Stuart Kaminsky: Catch a Falling Clown

It had happened to me before, that nightmare moment when everyone is turned to stone and no one wants to break the spell, even though everyone knows whoever doesn’t break it will stay there forever. The next step meant choosing an emotion or letting one out that you maybe didn’t know was there. Or worse, it meant feeling nothing, which soon turned to guilt.

Elder broke through and walked over to the Tanuccis, taking the older man’s arm in both of his. “Carlo, I am sorry, truly sorry. What happened?”

The young Tanucci girl turned her head in a daze toward Elder. “The rigging,” she said. “The Mechanic tore. Marco … he came down on …”

“Rennata is the only one who speaks English,” Kelly whispered to me, his voice almost as unsteady as hers.

“Who’s the Mechanic?” I whispered back, keeping my eye on the doctor who was examining the body. The doctor was a remarkably old man named Ogle, who looked as if he would probably need help getting up and would surely need help if the body rolled over on him.

“Mechanic’s a what, not a who,” said Kelly. “The leather safety harness flyers wear in practice sessions. Someone controls it from the ground. They must have been working out something new or having trouble with something old.”

At the entrance flap of the tent, a crowd had gathered but was being held back by a trio of men.

“Do accidents happen a lot in the circus?” I said. Elder was going down the line of Tanuccis, consoling them in English they couldn’t understand but with a tone they could.

“No, not much,” said Kelly. “Sometimes, but usually when it does happen it’s because an animal acted like an animal. You know, a lion or a bear smells something, hears something. But it happens.”

Peg, the dark-eyed woman with the gray man’s jacket who had called Elder to the tent, stayed just a step behind him, trying to see his face to know how she was supposed to act.

“He’s dead,” said Doc Ogle in a high monotone. It was the tone of my landlady back in Los Angeles, the tone of the deaf who have no idea how loud they are talking and no sense of emotion in the words they can’t hear. Everyone else in the tent had known Tanucci was dead the moment they saw him, but the doctor’s pronouncement hit behind the knees of the older Tanucci woman, who crumpled forward and would have smashed face first into a metal rigging bar if the older man had not pulled her back and up with a single, powerful pull.

The tent smelled of horse and elephant crap, of straw arid stale sweat. For twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses I sometimes had to get a little closer to things beating below the surface than most of us want to get. It always attracted me, that exposed, tender fear. I wanted to touch it in others but was afraid of how it might contaminate me. Grief was as dangerous as disease.

The Tanuccis moved forward toward the body, supporting each other, and Kelly stepped up to help the Tanucci girl, who looked a little unsteady.

“Neck bone and spinal cord just snapped like that,” said the doctor, struggling to get up. He wore a dark plaid coat, and his wild white hair had been combed by a drunken witch. He looked more like a clown than Kelly, and his voice cut through the smells and sobs like a set of instructions for building a model airplane.

“Probably not a long fall,” he said, addressing himself to everyone assembled. “Probably dead as soon as he hit.”

“Thank God,” said Peg.

Well, that was one way of looking at it. I knew some who might be a little angry with God for allowing Himself to accept the whim of young Tanucci’s death, but maybe God was just an onlooker.

I shook my head. I mean I literally shook my head to try to clear it. Sometimes I get angry and sometimes I get serious. Not often, but sometimes. I almost never get depressed. To get depressed you have to have a long-range plan that fouls up. I don’t have any long-range plans. I go job to job, concussion to concussion, dime to dime. If people get in the way of a car or a bullet or one of the grisly weapons including bad luck, I step to the side and keep going, hoping for not much more than the chance to finish up whatever I’m working on.

But the circus got to me. First the dead elephant, and now the Tanuccis. Hell, if I was going to feel guilty, I might as well feel it all the way. I felt worse about the dead elephant than I did about Tanucci. Tanucci picked the circus. He had a chance, maybe had some enemies, maybe didn’t check the harness. Maybe …

I walked past the small crowd and glanced at the people at the entrance, straining to see in. One or two of them were Cora and Thelma, the Siamese twins. Beyond them, more people were talking, asking questions. The ones in front had heard the doctor and seen the reaction. I moved to the circus ring in the corner and to the trapeze in its center, no more than a dozen feet over the ground. The Mechanic thing Kelly had mentioned dangled down from a pole. It swung slightly in the flat air about six feet over the ground. I didn’t even have to touch it to see what I didn’t want to see. The place where the leather belt had given way was torn for about one quarter of an inch. The other three inches of the belt were cut. I couldn’t tell how thick or tough the leather was or how sharp the knife had been that cut it, but it was clear that the final break in the leather had been jagged and rough and the rest along a straight line.

I was about to touch the harness to be sure when I heard Elder’s voice behind me say to either the doctor or the Tanuccis, “We’re going to have to call the police.”

The word police may have done it. Maybe it was something else, but a small group from the tent entrance broke through, a group of four. Then someone took charge at the entrance and cut off the crowd. The last one through was a short, fat man who waddled forward slowly, far behind. In front of him were a big man wearing a dark gray suit and a dark gray look, a thin man in gray work clothes whose silent tears caught the light against his pale cheeks, and a red-haired young woman in spangled blue tights wearing a little hat with a tall feather.

“Hold it,” shouted Elder, stretching out his right hand toward the crowd. “Right there. Stop. No one else in here. No Kinders, no brass. Peters.”

I turned and moved to Elder, who whispered, “We’ve got to get Nelson back here. You want to take the home run. Now’s the time.”

“Can’t,” I said, trying to ease him away from the Tanuccis. “Cops don’t like it when people they want to nail run away from murder scenes.”

It was Elder’s turn to move me away from the others by grabbing my jacket and stepping back. His grip could have gone through my arm.

“Hold it,” I cried, trying to shake him loose with less success than Billy Conn had had against Joe Louis.

“Look,” he said evenly, looking over my shoulder at the small group gathering around the doc, the corpse, and the grieving family. “Don’t try to make a profit on this. Don’t turn the circus into a …”

“Circus?” I finished.

“For a lot of these people,” he said, his mustache bobbing up and down, “the only thing they call hometown or a religion or anything is the circus. You make them think murder, and the panic you’ll see is like nothing you’ve ever seen. These are people who put their life on the wire every day and twice on Saturdays and Sundays.”

“But it’s murder,” I repeated. “No doubt. If you let a little circulation back into my arm, I’ll show you.”

He let loose a little, and I led him toward the harness. My back had been to it, and the small group had gotten between Elder and me and the ring where the Tanuccis had been practicing. No one was watching us as we moved toward the rigging except the fat little man who stood at the edge of the huddled group.