The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (8 page)

At the first clearing, I stopped to catch my breath and check my
compass. Was then I discovered something. While a compass'll tell you
where north is, from which you can figure out where south is, it won't
make sure once you head off in that direction you stick to it. Owing to
all that dodging and jumping and veering toward places where the
undergrowth was the lightest, I kept getting off track. I'd stop and
check the compass and find I'd been trudging more west than south,
and on the one occasion I went a long time without checking, I got myself heading straight back from where I came. Plus I couldn't use the
sky as any kind of guide, for it was the middle of the night, the moon
in the same place the sun is at high noon, so no matter where I went it
stayed in exactly the same spot: straight up and shining like a lantern.
Every few minutes I had to realign myself and start off again, knowing
I'd soon be charging in the wrong direction again. After a while I felt
as trapped in that damn forest as I'd felt in that damn lunatic asylum.

Finally, I reached the edge of the woods. I took a step into a field
gone fallow. It smelled dusty and earthless and like it needed rest. My
progress quickened. A bit later I reached a lighter forest, more of a
glade it was, and while crossing it I discovered a rushing creek. Here I
wolfed down one of the cheese sandwiches Levine had given me and
risked fever by taking a few swallows of water. Then I was on the move
again, over a flatland of farms separated by strips of light brush, reaching a road around two or three in the morning.

I took a breath and was about to cross the road and keep on going
when I heard hooves clomping against packed road earth. Was a
farmer, someone's grandpa, delivering a load of wheat-brown caskets
no doubt filled with sourmash. He looked at me, curious, and said,
"You need some help, missy?"

"I'm going to Clarkesville."

"You walkin' there? In the middle the night?"

I nodded as persuasively as possible, which wasn't very, seeing as
how my dress was wrinkled and my face marred with branch scrapes and
my hair full of leaves. I watched him figure it all out, his face roiling, and
I cursed both the full moon and myself for not running the instant I saw
him. It was a strange moment, the two of us standing there trying to figure what to make of the other, my only hope being he didn't have a
licence to transport whisky and so wasn't in any position to judge.

Finally, he said, "Well, you need a lift or not?"

I went with him the rest of the way to Tennessee. I didn't know
the laws, so I didn't know for sure if I was safer there, but I can tell you I sure felt safer once I saw the "Welcome To" sign. As for the bootlegger, he didn't make a word of conversation the whole way, and I followed his lead. By the time we got there, it was a cool morning bound
to turn hotter. You could tell because the sun looked bleary and white,
and because you could see bugs whirring atop grass stalks.

Wait a minute-I'm mistaken. Before dropping me off in the
town square, smack-dab in front of the court house, he did say one
thing.

Said: "Carnival's in town."

THEN, SUDDENLY, YOU'RE OLD. YOU JUST ARE. THERE'S NO
getting round it. One day you're young and fresh and your
skin's smooth as teak, and the next day you're lanolining your scars so
they don't gnarl during the night. Believe me. If you think lost love'11
spark a case of the maudlins, just wait till you can't tie your own shoes
without a symphony of grunts and groans and hoarse respirations.
Still, I'm not a complainer, never have been never will be, so I'll skip the
drawbacks and jump to the thing I do like about aging. The mind gets
supple. Believe it or not, it does. You start seeing around corners. You
start picturing what's behind you without having to crane your neck
(which you can't do anyway, seeing as it's getting stiffer by the day).
It's the one recompense of being aged and wrinkly and sore: you learn
the trick of being in two places at once. For instance, I can be in the
grocery store, buying a six-pack of Hamm's, and my body'll be in this
day and age, 1968 to be exact, while the rest of me will be in another
place, like the Al G. Barnes 4-Ring Circus of 1915. It's quite a feat. You get up there in years and if you let it, your imagination can get
about as real as anything else. Maybe more so.

Basically, what it boils down to is time. The way it works changes.
Used to be, I imagined time the way young people do, as something with
an order and a flow, like sand through an egg timer. Then, around the
day I started wearing orthopedic splints, I began to view time as something different, as more an accumulation than a march forward. If I had
to describe how I see time today, I'd have to say it's like gumballs in a
penny machine, all mixed together, jumbled up, rubbing the colour off
one another. For example. That thing I did in 1927. Jesus. Was the worst
thing one person can do to another person, and the hell of it is I did it
without even trying. For years afterwards I divided my life into two.
There was the before, when I'd hoped to the heavens I was a good person, and the after, when I knew for damn sure I wasn't and just had to
keep going despite it all. (Try greeting each day with something like that
weighing on you. Tiring, is the word comes to mind.) Then one day I
woke up and I was old and my worst sin had come unhobbled in time.
Started wandering, it had. Suddenly it was something I'd always done,
something I'd always been capable of doing.

Suddenly, it was a part of me.

Another example. My men. Whew. Had a slew of them. The exact
numbers I'll let you worry about but I know for a fact there were more
than you can count on the fingers of one hand. Used to be when I
looked back I saw them as a procession. I saw them as a parade. Now
I imagine them like you would people in an elevator, clumped together and facing the door. Fact is I can picture every last one of them, as
though they were sitting in front of me, my being in two places at once
even now. The tallest? That's Dimitri, who's a good foot taller than
Louis, who's the shortest. The richest? That's James, which is why
he's dressed so fine and looking so damnably stern. The homeliest?
That's Dr. Levine, who also happens to be the smartest. The oldest? That's Art, the one I loved, while the youngest is Albert, the one made
me fall out of favour with the Ringlings. The handsomest? Rajah, of
course, though Rajah was a tiger and only thought he was a man, so I
suppose he doesn't count. Otherwise, the handsomest by a country
mile is Al G.; just look at those eyes, so piercing, so blue, don't even
get me started on his jawline, Jesus he had a way with the ladies. The
one with the chin cleft? Dimitri. With the ten-gallon? James. With the
shoulders thrown way back and the backbone ramrod stiff? Louis.
The one with the worried look on his face? Albert. The one with a
general smugness about him? Al G. The one with the look of understanding? Of sympathy? Of willingness to lend a hand?

Art.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying my preference would
be to make my admissions the old person's way, gumball-style, the bits
and pieces all mixed up and swirled together, conjuring why what happened happened throughout the whole story, instead of just at the end.
It'd be a hell of a lot more accurate that way, and truer to the way I've
been feeling of late. Still, stories aren't told that way, the danger being
you'll write me off as an old woman given to rambling and I ... well. Let's
just say I can't have that. See, there's a lot riding on you having a pure
and clear-eyed understanding of the situation, so I'm going to have to tell
it the standard way, the way I would've before age settled in and put its
feet up and lit itself a slow-burning cigar. By the same token, there'll be
times I take liberties with this thing called order, with this thing we pretend is time, if only because at my age it's hard as the dickens not to.

Like right now, for instance.

Problem is, I didn't sleep well last night, and by that I mean I slept even
worse than old people normally sleep, which believe me is plenty bad
enough. Was up fuming, worried, frantic. Tossed and turned for hours
before finally nodding off, only to wake up in the middle of the night,
2:37 it was, eyes popping open like they were on springs. I was thinking so hard I could've sworn there was someone or something in the room
with me, whirring. You ever get that? Where the mind's worked itself
into such a lather your thoughts pick up where quiet leaves off, till it
gets so you can't think for all the noise? Might as well've been sleeping
by the side of a freeway. At least then I could've shut out the racket
with earplugs.

Naturally, I could barely drag myself out of bed when the alarm
went off at 4:45. Felt logy all day. Even Goldie noticed it-when I was
finishing boning out her cage she gave me a good long look and an eye
roll followed by a lazy high-pitched arf, which is tiger for I know, I
know. The rest had fallen asleep by then, and were all wearing those
restful housecat grins tigers get when full-bellied. You know a tiger
licks his lips when he sleeps? Little dreamy tongue slaps that dampen
his teeth and gums so they won't dry out? You know some tigers snore?
And talk in their sleep? Sweep their tails when they dream?

Scares me, goddammit, the idea of doing without them. For the past
thirty-six years they're what's kept my mind off the things I'm about to
tell you. They're what's given my whirring mind something to focus on.

Please, make yourself at home.

Nice little place, isn't it? Cozy, paved driveway, bit of a garden out
back, close to shopping. I'm the type of person who doesn't need much
but likes to form attachments to the things she does have. A favourite
coffee mug, comfortable shoes, a pearl-handled revolver bought years
ago in Wichita, a gold-rimmed poster from the Barnes show, a bone
rake I've had for so long there's a smoothness where my fingers, and no
one else's, go. After almost eighty years on planet Earth, those're the
things left to me.

In the early thirties I quit circus life-suppose I'd just plain had
enough-and took a training job out at JungleLand. I've been there
ever since, making me JungleLand's longest-running employee and the
world's oldest tiger trainer. Not that that counts for anything. Uh-uh. No siree. There are some pretty foul winds blowing out there, and I
don't want anyone eavesdropping on our frank conversations. Plus
we'll be more comfortable here, in my house, than in those little huts
made to look grass walled but in fact are polystyrene. While the past
couple of afternoons haven't been too bad, you get a hot one and the
damn things'll heat up like a woodstove. Louis, the old owner, tried
installing air conditioners about a year ago, but that caused havoc with
the fuses. Was a lot of sparking and power outages and one day the
dromedary pen caught fire so he took the units out and sold them for a
quarter of what he'd paid for'em. Course, that was always Louis's way
of doing business: buying high and selling low and finding the whole
thing damn funny. No wonder I liked him so much.

About six months ago, he found me at the snack bar. Was
lunchtime, and I was tucking into the same thing I eat every day: a hamburger Annie had leaned on between paper towels to get the fat out,
washed down with my second Hamm's of the day.

"Can I sit, Mabel?"

"Course, Louis."

He gave a little tug on his checkered slacks and sat. He was such
a tall man he had to turn sideways so his legs would have somewhere to
go. He twisted his body around so he faced me, and when he spoke it
was in a lowered voice. His forehead was long as an egg flipper.

"Mabel, you've been here for how many years?"

"Thirty-six, or leastways close to it, Louis. Came when the
Barnes show closed for good-you know that."

"Well, that means you've been here longer than anyone. So I
want you to know first. I'm selling. I'm retiring. I'm going to spend my
days watching rodeo in Santa Rosa. I'll make the announcement tomorrow. There just isn't any money in this business, Mabel."

"That's never bothered you before, Louis."

"That was then and this is now. Even Feld's Ringling show is
going bust-who would've thought that could happen? I'm getting on, and problems start to wear when you're not so young anymore. It's
high time I took a breather."

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

"Louis Goebbel leaving the animal business?"

"Running is more like it."

I was beginning to think he was serious.

"Who's buying?"

Here he started laughing. "A couple of candy butchers, if you can
believe that. They go by the names of Jeb and Ida Ritter. Plus another
partner named Ray Labatt. Seems he's got a rich wife who needs to lose
some money for tax reasons. Mostly it'll be Jeb and Ida running the
show."

"They know anything about running an animal park?"