Woman of Light (21)
————————
Jack Wesley’s Wild West Show came to Animas in late summer. The show bills lined the street poles and horse stables, white banners with red and blue lettering, advertising bear wrestlers, vaqueros, trick riders, sharpshooters, and more. The townspeople didn’t know what to expect from the infamous Jack Wesley show. There were murmurs in the saloons and storefronts—talk of an opening day parade, mentions of historical battle reenactments, the great and embellished drama of how the West was won, or, as Pidre looked at it, lost. He had spent several months anticipating the show’s arrival. The performers had finished a European tour, several stops on the East Coast, rolling inward to those industrial towns like Indianapolis, Detroit, and Kansas City. Mickey first told Pidre about the Wild West shows. There, he explained, Pidre could find performers to fill his amphitheater with their nearly divine talents.
“I hear the bear guy, his contract is up after these last couple spots,” Mickey said to Pidre over a bottle of mezcal. They were enclosed in the dark wood of Ma Chelington’s gin mill. Amber chutes of sunlight licked the uneven floorboards whenever a new patron passed through the batwing doors. The saloon smelled strongly of men—sweat, gunpowder, and rye.
Pidre took a swill of his drink. He dabbed around his mouth with a black kerchief. “I don’t want no wild animals. I can settle for trick riders, but a bear? That don’t seem right.”
“And imagine the shit! Well, ’pose it’s no worse than horse shit.” Mickey laughed in a gruff way and smacked his thigh, his dusty trousers releasing a brownish haze between them.
Pidre smiled and shook his head. “I’d rather stay away from bears.”
“Suit yourself,” said Mickey. “But these sons of bitches always want to be within an inch of death.”
Pidre glanced through the darkened saloon windows. Outside, in the afternoon sun, horses and passersby moved as if in shadows, some shallow and hazy representation of themselves. It reminded Pidre of the hours before waking, long after the mind has gone to sleep, when our world meets the world beyond, and spirits shuffle soundlessly in the night.
* * *
—
On a Wednesday morning, Jack Wesley’s Wild West Show arrived in Animas by train, dozens of black and red cars charging in from the east, smog raining reverse into the sky. That morning was unseasonably warm, and as performers opened their car doors and stepped out onto the narrow decks, they appeared brilliant in white sunlight. The women wore high leather skirts, draped in fringe, sashaying their capable arms through the dry mountain breeze. Vaqueros and cowboys leaned over the rails, clasping on to the train’s ladders in their buckskin gauntlet gloves. The people of Animas gasped and cheered, showered the performers with handfuls of candy and cigarettes. Graceful white horses rested their muzzles through gaps in their stock cars. The air was rich with the stench of gunpowder and manure.
From a hillside, Pidre studied the commotion, squatting above his spurs, rolling a piece of white sage in his palm. There was something ominous about the advent of Jack Wesley’s Wild West Show. And though he couldn’t fully grasp the eventual consequences of that day, as he was peering at those jubilant train cars screeching to a halt, Pidre felt some unknowable stone dropped into the pool of his destiny.
That evening, Mickey and Pidre dressed in their finest—topcoats and beaver pelts, the ostrich boots and silver buckles. They set out for the makeshift fairgrounds, the white beams of gas spotlights eclipsing the heavens, appearing to trample and flatten the stars. The sounds of the Wild West show boomed throughout canyon walls—a pistol crack, a long rifle’s pinging bullet, the exasperated neigh of a horse, the shriek of a female trick rider, the roar of a hungry crowd. The temperature had dropped and the men breathed fog as they walked through the carnival’s wooden and lighted arch. The main stage was housed in a red tent, the big top, as Pidre had learned from the other traveling circuses that came through the Lost Territory. But Jack Wesley’s show was different.
As they walked the crowded fairgrounds, Pidre made note of the different acts. A side tent featuring a real-live authentic train robbery and another with a brightly lit sign: INDIAN WAR BATTLE REENACTMENT. The circus goers were mostly Anglos from Animas and the nearby ranches and villages. They hungrily entered the tents, their eyes wide with amazement, their mouths open and full of half-chewed kettle corn. It was in that moment that Pidre realized he had entered the strange world of Anglo myth, characters resurrected from the language of story, populating the realm of the living, side by side, if only for one night and one night only. Pidre came from storytelling people, but as he passed a big top devoted to the reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, he couldn’t help but think that Anglos were perhaps the most dangerous storytellers of all—for they believed only their own words, and they allowed their stories to trample the truths of nearly every other man on Earth.
At a little past eight, Mickey and Pidre took their seats in the top row of the main tent, the wooden bleachers sticky with beer, the tent’s crimson walls coloring the arena like a wound. The sawdust floor was scabbed and uneven, clumped in areas where drunks had vomited or were too lazy to relieve themselves in the outside stalls. The bleachers were filled with single men, working women, small children with coal-smeared faces. While Pidre recognized several of the town’s people, the crowd was far larger than expected. They had come for the main attraction, a bear wrestler named Wilston Montez from Wyoming. He was rumored to be of Spanish and German lineage, a solid man with an enormous egg-shaped head, his face tattooed in inky pathways around his mouth and nose. He was shirtless and wore leather trousers, oddly flesh-colored. In some ways, Pidre noticed that Wilston Montez resembled a skinned and defeated bear himself.