City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (33 page)

The game stayed even, in an endless series of nullifying corruptions, until the Highlanders’ pitcher—a relentlessly lachrymose character everyone called Happy Jack—whipped a truly accidental wild pitch past his catcher in the last inning, and Big Tim roared with laughter at his lost bet:

“Well, well!” He pounded Mr. Devery on the back. “We could just’ve well have let them play it for real!”

Kid didn’t care. Late in the day, as the shadows began to lengthen over the park, he had gone down onto the field. The crowd had long overflowed the grandstand, and men stood and sat behind a flimsy rope in the outfield, watching Happy Jack put down the side, another hulking, sardonic character doing the same for the Pilgrims—the ball getting smaller, and grayer, and more invisible with each inning, until it seemed like they were playing a pantomime game.

Kid sat under the rope, with his knees tucked up, listening to the fans agonizing over each play, and bantering back and forth with the Highlanders’ fine little center fielder—a man who looked almost small enough to be a midget but who seemed able to run down anything hit beyond the infield. From where Kid was sitting, he could see everything: the whole grandstand, and the brilliant, fiery Palisades, and the pols and gamblers coming back down to Big Tim’s box every half-inning or so, joking and clapping each other’s backs like the players coming back from the plate—Sadie following behind, pinning her hair up under her hat again.

He sat watching the shadows lengthen over the infield, over the plywood outfield fences plastered with advertisements for tooth powder and bunion ointment. Watching the stately, mysterious procession of the fixed game: the players running off the field in their baggy, gray wool uniforms, spitting and tugging at their caps, and flipping their gloves out by their positions as they went down into the dugout. Watching the whole, lovely, inscrutable ritual until he was sure that he loved it, that he loved it all even if he couldn’t understand it, that he loved baseball.

Our city went up on a back lot of Dreamland, a treeless, rubbled flat, where the flotsam of the world floated through. It was there that Brinckerhoff had housed his exotic tribes—his Pygmies, and his Esquimaus, his Boers and his Bantocs, and his Dog-eating Igorrotes—all the funny little peoples, with colorful costumes and odd facial hair, who the world had passed by.

Once upon a time there had even been a fairy tale Dutch cottage. There, in the old days, you could find General Piet Cronje sitting out on his porch in the evening, smoking his pipe and stroking his long white muttonchops, contemplating the bygone glories of the veldt, or the day’s receipts.

Each afternoon at precisely three-fifteen, Oom Piet rode out straight and true as an acacia tree to surrender his sword to the British again. Brinckerhoff gave out that this was the exact time the Boer War had ended—though in fact it was merely post time over at Big Tim Sullivan’s racetrack over at Brighton Beach, and Big Tim didn’t care to have any of the fake guns spook his prize horseflesh.

Yet the silence when the old Boer rode out each afternoon was so sudden and startling, he played his role with such immense and impregnable gravity, that his audience was truly awed. A hush fell over the whole grandstand, the only sounds the muted cries from the roller coasters over by the sea and the pounding of the horses’ hooves from the track—like some distant echo of the real war, still galloping over the grassy hills of South Africa.

It didn’t draw, though, even with real veterans from both sides, and cannons and enormous painted canvases and an ingenious, glistening tin waterfall. Maybe it was the participants—after all, between the Boers and the British, how much of a rooting interest could you take?—but in any case the veterans began to drift off to Central America to find work as mercenaries, until there weren’t enough left to contest the issue.

For awhile they tried pitting the remaining white men against an imported tribe of Bantus—black against white always being a surefire draw at the box office. They figured they wouldn’t have to pay the Bantus
anything,
just drive a mangy Jersey cow or two into their kraal for them to slaughter and eat right there—an added attraction that drew more paying spectators than the battle itself.

Yet the Bantus surprised them and went on strike; as the
World’s
editorials tsked, it seemed they had been corrupted by the modern world after all. One afternoon, instead of falling in murderous ambush upon the Brits and Boers from behind the potted palm trees Brinckerhoff had dragged in from every ten-cent restaurant in Manhattan, they simply marched out and, with tremendous dignity, laid down their stage spears amid sat on the ground.

Naturally, this being America, they were treated like any other strikers. A load of toughs was driven in one night to break their heads and smash up their sham palm huts. Even General Cronje and his mercenaries agreed that this was the only way to deal with the black bastards. But a few nights later, after the parks had shut down, they shucked off their spectacular, sky-blue headdresses, and slipped the plaster chicken bones from their noses, and snuck silently off into the greater city, disguised in the uniforms of pantomime policemen they had found in a storage locker. Of course, no one noticed them—a long line of barefoot black policemen, male and female, without a word of English between them, creeping through the streets of New York together in a long line. They had gone for good, disappeared into the impenetrable vastnesses of San Juan Hill, or Harlem, irrevocably Americanized.

By the time we got there they were long gone—every last remnant of their existence bulldozed to make way for The Little City—their
kraals,
and their grass huts, and even Oom Piet’s nostalgic little cottage, all wiped away. Brinckerhoff laid out the plan of the town over their bones, plotting the broad avenues and squares himself with the surveyors. At night he worked ceaselessly in his tower, designing every house, every public building, every stick of furniture.

“Everything has to fit,” he commanded. “No slums, no tenements, no delinquency. It must be a model of city planning!”

They went up with breathtaking speed: no flowering Aztec city, but a modern, progressive village behind a gingerbread facade, planned after Nuremberg—for in those days anything clean and orderly had to be modeled after the Germans. There was a lovely little public square, and a clock tower, and livery stables, and even an exquisite miniature railway to draw passengers around and around our town. There was a powerhouse, and a gas works, and a fire station with a real working fire wagon, drawn by a team of Shetland ponies.

It seemed impossible. I had instigated the whole thing, I know. I had set the wheels spinning in Brinckerhoff’s head out of my desperation, but nonetheless it was incredible to see it actually taking shape. It emerged like a half-remembered dream the next day—impossible, fantastic, but somehow familiar.

My queen took it all in her royal stride. She liked to saunter out each afternoon and inspect the construction—obviously crazy as a loon, with her royal purple gowns and fake ermine furs flowing behind her. The workers would patronize her, sweeping their hats off in low bows when she approached, barely hiding their grins. They answered whatever lordly question she asked them with elaborate courtesy—“Oh,
yes,
Your Majesty!”
“Certainly,
Your Majesty!” “However you desire it, Your Majesty!” At Coney Island, every day was All Fool’s Day, and they were used to mock royalty: African kings, Gypsy princesses, roller coaster attendants dressed up like Teddy Roosevelt.

I scowled back at their sniggering, their insolent, smirking faces. She simply swept on, imperious and impervious, through her incredible new domain.

Which of us was more crazy?

“It’s built to last,” Brinckerhoff confided, in his quiet, confident way. “Inhabitable all year round. When all the rest of Dreamland—when Luna Park, and Steeplechase, and all the rest of Coney is gone—this will still be here.”

It
was
perfect, a miniature superior to the original—to the squalid, sprawling behemoth that lay just west of Coney. And with every day Brinckerhoff invented something to make it even more perfect, more complete: a police station, complete with jail cells, and fingerprint pads, and a tiny, windowless third-degree room. A town hall, and a church, and library, with miniature special editions that fit smoothly, easily in our hands. All of it so ingenious, so meticulous and perfect and unique, until only one, final addition remained.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten your contribution,” Brinckerhoff confided. “You will be the mayor, and live in the palace with your queen.”

For that’s what we were to be, strange combination: mayor and queen of The Little City. And there was a palace: not so grand as what I had promised her—for when has man not disappointed woman?—but still by far the biggest building in the whole miniature town, three reduced stories high, with red gables and turrets, and a splendid little garden.

Inside was an exquisite little jewel box, just for us. There was a working fireplace, and a library, and a billiards room; the walls hung with old swords and muskets and trophies and even portraits of fabulous, important-looking ancestors. All of it still
reduced;
even the stuffed rhinoceros head, and the moose, and the elephant-foot umbrella stand by the front door—one final, none-too-subtle joke from Matty Brinckerhoff.

“Come, come now,” he chided. “You must have the whole world, cut down to size. What is an elephant, compared to a dream?”

He couldn’t fool me. The miniature elephant’s foot clinched it. The palace, the town, even my poor, mad consort—all this was one more terrific joke. Mockery more terrible than any snickering workman’s—mockery worse than anything my father had endured, in his academic gown.

And yet I was seduced. I was seduced the way men usually are seduced, which is not by love, or lovely flesh—but by leather upholstered chairs, and fine thick carpets. By wainscoting, and oak panels, and a liquor cabinet full of the best Madeira. By substantial curtains, and real silver, and a quiet, soothing place to think and rest, and cut the pages of my books.

And for her—for my queen—there was a dressing room, and a bath tiled with leaping, Minosian dolphins. A bedroom that was an exact replica of the old queen’s—the real queen, the only real queen there ever would be, ever again, Vicky herself—drawn from a Sunday rotogravure. Perfect right down to the patterns on the wallpaper and the hairbrushes on the dressing table. Save that cut into all of it—into the corners of the mantelpieces, and the frame of the dressing mirror and the bedposts, and the carpets-was an imperial “CR.”
Carlotta Regina.

I saw her then. I saw her go up the stairs the first day we were in the finished palace, while I walked around gaping at the fixings. I saw her walk into what must have been far and away the most luxurious room she had ever seen, and sit herself at the dressing table without a second glance—as if she had been doing it all her life. And if that wasn’t the true embodiment of royalty, then I don’t know what is.

It was all ready before the season was even half over—all the fine, gingerbread buildings, and the broad, tree-lined streets. Only one thing was missing: the last, living props.

How do you advertise for a freak show? We needed so many, all at once, not just the usual trickle of the outcast and the disinherited. I suggested something in the Help Wanted, a call for your wretched refuse, perhaps, yearning to be tall. Brinckerhoff only smiled his sated, crocodile grin.

“Oh, they’ll come, sure enough,” he said. “They’ll find out, believe me, and when they do we’ll have to beat ’em off with sticks.”

He was right, as always. As soon as word got around they poured in. Dwarves and midgets. Hunchbacks and freaks, and acrobats and clowns, and jockeys disgraced for doping horses—and children. Real children pulling my disguise in reverse, pasting on false whiskers and trying to lower their voices—posing as little people just in the prospect of steady meals and a warm place to sleep.

My people swarmed in from around the country, and even the Continent, from vaudeville houses, and ten-twenty-thirties, and circuses and bawdy houses and Son-of-Ham shows. They came from the medical schools, where they were trotted out every hour on the hour, as examples of perverted physiology. They came from the attics in their isolated upstate homes, where they’d been stored since the day their parents first understood they were more than just short for their age. They came from working their pickpocket scams or crawling in among the gear wheels of gigantic machinery or serving some particularly delicate inclination in the most exclusive of brothels—in short, from anyplace where a fine hand was needed.

There were thousands of them. They came in by the trainloads, piling off at the New York & Sea Beach terminal. Blinking in the harsh Coney sunlight, sniffing the salt air, wondering if they could make it in the big-little town. They came in all shapes and sizes: there were the big heads and the Pekinese faces, the Chinless Wonders and the Ape Men and the cripples, the almond heads and the pinheads and the mongoloids. And those few, perfectly proportioned midgets, like my Carlotta, who merely had the misfortune to be short—if misfortune is what you could call such beauty in exquisite miniature.

We winnowed them down to four hundred, sorting them day after day through the endless, winding lines. Brinckerhoff had a doctor and a professor of anatomy on hand, to prod and poke at them. Their disqualifications were chalked on the back of their coats: “H” for a hunchback, “F” for freakishness, “T” for talentless, “U” for excessive moles, or hair, or simply overwhelming, repulsive ugliness. The losers were trucked back to the station without so much as a farewell handshake or the train fare—to discover their defects only later, when they happened to take their coats off.