“You were on a show?” the man asks. “Which one?”
“I was on two. The first was the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth,” I say proudly, rolling each syllable off my tongue. “The second was Ringling.”
The chair stops. The man’s face suddenly appears in front of mine. “You were with the Benzini Brothers? What years?”
“The summer of 1931.”
“You were there for the stampede?”
“Sure was!” I exclaim. “Hell, I was in the thick of it. In the menagerie itself. I was the show’s vet.”
He stares at me, incredulous. “I don’t believe this! After the Hartford fire and Hagenbeck-Wallace wreck, that’s probably the most famous circus disaster of all time.”
“It was something, all right. I remember it like yesterday. Hell, I remember it better than yesterday.”
The man blinks and sticks his hand out. “Charlie O’Brien the third.”
“Jacob Jankowski,” I say, taking his hand. “The first.”
Charlie O’Brien stares at me for a very long time, his hand spread on his chest as though he were pledging an oath. “Mr. Jankowski, I’m going to get you into the show now before there’s nothing left to see, but it would be an honor and a privilege if you would join me for a drink in my trailer after the show. You’re a living piece of history, and I’d surely love to hear about that collapse firsthand. I’d be happy to see you home afterward.”
“I’d be delighted,” I say.
He snaps to, and moves around to the back of the chair. “All righty then. I hope you enjoy our show.”
An honor and a privilege.
I smile serenely as he wheels me right up to the ring curb.
Twenty-five
It’s after the show—a damn good show, too, although not of the magnitude of either the Benzini Brothers or Ringling, but how could it be? For that you need a train.
I’m sitting at a Formica table in the back of an impressively appointed RV sipping an equally impressive single malt—Laphroaig, if I’m not mistaken—and singing like a canary. I tell Charlie everything: about my parents, my affair with Marlena, and the deaths of Camel and Walter. I tell him about crawling across the train in the night with a knife in my teeth and murder on my mind. I tell him about the redlighted men, and the stampede, and about Uncle Al being strangled. And finally I tell him what Rosie did. I don’t even think about it. I just open my mouth and the words tumble out.
The relief is instant and palpable. All these years it’s been pent up inside me. I thought I’d feel guilty, like I betrayed her, but what I feel—particularly in light of Charlie’s sympathetic nodding—is more like absolution. Redemption, even.
I was never entirely sure whether Marlena knew—there was so much going on in the menagerie at that moment that I have no idea what she saw, and I never brought it up. I couldn’t, because I couldn’t risk changing how she felt about Rosie—or, if it comes right down to it, how she felt about me. Rosie may have been the one who killed August, but I also wanted him dead.
At first, I stayed silent to protect Rosie—and there was no question she needed protecting, in those days elephant executions were not uncommon—but there was never any excuse for keeping it from Marlena. Even if it caused her to harden toward Rosie, she’d never have caused her harm. In the entire history of our marriage, it was the only secret I kept from her, and eventually it became impossible to fix. With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.
Having heard my story, Charlie looks not in the least bit shocked or judgmental, and my relief is so great that when I finish telling him about the stampede, I keep going. I tell him about our years with Ringling and how we left after the birth of our third child. Marlena had simply had enough of being on the road—kind of a nesting thing, I figure—and besides, Rosie was getting on in years. Fortunately, the staff veterinarian at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago chose that spring to drop dead, and I was a shoo-in—not only did I have seven years of experience with exotics and a damned good degree, but I also came with an elephant.