Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Outside the Center Ring

85 Outside the Center Ring It’s another night in another town and one by one the great gray elephants, the pink tips of their trunks wrapped around one another’s tails, parade through the main tent’s faded entrance. This morning the roustabouts tightened the guy lines for the wire-walking Alberto, steadied the rigging for The Family of Flying Falleronis. Now outside the center ring the clowns wait to honk their trumpet-sized horns, slap each other’s painted faces with mitts the size of frying pans, the grease-paint caked and cracked across their eyes. No one will laugh. Between each act, the roustabouts write home or sleep while in the next town, the advance man stakes the lot and heads on, tacking arrows on telephone poles to mark the way. Straw boss slides some tens into his pocket, tosses a few receipts into the green book, pours Jack Daniels over chips of ice from the mess tent, takes a sip, heads out to the back lot to wait for the tear down. The sun’s dropped into the end of the day, the night sky holding to the moon’s light falling over the patched canvas. There’s the faint ripple of thunder. No one can prepare for mud. Across the lot, behind the power truck, two kids fumble under each other’s clothes, talk of running away with the show, having their own act, he spinning her 86 in the death spiral high above the center ring. After the sale of prize candy, “a circus souvenir in every box,” the roustabouts move out, start stacking the empty seats on the flatbeds, and the elephants rise up on the long line. Then the disappointed crowd wanders out into the night and a last chance to buy a circus program, balloon, cloud of cotton candy. At the entrance the elephant boy waits to fasten the chain around the leg of Suzie, who will walk around the tent, pausing at each stake as the boy tosses the links up into the moonlit air, lets the chain drop and loop as he hollers, “Hunh, Suzie. Hunh!” and she will slowly lift her leathered foot, the iron rising from the earth then falling back against the dust. ...