Katherine Dunn: Nightmare Carnival

“Good morning, Mae. Come in.”

Mae took his hand to allow him to lift her up the steps into his private sleeper. While the circus train boldly advertised its existence on every car with bright colors and ornate calligraphy, the inside of the Bishop’s car was almost monasterial. His bedroom was closed off at one end of the car, the rest divided into his office and the infirmary. No other decorations adorned his walls, completely bare but for a plain wooden cross.

Maps of train routes were pinned to the plain walls, while all the paraphernalia of a circus train master sprawled across a plain oak table. Dozens of timetables and track connections, tunnel clearance charts, and mileage records balanced with the enormous amount of personal knowledge the Bishop carried in his head: where his competitors were and when, how much talent to hire for how long and how much to pay them to keep bigger circuses from luring them away, what towns offered the best pickings along the best routes.

Most circus folk had two personalities: the one they used in their everyday lives and the one they donned as much as a costume for the paying spectators. Even so, Mae had always found the dichotomy between the Bishop’s personal character and his public performances startling. As ringmaster, the Bishop could assume any accent; a hard Midwestern twang in Cincinnati turned into sugary antebellum Southern as soon as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. In private, the Bishop rarely spoke, as shy as a virgin schoolboy, and then barely above a whisper with an accent tinged with a faded Highland brogue. But there was nothing soft about the man, nothing effeminate or sentimental.

The Bishop escorted her through to the infirmary. Like the rest of his car, it was functional and austere, with an examining table, a bookcase of medical books, and a medicine cabinet. The air was tinged with the faint smell of phenol, carbolic acid, and chloroform.

“Is it worse today?” the Bishop asked as she sat down and allowed him to peel off the custom-made slippers she only ever took off to bathe or when on display in the sideshow.

“Yes, sir.” She watched him lift up her right foot to peer at it, her feet as ugly and warped as her hands. When she’d been a child, an unscrupulous manager had “enhanced” her feet, breaking the bones and binding them to fuse into even more of a fishtail shape. It increased the amount he could charge the curious and gullible, but left her nearly crippled. She’d had to use canes when she walked down the aisle last year with Max, and was only able to walk without them after Max had massaged her feet every night with Holland’s White Liniment. That hadn’t stopped the rheumatism, however, her feet still so swollen and red the skin had cracked.

The Bishop prodded the lumpy bone underneath the scaly, dry skin gently. “The liniment isn’t helping anymore?”

“It stings real bad when it gets in the cracks.” Which made her cry. Which made Max go white in the face and stand outside to smoke one cigarette after another helplessly.

“Pliny the Elder wrote about physicians in ancient Athens who applied bee stings to their patients, the venom having a therapeutic efficacy for rheumatism.”

Mae stared at the top of his balding head as the Bishop kept his attention on her feet. She had no idea who Pliny the Elder might be, but she was quite certain he would not have been a doctor she would want. Even if she could have ever gone to see a real doctor. “No, thank you.”

“Mmm,” the Bishop said, not fussed. “You should stay off your feet for a while. Cleanliness is vital to avoid infection. Soak them in Epsom salts and leave your slippers off whenever you can. Skin needs to breathe, too.” He set her foot down and picked up the left to scrutinize. “Madelaine seems to like your singing. You have a sweet voice.”

She started, her foot kicking out and almost connecting with his nose, forcing him to hold on more tightly and making her wince. Heat rolled up into her face. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“Don’t be. It’s helping her. Maybe you should ride her; that would keep you off your feet.”

Mae studied him, but couldn’t tell if he intended that to be funny. She decided he was joking, and smiled wanly.

He handed her a bottle of medicinal mouthwash to deliver to her neighbor Eric Malcome — the fire-eaters suffered chronic blisters and ulcers — and helped her down out of the carriage. The train already had been unloaded, poles and canvas piled onto the wagons. With the last of the animals harnessed, elephants decked out, and performers in costume the circus was ready for the grand parade through town to the lot. The site for the circus was a long haul from the railroad loading spur, further than the Bishop would have liked. But it was at least dry, late autumn rains turning most of the town into a swamp. Already a sizable crowd had clotted the roadsides as factories, schools, and shops emptied and closed for circus day.

Ashton wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, just another grubby boomtown in the middle of nowhere with unpaved streets and board sidewalks. The railroads had transformed this once isolated part of the South into a hub serving the supply lines to and from the coal mines and logging camps, the ironworks and textile mills all employing several thousand workers desperate for entertainment and ways to spend their money. Easy pickings for any circus.

Or it would have been, had it not been for the Reverend Leroy Taylor Randall and his Pentecostal tent revival already in full swing by the time the circus arrived on the lot. Although the revival consisted of one pathetically small tent with only half a wall around it, it was packed with parishioners, mostly women and old men, waving arms about and hollering in tongues at the top of their lungs. The preacher, dressed head to toe in funereal black, held a Bible over his head while shouting out scripture in a crow-hoarse voice. A gospel choir behind him clapped and sang while every few minutes he would lay a hand on a random forehead praise the Lord and send someone toppling backward Jesus save me to writhe and twitch like mosquito larvae in an overcrowded pond hallelujah !

The canvas men and the riggers laid out the tents and poles while pairs of gandy dancers pounded spikes with synchronized sledgehammers. The canvas boss walked through the lot demarcating where the midway would form, siting locations for the menagerie top, the big top, the sideshow tent, the cookhouse tents, while sledge gangs tried to ignore both the usual crowds of the curious and the sudden appearance of the preacher and his flock singing and clapping and shouting just outside the ticket tents rapidly going up.

“And the Lord said unto these followers of Satan, ye defiled whores of Babylon, I shalt cast out the sinners, I shalt pour down torrents of rain, hailstones, and burning sulfur and they shalt know I am the Lord thy God! ”

“Damned Bible thumpers,” Max said darkly as he buttoned Mae into her lobster costume and arranged the seaweed circlet on her head. “Don’t even quote it right.”

She watched the preacher and his mob through a chink in the sideshow booth, uneasy yet fascinated. But despite the preacher’s ranting and dire warnings, the afternoon show had gone off without a hitch, the midway and the tents packed out, the populace of Ashton happy to divide their patronage between two circuses. The midway continued to offer rides and high-priced junk and carnival fare during the break between shows, while North rounded up the elephants to take them to the river for a much needed drink and cooling down.

The smaller elephants were skittish enough being youngsters, North having to nudge them lightly with the ankus to remind them to behave. Madelaine followed them, docile and patient, ignoring the gawking crowd shoving and jostling for a better view. The afternoon had grown hotter, the humidity stifling. Half the circus company had decided on a swim as well to cool off before the evening performance, forming a mini parade down to the water. A few of the acrobats turned cartwheels and flip-flap handsprings, while Max and Mae and Eric followed Madelaine in the small pony cart, well hidden. They’d find a more secluded spot upstream. The crowd would be too fascinated by the elephants drinking, spraying each other, rolling in the river, to notice them. When they weren’t in their costumes and on display, Mae knew, they might as well have been invisible.