Cyprian and the Snake Man's Argus performance brings Cyprian back to town as a touring entertainer rather than a man looking for work. With Vilhus Gast, his partner in an eccentric act built around acrobatics and live reptiles, he transforms a school-gymnasium stage into a place where spectacle, danger, and deliberate absurdity command the audience’s attention. The performance becomes a triumph, and its afterlife makes Delphine, who watched with Markus, an object of the town’s respectful curiosity.

Cyprian Returns as a Performer

Cyprian tells Roy that he is in Argus to play an engagement, not to seek a job. He is part of a lyceum series and now travels with the Snake Man, offering Roy pink cardboard tickets. The distinction matters to Delphine: Cyprian has not simply come back to his former circle or resumed the search for ordinary employment. He arrives with a touring act and a new professional partnership, news she says he could have written to tell her.

The act’s name initially leaves Delphine uncertain about the man who shares Cyprian’s work and travels. Cyprian explains that performing with another man did not produce the same effect as his earlier balancing work, though he and his partner devised other tricks. The partner owns a python that travels in a wheeled leather case, keeps an assortment of reptiles, and includes a spider in the show. The performer is Vilhus Gast; Mighty Tom is the spider, not Gast’s name. The distinction introduces the act’s characteristic play with appearances, as its most memorable performer is also presented as a false toupee.

Gast and Cyprian have made their partnership out of a shared sense of being outsiders. Gast knew little about Indians while growing up, and Cyprian had not known a Jewish person on the reservation. Gast nevertheless spoke of both peoples as being cast as wanderers at the edge of society, hounded and hunted. The two men decided to roam together and developed an act that they have performed steadily since. Their touring partnership is thus both a practical arrangement and a response to a kinship Gast identifies across different histories.

The Gymnasium and the Audience

Delphine and Markus arrive early the following night and choose the first row of creaky wooden folding chairs. Delphine expects people to recognize Cyprian, notice his shaved head, and turn to look at her. Sitting at the back would leave her exposed to their curiosity; from the front row, she can turn her back on them and watch the show. Her decision establishes a quiet counterpoint to the public event: the room may inspect her, but she chooses where to direct her attention.

The curtains open on Cyprian and Gast barefoot in tight black gymnasium suits, each standing on a large red rubber ball. They pedal around one another, accelerate into a do-si-do, and leap into exchanged places to applause. Gast is close to Cyprian in size and build, but has indistinct features and wears a badly fitting toupee that shifts as they move. The balancing is more than a display of strength: the performers turn the possibility of losing control into the show’s central visual promise, repeatedly approaching a fall and recovering their poise.

Gast becomes still with his hands raised like a ballerina’s while Cyprian bounces with the ball caught between his feet. Cyprian springs upward, turns over in midair, and lands in a position to lock hands with Gast. They sway and nearly topple, then right themselves and balance. Soon Gast dances the ball back and forth across the stage, pretending to struggle to keep Cyprian aloft. Their bodies become the apparatus of the act: one-armed and one-legged balances make the audience watch the unstable arrangement, waiting to see whether it will collapse.

The Spider and the Hitler Routine

The shifting toupee supplies the show’s grotesque reversal. As Gast pretends to struggle, the wig creeps from his head and reveals itself as a giant spider. It crawls up his arm, reaches Cyprian’s elbow, and settles on his bare skull as the two men continue to perform. Gast then releases a smaller, equally hairy spider from a box on a stand. Using a feather to coax it, he guides it up Cyprian’s throat and over his mouth, where it curls into a square black mustache. A gag about a performer’s bad hairpiece becomes a live-animal spectacle whose unsettling intimacy depends on the spider crossing onto Cyprian’s face.

For the next routine, Cyprian puts on a swallowtail coat and polished black boots but leaves his legs comically bare. The spiders remain on his head as he impersonates Hitler. Each time an offstage tuba sounds, his rear end jerks between the coat’s tails; the tuba punctures the rigid, hypnotic authority of the impersonation with a bodily joke. When Cyprian calls for the Nazi salute, the instrument answers with a squawk and his body twitches. The audience discovers that its own straight-armed salutes make the Hitler figure fart, and it joins in until the tuba’s sound becomes one long groan and Cyprian ricochets around the stage. The act turns an image of political command into an unruly mechanism of audience participation and ridicule.

The Snake Dance and the Finale

The second act replaces the gymnasium’s red balls with an enormous leather valise balanced on four sawhorses. Cyprian and Gast appear in jeweled turbans and delicate transparent veils that billow around their legs and trail behind them. To tinny recorded music, they open the case and bring out a living, mottled python. They call their routine the Dance of Death and wind and unwind with the increasingly alert snake as it tries to coil them close. Their movement is impromptu and graceful, even peaceful, while the audience watches in the belief that the python may devour them.

The performers carry the snake down the center aisle so the audience can touch its dry, charged skin. Its small head, described as a wedge of muscle, and its bright, cold eyes unsettle the crowd; the spectators are relieved when the snake is returned to its case and the locks are fastened. Cyprian then calls for a butcher. Pete Kozka tests the sharp handsaws the men produce and pronounces them keen and effective. The performers saw the python in the valise, its tail whipping through the unlatched end, then burn a fragrant substance, chant, make signs over a pot of school glue, and put the snake back together. The staged destruction and restoration extend the show’s governing uncertainty: apparent danger and bodily disorder are displayed, then folded back into performance.

The program continues with juggling lizards, a huge motionless iguana, and Mighty Tom presented in a large round candy jar so the audience can inspect the spider. Gast and Cyprian balance cups, plates, and their curly-toed shoes on their heads and noses, then perform more acrobatics. After the crowd calls for an encore, they return as twin Hitlers riding unicycles, saluting and breaking wind as they nearly topple. They juggle burning swastikas, then hatchets, cleavers, and knives, before switching to apples and biting them down to their cores. The succession of political parody, animal display, balancing, danger, and slapstick makes them an enormous hit.

Aftermath and Significance

Cyprian and the Snake Man leave Argus, but the performance continues to circulate in the town’s conversation. For weeks, Markus talks of nothing else. People stop Delphine in the street and treat her with shy admiration, as though knowing or having access to a great artist has lent her a reflected distinction. They address her respectfully and ask for the show’s secrets, including whether the python has eaten anyone and whether the spider beneath Cyprian’s nose has ever made him sneeze. The questions turn the act’s manufactured peril into local legend, while Delphine’s first-row choice gives way to a new public role: she becomes the person expected to know what happened behind the spectacle.

The event joins the show’s comic irreverence to its technical dependence on balance. The performers repeatedly make bodies, animals, and objects seem close to slipping beyond control, only to recover, redirect, or theatrically restore them. Its humor can be grotesque, particularly in the farting Hitler routine and the apparent sawing apart of the python, but the audience’s response is not passive: it supplies the salutes that trigger the tuba gag and reaches out to touch the snake. The performance therefore makes spectators part of the unstable spectacle it stages, while the weeks of talk afterward show how completely a touring act can alter the standing of the people who witnessed it.