplanks that connected the scow to the Palace and the Palace to the Yellow Wen. Along the way the children of the Flying Saragossas and the Royal Stamboul Rola-Bolas, the alligator children from the ten-in-one, left off their marauding to follow him. All sought an opportunity to pet the infant tiger with its foxglove ears and outsize paws. By the time he arrived at the steamboat’s upper deck, the Captain’s progress had been slowed to a standstill, beset as he was by the sons and daughters of the circus. It was all he could do to hold on to the squirming whelp and keep it from being wrested from his hands.
Leaving her cabin on her way to rehearse, La Funambula caught sight of the lion tamer and paused. Tightening the cord at the waist of her robe, she spared him a curious glance—a sightly young man in a pith helmet festooned with children—and was rather touched; while he, in the midst of the mob, lifted the tiger cub like an offering above his head beyond the reach of the pawing brats.
At that instant the boat was passing a stand of liveoak on the riverbank. Perched in their moss-hung branches was a party of harpy eagles, one of which was moved to take flight. Swooping down between the smokestacks and over the hurricane deck, it snagged the cub by its nape with barbed talons and tore it from the upraised hand of Captain Cumberbund. There was total silence among the children and their elders standing in the shadow of the eagle’s wings—which flapped twice as the bird glided with its dangling prey above the trees on the shore. Not until it had shrunk to a spot against the sun then disappeared was the silence broken by Lem Kelso’s sobs.
There were portents besides the bird and the Burning Tower that turned up in Madame Hortense’s tarot readings. Awesome Arnold the human cannonball overshot the net and broke his neck. The surcingle came loose while Lady Equipoise was performing Mazeppa’s Ride and she slipped from the rump of her Arabian with her foot caught in a stirrup. The horse made five circuits of the ring with its rider’s cracked-open head throttling the curb before a shivaree of clowns were able to subdue it. The Yellow Wen docked at Rock Island, Buena Vista, and Prairie du Chien, and La Funambula continued to enthrall the spectators on her silver thread, thrilling them with near misses caused by the involuntary recollection of troubling dreams. In the interim Captain Cumberbund continued to eat his heart out over Jenny, its bitterness feeding his resentment of the degenerate clown.
Those who kept watch on the watcher said that the Captain’s ears steamed at the sight of Bonkers and Jenny together, though so far no open unpleasantness had transpired between them. The clown declaimed his verses, whose words (“O rancid night of the skin, you have kissed my buttocks in your covert conspiracy!”) may have sounded to the lion tamer like indecent proposals; and the fits of tittering those words provoked in the wirewalker were perhaps more galling than if they’d aroused her desire. There must have been times when the Captain came close to intervening. What a simple matter for a master of savage beasts to vanquish a mere buffoon. Was it an apprehension of how unwelcome his interference might be that stopped him? Or was it a morbid fear of Bonkers’s goat? With an Abyssinian lion you were more or less sure of where you stood, but who knew what contagions that one-horned deformity might carry? (Never mind that, in her petulant nudgings and bleatings, Medea appeared to view the liaison between the aerialist and the clown as unfavorably as did the lion tamer himself.)
Meanwhile Captain Cumberbund was looking much the worse for wear. From loss of sleep and appetite his cerulean eyes were sunken, his straw hair beginning to molt, flared trousers drooping from his spare flanks like hound dogs’ ears. In the cage his attitude alternated between recklessness and lethargy. Scarcely bothering to incite the cats to their sham aggression, he sometimes allowed them to nuzzle him like house pets, revealing the danger as only illusion. On those occasions the Captain was roundly booed by the crowd.
He watched the girl in the air, haloed in limelight, and saw an angel; watched the clown hanging on to the tail of a liberty horse while the goat rode the tails of his coat, and saw a devil that needed harrying back to the pit. “If I can’t have her,” he was heard to say to his cats, whose baritone growling may have echoed the Lord’s own approval, “can’t nobody else.” Then on a windy night somewhere between Wabasha and Winona, he came upon the two of them on the afterdeck; he heard the girl scream as the clown threw his coat over her head as if to abduct her, and something in him snapped.
They’d been reading a slender volume of poetry together, or rather Bonkers had been reading to Jenny in French. The book was an en face edition and the clown, in his absorption, seemed less concerned with seducing the equilibrist than refining her sensibilities. Bending over her chair, he invited her to follow on the left-hand in English the despondent lyric he was reading in the original on the right-hand page. Jenny, however, was paying scant attention to either the written or spoken words. She was fatigued after a trying week that had involved her oversight of the repair of the flying frame and the dead man’s rigging; she’d done double-duty, performing her matinee and evening turns then reappearing in the Babylonian-themed blow-off. So it was good to be voyaging again between stands; the brisk weather at this northernmost extremity of the Carnival of Fun’s circuit suited her. She enjoyed the rhythmic rocking of the packet over the choppy river, the way clouds slid across the face of the moon like gauzy tights pulled from the globe of a lamp. And the drone of the clown’s lugubrious voice in a foreign tongue was a fitting antithesis to the martial air of the brass band rehearsing “Billy Barlow” in the saloon.
Their evening ritual was something that, in truth, the girl had come to look forward to, and even Madame Hortense had learned to live with it—especially since Bonkers seemed to have decided it suited him better to languish for want of Jenny than to actually have her. (He was anyway consoled by a bevy of others.) Though lanterns abounded on board the Wen, he preferred to read by the light of a votary candle, but the wind tonight was too whipped up for the candle to hold a flame. So he kept striking matches, one after another.
“Votre âme est un paysage choisi,” he read, signally twitching the rubber nose he’d yet to remove. Then noting Jenny’s inattention, he construed, “It means you’re a blowzy baggage.”
Jarred momentarily out of her reverie, Jenny leaned her head toward the book to verify the translation, and as a consequence a loose strand of her hair was ignited by the match in the clown’s cupped hand.
“O for a muse of fire!” cried Bonkers as he tore off his ragpicker’s tailcoat and threw it over Jenny’s flailing head.
It was then that the lion tamer, having just emerged from a hatch, was unhinged by what he saw and charged blindly forward onto the deck. With a roar that rivaled the window-rattling vibrato of his cats, the Captain locked his arms around the clown’s midsection, and lifting him bodily, dragged the kicking Bonkers across the afterdeck and flung him over the railing into the foaming turbulence of the revolving paddle wheel. He turned around triumphantly, perhaps expecting the girl he’d rescued to run gratefully into the safety of his arms, but was met instead by Medea the goat who gored him in the calf with her single horn. As he bent to clutch at the searing pain of his injured leg, the Captain was further battered by Madame Hortense, who hammered him to the deck with a closed fist on her way to save the clown. Fresh from an assignation with Professor Hotspur, she was wearing her marquee-sized kimono, which billowed to reveal her ambiguous anatomy as she climbed over the rail.
Risen from her chair with her still smoking hair in wild disarray, Jenny Bashrig looked on with a sinking heart. But distressed as she was on behalf of Bonkers, she was more aggrieved by the realization that, despite his peril, the forlorn clown had never seemed to her entirely real.
Other members of the troupe, responding to Madame Hortense’s “Hey Rube!,” vaulted over the rail from the texas deck and tumbled out of the galleries. Apprised of the situation, they clambered out along timbers and spars, though whether they meant to save the clown or simply get a better view of his plight was uncertain. Kinkers and joeys, Hector the globe-of-death rider, Dainty Nell the Elastic Incomprehensible—all perched in the blustering winds on either side of the turning wheel, waiting along with the stronglady for the blades to complete their revolution and end the clown’s forced baptism. The gibbous moon spilled mercury like a burst thermometer, the band in the saloon played “Over the Waves,” and up popped the sodden Bonkers seated on a wooden bucket at the height of the paddle wheel. He was reciting verses above the churning propulsion: “Let him mark well who laughs at my despair,” he cried, pulling a catfish from the bosom of his shirt, sniffing it with his rubber nose before tossing it over a shoulder, “with no fraternal shudder in reply.” From a capacious pocket he extracted an apple that squirted him in the eye before he could take a bite. “Every moon is atrocious, every sun bitter; the flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read …”
As the clown was swallowed up again by the moiling waters, Jenny silently ended the refrain, “… all the books.”
Stupefied by Bonkers’s recital, the onlookers had made no attempt to grab him, though surely they would not allow him to make a second pass without releasing him from the wheel. Then the boat pitched violently as it clattered over some river monster or submerged tree, an object that could smash the rudders and fracture the keelson. Alerted to the crisis on board and off, the pilot had already killed the engines, though the stern-wheel continued its final rotation. This time, however, when the clown came back around, he was no longer speaking, his body hanging in a mangled configuration from a paddle blade.
Madame Hortense later claimed that the Wheel of Fortune card from her pack, which was always promising some type of categorical change, had foretold everything, though the circus had no need of referring to any laws beyond fate. Marmaduke Armbrewster’s remains were shipped back to his family in Iowa with condolences: he had sadly fallen victim to an unnamed occupational hazard. He was mourned briefly by the handful of ladies he’d dallied with, but beyond them there was little love to spare among his fellow performers for the clown-maudit. Reduced thereafter to the status of untouchable, Captain Cumberbund was otherwise left to carry on as before, but Lem Kelso’s festering conscience found its physical corollary in the leg wound inflicted by the goat.
“The tip of your unicorn’s horn is commonly known to be full of p’ison,” pronounced Madame H., offering a morsel from her dubious store of occult wisdom.
The goat itself had vanished since the death of her master. Jenny Bashrig had looked high and low, but nothing remained of Medea beyond her abandoned tether. A shame, thought Jenny, who’d imagined the goat becoming her own steadfast familiar, like in that story about the Gypsy girl the clown had read her. She missed others of his stories, such as the one about the doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde, and the wirewalker Elvira Madigan and her officer in their (what did Bonkers call it?) liebestod. There was yet another story that Medea’s disappearance had put her in mind of, about the goat who wandered into a cave that led to the Promised Land. But that one had been told to her in the top of a tree by Muni Pinsker, the scribe of North Main Street, before he left her to snuff out their unborn child on her own.
She missed the clown like she missed her original infatuation with all the circus ballyhoo. It was an earthbound sadness, however, that never reached the height of the tightrope, which more than ever she lived to mount. She relied less on props, disdained the parasol and the balance pole, performing increasingly risky somersaults and running leaps. She pirouetted high above the war in Europe and the champagne tastes of the absentee owners Forepaugh and Broadway, who were regularly cheating their employees out of their contracted wages. Beyond distraction, Jenny scarcely flinched when the human blowtorch accidentally inhaled, incinerating his innards; or when the lion tamer entered the cage with his suppurating leg, whose infection incited in his cats a lust for carrion, and as instinct trumped affection they mauled their trainer. He bled to death, despite the ringmaster’s best efforts to four-flush the horror away, before an audience of twelve hundred strong.
But when Jenny descended from on high, she was often made aware that she wasn’t the only one who’d grown disenchanted with the Carnival of Fun. There was talk in several quarters that the circus was hexed. It was a notion Madame Hortense corroborated in her readings, assuring La Funambula that the Hanged Man card lay athwart her immediate future.
“The hanged man I saw already yesterday!” Jenny snapped at the stronglady, who had, come to think of it, not one womanly feature and was maybe, she surmised aloud, “what they call a morphodite?”
As she spoke Professor Hotspur, having come to their cabin door holding flowers, turned turkey red and beat a retreat. Then seeing a bangle-sized tear stream down the cheek of Madame Hortense, Jenny relented. Nevertheless, she threw the cards overboard, though they blew back in her face like in that story she’d read under Bonkers’s tutelage, the one in which the little girl falls down a rabbit hole.
A week or so later, just south of Herculaneum, the boiler blew on the Yellow Wen. In the hope of reaching Cape Girardeau before morning, the rousters had allowed the pressure to rise beyond what the safety valves could contain. The needles on the gauges spun like teetotums and the middle boiler exploded, launching the pilot house like a missile over the wooded shore. The packet was blasted to splinters amidships, sparks from the resulting fire raining like phoenix feathers over the midnight river. There was no time to lower the lifeboats, leaky at best, and performers and crew alike jumped overboard from the decks just ahead of the flames. Some, already alight, sizzled in the current, while those that weren’t pulled under by the suction from the sinking vessel clung to crates and tea chests amid the burning debris. Set adrift, the Floating Palace continued careering downstream with the menagerie scow wallowing behind it until it ran aground on a sandbar. The scow plowed into the rear of the Palace, causing the cages and stalls on board to be smashed apart, releasing in turn a stampede of terrified animals, many of whom promptly drowned. But in the years following the disaster, hardshell religionists from the nearby towns might spot in the surrounding scrub a camel or rhinoceros, a Barbary horse or a Nubian lion with a nettle-snarled mane, and believe that Noah had unloaded his cargo thereabouts.
Jenny, who’d started life in America after having been fished from the wreckage of a steamboat, realized that she’d come full circle. But that didn’t mean it was time to go home. Instead, she thanked Madame H. for saving her life, as she had the lives of a dozen others, and parted company with her for good. (The stronglady had elected to join what remained of Professor Hotspur’s pachyderm act on the vaudeville circuit, where she became known as “the Human Bridge” over whose chest the elephants routinely paraded.) Along with a clutch of survivors from the Carnival of Fun, who’d clung to one another since the calamity, Jenny took up with the Great Southern Circus, which was no more than a flivver-drawn mud show. Tracked down by a scout from the Sells-Floto Spectacular, however, she was offered a contract and once more given a spot above the center ring. The sadness that dogged her in the back lot and the pie car and invaded her Pullman berth still couldn’t touch her on the wire. But the dreams that seemed to belong to someone else continued to disrupt her equilibrium during her more death-defying stunts. Especially the dream in which the earth is propelled through space by means of a paddle wheel: when its blades are sideswiped by the wheel of heaven, which turns in the opposite direction, they interlock and both wheels come to a grinding halt.