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

introduced me to the cast and crew after the dress rehearsal, put his arm around me, and said, “He’s one of us now. Treat him like a member of the family.” Thus blessed, I was free to roam.
    “So, are you doing anything special today?” I asked. “Any rituals?”
    “Go to work, that’s about it.”
    “Aren’t you nervous?”
    He shrugged. “What’s there to be nervous about? I know what I’m doing. If I land on the ground, well, I land on the ground. It’s a day-by-day act. You try your best to calculate everything, but you can’t always be sure.”
    Sean stood up with the costume. The shoulder pads fit perfectly above his arms, but the legs were slightly baggy. Elvin’s mother hurried to the car to get some pins for an emergency repair. The first show was now just two hours away.
    “So you don’t get scared?” I asked.
    “Scared? Scared of what? Breaking a few bones?”
    “Scared of having an accident.”
    “Falling’s not scary,” he said, bending down to lace up his high-top boxing shoes. “Scary’s catching AIDS. Scary is being poor.” He stood up, nodded for me to follow, and headed toward the cannon, which was parked in the space next to Dawnita. Sitting quietly in the grass with no glitzy trappings from the show, the cannon looked potent but slightly out of place, like a plastic mobile ICBM I had once seen in a toy store in Moscow. The thirty-foot-long shiny silver barrel was attached to the back of a flatbed truck that had been painted fire engine red. On the passenger door was a message: GUN FOR HIRE . “Pain is not scary,” Sean continued, now looking at me directly with a squint in his eyes. For the first time I could see his face. It was worn by the sun. His nose was sharp, his chin jaunty. His eyes were vivid blue. He was the picture of Marine Corps confidence. “No, pain is a feeling and it goes away. What I’m scared of is dying…”
    I raised my eyebrows. Sean nodded his head. Then, as if alarmed by his own morbidity, he suddenly caught himself. “But I’m not going to die,” he said.
    “Why’s that?” I asked.
    “Because I’m good.” He tweaked the cannon on the barrel. His voice assumed the mock-aggressive tone of a man pretending to wrestle with an inanimate object. “Aren’t I, you big lady, you big beast? I’m good, and you know it.” He hopped up on the sideboard and with a flash and jump was standing on the barrel above the mouth of the cannon, towering over the circus lot with his arms, Superman-like, at his waist. “I’m Sean Thomas, the Human Cannonball, the Daredevil of the Decade, the Big DD.”
    He looked down on me watching from the ground, recast his pose for a moment, then lay down on the barrel and removed the cover from the mouth.
    “So,” he asked, “do you want to have a peek inside?”
    “Why not,” I said.
    “Because you can’t.” He grinned. “People offer to pay me to go inside, you know, but I don’t let them. It’s a secret. Only I can know.” He bent down and kissed the barrel.
    “We’ll see,” I said with a nod to the barrel. I turned back toward Dawnita’s.
    “Where’s Sean?” Elvin asked when I arrived back under Dawnita’s awning.
    “I think he’s making love to the cannon.”
    “At least he’s not making love inside the cannon. I’d kill him if he did that.”
    “Thanks for the lesson,” I said. “I’m off to put on my makeup.”
    “Good luck,” Elvin declared. “And remember what I said: you’re doing it for the audience. No matter how bad it gets around here—how muddy, or gossipy, or miserable—you can never forget that you’re doing it for them.”
    I promised him that I would remember. “By the way,” I said, “what do you say to a circus performer before a show? Break a leg?”
    Elvin smiled at my question even as I winced at my faux pas. “Not really,” he said, slapping his thighs. “We just say, ‘Go get ’em!’”

Facing the Fire
    As soon as the lights shine into the ring, I