In the succeeding mayhem young Lemuel presented himself as not only prepared to take over the care and feeding of the cats, but ready to exhibit them in a caged act as well. He’d closely observed his mentor’s methods and learned from his example everything that one ought not to do. Given the go-ahead — as what choice did management have? — he set about culling the broken animals from the spirited, overseeing the sale of the “seat warmers” to zoos. Having picked the brain and plundered the medicine chest of the resident vet, he ministered to the ailing and abused: he dosed Oliver the costive Nubian lion with an aloes physic, then borrowed a shovel from an elephant handler to remove the results, and he nearly lost a finger rubbing cocaine on Ethelred the tiger’s toothachey gums. In teaching them tricks he substituted reward for punishment, and was sensitive to his critters’ mercurial moods. He nursed their offspring with warmed bottles when a mother’s milk ran dry. For having turned a brood of sulky and unpredictable felines into a pride of obedient beasts, Lem Kelso was dubbed Lancelot Cumberbund by Ringmaster Peavey, and promoted from fairy floss peddler to captain of the cats. He still carried the whip and pistol into the circular cage, but an occasional flick of the wrist was sufficient to signal a lion to fake an assault, and the blanks in the revolver (which the animals were used to) made a crowd-pleasing bang. Such confidence did Captain Cumberbund demonstrate in the cage that his bashful countenance outside it made him something of a figure of fun. That and the general suspicion that he was a virgin.
Of Lem Kelso’s leering after Jenny, Madame Hortense was distinctly aware, but she regarded him as harmless. Bonkers, however, with his marked-for-death demeanor and his distempered unicorn that even the lion tamer steered clear of, was another story. Though he was courtly in his manner toward the rope walker, no one would have mistaken his intentions as honorable. Kneeling beside her deck chair to help her with difficult words as she read, he practically singed her cheeks and throat with his hot absinthe breath, while Medea took unforbearing bites out of his pant legs. The Malay tumblers would cluck their tongues as they flip-flopped past, and even the india rubber man shook his attenuated head. No one, it seemed, trusted the dissolute clown with the delicate usage of a featured headliner.
Irrespective of the educational benefits, Jenny was amused by the boozy Bonkers, judging his overdone declamations—“The worm is in the fruit!” “Il pleure dans mon coeur!”—as mere affectation. She took his advances no more to heart than the scraps of news that now and then reached the Carnival of Fun. Pancho Villa’s insurgents might kill American passengers on a train in northern Mexico, German U-boats sink American merchant vessels, an anarchist take a potshot at J. P. Morgan — such things happened in places moored to history, whereas the Yellow Wen was adrift in time; it flowed with the river, having escaped the depredations that landlocked society was heir to.
Still, Jenny had her moods when she wondered if she’d only swapped one population of loose screws for another. And at night in her berth across from the volcanically snoring Female Hercules, she dreamed dreams that were an antidote to an excess of pageantry. Such as the recurring one in which the circus wintered in a decayed urban ghetto. Then she would wake to the strange sensation that the dream belonged not to her but someone else. She felt similarly remote from Madame Hortense’s relentless attempts at playing sibyl with her cards.
“The good news,” Madame H. had ruminated one morning over the current constellation, “you got Strength in your astral influence; that’s the card with Samson coldcocking a lion. But you got also Lightning in the place of your final outcome …”
Upon which Jenny clapped her hands over her ears. “Sweet mieskayt, enough! Please spare me your predictions. This is the circus: there’s no past or future, only the here and now. Anyhow, I’m not a child; I can take care of myself.”
But the stronglady was not appeased. Mother hen that she was, she warned her cabinmate, even as she massaged her instep, that her cavalier attitude in regard to the clown was driving him, well, bonkers; she was playing with fire.
“Fire,” pronounced Jenny, who’d learned the habit of uttering sphinxlike phrases from the clown, “is my element.”
Madame Hortense groaned and nearly pinched Jenny’s foot in two between her thumb and forefinger.
“Ouch!”
“You watch yourself, girlie,” admonished the stronglady, tucking her massive hands into her cavernous armpits, while outside their compartment the windjammers could be heard rehearsing “The Battle of Shiloh.” The music was augmented by a chorus of bleats, brays, and howls from the menagerie, the whole clamor muted in the shoosh of the paddle wheel.
To her list of worries on behalf of the equilibrist, Madame H. added her anxiety over Jenny’s unconcern for the superstitions that were de rigueur among the aerialists. (If someone patted you on the back, you must then be patted on the stomach; you must never place a costume on the bed …) As a consequence she made it her business to look out for the girl. In her helmet, brass bra, and leather girdle, Madame Hortense stood beneath the wire in the center ring, flanked by a pony act in one end ring and a human pyramid in the other. There she received the shabby clothes the drunk shed on his way to becoming La Funambula, clad in sequined lamé. The stronglady also endured, in the same ring, the presence of Bonkers the clown, seated astride his mock unicorn, and the lion tamer lurking at the margins.
But Jenny seldom faltered. She executed full gainers with flawless precision from the pedestal to the wire, threw herself backward through a crepe-papered hoop; she did a running forward somersault, the most perilous feat in the rope-walker’s playbook, because your feet must lead the arc over your head and find the wire before you can see where to place them. It was during such a leap on a particularly sultry evening that the rigging slipped, staggering La Funambula’s velocity, so that when her feet struck the wire, her momentum thrust her forward into the netless air.
Forty feet below, Madame Hortense was braced to receive the falling body in her arms, nor did the other watchers stand idly by. Goaded by a boot heel to her flank, Medea bolted forward with her rider as the lion tamer lunged from the ring curb. The stronglady, knocked from her formidable pins by the goat, toppled onto the clown, whose mount was then flattened beneath the combined weight of its rider, the doughty madame, and the madly scrambling Captain Cumberbund. Tucking in the nick of time, the plummeting equilibrist landed hard amid the scrum of her would-be rescuers, and rolled off into a balletic stance amazingly unharmed. She took a bow and made her exit with a spring in her limp, while the stunned crowd remained silent, uncertain as to whether the event called for laughter or cheers.
Risen to her buskined feet, Madame Hortense was enraged by the ineptitude of the rival spotters, whom she snatched up in either hand and flung into the stands. The goat, realizing that her single horn was no match for the pair on the stronglady’s helmet, retreated of her own accord.