We got up and left the bar. He didn’t want to leave a tip. I left one for both of us.

“So why do you stay?” I said as we walked across the empty parking lot toward the tent. The day had been the hottest in a month. The night was still uncomfortably warm.

“Well, to be honest, I think I’m running from something,” Darryl said. “Running from what, I don’t know. Ever since my grandmomma died about five years ago, my mind’s been fucked up. Then my little brother died and it got worse. He had AIDS.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was a faggot,” he said sadly. “I spent the last two months with him and was there when he died. Ever since then the world hasn’t been the same. For a long time I had to get away. I went back to hustling. I’d go to a nice bar, like the one we were just in. I would meet some nice white man at the bar. We’d chat. I’d make him buy me a drink. I’d find out how much money he had. Then when we got outside in the parking lot I would jump him. ‘This is a jack,’ I would say. ‘Don’t make it a murder.’”

I paused on the blacktop and looked at Darryl. His eyes were yellow and clouded with smoke. His arms were shaking at his side. He was remembering his childhood. He was recalling his brother. He was recreating his hustle. For a moment neither of us moved. My mind froze still in the face of a story I was helping bring back to life. My eyes darted nervously from his face to the nearby tent and back to his hands. I couldn’t help remembering that it was only a year earlier that Darryl had witnessed a murder during setup. Two men from props were setting the high wire when one of the men pulled a knife from his blue jeans and stabbed his colleague to death in the chest. Outraged, the rest of the crew, including Darryl, surged around the attacker and started beating him in frustration, eventually stabbing him in the eye with the weapon he had used to kill his colleague. The killer was left behind in jail. Word never leaked off the lot. The circle closed around itself.

Now face-to-face in the parking lot, Darryl and I eyed each other, each of us haunted by different fears. Across the street a young woman appeared with a dog. Darryl whistled in her direction. “Hey, babe, come on over here!” he cried. The woman ignored him. “I got a knife,” he called to her. “Okay,” I started to say. “Enough.” But I didn’t have to say it at all. He knew. Darryl put his hands over his eyes and wobbled on the pavement. For a second I thought he was going to fall over—or cry. He put his arm on my shoulder. I was no longer afraid.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he said. “I’ve got to get a new life.”

We started toward the tent. For a long time Darryl didn’t say anything. Finally I broke the silence.

“You’ve been telling me for a long time you wanted me to remember you when I left,” I said. “What do you want me to remember?”

“I want you to say that when you were in the circus you met this man named Darryl. He was a black man. And he was always jovial. No matter if you was in a bad mood, or if the world was on your shoulders, Darryl made you smile. When I sold magazines I used to love the grumps. They were the easiest people to sell because they were the easiest to cheer up. I like to make people smile. That’s my thing. That’s why I say to you every time I see you, ‘Just let me hold something, even if it’s just your hand!’”

“Yeah,” I said. “What does that mean anyway?”

“It doesn’t mean nothing. It just means we’re in this together, brother. It means we’re partners. It means that the circus is sometimes hell and the only way to survive is to enjoy it.”

He stuck out his hand about chest high. I stuck out mine in the same position, re-creating the mock dance we both had mastered in the course of the year. And in that moment before our palms locked, we both laughed out loud, and smiled.

Two days later Darryl’s fifth grandchild was born.

The day after that he left the show and returned at last to his family.

Love on the Wire

The penultimate act is the closest to heaven. Its actors are the nearest to God.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, directing your attention to ring one…Circus producers John W. Pugh, E. Douglas Holwadel proudly present…three-time Golden Clown winner at the Circus Festival of Monte Carlo…the amazing…the daring…Angel Quiros!”

Dressed like a matador in purple knickers and saffron shirt, Angel Quiros springs out of his clogs at the edge of ring one and lands soft-footed on a diagonal wire that stretches halfway across the tent and halfway up to the summit. The crowd grows hushed. They barely applaud. Their fingers, by now, are totally coated in popcorn butter and Cracker Jack caramel. Their lips are equally adhesive with Coca-Cola syrup and cotton-candy residue. At this stage the elephants have come and gone. The Kristo family has followed in style with an exotic hand-balancing act. The smoke from that act still lingers in the sky as Angel slowly tiptoes through the fog toward his own private skyscraping tower.

“For me, walking up is simple,” Angel said when I asked him why he ascended the wire instead of one of the ladders on the supporting towers. “Frankly it’s the easiest way to the top. It’s certainly easier than climbing the ladder. That would surely kill me.”

Ta-dum! Arriving at the platform on top of the tower, Angel lifts his arms like a triumphant bullfighter and—along with his wife, brother-in-law, and sister—waves his hands in introductory salute.

“From Spain…,” Jimmy James exclaims, “the Quiros Troupe!”

With a spicy intro from the band and a cheery clapping of his hands, Angel pivots on the platform and, at last, confronts the wire. Made of tightly braided steel, it’s thirty feet above the ground, thirty-five feet from end to end, and three-quarters of an inch around. In real life this type of wire is used to suspend elevators. In the circus it’s used to dance.

“I remember the first time I ever stepped on a high wire,” Angel said. His voice was still coated in Castilian elegance. His mannerisms were almost princely. “I was fourteen years old. We had been doing a low-wire act at my family’s circus in Madrid, and my father asked us if we wanted to do the high wire. ‘It’s much higher,’ he said, ‘and more dangerous. You might be scared.’ We decided to try it. It’s more prestigious, and more—how do you say?—commercial. The first time I went up there, though, I was like ‘Oooh, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?’ But we took our time. Sometimes we just went up, stayed an hour or so, and did nothing. Then we started to walk. Finally we began to run.”

Running, dancing, even dueling on the wire quickly became the trademark of the Quiros family. While traditional wirewalkers emphasized grace and beauty—elegant tricks performed with balancing poles to the tune of flowing waltzes—the Quiros Troupe emphasized speed and bravado, or what they called alegría—dashing empty-handed across the wire, climbing on one another’s backs, and generally behaving like raucous adolescents to the equally raucous, fast-paced rhythms of Spanish flamenco music. Angel’s opening tricks reflect this bravura. First he darts back and forth on the wire with amazing velocity. Next he stops in the center of the span, catches a gold rope from his wife on the platform, and before anyone in the audience has a chance to realize what he’s going to do, jumps rope with the speed of a championship boxer and the grace of a ballet star. Finally, after his sister rides a bicycle across the wire, Angel scampers to the middle of the wire with a shiny saber, thrusts it menacingly into the air, and then, holding the handle in his right hand and the tip in his left, jumps over the blade with a dramatic vertical leap. As always, he carries tension in his eyes, but the pressure is on his feet.