Against the Day (13 page)

In August he happened to be in
Columbus, where the papers were full of Blinky Morgan’s impending execution at
the state pen and various lastditch efforts to prevent it. A sweltering
somnambulism possessed the town. It was impossible to get a decent meal, or
even snack, anywhere, burned flapjacks and vulcanized steaks being as
appetizing as things got. It also quickly became evident—horribly
evident—that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were
some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking
up. Bridgerails were crowded with people watching the Scioto move sluggishly
along. Saloons were full of silent drinkers, who drank very slowly till they
collapsed, typically around eight in the evening, which appeared to be closing
time here. Day and night, thousands of petitioners milled at the gates of the
Capitol seeking admission to the hanging. Souvenir stands enjoyed a
remunerative trade in Blinky poker decks and board games, watchfobs and cigar
cutters, Blinky lockets and charms, commemorative china and wallpaper, Blinky
toys including stuffed Blinky dolls which each came suspended by the neck from
its own little toy gallows, and a great favorite, Blinky thumbbooks, whose pages,
showing fullcolor artist’s renderings of the bloody murders in Ravenna, if
flipped rapidly with your thumb appeared actually to be in motion. For a while,
fascinated, Merle wandered the booths and pitches, setting up his camera and
taking plate after plate of these Blinky Morgan keepsakes, displayed by the
identical dozens, until somebody asked him why he wasn’t trying to get in to
photograph the execution. “Why, you know,” as if coming to his senses, “I don’t
know.” There were people at the
Plain Dealer
he could have wired, he
supposed, cashed in a favor maybe
. . . .
Alarmed
at what seemed a dangerously morbid lapse, he uncovered all the plates he’d
taken and left them out in a vacant lot under the daylight, to return to
blankness and innocence.

As if the light of Heaven had
performed a similar service for his brain, Merle understood that he must never
if he could avoid it set foot within the limits of this place again. “If the
U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it
sat down,
Columbus,
Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness.”

Merle never did
get to use Professor Vanderjuice’s
letter of introduction to Michelson. By the time he got what he would have
called back on track, the Ætherdrift experiment was all written up in the
science journals and Michelson was away teaching at Clark University, and too
famous to be giving itinerant technicals the time of day.

Just like that, as if some period of
youthful folly had expired, it seemed time to move on—Madge and Mia had
both found rich beaux, the police had turned their attention to Anarchism in
the streetcar workers’ union, the Blinkyites had left town, many of them bound
for Lorain County, where it was rumored Blinky and his gang had buried a huge
treasure, the Ætherists and otherwise lightobsessed had dispersed to resume
whatever lapses of balance had brought them here—including Roswell
Bounce, who had been subpoenaed to appear in Pittsburgh regarding some patent
dispute. And it was exactly in this blessed lull in the daily discombobulation
that Merle met Erlys Mills Snidell, and found himself unexpectedly miles up
some unfamiliar road, as if in the dark he had encountered an unmapped fork.
“The Æther might’ve still been an open question,” he told Dally, years later,
“but there was never no doubt about that Erlys.”

“Then—”

“Why’d she leave? Say, my little
eggplant, how would I know? come back one day, she’s just up and gone, was all.
You on the bed blissfully deep in the first colicfree sleep of your young
life—”

“Wait.
She made
me
have the colic?”

“Didn’t say that. Did I say that?
Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Your Ma stuck as long as she could, Dally, brave
of her, too, considering the life we were trying to lead, deputies with court
orders way before breakfast, patent lawyers, vigilantes with shotguns, and
worst of all those town ladies, herds o’ locusts, no end to em, torchlight
rallies waving signs on sticks, ‘Beast Without Shame,’ so forth—she could
soldier on when it was just the men after me, but them sisters in indignation,
why, she couldn’t bear much of that, it’s women beware women when
that
starts
rolling down the pike. Oh but beg pardon, you’re all but about to be one
yourself ain’t you, so sorry there—”

“Wait, wait, go back a little, tell
me how that Zombini bird fits in to this again?”

“Oh, him. Wish I could say he’s this
evil interloper come swooping in and made off with her, alienation of
affections and all, but I figure you’re old enough to hear the truth, that’s o’
course if I knew what that was, seein’s I’d have to speak for your Ma as far as
inner feelings and them, which’d be not only unfair to her but also impossible
for me—”

“All right, Pa. Don’t go gettin
tonguetied, I can wait to ask her in person someday.”

“I mean—”

“It’s O.K. Really. Someday.”

Piece by piece, though, she got some
of the story. Luca Zombini back then had been pursuing a modest career in stage
magic, playing local variety circuits in the Midwest. One day in East Fullmoon,
Iowa, his regular stageassistant Roxana ran off with a tenor sax player from the
pit band at the local opera house, with little hope on the horizon of this
remote town for any replacement. Then, just to make the day complete, one of
Luca’s magnetic stage gadgets broke down. At his wit’s end, ready for anything
like a piece of luck, he spotted Merle’s wagon parked out at the edge of town.
Erlys looked upfrom darning a sock to see him perched on the doorsill, holding
his hat. “I don’t suppose you’d have a spare electrical coil around?”

Merle had been down to the opera
house and recognized him. “Look around, take what you need—what’s it
for?”

“Hong Kong Mystery Effect. Show you
the work if you like.”

“Rather be puzzled. Just having lunch
if you’d care to sit.”

“Smells like minestrone.”

“Think that’s what they called it
back in Cleveland, when they were showing me how to do it. Fry everything
first, basically.”

“Murray Hill? Eh, I got cousins
there.”

Both men were aware of a silence
audibly fallen over Erlys, though each interpreted it in his own way. It never
occurred to Merle that Zombini the Mysterious might be the cause, especially as
he showed none of those classic Italian warning signs, ringlets, dark flashing
eyes, oily courtesies—none of that, just an averagelooking gent who as
far as anybody could tell hadn’t even noticed Erlys till the matter of the
magician’sassistant vacancy came up, when he abruptly turned to her, simmering
like a pot of soup down the end of the table—“Excuse me, signora, what
may seem a peculiar question, but. . . have you ever felt that you wished to
suddenly disappear, even from a room full of people, just”—tossing his
hands to suggest smoke vanishing—“gone?”

“Me? All the time, why?”

“Could you stand perfectly still
while somebody throws knives at you?”

“Been known to hold still for worse’n
that,” nicking a glance, then, in Merle’s direction. At which point Dally woke
up, as if she’d been keeping track and chosen just that moment.

“I’ll see to her.” Merle brushing
past, voice in a mumble, painfully aware of the beauty that had swept upon the
young woman, as it did now and then, always unexpected, like a galvanic shadow,
her face, that is, while her long body did not brighten but took on a vibrant
dark density, a dimension you had to observe directly, with care, when that
might’ve been the last thing you were ready just then to do. He didn’t know
what was happening. He did know.

Roxana, possibly at the urging of the
sax player, had taken her costume along with her, so for that night’s
performance Erlys had to put one together, borrowing tights from one of the
dancers and a short sequined dress from one of the acrobats. When she appeared
in the stagelight, Merle felt himself hollow out from neck to groin with desire
and desperation. It might have been only the liprouge, but he thought he saw a
smile, almost cruel, he hadn’t much noticed before, selfsufficient to be sure,
but determined enough now, no denying it, on a separate fate. From her eyes,
the lids and lashes darkened elaborately with chimney soot and petrolatum, he
could read nothing. Next day, without mystical words or special equipment, she
and the magician had vanished, and Dally stayed behind with a note pinned to
her blanket,
I’ll be back for her when I can.
No “Good luck” or “Love
always, Erlys,” nothing like that.

Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long
as he could, waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in
from the winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would
all be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or
any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan—with
Erlys gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike
anyway—and that long s he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just
staying within the contours of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia
would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise.

After the
closing
of the Columbian
Fair, once out of Chicago and into the land again, Dally and Merle began to
catch sight of refugees from the “national” exhibits which had lined the Midway
Plaisance, all these nonmidwestern varieties of human, some teamed up together,
some going it alone. Merle would run for a camera trying to grab a snap, but by
the time he set up they were usually gone. Through the falling snow, Dally
thought she saw dog teams and Eskimos in silent recessional ever northward. She
invited Merle’s attention to Pygmies looking out at them from among the trunks
of birch forests. Down in the riverfront saloons of the towns, South Sea Island
tattoo artists whose faces seemed to her obscurely familiar inscribed the
biceps of riverboat men with hieratic images that someday when least expected
would be good for small but crucial acts of magic. Dally assumed these
wanderers had all been banished for no good reason from the White City, too,
making her and her Pa just some different kind of Eskimo, was all, and the
country they moved through never about to be better than a place of exile.
Rolling into city after city, St. Louis, Wichita, Denver, she caught herself
each time hoping that somewhere in it, some neighborhood down the end of some
electric line, it’d be there waiting for her, the real White City again, lit up
all spectral and cool at night and shimmering by day in the bright humidity of
its webwork of canals, the electric launches moving silently through the
waterways with their parasoled ladies and strawhatted men and little kids with
Cracker Jack pieces stuck in their hair.

As years piled on, it came to seem
more like the memory of some previous life, deformed, disguised, stretches of
it missing, this capital of dream she had once lived in, maybe was even
numbered among the rightful nobility of. At first she begged Merle, tearfully
as she knew how, to please bring them back, please, and he never quite found
the way to tell her that the fairground was most of it surely burned down by
now, pulled to pieces, taken away to salvage yards, sold off, crumbled away,
staff and scantlings at the mercy of the elements, of the manmade bad times
that had come upon Chicago and the nation. After a while her tears only
reflected light but did not flow, and she dropped into silences, and then
these, too, gradually lost their resentful edges.

Planted rows went turning past like
giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by
dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and
light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered
shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road,
and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life
passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its
way. Leaves sawtooth, spadeshaped, long and thin, bluntfingered, downy and
veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters,
purple and white or yellow as butter, starshaped ferns in the wet and dark
places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and
under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the
ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development
of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged
precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which
the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never
got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for different futures,
but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between
them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

Merle had put in some time at this
thankless job, argued with botanical jobbers out on warehouse docks, learned a
couple of the indications but never found in himself the gift the true
wildcrafters had, the unerring feet, the sure nose.

“There. Smell that?”

A scent at the edge of her memory,
ghostly as if a presence from a former life had just passed through
. . .
Erlys. “Lily of the valley. Sort
of.”