The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (27 page)

I said, "Let's go," to Rajah and tugged on his leash and we caught up to her. We all walked side by side for a few seconds, Leonora not
looking at us, until finally I said, "Well what is it, Miss Speeks. Why are
we parked in the middle of this drizzly nowhere?"

She stopped and peered at me through the white veil hanging
from her chapeau. In the process I noticed her eyes for the first time.
orange, like a marmalade cat's, with flecks of black to spice them up.
Even I had to admit they were something.

"Quarantine, Mabel," she said, saying the word like I was slow.
"Quar ... ann ... teen."

Then she gave me a smile suggesting she didn't care whether I
believed her or not and jiggled herself off, humming.

There was a possibility she was telling the truth: during a twomonth stretch in 1918 when influenza broke out in the northwest, the
show rerouted itself so as to avoid places where it might be seized and
shut down till the panic was over. Yet there was no good reason Al G.
wouldn't have announced this, staying one step ahead of health inspectors being a time-honoured circus tradition. That night, with the train
idling on the tracks, a few of the groomers hooked a radio to a generator and listened for news of influenza or red death or a water-borne
menace. If there was one it wasn't mentioned that night, the only news
being from Europe and how they were making progress clearing
bombed-out buildings.

In the middle of the night we started moving again. Though this
normally wouldn't have woken me, I must've been pretty anxious to
feel some motion again, for my eyes opened and I felt as alert as a gal
who'd slept well. Rajah's eyes opened too, and he murmured and
turned to me and yawned, his meaty breath wafting into my face.

He rolled over and fell back asleep with his face against my
neck. As the train rumbled east, I stayed awake, waiting for a change
of direction, hoping against hope we'd head toward civilization
instead of vast western Canada emptiness. No such luck. After
fifteen or twenty minutes a whistle blew and I felt the train taking a slow turn, straightening out so we were heading more north than
anywhere else.

We didn't travel long that night, maybe an hour, and when we
stopped we were in some dinky station, a single light illuminating the
words "Grand Forks." Beyond that was a blackness interrupted only by
firefly light.

The sun came up on a misty cool day, like every day we'd seen
over the past week. The transport wagons took us past little homesteader shacks to a field laid to fallow in the middle of nowhere. It had
the feel of weirdness, this place, for it was completely deserted, no evidence whatsoever of stores or saloons or meeting halls, only a big
clapboard church with Russian letters across the steeple base. We didn't bother with a parade, so we didn't see the townsfolk until the hour
before the matinee, when they began straggling toward the main
entrance. They were like ghosts, appearing in the mist, wearing long
white robes sashed at the waist, the men wearing beards that obviously hadn't been trimmed for years, the women looking plain and tired
and hooded.

After a lot of milling about and head scratching, the robe wearers
began to filter in; within a few minutes it became clear that in addition
to their strange sartorial sense, the other defining quality of
Doukhobors was they were way on the frugal end of things. There wasn't one rigged game of skill played that day. Not one drop of tincture,
elixir or nostrum was sold by the cure-all vendors. Not a single sideshow
ticket was sold, despite the efforts of both the outside talker and the free
act, a guy named Jorge who could swallow a fistful of swords and still
sing the Honduran national anthem. I did see one little white-robed girl
buy a live chameleon from one of the bug men, though when her father
found out he opened the matchbox and overturned it. The squishy
sound of him stomping it made the girl go teary.

Finally, it was showtime, "The Conquest of Nyanza" spilling
onto the hippodrome in a trumpet of sound and colour, and I remember thinking this would break them out of their stupor. It didn't; we all
stood outside the performers' tent, listening to the silence, one of the
spec riders breaking the tension by saying, "Maybe they're sitting on
their hands to keep them warm." Nor did things get any better, each act
finishing to not so much as a cough (though the clowns did get the odd
laugh from the children). During my twelve-tiger act, an act so exciting the audience was usually standing by the end, there wasn't so much
as a peep; throughout, I couldn't stop myself from taking little sidelong
glances, if only to try to figure out why they'd bothered coming in the
first place. The cats were doing the same thing. With pupils shifted to
the corners of their eyes, they did their sit-ups and ball rolls and hoop
jumping nervously, as though worried that something was being
thought up in all that quiet. When we got to our finale, poor Rajah was
so upset he crawled off his pedestal, limped over and stood on his hind
legs, more hugging me than pretending to attack. I had to ham it up,
pulling him down on top of me and reaching behind me to scratch his
pleasure spot in order to get his blood up. I even wiggled my exposed
arms and legs to suggest I was in trouble.

It wouldn't work. Rajah just sort of lay on me, panting and shivering and looking around. When the orchestra struck up a minute later
it sounded ten times louder than normal.

Finally, it was over, nothing left but the national anthem and the
after-show. Since it was obvious these people weren't about to part with
another penny that left the national anthem alone. The orchestra struck
up "0 Canada" and it happened: grumbling and yelling and every man,
woman and child covering their ears and rushing for the exit. I even
watched one woman with a baby trying to cover her ears and the baby's
ears simultaneously, finally making do by pulling the sash off her white
gown and wrapping it tight around the baby's head. Within two minutes every last one had vamoosed.

This behaviour inspired a chill in the membership of the Al G.
Barnes 4-Ring Wild Animal Circus. We started packing up as quick as we could, the workingmen taking the big top down so fast they were in
danger of tearing it in two. Within an hour and a half the last wagon
was rolling toward the parked train. Meanwhile, the entire population
of Grand Forks, British Columbia, had formed a standing patrol on the
far side of the tent, arms folded over bellies and faces locked in scowls.
It looked like they wanted to assure themselves we were leaving as fast
as was possible, and as far as we were concerned we were going to
oblige. The workingmen started poling the wagons onto the flatbeds
and ratcheting them into place. Meanwhile, our watchers' expressions
never changed, for better or worse, and for a second I wondered if
somehow the whole town was taking the same personality-flattening
drugs I'd been given in the nervous hospital.

As if that wasn't weird enough, after the whole train was packed
up, not a twitch of hay or a crumb of animal feed left behind, we sat
idling, as though we couldn't move without the protection offered by
darkness. Rajah and I curled up on the bed and I calmed myself by
pushing my face into his fur. We stayed this way for hours, Rajah
drifting off and me too nervous to read or knit, so I lay there, smelling
his fur and letting my hand comb the thick white hair between his
front legs.

Come evening there was a knock at the door. Immediately I figured
it was a posse of rubes, out to get me for the tightness of my uniform and
the fact I wore my hair in curls men found pleasing. For a second I told
myself I wasn't going to answer. The knocking came again, and
because this time it woke Rajah I decided I'd answer after all, figuring
five hundred pounds of tiger goes a long way in calming disgruntled
townies. I pushed my car door open and saw a great big whitecloaked Doukhobor standing under a hood. He looked like a small
upholstered hill.

A voice came from beneath the bedsheet that didn't at all sound
like what I imagined a Doukhobor voice would sound like. Polite, it
was, the diction precise and school taught.

"I was wondering," it said, if I might have a word with you,
madam."

I swallowed.

"About what?"

"It's a ... it's a delicate matter. Do you mind if I step inside."

"Yes, I do mind. You can state your business from right where
you are. I've got an animal in here who doesn't particularly warm to
strangers."

He tilted his face upward, something that suprised me for he was
clean-shaven and meaty around the jowls.

"Please ..." he said, and it was his Barnes-like charm that made
me involuntarily back away. He had to duck to get under the doorway,
and when he was inside his cloaked head practically touched the ceiling.
He had to have been six foot three, his body weight triple mine, with
dark eyes and prominent lips and a fighter's jaw. He wasn't handsome,
but at the same time had a way about him that just suggested importance. I studied his face, exploring the strange feeling I'd met him
somewhere before. He pushed his cloak off his head, revealing thick
black hair gone wavy with pomade.

"My goodness. I was beginning to think we would never have the
chance to meet. That Al G. Barnes. You have to to hand it to him. One
wily customer. Of course, he is a circus owner."

With that he bent over so he could take the hem of his robe in his
hands, an effort that made him groan. He started pulling it over his
head, revealing a crisp, beautifully tailored virgin wool suit underneath.
It must've cost $500 if it cost a nickel.

"There," he said, "that's better. Now perhaps we can talk."

He dabbed his hair, even though it hadn't been mussed, and he
evened his tie. When he reached inside his jacket pocket for a double
corona I realized how I knew his face. My heart sped, and I felt a rush
of heat to my cheeks and brow. In danger of fainting dead away, I took
a series of deep, slow breaths to save myself the embarrassment. Meanwhile, he held the flame from a solid gold lighter to the tip of his
cigar, the flame dancing and bobbing as he sucked. Within a minute
my rail car filled with tobacco smoke so fine you could smell apple and
sandalwood.

John Ringling was pointing at Louis's old scroll desk and saying,
"Tell me. Is that real Bohemian pine?"

One half-hour later I walked the length of the idling train. This being
a moment of high emotion, both good and bad, just the way I like it,
pretty much everything about that walk made an impression. My feet
were making sucking noises in the mud. I could smell elephant dung,
dark earth and rain. When I looked up through the drizzle, the fields
had a cottony greyness about them. I passed groups of workingmen sitting around playing cards on overturned crates, laughing and passing
bottles and not minding the weather for it was better than being in their
cars, crammed three to a berth. The sky felt low and thick, like a cozy.

I made it to the front section of the train and stopped in front of
the Holt car. There I waited for a few seconds to get my nerve up, Rajah
yawning as if bored and wanting to get out of the mist. I knocked on
the door, hoping Dan might peer out the window and see it was me and
open up. It didn't happen, so I knocked again, louder this time, calling,
"Jesus Christ, Al G., I know you're in there," and when this didn't
work I went to the side of the car, underneath a window, and hissed,
"Al G., you open the door. Goddammit I know what's going on...."

The stillness lasted a few seconds more. Then the car door
opened, both Rajah and me snapping our heads to the right, where Dan
was standing underneath the awning with his worry face. I passed him
into the car. He didn't say, How is you this evening, Miss Stark? or even
hello, for that matter.

Al G. was sitting at his desk, a mountain of train schedules and
maps and circus paper in front of him; it surprised me to see him
hunched over and fretting. He looked up and our eyes met. Leaning back in his chair, he linked his fingers over his stomach and, after looking sick for a few seconds, gave me a pained smile.

"Found you, didn't he?"

Rajah was pulling me toward a space of carpet next to the hearth
so I let him go and he lay down beside a burning log.

"He did."

This made Al G. laugh in the way people laugh when something
isn't at all funny. Dan was standing beside me, while Leonora Speeks
was sitting on the antique sofa filing her nails. We all just looked at him,
worried by the giddiness of his reaction.

"Let me guess," Al G. said between howls. "He ... he used a costume didn't he?"

I nodded.

"Ha! I knew it. You've got to respect a guy who'll go to those
kind of lengths to get what he wants. He's been trailing us since
Portland, you know."

"I sort of figured that."

"I'm sure you did, Kentucky. I'm sure you did. Of course, there
was no way I was going to win. A whole circus cannot outrun one man
with his own locomotive. With his own railroad, for Christ's sake. Am
I right, Dan?"

"You right, governor."

"It's putting up the fight that's the fun of it. That's the whole
point of it. Remember when he wanted those Peruvian flyers from Cole
Brothers a few years ago? The whole circus bribed their way into Mexico.
Thirty rail cars worth of circus, and they wandered around Chihuahua
and Sonora for a month, four hundred people stuck with Montezuma's
revenge and the workingmen all drunk on mescal. They didn't win
either but I bet it was worth it. Or the Robbins Brothers. Have you
heard this story, Kentucky? They paid a local sheriff to lock up their
star wire walker, and then they spread a rumour he'd been kidnapped
by Bolsheviks. The point is they did it, am I right, Dan?"

"You right, governor."

"Tell me, Dan. How long did I say it would take John Ringling
to catch up with Kentucky?"