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Pike's Circus Day

by Mel McKee; co-published with North Wolf Productions

269 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0212; ISBN 1-55212-812-1; US$25.00, C$29.95, EUR20.50, £14.50

The Beck and her little brother B.C. take on Zap Pike's Black Tower Gang to stop them from opening a hunting jungle in which Pike makes his profit by letting would-be hunters come in with their guns and kill exotic animals as they come out of their cages for giant fees. The Beck and B.C. find not only how Pike can turn his harm onto them but also love and a greater sense of family and community.

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about the book      about the author      Table of Contents and Chapter One      catalogue info

About the Book Pike's Circus Day is the story of The Beck, a Good Witch, and her brother B.C., who has magical capabilities including the option of changing into any animal he wishes. They live a good life in northern Georgia until Pike, his two vicious little sons Ralphis and Mikie, and his hirelings build The Black Tower on a Georgia mountain. This tower is the center of Pike's Hunting Jungle, a place where great exotic animals are kidnapped, caged and kept until the highest bidder comes along and kills them as they come out of their cages. Pike uses his great riches to control the elements, the country people and whoever will serve him in his cause of killing in order to make Americans "men". The Beck, who operates a successful country restaurant, and B.C. know that, because of their powers, they have a moral obligation to send Pike and his gang packing while at the same time exposing them internationally so that they cannot go somewhere else and cause the same troubles. The Beck, a lonely girl since the death of her parents when B.C. was born eight years before, gets hurt in this cause but finds Joe, someone to love, and sees B.C. become more and more a man. They not only expend their gifts in this fight but also brings the animals Pike would destroy into the fight to stop him and his gang in The Black Tower. They also use Pike's own worldwide communication system to expose his evil to the world.

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About the Author Mel McKee writes and teaches in Los Angeles. He is a native of the Missouri Ozarks. He has a B.A. in English from Tennessee Temple University, an M.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. from the Center for Writers at Mississippi Southern University. He came to California to attend the School of Cinema at the University of Southern California.

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Table of Contents and Chapter One

Table of Contents

Chapter One: What It Was Like Before...
Chapter Two: The Black Tower Rises
Chapter Three: The Town, the Tower, Jimbo, and the H.A.D's
Chapter Four: The Beck and Joe, Up in a Balloon, Pike's Hunting Jungle and the Killer Cloud
Chapter Five: The Beck Disappears at Night
Chapter Six: The Pike Invades The Beck's
Chapter Seven: We Go into Pike's Jungle and Find the Lands and the Terrible Trap
Chapter Eight: Doc Harts Warns Joe and Me about The Beck and Zap Pike
Chapter Nine: The Beck Hurts Worse, Trudy Imamura Comes and The Beck Talks to Me of an Important Manner
Chapter Ten: We Go to Millie O's Hundred-and-Second Birthday Party and She Mentions Zap Pike
Chapter Eleven: The Way Mikie Pike Played Ball, the Great Fight and How Tonle Showed Her Stuff
Chapter Twelve: The Pikes Invade The Beck's
Chapter Thirteen: We Look into the Blue Marble and Try to Understand, Zap Pike Pulls Her Strings and Lemonada Does Us Harm and The Beck Makes a Decision
Chapter Fourteen: In Spite of Zap Pike, We Still Live with Some Delight
Chapter Fifteen: Joe Comes To The Beck's with News and Zap Pike Makes Another Call
Chapter Sixteen: The Beck Shows Us Something New and Lemonada Send Mrs. Riddle and Jus Bork
Chapter Seventeen: The Beck, Joe and I See the Inside of Pike's Palace, I See Bub Again
Chapter Eighteen: We Go through the Week, Pike's Birthday
Chapter Nineteen: Circus Day
Chapter Twenty: After the Circus

Chapter One

What It Was Like Before....
    It changed that morning, early, way before dawn, after the moon went out, and black blasted the night. It changed with the rise of Pike's Tower above our valley.
    Our life, The Beck's, the people's and mine, changed because of the sewage that the Pikes discharged into our valleys and over our hills.
    It was different before that.
    My birth came late in my life. I say that because my father died six months before I was born. My mother was gone only six hours after my birth. She had stayed around just long enough to let me have life. Then she succumbed to a broken heart.
    My appearance in my generation had made the older generation, my parents, disappear before I ever saw them.
    As one of the Millies, Millie-O, later said, it left me old, old-before-my-time.
    I had one sister, Becky-Rebecca. She was known to all as The Beck. She was sixteen years old when we lost our parents. She raised me. She was The Beck, a G.W., a Good Witch.
    So through all my early old-manhood, from the age of six hours, there were just The Beck and I.
    The Beck had three aims in life, to live in the best way she could, to help me become young, and to see that I learned to deal with all the things that I was and with all the things that are of this Earth.
    She said it was the heritage of the Wicca.
    We lived in a small apartment above our small cafe in a very small town in north Georgia. The Beck had owned the building since she was fifteen and had bought it with the money she had saved. You see besides being a G.W., she was a V.G.C., a Very Good Cook. She had sold cakes and cookies since she was eight. My father had depended on her when the cabbage crop didn't make on the land he worked for Mr. Digger, a rich dentist in Atlanta.
    The cafe and the apartment were all we owned in the world except, of course, for our talents. But they were enough. After all the building stood among the green mountains on a highway next to the early beginnings of the Chattahoochee River.
    From any of the tables in the screened-in dining room, our customers could look down though the river's clear, cold waters to the smooth, flat river rocks and the hovering trout below. On a sunny day, they would shine. On a winter day, they would hide, the trout and the rocks. The look down through the clear waters of the Chattahoochee was one more thing our customers liked about The Beck's cafe.
    While I was still an old baby, The Beck did all the things for me a young mother would do, feeding, washing, changing, and also, beyond the call of all the average chores, keeping track of all the shapes I could get myself into. It was not easy work for a young girl, especially one like The Beck who worked as hard as she could to make her business a success. She'd go around the country side looking for the very best fresh vegetables, eggs, and butter, cook them into delicious meals, serve the customers, wash the dishes, and do all her G.W.T.'s, Good Witch Things.
    The Beck never acted like she minded. All the love she had for our parents and for everybody, almost everybody, she focused on me in my turn. During my early years, she never caused me an unhappy blink. And thanks to the good peasant stock from which I had come, I was never ill.
    But she did worry about me, about two things. They bothered her a lot though she never said that they did. I knew they did though from the deep thoughts in her eyes.
    They came from my acting like an old man much of the time. She thought I should be young and I wasn't sure just how I could do that. At other times, when I wasn't being old, I was being a tiger or a puma, a horse, a cow, a sheep or a goat, a dog or a cat, an elephant, a kangaroo, or a gazelle. All small ones, of course, since I wasn't big enough to be an adult.
    I also became birds. A tit, a robin, a hummingbird, a sparrow.
    For a few moments once I was a flamingo. But I quickly shifted back. It embarrassed me to have a big, pink bulbous body standing on one leg on a flat, slick river rock at the bottom of the Chattahoochee on the busy highway on the way south to Gainesville.
    Another time I almost changed into a swit until I realized what would happen. Once I started flying I would have to fly for three years before I could land, just the way all swits have to do.
    This shape-shifting, as The Beck called it, didn't bother her nearly as much as my being old. Being a G.W., she accepted my many incarnations to some extent. But my being an old man did bother her. She wanted my childhood to be a happy one, especially since our parents had died so soon before and so soon after my birth. She saw that I worried about what I saw as my responsibility for my parents' deaths. My worry hurt her heart.
    The years passed. I soon became a scruffy old man of five.
    It was all the same. It worried The Beck more: my reading the Atlanta Constitution and waiting each Sunday for the New York Times to arrive by the Trailways bus.
    I read encyclopaedia, histories, biographies, novels, and science books.
    I talked old too. At least The Beck said I did. In fact, she told me once that I talked older than she did. And The Beck was nineteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three as I became one, two, three, four, and five.
    The talk couldn't have been too bad though because I would often hear her tell the Millies what I had said and they would all exclaim together, "How can he do that?"
    Millie Maid would say she didn't believe any of what I said. She hadn't learned it in school. She'd insist for a half-an-hour that I take back my saying that George Washington wasn't really the first President of the United States and that John Hanson was before the states fully became the United.
    She got especially mad one day when I told her comet meant "long-haired."She complained mightily to Millie-O and Millie-One that she hated hearing a tiny child make up gigantic lies. They both asked me what I had said and I just explained that a comet has millions upon millions of ice particles flying out behind it so that when it catches the sun it looks like the shining of bright hair thousands of miles long. The older Millies said that didn't sound so unreasonable and for Millie-Two to quiet down. She started tssking harder than ever then about how my lies were dividing her family. But she stopped when I said that it was all true, that the comet looked like bright, beautiful hair that was just as bright and beautiful as her own.
    The day she got the angriest though she told me she had read a poem, "The Masque of the Red Death," that her high school teacher had told her was written by a dope fiend. I told her that that was a sad reputation for Edgar Allan Poe to have forever since he had actually been a very hard-working man and had made millions for his publishers. In fact, I told her that Poe had held a broad-jump record at West Point and had been a strapping noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps who practically ran his base. She raved and raved against my "theory" and even went upstairs on her break and used The Beck's typewriter to write a short paper refuting it. She turned the paper in the next day to her English teacher for extra credit. A few weeks later when Miss Agnes Core came to the restaurant she demanded to see the little boy who not only knew such incredibly false information but also went around telling people about it.
    I explained that there was a wonderful Poe biography in the library that explained and documented everything I'd said. Miss Agnes Core said, "Stop!" She didn't want to hear any more "made-up" stories disguising themselves as the truth.
    But it wasn't too bad. The Beck always listened to what I said. She may have felt concerned about my saying them, not because they were untrue, but because they were "older" stuff. But she would always say, "That's very interesting, B.C." She would actually mean it too because her lips would smile and her eyes would smile right with her.
    Then she'd say things like, "B.C., why don't you not be a little old man today and go outside and play. It is very beautiful out and it is very Spring."
    And I'd say, "Of course, it is. It's the first day of Spring, the day of the vernal equinox, and today you can stand an egg on its end."
    Then, since I had my outside life when I wanted to be an animal roaming the woods, I'd get down to work and unstop the stopped-up kitchen sink.
    I enjoyed it too because I knew how hard The Beck had to work for us and I liked helping. In fact, I was becoming, for such a small, old person, a good plumber and carpenter and even a cook. With The Beck's help of course.
    The kitchen where I unstopped the stopped-sink was where The Beck did her famous cooking.
    She cooked grits with red-eye gravy (bacon-drippings with a teaspoon of coffee in the middle of it), country ham and eggs and buttermilk biscuits. She cooked deliciously bitter collard greens and cottage fries and cracklin' cornbread and three-bean salad and apple-pan dowdy. She cooked all these good things we call Southern cooking.
    She cooked more than that. She cooked better than they cook in the Old Quarter in New Orleans at Antoine's or Galatoire's. She cooked chicken Kiev with wonderful butter sauce and chives and garlic. She made oysters Bienville and grilled sirloin steak they called entrecote nature and petits pois a la francaise so creamy and good with chopped ham and green onions and butter lettuce.
    She cooked filet de truite a la marguery, made from a wonderful rainbow trout from the cold north Georgia creek waters.
    She cooked a lot.
    All over the South people knew The Beck's cooking. They came from Atlanta and Macon and Tallahassee and Miami and even Key West. They came down from Louisville and over from New Orleans too. They wanted to eat the wondrous cooking of the wondrous Beck. On spring and summer and autumn weekends we stayed busier than bees in a new field of red clover. The Beck and I worked hard and harder. Luckily we had help, Millie Maid, a strong, tall country girl and her mother, Millie One.
    Above our restaurant was a small apartment. It had oak paneling and some old whittling master had wonderfully carved many of the panels.
    Woodland creatures. Southern birds and waterfowl. They lived and breathed and flew on the wood of our apartment walls.
    The Beck said that the oak was sea-oak from St. Simon Island brought north and carved by an eccentric sea captain who retired and moved north to get away from the sea and the hurricanes that often drove inland from the Atlantic in the spring along the south Georgia coasts.
    The wood of our walls, so The Beck said, came from the strongest trees in the world, sea oaks, and those that lived within the rooms they made could take great strength from them.
    My room was the smallest. I loved it. It had a large wooden bed with a large wooden headboard and the headboard had an owl and a rabbit and a wolf carved on it at the top. I slept in a goose-down feather bed. In it in winter I was as warm as newly-popped toast while outside in the room it was as cold as the bottom of an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean on a late January night.
    I loved our restaurant and our apartment and my room. I loved The Beck's telling me stories about the world and being a G.W. in it and her listening as I told her how I had tried being a new animal that day. I liked sitting in our living room in the big leather chair hidden way down in its recess reading a book late at night while The Beck read and wrote in another chair nearby. What a good feeling it was: going snugly to sleep after the driving busyness of each of our busy days.
    In the winter and the autumn I slept warm and secure as the ice snapped outside in the brittle trees.
    In the spring I slept safe and secure as the rain poured and then droned gently through the leaves.
    In the summer I slept cool for in north Georgia in the green mountains nighttime came cool no matter how much the heat burned during the day.
    It was good, our life in our valley, until that night Pike raised his tower above it.

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Catalogue Information

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