He watched the girl in the air, haloed in limelight, and saw an angel; watched the clown hanging on to the tail of a liberty horse while the goat rode the tails of his coat, and saw a devil that needed harrying back to the pit. “If I can’t have her,” he was heard to say to his cats, whose baritone growling may have echoed the Lord’s own approval, “can’t nobody else.” Then on a windy night somewhere between Wabasha and Winona, he came upon the two of them on the afterdeck; he heard the girl scream as the clown threw his coat over her head as if to abduct her, and something in him snapped.
They’d been reading a slender volume of poetry together, or rather Bonkers had been reading to Jenny in French. The book was an en face edition and the clown, in his absorption, seemed less concerned with seducing the equilibrist than refining her sensibilities. Bending over her chair, he invited her to follow on the left-hand in English the despondent lyric he was reading in the original on the right-hand page. Jenny, however, was paying scant attention to either the written or spoken words. She was fatigued after a trying week that had involved her oversight of the repair of the flying frame and the dead man’s rigging; she’d done double-duty, performing her matinee and evening turns then reappearing in the Babylonian-themed blow-off. So it was good to be voyaging again between stands; the brisk weather at this northernmost extremity of the Carnival of Fun’s circuit suited her. She enjoyed the rhythmic rocking of the packet over the choppy river, the way clouds slid across the face of the moon like gauzy tights pulled from the globe of a lamp. And the drone of the clown’s lugubrious voice in a foreign tongue was a fitting antithesis to the martial air of the brass band rehearsing “Billy Barlow” in the saloon.
Their evening ritual was something that, in truth, the girl had come to look forward to, and even Madame Hortense had learned to live with it — especially since Bonkers seemed to have decided it suited him better to languish for want of Jenny than to actually have her. (He was anyway consoled by a bevy of others.) Though lanterns abounded on board the Wen, he preferred to read by the light of a votary candle, but the wind tonight was too whipped up for the candle to hold a flame. So he kept striking matches, one after another.
“Votre âme est un paysage choisi,” he read, signally twitching the rubber nose he’d yet to remove. Then noting Jenny’s inattention, he construed, “It means you’re a blowzy baggage.”
Jarred momentarily out of her reverie, Jenny leaned her head toward the book to verify the translation, and as a consequence a loose strand of her hair was ignited by the match in the clown’s cupped hand.
“O for a muse of fire!” cried Bonkers as he tore off his ragpicker’s tailcoat and threw it over Jenny’s flailing head.
It was then that the lion tamer, having just emerged from a hatch, was unhinged by what he saw and charged blindly forward onto the deck. With a roar that rivaled the window-rattling vibrato of his cats, the Captain locked his arms around the clown’s midsection, and lifting him bodily, dragged the kicking Bonkers across the afterdeck and flung him over the railing into the foaming turbulence of the revolving paddle wheel. He turned around triumphantly, perhaps expecting the girl he’d rescued to run gratefully into the safety of his arms, but was met instead by Medea the goat who gored him in the calf with her single horn. As he bent to clutch at the searing pain of his injured leg, the Captain was further battered by Madame Hortense, who hammered him to the deck with a closed fist on her way to save the clown. Fresh from an assignation with Professor Hotspur, she was wearing her marquee-sized kimono, which billowed to reveal her ambiguous anatomy as she climbed over the rail.
Risen from her chair with her still smoking hair in wild disarray, Jenny Bashrig looked on with a sinking heart. But distressed as she was on behalf of Bonkers, she was more aggrieved by the realization that, despite his peril, the forlorn clown had never seemed to her entirely real.
Other members of the troupe, responding to Madame Hortense’s “Hey Rube!” vaulted over the rail from the texas deck and tumbled out of the galleries. Apprised of the situation, they clambered out along timbers and spars, though whether they meant to save the clown or simply get a better view of his plight was uncertain. Kinkers and joeys, Hector the globe-of-death rider, Dainty Nell the Elastic Incomprehensible — all perched in the blustering winds on either side of the turning wheel, waiting along with the stronglady for the blades to complete their revolution and end the clown’s forced baptism. The gibbous moon spilled mercury like a burst thermometer, the band in the saloon played “Over the Waves,” and up popped the sodden Bonkers seated on a wooden bucket at the height of the paddle wheel. He was reciting verses above the churning propulsion: “Let him mark well who laughs at my despair,” he cried, pulling a catfish from the bosom of his shirt, sniffing it with his rubber nose before tossing it over a shoulder, “with no fraternal shudder in reply.” From a capacious pocket he extracted an apple that squirted him in the eye before he could take a bite. “Every moon is atrocious, every sun bitter; the flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read …”
As the clown was swallowed up again by the moiling waters, Jenny silently ended the refrain, “… all the books.”
Stupefied by Bonkers’s recital, the onlookers had made no attempt to grab him, though surely they would not allow him to make a second pass without releasing him from the wheel. Then the boat pitched violently as it clattered over some river monster or submerged tree, an object that could smash the rudders and fracture the keelson. Alerted to the crisis on board and off, the pilot had already killed the engines, though the stern-wheel continued its final rotation. This time, however, when the clown came back around, he was no longer speaking, his body hanging in a mangled configuration from a paddle blade.
Madame Hortense later claimed that the Wheel of Fortune card from her pack, which was always promising some type of categorical change, had foretold everything, though the circus had no need of referring to any laws beyond fate. Marmaduke Armbrewster’s remains were shipped back to his family in Iowa with condolences: he had sadly fallen victim to an unnamed occupational hazard. He was mourned briefly by the handful of ladies he’d dallied with, but beyond them there was little love to spare among his fellow performers for the clown-maudit. Reduced thereafter to the status of untouchable, Captain Cumberbund was otherwise left to carry on as before, but Lem Kelso’s festering conscience found its physical corollary in the leg wound inflicted by the goat.
“The tip of your unicorn’s horn is commonly known to be full of p’ison,” pronounced Madame H., offering a morsel from her dubious store of occult wisdom.
The goat itself had vanished since the death of her master. Jenny Bashrig had looked high and low, but nothing remained of Medea beyond her abandoned tether. A shame, thought Jenny, who’d imagined the goat becoming her own steadfast familiar, like in that story about the Gypsy girl the clown had read her. She missed others of his stories, such as the one about the doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde, and the wirewalker Elvira Madigan and her officer in their (what did Bonkers call it?) liebestod. There was yet another story that Medea’s disappearance had put her in mind of, about the goat who wandered into a cave that led to the Promised Land. But that one had been told to her in the top of a tree by Muni Pinsker, the scribe of North Main Street, before he left her to snuff out their unborn child on her own.
She missed the clown like she missed her original infatuation with all the circus ballyhoo. It was an earthbound sadness, however, that never reached the height of the tightrope, which more than ever she lived to mount. She relied less on props, disdained the parasol and the balance pole, performing increasingly risky somersaults and running leaps. She pirouetted high above the war in Europe and the champagne tastes of the absentee owners Forepaugh and Broadway, who were regularly cheating their employees out of their contracted wages. Beyond distraction, Jenny scarcely flinched when the human blowtorch accidentally inhaled, incinerating his innards; or when the lion tamer entered the cage with his suppurating leg, whose infection incited in his cats a lust for carrion, and as instinct trumped affection they mauled their trainer. He bled to death, despite the ringmaster’s best efforts to four-flush the horror away, before an audience of twelve hundred strong.