Free Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus by Bruce Feiler Page A

Every two years I designed a different act, but the cannon was my ultimate creation. It was my legacy.”
    For his signature act, Elvin would crouch in the steel barrel of the world’s largest cannon and with a giant fiery explosion be propelled two hundred feet through the air and then land in a giant net. At every new site, he would calculate where to put the net by shooting a sandbag dummy from the cannon. In Hong Kong, however, it rained overnight and the dummy was left outside. The next day Elvin shot the sandbag from the cannon, placed the net where it landed on the ground, then loaded himself where the dummy had been. “Halfway through the flight I knew,” he said with the calm, abnormally stoic voice of a man who has been to hell and back and still can’t quite believe it. “I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I was going to overshoot the net.”
    He did. In what turned out to be his farewell performance, Elvin Bale overshot the net and landed on the ring curb, rupturing his spinal cord with a career-ending, marriage-ending, seemingly life-ending snap. Recalling the episode more than six years later, Elvin still seemed haunted by his accident. Though his performing days were over, his circus life had continued. Overnight, he became an elder statesman in the community. He opened an agency and began representing many of the top acts in the country, including almost every act on the Beatty-Cole show. More importantly, he sought out his own replacement. He went looking for the next Elvin Bale. When he found him it was in the most unlikely place.
    “He was my pool man.”
    “Your what?”
    “My pool man. He cleaned my pool. I was lying there one day looking at him. He was blond, muscular. Not too tall, not too heavy, about a hundred fifty-five pounds, I’d say, almost the same weight as me. He had been a high school football star. He was wiry and reckless, always getting into fights at school, kind of a rough-tough kid, though spoiled in other respects. But the thing was, he had that all-American look. And then I realized it: he was me. Sean Thomas was me .”
    The bustle of opening day was just beginning to pick up around the end of the trailer line, where Elvin’s three sisters parked their vehicles side by side. Elvin’s older sister, Gloria, stopped by with new blue and white ostrich plumes for her Arabian horses. His younger sister, Bonnie, was home sewing costumes for her cloud swing. His twin, Dawnita, the only brunette in a family of blondes, was complaining that her Siamese cat was about to escape through the screen door. Just then the Bales’s mother arrived from Sarasota bearing Cadbury Creme Eggs and a new costume for Sean. As they had done since they were children—first, on their father Trevor’s circus in wartime London, later on Ringling Brothers in America, after that on Beatty-Cole—the Bales made their own nest of sorts wherever they landed and pulled in a few stray fledglings like me and made them feel at home.
    “Oh, Mom, the costume looks great,” Elvin said as his mother bent down to kiss him.
    “Isn’t it magnificent?” she said, holding up a white bodysuit covered in red, white, and blue flaming stripes like something Evel Knievel might have worn. Her voice retained much more of the British accent that still lingered around the corners of her children’s speech. “It’s made with a new thing called a hologram. It’s very expensive.”
    As she spoke, Sean arrived. Noticeably bowlegged and decidedly stiff, he was wearing blue-jean shorts, no shirt, and a Los Angeles Raiders baseball cap. Around his neck he wore a gold chain with a Florida Gator dangling from its center. On his left breast he had a tattoo of Mighty Mouse in flight. He thanked Elvin’s mother for the costume and sat down on a beach chair to pull it on. The cellular telephone rang for Elvin, who answered it.
    I turned to Sean. Like everyone else on the show, he had seen me the night before when Johnny