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By Root 1320 0

money on apples and pencils instead of cornhusk dolls. Hank began to hatch a plan: he would sneak off to Jasper in time to be there when the circus arrived, and he would get a job with the circus, so when his folks showed up to attend the circus they would see that he already had a job, and might even be proud of him, and they wouldn’t make a big fuss when the circus moved on and took him with it. So on the eve of August 24th, when nobody was looking, he “borrowed” one of his father’s mules without telling anyone and rode it bareback into Jasper, where he found to his dismay that the circus had already arrived in town and was being erected, by the light of strings of intensely burning glass bulbs. Jasper had not yet received electricity, but the circus had its own portable generator.

Hank could do nothing at first but stare with fascination at all of the light bulbs, until one of the workmen said to him, “Show aint open yet, kid. Come back tomorrow.” Hank told the man he was hoping to get him a job of work. “See the punk pusher,” the man replied, and directed him to a tough-looking man in a teeshirt, who was supervising a bunch of local boys, many of whom Hank recognized. “No cash. Free ticket only,” the man said to him. “Go help those punks hold that rope.” Hank said that he wanted to join the circus for keeps and do something important like impossible stunts. The man laughed at him and asked what kind of impossible stunt he could do. Well, Hank said, he could touch his elbows together behind his back. He demonstrated. “Hey, that’s pretty good, kid,” the man remarked sincerely. “Come with me.” The man took him to a trailer where another man in a teeshirt was just sitting in a canvas chair, doing nothing but smoking a cigarette. “Hey, Cholly, get a load of this,” the first man said and told Hank to repeat his impossible stunt of touching his elbows together behind his back. Hank did. Cholly pursed his lips and stared at Hank through squinted lids. “He’ll do,” Cholly said and took Hank and fitted him out with a clown suit and showed him how to tie a rubber ball over his nose and put white and purple paint on his face. Then Cholly took him to another man in a teeshirt and said, “Phil, watch the kid,” and as Phil watched Hank touched his elbows together behind his back several times in quick succession. “What else can he do?” Phil wanted to know. Hank said that he could also pat his stomach while rotating his other hand on top of his head, and vice versa. “Great,” said Phil. “Can you juggle?” Hank couldn’t, so Phil took three oranges and began to show him how. Hank was getting sleepy, but he kept practicing until he could not only juggle the three balls but throw them all up in the air, touch his elbows behind his back three times, and catch them as they came down.

The putting up of the circus was finished, and all the other local boys were run off the grounds, but Hank was allowed to stay. It must have been close to midnight, but none of the circus people seemed to be sleepy. They sat around and played cards and smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes. Phil said to him, “Well, let’s meet some of the finkers and geeks,” and he took him around and introduced him as “the new joey” to several of the circus people: the other clowns, acrobats, horsemen, and even to the sideshow people, who made him uneasy: a bearded lady, a very fat lady, a midget, a man covered with tatoos, another man who seemed normal but Phil whispered into Hank’s ear that the man did an act of biting the heads off of chickens, and a man who was very, very old, who Phil said was billed as “the World’s Oldest Man.” None of these people showed any particular interest in meeting Hank, but the man who was the World’s Oldest Man seemed to be studying him keenly behind his wrinkled eyelids. The old man’s eyes seemed to be still working, although none of the rest of him looked like it would work; Hank doubted that the old man could speak, so he was surprised and momentarily disbelieving when the old man asked him a question, “Where are you from, Joey?” After Hank