The Fall of the Year (11 page)

The fire eater made a charred noise, like a burning log collapsing into its own coals.

Gawain, the armless-legless “child,” signed his autograph for Molly with a tiny flipper attached to his shoulder. The beautiful giantess complimented her on her performance on Rudyard during the street parade. And for a brief time in the Hippodrome, the daredevil withdrew, leaving good-natured Molly Murphy visiting amicably with the sideshow family of the Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth.

 

“Why come it's always the redheaded ones?” Slade was saying to me. “Every town has its Peck's bad boy or gal, and seven in ten of them sport a head of hair the color of barn paint. That gal is bidding fair to disrupt my entire show—complaints about her are pouring in from all quarters.”

“She really does want to join your circus,” I said. “Why don't you give her a shot?”

Slade shrugged. “She'd only come back home in six months, damaged goods.”

“I don't think so. She knows what she wants.”

“I want to run the Moscow Circus,” Slade said. “At this moment, my odds are considerably better.”

He picked up his blue megaphone and climbed up into a tall yellow ballyhoo stand at the entrance to the Big Top. “Hurry, hurry, hurry. The matinee of the Greatest Little Show on Earth begins at two o'clock. See the Flying Zempenskis' death-defying aerialist act. See the Four Horses of the Apocalypse Equestrian Exhibition. See clowns, clowns, clowns . . .”

The common was filling up with spectators, mainly parents with kids in tow. Flashing our passes, Molly and I crowded into the Big Top and sat as close to the single ring as we could get. At five of the hour, Rudyard Hefalump drew the steam calliope wagon inside. The beautiful giantess sat at the keyboard playing a booming rendition of “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Out ran Slade, tall and imposing in a crimson ringmaster's coat and a shiny stovepipe hat. He cracked a long whip in the fresh sawdust and gave a blast on a silver whistle. To the coughing strains of “Broadway,” punctuated by the rifle reports of the ringmaster's whip and his piercing whistle, two of the Apocalyptic Horses galloped into the ring side by side. Standing with one foot on the back of each animal was Count Zempenski.

The giantess played an anticipatory riff simulating a cavalry charge, whereupon the Countess and the Young Count rode into the ring single file on the other two horses, crouched low on their speckled backs like attacking Indians. Galloping a yard apart, the Count's teamed pair tore around the ring with the Countess and Young Count in pursuit. Suddenly the Countess and Young Count wheeled their steeds around and rode straight between the Count's horses, under his wide-spread legs.

The matinee sped by. Clowns dressed as demons plagued Slade with water pistols. Rudyard reared up on his wrinkled hind legs on a low stool. A trained seal balanced a ball on its nose and played “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” on six rubber horns while the Young Count rode a bicycle across the high wire with the Count standing on his shoulders and the Kilimanjaro monkey clinging to the Count's back. Roustabouts and riggers as sober as you would ever see them trotted in and out of the ring with props and worked their way through the cheering crowd, selling pink lemonade and Slade Bros. Circus caps. And for a few fleeting moments, the failing little one-ring circus under the patched old tent became a magical, blue-tinted fairyland.

Before the trapeze finale, the circus was interrupted by the obligatory drunk who wanted to perform. He was barefoot and dressed like a hayseed farmer in torn overalls and a straw hat. The ringmaster expostulated with him to no avail. The sheriff, Mason White, was called forward to evict the interloper; but when the law officer lunged for the drunk, he missed and, to the crowd's delight, sprawled face first in the sawdust. Then Slade rushed at the rube farmer, who sprang up the rope ladder to the trapeze rigging. Flinging off his overalls and hat as he climbed, he revealed himself as Count Zempenski. In the meantime, the Young Count mounted to the trapeze opposite his father. As the crowd cheered they launched themselves into the air, flipped, exchanged trapezes, seemed to fall only to catch themselves by their ankles, and performed a dozen other next-to-impossible feats.

To a gathering drumroll, played by the 150-year-old drummer boy, the Countess took her husband's place high overhead. In a bold voice Slade announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Countess Sophie Zempenski, world-renowned aerialist of the Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth, will now perform three somersaults off the flying trapeze. From Warsaw, Poland, just returned from a triumphal European tour, I give you—Countess Sophie.”

Assisted by her husband, who pulled a long rope leading up to the trapeze, Countess Sophie, in the briefest of spangled blue costumes, began to swing back and forth in widening arcs under the roof of the tent. Opposite and below her, some thirty feet away, the Young Count stood on a tiny platform holding his trapeze in one hand, the other hand and arm directing the crowd's attention to his mother. Molly was on the edge of her seat, no doubt thinking about the Young Count's sister and the terrible accident in Kansas. At a nod from the ringmaster the giantess struck up “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” on the calliope. The Countess dropped from her sitting position and hung from the trapeze bar with both hands. As she swung higher, the drumroll intensified. Alone in the spotlight, blue as a mermaid glimpsed far beneath the sea, the Countess released her hold, tucked into a glittering ball, and spun over.

“One!” the ringmaster shouted.

The countess spun again.

“Two!” shouted the ringmaster and half the crowd.

In unison the crowd rose. “Three!” they roared as Countess Sophie performed her final revolution and the Young Count, hanging from his trapeze by his legs, catapulted himself out over the ring, reached for her outstretched taped wrists, and plucked her from thin air as surely as a father catches a child tossed over his head for play, while the Common cheered its heart out.

The spectators continued to applaud as Countess Zempenski and her son dropped lightly onto the safety net and somersaulted out onto the sawdust. There they were joined by the Count and the other circus performers. Even a few smirking roustabouts bent a leg to the thundering applause.

Only Molly remained silent until, at last, the cheering died down and the performers ran out of the ring. Then, over the last smattering handclaps, over the calliope playing “Under the Hippodrome,” she shouted, “That's nothing! I can do four full flips, and I will before this day is out.”

 

“So she's given you the slip again,” a very unhappy Father George was saying as he caught up with me on the circus midway late that afternoon. “How the hell did that happen?”

“I don't know and I don't care,” I said. “Do you know what that damned kid did right after the matinee? She—”

“Good God almighty, the monkey's broke loose!”

It was Slade, rushing toward us, raising the hue and cry for his missing animal.

“Look!” someone shouted, pointing across the green and up at the courthouse tower.

Sure enough, the big white-and-black monkey was making its way swiftly up the bittersweet vine clinging to the side of the tower. By the time I joined the gathering crowd on the courthouse lawn, the runaway monkey was already higher than the limp blue-and-yellow pennants on the Big Top.

In the meantime, the hook-and-ladder truck, driven by Sheriff White, had skidded up onto the lawn beside us, siren screaming. But the ladder, when fully extended, still came up a few feet shy of the roof.

Slade paced back and forth on the lawn, while the Young Count called for the animal to come down. But the ten-thousand-dollar monkey continued its desperate ascent up the bittersweet vine, from time to time looking down over its shoulder in absolute terror, as if trying to escape not only from the village and the circus but from the earth itself.

“If it isn't redheaded scalawags, it's runaway apes,” Slade said in a distraught voice.

“Or both,” said Bumper Stevens. Bumper removed his cigar from his mouth and pointed its glowing end at the clock tower. Coming over the ridge of the roof below the tower, clinging to the bittersweet vine for dear life, was Molly Murphy.

She stood, ran along the roof peak to the base of the tower, paused, leaped high into the vine again, and continued to pull herself up nearly as fast as the monkey was climbing. Her left Ked came loose, and she kicked it far out over the steep slate roof below. It landed in front of the hook-and-ladder, bounced once, and came to rest right side up, like a single shoe in the road near an unspeakably bad automobile accident.

“Molly!” I shouted with my heart in my mouth. “Come down from there!” But I might as well have been shouting at the monkey, which, high above her in the hazy air, was resting just below the tower clock.

Here, some ten or twelve years ago, a professional human fly who called himself the Great Zeno had been stymied in his attempt to climb the courthouse tower. Zeno had come to Kingdom Common claiming grandiosely that human hands had not yet erected the structure he couldn't scale. In his résumé he had alleged conquests of the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Golden Gate Bridge, but after ascending to the uppermost reaches of the bittersweet vine, he'd been stopped in his tracks by the smooth face of the clock. He was obliged to descend in ignominy and return to the town his fee of five hundred dollars.

Yet a human fly was, after all, a human being, not a monkey, and the monkey, though visibly trembling, when it finally looked down and saw Molly climbing up the bittersweet vine like a monkey herself, made a desperate leap to the long iron minute hand of the clock. It scampered up that to the hour hand, and up the hour hand to a slight foothold atop the black iron XII. From there it sprang to the granite sill of the lookout window in the tower wall. Still trembling, it ducked inside. A few moments later it appeared on the railed walkway atop the tower, where it clung, shivering, to the base of the weathervane in the likeness of Blackhawk.

To my horror, Molly was at least three quarters of the way up the tower now. Here the bittersweet vine was so slender that the tendrils holding it to the granite blocks were almost too slight to see from below. Yet surely and steadily she crept upward, barefoot now, splayed against the perpendicularity of the battlement-like tower, which seemed to have been built just for this moment. From where I stood, far below, she looked no larger than a small child, pressed against the pink granite made even rosier by the haze in the air. Once she momentarily lost her foothold and slid a foot or so down the face of granite blocks, her legs dangling. A short length of the vine pulled away, and for a dreadful moment, Molly started to sway out from the tower. Somehow she lunged for and found another handhold; but as she did, a chunk of mortar, worked loose over the decades by the vine, broke free and fell to the slate roof below, where it shattered into several pieces with the heart-stopping sound of ice falling onto a hard pavement from a great height.

Now Molly was testing the vine with short tugs before putting her weight on it. The clock face that had ultimately thwarted the Great Zeno loomed just above her, its hands eternally frozen at twenty of twelve. Meanwhile the monkey had climbed up onto Blackhawk's back and was clinging there like a jockey riding down the home stretch.

At this point a new element was introduced into the drama unfolding high above our town. As the monkey, chittering with terror, clung to Blackhawk, and Molly clung to the uppermost tendrils of the bittersweet vine, a blue-clad figure appeared, running up the extended ladder of the fire truck. It was the Young Count, still in his circus tights, rushing to the rescue of Molly or the monkey or both. When he reached the top of the ladder he did not pause at all but simply leaped across the yard-wide space to the roof and sprinted up the slates, only sheer momentum preventing him from slipping backward and plunging forty feet to the steps below.

Just as the Young Count reached the base of the tower, Molly gave a powerful surge and scrabbled up the last few feet below the clock supported by her toes and fingers alone. She got one hand over the narrow projecting cornice at the base of the clock and pulled herself to her knees, then her feet. Using the VII as a foothold, she followed the monkey's route up the minute and hour hands. On top of the XII, she reached for the windowsill of the lookout. But, like the monkey, she would have to jump for it.

She glanced down at the Young Count, now more than halfway up the tower, bent her legs to the degree that her perch, almost flush with the clock face, would allow her to, and leaped for the sill. Just then an unearthly scream rent the smoky air.

My first thought was that Molly had missed the sill and was already falling. In fact, it was the monkey that had screamed. Molly was hanging by her fingertips from the granite windowsill, now hauling herself by main force up to her elbows, now crouched in the lookout window, and now out of sight, presumably on her way up the inside of the tower to the trap door in the roof and the railed walkway, by whatever means she could find, the wooden stairway from below having rotted away years ago.

Abruptly the monkey screamed again, a scream more piercing than mill whistle, fire whistle, train whistle. It screamed yet a third time as Molly emerged onto the iron-railed parapet atop the tower, where no man or woman had stood for more than half a century. And thirty feet below, at the uppermost extremity of the bittersweet vine, the Young Count stopped short where Zeno the Human Fly had stopped.

Now a contingent from the fire brigade came running with the town's big white nylon safety hoop with a red circle in the center. They stood on the courthouse steps—Harlan Kittredge, Stub Poulin, Abel Feinstein, and Armand St. Onge—holding the net and looking about as foolish as four well-intentioned firemen can look. What good would the hoop do if Molly fell from the tower onto the slate roof?