McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [13]
Alas, at 11:15, as the town clock was striking the quarter-hour, Mr. Timothy Phelps, senior director of the McKennon Railway, arrived at the parade via the narrow alley between the Second National Bank and Tannenbaum’s hardware store. He appeared mounted, with exquisite form, on his English saddle-backed horse, Jasper.
What happened next was so terrible, so simple, so unbelievable, that townspeople’s memories could never have been trusted to relay it accurately. In fact, the story would surely have been demoted to the realm of folklore were it not for a single motion picture camera.
The Pathé Prevost Camera, the camera of choice for professionals, had but one drawback: If the camera fell over and struck a hard object, the film stock tended to explode into flames. An amateur filmmaker named Alexander Victor was experimenting that morning with acetate “safety” film. He’d ridden the rails of the American South, tinkering with improvements in the optical range finder, and shooting endless locomotives in transit, train-crew razorbacks waving at the camera. Today, he had alighted on the circus parade, which was ideal to him for its interesting motion.
He hand-cranked his camera on the sidewalk, directly across from the alleyway. And so local memories, hazy in other details, are precise in this regard, all of them, no matter where they were that day, recalling it from the same vantage point. Their memories took on the scratched negative, the variable speed and mysterious lighting of amateur film. Mary broke from the parade route, trotting left with an almost magnetic attraction to Jasper and his rider, scattering to the four winds the townspeople between her and her quarry. Standing next to the brick wall of the bank, Phelps and his horse—rather a greyish smear in the frame-by-frame dissection of the scene—nervously paced back and forth, but couldn’t make up their collective mind, and then Mary, headdress and cape buffeting with each step, was upon them. It was as if she needed to scratch an itch against the rough bricks, one quick flex of her shoulder, forward, then one slower, luxurious kind of return back, and horse and rider were no more.
This was horror enough. But next, camera still rolling, citizens of Olson sepia blurs crossing the foreground, Mary lowered one front foot to Phelps’s back, as if holding the corpse steady, and then she wrapped her trunk around his neck. The next motion was fluid, like drawing a reluctant cork out of a champagne bottle.
There was pandemonium in the streets, people unsure of exactly which direction constituted proper fleeing, and Alexander Victor’s film ends with a man in a bowler hat running his way, his vest and watch fob suddenly filling up the screen, and then, blackness.
Nash, rooted in the mud, hadn’t seen exactly what happened, but tried to calm the situation, his clear showman’s bellow ineffective. He saw the village blacksmith run forward and withdraw a pistol from his apron, which he proceded to empty at Mary’s flank. The bullets made small pockmarks in Mary’s hide, and she flapped her ears in concern, but she continued walking and there was no further outcome.
Squonk stood paralyzed, his jaw wavering, in the middle of the street. He removed his pointed, conical hat, and lowered his head. He put his palm over his eyes as Mary, his friend and companion, approached him and gingerly reached out her trunk for the apple she always received at the end of every parade.
The rumor that the show must go on was one started by patrons and furthered by newspapermen who liked how it sounded. Many a circus folds without a second thought, and Nash knew, at noon, and at one o’clock and at two o’clock, that there would be no performance that night. He had returned Mary to her freight car, and put most of his men around it to guard her.