When the feeding was done Khris walked slowly back to his trailer and asked me to help him wrap his hand. His face was pale by the time he sat down. His leg was stained with blood. The second show was scheduled to start in less than an hour.
“To be frank with you,” he said after several moments of silence, “Kathleen was the first woman I ever had sex with. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had an aura about her. She was sexual—sensual even; I was extremely attracted to her. She was a little confused. But of course I knew that when I came down here. I had just broken up with my college girlfriend, Kim. I had considered getting married, doing the picket-fence-and-children thing. But still I had this secret part of me that wanted a little adventure.”
Outside, the cats were busy licking their paws and clearing their throats with low, guttural cries. Laurie had finished giving them water and had wandered off to her camper. Khris was tugging at his hair.
“On my first night in Florida the flame reignited and I knew I could never leave her. Then we went on the road. Everything was good for a while. We became friends, in addition to the physical thing. But then problems started happening. We are different people. Kathleen is fiercely independent. She doesn’t like to talk about her problems. I’m the opposite. If I have a problem I want to sit down and talk about it right away. Let’s put it this way: If Kathleen wanted something from the mall right now, she would just go and get it. If I needed something, I would ask somebody to go with me.”
He put his cap back on the lamp and slid off his Chinese slippers. It was now totally dark outside, and a small light over the stove produced the only shadows.
“Over the last few months, when we knew she was going to leave, we were on friendly terms, but it didn’t take long for the daggers to start flying. The last few weeks she started blaming me. She wanted to leave, to go to school, to grow, she said, yet she still didn’t want to leave the cats. I wanted to stay. If you had asked her last night why she was leaving, she probably would have said I pushed her.”
“Did she say goodbye?”
“Sure. It never got so bad that she would walk away and never talk with me again. In our greatest time we would call each other sweetheart and baby. Yesterday when I went to give her the final hug she got emotional. I choked up. I’m choking up now just remembering it. I said to her, ‘Kathleen, I’ll always love you.’ She said to me, ‘I’ll always love you too, baby.’ I told her I would take care of all this for her, and she said, ‘Take care of it for you now.’”
Tears coated Khris’s light blue eyes. For a moment he couldn’t speak, until he was coldly brought back to the present by a crisp metal bang and a growl from his front yard. “Fatima!” he shouted, swinging open his screen door. “Fatima. Be quiet!” The door slammed back into place.
“What makes me the saddest,” he said, his voice turning more Southern as his story went along, “is that the people in this circus don’t realize how much she did for these cats. How she trained them. How she loved them. I remember last year Mr. Pugh and Mr. Holwadel came to see me practice in DeLand. I had only practiced the act once or twice. I was scared shitless. I took a deep breath and went into the cage. To my surprise everything went perfectly. They applauded after every trick. Kathleen got so upset watching them approve of me that she ran into the trailer and hid. Later I had dinner with Mr. Holwadel in a restaurant in DeLand. He said, ‘Khris, I’ll be honest with you. I think we’ll have a better cat act this year.’ Outside I was very proud. I said, ‘I’ll do my best for you. I’ll try not to let you down.’ But inside I felt so bad for Kathleen. She trained these animals. She raised many of them by hand. She had been with them for six years. And still no one ever respected her.”
“Do you think they’ll ever respect you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I’m a man. Just the other day Mr. Holwadel stopped me in front of the tent and asked how things were going. I told him they were going okay. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now that you’re a member of the team I want you to do me a favor.’ I said, ‘Sure, Mr. Holwadel, what’s that?’ ‘Start calling me Douglas.’”
Buck knocked at my door at a little after eight.
“Get up,” he said. “We’re going shopping.”
“But the mall’s not open for another two hours,” I protested.
“We’re not going to the mall,” he said. “This is Hanover, Pennsylvania: Thrift Town, U.S.A.”
The show crossed the Mason-Dixon Line at the end of April and for many it wasn’t a day too soon. To landowners before the Civil War the famed surveying line may have been a divider between slave and non-slave states, to officers during World War II it may have been a warning of when to segregate their troops, but to butchers on the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus nearly fifty years later the line was the signal that for the first time all year they could raise the price of popcorn. Popcorn wasn’t the only thing. The coloring books that the clowns sold during intermission jumped from one dollar to two, programs went from two dollars to three, and Cokes, cotton candy, and hot dogs all surged fifty cents to two dollars apiece. Look out, Yankees, one almost wanted to shout, a herd of carpetbaggers from Dixie are coming to cart your money away.
Moving north also heralded other changes—first among them, the crowds. All through Georgia, the Carolinas, and southern Virginia we had seen mostly all-white audiences with few blacks and even fewer Hispanics. In addition, Southern audiences tended to sit in the general admission bleacher seats in the corners, which cost nine dollars for adults and six for kids, instead of paying two dollars more and receiving a reserved chair alongside the three rings. Moreover, they would sit quietly, without much emotion, and during the Ivanovs’ balletic hand-balancing act late in the second act many would hurriedly exit the tent. As we headed north, through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston, before the climax of the summer in New York City itself, the audiences began to diversify. Crowds were more ethnic and much wealthier; they purchased better seats, bought more concessions, made more noise, and stayed until the very end. This made everyone happy, especially Sean, because with fewer people leaving after the spaceship act more people would see him fly.
While the shows became better, daily life became worse. The roads deteriorated (Jimmy insisted Pennsylvania had the worst roads in the country: “They ought to pay us to travel on them,” he said), gasoline became more expensive, and the building inspectors started forcing performers to move their trailers in the morning to add a few inches to the fire lane. It made some veteran performers long for the days of simple bribes. Karen Rodríguez even complained that in the ritzy suburbs around Washington, D.C., she had to drive thirty miles to find a Laundromat. One person who particularly dreaded going north was Buck, because once we headed into New England there were fewer flea markets where he could buy or sell his wares. Hanover, Pennsylvania, was his last chance to stock up, and he didn’t intend to let it pass.
“Now there are two things you have to remember about the flea-market business,” he said as we sat down for a breakfast of biscuits and orange juice at a Roy Rogers across the street from the tent. “First, you can never have too much of a good thing.” The previous day, Buck said, he had driven one hundred miles to a library sale in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where he had purchased thirty-four books for a total of three dollars, which he would later resell for six dollars apiece. “The second thing is, you should always use psychology. Every flea market I go to I put up a sign saying since it is my first visit I’ll sell all my books at half price. It works like a charm. Everybody just stops to talk.”