The boys got up to leave. “So next time we go out, are you going to go with us,” Danny asked, “or are you going to say, ‘I’ll think about it’?”
“I think about everything,” I said.
“If you’re sitting in front of a girl and you get her legs spread open,” Kris said, “and all you got to do is stick your dick in her pussy, man, do you think about that?”
The boys were so busy giving themselves high fives in congratulations for that retort that they didn’t wait for a response. Finally, they looked at me, and I said, “Yes.”
The rain started around midnight. I could hear it pattering on the top of my trailer. I had left Camp Lejeune around 7 P.M., following two sold-out shows on Sunday afternoon. The whole crew was in a hurry to get to Murrells Inlet, a small South Carolina tourist trap south of Myrtle Beach, and enjoy the one night a week we had off. Buck had already been there the day before to sell circus memorabilia at a local flea market and had scoped out the lot. He reported back that Inlet Square Mall had a movie theater on the same side as the circus. He wrote down all the movies and put one to four stars by the ones he had seen, then taped the list on the bulletin board by the back door of the tent, right beneath the sign that reminded everyone to turn their clocks ahead one hour for the beginning of daylight saving time.
The grassy lot was mostly dry when I arrived, though already showing signs of bogging down in some places. The cannon got stuck where the back door would be and an elephant had to come pull it out. It took the elephant only several seconds but cost Sean five bucks. Other drivers got stuck, too, but didn’t want to part with their money. Harry Hammond, the legendarily frugal treasurer, got stuck as well but stayed put several days rather than pay the five-dollar toll. Chava, an aerialist, got stuck, but she didn’t have to pay. She got her husband, Royce, the manager, to pull her out with a forklift. The Rodríguez Family truck got stuck. But all they needed was to gather the whole family, which numbered close to twenty with wives, cousins, and kids, and they could push it out themselves.
By the time I woke up around ten o’clock the next morning, the tent was already halfway up and the water two inches deep. “What a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” Willie, the electrician, said to me as I emerged from my camper and surveyed the wasteland, where the blithe expression “April showers” began to take on a new level of cruelty. “Wouldn’t you just want to punch Mister Rogers if he said that today?” As the afternoon progressed and the rain continued, the circus lot began to transform itself into an elaborate constellation of rings that reminded me of Dante’s Inferno. The three performance rings themselves were surprisingly dry, while the hippodrome track was muddy. The area under the seats was also dry, whereas the road around the tent was soupy. Under the trailers was dry, yet the outermost ring was the gloppiest of all.
“They say that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow,” I said to Bonnie Bale as I slopped off toward Clown Alley that afternoon. “Do circus people have a hundred words for mud?”
“I have only one for it,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I think you can guess.”
By showtime the lot was covered with four inches of standing water that gathered in elephant tracks, tire tracks, even the tracks where previous walkers had left boot prints on the firm ground below. The tent looked unplayable, but a truckload of gravel was brought into the back door, several bags of cedar shavings were sprinkled around the ticket wagons, and a half dozen bales of hay were scattered around the track where guests would walk to their seats. Backstage, where the performers gathered, remained mired in mud. It was a grimy greenish-gray kind of mud that glurped when anyone stuck his foot in the ground and growled when he took it out. It smelled like a combination of fetid earth and stale horse urine, made only worse by the presence of elephant manure, which ironically stood out on account of its unnaturally yellowy color and its uncanny ability to stay firm. You know you have arrived on muddy ground when elephant stool is the firmest substance around.
“Now, this is the real circus,” the clowns crowed to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”
The rain seemed to bring out the best and worst in everybody. The houses were packed and the shows went on with only a few minor glitches. The performers wore their special “mud show” costumes, covered themselves with worn-out bathrobes, and hurriedly sloshed from their trailers to the tent with knee-high boots over their performing tights. In some ways it was funny watching people who could otherwise dance on horseback or fly through the air tiptoe around the lot like a bunch of amateur tightrope walkers.
At the same time the rain made people crabby, and when performers get crabby they start to bitch—usually about one another. “Did you see how she cut her act today? Not very professional.” “Did you see him wear mud boots in the ring? Nobody pays to see Wal-Mart waders.” “Did you see how Sean got pulled in by the elephants? It sort of undermines the mystique of the world’s largest cannon if it can’t even drive through a couple of inches of mud.” At moments like this, the circus community seemed to splinter along its natural fault lines as everyone became an expert on everyone else’s job. In particular, longtime show people liked to criticize the “gauchos”—people born outside the circus who took a job within. On our show, this included Douglas Holwadel, who was running day-to-day operations during Johnny Pugh’s convalescence, Kathleen (always a favorite, even after she stopped performing), Sean, and now me.
I heard a variety of reasons why gauchos should not be allowed on the show. First, gauchos don’t know how to play a crowd, I was told. Moreover, they complain a lot. “They will not perform with a hangnail,” Dawnita Bale told me, “while a circus person would perform with a broken hand. A gaucho almost closed the show several years ago after complaining to OSHA that the beds were too short.” But the biggest fear of all is that a gaucho will commit a blunder and cost a performer his or her career. The rain and cold of South Carolina, coming so early in the season, only heightened this alarm. “You just watch,” Dawnita told me at the end of that first day of mud as we waited to wade into the finale. “Something is bound to happen this week. Outsiders always make mistakes.”
That something happened in Rock Hill. The occasion was Easter weekend.
The rain continued throughout the week as the show moved down the South Carolina coast to Ladson before heading north again. Now three weeks into the season, I was struck by how each town took on its own narrative. Even though we might stay in one place for only two days, or three days, or even one day, a small story would develop in each location. In Waycross, Georgia, the story centered on a Chinese restaurant. On Sunday night sixty members of the circus crowded the eight-table restaurant for an all-you-can-eat buffet; the next day at lunch Kris Kristo returned with Danny and the two of them ate so much they got sick in the bathroom. In the morning everyone was talking about the previous night’s dinner; in the afternoon everyone was talking about that day’s lunch; that night we moved on to Hinesville.
The narrative was usually driven by one or more factors: the place we played, the people we met, or the weather we encountered. In Ladson, South Carolina, the show played an oyster-shell lot adjacent to a flea market, just up the road from a strip shopping mall. For three days, the workingmen went back and forth to the liquor store; the clowns went back and forth to the Laundromat; the Americans went back and forth to Burger King; and the Mexicans went back and forth to Taco Bell. As for people, Kris met a lingerie model named Angie during the first show who proceeded to drag him, Sean, and me on an elaborate three-day scavenger hunt/striptease that resulted in little but frustration and a crossed-off name in Kris’s spiral-bound black book.