I did look right at them once, early on. Someone had abandoned the cage a moment on the way to rolling them into the train car, and I took a corner too quickly and startled them.
They were sitting up, two she-lions, unblinking. They looked at me.
You saw them, of course, you saw them all the time, every night in the ring you saw them. But there’s seeing and then there’s seeing.
I don’t remember what they looked like. I was cold, I remember; I was shaking all over for half an hour. Daisy had to hold the other end of everything I carried that night just to keep it steady, until even Joseph the rigger noticed, from three cars away, and came over.
“Nobody’s business,” said Daisy when Joseph asked what happened, in a tone I’d never heard from her. He left us alone.
I sat in the train car that night and listened to the muted sounds of the circus, drumrolls and applause like a heartbeat, and after long enough it felt less horrible to think what I’d imagined when I saw the lion cage.
(Night had fallen, all at once, the moment I’d surprised them.)
Carvessa was the lion tamer.
The first time I saw the circus, Matthew Brandini introduced him second to last, with a drumroll and the spotlight swinging wildly all over the place before it found him, and I had been distracted by the spotlight and never really noticed the act.
It was for effect, of course, I realized after I joined up. Alice who handled the light already knew where he’d be; they just wanted the audience in suspense.
(I didn’t understand showmanship, the Brandini Brothers were always telling me. Matthew sometimes sighed about it and looked over at Jim with the patience of a saint, like if only I’d come to my senses they could put me in some rouge and a spangled leotard and get me into the ring where I could be useful.)
I did understand it, some ways; it was more exciting for the audience if the light discovered him, so when he cracked his whip and the pair of cats jumped from the pool of darkness onto the stools behind him, it was like magic. Maybe that was the only magic they ever saw in it. Maybe that was what I didn’t understand.
Carvessa was tall and tawny, and had probably been handsome once, but life had happened to him so that his face was hardened something awful. Seeing him standing next to the pair of mountain lions was like seeing triple: the same expression when the light came on, hard to fool and hard to please.
He drove the pair of lions from one stool to another with a single crack and a flower of dust, as everyone sitting in the stands that I’d built clapped and murmured like they were waiting for something.
He made those two cats jump over one another onto an empty stool, and then up teetering onto the same stool, and he made them get down again and dance in the dirt, curling over one another faster and faster until they looked like one animal. The light cast his shadow across them both.
Finally he made them leap from a dead stop through the hoop standing behind him, their claws missing his face by a hair as they passed like thread through a needle.
The audience gasped, because to them out there under the bright light, everything looked beautiful and dangerous.
I didn’t make a sound, because I could see Carvessa’s face as the cat leaped over him, and the lions looked more human than he did.
On his way out he drove the cougars before him, stinging the packed ground on either side of their paws. As he passed, he looked at me, and even though I was a good twenty feet away, the next whip crack took the end off my right shoelace, sure and sharp as if one of those cats had reached out and snapped her teeth.
The audience was still clapping for him, but it was getting softer and softer; the cougars hadn’t eaten him, and they were disappointed.
Back at the bunks I showed Daisy what Carvessa had done, and as she was shaking her head and handing me the flask she’d pulled from nowhere, Joseph leaned in and clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Just keep clear of him, you’ll be all right.”
Joseph was a rigger for the trapeze. Technically we were all working on the tent together on anything that needed doing, but Joseph always ended up with that, as soon as we broke ground. He was one of those people you trusted to make sure something held like it was meant to.
Sometimes he asked me to help with the pulley, and I’d haul things up to him hand over hand, looking up at the shapes his shoulders made as he worked, him so high up he looked hazy from the sawdust and me on the dirt where they’d paint center ring.
To feed the lions, you brought whatever you could catch as near the cage as you dared, then threw and hoped you trusted your own aim.
“I can’t throw to save my life,” Joseph said, the first time I brought back a rabbit. “Let me clean that for you and you can be the messenger.”
His hands shook the whole time the rabbit skin fell away from the meat.
The cats were more mannered than any people at the circus — the crew never had time for delicacy, and the Brandinis might pretend to be refined men of the theater, but they ate with their heads as low as anybody else who’d grown up hungry.
The mountain lions never moved an inch so long as you were standing there; no one had ever even seen them eating. The meat just vanished somehow when everyone’s back was turned. When you tossed the meat into the cage, they were sitting with their paws pressed together like prim little hills, claws quietly appearing and retracting, just waiting for their chance.
I stared at their paws whenever I fed them. My head got so heavy when I was near their cage, like all the blood had drained from my neck; I couldn’t have looked any higher. They were tawny on first glance, and dusted with white, but there was a gray underneath that got deeper the longer you looked, like they were pulled tight over some darkness that had no name, like the pads of their paws were made of stone. When they stretched their claws came out, sickles of bone that scraped the bottom of the cage without a sound, just long enough that you shuddered and turned your head.
The meat was always gone when you looked back.
I learned to hand the rabbits to Joseph for cleaning and then make myself scarce until I knew the feeding was over. Otherwise my dreams were filled with talons.
Some of our crew had their eye on becoming an act. Every so often you’d catch Peter and Richard juggling things at each other, or Allan throwing knives into a block of wood. Matthew Brandini would hover around our train car every so often, watching them practice as if they actually had a chance.
(Even early on, I hated how much it got their hopes up. They all had to know it was useless unless Jim Brandini made a round, looking out at someone in particular from under eyebrows as dark and sheltering as the brim of a hat. Matthew could stroke everybody’s egos and think about flashy introductions all he wanted, but Jim was the one who decided what the circus was willing to be responsible for.)
Daisy said once, “If you’re interested, you’ll have to put yourself forward. Matthew suggested you and I pair up as the Two Giant Nymphs of Olympus. I flicked my cig at him. Nearly caught that coat on fire. It might have given the impression you weren’t interested.”
We were coiling rope around our shoulders to drag a wagon full of benches to the tent, looking like a pair of Clydesdale mares in denim trousers and shirtsleeves.
“Haul,” I said, and she grinned.
Joseph could have performed, I thought. He was surefooted and pleasant to look at, and anything else you needed Matthew Brandini could probably teach you.