He did. In what turned out to be his farewell performance, Elvin Bale overshot the net and landed on the ring curb, rupturing his spinal cord with a career-ending, marriage-ending, seemingly life-ending snap. Recalling the episode more than six years later, Elvin still seemed haunted by his accident. Though his performing days were over, his circus life had continued. Overnight, he became an elder statesman in the community. He opened an agency and began representing many of the top acts in the country, including almost every act on the Beatty-Cole show. More importantly, he sought out his own replacement. He went looking for the next Elvin Bale. When he found him it was in the most unlikely place.

“He was my pool man.”

“Your what?”

“My pool man. He cleaned my pool. I was lying there one day looking at him. He was blond, muscular. Not too tall, not too heavy, about a hundred fifty-five pounds, I’d say, almost the same weight as me. He had been a high school football star. He was wiry and reckless, always getting into fights at school, kind of a rough-tough kid, though spoiled in other respects. But the thing was, he had that all-American look. And then I realized it: he was me. Sean Thomas was me.”

The bustle of opening day was just beginning to pick up around the end of the trailer line, where Elvin’s three sisters parked their vehicles side by side. Elvin’s older sister, Gloria, stopped by with new blue and white ostrich plumes for her Arabian horses. His younger sister, Bonnie, was home sewing costumes for her cloud swing. His twin, Dawnita, the only brunette in a family of blondes, was complaining that her Siamese cat was about to escape through the screen door. Just then the Bales’s mother arrived from Sarasota bearing Cadbury Creme Eggs and a new costume for Sean. As they had done since they were children—first, on their father Trevor’s circus in wartime London, later on Ringling Brothers in America, after that on Beatty-Cole—the Bales made their own nest of sorts wherever they landed and pulled in a few stray fledglings like me and made them feel at home.

“Oh, Mom, the costume looks great,” Elvin said as his mother bent down to kiss him.

“Isn’t it magnificent?” she said, holding up a white bodysuit covered in red, white, and blue flaming stripes like something Evel Knievel might have worn. Her voice retained much more of the British accent that still lingered around the corners of her children’s speech. “It’s made with a new thing called a hologram. It’s very expensive.”

As she spoke, Sean arrived. Noticeably bowlegged and decidedly stiff, he was wearing blue-jean shorts, no shirt, and a Los Angeles Raiders baseball cap. Around his neck he wore a gold chain with a Florida Gator dangling from its center. On his left breast he had a tattoo of Mighty Mouse in flight. He thanked Elvin’s mother for the costume and sat down on a beach chair to pull it on. The cellular telephone rang for Elvin, who answered it.

I turned to Sean. Like everyone else on the show, he had seen me the night before when Johnny introduced me to the cast and crew after the dress rehearsal, put his arm around me, and said, “He’s one of us now. Treat him like a member of the family.” Thus blessed, I was free to roam.

“So, are you doing anything special today?” I asked. “Any rituals?”

“Go to work, that’s about it.”

“Aren’t you nervous?”

He shrugged. “What’s there to be nervous about? I know what I’m doing. If I land on the ground, well, I land on the ground. It’s a day-by-day act. You try your best to calculate everything, but you can’t always be sure.”

Sean stood up with the costume. The shoulder pads fit perfectly above his arms, but the legs were slightly baggy. Elvin’s mother hurried to the car to get some pins for an emergency repair. The first show was now just two hours away.

“So you don’t get scared?” I asked.

“Scared? Scared of what? Breaking a few bones?”

“Scared of having an accident.”

“Falling’s not scary,” he said, bending down to lace up his high-top boxing shoes. “Scary’s catching AIDS. Scary is being poor.” He stood up, nodded for me to follow, and headed toward the cannon, which was parked in the space next to Dawnita. Sitting quietly in the grass with no glitzy trappings from the show, the cannon looked potent but slightly out of place, like a plastic mobile ICBM I had once seen in a toy store in Moscow. The thirty-foot-long shiny silver barrel was attached to the back of a flatbed truck that had been painted fire engine red. On the passenger door was a message: GUN FOR HIRE. “Pain is not scary,” Sean continued, now looking at me directly with a squint in his eyes. For the first time I could see his face. It was worn by the sun. His nose was sharp, his chin jaunty. His eyes were vivid blue. He was the picture of Marine Corps confidence. “No, pain is a feeling and it goes away. What I’m scared of is dying…”

I raised my eyebrows. Sean nodded his head. Then, as if alarmed by his own morbidity, he suddenly caught himself. “But I’m not going to die,” he said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because I’m good.” He tweaked the cannon on the barrel. His voice assumed the mock-aggressive tone of a man pretending to wrestle with an inanimate object. “Aren’t I, you big lady, you big beast? I’m good, and you know it.” He hopped up on the sideboard and with a flash and jump was standing on the barrel above the mouth of the cannon, towering over the circus lot with his arms, Superman-like, at his waist. “I’m Sean Thomas, the Human Cannonball, the Daredevil of the Decade, the Big DD.”

He looked down on me watching from the ground, recast his pose for a moment, then lay down on the barrel and removed the cover from the mouth.

“So,” he asked, “do you want to have a peek inside?”

“Why not,” I said.

“Because you can’t.” He grinned. “People offer to pay me to go inside, you know, but I don’t let them. It’s a secret. Only I can know.” He bent down and kissed the barrel.

“We’ll see,” I said with a nod to the barrel. I turned back toward Dawnita’s.

“Where’s Sean?” Elvin asked when I arrived back under Dawnita’s awning.

“I think he’s making love to the cannon.”

“At least he’s not making love inside the cannon. I’d kill him if he did that.”

“Thanks for the lesson,” I said. “I’m off to put on my makeup.”

“Good luck,” Elvin declared. “And remember what I said: you’re doing it for the audience. No matter how bad it gets around here—how muddy, or gossipy, or miserable—you can never forget that you’re doing it for them.”

I promised him that I would remember. “By the way,” I said, “what do you say to a circus performer before a show? Break a leg?”

Elvin smiled at my question even as I winced at my faux pas. “Not really,” he said, slapping his thighs. “We just say, ‘Go get ’em!’”

Facing the Fire