Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top (6 page)

He cut to the right through the area where the campers were parked, catching his form and pulling it into a near classic movement—knees well up, spit flying out of the side of his mouth, eyes glazed and straight ahead (normal, although this time it was from the blow to his head)—and ran full on into Blades.

“Hey! How’d you get out?”

Amos didn’t hear him, and there was no way Blades could slow him down or catch him.

He bounced off Blades, knocking him down, and was out of sight between cars in an instant.

Dunc was in back of Amos, not gaining but moving with good speed, so fast that he ran up to Blades just as the man was getting up. Dunc was moving too fast to turn, and at the last possible instant he jumped, trying to clear Blades, but he was just a bit too low, and
his foot came down directly on top of Blades’s head.

Dunc compensated, lunged, putting all his weight on Blades’s head, and powered over, jamming Blades’s head down between his shoulders so hard that Blades’s eyes crossed, and he dropped on his face.

The lunge slowed Dunc. He had been almost holding his own with Amos, but now the half-beat required to push Blades’s head down into his chest caused Dunc to lose two steps, and when he looked up, Amos was gone.

Still, Dunc thought it was not so bad. But he had not seen Amos hit the mirror bracket, did not know Amos was running on automatic.

Dunc remembered the plan and assumed Amos would go for the authorities, try to find the police.

The security guard.

There was a security guard by the ticket booth to keep people in line, and Dunc was sure that was where Amos would go.

He gave up following Amos and cut to the left, headed for the ticket booth to find Amos
and tell the security guard what was happening.

It was too late.

When Dunc rounded the corner of the big top, he found the front area jammed with people. The crowds waiting for tickets were packed back to the parking lot, and Dunc couldn’t see either the security guard or Amos anywhere.

He stood on a small stool for a few minutes, scanning the crowd, but he still didn’t see anything and was about to jump down when he recognized somebody.

Melissa.

She was getting her ticket and moving to the front opening on the tent.

And he knew.

Seeing Melissa triggered his thinking and he knew.

Amos wasn’t coming to look for the security guard.

Something must have happened. There hadn’t been time, or he got his wires crossed, and Amos would go to the service truck and then head for the trapeze.

Dunc knew.

He wheeled around, cut in front of the crowd, and ran into the tent just as Melissa passed through the opening with the rest of the crowd.

Of all the directions where Dunc didn’t want to look for Amos, most of all he didn’t want to look up.

He looked up.

There, standing on the small platform near the top of the tent, holding on with one hand and waving down at the crowd, smiling widely—his eyes still vacant—glittering in spangly tights that caught light from the lights aimed at him and only looked a little bit tacky and worn; there bigger than life, there what seemed hundreds of feet above the ground …

There stood Amos.

“Oh,” Dunc said—whispered to himself. “Oh no. Amos. Not really. Don’t do this, Amos.” He’d have to get Amos down, get him down without hurting him, but even as he thought it, he saw how impossible it would be.

Amos was near the top of the center pole on the small stand, his head up close to the canvas of the roof, and the only way up to him
was right up the center of the pole on a small ladder.

Dunc would have to get to the center of the tent and climb the ladder and somehow drag Amos back down against his will.

Just impossible.

Still, Dunc thought, they were best friends for life. He had to try.

Dunc made his way through the crowds, which were already taking their seats while the small band—Willy and Billy with trumpets—finished the fanfare. Willy jumped from the bandstand out into the middle of the ring and took a microphone from a stand.

“Ladeeees and gentlemen! Welcome to the Classic Grand Old Circus! Before the grand entrance parade, hold on to your hats and watch the top of the tent—”

Dunc was at the pole. He grabbed the metal rungs of the ladder and started climbing.

“—for our first act. The death-defying high-bar trapeze performed by the bravest of the brave, a young man from your own home town. His name is Am—”

The microphone cut out. Willy kept talking
and hit it with his hand, but Amos’s name was lost.

Dunc was at the platform.
Don’t look down
, he thought—
just don’t look down
. His hand was reaching up on the platform, was an inch from Amos’s ankle.

“Amos!” Dunc yelled. “Amos, don’t do this!”

Billy ran back to the bandstand and picked up his trumpet and joined Willy, and the music swelled higher and higher, and Amos nodded, grabbed the bar with both hands.

“No! Amos, don’t! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Amos stepped off into space.

•
11

Dunc scrambled up onto the platform, still not looking down, just in time to see Amos swinging, growing smaller as he swung away.

Maybe
, Dunc thought,
if I don’t look, maybe it won’t happen
.

But he had to look, and Dunc was stunned to find Amos doing everything perfectly. He acted as if he’d been doing trapeze acts all his life.

Amos swung away with almost perfect rhythm, arching his back and kicking to make the bar go higher.

Dunc stole a quick look down at the crowd, and they had gone silent and all had their
faces up, hundreds of silent faces watching Amos. Just in back of the bandstand, Dunc thought he could see Melissa.

Amos finished the swing out, kicked up at the canvas of the top of the tent, and started back. On the way back toward Dunc he curled up and stuck his legs through and hung by his knees.

The crowd oohed.

Amos’s swing brought him close to Dunc, and Dunc made a grab but missed. For a moment Amos hung at the top of the swing, upside down, facing Dunc, and his eyes were still glazed.

He started the swing back, the speed picking up rapidly, and halfway through the swing he suddenly straightened his legs and dropped to hang by his ankles and feet wrapped around the ropes.

The crowd gasped.

Dunc looked down and saw that Melissa was standing, one hand to her mouth. Well, he thought, Amos had gotten her attention.

It was on the fourth swing back that things began to go wrong.

Perhaps because of the wind rushing past
his face, or just the passage of time—whatever the reason, the dazed condition wore off.

Amos swung back toward Dunc, hanging by his heels, and as he came up to Dunc, his eyes cleared and he recognized his friend.

“Dunc, what’s happening?”

He looked down.

His eyes came back to Dunc, wide with fear and horror. Amos was at the top of the swing, pausing before the swing down again, hanging full down so his face was even with Dunc.

“What am I doing here?”

He started the swing back.

“Helllllllllppp!”

Except that this time he was not in good form, not classic at all.

He was like meat on a hook.

The trapeze bar swung away, then back, then away again like a pendulum and back, and each time it went less and less until it hung straight down over the center of the ring, over the net.

With Amos hanging by his ankles below it.

“You’ve got to swing, Amos!” Dunc yelled.
“Swing a little and get back to where I can grab you!”

Amos hung silently.

“Just a little, Amos—just swing a little.”

Amos didn’t move. He hung upside down, looking over at Dunc, then at the ground, then back at Dunc.

“Come on, Amos.”

Amos’s ankles slipped a bit.

“Reach up and grab the bar!” Dunc yelled. “You’re slip—”

Amos dropped.

Like an arrow, like a shot, like seven pounds of garbage in a three-pound bag, like a spear heading for a target Amos dropped exactly straight, head down, perfect, and hit the net at about seventy-two miles an hour, arrow-true, with his face.

For half a second it seemed that he would go through. The net plunged with him, down and down until Amos’s nose was exactly two inches from the dirt of the floor of the ring.

Then the spring ties at the corners of the net took over and snapped him back up with a force very nearly equal to the speed with which he’d come down.

Except that his body had angled over, and he did not head straight back up. Instead, he went off at a forty-five-degree angle, arms and legs flailing in a great cartwheel, up over and off the net, across the side of the ring, wheeling end-over-end to land in a heap.

Directly beneath the elephant Biboe, who was waiting to do his bit with the entrance parade.

It was all too much for Biboe. First the business of Amos running beneath him earlier, and now he came flying out of nowhere and landed in a cloud of dust and animal droppings.

Biboe snaked his trunk back and down and wrapped it around Amos’s middle and flicked him like a booger, back cartwheeling through the air, across the bandstand, across Willy and Billy into Melissa’s lap.

The bleachers couldn’t take the sudden strain, and Amos and Melissa went through, down in a pile with eight or ten people on top of them in a cloud of dirt and dust and popcorn.

All this time, Dunc had been coming down the ladder. He arrived just in time to see
Amos push his head out of the pile of splintered boards and tangled people, look up, and say:

“Was it too showy?”

Before he passed out.

•
12

Amos raised his face and aimed it at Dunc. “So what do you think—are the lines gone?”

They were at Dunc’s house, in Dunc’s room. Dunc was working on a model of a World War II fighter plane. He was just finishing it, and the workmanship was, as usual, perfect. No extra glue, all the joints tight and sanded smooth. Perfect. Amos was also working on a model—same war, different fighter. His model looked like a blop of glue with a piece of plastic stuck to it.

But Amos wasn’t talking about the model. He was talking about his face. It had been a week since the circus disaster—as Dunc and
the newspapers thought of it—and Amos was worried about the grid lines in his face. When he hit the net face first, the cords had made deep impressions and left him looking like a waffle with eyes.

“The lines are almost gone.” Dunc set his model on the desk.

“Good—I want the lines all gone before I call Melissa and apologize.”

Dunc shook his head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Why not? We saved the circus, didn’t we?”

“Well … yes. We told Willy and Billy, and they fired the guys who were trying to ruin them. So we sort of saved the circus.”

“And I did the trapeze like I said I would, didn’t I?”

Dunc stared at him. “That’s where the trouble starts. You didn’t exactly
do
the trapeze.”

“I most certainly did! Willy and Billy both said it was the greatest trapeze act they’d ever seen.”

“No.” Dunc shook his head. “What they said was it was the most incredible trapeze act they’d ever seen.”

“It means the same thing.”

“Not exactly.”

“Close enough for me to call Melissa.”

“Amos, you broke her ankle when you fell on her.”

“I didn’t fall—Biboe threw me.”

“Still—”

“And I didn’t mean to break her ankle. It was an accident. And that’s what I want to apologize for—she’s just waiting for me to call. I can feel it.”

Dunc leaned across the desk. “Look, Amos. She didn’t catch your name. She said if she ever found out who broke her ankle, she was going to break
his
ankle, and then his neck. The way it is now, she doesn’t know you—in other words, it’s normal. If you tell her your name, it’s all over.”

He was going to say more, was going to tell Amos that it was better to be wise and wait—maybe until he was sixty or so. He was going to try and help Amos through this difficult time, was going to do all that he could—except that the phone rang.