The Circus in Winter (23 page)

A hundred dollar bill wrapped around fifteen singles.

 

PEGGY WORKED
graveyard shift that night, and Joey, freed from gypsy duty, escaped to a friend's house, leaving Earl alone to check in the Labor Day campers. He welcomed them with a smile and a firm handshake, glad to have the gypsies out of his hair. But near sundown, he found the animal carcasses, tiny pieces of meat still hanging on the bones, thrown near the start of the first hole of the Frisbee golf course. Flies buzzed and clung to the skeletons. In the dim twilight, Earl picked up the carcasses with his bare hands and threw them into the bed of the truck. The stink of rotten meat was all over him. He scratched his nose, smelled the carrion wedged under his fingernails. His stomach turned, but he kept it all down. After dumping the bones into the green garbage Dumpster, he walked back to the house, took a hot shower, and threw his clothes away.

At nightfall, he set up a lawn chair next to the Skamper in the backyard and opened a beer. In his mind, he saw the king in his Silverado, leading his family in that long caravan. He knew where they were going. South down 1–65. Indianapolis. Louisville. Bowling Green. Nashville. Birmingham. Montgomery. Mobile. The Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes at night as Peggy read her Danielle Steels and Janet Daileys, Earl read the Rand McNally, skimming the highways with the tip of his finger, making up the plot as he traveled from town to town. But all the roads, all of his stories brought him back to the place he started. He didn't know how else to finish. The gypsies were their own home. Earl saw their secret, and that was why they were going on to the next thing, and he, Earl Richards, was sitting in the backyard of his two-story house, watching the flicker of campfires not his own.

 

EARL DECIDED
never to tell Peggy or Joey or his parents about the carcasses. They would take the carcasses personally, a confirmation of gypsy lowliness. Earl knew he'd never be able to explain to them that the carcasses were just part of the deal, and certainly no different than the cases of VTX toilet paper sitting in the campground storeroom. For weeks, neighbors came by to complain that the blacktop sealer the gypsies had spread over their driveways had melted and run in the first rain. The mailman delivered bills for tires, truck repairs, portable video games and televisions, and car stereos—all addressed to "John Smith c/o KOA Kampgrounds." Earl returned the bills, "Not at this address." Angry merchants called, trying to hold Earl accountable, but he hung up on them.

In the spring, Altman called. The Dairy Queen hadn't done well, and they were thinking about moving back to Lima, back to the KOA. He asked Earl if he was ready to buy, two years before he was even supposed to ask. Earl told him, "We've been having second thoughts. Not enough cash flow. Too far from the highway."

"It's a shame you have to move again," Altman said smoothly. "You barely just got there."

"A man's gotta be mobile," Earl said.

As it turned out, it was a good thing Earl never got rid of the Skamper. They had to move in with his parents, and since the house only had two bedrooms, Joey slept in the Skamper parked in the driveway. Then, in the fall, VTX closed the yard office and Earl, Peggy, and Joey were gone, following the rails to the next biggest railroad town, Cincinnati, the Queen City.

At the Queensgate Yards, Earl asked, "Is there somewhere I can work so I can at least
see
a train?" His boss, another College Boy, rolled his eyes at Earl's request, as if trains were quite beside the point. He led Earl to a small room containing a TV, VCR, and boxes of videotapes, hours and hours of passing trains. Eight hours a day, Earl rewound and fast-forwarded, writing down the numbers painted on the sides. When he tired of that, Earl was assigned to the stockroom, where he pointed a laser gun at computer barcodes so every box was inventoried and accounted for. When Peggy asked him to bring home a case of toilet paper, he had to tell her that it was no longer possible.

Earl says there's no honor in railroading anymore. He works to pay the bills, secure his retirement, and send Joey to college. On summer nights, he likes to buy a six-pack and sit on a picnic table down at the city park and watch the barges moving up and down the Ohio River. He thinks about the quarter of a million he'll get when he retires at sixty-five, about how he and Peggy will finally see the West. They'll take the Skamper over the prairies, the desert, the mountains, all the way to the Pacific. They'll sit on the beach with beers and watch the blue ocean until the sun goes down.

THE STORM HOWLED
across Illinois, hovered over Lake Michigan, then swooped down into northern Indiana, dumping over three feet of snow onto Lima. Outside town, at the winter quarters of the Great Porter Circus, animal handlers fed the big cats, which were pacing nervous circles, spoke soothing words to the liberty horses fretting in their stalls. Nettie Hofstadter woke up alone in a cold bunkhouse and touched the empty space beside her. Her husband, Hans, was superintendent of the menagerie, responsible for keeping the animals calm. Over the roaring wind, Nettie thought she heard the elephants screaming. Still, Nettie cursed Hans and his absence from under her mountain of quilts. In the night, she'd told him she felt sure the baby was coming. He'd touched her taut belly and laughed. She'd been saying the same thing every day for a week.

For hours, Nettie lay completely still, watching her smoky plumes of breath and the angry white cloud outside the window. Her water broke at nightfall, and she shouted for help. No one came. Perhaps the storm drowned her cries, but more likely, the neighbors had become all-too accustomed to the shrieking that accompanied Hans and Nettie Hofstadter's nightly spats. Afraid to deliver her first child alone, she considered walking to the nearest bunkhouse, but it belonged to a reclusive acrobat, a woman Nettie strongly suspected of witchcraft. A labor pain sent a sharp knife into her back, and finally, she decided to head for the elephant barn.

Nettie pulled on her coat, but it wouldn't button over her belly. Swaddling herself in the bed quilt, she stuck her swollen feet in a pair of Hans's boots. Outside, she staggered toward the elephant barn, trying not to waver. She'd forgotten to pick up the blizzard rope—if she missed the barn and wandered past the camel paddocks, she'd disappear forever into the winter fields. The falling snow was blowing sideways and slantways and up from the ground. Nettie turned around, saw her footprints disappearing behind her, and trudged forward.

As Nettie made her way to the barn, inside two old gypsy women—sister seamstresses, passing the time with a bottle of spirits—were watching Hans put his herd of elephants through an amusing pachyderm headstand lesson. The class was not going well. When Nettie threw open the barn doors, she let inside a tornado of cold and snow. Hans scolded her, raising his metal bullhook over his head. She might have sent the elephants into a panic. The gypsies came upon them, separated man and wife, saying, "Let us take care of this, boss. You go now, and we bring you good news later."

They led Nettie to an empty stall, spread out her quilt, and ordered her to lie down. Hans stoked the nearby stove, listening to Nettie's curses—all in German. He smiled. Mostly, he and Nettie spoke English now, thickly accented but passable. When they fought, which was often, they did so always in German. Afterward, they had sex in German, an indifferent but necessary joining done in silence. Hans spoke his native tongue when he talked to God, when he talked to his elephants. His mentor back in Hamburg taught Hans that German was the only human language wild beasts could understand and obey.

A half hour later, one of the gypsies handed him a mewling bundle of scarf. She said, "Look here, boss. I bring your son."

"
Hier ist mein Sohn,
" Hans said, holding the baby up to each of his elephants. The biggest, a bull named Caesar, touched the baby's head softly with its trunk.

The gypsy sisters whispered only to Nettie, "A sign. Your son will live a hundred years." Then they turned back to look at the baby in Hans's arms.

Nettie sighed. She wished she'd had a girl, a daughter to keep her company through the long winter days in the bunkhouse, the summer nights in Pullman cars and cheap hotels. Instead, her son would grow up in the elephant barn with a bullhook in his hand.

She almost got it right.

The Lima Journal,
April 25, 1901

ELEPHANT IS KILLED
CAESAR IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
Pays the Penalty for the Murder
of Hans Hofstadter with his Life
Elephant Jack Pursues the Beast
to the Fields and Shoots Him

A short time after dinner yesterday afternoon, Keeper Hofstadter and his assistant Elephant Jack took the elephant to the Winnesaw River for water, as the pump for the Elephant House was not working. On the way down to the river, Caesar showed a disposition to be unruly and was given a couple of jabs by Hofstadter. Down in the water, Caesar took the idea of revenge and caught Hofstadter in his trunk. He threw him in the air about 25 feet and Hofstadter came down flat in the water. He was able to get up and return to his former position and was trying to control the beast again when Caesar caught the man once more and this time threw him into the water and drowned and crushed him to death by holding him at the bottom of the stream with his tusks and feet.

An order was quickly put out by Wallace Porter to put down the elephant, and he was disposed of with a combination of rifle shots and apples filled with strychnine. People crowded around the remains and viewed them until dark. The tusks, four feet and two inches in length, were sawed off and taken in for safekeeping, as they are of great value. The remains will be skinned and the hide sent to a tanner. Caesar weighed about 9,500 pounds and was the largest animal in captivity. He was worth $6,000. The act Hofstadter went through with him at the circus was worth $100 a week to the circus. It has been reported that he was vicious and had killed three men before coming to this circus, but this is denied. Hofstadter had him in charge for eight years or more. He was first with the Washburn Show, then with the Diamond Show, and when Mr. Porter bought the Diamond stock, Caesar and Hofstadter came along. He showed no specially mean traits at the farm here, though yesterday morning he made a swipe at Hofstadter who had been sick of late.

Mr. Hofstadter was about thirty-five years of age and leaves a wife, Nettie, and son, Ollie. His skull was fractured and his arm broken by the beast's awful treatment.

OLLIE SAW
his father's dark, featureless face almost every night. Always, he woke from this dream feeling melancholy, a few notes of a sad song stuck in his head. But no matter how hard he tried, Ollie could remember neither the words nor the melody. Sometimes his mother looked at him strangely, as if at any moment she might start singing the song, but she never did. Instead, she'd look away, pressing her lips into a firm and final line. When he asked her, "What was my father like?" she said nothing. She said, "Look at that funny dog." She said, "Are you done with chores?" She said, "Don't ever ask me that again."

And so Ollie's father became not a memory or even a ghost, but rather a pocket of absence with distinct shape and form. It slept on the side of the bed his mother never touched, even in her sleep. It sat in the empty chair when they ate. It stared out from the wall where his father's framed picture should have hung, but didn't. It floated in his mother's clipped-off words, like soap bubbles that disappeared with a silent pop. It was the book his mother never read from, the story she never told.

OLLIE FOUND
his father on a wall.

His mother worked as a maid for Colonel Ford, the show's general agent. Mrs. Colonel had hired a painter to cover the walls of her house with murals of circus life, and one day, Ollie wandered into the study, the one room his mother had forbidden him to enter. The mural depicted a tiny man in a red shirt held aloft in an elephant's trunk. The man on the wall had no face, but Ollie knew it was his father even before Mrs. Colonel slipped up behind him, even before she told him everything she knew.

She let him look at the wall whenever his mother wasn't around. After, she gave him cookies. "Our little secret," Mrs. Colonel said. "A boy needs a father, even if it's only like this."

THE DISEASE
did its work quickly—one morning over breakfast, Nettie complained of a headache, and by nightfall, she had a fever of 105. Blood and fluid filled her lungs, leaving her gasping for breath. The doctor quarantined her, so Ollie waited outside, entering every couple of hours to check. The bunkhouse reeked with the stench of death, and he could hardly wait to escape outside, to fill his lungs with the wet, earthy smell of early spring. Smoking his cigar, he listened to Nettie moan and scream, all in German, a language she hadn't spoken in years and which Ollie had never learned. Stubbing out the cigar, he set it on the windowsill, realizing that the next time he came outside to smoke, his mother would be dead.