ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After subtracting the many debts I owe in the researching and writing of City of Baraboo, I find little remaining save the responsibility for whatever inaccuracies that managed to escape detection before they saw print. First, for suggesting the development of the star-circus idea used in one of my short stories, and for many suggestions that should earn him a generously declined byline, my thanks to George Scithers, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
Special thanks go to Robert L. Parkinson, Chief Librarian and Historian of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for taking a highly unreasonable request for information and supplying it. Sincere thanks go, as well, to Betty Austin, Colleen Condon, and Barbara Watt of the Cutler Memorial Library in Farmington, Maine, for their long hours of searching that produced several invaluable circus histories the absence of which would have made this book, at least in its present form, impossible. Many thanks also go to Glenys Gifford of the Mantor Library at the University of Maine at Farmington both for the books she found for me, and for the length of time I was allowed to keep them.
My remaining thanks go to my chief critic, first reader, researcher, copy clerk, and wife, Jean.
To George H. Scithers
and My Wife, Jean
I The Last Show On Earth
EDITION 2142
ONE
Two and a half centuries after August Riingeling's famous sons—the Ringling Brothers—took their first circus on the road in 1884, the "Greatest Show on Earth" was, as well, the last show on Earth. It was a poor three-poled affair stalled under patched canvas on the outskirts of Ottawa. As the mud road had given way to rails, and the railroad to concrete and asphalt, the hard road had ended under a blizzard of paper.
The old problems had never left. Fire, windstorms, ice, mud, accidents, rain, shakedowns, breakdowns, and crackups were as common to the trouper as his name. But in an age when the resolution of human problems was taken for granted, no room had been left for John J. O'Hara's circus. Room, the kind needed by a canvas show, was too valuable. The road cost the show seven-hundred credits per kilometer in tolls, while hard, grassy lots near population centers—such as remained—cost the show upwards of thirty-thousand credits for the twenty-four hours the site would be occupied to put on five hours' worth of entertainment. All this, and more, the show had endured. Its road ended at the Ottawa stand when it was faced with that thing feared above all else by an institution of exception—laws for the general good enforced by incorruptible officials.
"They won't budge an inch, Mr. John." Arthur Burnside Wellington, the show's fixer, had stood before the Governor's desk shaking his aging head. The tall, frail man in black seemed stumped for the first time in his sixty-odd years. He held up his hands, then dropped them at his sides. "I just can't move them."
O'Hara rubbed his eyes, then looked at Wellington. "Patch, have you tried a little sugar?"
Wellington nodded. "Those gillies aren't hungry, Mr. John. Not a bite."
"What about dirt?"
Wellington shook his head. "Never saw a cleaner bunch of politicos. Not so much as a parking ticket. No outside incomes, no affairs, no relatives on the payroll—nothing." Again he shook his head. "Of all the times to run into honesty in govern..." Wellington stopped short, rubbed his chin, then stared at the Governor without seeing him.
"Patch, what is it?"
Wellington frowned, then shook his head. "Probably nothing. Maybe a straw; maybe not." Wellington turned and left the office wagon, deep in thought.
Hours later, midway through the evening show, O'Hara sat in the dark of the office wagon half-listening to the windjammers slamming out notes from the main top. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. Nothing sounds like a circus band. Skilled orchestras sawing and blowing away make good tries but to the ear that had been reared with the windjammers, the difference was considerable. No musician strapped into rigid notes, bars, and rests can imitate the sound and beat of windjammers trained to play to the kootch of a dancing horse or elephant, making it look as though the animal was dancing to the music rather than the other way around.
O'Hara opened his eyes and watched the colored reflections of the main entrance lights dancing on the wall opposite the wagon's pay window. That fellow in Bangor—that writer—had asked why. He had really been puzzled. Circus work was back-breaking, dangerous, and not particularly profitable. Why a circus? The Governor had made an effort at finding the words, but in the end had resorted to the stock trouper's reply: "It's a disease."
The Governor leaned forward, placed his elbows on his desk, and lowered his face into his hands. The disease. It's worse than a disease—an addiction. It's a clawing need that no rube with a typewriter could ever understand. And so, the ladies and gents of the media get told the same thing that circus people have been telling civilians for uncounted years: "It's a disease."
Troupers have no ready answers for why they troup. Question-asking is a head game, and the answers—if they exist—are under the paint, the sweat, the scars, the pain, deep within that thing called a soul. A trouper troups. It's a given.
"Perhaps we should ask why." O'Hara lowered his hands, dried his cheeks on his sleeves, then surveyed the empty interior of the wagon. He pushed himself to his feet, walked around his desk, then to the door of the wagon. O'Hara was feeling his years, and Wellington had been the Patch for O'Hara's Greater Shows when the Governor's father had been Governor. O'Hara rubbed his close-cropped white beard and nodded. "Maybe we're all past our prime."
He pushed open the door and inhaled the smell of the lot. It was a curious mixture of grass, straw, candy, and wild animal. The afternoon's dust was out of the air, giving a sharpness to the colored lights still strung around the sideshow and animal top. The windjammers swung into the waltz that cued the flyers, marking the forty-sixth minute of life left to the circus. It gave O'Hara a strange feeling to hear that waltz and still see the animal and kid show tops standing. On normal nights, they would have been torn down, loaded, and off to the next stand by the waltz. The canvas gang would be preparing to clear out and tear down the main top hot on the heels of the last customer.
O'Hara thrust his hands into his coat pockets, stepped down from the office wagon, and headed toward a small group of roughnecks standing next to a moving den in front of the animal top. As he approached, one of the husky men parted from the others. "Evening, Governor."
O'Hara stopped and nodded at the heavy-set man in plaid shirt and work-alls. The man's face was hidden by the shadow cast by the brim of his sweat-stained hat. "Goofy Joe."
"Any word, Mr. John?"
O'Hara looked down and slowly shook his head. "Looks like we're in the cart. Those environmental officers say they'll confiscate the animals and run us in if we cross the district line."
Goofy Joe pulled his hat from his head, threw it on the lot, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his work-alls. "Damn!" He frowned at the Governor. "Can't the Patch fix it?"
O'Hara shrugged. "I wouldn't count on it. Not this time. Seen the Boss Canvasman?"
Goofy Joe stooped over, picked up his hat, then held out a hand toward the menagerie entrance as he stood. "You know Duckfoot. He'll be in there with the bulls." The roughneck threw his hat on the lot again. "Why'd we ever have to come here?"
O'Hara placed a hand on the man's shoulder. "We're in the right place, Joe; it's just that we're about a hundred years too late." He withdrew his hand, turned, and walked through the dark to the animal top entrance. In the dim light of service lamps at the ends of the tent, he could see the eight elephants calmly pulling truckfuls of hay from bales, and munching. As she recognized him, Lolita stuck out her ears, lifted her massive head, then lowered it again as she pretended not to see him. He entered the tent, nodded at the Boss Canvasman and Boss Animal Man seated in the center of the tent on overturned buckets, then he stopped with his back facing Lolita. In seconds O'Hara felt Lolita's trunk slip into his coat pocket, grab the bag of peanuts he kept there, and sneak it out.