Bright and Distant Shores (4 page)

The scrapyard was the only thing Owen inherited and he refused to sell it. By now he had amassed hundreds of items in his salvage museum. He leased the yard to a colleague of his father's and received a small monthly stipend from the rental. The tin shed museum was locked and the entire compound—an acre of coiled metal and building innards—was guarded by a pair of mongrel yard dogs. Everything but the yard had been mortgaged and financed, down to the pneumatic guns. And so at thirteen Owen found himself without relatives and packed off to the South Side Tabernacle Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic lair of moral training and practical instruction that boasted a separate department for crippled orphans. During his six-year stay, he learned to fix small engines, say the Hail Mary, fear the Holy Ghost, fist-fight, masturbate silently and in the dark. He hoarded books from the City Hall library, an excursion that happened once a month. Owen always chose seafaring tales and missionary journals, epics that unfolded in the tropics or the Arctic, in a brig being slowly crushed by pack ice or in a shanty beset by warring cannibals. He preferred books with digestive-smelling pages, odorous proof of their hoary contents; marbled inside jackets and ink-drawn maps, frontispieces that depicted voyage routes with indigo dotted lines. He was so moved by these tales of adventure that he began to prepare for a life of deprivation in equatorial climes or the Arctic Circle. He did not love Jesus enough to be a missionary but freelance adventurer, bounty hunter, and buccaneer all seemed like
possibilities. Attempting to strengthen his constitution, he left his bedside window open in August and February and went out of his way to eat foods he didn't like—cow tongue, liver, sweet potato, tinned trotters, cabbage soup.

By the time he was sixteen, he would sometimes escape into the city—run out into the South Side streets, jump a cable car, and be inside the Loop within fifteen minutes. He felt at home in the avenues and side streets, the alleyways of perpetual shade. Owen moved among the newsboys and bootblacks, the hundreds of children making their living at the curbstone. The bustle of deals and arrivals was everywhere—high-flyers, down-easters, men on the make. Sandbaggers met the country trains, waiting for unwitting couples from Dubuque, showing them parklike estates then producing deeds for marshland and backwater swamp. Farm girls arrived by the platoon, valises in hand, sunhats fastened, rooming on Van Buren and warring for jobs as milliners and secretaries. Chicago was a battlefield of wits. But more than anything the city contained Owen's father—in the awnings and cornices, in the weary admiralty of janitors smoking on their building stoops. The ghosts of demolished buildings lingered, somehow, behind the plate-glass windows of pristine towers.

B
y the time of the Esquimaux rebellion, Owen was on his own, half a dozen years out of the Tabernacle School and sleeping in the tin shed at the back of the scrapyard. He worked sporadic wrecking jobs but, as his father had predicted, building methods had changed and eroded the profit margin in traditional demolition. More and more, wrecking was done by derrick and power winch instead of adze and sledgehammer. He idled along, scraping by. He took carpentry jobs because he'd always been handy with a hammer and awl, but building kitchen cabinets wasn't nearly as satisfying as dismantling a building from the top down. Many afternoons were killed off at the City Hall library, reading travelogues and the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson in the
Tribune,
South Sea dispatches describing life amid coral reefs and archipelagos. Owen followed preparations for the Columbian Exposition and was determined to attach himself to a voyage. He would gladly spend fifty cents on admission for the chance to approach a whaling skipper or merchant captain. He had no interest in river and lake routes, the commercial steamer lines to Montreal and New York. He wanted open waters, distant latitudes, volcanic shores.

The Esquimaux were brought in for the fair from Labrador, in the fall of 1892, so they could acclimatize before the onslaught of a Chicago summer. Under the watchful gaze of an overseer, fifteen of them raised a native village, an exact replica of their native home down to the skin tents and corral of sledge dogs. Photographers captured them with their fur coats and hooded eyes, whips
unspooled midair, pack dogs wheeling. But as the temperatures mounted they grew despondent, then restless. They threw off their skins and furs and huddled in the shade. They exchanged handicrafts and bone harpoons for German lager. On the first day above seventy degrees, a group of them burned down the tent village and ran off into the streets with their dogs. The city police patrolled a wide perimeter. The overseer sent teams of men out into the back territories, the immigrant neighborhoods and meatpacking district, but they were nowhere to be found. For a month there were sightings of huskies, traveling in pairs, loping through Washington Park or along the shoreline of driftwood and squatters' huts.

Indians and South Sea Islanders fared better. By the time the fair opened, they filled the Midway Plaisance with spectacle. The Samoans wrestled, the Javanese worked traditional puppets, and the Quackahl Indians performed a Sun Dance that shocked the gathered crowd. On a float in the main lagoon, two braves were led around by heavy twine attached to slits in their bare backs. As thousands looked on, they moved to a low drumbeat, faces upturned, braided hair quilled with blood. Women fainted. Men reached for snuff pouches, wiped monocles, averted their eyes. Owen watched the gruesome sight with more curiosity than disgust. At the Tabernacle Industrial School for Boys he'd been encouraged to think of the Holy Ghost as divine ether that filled the hearts and minds of good Christians; it animated their beliefs and conduct. Despite the nuns' affirmations, however, he'd always pictured the spirit as vengeful, something furious and consumptive, and this was what he saw in the crazed dance that floated before him—a ghostly ancestor presiding over the punishment of human flesh.

Owen spent his day at the fair struck in a kind of trance. The combination of people and objects was overpowering. He found himself framing his view with cupped hands so that he could see a thing in its singularity. He scrawled notes in his program.
The interiors were split between order and whimsy—weather stations, model farms, livestock, steam engines, the latest phonograph, a Liberty Bell made from oranges, a rooftop fountain of beer. Some exhibits invited the fair-goer to touch a machine or display and he lined up and jostled with the rest of them, probing metal recesses and hatches, fingering a latch-pin, trying to fathom a machine's construction and design. The peculiar beauty of a perfectly placed eyebolt. The simple genius of a fillister groove.

The stock market had crashed five days before the opening, but there was no denying the bravado, the gritty optimism of the speeches. America felt at war, incendiary in her pride. Cream of Wheat, Aunt Jemima, Juicy Fruit—how had the nation ever lived without them? The next century stretched away and here was Chicago, a marshland and frontier fort within living memory, waiting impatiently at the gates.

The Columbian Guard circulated for pickpockets and rabble-rousers, fined those attempting their own photography. Owen rode the movable sidewalk, sat through two revolutions on the Ferris wheel. He moved through the crowd, elbows jutted to keep the drunks at bay. People cheered and shouted and he felt his senses strip away. He stared at the ground, counted his footsteps. At the midway he broke into a jog. He passed the balloon ride, the ostrich farm, and the congress of forty beauties without a second glance. It was his first crowd and he'd had no inkling of its terrors—a thousand men clearing their throats, hawing at their wives, the surge of bustled skirts and preened gloves. He ran past the lagoons and slowed in the wooded croft where folk houses from various nations had been built. Studying the workmanship, the plumb of a wall, relaxed him. He found himself thinking about the most efficient way to tear each one down.

By the time he approached the Anthropological Building it was evening. There were no crowds this far down. Distantly, he heard the report of fireworks and caught a whiff of gunpowder,
a smell that inevitably brought him to the image of his father's scuffed boots protruding from a mound of rubble. They were no longer a terrifying vision, the boots, but rather an omen, a testament. What Porter Graves expected from life could be seen in his shoes—toes capped in steel, seams resewn, leather tongues like two ancient pelts. Every day had been a battle. Suppose a man's fate, Owen thought, was carried in the mold and cut of his shoes. Had Porter lashed his bootlaces in a square knot every morning for decades, a safeguard against tripping, just so that he could make it safely to his own scheduled demise?

Owen buttoned his coat and walked along the South Pond, where an ethnographic encampment had been set up. Lank Indians stooped in front of wigwams, made supper over small campfires. A few women thumbed pottery or wove baskets in the outlandish light of an electric lamppost. Farther along there were Apaches in wickiups, Mohawks whittling birch bark canoes. A single family remained from the Esquimaux group—a husband, wife, and child—and they withdrew into the candlelit interior of their tent, wavering shadows on the skin walls.

Owen entered the Anthropological Building and was relieved to find it almost empty. It had the lofty but neglected atmosphere of an old bathhouse—a vaulted ceiling with trussed skylights, but a dank odor permeating the corners. He moved through the South American ethnology section, amid objects of flint, obsidian, mica. In his program he sketched a monkey-tooth necklace. The Pacific Islands and New South Wales shared a section. Here, Owen tried to match his mental images of the Pacific—the black-beach warriors and volcanic atolls of Stevenson's letters— with the objects themselves. Easter Island effigies, poison-tipped spears, mud-daubed shields, war gods etched onto the hull of a canoe. He'd read of the natives burying themselves in the sand at night to get away from mosquitoes and pollywogs and had assumed it was an exaggeration on Stevenson's part. But now he saw a sketch of just such a thing by a ship's naturalist: five
Papuan heads, still attached, protruding from a beachhead under a full moon.

After an hour poring over idols and amulets, he moved toward Psychology, where a few curious fair-goers were having their sight and color sense tested. Attendants in lab coats offered them chilled water and hand towels between tests. A chromoscope claimed to measure hundredths and thousandths of a second. Something called a kymograph plotted blood pressure on smoked paper. He drank a cup of iced water and moved on.

The department of neurology was an alcove of bottled brains. A young woman—
Miss Adelaide Cummings, Department Secretary,
declared a plaque—sat at a small desk with a ledger. The aspic-gray light spilling from the glass jars offset her patrician beauty. But her high, flushed cheekbones and straight, dark hair, the delicate line of her pale neck, all of it seemed to defy the floating cortexes. Owen smiled at her and put his hands behind his back, hoping to affirm that he was no tourist, that his interest in neurology was substantial. The truth was the brains unsettled him, some dulled by wax, others swimming like jellyfish in brackish waters. They had the coloring of diseased livers and it was almost impossible, standing there, to accept this organ as the parliament of human thought and desire. It had to be the most obscene organ in all the body. He fingered the book spines in the small library and picked up Vesalius's
Structure of the Human Body
from 1543. He affected a manner that suggested he'd been trawling the city for it. Miss Cummings failed to notice, however, making a mark on the ledger before her, and he set the book back on its shelf. He shuffled toward a chart that correlated gender and age with the weight and volume of the brain. A stifled female giggle rose from Psychology and Owen thought he detected a vexed sigh on the part of Miss Cummings. He looked away from the chart and met her eyes with a diffident shrug.

“They've been testing reflexes all day over there,” she said. “Tipsy girls from Milwaukee come over here after the beer gardens.”

Owen liked the way she wagged her pen when she spoke—a slow pendulum swinging over her bony, unwed finger.

“I'm here to answer any questions if you have them,” she said.

“That's very kind.” Owen planted himself in front of a photograph that featured the brain of a murderer who'd been electrocuted the previous year. “I don't see much difference between his brain and the others,” Owen said.

Miss Cummings looked up from her papers. “I think that's part of the point. If you look at the brains of the insane and ours they look remarkably alike.”

“And what about male and female?”

“Also the same.”

“That would explain why lady bicyclists are terrorizing the city. You're just as savage as we are.”

She let out a careful laugh. He gestured to a photograph caption that read
The Brain of an Idiotic Male
to expand on his point. She looked at the caption, then at him, smiling. He felt a flush of confidence, like fingering the edge of a banknote in his pocket. He realized with some heaviness that it had been two years since he'd kissed a woman. Scrounging between wrecking jobs and cabinetry, spending his nights drinking beer with secondhand-brick dealers, he'd removed himself from the company of women. Was he going to bring a woman home to his tin shed emporium? Lay her gently on the straw mattress that floated like a raft in a sea of etched glass and broken cornices?

“Do you have a specialized interest in brains?” he asked, moving closer to the desk.

“Not really. But a few of us take turns sitting here. To help the public.”

The word
public
struck him; a girl with a mission.

“Ready with the smelling salts, no doubt,” he said.

She looked down, smoothed a hand over the desktop. “I also attend departmental meetings, take minutes and dictation. We're preparing to open a museum after the fair. Marshall Field is going
to donate a million dollars.” She covered her mouth for a second, as if that amount were the most scandalous thing ever to graze her lips.