The Swan Gondola (7 page)

W
ITHIN THE WAGON,
in the light from a little window at the front, I saw trunks with clothes and costumes spilling from their open lids, and gowns and crinolines hanging from hooks. Strapped to the walls were dented-up instruments, some that plinked and twanged with the rocking of the wagon—a xylophone, a mandolin, an accordion.

I stumbled over a row of pretty shoes and nearly slammed myself into the wagon's wall. I worried that everyone outside would hear me inside, rolling around, so I sat atop a trunk and tried to keep still. I hugged my knees to my chest. I cozied up to the automaton seated next to me—such puppets had become popular parts of traveling shows. They did magic tricks, these bloodless characters. They were often life-size, dressed up in fancy robes and wigs, and within their guts was machinery that worked their arms and neck, animating them with a muffled clicking of gears. They were like ventriloquists' dummies, but with no ventriloquist nearby.

This automaton's skin was the texture of burlap, its wrinkles sewn deep, its nose bulbous, its wig all dirty-gray wires twisted into two braids. She slept. She wore a ruffled collar like a clown, and a silver whistle hung at the end of a chain around her neck. Her long skirt was patterned with suggestions of sorcery: frogs, snakes, a crescent moon.

As I reached up to press at her eyelid, the eyelids drifted open, as if from weights in the doll's skull. Her head turned to me, and though it moved on a slow cog, the movement made me jump. The left eye, clearly glass, was all milk white, not a single dot of color, but the other eye . . . the other eye was as real and wet as if it had been freshly spooned out of a corpse's head.

That's when the automaton opened its mouth. Her breath smelled so thickly of death, of yesterday's onions, of the blackest of pepper, I knew this old woman could only be alive. But before I could back away, the woman grabbed my wrist with the strength of a man. Despite the lack of bright light in the wagon, her one living eye continued to shimmer. One hand still on my wrist, she put the other to my throat, and she clutched until I wheezed.

“All my life,” she said, her voice hoarse and broken, “little thieves have thunk they could snake past me and fill their pockets.” All her weight was pressed against me, pinning me to the wall.

“I'm not a thief,” I choked out.

“Them's the famous last words of all the little thieves whose necks I snap.”

“I don't want anything,” I said.

“There ain't a man who walked this earth that didn't want something and who didn't want that something every minute of his stupid, worthless life.”

Gagging, I attempted, with both hands, to pry her grip from my throat. “Nothing,” I said.

“That'd be a shame to choke to death for
nothing
,” she said. “You should figure out here, in your last minutes,
something
worth dying for.”

“Stop killing me,” I said, my voice deflated to nothing but a slow, weak whistling.

“Oh, I ain't even started killing you yet, little thief. You'll know for sure when I'm killing ya. Now I'm just playing with ya. But maybe
that's
what you want, ay? To be the first man dead at the Fair? Then everybody would know your name for a couple of days. That'd be something worth thieving for, I'd say.”

“Cecily,” I said, and at the immediate mention of the actress's name, the old woman loosened her grip. But then she tightened it again. “Little thieves like you don't know nobody named Cecily,” she said.

“No,” I said, her grip tighter and tighter. “I don't know nobody.”

“That's the smartest thing you said all day,” she said. “Not knowing nothing is the smartest thing you can do for yourself, little bandit. I don't know you all that much, but you don't seem all that smart to me. But let me tell you something about that girl you say you don't know nothing about.” She put her hand to my chin in a manner that might otherwise have seemed motherly. She stroked my cheek with her thumb. With her other hand, she smoothed my curls back. “You better keep knowing nothing about her. You don't have to go no further than troubling yourself with that girl to get that early death you've been wanting so bad.” And with that, she grabbed me by the collar, dragged me to the door, and tossed me from the wagon.

I
HAD THE PRESENCE OF MIND,
as I stumbled over my ankles and fell to the ground, to lead with my shoulder so as not to bust up Oscar, but I was bounced onto my back anyway, hitting my own head hard against the dummy's wooden one. Though I wasn't knocked all the way out, my wits had scattered plenty.

For a brief moment Cecily hovered over me, a glowing shadow, as I squinted into the morning sun behind her head. I was embarrassed to have her help me up, but I leaned into her as she put her arms around my waist, as she cradled me to get me to my feet. My head throbbed so, I couldn't see straight. And, in a blink, the shadow wasn't Cecily at all. The woman who held me wore a Salvation Army uniform—a cape and bonnet, and her hair was silver. “God be with you,” she muttered as she righted me, and she ducked her head and slipped away.

When all the spots in my eyes left, I saw the real Cecily, but only as she disappeared yet again, as she turned a corner to follow her wagon through the service gate. As I ran ahead, a sting in my ankle from a twist, I could tell there was something wrong with Oscar too by the clack of his jaw. The thought of him back there, broken, nagged at me, but I couldn't stop to look.

The Fair's security guards were dressed as English bobbies, billy clubs and all, in domed hats and brass buttons, just for the novelty of it. The guards were checking passes, and that's when I realized the Salvation Army angel hadn't been cradling me—she'd frisked me. She'd fingered my counterfeit pass right from the crotch of my pants where I'd hidden it, likely mistaking it for a wallet. A wizened thief myself, I always kept my money in the hollow heel of my left shoe, a heel I could push open on a secret, swiveled hinge a cobbler had tapped into place for me. At that particular moment I would have given away every dollar in my shoe to have that pass in my hands.

“I'm with them,” I said, pointing toward the Silk & Sawdust Players, but the guard ignored me as he checked the pass of the driver of a flower cart. I tried walking past him but only ended up on the ground again, the guard having grabbed me by the neck and shoved.

“Get up and try to get by me again,” the guard said, the tip of his boot nudging at the base of my spine. “I get paid more, the more bones I crack.”

I rolled away and he left me alone. When I sat up I saw my dummy had suffered worse than I'd thought in the fall from the wagon. Oscar's jaw had gone unhinged and it hung there, speechless. I pulled a piece of string from a new tear at the seam of my sleeve and knotted it around an exposed screw and a hook, until I'd doctored him the best I could. I nonetheless worried about his innards. I relied on those switches and gears to keep him spunky. I shook him a little, and he gave off a deathly rattle.

My skeleton felt jangled from all the bullying too, and in my thinking I was a kid again—I'd got the name
Ferret
as a wily boy of a narrow, ferretlike build. I supposed I might never outgrow beatings from every sack of rusty guts who had a pound or two on me. And what would I say to Cecily now? In her eyes,
I
was the bully.

As I walked back toward the front lot, poor old Oscar under my arm, I didn't think at all about what I might say to Cecily if I saw her again but of what I should've said when I saw her before. I went over and over in my head how it all could have been different, as if there were still time to magically undo the hour if I just fussed and fretted enough. I should have tipped my hat to her, said the right thing—whatever that was—and she would have let me carry her bag and thanked me for it. And she might even have remembered me from the Empress.
Your mustache is gone
, she might have said with a wink.

But I refused to believe I'd been unlucky. Seeing her again, on the Fair's very first day, was a kind of miracle—my every misstep had tripped me right into her path. My luck was changing for the better. After all, it wasn't her that pushed me away.

Up ahead, beneath the arch over the entrance, the ticket booth had opened and the mob pulsed forth like a pack of twitchy rats toward a hole in a boat.

The summer sunlight harsh against the stark-white arch scorched us all, and those with umbrellas opened them, filling the air with the screech of steel spines and the pop of silk pulled taut. I skirted the fee by ducking in and out of the parasols of others, my accomplices barely noticing me at their sides, though we were nearly cheek to cheek, knocking elbows, as I slipped around in their shade.

I entered the courtyard tucked in beneath some lady's ruffled white parasol, my head low to avoid suspicion. The lady took my arm, mistaking me for her gentleman, and she whispered in my ear, with a lovely gasp, “Sugar.” I patted her hand and somehow got away without her noticing that I wasn't hers.

Once I was out from under the umbrellas and parasols, I looked up and saw what she meant. The buildings of the Grand Court shimmered with shattered glass that had been dusted over the whitewash, to glisten like something from a confectioner's shop.

And those buildings went on and on without end. I was most stunned by the expanse of it, and all its elegance. The rotundas, the columns and pillars, the winding ivy, the rows of flags, the statues of winged horses, of chariots and bare-chested angels and warriors, everything white and shimmering as if chiseled from a salt lick—it was like looking upon an ancient city before it fell. It was not part of Omaha, but something in place of it, something else entirely. In this new place that had risen from the city's humid summer fog, the breezes seemed blown in from the sea.

Most of the fairgoers floated slowly across the pavements as if addle-headed from liquor. They seemed to want nothing other than a lazy stroll through this strange, sudden kingdom that might just ripple away in the waves of heat. This was
their
spectacle, and they were determined to be marveled by it.

I can't say
I
marveled for long, beyond those first few moments. Soon enough I felt the grit of Omaha's dirty wind between my teeth and in my eyes. The Grand Court was something I had to get past to get to the midway, to find Cecily. And the court, and all its white mansions, looked like it might go on for miles, as if you could keep walking toward the end of it and never reach the other side. I'd known this lot when it was empty—among my odd jobs over the years I'd been a wharf rat, picking up work at the riverbanks, pulling in barges and loading up wagons. Me and the other boys had climbed to the top of the tall railroad bridge, back before my fear of heights, allowing us to gaze across the fallow fields. I'd imagined the property mine.
Even just a scrap of it
, I'd dreamed.
Even just a dry corner left for dead.
A patch of land, I'd figured, would change everything. I'd get something to grow on it and live a halfway honest life.

How had they fit this court into that stretch of empty fields? I'd never guessed it'd hold so much. And there, all down the middle of the court, was the lagoon, which itself seemed as long and wide as the river.

I headed to the east end, toward the bridge with the plaster angels and cherubs with trumpets. The bridge rose up and over Sixteenth Street, over the streetcar line, then down into the bluffs that lined the river, to the midway and all its shuck and jive—despite my tuxedo, I knew the Grand Court wasn't where I'd be lingering that summer; it was on the midway I'd be able to hustle for tips once Oscar had his wits about him.

But there was no getting on the bridge because there was no getting past the elephant. The midway wouldn't open until afternoon, it seemed, and the wild animal show had been enlisted to block entry while giving the crowds a peek at the carnival's beasts. I would eventually come to know the little family that managed this zoo, just as I got to know everyone who worked the midway. A yellow-haired girl in hair ribbons, one of the daughters of the circus barker, wore a python around her shoulders like a fox stole. Another daughter, probably four years old, sat locked in the cage with the sleeping lion, one hand wrapped in the cat's mane. The barker's wife, peacock feathers rising from her headpiece, kept a panther on a leash, letting it prowl and pace. A grizzly bear wore a clown's neck ruffle. And atop the elephant, standing on the creature's back, was the barker himself, barking his guts out, in tall black boots and long red coat, boasting loudly of all the terror he'd tamed.

I stepped back into the court, realizing the midway would have to wait, and stood at the railing at the edge of the lagoon.

The gondoliers steered their boats through the still water of the canal, and swimming among them was the one shaped like a swan. Phoebe had told me about these gondolas and gondoliers sailing up the river in the winter, boats full of actors. I had pictured Cecily bundled in furs on a gondola's pillowed bench, beneath a candy-striped awning, a kettle of hot tea on a tiny gas stove, like some Russian duchess. And I'd pictured a swan gondola as elegant as the birds themselves.

That wasn't quite the case. This swan boat, though pretty with its frail, curved neck, needed paint. The yellow was nearly all chipped off its beak, and the white of its wooden feathers was faded to the color of a dirty egg. There was hardly any blue left in its eyes. The bench at the bird's tail feathers had a heart-shaped back, like on a lovers' swing, and even that looked battered, with faded velvet cushions.

And yet I saw myself with Cecily sitting on that bench, sharing a bottle of wine. The boat's ruin had a shabby romance, like it had jumped the track of some cheap midway carousel, sneaking into the court's precious waters. It was an honest wreck, and it was a welcome sight.

After looking away from the swan, all I could see was the toil of illusion. I followed the promenade toward the band shell, where speakers had already begun to speechify. I passed a patch of garden where a few women in aprons across their black skirts tended flowers, carrying what looked to be large bottles of perfume. They pinched at the bulbs of atomizers, enhancing the scents of the petals with floral extract.

Nearby, a man wrestled with a tangle of wires in a lamppost. I could almost feel the electricity, as if it buzzed unharnessed in the air, singeing and bristling the hairs on the backs of my hands. I could taste sulfur on the tip of my tongue.

This
was the magic of the Fair for me. The Grand Court had been built only to be torn down and would never survive a single Nebraska winter. It all even seemed
of
the winter, like the mists that rose over the river in early December, those columns of steam and cloud that hover over the water like a ghost city. Cecily and I would fall in love at the Fair, I determined. We would lose the whole summer as we stared at each other, and then we'd let the White City collapse behind us. The place could turn to cloud and fade away like Avalon.

Already, the gondolas had passengers. As I looked down on them from a bridge, they looked up above my head. They pointed at the sky behind me. When I turned, I saw the hot-air balloon that rose from the hidden midway, its basket tethered with a rope to keep it from floating off.

The balloon was a pale yellow with a few large square patches, like patches on the knees of a boy's trousers—I thought I could even see the
x
's of the stitching. One patch was green, another blue, and one seemed a pattern of plaid. And draped across the balloon was a giant purple banner with only one word—
Omaha
. And the balloon seemed to have no captain.

The thought of hovering up there, carried by ether, gave me the shivers like nothing else. You wouldn't get me in a tree even if the ground was squirming with rattlers. I wasn't one to hammer a shingle on a roof or to climb the ladder that would get me there. It reminded me of the dream that showed up again and again in my nights, which would start sweet, with me waltzing a pretty but faceless lady in a pavilion, under paper lanterns, only to end with us both stumbling down an open well. I would wake, my heart pounding to get out of my ribs.