Katherine Dunn: Nightmare Carnival

A few weeks after Mischa died, Bishop purchased five more elephants along with a sea lion and a team of sturdy draft horses to pull the stock wagons from the train to the setup lot. All of the elephants had been born in other circuses and sold on as soon as they could be separated from the cows. If he’d harbored any illusion that Madelaine would feel a natural maternal instinct for the newcomers, the Bishop was sadly disappointed. One of the calves bawled nonstop and refused to eat from the moment he was unloaded from the train wagon, then lay down and died within a week. The other four fared better, healthy if half Madelaine’s size. But while they performed well enough with Madelaine, even deferred to her, the younger elephants had already formed a tight camaraderie of their own while Madelaine still pined for her lost friend.

Without Mischa, the normally good-natured Madelaine seemed bewildered, turning sullen and uncooperative. North was enough of a professional to know how to balance the carrot with the stick to get the best out of his animals. But not even chaining Madelaine down when she misbehaved and beating her with an ankus until she had to be painted with “wonder dust” to hide her wounds before a performance worked nearly as well as had Mischa’s gentle persuasion — his fingers stroking under her wrinkled eye, a whisper in her ear enough to work miracles. North, exasperated, stalked off in frustration as the big elephant turned her face to a wall and rocked for hours with her eyes closed like a disconsolate child.

Pieter Schmidt, Kleininger’s dwarf sidekick who was shot out of a spring-loaded cannon in a puff of fake smoke into a net a dozen times a week, refused to go anywhere near the elephants, terrified of them. Olga, smallest of the Van der Honigsberg sisters trapeze ensemble, complained the howdah was too tight a fit, her legs cramping. They’d tried the monkey, but Madelaine didn’t react well to the gabbling creature struggling hysterically as it was tied down in the howdah, nor did the monkey adhere to its training discipline, no matter how emphatically it was applied to the screeching animal’s head and shoulders. The Bishop finally conceded defeat, and the howdah remained empty.

The oversized poster of happier days crept past Mae’s window and disappeared as the train rolled to a stop, steam hissing loudly, hot metal clanking. Max stirred, stretching naked arms as vibrantly decorated as the circus posters, his strongman-thick body swathed in tattoos of tropical flowers, foundering shipwrecks and mermaids, exotic butterflies and mythical dragons. A campaign portrait of Charles E. Hughes, Senior, in a cartouche of laurel leaves and a furled American flag, covered half his back. Max smiled at Mae, and blinked out the window of the railcar, scratching his unshaven cheeks.

“I think we’re early,” Mae said.

Max coughed, the sound wet and sticky in his lungs, as he rolled a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling deeply, he left it in his mouth as he pulled on a button-up shirt and drew up his canvas overalls, one strap of his suspenders nearly frayed through. “Best be getting the rousties up for the haul, then.” He shoved his feet, still in the socks he’d slept in, into his boots, banged on the partition separating their compartment from Eric and Lavinia’s, eliciting a drowsy groan from the other side. The Bishop had a team of roustabouts along with employing a few forty-milers and itinerant wobblies willing to work for a meal and a bunk before the circus moved on. But any of the able-bodied performers were expected to muck in as well. Max gave Mae a tobacco-perfumed kiss, then jumped down out of the car to help unload the train and set up for the parade through town.

Mae stripped to the waist and washed her face and chest in the cold-water washbasin, then slipped on her cotton chemise and a skirt before opening the sleeper car window and tossing the contents of the chamber pot onto the tracks. She could hear murmured voices as the rest of the occupants in the married carriage roused themselves from their beds. Mae stepped down onto the wide, sloping rail line, struggling for balance on the crushed stone ballast dotted with optimistic weedlings. Her feet hurt, her equilibrium not good even at the best of times.

The mist was dissolving as the sun rose behind the Great Smoky Mountains, the stink of creosoted sleepers, coal smoke, and animal dung mixing with the aroma of frying bacon and hot corn muffins already drifting from the smokestack of the pie car. The new trio of Negro cooks the Bishop had hired in Ohio bickered with one another in their good-natured sing-song voices. A little pickaninny, the girl no more than two years old, sat on the steps of the pie car eating a slice of bread and jam, but froze when Mae smiled at her before scurrying inside to the safety of her mother’s apron.

“Coffee’s near ’bout ready, Miss Mae,” the head cook said from the open window of the pie car. “I got a sack of treats fo’ you, too.”

“Thank you, Eileen. I’m going to see the Bishop, back in a tick.”

The treats were for Madelaine. Whenever she could, Mae took her bits of carrots and apples, leftover cornbread, or watermelon and celery, then stroked her trunk to calm her down as she’d seen Mischa do. Sometimes she would sing quiet lullabies or snatches of ragtime tunes, or hum through forgotten lyrics of vaudeville songs. Sometimes, not always, the elephant would stop rocking, would explore Mae’s open hand, blowing hot puffs of breath across the claw-like palm as she delicately searched for the last crumbs of bread or apple slices. Sometimes, not always, Madelaine would gently wrap her trunk around Mae’s waist. Then Mae would lean against the elephant’s leathery sides and feel a rumble from deep within that vibrated through her skin into her bones, close her eyes, and imagine distant thunder out over a foreign ocean far away.

Schmidt and Kleininger sat in folding chairs outside the clown carriage smoking and muttering to one another in gloomy German as their pack of yapping dogs bounced around them. The surplus roustabouts, riggers, prop and canvas men who shared the clown car rolled out, yawning and stretching. The girls in the “glamour car” were already squabbling, tempers as usual frayed and high pitched.

Out of fifteen carriages, six were sleepers, the rest either cattle cars for transporting the menagerie animals, or flatbeds to carry the circus wagons. The Bishop had bought English surplus hospital train wagons after the Great War and revamped them into living quarters — one for the single roustabouts and one for the colored workers and minstrel band — providing not much more than a six-foot by three-and-a-half-foot bunk and a battered footlocker. The women-only carriage wasn’t any roomier but it at least had its own changing room and private donniker and the Bishop allowed the spec girls to decorate their individual berths as they liked, fancy curtains and cubbyholes stuffed with feminine bric-a-brac.

Not that any of them were ever satisfied, jealous of the extra space the married couples and those with families enjoyed in their sleepers. Most never lasted an entire season before they bit the grass and took off running. As long as they were pretty and plentiful, they didn’t have to be talented, Max always told her. That’s what separated real circus folk from the greenies. Mae walked past without looking in their direction, and they returned the favor by pretending she didn’t exist.

The Bishop lived alone in his sleeper behind the caboose. Even though the door to his sleeper was open, Mae knocked timidly on the side of the carriage. The Bishop stood at the map table, his back to her, but didn’t stir for a long moment, his attention fixed on his charts. Then he straightened as if awakening from a trance, turned, and smiled. He hadn’t yet shaved or waxed his moustache, the ends drooping limply.