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I shouted.
For, half ‘round the ring, the camel, seized with an earthquake of arthritis, collapsed.
It fell as if its tendons were chopped.
With a ridiculous leer, with a grimace that begged our pardon, the camel crashed like a wall of canvas and dung.
It knocked one of the ringside tables flat. Beer bottles shattered amidst one elegant funeral-director husband, his hysterical wife, and two sons made joyous by this event which they would tell about for the rest of their lives.
The tiny lady with the big teeth, waving bravely, smiling her own pardon, went down with the ship of the desert.
Somehow she retained her seat. Somehow she was not rolled on or crushed. Pretending that nothing whatsoever was wrong, she continued to wave and smile as the various rope-haulers, trombone players, and trapeze artists, half-in half-out of their new-old disguises, ran to butt, kick, pummel, and spit on the eye-rolling beast. Meanwhile the rest of the parade circled the ring, making a wide detour around this point of collapse.
Getting the camel put back together this leg here, that joint there, and the neck, so! was like putting up an Arab tent in a hurricane. No sooner had these sweating architects established one leg and nailed it to the earth, than another leg creaked and broke apart.
The camel’s humps flopped in opposite directions, wildly. The little woman stayed bravely sidesaddle. The phonograph brass-band pulsed, and at last the camel was reassembled; the great homely jigsaw of bad breath and Band-Aid-covered pelt reared up to shamble, walking wounded, drunk and disorderly, threatening to crack yet other tables flat, one last time around the ring.
The tiny lady way up there on the smelly dune of beast waved a final time. The audience cheered. The parade limped out. The trombone player rushed over to the platform to shut the fanfare off.
I found that I was standing, my mouth open and aching, my lungs raw with shouts of encouragement I had not heard myself give. I saw that there were dozens of others, like myself, who had been caught up in the despair of the woman and the embarrassment of the camel. Now we all sat down, giving each other quick proud looks, glad for happy endings. The band shuffled back in, wearing gold epaulettes on their work-coveralls. They struck a brass note.
“The Great Lucretia! The Butterfly of Berlin!” cried the ringmaster, appearing for the first time by the very proper tables, his trumpet hidden behind his back. “Lucretia!”
Lucretia danced out.
But of course it was not just Lucretia who danced, but tiny Melba and Roxanne and Ramona Gonzales. With many hats, many costumes, she ran with the same vast piano smile. Oh, Lucretia, Lucretia, I thought.
O woman who rides camels that fail, O woman who juggles kegs and rips tacos—
O woman, I added, who tomorrow will drive one of those flimsy tin locust-scourge trucks across the Mexican desert toward some lonely town inhabited by 200 dogs, 400 cats, 1,000 candles, and 200 forty-watt bulbs, plus 400 people. And of those 400 people, 300 will be old women and old men, 80 will be children and 20 young women waiting for young men who will never come back from across the desert where they have vanished toward San Luis Potosí, Juárez, and sea-bottoms dry and empty and baked to salt. And here comes the circus, packed in a few grasshopper-plague cars, flicking, rattling, jouncing over the pothole roads, squashing tarantulas to strawberry phlegm, crushing slow dogs to tarpaulin papier-mâché shapes left to flake at high noon on an empty turnpike, and the circus, not looking back, gone.
And this small woman, I thought, why, she is almost the whole thing. If she ever dies …
Ta-ta! said the orchestra, calling me back from reveries of dust and sun.
A silver buckle flew down out of the tent sky on a fishing line. It had come to fish for—her!
She attached the silver buckle to her smile.
“Oh my God, look!” said my friend. “She … she’s going to—fly!”
The tiny woman with the biceps of a truck dri
ver and the legs of a six-day bike-rider jumped.
God, on his long fishing line, drew her whizzing into the brown flapping-tent sky.
The music soared with her.
Applause shattered the air.
“How high would you say she is?” whispered my friend.
I would not answer. Twenty feet, maybe twenty-five.
But somehow, with this tent and these people and this night, it seemed a hundred.
And then, the tent began to die. Or rather the Smile began to collapse the tent.
