Leslie Silko - Gardens in the Dunes

THE PERFORMANCE of the dog circus drew a big crowd — not only the construction workers and off-duty soldiers, but miners and cowboys from outlying areas heard about it and came. The early arrivals bought beer and tried their luck in the gambling tents just as Big Candy hoped they would. A quick survey of the cash receipts proved this day to be their best by far. Even the women who worked in the wagons and the Prescott businessmen they worked for came to see. Candy estimated their number at close to two hundred, and both Wylie and Big Candy were enthusiastic about hiring the dog circus to travel with them when the construction camp moved to Twentynine Palms.

It took a good while to dress the seven dogs and to keep them from tugging at their lions’ manes of horsehair and the long striped tiger tails of painted burlap. For the mother dog, who led the troop despite her lameness, Delena had fashioned a strange cape of long black horsehair, which was quite unsettling as the dog approached, so Sister Salt and the twins dubbed her the Bear.

Delena covered her dress with a long cape of burlap covered almost entirely with bits of red, yellow, green, blue, and white ribbon that flickered in the breeze, trimmed with dozens of little dangling baubles made of tin cans, which jingled as she moved. By the time Sister Salt and the twins helped Delena arrange a circle of smooth river stones for the ring and piled kindling on two sides of the circle, the sun was down. The girls took turns beating an old tin bucket with a stick to announce the performance. More and more onlookers gathered and the buzz of voices and barks of the dogs added to the excitement.

Delena called to the crippled dog, and the others followed her inside the circle of stones. She talked to the dogs constantly in a low voice Sister Salt could barely hear, but it soothed them and kept their attention on her. In pairs, the black dogs danced together on their hind legs around and around as Delena waved her wand — a willow stick tied with strings of sparrow feathers; the crippled dog sat motionless on a keg in the center of the ring.

Delena left them dancing while she lit the oil-soaked rags wreathed around two hoops she fashioned from scraps of wire. As the crowd cheered her on, a fiery hoop in each hand, she called first to the crippled dog, who leaped off the keg and through one hoop after the other to wild applause from the audience that had consumed a large amount of beer. The other dogs followed their mother through the hoops eagerly, and barked excitedly as they raced around the ring.

Next Delena rolled in other empty nail kegs and arranged scraps of corrugated tin roofing for an elevated track around the ring, which made resounding thunder as the dogs raced over it. While the “lions” and “tigers” pounded the tin, now gaily chasing one another’s cloth and horsehair tails, Delena stepped out of the ring, and the crippled black dog in the bear costume followed her into the shadows, where a moment later she returned with an old ladder, which she held upright in both hands while one after the other the dogs climbed on, until she had six dogs at once balanced on the rungs of the ladder. Later the twins and Sister Salt did recall the absence of the crippled dog in her bear costume; at the time they did not make much of it — they assumed the dog was too disabled for the ladder trick.

The last trick consisted of the dogs each sitting up on their hind legs on a keg while Delena rapidly tossed them wild gourds, which they caught and held in their mouths before dropping to catch another. When each dog had six gourds by its keg, Delena bowed to the crowd with a flourish, spreading both arms to direct their applause to the dogs on the kegs behind her. Then, while the crowd continued to whistle and cheer, Delena reached down into her gunnysack of costumes and props and brought out a strange doll almost two feet tall, made of white canvas, with a long beard of white horsehair and a matching wig topped by a paper top hat painted with stripes of red, white, and blue. The doll wore no clothing, but around his neck was a string of little round tin bells.

At the sight of the doll, the dogs became alert and some of them began to wag their tails in anticipation; Delena sternly commanded them to stay put before she took the doll’s hands in her hands and began slowly to dance around and around the ring. The light from the lanterns and from the two small fires at either end of the ring trees threw giant shadows of the doll and the woman across the audience, which was drunk and disorderly now; those in back attempted to push forward to get a better view. A drunk miner bumped a drunk soldier, who stumbled against a drunk cowboy, and a fight broke out in front of the gambling tents. Big Candy ordered the dealers to shut down until the crowd was more orderly, and halted the sale of beer for the time being to avoid more trouble.

Now as Delena whirled faster and faster with the strange doll, and her dogs danced around with her on their hind legs, barking excitedly, a drunk soldier staggered into the ring and pulled the white doll out of her hands to dance with it himself. The dogs took this as their cue to grab the white doll for their finale, and grabbed hold of its legs and arms and head. The drunk clung to the doll’s torso with both hands even after the dogs pulled him facedown hard and began to tug and pull the doll and him around the circle. Once the dogs tore off the doll’s hat and wig, they pulled off the beard and tugged at it between them before one of dogs grabbed hold of the drunk’s shirt, and then all of the dogs were on the man, pulling and tearing at his clothing while the crowd laughed and urged them on.

Soldier friends of the drunk who tried to push their way through the crowd to stop the dogs met with resistance; the resentment many felt toward the presence of the army surfaced, and fistfights broke out. Oblivious to the disorder that spread through the crowd, the dogs gaily tore to pieces the drunk’s uniform but ignored the naked man on the ground. Once the uniform was shredded, the dogs began wild tugs-of-war with their own costumes. In their excitement they tore off the horsehair lions’ manes and tigers’ tails and the burlap capes trimmed with tin jingles. Their mistress made no effort to stop them; in fact, Delena was nowhere in sight.

The crowd surged, then swelled like floodwater over one another to the protests and yells of those pushed and trampled. Sister Salt held the baby close to her in both arms as she ran to escape the fighting mob. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Big Candy with a shotgun cradled in his arms in front of the gambling tents. She ran a short distance downriver until she saw a dense stand of willows; with the little black grandfather safely cocooned she crawled as far back into the willows as she could. She could hear the voices — the curses and shouts, and then the shotgun blasted twice, followed by three or four pistol shots and more shouts. The little black grandfather’s eyes widened at the gunfire and he waved his arms furiously but did not cry. “Yes, you were right all along,” she whispered to him, and the cards were right too — a big flood came all right, but it wasn’t the river that wiped out everything.

Wylie was on his horse behind the crowd when the riot broke out; he pulled the six-shot thirty-two special out of his right boot and took the two-shot thirty-eight derringer from the left boot. He regretted leaving his sawed-off shotguns in his tent. He could not see Big Candy for the mob that boiled around the tents, but he heard Candy’s shotgun fire and then more shots. Wylie knew there were bound to be off-duty soldiers involved, so he turned his horse away and raced off to alert their commanding officer to send military police.