“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.
Mickey handed Pidre a whiskey-filled flask from his coat and pointed to the arena’s center where a vast silk curtain draped from the ceiling with ropes. A bedraggled clown sat on a barrel—face down, legs crossed—silent under the faintest spotlight. The clown appeared neither male nor female, but rather some in-between state, their face painted orange and red, their hair a marvelous blue. The clown drew silent stares as they tapped their long-shoed right foot against the barrel, a loud, rhythmic thwack. Then a drum line appeared, and the red tent erupted in marching music. The silk curtain fluttered and rose as if by a great wind and Wilston Montez materialized at the heart of the arena. The clown stood from their barrel and tumbled away. Wilston stepped down from the crate, revealing the great expanse of his musculature in rippled form.
“He’s a wild man,” Mickey said with a sparkle in his voice. “Hunted lions, sailed with pirates, trafficked in guns.”
“And now he kills bears,” said Pidre with an air of annoyance. “I suppose we’re all animals to him, then.”
If Mickey heard Pidre, he didn’t let him know and instead drank heavily from his flask. The arena went black, and lights reflected inside the audience’s eyes. They were silent and eager. They were greedy for death.
And then, the bear.
The animal emerged in iron shackles from the tent’s open door. Half a dozen men led the black beast, bound and already bloody, its claws bent inward and deformed. The pink and meaty side of the animal’s paws were cadaverous, as if by stigmata. Beneath the rising jeers of the crowd, Pidre could hear the bear’s agonizing shrieks, an extended lonesome plea.
“My god, Mickey,” Pidre said, dropping his face between his hands. “For shit’s sake, it’s damn near dead.”
The bear had been unshackled by its handlers and was now face-to-face with Wilston, who promptly grabbed the animal’s scarred snout and pushed the bear’s contorted face into rancid sawdust. He began beating the bear’s humped back with his fist. The bear grunted and Wilston reached for the animal’s discarded chains. He roped the iron shackles around the bear’s neck and pulled, impressive in his ability to drag the creature in a half-moon. But the bear was sickly, underfed, and Pidre knew that it was as close to death as possible while still being kept alive. That was a dangerous state—the line between the living and dead collapsed—and only evil could come of it. Wilston paused and held up his right hand to his ear, motioning for the crowd to raise their voices. He laughed maniacally. He grinned with mossy teeth. He pulled a blade from his flesh-colored trousers, taunting the animal with his flickering knife. The bear cried. There is no other way to say this. Pidre’s eyes welled with tears as the animal moaned in agony with its mouth opened to the crowd. For the first time, Pidre saw that every tooth in the bear’s mouth had been hastily removed, leaving behind a serrated bed of blackened gums.