I shouted.
For, half round the ring, the camel, seized with an earthquake of arthritis, collapsed.
It fell as if its tendons were chopped.
With a ridiculous leer, with a grimace that begged our pardon, the camel crashed like a wall of canvas and dung.
It knocked one of the ringside tables flat. Beer bottles shattered amidst one elegant funeral-director husband, his hysterical wife, and two sons made joyous by this event which they would tell about for the rest of their lives.
The tiny lady with the big teeth, waving bravely, smiling her own pardon, went down with the ship of the desert.
Somehow she retained her seat. Somehow she was not rolled on or crushed. Pretending that nothing whatsoever was wrong, she continued to wave and smile as the various rope-haulers, trombone players, and trapeze artists, half-in half-out of their new-old disguises, ran to butt, kick, pummel, and spit on the eye-rolling beast. Meanwhile the rest of the parade circled the ring, making a wide detour around this point of collapse.
Getting the camel put back together this leg here, that joint there, and the neck, so! was like putting up an Arab tent in a hurricane. No sooner had these sweating architects established one leg and nailed it to the earth, than another leg creaked and broke apart.
The camel’s humps flopped in opposite directions, wildly. The little woman stayed bravely sidesaddle. The phonograph brass-band pulsed, and at last the camel was reassembled; the great homely jigsaw of bad breath and Band-Aid-covered pelt reared up to shamble, walking wounded, drunk and disorderly, threatening to crack yet other tables flat, one last time around the ring.
The tiny lady way up there on the smelly dune of beast waved a final time. The audience cheered. The parade limped out. The trombone player rushed over to the platform to shut the fanfare off.
I found that I was standing, my mouth open and aching, my lungs raw with shouts of encouragement I had not heard myself give. I saw that there were dozens of others, like myself, who had been caught up in the despair of the woman and the embarrassment of the camel.
Now we all sat down, giving each other quick proud looks, glad for happy endings. The band shuffled back in, wearing gold epaulettes on their work-coveralls. They struck a brass note.
“The Great Lucretia! The Butterfly of Berlin!” cried the ringmaster, appearing for the first time by the very proper tables, his trumpet hidden behind his back. “Lucretia!”
Lucretia danced out.
But of course it was not just Lucretia who danced, but tiny Melba and Roxanne and Ramona Gonzales. With many hats, many costumes, she ran with the same vast piano smile. Oh, Lucretia, Lucretia, I thought.
O woman who rides camels that fail, O woman who juggles kegs and rips tacos—
O woman, I added, who tomorrow will drive one of those flimsy tin locust-scourge trucks across the Mexican desert toward some lonely town inhabited by 200 dogs, 400 cats, 1,000 candles, and 200 forty-watt bulbs, plus 400 people. And of those 400 people, 300 will be old women and old men, 80 will be children and 20 young women waiting for young men who will never come back from across the desert where they have vanished toward San Luis Potosi, Juarez, and sea-bottoms dry and empty and baked to salt.
And here comes the circus, packed in a few grasshopper-plague cars, flicking, rattling, jouncing over the pothole roads, squashing tarantulas to strawberry phlegm, crushing slow dogs to tarpaulin papier-mache shapes left to flake at high noon on an empty turnpike, and the circus, not looking back, gone.
And this small woman, I thought, why, she is almost the whole thing. If she ever dies …
Ta-ta! said the orchestra, calling me back from reveries of dust and sun.
A silver buckle flew down out of the tent sky on a fishing line. It had come to fish for—her!
She attached the silver buckle to her smile.
“Oh my God, look!” said my friend. “She … she’s going to—fly!”
The tiny woman with the biceps of a truck driver and the legs of a six-day bike-rider jumped.
God, on his long fishing line, drew her whizzing into the brown flapping-tent sky.
The music soared with her.
Applause shattered the air.
“How high would you say she is?” whispered my friend.
I would not answer. Twenty feet, maybe twenty-five.
But somehow, with this tent and these people and this night, it seemed a hundred.
And then, the tent began to die. Or rather the Smile began to collapse the tent.
Which is to say, the teeth of the tiny woman attached to the silver buckle pulling one way, toward the center of the earth, caused all the tent-poles to groan. Wire hummed. The canvas boomed like a drum.
The audience gasped and stared.
The Butterfly spun and whirled in her bright unfurled cocoon.
But the ancient tent gave up. Like a hairy mammoth despairing of his bones, the tent leaned, wishing to roll over and sleep.
The men holding to the rope, which had yanked the Smile, the Teeth, and Head, the Body of the brave little muscled woman fifteen and then twenty feet into the air, these men now also gazed up in terror. The poles would crush, the canvas smother their insignificant lives. Their eyes flicked to the ringmaster who snapped his whip and cried “Higher!” as if there was somewhere yet to go.
She was almost to the top of the tent now and all the poles were vibrating, shaking, leaning. The orchestra brassed out a single note as if to summon an evil wind. The wind came. Outside in the night, a very dry Santa Ana indeed arrived, picked up the skirts of the tent, let the night peer under, blew a vast whiff of hot oven air in on us with dust and crickets, and fled.
The tent boomed its canvas. The crowd shivered.
“Higher!” cried the ringmaster, bravely. “Finale! The Great Lucretia!” Then he hissed in an explosive aside: “Lucy, vamanos!” Which translates to: “God sleeps, Lucy. Down!”
But she gave an impatient shake, twist, ripple of her entire muscled Mickey Rooney body. She shed her wings. She became an angry hornet cutting swathes. She spun faster, divesting herself of silks. The band played “Dance of the Seven Veils.” She whipped off layer on layer of red, blue, white, green! With a series of amazing metamorphoses she spellbound our uplifted eyes.
“Madre de Dios, Lucretia!” cried the ringmaster.
For the canvas heaved, exhaled. The tent skeleton groaned. The angle-pullers, the rope-haulers shut their eyes, moaning, afraid to see that insanity in the air.
Lucy-Lucretia snapped both hands. Zap! A Mexican flag, an American flag sprang from nowhere into her fingers. Crick!
The band, seeing this, played the Mexican national anthem (four bars), and ended with Francis Scott Key (two).
The audience clapped, yelled! With luck, that midget dynamo would be down on the earth instead of the tent down on our heads! Ole!
The three ropemen let her drop.
She fell a full ten feet before they remembered she had no net. They seized the smoking rope again. You could smell their burning skin. Devil’s fire leaped from their palms. They laughed with pain.
The little toy lady hit the sawdust, her smile still attached to the buckle. She reached up, unplucked the rope, and stood waving the two bright flags at the gone-mad crowd.
The tent, relieved of 110 pounds of mighty muscle, sighed. Through the many moth holes in the gray-brown canvas skin, I saw a thousand stars twinkling in celebration. The circus was to live for yet another day.
Pursued by a tidal wave of applause, the Smile and the tiny lady who owned it ran along the sawdust shore, gone.
Now: the finale.
Now, an act which would put out our lives, blow out our souls, destroy our sanity by its beauty, terror, weight, power, and imagination!
So said a rope-hauler over the lilyhorns!
The rope-hauler waved his trumpet. The band fell in a heap of super-induced affection upon a triumphal march.
The lion-tamer, in a banging cloud of pistol-fire, bounded into the ring.
He wore a white African hunter’s helmet, a Clyde Beatty blouse and puttees, and Frank Buck boots.
He cracked a black whip. He fired his pistol to wake us up. The air was filled with an immense bloom of scent.
But under the shadow of his white helmet, and behind his fierce new mustache, I saw the face of the ticket-seller out front an hour ago, and the eyes of the ringmaster.
Another pistol crack. Ta!
The round lion-tamer’s cage, hidden until now under a bright tarpaulin toward the rear of the tent, was revealed as its brilliant cover was yanked off.
The ring-attendants came trudging in, pulling a crate inside which we could smell a single lion. This they pushed up to the far side of the cage. Doors were opened. The lion-tamer leaped into the main cage, slammed the door, and fired his weapon at the open door of the lion’s shadowy crate.
“Leo! Andale!” cried the tamer.
The audience leaned forward.
But … no Leo.
He was asleep somewhere in that small portable crate.
“Leo! Vamanos! Andale! Presto!” The tamer snapped in through the small crate door with his whip, like someone turning meat on a tired spit.
A big fluff of yellow mane rolled over with an irritable mumble.
“Gah!” The pistol was next fired into the deaf old lion’s ear.
There was a most deliciously satisfying roar.
The audience beamed and settled back.
Leo suddenly manifested in the crate door. He blinked into the damned light. And he was—
The oldest lion I have ever seen.
It was a beast come forth from a retirement farm in the Dublin Zoo on a bleak day in December. So wrinkled was his face, it was a smashed window,
