ways me. But it was too late. Liz looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to begin.
“Well, here goes.” I took a deep breath. “I think as good a place to start as any, is at the beginning of the end of the story. It was 1936, just around this time of year. The circus was in New York for our month-long opening run at Madison Square Garden. Things were going bad for me—really bad. I had a lot on my mind—too much. You might say I’d reached the end of my rope. As I often did, I had been walking in the darkened menagerie to clear my head before I left the circus. I couldn’t put off the decision any longer. I clutched the sideshow contract in my right hand, unsure what to do about it. That night, I particularly needed some peace and quiet. That’s not what I got.”
CHAPTER 1
Gargantua the Great
“Hey, you gigantic, ugly son of a bitch.”
The menacing voice stopped me in my tracks. More frightened then enraged, I clenched my fists and slowly spun around to face him. But there was no one there. I must be losing my mind, I thought.
Then I heard it again, louder and more threatening. That time, as if dragged by a tiger into the brush, the raspy voice yanked me across the dimly lit menagerie, all but vacant at that late hour. That’s when I saw the rube, looking like a drunken lunatic, shouting at a seemingly empty, hand- carved red and blue animal cage. The whole scene was eerie and strange. I knew he was asking for trouble, because I recognized whose cage it was. He continued to scream but there was still no response from the darkened confines. Then, out of the shadows, as if from another dimension, Gargantua lunged at the bars with such force that he would have broken through them if his leg wasn’t chained. The gorilla shook those bars with all his strength, hurling primate invective at his tormentor, like it was feces: “Oooh, oooh, aaah, aaah,” Gargantua roared. Then he pounded his chest.
The rube taunted him again, mimicking his cry. “Oooh aaah, I’ll give you something to holler about, you flea-bitten monkey.”
I was incensed at the rube for tormenting Gargantua, but I didn’t know what to do. I had an ominous premonition he was planning to hurt the gorilla. Still, I was shocked and couldn’t believe my eyes when he reached into his pocket and took out a baseball-sized rock.
What kind of a maniac would do something like that? I thought. Then the rube wound up and hurled the rock between the bars, into the cage, striking the gorilla on the arm. Gargantua shrieked. I felt an overpowering need to protect him. I knew what it was like to be hit by rocks. That’s when I charged him. I don’t remember much after that. Everything went black.
The whole episode was like a bad dream. They told me I smacked him hard—really hard. They said that at a full gallop, I planted my left shoulder squarely in his upper back, just below his neck. The next thing I knew, Clyde Ingalls, Frank Buck, and two roustabouts were pulling all four hundred pounds of me off him.
“He could have taken his head off!”
“The rube crumbled like a paper doll.”
“You should have seen it. He hit him like a freight train!”
From every direction a chorus of anonymous accusers filled the air.
“Now . . . in the backyard!” Ingalls ordered, slamming his half-smoked stogie into the dirt. He was furious. He had my contract, now torn and bloody, in his right hand. The two of us hurried out of the menagerie. I looked back at the figure crumpled on the ground and wondered if he was dead. As we walked away from the scene of the crime to whatever my fate would be, my left shoulder and my neck ached. My head throbbed. Under my torn pants I could feel that I had scraped and bruised both of my knees when I crashed down on the ground with the rube.
“What in the hell has gotten into you, Jake? You could have killed him,” he thundered as we walked. “For your sake and ours, you better hope to hell that son of a bitch’s okay.”
“He hurt Garganatua. He threw a—”
“I don’t give two shits what he did. It’s not your place to protect that gorilla. It’s not your place to protect anyone. All you’re paid to do is sit on your keister and let the fans gawk. If that’s not enough for you I’ll give you your walking papers right now.” He stopped to glare at me. “You could have maimed that guy, or worse! What the hell were you thinking?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I said, stopping and looking down at him. Ingalls kept moving. I hurried to catch up. “I just lost control. I blanked out. It’s never happened like this before.”
What’s happening to me? I thought. I felt frightened and guilty. What have I done?
“There’s no excuse for what you did,” Ingalls said as if reading my mind. “We’re hurting. We’re hurting bad. We can’t afford a lawsuit. Do you want to put the nails in our coffin? The Gentry Brothers, Sparks, Cole, Robbins, 101 Ranch, and Sells-Floto and in the past two months, Al G. Barnes and The Hagenbeck-Wallace Show; they’ve all gone belly up. If it wasn’t for that snarling simian, the biggest thing since Jumbo, we’d be on the street as well, eating in soup kitchens.” Ingalls shook his finger at me.
“Gargantua doesn’t snarl, Clyde,” I said nervously. It was easier for me to defend the gorilla than myself.
“Just shut up!” Ingalls shouted. “I have to think about what to do now.” He paced back and forth in front of me, took his hat off and began nervously running his fingers through his thinning hair.
Ingalls and I stood alone just outside the empty, three-ringed arena where the main acts performed in the old Madison Square Garden. That space, which had been packed with circus performers, animals, clowns, musicians, and fans just a few hours before, was like a graveyard. I hung my head, wishing I could melt into the grimy sawdust and peanut shells that lined the floor. My knuckles were raw and my knees must have been bleeding because my pants were sticking to them. My head felt like it had been hit with a roustabout’s sledgehammer. As if I’d been living in one of those cages in the menagerie, I couldn’t get the smell of urine-soaked hay out of my nose.
“That’s just what we need—a full-on scandal. I can see the headlines now: ‘The Great Gargantua Goes Wild as Freak Cripples Fan.’” My boss kicked the dirt and sent fragments of sawdust flying in every direction. Clyde was about five and a half feet tall with a big beer belly, dressed in his signature seersucker suit and straw hat. To anyone who watched as he scolded me, it must have seemed comical. I bit my lip and didn’t say a word. Clyde Ingalls, who the public knew as the colorful and always-affable manager of Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey’s sideshow, the largest and most famous freak show in the world, could be very scary. In nine years with the circus, this was the scariest I’d ever seen him.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asked, pacing back and forth in front of me again. “First you disappear for three days in Milwaukee. Then you’re a month past due to sign your contract for next season. Now you attack a customer.” He shook his fist up at me. “Should I call the men in white coats to take you to Bellevue in a straitjacket? Or maybe you want to end up in a mud show, or worse? You’ve got a home here. You’re a flea’s dick away from losing it.”
I felt numb. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just shook my head mechanically, as if I agreed with him.
“You goddamned
