William and Sam's Circus

Friends and Readers,

The Guardian Dolphin begins with a young dolphin taking on human form in order to save humanity. Most of the story, however, takes place when he is an old man, a sort of failed con-artist with good intentions.

But the novel is also about his friends.

Today’s selection introduces us to one of those friends with a bit of that friend’s history.

While I was getting ready for his party, William was in his study—tall, thin, balding, and serious—preparing for the business meeting that night.

He wasn’t the kind of man to leave anything to chance.

He had made sure of a thousand details already. The dark wood bookcases had been thoroughly polished. The enormous picture windows that looked out to sea had been washed inside and out. The carpet had been cleaned—not just vacuumed, but cleaned—and there were fresh flowers in the vases.

Now he turned his attention to the meeting itself.

He set up an easel on the large oak study table he normally used for a desk, and placed an artist’s sketch of the proposed pipeline—running past a broken down seaside restaurant, across the beach, and into the sea.

William was not happy about the restaurant. That’s the way he was. He didn’t like anything shabby associated with one of his projects, not even in the background.

The artist had not just included the restaurant in the picture, she had made it look just as bad as it actually was. William would have had her do the sketch over, without the restaurant, but there wasn’t time.

He had no choice. That irritated him even more.

He sighed and picked up the contract. It was all there, in order, ready to be duplicated. He had gone over every line, of course, word by word, days ago.

Now he just checked to make sure the pages were all there, and went looking for his housekeeper, to have him make copies for all the principals.

He was halfway to the door when the posters caught his eye.

There were two of them, circus posters, hanging on the wall, side by side in identical frames.

One was an actual, printed poster from the “Hogan and Ross Circus,” covered with pictures of clowns, acrobats, horses, elephants, tigers and trapeze artists—all in bright colors, leaping, falling, roaring, twisting in mid-air.

The other was just as elaborate, and even more full of promise, but it was handmade. It was the painstaking work of a child, lovingly drawn and lettered and colored, and was now more than a little the worse for wear.

The edges were tattered, the colors faded, the paper yellowed.

It proudly declared that “William and Sam’s Circus” would be open “Saturday” in the “field behind William’s house, by the old tree.”

It was the second poster, the tattered one, which stopped my friend in his tracks that day, even though he had seen it practically every day in the three years since he had hung it there.

Looking at that poster, William remembered a hand-lettered sign announcing “The Great Willini”, sitting on a makeshift stage. He remembered the smell of the grass in the field, and the cool morning breeze.

They had made a fortune teller’s booth out of sheets and poles. And the ride—they had tied ropes to a wooden crate, and fastened pulleys in the old tree. They had a lemonade stand and a ticket booth.

William had been ten years old.

He had one foot on the tightrope they had stretched between a discarded clothesline pole and a branch of the old tree. His other foot was still planted safely on the thick branch the rope was tied to, and he held a broken broomstick in his hands for balance.

A little blood oozed from the scab on his knee.

He held his breath, and transferred his weight to the rope. His friend Sam watched from the ground.

Then he saw something at the edge of the field.

“Wait, Sam, I’m coming down.”

Sam laughed.

“I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

“In a minute. I will. My dad’s over there. Catch.”

He tossed the broomstick down to Sam, then dropped to a lower limb. He hung upside-down by his knees for a moment, grabbed the limb with both hands, swung his legs free, and dropped.

“Race you!”

The two sprinted to the driveway, where William’s father was just getting out of his car.

William arrived first, panting, to lean nonchalantly against a pine at the edge of the driveway. The poster for “William and Sam’s Circus” was tacked to it.

“Well Dad,” he said with as much cool as he could muster, “how do you like my circus?”