The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (30 page)

Still, it was an offer, and I had it delivered to John Ringling, who
apparently wrote out a cheque without thinking. I never even had a
chance to thank Al G., Dan telling me he'd gone off to Nevada to oversee the construction of some house he was having built in the middle of
the desert. After that, I finished out the season as quietly as possible.
Word got round I was giving up the Barnes show for the Ringling
show, and though there were a lot of congratulations and back-slapping
there was a feeling on the lot I wasn't "with it and for it," which meant
a slight frostiness every time I came upon a group of people. Or maybe
it really was jealousy, something that brings out the worst in people.
Mostly I spent my time with the tigers I'd have to say goodbye to.

The final show was sometime in late November in Tempe,
Arizona. I didn't even go to the farewell party, just locked my door and
listened to the hooting and hollering rage on outside while Rajah and I
had a quiet evening in. Next day, the circus packed up and moved to
temporary winter quarters in Phoenix, Arizona, the rumour being that
divorce lawyers hired by Leonora Speeks were already picking apart
everything back in Venice and Portland.

I spent the next day and a half reading and knitting and taking
Rajah on field walks. Was a happy time, being alone with a cat and a
rosy-looking future. Midway through the following afternoon, the
eastbound came. A Negro porter deboarded, having been instructed to
be on the lookout for a white woman, a steamer trunk and a housecat
the size of a sofa.

IT TOOK THREE DAYS TO GET RAJAH ALL THE WAY TO
Bridgeport. At every whistle stop I'd gentle him and coo at him
through wire mesh, and if the baggage hands were susceptible to flirtation I'd leash him and take him out for little walks around the rail yard,
Rajah arfing and moaning when I put him back. He lost weight and
piddled like an old person.

By the time we reached Bridgeport, there were already spots
where his hair was growing sparse. A different winter quarters with different people didn't help much either. Within a week and a half, he was
bald as a pool cue, again, meaning I was subjected to the usual jokes
about my prize tiger and how if old P.T. was still alive he'd advertise
him as a rare hairless sabretooth from the northern plains of
Manchuria. I was living in a hotel in downtown Bridgeport that didn't
allow pets, much less wild ones, and though Rajah spent all day following me around I still had to put him in a menage pen at night. Slowly he
adjusted to his new life, though I do mean slowly: we'd been there a month and only small, plum-sized patches of hair had grown back, his
coat looking more checkerboard than regal. Two weeks into the new
year, I started to worry my famous wrestling tiger might not be ready
for the season opener in New York City. Nervousness or no nervousness, he had to start working again.

That afternoon, I leashed Rajah and let him into the practise
arena. He went to his pedestal, in fact he looked sharp doing so, which
is why I suppose my guard was down. I turned my back and gave the
signal and a second later I had a tiger around my shoulders, nuzzling
the spot of neck between ears and back. He leaned his weight against
me, this being Rajah's way of pushing me down and smothering me
with fur and body. Lying under him, I felt pleased, so I said, "Good
Rajah, that's real good," and to show he understood he purred and
began a series of wriggles and warm undulations.

At which point a tapir wandered by.

Now I don't know if you've ever seen a live tapir. In this day and
age there're zoos in pretty much every decent-sized city and the average person knows a whole lot more about animals than the average person in 1921, so I assume you have. But just in case you haven't, believe
me when I say a tapir could just be the ugliest animal ever put on this
green earth, and that's saying something given we also have pugs,
duck-billed platypuses and the naked mole rat. In other words: wrinkly
black body, a little like a donkey and a little like a horse and a little like
neither, along with a face that'd be nothing worse than mopey except
for a long, dong-like thing dangling where a nose should rightfully be.
What this tapir was doing wandering free is anybody's guess, though at
times the menage hands did let the gentler animals out when they
cleaned their cages. Though it was strictly against the rules, it meant
they didn't have to find other cages to put them in.

Anyway, I was lying there, peering through the gap between tiger
and floor, when the tapir stopped and looked and let his face-dong waggle with curiosity. I suppose he'd never seen a big naked cat lying atop a woman before, and I suppose this bizarre sight inspired him to let out
the screechy barking noise tapirs make when they want to comment on
something. Suddenly I could feel Rajah's muscles clench, and I knew
something was wrong. He growled, stood and started toward the tapir,
who was braying like a lanced mule and waggling his dong-thing so
furiously it was practically a blur. The one thing the tapir wasn't doing
was backing away from the cage bars, common sense never being a trait
among animals who defend themselves by looking weird enough
to frighten.

Meanwhile, Rajah was stalking his way toward the outer cage, his
ears back and his body low. It was clear once he reached the bars he was
going to reach through and take the tapir's dong-thing clean off and
probably its head right along with it. And while the thought of a dead
tapir didn't upset me greatly, it was equally true I didn't have much
clout with the Ringlings, seeing as so far my world-famous act had
amounted to nothing but a bald tiger whose sorrowful arfing kept the
other animals up all night. Under no circumstances could Rajah kill that
tapir. By the time I figured this out, however, he was exactly one tiger
step away, meaning all I could do was lunge forward, yell, "Rajah no!"
and take hold of his tail.

Was sheer stupidity, my forgetting Rajah was tiger, for he chose
that moment to take out all his perturbation of the past six weeks.
Meaning: he turned and swung a forepaw full force at my head. He kept
his claws in, which proves he was only trying to issue a complaint
(though even if he had killed me I wouldn't have blamed him for it was
my fault trying to work him so soon). In the end, it didn't make much
difference who was at fault and who wasn't at fault, for I was lying flat
on my back out cold. At least I was doing better than the tapir.

I woke up in the Ringling infirmary with a jackhammer for a
head. When they asked me if I was all right I assured them I was fine,
though in truth I was soon pestered by headaches and dizziness and,
most worrisome, periods in which my hearing would go on the fritz, everyone sounding as though they were standing a long way off and
mumbling. Around this time, I stopped kidding myself that Rajah
would be ready for the season opener in New York. If I wanted to keep
my reputation I needed to find something interesting and cat-like to
train, and I needed to find it quick.

So I went for a good long walk through the Ringling menage. I'd
done it before but this time I had my eyes peeled and that's a different
experience altogether. I saw black bears, brown bears, grey bears and
polar bears taken from Eskimo villages in Greenland. I saw nilgai, black
bucks, aoudads, gemsbok antelope and the tapir bought to replace the
tapir Rajah had beheaded. I saw six giraffes from the plains of Ethiopia;
because of their specially built car, the Ringling circus had to be routed so it didn't encounter any tight tunnels or low bridges, which was
possible only because the Ringlings owned half the railroads in the
country. I saw hippopotamuses from the Transvaal, orangutans from
Borneo, howler monkeys from British Honduras and tiny rhesus monkeys from the jungles of India (who by the way are the only monkeys
on earth with a natural friendliness about them, chimps being testy and
gorillas being grumpy and the orangs being out-and-out vicious). I saw
Peruvian llamas, Ecuadorean pumas, Mexican macaws, Nicaraguan toucans and oscillated turkeys lifted straight from the jungles of Guatemala.
I saw sea lions, sea elephants and sea turtles. Saw rhinoceruses, elephants
and jumbo the hippopotamus (who like Barnes's hippo was fed only
water dyed red, it being the fashion back then for circus hippos to sweat
what was supposed to be blood so they looked like something from the
Book of Revelation). I saw kangaroos, koalas and hairy-nosed wombats. I saw bats and snakes and spiders and serpents and salamanders,
all sideshow-bound. I saw camels and horses and zebras (though back
then troupers called zebras convicts, owing to their stripes). I saw yaks
and bison and Vietnamese water buffaloes. I saw a white stallion with
a papier-mache horn that'd be billed as a unicorn if someone could
figure out how to stop the horn from shaking free every time the horse hiccuped. I saw pigs and Sicilian burros and goats and deer. I even
saw a wild boar or two, with their tiny, pig-like eyes and wine-corklength horns.

Plus I saw Nigger.

Now I know that's a dirty word today, but back then people used
it all the time and if you want me to apologize for the sins of an age well
maybe I should. Still, there's no denying when I first laid eyes on him,
I was struck by how dark he was, darker than the darkest of the Negro
stake drivers. Even in sunlight there wasn't a suspicion of purple in his
coat or the spots that lay underneath; right then and there I decided I
had to work him, a pure blackness being something that's mighty rare
and beautiful to look at.

I admit there was also a healthy dose of my own vanity at work
here, for until then there hadn't been a trainer in the history of the
circus who'd tried working a jaguar, probably because every other
trainer in the history of the circus had had the horse sense not to,
jaguars being evil, flat-foreheaded beasts who in addition to suffering
from extreme hostility are fast as greased lightning. The only upside
was if they attacked, they were small enough you'd most likely survive.

This one had been bought by a Ringling animal hunter in
Barbados and had been shipped to Bridgeport in a wooden crate.
Throughout the trip he kept trying to batter his way out, so the Creole
deckhands had driven nails through the sideboards. The upshot was the
cat had gotten scratched and punctured and perforated on the way over,
something that didn't help his disposition one iota.

I started breaking him. Thankfully, the rest of the act was trained,
for it took all winter, hours and hours a day, a whip in one hand and a
sawed-off broom handle in the other. Was ages before I even got
Nigger to entertain the notion of taking a pedestal, and even then I had
to put a second pedestal between the two of us, seeing as he had a bad
habit of acting quiet and kitten-like before launching a sudden spitting
swipe at the eyes. The key, of course, was rewarding him every time I drew close and he didn't launch one of those big muscled forepaws at
my eyes (jaguars having paws of a size that wouldn't look out of place
on a Sumatran).