The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (22 page)

Here. Let me show you some photos. I took them on Al G.'s old
tripod, which tended to let light in and turn things a wash of grainy
grey; for this reason they look a lot more melancholy than the moments
they were meant to capture. Truth was, they were some of the happiest moments I've known, though I don't think I realized it at the time
because I was pent up with aspirations and kept thinking life would really be good once Rajah made me famous. (The problem with ambition?
If you let it it'll act like the blinkers on a horse.)

Notice how in all of them it's twilight, the sun either on its way
up or on its way down, for with Rajah getting to be the size he was, I
took him to the beach only at times when there weren't many townies around. This one I like. Rajah, just coming out of the ocean, shaking
water off his new fur. The way the sun's catching all those droplets and
the way those lit-up droplets are framing my tiger, Rajah looking like
there's no such thing as problems or worries. Eyes sparkling, and
though you can't see it here, they're the green of emeralds. His incisors
white as ivory. And his whiskers ... you know if you look close at the
black of a tiger's whisker, it turns out it isn't black at all, but a swirl of
violet and deep blue and kelp green.

Or this one: if the beach was deserted, which it often was given
the time of the year and the time of the day, I'd let Rajah off his leash
and let him charge at the seagulls. Lord, how he loved that, leaping
and jumping and pawing at those birds, which is why he's airborne
here, back paws all the way off the sand, body twisted and a paw
reaching as high as a tiger paw can go. Or this one: looks like he's
fixing on doing a back flip, for he'd jumped just as the bird passed
overhead and kept on tracking it till his back was arched as a hairband.
To me, it's a photo of determination, something me and tigers have
in common.

Or this one. Just an empty beach scene, right? Look harder.
Much harder. See that dot, disappearing into the sun's belly? Isn't a dot.
It's Rajah, and what happened was I'd taken him off his leash and we
were both standing on the beach when he did what tigers do in place of
smiling. By this I mean he got himself a look of clear understanding:
the ears perk and the eyes pierce and they radiate a purity only tigers
have. Then he took off. Just started running at hunting speed, not at all
bothered I was yelling at him to stop. This left me thinking, Oh great,
there goes fame and fortune, worse he'll probably head into town and kill a
child and they'll blame me and throw me in a place where the criminal minded never see the light of ' day. Was such a dour moment I could do nothing but sigh and duck inside the camera bellows, if only to record the
moment for posterity. Rajah kept on running. It felt to me like he wanted to find out the meaning of forever, a question bothers animals as well as humans. Finally, and I mean finally, the speck stopped and
stayed the same size for the longest time, an orange blip in a blurry gold
distance. Then it looked like it was a little bigger, and then for sure it
was getting bigger, and then Rajah came back panting and happy and
wanting to roll around in the sand.

I figured I'd better start training him.

Now. The way you pick animals for tricks is you look for natural
behaviours. You get a tiger with good balance, you make him your ball
roller. You get a tiger likes waving his paws up in your face, you put
him in your sit-up chorus. You get a cat that's heavy and graceless, last
thing you do is send him jumping through a burning hoop. With Rajah,
the natural inclination was toward bodily contact, for he liked nothing
more than jumping on me and lying on me and letting me lie on him,
all the while batting at me with leathery paw undersides. So I started
encouraging this. Then I started teaching him to do it on signal, something no more difficult than giving him meat every time he began frisking me if I'd whistled first.

So. February 15, 1917, and the Santa Monica opener is three
weeks away. America's official entry into the great war is six weeks
away. A smiling and proud Mabel Stark finds a groomer and asks him
to tell Al G. to meet her by the training arena in the cathouse. With
Red's help, I shifted cages and let Rajah into the arena. After Rajah'd
been up on his pedestal for a few minutes I heard feet against floorboards. I looked up, and there was Al G., looking handsome and
slightly portly, as he'd been eating a lot of steaks and potatoes fried in
butter and ice cream sundaes of late, it being his belief a man larger
than life had to literally be larger than life. (Course, it was a belief
he'd gleaned from guess which famous circus owner?) Naturally, he
was with Dan, who'd recently started wearing three-piece suits himself, though of a slightly inferior quality to the ones worn by Al G.
Miss Speeks wore a bright red dress, loose at the bosom and tight at the caboose, all in all a dress engineered to be fetching to men and an
embarrassment to women. Seems we were all in costume that day, for
around this time I'd started wearing a tight black leather bodysuit.
And despite what you might see in old circus paper, in which a hundred different adjectives were used to suggest I had a way of riling
men-enchanting was a favourite, as were tempting and seductive-my
suits weren't in any way an attempt to outdo Miss Specks in the sexpot department. For me, it was simply a matter of safety, the leather
offering protection against claws and the tightness offering nothing to
take hold of. My shoulders were padded, shoulders being a favourite
grabbing spot for tigers, and I wore a thick black leather hat I'd patterned after the one my second husband wore whenever he drove that
Model T of his.

(And what of Louis Roth? What of the ex-Hungarian military
officer turned head catman of the twelve-hundred-animal Al G. Barnes
circus? A man who knew how hard I'd been working and who hadn't
helped me one iota despite it being his job to govern all cat acts? A man
I'd married in the capital of the potato state and who'd been annoying
me with his thumbness ever since? Where was he on the day I first
showed people the most famous cat act in the history of the American
circus? Well, he wasn't there, is all I can tell you.)

I got myself into the cage. Walked to the middle of it. Stood
looking at Al G. and his entourage, all three of them slack-jawed with
curiosity. I whistled. Rajah lunged off his pedestal, charged me, and
without my so much as turning to defend myself I let him leap up and
get me by the shoulders and push me down and start rooting in the
space separating a woman's shoulder and jaw. Already he weighed
almost three hundred pounds, for despite his runty start Rajah was
going to be big for a Bengal, maybe even over five hundred, and with
his size he easily rolled me around on the floor with those big paws.
Meanwhile, Miss Speeks shrieked and Dan started yelling, "Oh my
God, governor, he's killing her!"

To show them he wasn't I got an arm up and around Rajah's
throat and I held him and rolled him over and got on top, and was then
I felt those hind legs slip up to my belly. The disembowelling reaction
was what it was, so I got my mouth right close to his ear and said, "No
no no, Rajah," in that soothing tone he loved so much. When his hind
legs drifted back down I replaced them with my left hand and started
scratching his pleasure spot, such that he started arfing and hugging
and licking my face with his barbed wet tongue.

At this point I heard Al G. laugh, for it was then he realized the
whole thing was an act and I'd never really been in danger, or leastways
not in any danger I couldn't control. Hearing this, I wrestled a few seconds more before pushing myself away and hollering, "SEAT!" Rajah
went to his pedestal, looking dejected, and while I exited the arena Red
got him out with pieces of horse.

I looked over at Al G. He and Dan were smiling more broadly
than I'd ever seen. Miss Speeks looked at me like what I'd just done was
slatternly and disgraceful, which I suppose was appropriate seeing as
that was pretty much what I thought about everything she did. I was
covered with a layer of sweat, and my face was sticky with cat gob.

"Will you mix him with the others?" Al G. asked in a voice more
a laugh than a question.

"Oh yeah," I answered, "get him sitting up there, King and
Queen and Pasha and Duchess doing all the tricks, until the audience
figures Rajah's there to warm the seat and nothing but. Then I'll turn
my back and whistle."

"You know what this means?"

"Not sure I do, Al G."

"It means you've broken the first wrestling tiger act in history,"
to which I said, "Oh, right, that," which was a joke Al G. thought so
funny he came over and kissed me and hugged me, something I
enjoyed mostly because it made Leonora Speeks's face fold in on itself
like an origami horse. Pulling away, Barnes stopped at my ear and whispered, "A wrestling act, Kentucky. I'll be very pleased...."

Which was code for: do this, and you'll get more kitties.

Next day, I decided to acquaint Rajah with the other cats. After shifting
cages I took the pedestals out of the steel arena, leaving it completely
empty, something I figured would encourage mingling. As soon as
King stepped inside, I knew I'd made a mistake, for I could see Rajah
start to quake and pant while King did slow, quarrying circles around
the younger tiger. I was already calling for King to tunnel when he
stepped up and growled and hit Rajah on the shoulder, a blow not
intended to injure but to leave no question who was boss. Still, it was
hard enough poor Rajah got knocked to the cage floor, and when he
tried to get back up he was so panicked his hind legs couldn't get a grip
on the tanbark, so they kept spinning and slipping as he tried to make it
to the side of the cage. There he whimpered and peed and looked for
me through the bars. King was already through the tunnel door.

I stepped inside the ring and went over and soothed Rajah by
explaining this was just the way King was, that he'd warm up to him
and before he knew it Rajah would be enjoying the company of his own
kind. Rajah kept shivering, though this subsided when I put my arm
around his neck and hugged him and rubbed his belly spot. After I did
this for more than ten minutes Rajah seemed to calm down, a calm I
made the mistake of trusting.

I stood and had Red hand me a pedestal, which I lugged to the
centre of the ring. Rajah immediately went over to it and climbed
aboard and started grooming. After a minute or so, I decided he was
tractable enough to practise a little wrestling, just so the day wouldn't
be a total waste. I turned my back and whistled and a second later felt
those paws hit my padded shoulders hard and knock me over. Now
there's playful knocking a person down and there's let's-make-something-clear knocking a person down and this was clearly the worse of
the two. My knees and palms stung and I had trouble gaining my breath. I had the full weight of a tiger on top of me, and while I normally liked this sensation, Rajah chose not to support any of his weight
on his legs and forepaws, giving me his full tiger bulk to deal with. It
felt like I was drowning in fur and muscle. He bellowed in my ear, and
then I felt his jaws take hold of my right shoulder. And while he didn't
bite down nearly as hard as he was able-lie could've taken my shoulder clear out if he'd wanted-it was enough I knew I was being held
down, something makes the question for what purpose? grow large and
loud in the mind.

Now, I want to make something perfectly clear. Rajah could've
killed me if he'd had half a mind to, was nothing Red or I could've
done, and though what he did was bad remember in a tiger's mind he
was being gentle as he possibly could while still getting his grievance
across. What he did was: take a big rubbery paw and stick it in my face.
It felt leathery, like the padding on a boxing glove, though coarse with
pebbles. The worst of it was I couldn't breathe, for he was holding me
hard enough his paw had closed around my nose and mouth, so I panicked. I flailed my arms and legs, none of which made much impression
against the weight and strength of a tiger.

Figuring he'd made his point, Rajah pulled his paw away, and to
this day the fact his thumbnail got caught in my left eyelid I put down
to accident. Course, I wasn't thinking that then. I was thinking more
about the sensation of that big hardened orange nail dragging along the
surface of my eye, something that hurts more than you can imagine, the
eye being about as sensitive a part of the body as there is. I thought
Rajah had torn it plumb out, something a tiger'll sometimes do to disable its quarry. Worse, it was an impression confirmed by all that
adrenalin pumping through my body, adrenalin being a substance that
makes the mind race and bend and play tricks on itself. In other words:
I swore I felt my eyeball pop loose and roll down my cheek and settle
in tanbark, and it was this belief that made everything spin and a second later go dark.

I woke up in our rail car. Louis was above me, and when I peered
at him through my right eye he smiled weakly, though his face looked
wavy and dreamlike. There were silver clamps closing the tear in my
left eyelid, and I knew they must've coated the wound with an anaesthetic, for I couldn't feel any pain (and believe me, it hurt like a raging
son of a bitch later on). It wasn't bandaged, the worry being infection,
so I just lay there seeping over my cheekbones, feeling foggy headed
and strange, Louis periodically wiping one of his disinfected cloths
over my slitted eye.

"Mabel," he finally said, "I sink you must give up on zis wrestling
tiger business. It is foolhardy."

Here I shook my head, causing Louis to withdraw his hand for a
second.

"I shouldn't've put Rajah and King together without pedestals. I
was hurrying things, and not thinking of the cats. Was my fault, not
Rajah's."

Louis laughed, and I caught a whiff of Tennessee's finest,
though with my head acting up the way it was, I wasn't sure whether I
was imagining it.