The Swan Gondola (14 page)

T
HOUGH THE MUD
hardly kept anyone off the midway that afternoon, my business was sluggish, everyone's spirits were sapped. Not only did no one stop for my jokes, nobody even slowed. Oscar and I resorted to following fairgoers, mocking a lady's hat perhaps, or insulting the mustache of the man at her side, until they paid us to shut up and go away. And Oscar had been soaked by the rain, so most of his tricks fizzled and flopped. His sparks sputtered, his joints squeaked.

My heart wasn't in it either. I was fretful. If Cecily and Doxie didn't join me in the swan gondola, I reasoned, they probably never would. Why, after all, would Cecily trust me? I closed my eyes, trying to again feel Cecily's kiss on my pouting lower lip. I gave my lip a pinch. The kiss had been so soft and quick, it had been almost nothing at all. But the taste of her lips had lingered—she'd been wearing some kind of balm the flavor of cucumber and rose.

When I opened my eyes, an old man in a black swallowtail coat stood before me. He wore the white gloves of a footman. He had hardly any hair but what hair he had needed cutting. The pale gray hair hovered over his skull like a halo of smoke. He said nothing. He only nodded, expecting me to perform, so I began my routine. He was generous with his laughter, but the laughter was silent. It shook his whole body, sent his head back, shut his eyes, but never reached the volume of a wheeze.

After several minutes of this, the man finally held up a hand and shook his head, as if he could take no more hilarity. He smiled and sighed, exhausted. He reached into the front pocket of his coat as he stepped forward. In his hand was not a tip but an envelope of a fine linen paper, its red wax seal stamped with the letter
W
. Across the front of it, in an elegant hand, was written:
The Ventriloquist
.

The footman tromped away, holding up the legs of his trousers to keep the cuffs from the mud. And I read the invitation.

A Masquerade Ball,

to “Remember the
Maine
,”

on July 1,

on the roof of the Fine Arts Building

in the Grand Court

of the New White City,

after dark.

William Wakefield, President of the Board of the Omaha World's Fair, King of the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, invites you to the Sinking of the (miniaturized) Battleship
Maine
. The USS
Maine
exploded and sank in the Havana harbor, on February 15, as the city celebrated Carnival. The lagoon will stand in for the harbor as we watch from the roof as the toy ship sinks. Our spectacle is a tribute to the Americans who've lost their lives in the Spanish-American War thus far, and those lives still to be lost in the name of Freedom.

Please come masked, and in costume.

Beneath the type, Wakefield had scrawled me a message in pencil.

P.S. Bring along any friends. And bring along the dummy.

P.P.S. I'm the man in the car, with the silver skeleton.

•   •   •

I
'D HEARD OF
the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, but they were rich, and I was poor, so what did I care? It was a kingly court of the wealthy looking to improve the city. They took the name of the state of Nebraska and turned it in on itself, spelling out, symbolically, how backward things had got, everything topsy-turvy in the city of Omaha, with its saloons and whores and gambling dens. The knights hosted coronation balls and parades. They built the Fair. When they gathered for court, they wore crowns and ermine capes, and jester's tights and pantaloons. The men painted their faces like harlequins and drank wine from golden goblets. I could just picture them all eating grapes fed to them by skinny boys dressed as sprites. Appalling. At Ak-Sar-Ben Hall, for ten cents, the common folk could stand at the railings of the upper reaches to look down upon the dance floor, during the knights' famous masquerade balls. Yes, the rich bastards let us watch them waltz, and charged us a dime for the privilege.

I had never attended and I never would. They spent thousands of dollars on their revelry so they could raise hundreds for orphans and poorhouses.
William Wakefield.
Of course he'd be the king. Wakefield was the king of all.

And he still is, as far as I know. And always will be.

I should've killed him when I could've.

November 18, 1898

Dear Cecily,

Forgive the rusty thumbprint at the corner of the page—my every fingertip is red. Emmaline brought me a plate of gingersnaps and broiled marrowbones. She dusted the snaps with cayenne pepper, which helps the night seem not so cold.

I've been letting Emmaline read the letters I write to you. I'm letting her read this one, even as I write it. She sits with her cheek near mine, criticizing my handwriting, complaining that she can hardly read a word.

There's been no talk of how long I might or might not stay. The Old Sisters Egan and me grow sleepy at the same hour, grow chilled at the same temperature of an evening.

And I've told Emmaline about you, about the Fair, about Doxie. I tell her I'm only telling a ghost story, but Emmaline tells me I'm wrong. Ghost stories have ghosts in them, she says.

But you, Cecily, haven't so much as said boo to me.

Emmaline's starting to think that
I'm
the ghost. And who can blame her?

Emmaline wants you to know that her favorite character in my ghostless ghost story is the baby in the carpetbag. But that shouldn't surprise you. That's Doxie's way—she just has to purr a little and we're all in love.
Write more about Doxie
, Emmaline begs, sitting here at my shoulder, tugging at my sleeve like an impatient child.
Cecily would want to know more. Mothers never tire of hearing all about their babies.

So if there's no ghost story to tell, I'll tell you a fairy tale.

When I went up in the balloon, on the last day of the Fair, I took Doxie with me, and I wasn't afraid at all. I didn't cower in the basket. When you have someone to protect, someone to look after, bravery runs through you, sharp, like the fear used to.

And we didn't crash, and my leg didn't break. We floated to the farm just in time to wrestle it back to life. Doxie was crowned queen and heir of all the acres of nothingness. She rests in a basket and does nothing but magic. The creek bed is wet again and the corn has grown tall. When we wake up every sunny morning, it's summer, with a chance of rain, no matter what.

Your spinner of tales and teller of lies,

Ferret, again

BOOK TWO

Lovers

A
UGUST'S CARPETBAG WAS
no longer sufficient for his business, so he'd taken to wheeling around a trunk full of his potions and tonics. He painted on the side of the trunk
August Sweetbriar, Omaha Indian
, and he parked in front of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. On the day of the storm and the fire, I found him sitting on the trunk, smoking another of his asthma cigarettes, lines of red and yellow paint across his cheeks. Stuck into the brim of his hat, next to his bluebird, was a tall gray feather.

“War paint,” he told me, winking, touching his finger to his colors. He found that the closer he could match the white folks' idea of a witch doctor, the more he sold. And with the rain having weighed everyone down and quickly given them sniffles and chills, he was making a fortune off sweat-inducing extracts of dwarf elder and marigold alone.

I sat next to him on the trunk and showed him the invitation from Wakefield. “Oh my,” August said. “Are you taking me to the masquerade ball, my love?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “What's Wakefield's story, anyway? I see his name on ice trucks.”

“
Billy Wakefield
,” August said, bewildered by my bewilderment. “You've lived in Omaha all your life, and you're asking me about Billy Wakefield?”

“I am,” I said.

“Yes, darling, Billy Wakefield is an iceman. In the summer, his lake is a resort, and in the winter they cut the ice off it. He's ice and fire and everything in between. He has money in the smelting works, a meatpacking company. He deals in linseed, sugar beets. He's everything, and everybody knows him.”

“I don't,” I said, “and I don't want to.”

“We have to go to his party.”

“No,” I said.

“It's almost a month away,” he said. “That gives me plenty of time to change your mind.”

I took my dummy's hand in mine and pressed my thumb to the center of it. His fingers curled around to grip my knuckle. What was it about my shabby doll that would make a man like Wakefield so interested?

“Oh, and such tragedy. There was even a song,” August said, glancing over the smoke of his cigarette, contemplating.

“A song?” I said.

August nodded and thought some more. “‘The Ballad of Billy Wakefield's Little Boy,'” he said. “It was
very
popular. It broke all our hearts.”

And so August told me the story behind it. Like a lot of men's misery, it started with all the bad business of the nineties, the corruption, the failures, the debt. The railroads, running out of money, began staging locomotive collisions for spectacle, driving two trains at top speed right toward each other on the same track, just so people could watch the catastrophe. Billy Wakefield, a lover of toys and sport and grand productions, took his son to a locomotive collision in the deserts of western Nebraska. In his zeal, he arranged to have a gazebo built as close to the track as he could get, so he and his boy could sit in the shade. A little
too
close, it turned out, because when the trains crashed and the boilers exploded, debris flew. The little boy was killed and Wakefield was maimed, his arm lost. “I can't really remember the song,” August said, “except that it rhymed
rails
with
coffin nails
. Oh, and there was a whole other ballad too. When the mother died. She dwindled. She fell ill. Her ballad rhymed
the boy's life so brief
with
she died from grief
. ”

And I pitied Wakefield just then, no matter how rich he was. Whatever role he played in his own demise, he'd been punished more than any one man deserved.