This Side of Jordan (33 page)

“Let's go see something,” Alvin said, feeling impatient. He didn't know how long he had until fever wore him out or another coughing fit struck and he wanted to have some fun for once.

“You go along, if you like,” the dwarf said, his roaming eyes stilled by the tiny maiden. “I believe I'll stay here awhile.”

“Maybe we ought to have a look in that funhouse back there,” Alvin suggested, reluctant to go off alone. What if he had a coughing fit like he did at that carnival in Galesburg last summer?

“Isn't she a knockout?” the dwarf remarked, as the darling midget performed a short melody on the penny flute while executing a dainty pirouette for her audience. “Yeah, sure,” Alvin replied, beginning to feel febrile and wobbly again. He watched one of the midgets breathe fire through a golden ring and another strummed the lute. “But what do you say we go have ourselves a good time? Why, I'll bet there's something doing in one of them big tents. Let's go have a look-see.”

“No, thank you,” the dwarf demurred, sounding moony now. “It's plenty wonderful right here.” He sucked in his breath and folded his fingers together in a squirmy knot.

“Well, I ain't coming back for you,” Alvin groused. “I'll be too busy hunting up some real fun.”

A dreamy smile on his lips, the dwarf replied, “I'll look you up later on.”

Disgusted, Alvin went off on his own, hoping to find the girl from Spud Farrell's boardinghouse. Without the dwarf to keep him company, nobody paid him any notice at all as he walked alone under the gusting banners and electric lights. The farm boy jostled and shoved with circus-goers at tent openings and game booths, and grew dizzy admiring the mechanical Whirly-Gig and the bright electric Ferris Wheel. He ate a steaming hotdog and a bag of popcorn while watching Tessie the Tassel Twirler perform for a noisy crowd of men in a 10¢ tent behind the marionette show
(“She wiggles to the east, she wiggles to the west, she wiggles in the middle where the wiggling is best!”).
In the Topsy-Turvy House, he chased a gang of kids tossing half-chewed Crackerjack at each other through the dizzying Rolling Barrel and the Mad Tea Party in candlelit Upside-Down Room and out the slippery Shoe-Chute where Alvin tripped on the Crazy Stairs and skinned his knee. Outdoors again, more children ran past, screeching like wild animals. Fireworks boomed overhead. A cold wind blew across the sky, chasing the farm boy deeper yet into a glimmering sawdust land.

 

The citizens of Icaria swarmed the high-grass circus, clustering at Laswell's mysterious tent shows and cage wagons, awed by his Chinese magicians and Egyptian mummies and ferocious Bengal tigers, his wild black cannibals nine feet tall. A thousand tales of wonder in a single evening of blue fire and rolla bolla. For a nickel a head, the curious pack Charon's Tent of Sorcery to see a pale spook in a silken cloak grace Cleopatra's throne whose fragrant apparition roils from clouds of purple smoke by the bleak light of the sideshow conjurer's font. No sad angelfaced harlequin in pearls, but a proud Ptolemy rid at last of Antony and the asp. Tent flaps rustle as she strums a golden lyre: white doves fly forth: flower petals fall. Women faint and a few men yell “Cheat!” and “Humbug!” and half a dozen red-hot cigar butts are hurled across the amber haze of burning candle wax. A trio of fresh towheads who'd wriggled under the tattered canvas walls for a peek, crawl back out of the dusty shadows and race down the windy night to the elevated platforms under the square tent of Laswell's torch-lit Hall of Freaks where the gathered crowd is restless but timid.

“That's right, folks! Come in a little closer! She won't hurt you!”

At a rap of the sideshow talker's cane upon the podium, Sally Victoria, the Two-Headed Girl, dressed in a lavender and silver lamé tea gown, steps out from behind a woven brown curtain and begins to sing in harmonious duet a waltz lullaby called “Dreamy Moon.” Her darling faces are dolled up with show-lashes and ruby-red lipstick and a fancy French hairdo. Harvey Allison from the hardware store on North Main falls in love by the second stanza and immediately begins composing a love sonnet to sweet Sally Victoria. When the song ends, the rural crowd hurries off to the growling Dog-Woman from Burma who swallows full-grown rats with shotglasses of Kentucky bourbon (“In her own land she is considered a great beauty, but she's a long way from home!”), and on to the next row of platforms where a mated pair of steely-clawed Stymphalian birds from the marshes of Arcadia squawk and hiss at photographs of President Hoover, and the recently unearthed Peking Man demonstrates his astonishing knowledge of algebraic equations, and the Human Pin Cushion from Iranistan receives one hundred forty-two needle punctures from audience volunteers while reciting “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Then the bronze torches dim and the anxious crowd is invited to the platform draped in Oriental carpets at the back of Laswell's Hall of Freaks where a silken gold shroud is withdrawn from a glass aquarium revealing the Turtle Boy paddling in foamy brine and pink coral with the strange man-sized Bishop Fish: a queer pair, indeed.

A dark-bearded lecturer in black top-hat and tails steps out from backstage to address his audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, listen to a tale of woe from distant maritimes, a fable for the ages. Here in this crystal tank a remnant of moral tragedy resides, for in truth these two sad creatures were once as human as you or I. Many years ago by the shores of an ancient sea dwelt a humble tinker of little means. Such was his station in life that even beggars took pity on him and shared what meager portions of bread and fish they had, knowing without such mercy the poor tinker would surely starve. By that same barren shore was a small chapel whose devout cleric ministered to all who sought comfort and delivery from the harshness of the world. He knew the tinker well and regarded him plainly as another child of God who had lost his way. Each morning the cleric watched the lowly tinker pass along the shore with his sack and his old nets. Each evening he watched the tinker return, his scant accumulations in tow. Perhaps he envied the tinker's perseverance. Perhaps he despised the tinker's disregard for pious fellowship. Who can say? From a nearby village the cleric had taken in a wayward youth to look after the chapel grounds and garden. Now, this youth, too, watched the tinker come and go and had little patience for hardship, believing that life was a blind drawing of lots and fortune simply a matter of will. One evening after vespers, the youth approached the cleric with a remarkable story. The meandering tinker, he claimed, had cast his ragged net upon the waters that morning and retrieved a treasure of uncommon degree. He had hidden it somewhere under the floor of his straw hovel, intending to tell no one, nor share even an ounce of his newfound prosperity. The cleric agreed that it was indeed characteristic of the selfish tinker to obscure so great a discovery and reminded the youth that all men are born stewards of this earth and that what belonged to one, belonged to all equally and without distinction. Therefore, the cleric determined that the tinker's vanity was in fact a sin whose absolution required the forsaking of his prize. Furthermore, he and the youth would go to the tinker that very night and remind him of this obligation. Now the cold sea was fitful and blustery as the cleric and the youth went along that ancient shore with lanterns to light their way in the dark. Few thieves from iniquitous Calcutta ever conspired so unmercifully as this cleric and the callous youth to plunder such a guileless mark. In his drafty hovel the tinker slept before a dull kindling fire while outside the cleric searched the sky for providential indications and saw instead a great black tempest rising off the sea. The youth stole into the straw hovel and shook the tinker awake and demanded he reveal the whereabouts of his treasure. The tinker replied that he no longer possessed it, that a dream he'd had persuaded him to cast it back into the sea, and he showed the youth an empty hole in the floor where the treasure had been hidden. Now the cleric, too, entered the bleak hovel and accused the tinker of deception and warned that blind avarice provoked a particularly harsh wrath from heaven. The poor tinker acknowledged that the greed of men was, indeed, insatiable, threatening of immorality and ruin. Better, he had decided, to be rid of wealth than remain its fearful servant. Furious, the youth stepped forward and bludgeoned the hapless tinker and dragged him from his sad hovel out into the storm and threw him to the raging sea. Then the youth returned to the straw hovel and began digging in the floor while the cleric sought guidance from heaven and the great dark tempest surged ashore with sea waves mighty and deep.”

The top-hatted lecturer pauses to gaze briefly at the two curious creatures paddling lazily in the shallow coral water of the glass aquarium. A woman at the back of the tent who had fainted rises again to take her seat. The surrounding audience remains hushed by the lecturer's tale.

“At daybreak, a merchant passing along the barren shore caught sight of a fisherman's net half-buried in wet sand and straw. As he drew closer, the merchant spied a figure wriggling in the old net, a slimy fin, a long scaly cloak, a pair of drooping eyes shrouded in kelp: our pious Bishop Fish. Working to liberate this creature, the industrious merchant discovered another cowering beneath, this sad Turtle Boy, limpid and weak, limbless, wallowing in fear. Soon enough the merchant freed both from their entanglement in the old net, then seeing how curious was their appearance, how grotesque and godforsaken, he loaded both together atop his donkey cart and brought them along with him on his travels throughout the world. When he died, a good-hearted gypsy took possession of both creatures, and after many exhibitions in many carnivals in many lands, we present them here tonight. Legend has it that every creature on earth possesses its twin in the sea, a doppelgänger of the soul, a perfect likeness of its truest nature. Who knows? What is certain, however, is that the tinker and the cleric and the youth were never again seen on that distant shore, and if miracles are, indeed, indications of divine will, let no one leave this tent tonight unmoved.”

The lecturer departs the stage as a pair of platform torches flare brightly, further illuminating the two strange creatures who paddle sluggishly about the aquarium, occasionally grazing each other, seemingly indifferent to the slackjawed audience. The pale Turtle Boy flops onto a flat stone perch and belches loudly enough to be heard at the back row. That trio of towheads who lie under the tent walls giggle while the plump Bishop Fish folds his fins together on a miry lap as if in prayer and shuts his eyes. The surrounding coral glistens in the flickering orange light. Eventually the platform torches dim once more and this tent crowd is shown to the rear exit in favor of another curious audience waiting out front. The show goes on.

 

Late in the evening, Alvin wandered through the Palace of Mirrors whose drafty corridors shimmered a pale winter blue and mocked his sorry reflection. The ceiling was hidden in black drapes that billowed like the wingéd shadows of great birds. Mechanical voices tittered laughter in the dark. Ticket stubs and dead cigarette butts littered the floor. A stink of bathtub gin and witch hazel and burning tobacco fouled the sparkling corridors. Alvin Pendergast strolled a crooked path and went nowhere while odd voices chattered here and there and the draft grew colder. In one mirror he resembled a pale blimp, in another a ridiculous string bean. He was elongated and squashed, his nose flattened, his smile wide as a pie, his eyes like saucers, his hands and feet swollen as if by a summer bee sting. His mouth looked sloppy and mean, his arms slithered like rubber snakes. Shadows of passersby darted from the corner of his eye. Soon he felt dizzy and stopped walking. Fever chilled his skin. He sat down and stared at a trio of reflections across the filthy corridor, each joyless and shriveled, sour with sweat. His head throbbed and his legs were numb and he felt faint. Alvin had expected to die in the sanitarium. He had seen blood in his sputum and imagined thousands of rancid tubercles growing like weeds beneath his ribs. For days on end he lay hushed in bed listening to the ashen wheezing of his own invalid lungs in hopeful anticipation of swan-winged angels descending to the gloom-gray ward. Doctors came and went, jotting notations on daily charts while muttering to themselves in Latin. Nurses spoke most cheerfully to the doomed. No more fishing under slants of drowsy sunlight. Alvin napped in septic clouds of waste and rude medications. Gurneys wheeled in and out. Homesickness for the farm persisted through numerous belladonna plasters and daily treatments of cod liver oil. A dozen series of X-ray photographs failed to reveal his despair.
These sanitarium corridors are dark and drafty, too, traveled by consumptive patients like himself whose bleak faces reflect malignancy and hemorrhage. The floor is cold on his feet and his gown flutters as he proceeds. No one speaks, but many faces seem familiar. Passing the children's ward he sees old schoolmates seated in a circle eating biscuits and custard pie, each exhibiting the scrofulous habit of watery eyes and translucent skin, glands swollen up like walnuts. Across the hallway, Mrs. Burritt and the Szopinski twins are taking the sun cure, bathing euphorically in a shower of bactericidal ultra-violet rays under bright tungsten lamps. They see his reflection in the mirror and wave as he passes. He pretends not to notice, so ashamed is he of being there. Why among all Pendergasts did he alone become infected? Aunt Hattie maintained his fate was sealed at birth. Uncle Henry argued in favor of invasive bacilli corrupting a glass of raw milk. What does it matter now? Down this dark angled corridor, the fortunate expectorate lung stones and weave baskets for exercise while the ill-fated lie in tub-baths with cloths of black silk shrouding their eyes or endure the gruesome treatments of the artificial pneumothorax apparatus. Looking into a mirror ahead, he sees Rascal administering an injection to Clare from a hypodermic needle flooded with a solution of gold and sodium. Both are dressed in white sanitarium gowns. Quivering with fear, Clare calls to him for help, “Melvin!” while the draft in the corridor rises like a wintry spook. He feels as if he is suspended upside-down.