Free The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day Page A

and mirth and awe, but with something worse—the quickly averted gaze of shame, the teary-eyed glance of pity. When he stood waiting for the Retard Bus, when he walked down the street with his mother, when he paid for gum at the B&B Grocery—Chicky felt Lima watching him. Instead of court jester, he was the poor, poor poster boy.
    Chicky got off the Retard Bus at Clown Alley Cleaners to wait for his mother, but mostly he went to sit on the counter and listen to Mr. Ollie's circus stories. Like the time Annie Oakley shot a quarter from between his fingers at forty paces. The time Lima made the front page of the
New York Times
because Rasputin's daughter was mauled by a lion out at the winter quarters—she'd escaped Russia by joining the circus after the Mad Monk's assassination. As Chicky got older, Mr. Ollie's stories got bawdier, full of genitalia and deformities. The severed finger floating in cloudy formaldehyde Wallace Porter passed off as Napoleon's pecker. The drag queen named Monte Alto who danced the hoochie-coochie dressed as "Monsieur et Madame," a fake hermaphrodite. The Four-Legged Woman named Trixie with the legs and lower torso of her parasitic Siamese twin sticking out of her stomach. Mr. Ollie looked to make sure Verna was out of earshot. "Trixie and her sister was both fully operational," he said, chucking Chicky on the shoulder, "if you know what I mean."
    Chicky did—sort of. He was a very innocent sixteen.
    One day, Mr. Ollie hustled Chicky back to his private office. An old daguerreotype hung on the wall—a skinny fellow walking next to an elephant during a city street parade. "This here is my pop," he said. "He died when I was only a wee babe."
    "My dad left when I was ten," Chicky said, remembering the screen door slamming.
    Mr. Ollie touched his shoulder and told the story of his father's death, the version he'd heard from Chicky's grandfather Gordon while they rocked on the front porch all those years ago. Chicky had never heard it before.
    "I don't tell many people that story," Ollie said, looking at the floor.
    "That's the skull down at the museum." Chicky pointed to the elephant in the photograph.
    Mr. Ollie nodded. "I heard they did that. Never been able to bring myself to go down there and see it myself." Opening his desk drawer, he pulled out a leather drawstring pouch and withdrew a sliver of yellowish bone. "I do have this though. Ivory. A piece of that elephant's tusk. Elephant Jack gave it to me when I was a little boy. A memento, he said. Something to remember things by."
    On the slow walk home, Chicky told his mother about the mean bull elephant that killed Hans Hofstadter and the tusk in the pouch, but she stopped him midway and told him the real story, the one her father had told her that night in the kitchen, so long ago. "My dad told me Elephant Jack cut off that poor animal's pecker intending to make purses and wallets with the leather." She shook her head. "I'll bet that pouch ain't rawhide."
    "I touched it," Chicky said, stunned.
    "Well, now you know not to."
    Chicky looked up. "Mama, should we tell Mr. Ollie?" He meant the pouch, everything. Verna stroked his head. "Sometimes the truth don't set you free, honey. Sometimes it's the very worst thing."
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    AFTER HIGH SCHOOL graduation, Chicky started collecting disability. He gave Verna most of his check and spent the rest at Snake Eyes, a downtown bar. The clientele consisted mostly of laid-off railroaders, bankrupt farmers, and members of the Sons of KY, a biker gang who wore the Confederate battle flag emblazoned on their hogs and jean jackets. Chicky shouldn't have been allowed in the door—he was underage, not to mention black—but he'd become a permanent fixture of the place, its mascot and inventor of the Chicky Dance, a variation of the Chicken Dance he performed atop the pool tables. Marty Cutter, a regular, said it was a good-luck dance—IU usually won if Chicky danced before Big Ten