Katherine Dunn: Nightmare Carnival

On the midway, shills and grifters played lightning-fast shell games and three-card monte while nimble-fingered pickpockets drifted through the crowd, lifting money and tickets and jewelry and watches. The mooches patted jackets and rummaged handbags in bewilderment while grinders kept them spinning along like leaves swirling in a rain-swollen creek. The police didn’t even need to be juiced to turn a blind eye, all of them down at the rail yard guarding Madelaine.

In the sideshow, the marks were run through ten-in-one shows in record time, so hastily most weren’t aware there wasn’t actually much to see; Theresa had substituted an assortment of pickled punks and devil babies floating in jars of formaldehyde for her act while she got her small animals safely packed up. If anyone recognized Mae as the woman who had sung to an elephant, there was no flash of surprise in their dull, vacuous eyes.

Then the show was over, and the circus lot emptied in minutes, all of Ashton along with thousands more who had swarmed into town for the execution sprinting to the rail yard at the far end of the town. They poured over boxcars, climbed onto locomotive engines, scaled water towers, shimmied up telegraph poles like a swarm of ants.

Mae knew the Bishop would string it out as long as he could to give the rousties time for the teardown, tents and stick joints and gennies and rides dismantled, the animals herded, the equipment loaded onto wagons and hauled to the circus train as fast as possible.

Mae had accepted a ride in one of the tiny pony carts with an elderly caller. When she reached the derrick, Madelaine had already been chained to a rail, the big elephant shifting back and forth fretfully, head down, trunk hanging limply. A few hundred yards down from the track, a steam shovel hissed and clattered as it dug a deep pit, several dozen railroad men shoveling out a muddy grave.

North strode across the rail yard, big shoulders hunched under a plaid shirt, suspenders hanging off his hips. He helped Mae down from the pony cart, the old caller’s hand on her waist to keep her balanced.

“You shouldn’t have come, Mae.”

“She should have at least one friend with her,” Mae said, surprised herself with how hot her throat felt. North looked away, his face reddening.

The Bishop listened as one of the lot manager’s boys whispered in his ear, then nodded without a word to the pair of rousties standing by Madelaine. One drew a thick chain around the elephant’s neck while the other fitted the end to a steel ring. In the expectant silence, the derrick operator started the winch, drawing the chain up tightly. Madelaine stopped rocking, then — as if she believed this was just some new trick she was expected to perform — she heaved both front feet off the ground and stood upright obediently on her back feet. She lifted her trunk and curled it in a meticulous salute to her forehead, holding her pose as if expecting applause. None came. Mae bit her lips to fight back tears.

The derrick operator kept rattling the chain upward, taking up the slack. Madelaine began to struggle as one back foot slowly lifted as well.

Mae had heard audiences burst into enthusiastic applause when a tightrope walker fell to his death, mistaking it as part of the act. She had heard them laugh and cheer mindlessly when a clown accidentally caught on fire, so badly burned he never worked again. But nothing she had ever heard before matched the viciousness, the sheer brutality in the shout that went up as Madelaine began to buck, her body arching when all four feet came off the ground. The elephant’s mouth gaped open, her tongue as pink as a tea rose. Urine snaked down her back legs, darkening the gray skin, splashing onto the railing. The entire derrick shook as she twisted on the end of the chain while her eyes rolled white under dark lashes. The chains creaked under the strain, a strange crackling and popping as Madelaine’s own weight tore ligaments from her bones. It took several minutes, far longer than Mae had thought possible, before the thrashing grew weaker, the elephant’s body slowly slackening until Madelaine hung limply, only the slightest of tremors as she pirouetted on the end of the chain.

The Bishop let her hang for another half an hour after the last quiver had stopped, and the last of the cheering finally died away, the crowd, bored, melting away. As the derrick operator lowered her body back to the ground and the rousties unhooked her, the Bishop put his hand on the elephant’s head. Behind him, a photographer held up a Kodak camera and snapped a picture. He bleated in protest as Billy North wrenched the camera out of his hand.

“Get out of here before I shove this thing down your neck.” North punched the camera back into the photographer’s chest, growling as the man stumbled away.

There was no one to record the tractor as the same chain that had hung her was hooked to one leg to drag her several hundred yards to the massive pit. She tumbled in, and it took only a few minutes for the steam shovel to pile the muddy earth back into the hole, the tractor tamping it down flat. Mae waited until the machinery had clanked its way back to the rail yard, then hobbled toward the grave. She glanced up in surprise as the Bishop suddenly took her elbow.

“What are you doing, Mae? We need to leave now.”

Guiltily, she withdrew a handful of paper flowers she’d gleaned off one of the carnival stands and hidden under her coat. “For Madelaine.”

“Don’t be stupid, girl,” the Bishop said roughly. “It’s just an elephant.” But he didn’t stop her from placing them on the newly turned earth.

The mayor waited for them by the train, straw bowler hat making a red mark around his forehead. The Bishop helped Mae onto the steps of the married sleeper car, Max catching her by the hands to lift her the rest of the way.

“We’ve passed an ordinance,” the mayor said, “banning circuses in Ashton. We don’t want to see the likes of you back here again.”

The Bishop laughed, the harshness of it making the mayor step back. “You have no need to worry on that account, sir,” the Bishop said. “There’s not a circus anywhere on earth that would ever come within a fifty-mile radius of this. town .”

The Bishop walked to the caboose, and remained standing on the platform as the train pulled out, leaving the mayor fuming in its wake. The conductor blew the whistle in one long, unbroken wail until the last clapboard buildings fell behind, lost in coal smoke.

They put a few hundred miles between themselves and Ashton before the next morning. When they finally stopped in a cornfield far from any station, Mae knocked on the side of the Bishop’s sleeper car. He didn’t respond, so she turned, about to leave, then heard a child crying from inside. She had to lift herself up by the rails and open the door, but was inside before the Bishop could exit the infirmary and block her way. He wore a white apron with sleeves over his suit, blood speckled at the cuffs.

“I’m rather busy at the moment, Mae,” he said. “Can it wait?”

She peered around him, getting a glimpse through the curtain, enough to make her push past the Bishop. A small child wrestled against the straps holding him down to the table, but in that clumsy manner of a patient not yet completely sedated, a linen mask tied across his face and the smell of chloroform in the air. Surgical instruments gleamed from a tray, linen bandages laid out beside a pan of steaming hot water.

“That’s the mayor’s son,” she said, recognizing the chubby boy who had fed a peanut to Madelaine.

“No, no. You’re mistaken. Just another orphan who’s run away to the circus.” The Bishop took her by the elbow firmly, steering her toward the sleeper’s door.