Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (37 page)

“I didn’t have much luggage,” he said, “only a bag with a pair of tennis shoes and a T-shirt. I left everything else behind. I didn’t even leave a note. I’ll tell you, you think everything at a time like that. Why am I doing this? Why am I hurting my parents? But I told Michelle, ‘Something inside me was saying,
It’s okay what you’re doing. Don’t worry. Don’t stop…’”

“He was scheduled to arrive in Sarasota about seven o’clock,” Michelle remembered. “I drove myself to the airport, hoping that he was on the plane. Then I waited. And why is it that when you’re waiting for somebody they’re always at the end of the plane? All of these people were coming out, and I was saying, ‘Come on…Come on…’ When he came and I saw him I couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle, really. I was in shock. I was too happy to cry.”

“It felt very strange,” Angel agreed. “What I had gone through was very difficult, but when you love somebody you love somebody. Other things don’t matter. If it wasn’t for my family she would have come to Europe with me. But things didn’t work out like that, so I had to come to her. In my culture that’s a very bad thing to do, but I decided to do it anyway.”

Two days later Angel Quiros and Michelle Ayala were married in the Sarasota United Pentecostal Church. That night they spent their honeymoon in a hotel by the beach. The following day they left for Reno, Nevada, where Michelle’s family was scheduled to perform on a show. Angel’s family was not informed.

“I didn’t speak to my parents for a year and a half,” Angel said. “My sister, who was already living in America with Juan, called every week, so they knew I was alive. But I never talked to them directly. I had nothing to say to them. Finally, a couple of weeks ago we were in Sterling, Virginia, and Mari was talking to them on the phone in front of a Home Depot. I told her, ‘I want to talk with Mother and Father.’ She said she didn’t think it was a good idea. I told her I thought it would be okay. I picked up the phone and my mother spoke first. ‘We want you to know we love you,’ she said. ‘Everything is fine. We’ve forgiven you. It’s all in the past.’”

Michelle was holding her husband’s hand. “That night he said, ‘We’re going to visit.’”

Angel nodded through his tears. “That’s right,” he said, “we’re going home.”

Circles are hallowed in the circus: even life is lived in rings.

For the final trick the troupe unites. Little Pablo, who started walking on the wire at the start of the year in an effort to expand the act, grabs an eight-inch stainless-steel wheel and sets it on the wire. Holding the wheel by its two small handles, he tucks his feet underneath Angel’s arms and lowers his head just inches from the wire. To make this human wheelbarrow even more complex, Mari climbs onto Angel’s shoulders and raises her arms in the air. The trick is ready. The band stops playing. With heart-pounding accompaniment from the bass drum, Angel takes up a twenty-foot pole for balance and begins to step across the wire—pushing his brother-in-law, carrying his sister, and inching ever so carefully toward his wife, who stands at the far end of the wire gesturing anxiously at her family and trying to lure them home.

In the middle of this odd family portrait Angel Quiros remains calm.

“When I’m on the wire I’m a different person completely,” he said. “I’ve got to show the people: I’m Angel Quiros. That means something to me. I want people to remember us. Sometimes they are a little tired. They’ve seen so many acts. I don’t want that to happen. I want the people to wake up and say, ‘What’s going on? What is he doing…?’”

And down below they are saying just that.

“Can you believe it?”

“His feet are so small.”

“Oh my God, he’s going to fall.”

But Angel isn’t going to fall. He’s never even considered it.

“People always say to me, ‘Look, you’re crazy.’ But I’m not crazy. I know some people who are. They don’t practice. They don’t know what they’re doing. But they go out and work anyway. And they fall. If you know what you’re doing, if you know how to pull everything together, even the most extraordinary act is just doing your job.”

And what a job it is: before 3,000 people, thirty feet in the air, with your sister on your shoulders, your brother-in-law around your waist, and your wife welcoming you back home with a kiss on the cheek and a thank-you to God. All jobs—all stories—should end so happily…twice a day, seven days a week, every day of the year.

“
Ladies and gentlemen, the Quiros Troupe!
”

12

At Heaven’s Door

Marty came running into the Alley just as intermission approached.

“Bruce, come quick. It’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” I asked, standing up to go. At this point, could there be any surprises left?

“It’s Barisal,” he said. “Her water broke.”

The answer was a resounding yes: tiger births on Halloween eve.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’m on my way.” I slipped on my floppy shoes.

The show arrived at the Gulf of Mexico just as the calendar tipped into fall. Now that we were starting our eighth month on the road, signs of aging were everywhere evident. Fabio Estrada, a newborn in March, was already beginning to walk. Georgi Ivanov, a teenager in August, was already sporting an earring. And Esmeralda Jamaica Queen, the baby Burmese python that Pat and Mike of the horse department purchased in Forest Park, had already increased her infant diet from one mouse a week to four. Susie, the ticket seller, meanwhile, had slashed her diet in an effort to lose her baby fat and had passed her maternity clothes on to Blair, who was one of four women on the show to get pregnant since the season began.

In Clown Alley the strain was beginning to show. In late October my beleaguered trunk finally collapsed, and in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, I spent nineteen dollars on a replacement at Wal-Mart, another reminder that we were back in the South, along with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, NRA bumper stickers (
MY WIFE
YES,
MY DOG
MAYBE,
MY GUN
NEVER), and nineteen different kinds of chewing tobacco in the aisles of the Starvin’ Marvin convenience stores. As the weather got steadily chillier, the boys in the Alley replaced their cans of cheap generic cola with cups of cheap generic tea, and supplanted their Saturday-morning games of pickup softball with Sunday-afternoon games of touch football. Moreover, in the most conspicuous sign of general fatigue, the number of “dick in the ass” jokes declined from a testosterone peak of five an hour to a mere one or two feeble attempts a day. I knew it must be getting late in the season when the boys in the Alley couldn’t even get it up for one another anymore.

In the midst of this communal death watch—three weeks and twenty-five shows to go—a parallel watch was taking place around the tigers. This one involved a birth. Since Kathleen left in early May, Khris Allen had been confronted three different times with what he thought was a pregnant tiger. The first, Barisal, proved to be a false alarm. The second, Fatima, suffered a miscarriage. Still, acting on Josip’s orders, Khris continued to mate the cats—during pre-show playtime in the ring; overnight in their cages—and by early fall he seemed to have scored. “It happened somewhere in New York,” he recalled, “probably in Queens. Again it was Barisal. She’s a tabby, so I mated her with Taras, another tabby. The general idea was to have a tabby-tabby litter to see what type of colors she would have. In her first litter, with a standard male, she had a snow white and a white. In her second litter, with another standard, she had a tabby and a white. By mating her with another tabby—pale custard in color with dark sienna stripes—we could learn if the tabby is an actual gene or just an aberration.”

By early October the signs of pregnancy were apparent.

“Her belly got bigger, much bigger than before,” Khris said. “This time when her nipples dropped they were as big as grapes. Also this time she seemed proud. When I took her into playtime she would march around and say, ‘Yeah, look at me. I’m pregnant. Come scratch my belly and feel my baby.’”

By the end of the month her anxiety increased. During the last week of October, Khris took her out of the act. Twice a day he checked her nipples to see if they had started producing colostrum—a mixture of antibodies and hormones that’s a sign she’s about to deliver. On Thursday she started defecating a lot, another sign of imminent birth. On Friday she didn’t eat her dinner at all. “For the last few weeks she’s been wolfing down her food,” he said, “then suddenly she only picked and played. I was pretty sure today was the day.”

And it was.

Marty and I arrived at the tiger compound just as intermission was beginning. The sky above the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds in Mobile was mottled with clouds and an impending storm. The general buzz inside the tent mirrored the murmur around the tiger cages. Khris was pacing nervously, running his fingers through his hair, which was now even thinner on top and longer in back.

“I was at home when I heard it,” he explained. “Actually I was in bed…” He winked. The previous night, in a rare moment of bravado, the normally shy Khris had succeeded in breaking the rules of the Roosters nightclub and inviting one of the young female “dancers” back to his compound for a private show. “I was rather proud of myself,” he said. “Score one for the balding men of America…. Anyway, I was taking a nap when I heard Barisal scream. She has a moan that sounds like ‘Aaaoom. Aaaoom.’ But this time it sounded like ‘AAAAAAhhhoooowwww.’ I was like ‘Oh, shit. She’s gone into labor.’” Khris threw on his clothes and ran outside. By the time he arrived a small assembly had gathered—Marty, me, and Khris’s friend Bushwhacker from the mechanics department.

Rocking back and forth in her cage, Barisal was agitated. Her rear end was covered in brownish fluid. The hay at her feet was clumped on one side. For a few minutes she walked around in a circle unsure what to do. She would lie down for a moment, writhe uncomfortably, then stand up again. Seconds later she would repeat the routine. Finally, at a little after 8:30, as intermission was drawing to a close, Barisal stood up for one last time, roared with a slow, almost mournful yawn, and arched her subtly striped back as the head of a cub—like a large sticky bun—first appeared between her legs.

“Holy shit!” Khris exclaimed. “The first one’s coming already.”

The cub’s head was moist, still coated in brine; its legs were hidden from view. Barisal squatted down in her cage, strained the muscles in her brawny legs, and with a rather indelicate pop deposited her plump little bundle of life in the six-inch pile of hay. Almost immediately Barisal turned around and began chewing off the umbilical cord that dangled limply from her baby’s belly. Then she started cleaning her cub—lapping up the afterbirth to stimulate her own milk production; licking the nose to clear it for air; and finally nudging the infant’s mouth to encourage it to breathe. Within minutes the baby began to squirm, and the mother pulled back to observe her cub. An unspoken creation had made the world fresh. The circus had new life.

Within minutes of the birth, it began to rain. And Khris was starting to panic.

“I was excited when I saw the baby,” he said later, “but also nervous. I was like an expectant father whose wife was in the hospital. I didn’t know what to do. It was starting to rain harder. We had another show to do, but I still had to keep an eye on her. What if she rejected the cub? What if she started to eat it? At first I thought: What the hell. I’ll just take her into the tent and won’t put her in the ring. Then I realized: What the hell am I thinking? She’s going to be having other babies. She’ll start screaming. People will think she’s dying or something. I decided to load her into the truck. Then Royce came and told me the second show was being canceled because of the storm. That raised a new set of problems.”

Now freed from the show but burdened by the long jump ahead, Khris moved quickly. He ordered his grooms to tear down the awning and prepare the tigers for the move. One by one he winched the steel cages up the wooden ramp and into the back of the tiger truck, No. 78. He put Barisal’s cage in last so he could monitor her during the night. By 10:15, with only one cub born and the rain starting to muddy the field, he was ready to leave for Panama City, Florida. If he was lucky he could make it to the next lot in under three hours and be there for most of the other births. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it five miles before his truck broke down.

“I was numb,” he said. “I was really frightened. The whole thing was happening so quickly, and there I was on the side of the road with a truck full of tigers, a mother in labor, and no one else around.”

Over the next three hours, as Khris waited for the show’s mechanics to arrive, Barisal gave birth to the rest of her litter. By the time they reached Panama City it was 3:15 in the morning and Barisal had a total of four cubs, all of them tabby.

“I was tired,” Khris said, “but very proud. This is one of the reasons I’m here. Doing a good performance is like performing well in sports. You feel confident in your abilities. You feel proud that the cats responded well. But this was an experience of a lifetime. It’s a true miracle, more so than a human baby, because human babies are born every second. This is an endangered species that I’m helping nurture. She’s doing all the hard work, of course. But I have a lot to consider. When she had the first baby I had to walk away for a moment because I was too emotional. I was at the point where I was ready to cry. I was very proud of her…”

“So who did you share this with?”

“Who do you think?” he said. “When Barisal was having her babies by the side of the road I called my dad, my mom, my brother, and my grandmother. They were all excited and wanted to know what was happening. Then I called Kathleen. She’s the only one who really understands how this feels. After that whole experience between me and her it’s really good now because we’re talking again. She understands about the babies…and what might happen tomorrow. After all the bullshit that has happened—the jealousies and the intimidations—our friendship is starting to overcome it all. It’s funny, isn’t it? The tigers are originally what pulled us apart. Now they’re bringing us together.”