Dancing in Dreamtime (17 page)

So when Mooch popped out of the lion's mouth and offered to let him adopt her, Orlando promptly, if unwisely, agreed. The orphanage had him filling out forms for six weeks before they surrendered the girl into his care. He framed the certificate that declared him to be Mooch's guardian, and hung it on the wall of his workroom between a moose head and a swordfish.

Thinking back on his year with the girl, as he did now while mending the lion's pelt, a year of wonders and miseries, Orlando still could not bring himself to regret a minute of it. First she had persuaded him to make the beasts more natural, which meant smelly and shiftless. When this failed to impress the visitors, she urged him to make the beasts vicious. He was one of the first victims of this new regime, getting a leg broken in the alligator pen. While he was recuperating, Mooch programmed the beasts to attack anybody who put a foot in their territory. When the Overseers tried to shut the place down, four agents were mauled, and in the
hubbub Mooch rode an elephant out through the gates of the disney, leading an exodus of beasts down the shocked avenues. Every last beast was vaporized. Only the girl was spared. While Mooch and Orlando were awaiting trial, she built a drilling machine, bored a hole through the wall of the city, and escaped. Waking up to find her gone was the worst pain he had ever felt.

The Oregon City Disney was torn down while he sat in prison. In its place rose feelie-farms, eros parlors, game arcades, a thousand-and-one delights. Orlando spent the three years of his sentence fixing gadgets for the warden and thinking about Mooch. The warden tried to get him to stay on past his allotted time and live rent-free in her guest room, since she had a houseful of appliances and one gismo or another was always breaking down. But Orlando wanted out. “If you ever change your mind,” said the warden, sorry to see him go, “come back here and I'll put you to work.”

He would need work, all right, since the authorities had confiscated his meager savings and auctioned off his possessions to pay for the damage wrought by Mooch's beast parade. Only his grandfather's collection of stuffed animals, protected under the law as family heirlooms, had been saved for him. When he crammed these moldering trophies into the minibus which he had bought with his prison-leaving bonus, there was barely room enough inside for his bed, stove, and workbench.

The city gave him a job repairing robocops. Although he frequently bungled his dealings with people, Orlando was a wizard with machines. Within a few months he was foreman of the maintenance crew, and had a private shop where he could tinker in his off hours. First he built the lion, in memory of Mooch. Next he built the monkey, rigging it with all the smarts he could program
into it, so he would have somebody to talk with during his lonely hours. Then he went on to construct a rhinoceros, a gorilla, the two pandas, a Komodo dragon, an abominable snowman, a unicorn, a griffin—every beast, in fact, for which his grandfather's taxidermy collection provided suitable materials.

He left the monkey running all the time, for the sake of its chatter. The other beasts he fired up only one or two at a time, because there was so little space for them to do their tricks inside the bus. “Not room enough to swing a cat in,” his grandfather would have said. Certainly not room enough for a gorilla to beat on its chest without hammering dents in the neighboring animals. As soon as he had saved enough money, Orlando bought a trailer to hitch on behind the bus, then a second trailer and a third.

“You ought to take that show on the road,” advised his assistant, also an ex-con, who was angling for the foreman's job, “and see what you can milk out of the rubes.”

“That's exactly what I'm going to do,” Orlando replied.

He painted
SPINKS ANIMAL CIRCUS
in scarlet on the sides of the bus and three trailers. He furnished the trailers with grass-colored rugs and plastic trees and inflated stones, to give the effect of wildness. When everything was ready, he quit his job at the robocop shop, charged up the bus with a six-month supply of electricity, and set out to astonish the populace.

The populace—chiefly gawking youngsters and hawking oldsters—was intrigued, if not astonished. When the yellow bus and blue trailers rolled to a stop, loudspeakers blaring with circus tunes, a skeptical crowd gathered. The spindly, whitehaired man
who climbed down from the bus and announced himself in an age-cracked voice to be Orlando Spinks, ringmaster, did not promise to be much of a showman. But once he got cranked up, hooting and hollering about the wonders of his mechanical beasts, he wasn't half bad. He wore white boots, white tuxedo, white top hat, and purple bowtie.

One by one his beasts lumbered down the ramps from the trailers, ambled onto the sidewalk, and did their turns. Bears sat up and begged, lions roared, elephants chomped bales of seaweed, dragons blew smoke rings, rabbits did cartwheels. “All authentic!” the ringmaster yelled while skipping among them, prodding the beasts with his whip.

But no sooner had the sidewalk show begun than the white-suited ringmaster was herding the beasts back into the trailers and crying, “See the whole show inside! Tonight at eight! Tickets only a hundred C's!” When no one stepped forward to buy a ticket, he lowered the price to ninety—then eighty, sixty, forty—all the while bellowing, “Wildness on stage! Animal secrets revealed!” Only when the price dropped to fifteen, and the ringmaster in despair began climbing into his bus, did a few people step forward to buy tickets.

These rare customers later reported to friends that there wasn't much more to see at the inside show than they had already seen for free on the street. The liveliest part of it was the skin-and-bones ringmaster, this Orlando Spinks, who cavorted among his sluggish beasts, balancing on a zebra's back, wrapping himself in a boa constrictor, making a tiger dance. The audience yawned. The more they yawned, the more frenetic the ringmaster became, revving up his beasts until they twitched through their routines in seconds. When the rhino thrust its horn through the trunk of a
plastic tree and stopped dead, as if shot in its tracks, and the wolf began gnawing on its own hind leg, shorting wires and producing a billow of acrid smoke, the audience stood up. “Wait!” the ringmaster yelled, “there's more to come!” Ignoring him, the customers shuffled outside to find juicier entertainment elsewhere.

Orlando loaded up his bedraggled menagerie and drove the caravan to a new neighborhood. There he met with pretty much the same reception. “My kid's got fancier dolls than that!” somebody might yell during the tease performance on the sidewalk. “When's the show gonna start?” somebody else might yell halfway through the gala performance inside the rented hall. It was discouraging. People had no eye for art, and even less of an eye for nature. On his first swing through the precincts of Oregon City, Orlando earned just enough to pay for recharging the battery on his bus and restocking his larder.

Early in his second season, a heckler cried, “Is that all they do, jump around and growl?” Orlando shouted back, “Did you expect them to juggle? Do backflips? Tell jokes?” After weeks of such heckling, and after wrestling with his conscience, Orlando reprogrammed his beasts to perform such foolishness and worse. The pandas now played duets on the organ. The cheetah's spots and the tiger's stripes now blinked on and off like neon signs. The dragon swooped through the air, puffing smoke. The orangutan sped about on a motorcycle. With its long snout, the anteater tossed rings at the unicorn, which caught them on its horn. And so, in one way and another, all three dozen beasts were turned into buffoons.

Even though the audiences grew, attracted by these antics, Orlando took little joy in his success. Mooch would despise him for what he had done to the animals. She was a great believer in
wildness, and a terrible scold about dumbing down nature. His ears burned from imagining what she might say about these shenanigans.

“There's grumbling back in the trailers, chief,” the monkey reported to him one night during that second season.

“How can there be grumbling? They're all turned off.”

“I hear what I hear,” said the monkey sagely.

Limping back to investigate, still wearing his white ringmaster's tuxedo, which was beginning to fray, Orlando placed an ear against each of the trailers in turn, and sure enough, through the aluminum walls there came a low rumbling.

“What are they saying?” he whispered to the monkey.

“You got me, chief.”

“Who turned them on?” The monkey shrugged. When Orlando flung open the door of the first trailer, a hush fell over the beasts. “What are you all chattering about?” he demanded. No answer, only a heavy shifting of limbs. Angry and more than a little frightened, he rushed down the aisle throwing switch after switch until every beast was stilled. “You keep a sharp eye,” he told the monkey, “and if anybody comes messing around with them, give a howl.”

“Right you are, chief.”

Later that night the tiger slipped away, the first of his animals to desert him. Swearing that it never saw the great cat slink off, the monkey advised, “You want things watched, you ought to build a dog.”

“I might just do that,” Orlando threatened.

He made inquiries in the neighborhood, referring to the escaped tiger in the vaguest terms, to avoid scaring people, but nobody had seen anything prowling about on all fours. Orlando was stumped. How could a tiger, even a mechanical tiger, meander through the streets of Oregon City without being noticed?

A few days later the mystery multiplied, for the gazelle and griffin vanished during one of Orlando's afternoon naps.

“Could be they eloped, hey chief?” said the monkey, trying to cheer him up.

Orlando was not cheered. He was downcast. He was mystified. It could only be a judgment on him for having made fools of his animals, who were abandoning him like sailors jumping ship to escape a mad captain.

He doubled the locks, shortened his naps, and slept at night sitting up on a recliner in the middle trailer. But still the beasts stole away. While Orlando was counting up the skimpy gate receipts after an evening performance, the gorilla and sasquatch disappeared. Surely this was a judgment. Mooch had warned him against trivializing nature to put on a gaudy show. Repentant, he began reprogramming the animals, erasing their tricks.

The audiences dwindled. Who wanted to pay to watch a herd of furry robots sit around and scratch imaginary fleas? After a while, only hecklers showed up, mocking the fidgety little ringmaster in his threadbare tuxedo. They flung taunts at him, and he flung them back. While the circus animals lounged and gaped and snored, the ringmaster danced. He juggled plastic coconuts. He twirled his baton. He performed tricks of derring-do with knives and torches. At the conclusion of his act he removed the top hat to bow, and his white hair blazed in the house lights, sweat stains showed beneath his arms, his legs trembled. Occasionally a few
onlookers clapped halfheartedly. But more often Orlando heard only the scuffle of departing feet.

After his performances, he would put his animals away in the one remaining trailer—he had sold the others to pay his bills—and go sit on the bus, worn out, heartsick. He didn't bother locking up the beasts; if they were so eager to go, let them go. When he thought of the future, he saw only a black hole—his entire menagerie run off, the rented halls echoing to his solitary voice.