As they mingle in the center ring, she hanging by her hair in bikini evening wear, he guiding her gently from the ground in bolero dinner jacket, Michelle and Angel seem like a circus fairy tale come true. The look in his eyes is adoring and passionate. The smile on her face is loving and calm. But the story behind his look, her smile, is anything but serene.

“I first saw her when I was practicing about eight years ago,” Angel said. A dashing Spanish conquistador type, Angel has piercing eyes, ink-black hair, and a sprightly matador step. In addition he boasted a naughty smile. “I was twenty-three at the time. She was sixteen. I thought she was kind of young—”

“Plus he had a girlfriend.”

“Well, of course,” he said. “But I had many girlfriends at the time.”

“Many is not the word, I’d say. Kris Kristo is nothing compared to you and your brother.”

Angel breathed a guilty sigh. Sitting in their brand-new Shasta trailer on a Monday night in early summer, Angel was soaking his feet in hot water and wrapping an open sore in the palm of his hand where he had caught himself on the high wire. Michelle spooned some vanilla ice cream into three bowls, gave one to each of us, and settled into an easy chair as if she were about to watch a Hallmark romance on their portable television. In this case the romance was hers.

“So, anyway,” Angel continued, “I had this friend who told Michelle’s father that I wanted to go out with his daughter. He said, ‘Well, he should know I’ve got a gun, and the one who goes near my daughter…Pow!’ I was standing nearby when he said this and I thought: Uh-oh, better stay away. Still, I saw something in her I liked, and I never forgot what I saw. Two years later she came to the show again. She looked more like a woman that time. We started dating. Two weeks later I asked her to marry me. I thought it would be okay.”

It wasn’t. For the next two years Michelle and Angel were forced to conduct their engagement in secret. They were on different shows at the time—in a different town almost every night—making communication all but impossible. But still they persisted, and at the end of that period, when Michelle, her sister, and her mother, remarkably recovered from her fall, were invited by Kenneth Feld to do a mother-and-daughter hair hang on the Ringling Show, the two lovers were reunited. Unfortunately, their families were reunited as well.

“It all started with one family on the show,” Michelle said. “They were Catholic and became born-again Christians. After they were born again they started talking to people on the show. About the Bible and stuff. My family was all Catholic, but we never read the Bible. We followed what the priest said and believed it. But if you read you find out the truth. So this family showed the truth to my mother and she became a Christian. It took about a year. Then Angel found out about my mom and he told me, ‘You better not change.’ He even told me if I ever became a Christian like her that we were going to break up.”

“And I was serious,” he added. “My family is Catholic. In Spain we are very proud. That’s the way we are. My parents would not understand.”

“Of course, I told him I was not going to do that. At that time all my family was against my mom. Then six months after that my dad became a Christian, too. And a month later, me. At the time Angel didn’t know what it means to be a Christian…”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means I read the Bible and realized that it is the word of God. To be Christian is to live like Christ, or as close to Christ as possible. Like Jesus when he walked the earth. Nobody can be perfect. God knows that. But he knows you are trying. You stop drinking, you stop smoking. Around here they say we sacrifice chickens. But if you live a crazy and wild life like Sean Thomas then that’s considered normal.”

“And were you prepared to end the relationship?”

“If it was for God.” Her answer was firm. “For me, God is first. Before anybody—my mother, my father, even him. Of course, I didn’t tell him right away. In fact, I said I would never talk to him about it. For a while he knew I was going to some Bible study. I told him that was all. Then one day my father was going to church to get baptized. I didn’t want to go, but my father begged me to go with him. I agreed. Angel was standing outside and he saw me leave with my family. He gave me the dirtiest look. It was then that he knew what was happening.”

“And I was so mad,” he seethed. “I was on fire. Boiling, I’d say. I had told her, ‘If you go to that church we will break up.’ Now I knew it was over.”

“The next day he asked for the ring back. I gave it to him, then I tried to calm him down. ‘Oh, Angel, don’t get mad,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I just went with my father.’ I tried to convince him, but he was angry. ‘No, I don’t care,’ he shouted. I tried eight hundred ways to calm him down, but none worked. By the end of the day everyone on the show knew it was over. I thought we would never speak again.”

There was a long pause in the conversation. Their gloomy faces were reflected in the oversized mirrors and glassy windows that gave their compact trailer a larger-than-life feel. Peach pillows and blown-up photographs covered a seamless path from sofa to ceiling. On the wall was an ornate scripted plaque that said: “En este hogar somos cristianos. Aquí todos son bienvenidos.” (“In this home are Christians. Here everyone is welcome.”)

“But I had a friend,” Angel said. “He came to me about a week later and told me Michelle was sitting home by herself that night. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Well,’ he told me, ‘I think you should go see her.’ I didn’t really want to see her, but something inside of me said, ‘Go, go talk to her.’ So I went and knocked on the door.”

“He didn’t say anything at first, and I didn’t say anything to him. Then I invited him in. I had been praying a lot for him, that God would make him understand the truth. But I asked God never to send me to him. Now God had sent him to me. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know about the Holy Spirit, but I felt like God was inside of me at that moment. I felt this voice inside of me, this is not a lie—God knows it—and the voice was telling me to go get my Bible. We were just sitting there, and I heard it again: ‘Go get your Bible.’ Finally I got up to get it, and I was thinking: What am I doing? I said to Angel, ‘I want to show you something.’ He didn’t resist. We were there for two hours.”

Michelle was almost apologetic. “I had just started reading the Bible,” she said. “I didn’t know how to quote scriptures or anything. I didn’t know where anything was. But I would somehow open the Bible to the right place every time. It was amazing. He was looking at me like it wasn’t really me. I told him about my experience and I said, ‘I wish you could experience the same thing.’” Her voice picked up. She moved to the edge of her chair. “As soon as I said that I thought to myself: Whatever happens now is going to happen.”

Angel moved forward in his seat as well. They were in the same position they had been in that night in Dallas: she on the chair, he on the couch. They were staring toward the ceiling.

“I was listening,” Angel said, his voice quivering and soft, “and when she finished I felt a kind of peace. Then I started to cry. I had never cried before that, ever. Even when my father hit me, hit me hard. I was taught never to cry. But at that moment I did, and I knew that was it.” He set his hands down on his knees. “God had touched me.”

Michelle followed his hands with hers. “It’s hard to understand unless you have experienced it yourself,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing, really.”

“It’s true,” he added. “There’s no way to describe it. At that moment I opened my heart to God. And when it was over we both kneeled on the ground and embraced. It was then that I spoke for the first time all night. I said, ‘Whatever you want, God, I’m ready…’”