Free Unhappy Hooligan by Stuart Palmer Page A

high trapeze in the center ring. She seized it, looked provocatively at the crowd and somewhat carefully at Gordo directly beneath her, and then went into a balancing act which Howie Rook would rather not have watched, but from which he could not tear his eyes away. She started by standing upright on the wildly swinging trapeze, then stood on her hands, and finally on the crown of her head, cushioned only by her mop of black curls, arms and legs extended wide.
    “Wonderful!” gasped Howie Rook.
    “Oh, du Mond isn’t bad at her work,” said Hap judicially. “But watch Dawes there on the bandstand.” The big bandmaster—leading the thirty musicians with his left hand and playing with his right one of the loudest and most blaring cornets in history—never took his eyes from that gyrating girl high up in the lonely air. He was really something to watch; he was as much of a performer as anybody in the circus. “She’s not balancing on the trap,” explained the veteran clown. “She’s balancing on the music.”
    Now Mary Kelly, still on her head alone, was eating a banana and tossing the peels to Gordo down below. He was resplendent in a new white-and-gold Tartar uniform, but nobody had eyes for him. He was looking up and waiting, his face moving jerkily from side to side as if watching an aerial tennis match. The girl was reading a comic book now, and laughing—laughing at the comics and at death.
    “Oh, no!” gasped Rook.
    Hap Hammett was amused. “Ever wonder why all the aerialists are young, mister? They don’t live long enough to get middle-aged. Look at Lillian Leitzel, best of them all. She got it over in Europe. That’s her tune Leo is playing—‘Crimson Petal.’ He’ll only play it for du Mond nowadays.”
    “I should think he’d be gray with all that responsibility.”
    “Him? He’s a trouper. They say it’s his lifetime ambition to straighten out that cornet into an Aida horn just by blowing. Come on, I gotta throw a change.”
    The rest of that performance was a walking—no, a running nightmare for Howie Rook. He clumped after Hap Hammett and Cordelia on two more walkarounds (and why they called them that he would never know); he was tripped up incessantly by the dog and occasionally by the leaden shoes. He gave away the bride at a clown wedding and was rescued from a burning house in a clown fire, mostly to the music of “The Anvil Chorus”—he wondered if Leo Dawes had chosen that in honor of his footwear. There were brief respites in between, but they seemed to grow shorter and shorter.
    Most of the show itself was a kaleidoscope of color and motion, a brilliant blur of beautiful horses and beautiful harem queens and walking vegetables and midgets and dwarfs wearing Mother Goose and Disneyland masks larger than themselves—of giraffes wearing collars and ties, and hippos with red ribbons around their necks. Everything was charming and ridiculous and fast—incredibly fast.
    Aerialists swung to and fro overhead like mechanical birds; whole families balanced on a bicycle high on a taut wire, And the band played on, a succession of galops and marches and waltzes and fanfares, one seguing into the other, cuing each act, never stopping for breath. Leo Dawes, somehow managing while chewing popcorn to blow a cornet louder than a steam calliope, ruled it all from the high podium, never missing a beat…
    Sometimes the music dramatically stopped, except for a long roll of drums as the end rings went dark and fill the spotlights focused on some very special feat by a human or animal performer. It all became a blur to Howie Rook. After the last walk-around, which involved certain shenanigans with toy balloons, he sat down on a box in the clown entrance, feeling that he would never rise again. “Time for the finale, the last big spec number,” Hap Hammett announced. “This time you get to rest your feet—you ride in state.”
    He beckoned, and Rook obediently followed his mentor around to the