This is a story I’ve had percolating in my head for a bit. Here’s the start of it. Let me know what you think so far, if I need to change anything grammatically, structurally, etc.

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“He was a thorn in my side for twenty years.” Harold said, sipping his mint julep on his porch and staring the portly feller down who just told him about of Moses Geldman’s passing.

“How did he go?”

“Slipped off his back porch after a good rain. Guess he was going out to put feed on that deck of his. Fed those birds every day.” said Bob Roberts, the executor of Geldman’s estate. “I thought you two were close, no?”

Harold guffawed, “Who? Me and the ol’ flying rabbi? No. Not friends. Fierce competitors. Bastard took every opportunity to run me off the Southern States Human Cannonball Circuit he could.”

“Well, according to his will, he thought very highly of you.” muttered Bob, who couldn’t imagine this feeble white haired crotchety bric-a-brac of a man shooting himself out of a toaster let alone a cannon in front of a crowd of people. “We will be reading the will after the funeral, which will be in a couple of days.”

“Fine. Fine.” said Harold.

Harold hadn’t noticed the dull pain of regret and sadness that was hardening in his chest as he sat in the hot July sun waiting for this man to leave his property. He’d known the rabbi was sick, hell, who DIDN’T know he was sick but he didn’t expect this to happen.

“Good riddens, huh Moe?” muttered Harold do his basset hound, who sat lazily at his feet chewing a bone and leaning his massive flea bitten butt up against the leg of Harold’s overalls. Moe knew that Harold needed him, and the weight of the dog on Harold’s leg soothed his heart a little… enough to notice that he loved the dog, more than anything else in the world.

“Come on. Let’s get some food.”

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Harold Holden started in the Human Cannonball circuit on accident. A child of the dust bowl era, Harold would go from town to town looking for odd jobs. Painting fences here, building barns there. Most of the jobs that were outside at least were futile on account of all the said dust.

No sooner than you’d white wash a fence and get from the front porch to the side of a house then a storm would brew and you have to wait, either repaint, or ironically wait for the sand/paint mixture to dry and re-sand, THEN paint again. It was back breaking work, and in those days when you couldn’t afford to go to the hospital for a hang nail let alone a broken back, you had to be careful.

So Harold was careful. He’d made quite a living for himself, enough to pay for room and board at the local inn and keep him in poker and beer money. That’s all he needed really. That is until the circus came to town.

You see, Harold was always interested in traveling. Hell, that’s how he ended up in Del Rio, TX in the first place from Oklahoma. But the circus, the circus was what always peaked his interest after seeing the railcars stop near his Daddy’s fields that one cool night in September after the cow catcher on the rail line caught all 5 head of cattle in one fail swoop. They always were stupid cows.

With the money the railway gave his Daddy, on the sheer embarrassment of it all; Harold took 14 dollars and hopped the next train south the next night to God knows where, following that circus train he saw the night before.

He just so happened to stop in Del Rio on a whim because he was hungry, and he needed a drink.

That was 4 years ago. In the meantime, he’d worked pretty much everywhere you could see, working on horse stables, mending fences, painting houses, electrical work…. Anything to be the rent, and keep the liquor flowing.

But that day was different. That day as he was walking to his latest handy man job he saw something he hadn’t see since he was 13. That circus was back in town. He knew even before he passed the train station, because he saw the giraffe’s heads sticking out of one of the train cars.

The smell of manure never bothered him, but the closer he got to the animal cages and circus train in general, it excited him to the possibilities of finally seeing what he’d read about in the newspaper and heard other people in the bar talk about all the time.

He wondered if he’d see the lions jumping through the flaming hoops or the trapeze artists soaring through the air. He promised himself right then and there that he would see a show sometime this week at the fairgrounds at the edge of town.