Pride (24 page)

Finally, she begins to slow down and goes rolling onto the bottom of the pit. She sits still on the motorcycle while the older guy goes over to the lion and unhooks him. The younger one has moved toward the door opening into the lion cage; he's pulled back the wooden cover and pushed up the bars. He stands there with his pointed stick like a harpoon, still looking scared and trying not to let on.

The older guy helps the lion out of the motorcycle and holds him by the mane beside him. He doesn't seem afraid of that lion at all. But the lady gets off the motorcycle on the other side from the lion, takes off her helmet, and holds her hands up in the air, smiling a fake kind of smile and sneaking looks over at the older guy and the lion. She stays like that with her arms up and perfectly still while the older guy leads the lion toward the door out of the pit. Everybody is applauding. The lion gives a growl at the young one with the pointed stick but goes into the door without any trouble. Then, quickly, the young guy comes over when the lion's already halfway through the door and gives him a good hard punch with the pointed end of his stick. This makes the lion really roar, but he hurries through the tunnel and out to his cage.

I look at Dad. For some crazy reason I feel almost as if I'm going to cry and I don't really know why. It's probably all the excitement. Dad's face looks mad.

“There's no excuse for treating a lion that way, Dickie. He didn't have to poke him; he's just goading the poor thing. I really don't think that lion would hurt a soul; he's tame as a kitten. Cannibal's meaner than that lion by a long shot.”

He puts his arm over my shoulder and we start toward the stairs with all the other people.

Mom and Laurel are waiting for us outside. Laurel has bought a little statue of Happy, one of the Seven Dwarfs. It cost twenty cents. I guess it's to help balance out the twenty-five cents I got to spend watching the Wall of Death.

Dad and I go over to look at the lion again. He's already settled down and is just sitting there staring out at the crowd as if all those things we saw inside hadn't happened at all.

Laurel is between Dad and Mom. She has hold of their hands.

“Gee, he looks so nice but he must be lonesome all by himself. Doesn't he have any family?”

Dad leans down and gives her a kiss on the top of her head between her braids.

“A lion's family is called its pride, Laurie. This lion was probably born in captivity; he's never had any family, any pride.”

I turn away from watching the lion. I know he's looking right at Cannibal, and I'm sure he doesn't want to eat her or anything, he just wants to be friends.

“Is that pride like one of the capital sins, Dad? Can lions commit sins too, like people?”

“There's all kinds of pride, Dickie. There's real pride, like being proud of good work, like when we do a good job building a porch. Then there's false pride like when you think you're better than somebody else for no good reason; that's the sin one. Then there's the lion's pride, his family.”

“Gee! I like the idea of a family being a pride. Let's call our family a pride. I'd be proud of our pride and I bet it wouldn't be a sin at all.”

“Probably just the opposite of sin, Dickie. I hope we can always be proud of our family.”

Now Laurel pulls on Dad's hand again.

“What's the opposite of a sin, Daddy? Even in first grade Sister Carmelina talks a lot about sins to us but nobody's ever said anything about the opposite of sin. Opposite means the other side, doesn't it?”

Dad looks over at Mom. He has a big smile on his face just at the edge of a laugh, but he knows Laurel's serious. Laurel's much more serious than I can ever be.

Mom straightens Laurel's collar over the top of her sweater.

“Laurel, don't you worry your head about sin. I think the opposite of sin is good deeds or maybe it's ‘grace.' You can ask Sister Carmelina when we get back home.”

She looks at Dad again and they don't smile. I think the idea of going back isn't something they're looking forward to either.

Really, we should just up and move here to Wildwood. Imagine living all your life next to an ocean. It'd make your life seem important. At home, there's nothing but streets, pavements, houses, and lawns; only the alleys are any fun. There's nothing big and natural. I've never even seen a mountain in my life except pictures in books. It's terrible not seeing lakes or mountains or oceans. The only thing big I ever get to see is the sky and that's big but it's not enough; you can't touch it. I grab hold of Dad's other hand. I have Cannibal in one hand and Dad's hand in the other. He gives my hand a little squeeze.

“Daddy, do you mean that lion there never lived in a jungle with other lions; he's always been by himself in a cage like Cannibal in her box?”

“I don't know, but probably. Lions don't live in jungles anyway, Dickie; they live on grassy plains called savannahs.”

“In
Tarzan
they live in the jungle.”

“That's only in movies. I think tigers live in jungles but not lions. I could be wrong, though.”

C
ap decides to keep Jimmy on for a while, anyway, until he's learned how to put up the wall, take it down himself, mostly how to run a motorcycle up the wall and keep it there.

The next morning they remount the wall on the same spot. Chuck and Jimmy had been scheduled to go on to Point Pleasant, but Cap can't do that until he's mastered the wall. Cap and Chuck drive into Freehold and fill out the papers transferring ownership. When they come back, Chuck shakes hands with Jimmy, Cap, and Sally. Then he drives off with the truck and car.

It doesn't take Cap long to catch on to the skills necessary for riding a motorcycle on the wall. It's a question of getting up speed quickly and feeling for the relationship of gravity and centrifugal force. With Cap's skills and his sense of balance he is swinging around that first day. It takes some adjusting to the tilt, looking over his left shoulder and seeing the bottom of the pit below.

Cap soon finds out that you have to keep up the acceleration, and if for some reason you lose speed, you turn quickly toward the bottom. He takes a few spills but it's more like learning a new trick than taking real racing risks. It's just you and the wall; you don't have to depend on anyone else.

Jimmy shows him that about twenty of the two-by-six, tongue-in-groove timbers forming the wall are splintered and need replacing. Cap has had enough experience with board-track splinters racing, so he makes the investment and replaces the boards. But, even with that, the entire wall rattles and rocks under the weight of the motorcycles, especially when Jimmy and Cap are up on the wall together.

Cap first practices his stunts on the rollers in the platform before he tries them on the wall. He learns to stand on the seat and do the handlebar handstand while on the rollers, but can't quite manage it up on the wall. Jimmy gets a kick out of this and keeps egging him on.

In some ways Jimmy reminds Cap of himself at that age, before he went off to war. But Cap also feels there's something completely different. Jimmy has a deep mean streak in him: he likes to hurt; he'll do almost anything to dominate, get on top. He sees everything in competitive terms: life is one long battle for survival. For him, winning is all that counts, and he's a sore loser.

But worst of all he fears and hates Tuffy. From the very beginning he taunts him. For the first time, Tuffy manifests hostility to a human, strikes out at his tormentor. Cap's afraid something bad can happen.

Jimmy also keeps after Sally. He makes no bones about it; there's nothing subtle in his approach. He's accustomed to taking what he wants and he has the male notion that he can physically get a woman by constant touching, rubbing, grabbing, pinching, stroking. Sally's scared and wants Cap to fire Jimmy.

But Cap's beginning to realize he needs Jimmy—for a while anyway. Together they work out an act where they pretend to race on the wall. Cap takes an early lead and Jimmy gradually catches him just before the end of the race. Jimmy follows this up by doing a few laps, stunting, standing on the seat, handstands, one-leg-stands on the seat. Cap knows if he's going to fire Jimmy he has to get Tuffy into the act somehow.

Jimmy is constantly trying to corner Sally, and she sticks closer to Cap. Whenever Sally is there to watch them practice, Jimmy goes through the wildest stunts, hanging out sideways and slowing down until he's right at the point of falling off, then shooting down at a sharp angle to the bottom.

Everything has to be exciting for Jimmy and at the same time he's basically afraid. He's superstitious, wears a crucifix and an amulet he claims has rhinoceros-tusk dust in it. He's deathly afraid of the dark. It's almost as if he's afraid to close his eyes even to sleep. He's better than a watchdog because he wakes at the slightest noise around their camp.

He insists that what annoys him more about Tuffy than anything is when Tuffy roars in the night, or even when he gets up and paces, as lions sometimes do. Jimmy is awake immediately, then can't sleep.

The only thing Cap gets out of Jimmy about his background is he grew up in the panhandle of Texas and ran away from home at fourteen because his old man beat him so bad. He won't tell his last name, so Cap figures there must be something more to it than that. He never reads, and Cap isn't sure Jimmy can write, even his name. He's as close to a natural animal as you'll find inside civilization and outside jail or a mental institution.

Cap buys a sidecar near Uniontown and trains Tuffy to ride in it. He strengthens the shocks and springs so they can handle Tuffy's four hundred pounds.

It isn't easy getting Tuffy up on the wall. At first he's willing to sit in the sidecar and let himself be strapped in. He's even willing to let Cap ride him around on the level without making too much fuss. But when Cap tries him on the wall, mounting higher bit by bit, Tuffy struggles to free himself. He roars, coughs, and grunts. Cap tries to comfort him but it's months of training before Tuffy submits to this indignity.

The problem is a cat automatically twists to balance itself. It does this, using information piped into its brain by an internal gyroscope in the middle ear. At the same time, it uses its eyes to make adjustments in space. Poor Tuffy's getting two different sets of information. One, from his eyes, says, Twist, you're out there sideways and you have to land on your feet. The other, from his gyroscope, which is being fooled by the centrifugal effect of the motorcycle on the wall, is saying, You're O.K., the gravity pressures are all in the right direction, you don't have to do anything. So Tuffy is confused.

He never closes his eyes while he's in the sidecar. He's upset and roars all the way around, not looking down into the pit, but looking, staring up out of the bowl. It's all so unnatural, so hard for a simple lion to understand.

But Tuffy finally succumbs. He succumbs out of his love for Cap, who wants him to do it, and, probably something of his feelings for pride. This is what his pride seems to be doing now, riding sideways on walls.

Cap is lucky and gets a regular concession in Wildwood right on the boardwalk. This is mostly because the concessionnaire in charge of making these assignments is one of those people who live a war over and over again long after it's finished. He's a member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The aftermath and reconstruction of those brief months of involvement by the AEF have become the center of his life. From his reading he knows about the 32nd Division, “the Powerhouse Division,” and also about Cap Modig, one of the few drafted enlisted men who reached the temporary rank of captain, who won a bronze star, a distinguished service cross, and two purple hearts.

It's one of those lucky breaks that make life. Cap takes advantage of it, immediately, though he refuses to join the Legion or the VFW. With this Wildwood concession alone, in normal times, they can make a living.

During the next three years, the act gradually changes. Cap finds it hard both to race Jimmy and ride the lion around in the sidecar. Sally, who's dressed in a purple sequined costume to show off her beautiful legs and her generally fine figure, has done only the announcing of the acts, the come-on spiel from the platform. She's now enlisted to ride Tuffy around on the motorcycle. For the act, they also change Tuffy's name. He becomes Satan, the Dare-Devil Lion.

She, like Tuffy, doesn't like it, but agrees. It takes a long time before she can get the motorcycle with the sidecar empty up on the wall. Finally after much practice, she can develop the speed to climb up the wall with Tuffy. Tuffy now weighs over four hundred pounds.

A part of the problem is Sally is scared of Tuffy. But she isn't scared of Jimmy any more. Jimmy's theory about women has been proven out for him once more. He's got her on her back, legs up, whenever he wants her.

The first time, it was rape. Jimmy trapped Sally in the pit while Cap was out buying meat for Tuffy. He closed and locked the trap door. There was no escape. Then he began pressing himself on her, first undressing himself, baring his hard, magnificent body, the ample evidence of his passion for her. He then pushed her against the blackened wall, violently ripping off her clothes, pressing his hand over her mouth, wrestling her down the tilted edge of the wall to the bottom of the pit, where she finally succumbed in unsummoned abandon.