“I felt light, like somebody was lifting my soul. The water went rushing over my body. The white gown got wet and stuck to my skin. I could feel myself transform…”

Sean Thomas was lying on his newly purchased mauve sheets staring up at the ceiling in the back of his trailer. Dressed in tan shorts and white athletic socks, he looked uncommonly crisp and clean, like a child fresh from a bath. The Mighty Mouse above his left nipple was pink from the shower. It was just after eleven on Saturday night in Toms River, New Jersey, and the show was tucked in for the night behind St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church just off the Garden State Parkway. Talk of God was in the air: Reverend Mark Fieger, the local pastor, was planning Sunday-morning services for the center ring. The Lord works in mysterious ways: Father Jack, the regular circus priest, was forced to hold mass in the cookhouse. Sean, meanwhile, had seen the light.

“The truth is, I owe it all to Jenny,” he said. “If not for her I wouldn’t have gone.”

“That Jenny,” I said. “She must be magic.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “All I know is, she’s my wife.”

When Sean hit the ground he switched direction. His new course took flight surprisingly fast.

“I remember the first time I saw her.” he said. “She came to see show in Florida at the end of last year. She was dressed real plain on account of her religion. She had no makeup on and was wearing a long dress. But she had these pretty green eyes and a killer smile. ‘Kris,’ I said, ‘who’s that?’ ‘That’s Jenny Montoya,’ he said. ‘She does a flying act.’ I asked him to introduce me to her. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’ve gotta warn you. She won’t sleep with you unless you marry her.’

“We started talking,” Sean remembered. “At first it was mostly about her old boyfriend and stuff. There was this guy from town who she was engaged to, but she had to break it off. He wanted her to go to college, but she told him she had to go back on the road. He thought about joining the circus, but it wasn’t really for him. Eventually they split up. I told her I had had a girlfriend, too, and basically the same thing happened. Sometimes you just can’t call from the road. Sometimes you can’t call for months. Jenny and I were talking about all these things, and the more we talked, the more we had in common. I swear we were like the same people.”

The next day Jenny came to the show again.

“I knew she was there but I didn’t say anything to her,” Sean said. “Later I was walking off the lot after the show when I heard somebody say, ‘Sean.’ I looked around and it was Jenny. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I want you to meet my pastor.’ I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even met her mom and dad. I knew something was going to happen…”

For the moment, however, nothing did. For the next three months they didn’t see each other, and when they met again in Louisville during a pre-season gig for another circus, Sean completely ignored her. “Blew her off, cold,” he said. “This was my first time on a different show. There were lots of girls. Still, I always had my eye on her. I would see what she was doing, who she was with. She was always alone or with her parents. I just kept my thoughts to myself.”

The season began for Beatty—Cole and another four months passed. The two of them were out of touch. Sean never mentioned Jenny around the lot, but his primping and nesting around his trailer belied his distraction. None of us knew why, until we reached New York. At the time there was a sudden flurry of activity. Nearly half a dozen shows were in the area, and every night performers went hurrying to see their friends on other circuses or hosted small reunions around our tent. It was in this stir that Jenny reappeared. She was quiet, shyly beautiful, and blended right in. Like most circus people, she was related to many of the performers on our show. Also she was best friends with Michelle Quiros. Nobody thought anything about her visit. Nobody, that is, except Sean.

“For a week every time I came out of the tent I would run into her. We would talk. The truth is, I made a point of talking to her, We would talk. The truth is, I made a point of talking to her, and she did the same with me. We just talked. Nothing more. I didn’t even make a move. One night we were sitting in front of the horses talking and her brother came walking by and said something to her in Spanish. She started crying.

“‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her.

“‘My brother called me a tramp.’

“‘Why?’ I said. ‘Because you’re talking to me?’

“‘Because he’s jealous,’ she said.

“‘What for?’

“‘You know my brother…,’ she said. ‘He’s jealous because I’m with you.’ Then she started laughing.

“‘No shit,’ I said. ‘You mean you people are fighting over me?’

“‘I guess so, but it’s still bad for me to be talking to you all the time. People will think. You know how the circus is….’ For a week she didn’t come back. I thought she had given in to the pressure. That’s when I hit the ground.”

In the wake of his accident on Staten Island, Sean was a different man. Isolated because of the fight, he was mostly left alone. In pain after every shot, he became surprisingly self-restrained. For the first time since he joined the circus he had been rebuffed—by his body, by his friends, and, apparently, by a girl.

Jenny, it turns out, was in a similar plight. After the incident with her brother, she got into a fight with her parents. She was twenty-three years old, she said. She ought to be able to talk with anybody she wished. Sean had encouraged her to stand up to her family. Now, having done it, she felt all alone. Finally, in a gloom, she decided to flee. With the aid of a friend she jumped into a borrowed car and drove the length of Long Island overnight to the tiny seaside town of Greenport, where the world’s largest tented circus was playing a one-day stand.

She couldn’t have picked a worse day. The lot was dusty, behind an abandoned warehouse. The circus was ornery, Danny had just left. And to make matters worse, word had just reached the lot that Elmo—on an advance publicity tour for the show—had thrown a fit at a mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, tossing his makeup into a fountain, smearing black greasepaint on a photographer’s bald head, and quitting the show in a late-summer huff that seemed to prove that no one was immune to the back side of the circus pendulum. It was hardly the right atmosphere for a confrontation, but at this stage one could hardly be avoided. Jenny’s parents, realizing what she had done, hopped in a car themselves the following morning and headed out in pursuit. The circus would have a rival show that night, just at the time that Billy Joel was said to be bringing his children to the circus.

Jenny arrived just as the first show was ending.

“I saw her step out of the car,” Sean recalled, “and I could see the tension on her face. She tried to avoid me and go straight to Michelle’s, but the high wire was working and nobody was home. Finally she came over to the cannon. ‘Man, you just need to get away from your parents,’ I told her. ‘They’re driving you crazy. You can’t do anything. They’re treating you like a child.’

“‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy. But there’s no way I can leave. I have no place to go.’

“‘Sure there is,’ I said. ‘You can come with me.’”

“‘I can’t go unless I get married,’ she said.

“‘Well then,’ I said, ‘let’s get married.’”

“Ladies and gentlemen, our featured attraction, the World’s Largest Cannon…!”