City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (6 page)

“Walk!” he bellowed—and she walked. Straight-legged as a goose, yet somehow elegant, an unworldly, mechanical, sleepwalker’s step.

She kept moving her small legs forward, walking right toward us, eyes fixed over our heads until we thought she would walk right off the stage. She reached the edge, dangled one foot over—

“Return!”

Instantly, she executed a perfect, mechanical ballet turn, and began to march back toward her master—Marconi drawing her back with cheesy, pantomine motions that looked like he was hauling in a dinghy.

“Stop!” he commanded, pressing his hand out flat like a traffic cop’s—and she stopped in midstride, her left leg still raised but
motionless.

The crowd was in an uproar. They must have known in their hearts by now that she was really a person—those cynical, streetwise boys—but they cheered anyway.

“Now—dance!”

She made another perfect, balletic turn to face the crowd, and then dipped the raised left leg to the ground, bending awkwardly at the knee. Now she began to move her arms—very mechanically again, thrusting them up in the air like a marionette.

Then it changed—quickly, seamlessly, right before our eyes. The arms moved up over her head, her feet touched the stage more rapidly. She spun, and bent at the waist, and pivoted as gracefully as any dancer from the Ballets Russes. Her arms swayed like willows, the curls of her hair sweeping out; her face still fixed and expressionless. She was dancing something from an epic now, this small, immaculate woman, like a Trojan princess, or a captive Hebrew maiden.

She waited until we were dazzled into silence—until we believed it all—and then she slowed. Rather, she
wound
down—just like a mechanical doll again. Slowly, slowly, folding up on herself until, in the very last movement, she seemed to give out entirely. Her head lolled, hands fell to her sides. Finally, she dropped lifeless to her knees—with an authentic, wooden knock ringing out when she hit the stage.

There was a gaping silence—then the boys in the Grand Duke’s Theatre went wild. They mobbed the stage, and it took all the magic Marconi could muster to preserve any of his doll’s illusions. He hustled her away under his cloak again; fighting them off with his free arm.

“There will be an-other show in
one
hour! One hour!” he shouted above the mob—tossing her into the closet that served as a backstage dressing room and barring the door with his body.

“Please! Time is required to restore the magno-electro waves!”

They kept shouting and stamping and whistling for her. The stage managers tried to start up the next production: excerpts from
Richard III.
Clarence drowned in his barrel, Hastings’s head delivered to Richard at dinner, the princes smothered in the Tower—all the good parts. They would have none of it. They kept yelling for Thumbelina, pelting the poor actors with foodstuffs.

Marconi kept guard over her dressing room for a while, but I knew he would not stay. I noticed before he had a drinker’s eye, darting greedily back and forth between all the lovely, amber glasses. I knew he would get thirsty, and I bided my time until he put a padlock on the door, turned it with a key he shoved down somewhere deep beneath that mysterious cape, and went off to join the youth of New York at the bar.

I could pick any lock made—one of the lowly, useful skills one picks up over a lifetime in show business. I opened his in seconds, with a hairpin. The door swung open and there she was—beautiful and human and animated now, curling her hair up before a warped old vanity some of the Dudes had managed to pinch off the back of a furniture wagon traveling down Broadway at midday.

She didn’t look at me when I came in, for which I was grateful. She didn’t look around at all, until she realized that I wasn’t blocking the light behind her and therefore could not be the Big Person in her life. When she did, she turned around slowly, regally—no doubt assuming I was some real boy.

“It is five dollars,” she said, haughtily as a queen.

“My God, does he make you do that, too?”

She heard my voice then, undisguised, but she only turned back to her curls, in the mirror, answering me with the lofty candor of royalty
in extremis
—Charles I asking for an extra shirt, Louis XVI picking up the revolutionary cockade.

“No—not what
you
mean. I . . . show. That is usually enough for them.”

“And when it isn’t?”

She said nothing, letting me stew in that indiscretion.

“Do you
like
this life?” I asked her.

“One indignity or another—what difference does it make, after the crowned heads of Europe abandoned our husband to his fate? We are condemned to suffer everything.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. Was she having me on—or had her life driven her truly mad?

“Have you been sent by the Holy Father?” she asked casually, turning back to me as she powdered her face.

“The
Pope?”

“He often sends emissaries to us.
Incognito,
you understand; to see if we are truly mad. It is all the same to us. We would have the
world
see the grief of Carlotta, to let them know what foul betrayals have been perpetrated against us, and our beloved Maximilian.”

I should have walked out then and there. The Mad Carlotta!—that creaky old number. One impersonator or another holding court behind the midway for nearly fifty years, in every carny show around the country. The Empress of Mexico, gone mad in the Pope’s chambers trying to save her dim-witted husband from a firing squad—and who was, by all accounts, more than three feet high.

It was the most pathetic of stage disguises to get lost in, and I should have told her I had to hotfoot it back to the Vatican.

But I didn’t. Maybe it was because she was so beautiful, or I was so needy, or the sawdust and camphor had rotted my brain. I think, though, it was because of what she did next: she leaned over as calmly as ever, lifted up the bottom of her mantilla, and tied two curved wooden slats around her legs, like a baseball catcher lacing on his shin guards.

I should have anticipated something like this. It was the slats, of course, that made the wooden
knock
when she bowed to the floor at the end of her dance. Yet it was such a strange, such a touchingly pathetic gesture that I could not help but stay.

“What if I could make you queen again?” I asked impulsively, trying to think of anything that might interest her.

She looked up at me for the first time with genuine interest, crystal-blue eyes spinning speculatively.

“Could
you?”

“Yes—yes, I think I could.”

I must have been mad already—as mad as she. I was employed at the time egging people on to hit their fellow human beings with baseballs. But the best ideas are born on the tongue and only then proceed to the mind. I had a plan percolating even then.

“How?” she asked directly, all business now.

She finished adjusting her shin guards and sat up, staring directly at me—and I thought I would do anything to have that perfect face before me, it didn’t matter what the price. I started to answer her, to say anything—and then the door swung open behind me. The Great Marconi was back.

“Show ain’t back here, sonny,” he said, shoving me halfway across the room with one large, hairy hand—the great Italian’s accent now somehow akin to that of the Border South. “ ‘Less you got more money than it looks like you do.”

“You are a common panderer,” I told him in my real, adult voice—words right from a dime novel, words I could hardly believe I was uttering. “And if you put your hands upon me again, I will cut your tongue out!”

—ridiculous words, foolhardy words, and just the heroic language for her. At thirty-eight inches, I would have had to get up on a chair just to reach his throat. But I could see her eyes shining.

Marconi just laughed—a sudden, unpleasant fart of sound—and sat himself down on a barrel across the little room.

“You best get outta heah now.”

“Come with me,” I said to her, holding out my hand. Like any good performer, I knew who my real audience was.

“Come with me, and I will make you a queen,” I said, trying to look as cool and masterful as anyone can be with six-inch forearms.

“You’re not very funny anymo’,” the Dixie Neapolitan said now, getting up off his barrel.

He was quicker than he looked. He stamped his foot, and I broke to my left, and before I could dodge back he had me. He hauled me up to his face by my lapels, my feet dangling ridiculously in the air.

“Let’s see what we got heah.”

He held me out at arm’s length, both hands around my throat. I flailed and kicked at him, but mostly I choked: a futile, silly dwarf, hung up in the air for her to see.

“Yes, suh,” he chuckled, and licked one big thumb and ran it through the soot on my face, exposing a whole matrix of lines and craters. I could see it myself, in the vanity mirror: the stubbled skin, the blue shadow. The face of a man: a twisted, little man.

I pounded on his arm with both fists, but he just let me drop to the floor where I lay, scrambling for breath.

“You people,” he said disgustedly. “You people. You always find each other, don’tch you?”

He stepped back, grinning like a wolf, and put an arm around her shoulders. Her face was completely frozen, the perfect little doll again.

“ ‘Thumbelina, won’tch you marry me?’ ” he mocked in a high, tinny voice. “ ‘Thumbelina, won’tch you leave that big awful man an’ run away with me?’ ”

She didn’t move, didn’t say anything, and he advanced on me again.

“Run away with you to
what?
The
circus?”

He laughed, and leaned over me, where I had managed to sit up on the floor.

“You don’t understand. You’re all
freaks
—dwarves, hunchbacks. Warped little sideshow attractions. She—she’s
fine.”

He stood up, and the smile left his face.

“Now
get out!”

He reached for me again, but I pitched forward and rolled through his legs, kicking at his shins as I passed. He nearly fell right on me, and before he could get up I was out the door—pausing only to blow a kiss back to her, and promise like some addled cavalier:

“I will return for you!”

I went running back out through the Grand Duke’s—his great, carny barker’s voice booming after me soon:

“Tha’s no boy! He’s no boy, he’s a goddamned
freak
!”

—but all they did was mob him on stage, chanting
her
name, thinking his appearance meant that
she
would be back out soon. I ran crouching through the rows of crates, holding up my jacket to conceal my ruined boy’s face.

I got outside and kept running, down Water Street, as fast as my stubby legs would carry me, then ducked around a warehouse on Maiden Lane, where I could at last get my breath back, and resoot my face with whatever bile presented itself. There was nobody else around but an ancient woman, gathering coal in the vacant lot.

She turned to me when I ran up, white hair shining in the moonlight, and asked, “Wet yer whistle in a mouth sweet an’ soft as yer old mother’s, sonny?”

I sat behind the left ear of Satan, and watched the sun come up over Sheepshead Bay, and dreamed of an empire of little men and little women, ruled by a mad queen.

“Hell is very badly done,” that snotty Russian anarchist Gorky had sniffed, after his visit, but I thought it was perfect. From where I sat I could see all the weary banalities of damnation: the fake, piled brick, as dismal and forbidding as the Tombs prison. Old Nick himself leaning speculatively over the front gate, one heavily muscled arm and his enormous, hooked wings resting on the entrance. Up close you could see that Satan’s nose was chipped, and the red plaster head could use a new paint job. The eyes glaring down in perpetuity at the sign strung over the front—
H-E-L-L-G-A-T-E
—10¢. Just ten cents to go to hell—though I knew places in this city where you could do it even cheaper.

Inside was a red, papier-mâché Underworld, a prancing, grimacing Devil in red tights, a gorgeous angel, a bunch of tubercular imps wandering about. There were several hilarious tableaux of sin: a young man was dispatched to eternal torment for a drink of whiskey, another for smoking a cigar, others for making sport on a Sunday.

The most popular, though, was a young woman trying on a new hat. She preened and primped in front of her mirror—too vain to notice the grinning devils that rose up from the floor around her. They spun the mirror around, turning it into a casket. The young lady was pushed into it, screaming impressively, then pitched down a trap door billowing smoke and fire. Only the hat, and a new mirror, were left behind.

This never failed to get a real scream from the working girls. How they howled to see that!—rows of them doubled up with laughter at the Sunday matinee, a few dreamily contemplating what it might be like to once be tempted to damnation by something so grand as a hat.

Most of the others, the workmen and the animal trainers and my fellow freaks, liked to go up to the Shoot-the-Chutes at night, from where they could look down on the lake, and the picture-postcard view of Dreamland, and the Tower, and the Fall of Pompeii. They went there to drink and make love and dream, after Dreamland closed for the night.

Only I preferred Hell Gate, and Old Scratch. The whole park sleeping before me like some lost Mayan city. The scraps of newspaper, and hot dog wrappers, and half-eaten candy apples still blowing about from the day’s action, but the whole place nearly silent for once—the hissing lights shut off, and the calliopes, and the shooting galleries and the rumbling roller coasters. The only sounds the steady sweep of the ocean and the closer, quieter sweep of a hundred brooms, already preparing for the next day. Here I would figure out how to win her, my queen.

How that cheap wop charlatan had got hold of her in the first place I could only guess. He might have bought her from a brothel, or one of the moldering freak museums along the real Bowery, back in Manhattan. These were the depths to which any of our kind could easily descend. The more we reflected some larger beauty, the higher the price we brought.