After the woman shoots out of the cannon at 65 mph (says here) and lands on the big mat 110 feet away, fireworks blow up on either side. Then the whole arena goes nuts. With joy.
Out rush the acrobats, the trapeze artists. the walkers on the wire and jugglers of fire, the mad riders of stunt bikes and ultra-tall unicycles, the singers and the dancers and the crew, shadowy until now, in charge of rolling props away. They flood the rings and do cartwheels. Hug. Cheer. Wave to the crowd.
Joy, I mean, of the animal kind – what any fit, vigorous miracle of flesh might feel after pushing the body to limits hard to imagine for us blobs who watch from the seats.
Lights up. We churn out, elbow to elbow. Among us are good ol’ boys under backward-brim baseball caps. They move with a lumbering sway and raspy nose breath. Grannies herd sugared-up kids in full-throated scream. Tired wives/mothers, in faraway thought, amble toward their next set of chores. At the rear shuffle old men like me, for which this is no country.
*
Rewind a few weeks, and imagine the scene:
A blanket covers the whole figure so it's like a draped corpse, except for the feet in battered shoes that almost hang off the bench. Snow has sifted into the ridges and valleys of the blanket and sunk into his footwear’s frozen laces. Rare for Atlanta, still coming down – puffy flakes whipped by a brisk wind.
Leela’s busy scooping. I squint into the glare with my bad eyes. It's Joyce who notices the laid-out body sleeping or dead or maybe wide awake and shivering, teeth a-clatter under there.
At home, Joyce says, “I gotta take him something.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” I figure he’s likely not dangerous to someone bringing food, and anyway she can outrun him.
From our “bugout-bag” Joyce packs up flip-top cans of beef stew named after an essay god and bottles of water and a quick-assembly, lightweight tent.
I must explain the bugout-bag. She put it together after a hurricane made landfall in the gulf and was headed directly for Atlanta but suddenly took a right turn and destroyed Asheville. Next time luck might not favor us.
“He looks like you,” Joyce says when she returns. An unkempt but cordial geezer with a white beard and missing teeth. Walter.
We’ll be feeding him for a while.
Ha, yes! We wondered if there would be animal acts -- figured probably not. There was one, but it was a titanium robot dog. Sort of interesting and funny for the tots/rubes, but conflicted with the spirit of the show, I thought.
That poor old guy!
Decades ago in Atlanta, I went to see the Moscow Circus in an old arena that has since been torn down. I was with my ex-husband and our daughter who was about 4. We were actually in the front row, and I became concerned during the lion taming act: Would the big cats escape and attack us? The ex’s favorite act was the voluptuous young woman who was keeping about 25 Hula Hoops going for several minutes. Very different kind of circus.