"Be careful up there, sweetheart," Estelle said. "Nothing like the last day of the year for bad luck."

 

Roger looked at Estelle's sagging painted face and saw the wet twinkle of real worry underneath the gobs of eye make-up in her gypsy mask. In spite of her warning, he had a good feeling about the day. It had been a bad week and a worse night and today the sun was up high and warm. It was the first Saturday in October, the Scarapelli Circus' last show of the year, and the weather was going to be perfect.

 

"It's alright," Roger said, giving her the thumbs up.
"You're a sweetheart," Estelle said, pinching his cheek. "I think we'll keep you around."

 

Estelle was the Scarapelli matriarch and her approval was a contract offer for the next season. Roger was sick of the road, and sick of the circus, but he knew he'd be hungry for it next spring and it made him feel good to know he was welcome back with the Scarapelli's. They were one of the oldest family circuses in North America.
Estelle married Giovanni Scarapelli when he was a twenty-year old acrobat for Ringling and they had traveled together ever since, 52 years. Giovanni had had a stroke in January and couldn't run the troupe anymore. The stroke was the result of a career punctuated by aerial accidents. He'd been in a coma three times in his 72 years. All of Giovanni and Estelle's children were performers.

 

Roger turned away from her and jumped onto one of the twenty-foot poles that held the tent's outer edges off the ground. He found the pole with his feet and walked up it one foot it front of the other, hand over hand, like a Caribbean boy going for a coconut, til he reached the lip of the tent. He felt for the thick metal line that ran from one of the sixty-foot masts that anchored the high part of the tent marquee down to the tent poles at the edge of the canvas. He grabbed the line through the canvas, let his feet slide off the pole so that for a moment he dangled twenty feet above the ground. He swung his left leg up over the edge of the tent, and then pressed down with his knee until he was up onto the tent's canvas. His muscles burned a little. They were tight from the long ride the day before and from unpacking the tent canvas late at night without stretching. Roger turned over and lay back against the tent canvas.

 

"Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, it's the circus life for me," he said to the early morning sky.
He placed his hands behind his head and leaned into the canvas and watched the little puffball clouds sail above him.
"Wake up lazy bones."

 

Roger opened his eyes, which had closed for a moment. He leaned his head back and looked upside down up the line of the tent canvas to the high ridge that separated one side of the tent from the other. Cara straddled the line of the tent, comfortable as could be at sixty feet in the air. She was kicking the tent canvas with her boot heels, like she was riding horse.

Roger had been in love with Cara since he'd joined up with the Scarapelli's at the beginning of the season but she had still been involved with Ivan then, in whatever way they were involved. She had only recently started to notice Roger, and in the past two weeks she had started needling him. Sometimes it was mean-spirited but mostly it was just flirty, another cause for being in a good mood.
Roger turned over onto his stomach and admired Cara right side up. She had brown hair and brown eyes and a long lithe body with the strong thick thighs of a horse rider.

 

"Hurry up," she said. "They're waiting on us."

He scampered up the side of the sloping tent canvas, counting on his forward momentum to keep him from sliding backwards. He swung his leg over the tent guideline so that he straddled it facing Cara, now sixty feet off the ground.

 

"I didn't hear them yet," Roger said, catching his breath.
Cara shrugged.

"I thought I heard Ivan."
"The tent's a little slippery," Roger said.
"That's what we get for dropping it. It's not supposed to touch the ground."
Roger ran his finger over the tent's surface and held it up for Cara to see the black grit.
"Check out my jeans," she said.

 

She stood straight up, digging her heels on the sloped surface of the canvas, and turned at her waist to show how the ass of her jeans had turned dark. Roger wanted to touch it. His dick got hard and he had to shift his weight on the wire to hide it.

 

"We can do laundry tomorrow," Roger said. "We can do anything we want."
"After we break down."
"We're not breaking down tonight?"
Cara shrugged. Roger looked at her face. She was part Hungarian and had grown-up in Arizona. He was from New Hampshire.
"You guys ready up there?"

 

Ivan's voice was loud, a stage voice, and it had some exotic tinge, Italian-Russian-Makebelieve. Roger leaned forward and peeled the tent apart at the seam so he could look straight down inside the tent. Ivan was there with Werner, the old Hanoverian animal trainer, and Ted, the show manager.
"We're set," Roger said.