Kirby's Last Circus Read online

  Birch Kirby had been an impressionable youngster, and it might have been argued that Blackthorn had established some sort of subliminal foothold within his mind, bringing about Kirby’s entrance into the field of private investigation at a relatively early age. Unfortunately, Blackthorn’s influence had stopped at that point, leaving Kirby to his own devices, none of which had been particularly effective, and there’d been times when Kirby had longed to meet Oliver Payson Seltzer for the express purpose of kicking Oliver Payson Seltzer squarely in the balls.

  Still, Kirby looked back with considerable affection on his days with Creighton Blackthorn, and he dozed on the hilltop, recalling a fragment of an old poem:

  Fond memory a mural weaves

  With threads of smoke from burning leaves:

  Of creaking porches, squeaking swings,

  Of butterflies on gaudy wings,

  Of all the burnished stars that gleamed,

  Of all the dreams I ever dreamed,

  Of all the shady summer nooks

  Where I held rendezvous with books,

  And recollection’s bright brigade

  Goes swinging by on proud parade,

  But, now, to muffled, fading beat,

  It marches down another street…

  Proud parade—Kirby had yet to hear the first fucking flute. His cigarette singed his fingers and he left his lethargy to watch a fellow with a crooked cane come stumbling up the grade. The man was dressed in a loose-fitting red-plaid shirt and baggy chino pants, and as he drew nearer, Kirby could see that he was quite old, and that he labored strenuously against the gentle pitch of the hillside. His pace was faltering badly when he topped the rise to sit beside Kirby on the flat rock, parking his cane against the sugar maple and saying, “Howdy, young feller, how goes it?”

  The elderly man’s voice was quavery, but he smelled of roses and spice, and Kirby winked at his visitor. He said, “Hi, Dixie.”

  Dixie Benton half-smiled through the wrinkled latex of her facial makeup. “I should have mentioned it last night—those roustabout coveralls fit you nicely.” She made that little growling sound deep in her throat. “Becomingly tight!”

  Kirby avoided that one. He said, “So, what’s new?”

  Dixie held her lighter to a cigarette and sighed a dismal sigh. “Not a helluva lot. Matilda Richwell called Chicago from somewhere in the Ozarks and they’re grilling Kisarze in Washington—they think he’s showing signs of cracking. I have a premonition that the lid’s going to blow off this teakettle shortly, and, God damn it, we still don’t know the meaning of ‘SAMD + 23’! Any ideas?”

  Kirby was staring preoccupiedly at the picnickers in the cottonwood grove and at the turmoil on the circus grounds below, where children were running, laughing, screaming, tripping, falling, peering under tentflaps. Apparently there was a special occasion. He said, “I’ll bet it’s Smoky Abe Matthewson Day.”

  Dixie glanced up quickly, her violet eyes alive with interest. “What was that again?”

  Kirby said, “Smoky Abe Matthewson Day—it’s the big local holiday in honor of the old buzzard who used to own the Grizzly Gulch Bank.”

  Dixie spun sharply on the flat rock, grasping Kirby’s biceps and squeezing until he winced. She said, “Smoky Abe Matthewson Day—Smoky Abe Matthewson Day—oh, Jesus Christ, Smoky Abe Matthewson Day!”

  “Sure, that’s what this is all about—otherwise, why the big picnic and why are these kids…”

  Dixie was beating Kirby’s shoulders furiously with her fists. “Birch Kirby, you genius sonofabitch, you’ve done it again! How long have you known?”

  “Since right after we got here—the bartender at Brady’s Corncrib…”

  “Oh, my God, Kirby, that’s it, that’s it, you’ve busted it! I’ll be damned if you don’t beat anything I’ve ever run into! ‘SAMD’ stands for Smoky Abe Matthewson Day, and the ‘+ 23’ translates to hours! Smoky Abe Matthewson Day began at midnight, and midnight plus twenty-three hours brings us to eleven o’clock tonight! That’s when the bastards will hit us—during the fireworks display!”

  “What the hell fireworks display?”

  “Now, please, don’t lapse back into that old flim-flam game of yours! Have you ever been in a rube town that didn’t throw a big fireworks show on a holiday evening? Kirby, you’re wonderful—you’re downright unbelievable!”

  “So what’s going to happen during the fireworks?”

  “More fireworks, and don’t tell me that you don’t know! You know, you’ve been three jumps ahead of the KGB every damned step of the way!”

  Kirby was silent, responding only by lighting a cigarette.

  Dixie said, “Oh, I understand—you want to handle it alone—you’re afraid that one of us peons will fuck up the detail! All right, we’ll go with that, we’ll play along, who are we to argue with the king of the hill? But be so kind as to give us an inkling of your plans so we can be ready!”

  Kirby knocked ash from his cigarette and watched a fight that had broken out in the cottonwood grove—probably over the horseshoe game—whaddaya mean that’s a ringer?

  Dixie was staring at him, raw admiration roiling the depths of her eyes. She placed a hand on his knee. “Not to mix business with ecstasy, but the Agency has permanent access to a lovely little chalet in the Alps. If you get us through this thing alive, we could take a month, you and I.”

  “Can’t afford it.”

  “On me—which is where you’d be spending most of your time, incidentally.”

  “We’d starve up there.”

  “We’d live on moonglow!”

  “It’d rain. There’d be floods. Thousands would die.”

  “Uh-huh, well, in the meantime, why don’t we just duck into the bushes for a few minutes?”

  “There’ll be poison ivy in there. What’s more, with you dressed like that, we could be arrested on sodomy charges.”

  “I’ll take my chances on the poison ivy, and there’s no way they could make a sodomy rap stick!” Her hands flashed to the belt of her baggy chino trousers. “Wanta see why?”

  “I’ve already seen why.”

  “The fourth time’s the charm.”

  “Later, okay?”

  Dixie’s smile was half-hearted. “I know—you’ve got things on your mind. Well, you know best.” She lifted her crooked cane from its resting place against the sugar maple, and got to her feet. “It’s your ball game, Kirby—it’s been yours since we left Chicago, and I should have realized that. You’ve been responsible for all the progress we’ve made down here, and I’ll be damned if I’ll interfere further. I’ll have every available hand on deck tonight, just in case things get out of control, but don’t you worry, we’ll stand clear.”

  She blew Kirby a kiss and he watched her make her halting way down the hill, playing her role of a wobbly old man to perfection. Dixie Benton was a strange creature, two different women, really—one warm, excitable, sweet, gentle, naïve—the other cool, calm, calculating, ruthless, blasé—these collaborating to make her a carbon copy of every other female on the face of God’s green earth. Creighton Blackthorn wouldn’t have put it that way. Creighton would have said, “Stand ’em on their heads, and they’re all the same.” Blackthorn was a pragmatist, cut from the very same cloth as the second Dixie Benton. Pragmatism puzzled Kirby, he couldn’t even spell it. Kirby was a dreamer, doomed to dream until there were no dreams to dream. Dreamers share that unhappy characteristic—stand ’em on their heads and their brains fall out.

  Thirty-One

  The gaunt gray ghosts of eventide prowled the dense green thickets around the circus clearing, and Birch Kirby’s weariness had thickened to a consistency similar to that of dry concrete. He’d spent his early afternoon tinkering—the steam calliope had required a minor tune-up, the cotton candy machine had been acting strangely, and Kirby, who didn’t know a pair of pliers from a bumperjack, had done his bewildered best with these unusual contraptions.

  A soft, melancholy, cathedral
hush had descended with the twilight, but now the children of Grizzly Gulch were returning, this time with banjo-eyed parents in tow, the sideshow tents were beginning to light up, and in a very few minutes all hell would bust loose with the midway coming to life and the evening’s gentle quiet falling prey to hammer-and-tongs circus frenzy. Kirby’s performance assignments had been delivered by the freckled, barefooted youngster—assist Zamaroff, the Human Cannon Ball, then drive the tractor that pulled the cage of Kenyali, the Devil Lion from Darkest Africa, and Kirby anticipated these chores with considerable apprehension, because he knew more about tractors than he knew about cannons and he knew next to nothing about tractors. Now he sagged against the tailgate of a brightly-painted circus truck, sucking on a cigarette, listening to the steam calliope’s prelude to the festivities of the evening, a honking, bleating version of “Poor Butterfly,” and thinking about Tizzie Bonkowski.

  For all Kirby knew, one of Tizzie’s hard-to-control customers might have kicked her teeth out, and that disturbed him. He’d be back to watch over her, probably by tomorrow, because, according to Dixie Benton’s prognostications, the close of the coming circus performance would herald the finish of the Grizzly Gulch matter, be it for better or for worse. Kirby hoped for this. He felt hollow, run down like a bargain-basement wind-up toy, he’d bitten off a bigger chunk than he’d been capable of chewing—Matilda Richwell had nearly raped him twice, Cleopeo had designs on his exhausted body and Dixie Benton wanted to take him to the Alps of all fucking places, the No Sox bullpen had left splinters in his keester, he’d fallen out of a tree, his gravitational collision with Kisarze had damaged his knee, an elephant had sat on his foot, and here he was, sharing a tent with an honest-to-Christ vampire, remembering Dixie’s experience with Rudolpho’s missing knife, and sleeping with one eye open. There comes a time in the life of every man when he’s ready to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after him, and that moment had arrived for Birch Kirby. He was down to his last thin dream, and that dream was in Chicago, selling her ass to drunks, but she was better than no dream at all.

  Kirby watched a heavy-set woman with frizzy-gray hair come stomping purposefully up the midway, glancing fiercely left and right, fists clenched, fire in her eyes, and he recognized her as the steam calliope player. She glared at Kirby, swerved sharply in his direction, and thumped his chest with a grubby forefinger. In a voice like a head-on locomotive smash-up she said, “You the long-legged, misbegotten sonofabitch who worked on my fucking steam calliope this afternoon!”

  Kirby nodded. “Yes, ma’am, is something wrong?”

  “Is something wrong? Oh, you’re God damned right, something’s wrong!”

  “Well, my gosh, I thought you did real well on ‘Poor Butterfly’!”

  “Yes, and that’s what’s wrong—I wasn’t playing ‘Poor Butterfly,’ I was playing ‘When the Fucking Saints Go Marching In’!”

  Kirby shrugged. He said, “Well, it sounded just like ‘Poor Fucking Butterfly’ to me!”

  The heavy-set woman stormed away, mumbling to herself, and Kirby left the truck tailgate to limp dejectedly along the midway, his thoughts jumbled, his knee aching, his foot throbbing. He noticed that two new sideshow tents had been erected. The first of these bore a sign reading SEE THE SIX-FOOT-SEVEN PURPLE TARANTULA. Kirby paused to watch a roustabout nail a sign to a post in front of the second tent—SEE JEANNETTE, THE SHARK WOMAN. He hobbled on, wading through the chattering, shuffling throng, through the wails of unhappy babies and the barkers’ highpitched yammerings, through the stenches of re-heated stale popcorn, greasy meat, cheap perfume, and sweat. Cleopeo stood on her little tasseled stage, smiling, rotating her middle, beckoning to him with her navel. A half-dozen red-jacketed band members crossed his path on their way to the big-top, and Kirby wondered how many of them were on the KGB payroll. The steam calliope had resumed its discordant bleeping, and Kirby stopped to watch the cotton candy machine spin neat pink beehives of sugar. It seemed to be in excellent operating condition, but then so had the steam calliope. He pulled up at the Portside Hotdog Galley to wash down a slippery frankfurter on a crumbly bun with a paper container of flat lukewarm root beer. The slender gray-haired woman at the counter was wearing large-lensed smoked glasses, and she’d smiled sweetly at Kirby, grabbing his hand and squeezing it when she’d accepted payment. Poor old thing—she probably made that approach to every unaccompanied male customer, and in a more favorable situation, Kirby might have been tempted—he liked the gentle swell of her buttocks. He backed away from the counter, shifting his attention to Admiral Doldrum, who was hiking north on the midway, his gold braid sparkling in the glare of the naked lightbulbs. Kirby snapped briskly to attention and threw the Admiral a salute which was curtly returned. Kirby said, “Which tractor am I to use tonight, sir?”

  Admiral Doldrum lofted an imperious forefinger, pointing it at Kirby. “Now hear this: You will drive the red tractor—always the red tractor, because the green tractor has no brakes! Kenyali is the green cage, so you may employ word association by concentrating on Christmas! Christmas colors are red and green—red tractor, green cage—get it?”

  Kirby nodded, saluted, finished his root beer, lit a cigarette, and wondered with the Admiral would have suggested had the red tractor been blue and Kenyali’s cage orange, but he didn’t dwell on it.

  Concentrate on Christmas, Doldrum had said. Well, that wouldn’t be difficult. His smile was a distant, sentimental thing as his mind drifted to better days when the snows had been clean and squeaky and there’d been stars that actually twinkled. One long-ago Christmas Eve, he’d asked his mother to point out the star that had hung over Bethlehem. His mother had ruffled his hair and put her hands on his shoulders as his innocent eyes had searched the heavens. She’d told him that the Star of Bethlehem had been suspended over that little town for a very special reason, and that she didn’t believe that it was up there any longer. She’d suggested that he pick another star and just pretend and she’d picked the right fellow for the job, because Birch Kirby had always been good at just pretending. At the age of five he’d pretended to be a cowboy. At ten he’d pretended to be an Indian, and this had gone on until the neighbors weren’t at all certain that he was pretending. Then he’d run into Creighton Blackthorn, and he’d pretended to be a private investigator, a role he still pursued, however unconvincingly. Admiral Doldrum tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Sailor, you haven’t stirred from these waters in fifteen minutes!”

  Kirby struggled back to reality. “Uhh-h-h-h, no, sir—you see, I was concentrating on Christmas, just like you said I should, sir.”

  The Admiral snorted. “Christmas? This is June, lad! Find something better to do with your time—we cast off at 2000 hours!”

  Kirby said, “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Some days work out better than others. Apparently this was one of the others.

  Thirty-Two

  It was eight o’clock sharp and Admiral Doldrum’s great peppermint-striped tent had filled until its seams threatened to pop. In the surrounding fields, dozens of empty charter buses were parked, awaiting return trips to Wesley Springs, Tomahawk Falls, Swing City, and other destinations unfamiliar to Kirby. The Grizzly Gulch No Sox, enjoying an open date after winning their second straight from the Blister Bend Bandits, had turned out as a body, wearing their uniforms and drawing a crisp round of applause from the assemblage.

  Grandpa Earlybeam waved to Kirby, Nightlife Nesbitt and Barefoot Boyd shared a wicked-looking black bottle, Nitro Droofik scratched his balls disinterestedly, and Roger Hannistan, whose five extra-base hits and phenomenal fielding had won the previous night’s contest, sat apparently oblivious to his surroundings, perusing a volume of Shakespeare. Kirby seated himself on a large oblong packing case near the entertainers’ entrance as an expectant hush fell over the audience, its tension building until it seemed no longer bearable before a single spotlight clicked on, its beam fluttering around the tent like a bright, bewildered butterfly, then swe
rving to freeze on the bandmaster who stood at parade rest just within the main entrance. He was an impressively large fellow, clad in brilliant yellow jacket and riding breeches, bright-red garrison cap, long red leather gloves, and highly-polished red jack-boots. There was a broad red sash knotted at his waist, and he sported a bristling, jet-black handlebar moustache with its tips waxed to needlepoints. The audience broke into light applause as a snare-drum struck up a solemn cadence to which the bandmaster strode across the center-ring, goose-stepping, head up, shoulders back, looking for all the world like something that had just stepped out of Gilbert and Sullivan. When he mounted the conductor’s pedestal, the interior of the big tent was scalded in a torrent of white light, and a lusty cheer went up. The show was on, and Kirby, seated on a large oblong packing case at the performers’ entrance, found himself caught up in the spell of the moment, applauding despite his nagging pains.

  The bandmaster rapped sharply for attention with his baton. There was a no-nonsense mien about the big man, a self-important stuffed-shirtedness that begged to be punctured. He raised his baton high above his head, held it motionless for the space of a few tantalizing seconds, then snapped it downward with sudden ferocity to drive his charges into “Billboard March,” a smug little smile creasing his haughty features. The band was romping through “Billboard March” when a spotlight shone on a smudged, ferret-like face peering around the draped canvas of a narrow opening in the south side of the tent, and a midget clown, dressed like a hobo, stepped cautiously into view, signaling to the crowd for silence by clamping a stubby forefinger to his lips. He tiptoed across the middle-ring, stalking the bandmaster from the rear. There was mischief afoot and the crowd tittered expectantly. During the final all-out chorus of the rousing musical introduction, the little hobo came stealthily to a position immediately behind the bandmaster, and with a swift terrier-like leap he grabbed the great man’s baton and faced the musicians, wielding the slender stick in great sweeping motions. The band was quick to respond, swinging into “Over the Waves,” and the bandmaster clapped his hands to his hips, staring icily at the tiny intruder. With grim determination he descended from the conductor’s pedestal to lunge for the miscreant the way a mastiff lunges for a pork chop. The little hobo ducked under his clutches and departed the scene as a cat departs a barrel of turpentine, the bandmaster lumbering after him with all the grace of a grizzly bear pursuing a rabbit, while the band played “William Tell Overture.” Following two frantic trips around the sawdust oval, the bantam fugitive stumbled and fell, the outraged bandmaster crashed down on the little man like a Peruvian avalanche, and they rolled in the sawdust, struggling for possession of the baton with the band playing “My Buddy” in plaintive fashion. The bandmaster regained his baton and scrambled to his feet, red-faced and puffing, as the band lit into “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The bandmaster seized the insubordinate prankster by his collar, hauling him to an upright position and administering a swift kick to the patched seat of his trousers as the band played “Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere.” The bandmaster returned to his pedestal, strutting, dusting his red-gloved hands, a model of triumphant righteous indignation, the band was again belting out “Billboard March,” and the opening parade was coming into the big-top. The audience was in stitches, and Kirby, who hadn’t seen this portion of the show, had laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks, for those few glowing moments a kid again, the same all-believing kid who’d asked his mother about the Star of Bethlehem. The past was rushing at him now, and there was no place to hide. It swelled over Birch Kirby in a great warm wave, and he brushed at his cheeks with the back of his hand, wishing that Tizzie Bonkowski was with him. The laughter was fading, so was the music, and Kirby felt his tears subside, having no idea where they’d come from, or where they’d gone. A tired man will fight, fornicate, or weep at the slightest provocation, and Birch Kirby was exhausted.