Circus Parade (14 page)

 

H
E joined us in a Florida town. He was not a typical circus roughneck in appearance. His hair was a wavy black turned prematurely grey. His eyes were deep brown, his jaw was firm, his lips tight, and his body large, well shaped, and muscular.

“Any work here?” he asked Silver Moon Dugan.

“Nope. All filled up. But the property boss needs a man,” was the terse reply.

The property boss gave him a sixteen-pound sledge and told him to drive tent stakes. It was before breakfast. By the time the meal was announced he had driven, with the help of two other men, over a hundred stakes to hold the property tent.

He unloaded property effects belonging to performers. He also wore a bright red and green uniform and led a group of Shetland ponies inside the big top when the special act was on.

As Sunday was wash day with the circus, he would always take time to wash his rough clothing.

He worked hard. He smoked a twisted pipe when sitting alone, and acted disdainful of everybody, including Cameron. We called him “Blackie” among ourselves.

It was not long before we looked upon him as a superior being. His good looks, his strong and clean body, his proud manner fascinated us. We respected his disdain.

He seldom talked to us. When he did, his speech was direct and brutal.

Having created an air of mystery about himself, we were always anxious to learn something about him.

Silver Moon Dugan soon heard of his ability to swing a heavy sledge. He induced him to leave the property boss and join his unit at ten dollars a month increase, or forty dollars a month, top wages on the canvas crew.

He made the change with no more concern than he took in filling his pipe. The stakes were always laid out for him when the tent was to go up. Once the stake was started in the ground by his two helpers he would slam it downward in nine strokes. The sledge would swing upward, the steel glistening in the sun. After making a circle at least eight feet it would hit the stake squarely. No other man with the circus could drive a stake in the ground with less than twelve strokes.

Even Silver Moon Dugan respected him.

“Where you from, Buddy? Been troupin' long?” he asked him.

“Sure thing. I was raised with a circus. My father was Barnum's mother.”

Silver Moon Dugan muttered contemptuously to Buddy Conroy, “Funny guy,” and let him alone afterward.

“What do you think of Blackie?” I asked Jock.

“You
git
it, say it yourself, kid. He's no regular circus stiff. Look at that nose and that jaw and those eyes that cut like steel. He's got razors in 'em. He was born to be hanged.” Jock would say no more.

We left Pensacola, Florida, and played a small town about eighty miles distant. It had drizzled all day and the lot was slippery. Blackie had a habit of walking around it, head bent low, left hand holding the pipe in his mouth.

It was about seven in the evening and the drizzly day lingered faintly. Blackie saw a form in the semi-darkness. “Here—what are you doing there?” he asked quickly.

A scared Negro girl, not over fourteen, had been trying to crawl under the tent. She stood before him.

“I doan do nothin', jist a peerin' in,” she answered, with a half petulant smile.

She was more yellow than black. Her face was beautiful and round, her mouth small, her teeth even and white, her lips full and she was dark-eyed. She wore a plaid dress which curved above her hips and accentuated her lithe and lovely form.

Blackie held her shoulders in his immense hands.

“
God damn
, but you're nice,” he said, “slender and clean like a new whip.
GOD DAMN
!” He crushed her to him.

Pushing her away at arm's-length, he still held her shoulders and looked in her eyes.

“Why in the hell you should have to sneak in a circus is what I'd like to know.”

The girl looked up at him with wide eyes of wonder. He put his arm about her. She clung to him at once and pulled his head down and kissed him.

Blackie's eyes blazed. He led the slender young girl, now all animal herself, to the rear of the snake-charmer's wagon. She was heard to cry, “Oh Misteh Man, Misteh Man,” a few times as if in pain. Then all became very still.

Later, he put her on a mattress in an empty canvas-covered wagon and stood guard over it while fifteen white circus roughnecks entered one at a time. Before entering, each man gave Blackie a half dollar.

When the last man had gone Blackie smuggled the girl into the big top.

Late that night, as the circus train was ready to pull out, the little Negro girl saw Blackie standing in the open door of a car.

Running with arms extended she yelled, “Misteh Man, Misteh Man!” and tried to board the car as the train started.

We watched Blackie's unchanging expression. The girl held desperately to the car and tried to swing her lithe body inside. “Let her come on in,” yelled Silver Moon Dugan.

“
What?
A nigger wench?” snapped Blackie as he put his foot against the girl's forehead and kicked her from the car.

The girl could be heard wailing pitifully above the accumulating noise of the rolling cars, “Misteh Man, Misteh—Man—do come on back, Misteh Man!”

The engine whistle shrieked as we rattled by red and green lights.

*      *      *

No man spoke for a long time. I watched their changing expressions. Silver Moon Dugan's eyes looked a trifle sad. I heard Blackie trying to puff his pipe. It had gone out. He remained silent for some minutes. He then lit a match and smoked.

 

S
ILVER MOON DUGAN was known as the greatest “red-lighter” in the country. Red-lighting was an ancient and dishonorable custom indulged in by many a circus twenty years ago.

The act consisted of opening the side door of a moving car, and kicking the undesirable traveler out.

How the term originated is in confusion. Some ruffian authorities claimed that men were only kicked off trains near the red lights of a railroad yard. But I have seen many kicked off circus trains where no red lights gleamed at all.

But there can be no doubt that the practice originated in order to cheat circus laborers and other roustabouts out of their wages. If the victim persisted in walking many miles and following the circus he was chased off the lot. There was no redress in any of the states for those cheated. The poor man's justice then, as now, was not only blind, but lame and halt.

Silver Moon Dugan had been with Cameron's World's Greatest Combined Shows three years. He was either of French or Spanish extraction. How he came by any of his names no one ever knew. He was tall, wiry and dark. He had thin straggly hair. His black eyes burned out of a rat face. He had a club foot and walked with a limp. He could talk French, Italian, German, and excellent English when necessary.

His greeting each morning to his roughneck canvasmen was, “Good morning, sons. You know what kinda sons I mean.”

Dugan was nearly aways drunk, but never showed it. He was a hard, domineering, brutal, snarling driver of men. He carried a blackjack and a revolver at all times. He could load or unload a circus faster, and with fewer men, than any other canvas boss in the nation.

To mark a lot for a tent it is necessary to make accurate measurements. A steel tape is used to locate places for centre poles, dressing tents and stakes.

Silver Moon Dugan could walk on a lot, give it a quick glance as he limped about on his club foot, and know with unerring precision in five minutes just how the tent was to be placed. “You gotta know your canvas,” he would say as he would allow two feet for shrinkage if the tent was wet. If the canvas was extremely dry, he would allow for its stretching a foot.

Once on the lot, he would gather a bundle of “laying out pins,” wire needles about a quarter of an inch in diameter and two feet long. The eyes of the needles were about an inch in circumference. To each was tied a piece of red flannel. Dugan would throw these needles in the ground with exact precision at the point where a stake was to be driven.

A canvas boss of the old school, he hated all advance men, those fellows who traveled ahead of the circus. He blamed them for rough lots, inclement weather, poor business and bad food.

Once while hurrying about the lot he stumbled over a pile of manure. “The God damn advance man's fault,” he yelled, unmindful of the fact that the advance man had no control over local horses.

Two men had been his lieutenants during the years he spent with Cameron. One was Gorilla Haley, so named because he looked like a gorilla and moved slower than the sands of time.

The other man was called “The Ghost.” He was more like shadow than reality, a shambling watery man with uneven shoulders, a crooked mouth and a hare lip. He was a man who never did anything right. Clumsy and filthy, a human nearly as low in the mental scale as an animal, he worshipped Silver Moon Dugan as a god. That was his chief value in the world. Dugan had carried “The Ghost” with one circus or another for eleven years.

Dugan never smiled. The right corner of his mouth would merely twist in a leer when he was amused. Judging him from the memory of adolescence, I am certain he had no sense of humor. Rather did he have a sense of the atrociously ridiculous. The right corner of his mouth was seen to twist several times when he heard Goosey hitting Gleason with the bull hook.

Dugan hired many romantic young men who wished to see the world. “I'll show 'em the world,” he used to say, “at the end of a sledge.”

Two weeks before he had come across a young fellow who was anxious to travel. Dugan observed his clothes and watch. He agreed to give the young man twenty-five dollars per week and a chance “to work himself up,” after he discovered he could bring a few hundred dollars with him.

He told the young fellow, who was a railroader, that it would be necessary to bring a good watch so as to be on time for work each morning. “Promptness is a jewel,” were his words. He also told him to bring several suits, two pairs of shoes, a good pistol and all the money possible, as the first month's salary was held back.

The youth reported to Dugan with two suitcases full of clothes, three hundred dollars in money and an expensive watch. The next day Dugan told him to put on overalls and save his good clothes for the larger towns. Clothes, watch and money were left in Dugan's care.

The young fellow was now huddled in the car with Dugan, Blackie, The Ghost, Gorilla Haley, myself and several others.

At the next stop, Cameron and Slug Finnerty crawled into the car and talked over details of the next day with Silver Moon Dugan. The train started before they could get off and go to their own section.

“It's only a sixty-mile run now to ———, and not a stop. We'll make it in a couple of hours,” said Silver Moon as Cameron and Finnerty resigned themselves to their environment.

The rain rattled heavily on the roof of the car. The late season was making business even poorer. Everyone was in an evil mood.

The heavy sopping pieces of canvas had been rolled into huge bundles and put at one end of the car. “We've paraffined 'em till they cracks but they don't hold off water no more. It soaks right through,” said Dugan to Cameron.

The car was lighted with smoky kerosene lamps such as were used in old-fashioned railway cars. The kerosene smoke, the odor of bad liquor and filthy bodies, the reek of the wet and muddy canvas filled the air. Combined with the rainy and gloomy night it all seemed unreal to my tired brain, the haunted fragment of an ugly dream. A few men played cards with a dirty deck. The Ghost smoked the butts of cigars he had collected under the seats in the big tent after the show.

There were no bunks in the car. Every canvasman slept in a dirty blanket in wet weather, or on the rolls of canvas in hot, in any spot which he could keep hold by right of might.

The romance of circus life had fast faded from the young fellow as he looked for a spot upon which to stretch his shivering body. No man talked. We lay like stunned animals on soggy ground. The young man had seen neither clothes, money nor watch since joining the show.

He looked about at the dreary assemblage and then looked up at the roof upon which the rain pounded heavily.

“Gee, I wish I had a nice clean bed and a warm bath,” he whined. The card players paused for a moment and frowned at the boy. The Ghost held the butt of his cigar and looked at the young fellow a moment, then put the bad-smelling tobacco rope in his mouth and resumed gazing at his feet. Blackie held his pipe tightly.

I looked across the car at him and wondered. He was not one of us. But what was he? He made of silence a drama.

He now rubbed his beaked nose with the stem of his crooked pipe. Gorilla Haley, with arms spread out, snored like a grand opera singer. Silver Moon Dugan lay on a roll of dry flags of many nations. They had not been used on the main tent that day on account of rain. He breathed heavily with asthma.

Cameron and Finnerty, oblivious of surroundings, sat on a bundle of wet canvas and talked.

The old car rattled, swayed and creaked over the rough roadbed. Thick sprays of rain blew in through the cracks of the side doors.

Silver Moon Dugan buttoned his red flannel shirt and, rising to his feet, made his way quickly over piles of canvas and stacks of poles and seats.

Accustomed to dirt, and the squalor of the circus, the corner of his mouth twisted at the young fellow's desire for a bed and a bath.

He put his hand on the boy's shoulder.

“So it's a bath and a bed you want, my lad,” he said, not unkindly, as he opened the door about two feet. “See if you can see any red lights ahead.” The young fellow looked out and answered, “No.”

“All right,” jeered Dugan, “there's a nice roadbed down there, an' a whole damn sky full of bath.” He kicked the young adventure searcher out of the car.