Dunc and Amos Hit the Big Top by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

and horror. Amos was at the top of the swing, pausing before the swing down again, hanging full down so his face was even with Dunc.
    “What am I doing here?”
    He started the swing back.
    “Helllllllllppp!”
    Except that this time he was not in good form, not classic at all.
    He was like meat on a hook.
    The trapeze bar swung away, then back, then away again like a pendulum and back, and each time it went less and less until it hung straight down over the center of the ring, over the net.
    With Amos hanging by his ankles below it.
    “You’ve got to swing, Amos!” Dunc yelled.“Swing a little and get back to where I can grab you!”
    Amos hung silently.
    “Just a little, Amos—just swing a little.”
    Amos didn’t move. He hung upside down, looking over at Dunc, then at the ground, then back at Dunc.
    “Come on, Amos.”
    Amos’s ankles slipped a bit.
    “Reach up and grab the bar!” Dunc yelled. “You’re slip—”
    Amos dropped.
    Like an arrow, like a shot, like seven pounds of garbage in a three-pound bag, like a spear heading for a target Amos dropped exactly straight, head down, perfect, and hit the net at about seventy-two miles an hour, arrow-true, with his face.
    For half a second it seemed that he would go through. The net plunged with him, down and down until Amos’s nose was exactly two inches from the dirt of the floor of the ring.
    Then the spring ties at the corners of the net took over and snapped him back up with a force very nearly equal to the speed with which he’d come down.
    Except that his body had angled over, and he did not head straight back up. Instead, he went off at a forty-five-degree angle, arms and legs flailing in a great cartwheel, up over and off the net, across the side of the ring, wheeling end-over-end to land in a heap.
    Directly beneath the elephant Biboe, who was waiting to do his bit with the entrance parade.
    It was all too much for Biboe. First the business of Amos running beneath him earlier, and now he came flying out of nowhere and landed in a cloud of dust and animal droppings.
    Biboe snaked his trunk back and down and wrapped it around Amos’s middle and flicked him like a booger, back cartwheeling through the air, across the bandstand, across Willy and Billy into Melissa’s lap.
    The bleachers couldn’t take the sudden strain, and Amos and Melissa went through, down in a pile with eight or ten people on top of them in a cloud of dirt and dust and popcorn.
    All this time, Dunc had been coming down the ladder. He arrived just in time to seeAmos push his head out of the pile of splintered boards and tangled people, look up, and say:
    “Was it too showy?”
    Before he passed out.

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    Amos raised his face and aimed it at Dunc. “So what do you think—are the lines gone?”
    They were at Dunc’s house, in Dunc’s room. Dunc was working on a model of a World War II fighter plane. He was just finishing it, and the workmanship was, as usual, perfect. No extra glue, all the joints tight and sanded smooth. Perfect. Amos was also working on a model—same war, different fighter. His model looked like a blop of glue with a piece of plastic stuck to it.
    But Amos wasn’t talking about the model. He was talking about his face. It had been a week since the circus disaster—as Dunc andthe newspapers thought of it—and Amos was worried about the grid lines in his face. When he hit the net face first, the cords had made deep impressions and left him looking like a waffle with eyes.
    “The lines are almost gone.” Dunc set his model on the desk.
    “Good—I want the lines all gone before I call Melissa and apologize.”
    Dunc shook his head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
    “Why not? We saved the circus, didn’t we?”
    “Well … yes. We told Willy and Billy, and they fired the guys who were trying to ruin them. So we sort of saved the circus.”
    “And I did the trapeze like I said I would, didn’t I?”
    Dunc stared at him.