Khris Allen sat upright in a blue director’s chair and stared at a pile of bullwhips and kangaroo crops on the futon sofa of Kathleen’s trailer. Only now the futon was empty and the trailer belonged to him.
“Kathleen really didn’t do housework,” he said. “She dusted every now and then. She could cook. But just smell this place: it’s all dog hair and tiger urine. I don’t know how Josip stood it. I don’t know how I stood it…”
Khris rubbed his hands across his face. He was dressed in a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and black canvas slippers. He wore no shirt, revealing a taut, wiry torso made strong from practicing jujitsu for the previous ten years and from pushing tiger cages for the previous two. He was roughly the same size and shape as Sean. “They look exactly the same,” commented one friend of mine. “They’re both hillbillies with good bodies.”
“I decided I should try and clean up a bit, but everything still reminds me of her. Those are her tiger pictures on the wall. That’s her calendar. Even the cats still remind me of her.” He reached toward an overturned wall lamp and pulled down an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Not far away on another sideways lamp hung a cap from the year the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets shared the national championship in football. Above it was a comic strip showing a man standing in front of a tiger. “Fellow Animal,” the man proclaims, “I am Hugo Flealover, Animal Rights crusader, come to free you from bondage.” In the next frame the tiger is eating the man.
“Come on,” Khris said. “Let’s go feed the cats.”
Outside the trailer the late-afternoon sun was just dipping behind the Shenandoah Mountains. The air was still warm with the faint blush of spring. The sound of squealing laughter from children leaving the early show still lingered in the valley around Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Washington, Madison, and Jefferson once traveled. The tent was quiet in its chameleon pose as it gave up the bright stripes of afternoon sun to its silhouette before the stars. The season was now in full bloom. After the Easter rains in South Carolina the show had trekked north into a cold snap in the coastal plains of North Carolina. In Henderson, Sean almost missed the bag. The air was cold, the mud nearly frozen. He turned on the heater inside the barrel to 70 degrees. Checking his logbook, he adjusted his power level (its true function, like the rest of the cannon, still a secret to me, but less so every day) to what he thought was the correct level to get him to the middle of the air bag. Still, it wasn’t far enough, and he barely caught the front lip of the bag and skidded to the ground. “You can mark my words,” he said after limping out of the finale. “If the weather stays this cold I’m going to land on the pavement before the year’s out.”
In Virginia the weather got warm again, and by the time we crossed the Appalachians it was almost ideal. Yet somehow all these changes were maddening, like a case of schizophrenia shared by two hundred people at once. On certain days, when the sun was shining brightly, the breeze was blowing softly, and the temperature was just this side of perfect, when the boys walked to a nearby field to play baseball, the girls sat under a veranda having a baby shower, and the cookhouse was serving meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, followed by chocolate cream pie for dessert, nothing seemed more ideal than the circus. But a day later, when the rain started falling, the mud began rising, and the temperature was just this side of freezing, when the men complained about their shoulders being bruised, the women griped about their husbands losing money at poker, and the cooks in the cookhouse were so busy frying crack in the pans that they ran out of spaghetti for dinner, nothing seemed more miserable than the circus. Often both these days would happen at once. In Harrisonburg, I was having the former kind of day; Khris was having the latter.
“I hope you don’t mind a little smell,” Khris called as we wandered over to a wheelbarrow near the twin lines of cages where fifteen servings of meat were thawing out on an open board. Each portion was about the size of a fire-starter log and the consistency of leftover meat loaf. Little starlights of ice still glistened in the center of the meat, and a virtual road map of dark red blood dripped from the plywood board onto the grass. The entire compound smelled like rancid hamburger meat.
“It’s a combination of beef, chicken, and beef by-products,” he explained, “fortified with vitamins A, E, and B.” He slid on a pair of bright yellow dishwashing gloves and began transferring the meat from the board into the wheelbarrow. “It’s what they call Grade B meat, not for human consumption. We order about forty thousand pounds a year. It’s actually made for racing dogs.”
“Forty thousand pounds,” I said. “That sounds expensive.”
“Last year we spent thirty-two thousand dollars on food alone.”
“And what does this meat taste like?”
“Well, it’s not tenderloin or sirloin. It’s basically fatty meat mixed with bonemeal to give it marrow. The USDA makes us put charcoal in it so we can’t sell it to humans.”
“And what happens if you eat it?”
He smiled. “Let’s just say it gave me the runs.”
Laughing, he rocked the wheelbarrow onto its wheel and headed toward the cages. Laurie, now the last-remaining groom, was just clearing the final remnants of sawdust from the cages with the help of an electric leaf blower. As soon as she finished, the two of them went to work. Their routine was precise. Laurie would slide open the small door on the seven-and-a-half-foot-long steel cage that was five feet high and four feet wide, while Khris would toss in the meat. If Laurie opened the door too early or kept it open too long, the tiger would have time to swat at Khris’s body.
“You always have to be careful with the cats,” he said. “You get a false sense of security around them. Whenever they go after you, they’re probably playing. But sometimes that develops into maliciousness. You can’t let them see you scared.”
As soon as Khris rolled toward the cats all nine of them sprang to their feet and started pacing excitedly in their cages—rocking back and forth, panting with their tongues, growling in a bloodthirsty way that no doubt came from their grumbling stomachs but made my own stomach churn.
“This is when they become real tigers!” Khris shouted over the roar. “This is when I love it the most.”
Laurie put a metal hook on top of the first door, opened the slot, and counted slowly to three. By the time she finished and dropped the door, Khris had already tossed the meat onto the plywood floor and Tito had already devoured his first log. Being the biggest, Tito got the most: twelve and a half pounds. Orissa got seven and Zeus ten. “He was getting chubby, so I just put him on a diet,” Khris explained. Down the line he went. Taras, ten pounds. Fatima and Simba. seven. As each tiger was fed, the noise level declined. Toshiba received only five pounds because she had just had a hysterectomy and had begun to gain weight, while Barisal received a hefty eight and a half pounds because she was thought to be pregnant. Before Kathleen departed she had left explicit instructions on what to do should Barisal give birth to a litter.
For now, other concerns were more immediate. As Khris approached Tobruk in the last cage, he was slightly distracted by another tiger and wasn’t looking when Laurie opened the door. When Khris finally did turn around, Tobruk flung himself against the cage and thrust his outstretched paw through the door, missing the sagging loaf of meat but snagging instead the back of Khris’s hand. Almost immediately Tobruk’s curved claw slid deep into the tendon behind Khris’s index finger. Khris winced in pain, but didn’t shout. Laurie dropped the door. I instinctively reached out to help, but Khris merely waved me away. He dropped the log of meat on the ground and with remarkable composure grabbed the back of Tobruk’s paw and carefully pulled the claw from his hand in the same direction the nail had entered. With blood pouring from his wound and his jaw tightly clenched, Khris calmly picked up the meat from the ground, waited for Laurie to reopen the door, and continued feeding the cats as if nothing had transpired. “You can never let them see you scared,” he had said. His manifesto come to life.