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By Root 1175 0

though, the third cat had had enough: as the fish-stinking kiss brushed his twitching, whiskered muzzle, there was a blur of orange-and-black paw and the penguin looked down at the three red stripes on his white breast with the surprise of a rich man who’s spilled claret on his evening shirt. He raised his beaked head, astonished. He looked to the lazy tiger keeper who’d trained him, talked him into this twice-daily escapade, and was himself stunned at the tiger’s break in discipline, and now was raising his whip and shouting at the cat, but too late. The paw flashed again, and the suddenly headless penguin rocked in place but didn’t tip over, because the cat’s other paw was pinning the flipper feet to the sand. The tiger was about to enjoy the snack he’d just uncorked when he felt the lash bite his back, and he turned with a roar on the man who’d both whipped and fed him since his tiger-cub days. “You don’t snarl at me, boy-o!” shouted my ticket vendor, flogging with a fury. Only now did the two children in the audience realise the penguin whose antics they’d just been admiring wasn’t well, as its head, beady-eyed and baffled, had come to rest on the red wooden wall a few rows in front of them.

For reasons Mrs. Hoyt later explained to me as a matter of discipline for the beasts and safety to their master, the cats were required to perform their entire routine again, without fail, before they could be allowed out of the cage for their meat reward. While the two children sobbed and their parents told them, “Now, now, it’s all just a trick,” the tigers, growling and irritable, reviewed their tasks and swatted at their man. Again the leaping, the rolling, the springing through rings. Again they all lay down facing forward. Again the back hatch lifted. Again a dramatic silhouette of a plump, banana-nosed fellow. And again a trained penguin waddled in, expecting to win applause and a fresh fish. What this second penguin thought as it passed the decapitated, dusty football of its colleague I cannot say. “No! No! Fly away!” called the little boy to my left.

I only mention this scene, Mr. Macy, to illustrate the state of the circus by 1922, for I then watched two middle-aged Chinese contortionists twist themselves into the most peculiar shapes, to audience discomfort. I watched a single, spangled trapeze man swing listlessly for a spell before just dropping onto his net and from there to the ground, taking off his costume even as he was walking away. All through it, a visibly disheartened man of sixty played an out-of-tune upright piano. From time to time he murmured with a pained seriousness at the frightened children, “Ah, the circus! It’s magical, just magical.”

“He is classically trained, you know. He used to conduct our ten-piece orchestra, in Paul’s day,” Paul Caldwell’s chosen next of kin, Emma Hoyt, later told me, her face drooping. Her business was at its very end, of course. I think she held on to it another week, but I’d witnessed the death throes of the Flipping Hoyt Brothers Circus. “In better days,” she started most of her sentences, or “When my husband, Boyd, was alive,” or most interesting, “Paul would have hated to see things end like this.”

A woman of forty-five or so, and not without her charms, she was still dressed like a major in some brightly coloured army, her hair blond and compressed under her red, cylindrical hat. She lit cigarette after cigarette, but didn’t smoke them. Her private caravan smelled of perfume, her performing dogs, wild animal dung.

She was eager to talk about Paul Caldwell. I told her she might have inherited some money from him, but she scolded me: “That’s impossible. He’s only missing.” My notes are easily enough compiled for you, more or less as they must’ve been said. (Do you think we should present polished stories with long speeches, or just the fragments of my notes? The latter is more “real,” I suppose, but the reader wants to feel it’s happening to him, if you see what I mean, Macy.)

“So many difficult memories are stirred to life by your visit, Mr. Ferrell. Paul was the