City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (42 page)

“Whatta you have to go back for? Why not stay out here all the time?”

She could see the smirk on her father’s face:

This is what you have, this is what you do instead of a family?

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “I got—
things
going on.”

“Ach,
what things? Working yourself to death on the machines?”

“Just—
things.”

And if she stayed, how long would she stay? She thought of the job, and the strike, and her parents. But also her friends, the Talkers’ Cafe—a whole life. A person, a
real
person, would have a whole life she couldn’t just walk away from.

“To hell with ’em,” he said suddenly, fiercely.

“With who?” she asked, taken aback.

“With all of ’em, any of ’em—I don’t care who they are. To hell with what they want you to do. You don’t got to live like anybody else does, you should know that. You’re too fine. You just stay—just for tonight. Then we’ll see.”

Why not? Why not take this, at least?

She smiled at him—and gave in.

“All right. Just for tonight,” she said, ashamed of herself and pleased at the same time, just as glad not to be headed back to the city yet.

Monster! Wretch! You really are a whore, an unclean bone,
he raved at her, in their continual, one-sided conversation. She dismissed his specter with a toss of her head.

She didn’t care, she didn’t care what any of them might think: not him, or her mother, or even Clara. At least for this night, she was that woman in the mirror, that stranger, bold and naked in a strange man’s room.

She had seen her father in front of the storefront synagogue—once, back when he had still been reb—arguing furiously with a member of his congregation. His eyes flashing, brow knitted ferociously, prematurely white hair rising in tangled curls as he grew more agitated. How frightening, how formidable he had seemed in his anger! Ranting and raving over some point of Talmud no greater than a sesame seed, which he allowed to carve a chasm between himself and a man he had known for years, all the way back to their village in Russia. Ridiculous, still, in his greenie clothes—the baggy shtetl pants, belted with a rope, shoes soft as slippers, the ill-cut coat—but at least like someone of significance. Like someone whom people might follow, even found a synagogue. Like someone’s father.

The image of him there returned, sometimes, unbidden—like tonight, blowing in from the sea, through the open window of the Tin Elephant. Yet far from being frightened by it, his rage, his formidable appearance only intrigued her. It made her want to ask him again why he had never adapted to the ways of his new country.

Do you think I couldn’t have made a fortune if I wanted to?
he would sneer at her, showing his teeth.
I was brilliant! Not a scholar in a hundred miles could compare. All the best houses had me at their table; they thrust their daughters upon me!

Then why didn’t you? Why rely on an old woman and a girl to earn your meat for you?

Ach, you don’t understand! How could you? How could you know what it was like?

He would fold his hands into each other—two, three times, the way he did when he was truly confused.

One evening, when I was still a boy, I was coming home from the Bes Midrash. I came over a hill, and there I saw the whole village sleeping before me. Why I had never gone that way before, I don’t know, but I came over the hill and there, no bigger than my hand, was the whole village.Just as it had been for three hundred years, sleeping out in the open, as helpless as a tethered lamb.

And? And so what does that have to do with me?

There I saw the whole beauty of our lives, as the Upper One Himself might have seen it. That was His revelation, granted to me. I looked down, and saw it all there—so beautiful, so perfect in its simplicity, and its poverty. Following the same eternal laws, enduring the same outrages, year after year. A whole life dedicated to the Uppermost in its humbleness, its goodness.

And? And you left it?

I had to leave it.
He said it matter-of-factly, the way he did all his betrayals. Hoping to numb the pain, she decided—

I had to leave it, we all had to leave it. And yet I will not forget it. To forget it, to repudiate even the least important of our laws, would be to make of it all a cruel joke. Don’t you see? To abandon it would be to mock all those years, and all of that suffering. To make of it a sacrifice without meaning.

So instead you continue it. You continue the sacrifice, on and on!

But he would not be listening then, she knew. His eyes would be milky and distant, clouding up to think less of the village than what he himself had been: a young yeshiva bocher, granted his revelation:

I was so lovely then! So lovely,
he would remember, wringing his hands together.
So fine!

She fell asleep, again, in her lover’s arms.

Lying on his back, with her snoring gently into his shoulder, he was amazed by how she felt against him. He loved all the little things about her: her full lips, her eyes, the unevenness of her hips that lent a small swagger to her walk. The deep seriousness with which she looked at him sometimes.

She had little dimples at the very edge of her shoulders, he had noticed for the first time tonight. Tiny indentations, barely noticeable, on the back of each shoulder, but completely endearing. He ran a finger over each one as she slept against him; thinking of nothing, listening happily to the waves through the open window.

Everything in the little room was always damp: the bedding and the curtains, and all his clothes. Even the chairs and the floorboards, and the single dresser, with its drawers that wouldn’t close all the way: damp and warped, with jagged white silhouettes of salt etched into the wood.

At night, when she wasn’t there, Kid would lie in bed and listen to the ocean rolling and hissing up on the sand. It was so close, so much nearer here than it had ever been before, save on the boat over, and there it had been different—a bottomless, gurgling horror on the other side of the rusty hull.

Sometimes, listening to the sea from the Elephant’s Arse, it seemed to him that he and Spanish Louie must have been forgotten already. That if they waited long enough, the sea and the sand would cover over everything—the crazy old hotel in the shape of an elephant, and the great parks back on Surf Avenue, and all memory that any of them had ever existed.

But he could hear, too, the drunken shouts and protests of the last stragglers staggering home from the park, or out to sleep on the beach, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they came for him: at night, most likely, without a sound to be heard above the whores’ racket. Or in the midway crowds, over in Steeplechase or Luna Park, Gyp and his boys all around him before he even knew it.

He should be away. The day before he had tried to make serious plans, tried to decide on a city at least: San Francisco, perhaps, or Baltimore, but it had all come to nothing. He simply couldn’t concentrate on the problem for more than a few minutes at a time. The question that kept coming to mind was more basic:

Why did he do it?

The lack of an answer had begun to gnaw at him. What in the world had ever led him to whack the most dangerous man in the City over the head with a coal shovel?

Was it for the dwarf? Kid had felt bad for him, sure—especially when he thought he was a boy. But he had seen things like that happen before—or even worse—and he had kept his head down, and his mouth shut. He hadn’t been drinking, or under the influence of some mab. He had done it without hesitating, without thinking about it, which was probably the trouble.

And now—here he was: stuck out here on this sandbar with Spanish Louie, ‘til God only knew when. And all because of the actions of a moment.

Why, then?

He looked over at the woman snoring sweetly beside him. She wouldn’t mind, he knew; she would understand. If he told her she would approve of what he had done, and understand that he had to go.

He knew all this—but still he could not leave. It seemed impossible that there was any other life outside this room: the sleeping woman in his bed, the roll of the surf outside, and the sea air, blowing gently in through the window. How could he flee this homey little room, this city, the woman sleeping beside him? This was his love, and he sunk into a blissful sleep despite himself.

In Bostock’s Circus the great cats stalked Captain Jack around the main ring: a flat-haired man with a huge black Kitchener moustache, and a cold, shaming stare. He stopped the beasts with his look, drove them back on their haunches with his one good arm. They crouched behind him, pawing the air, and followed him through slitted eyes, waiting for their chance.

It was the closest thing to legal suicide: a one-armed lion tamer. They packed every performance, waiting for the next disaster. Three years before, Captain Jack had got too close to one of his charges, a great, shaggy, Nubian lion called the Black Prince, and the beast had snapped two of the fingers off his right hand—gulped them down before he could even feel they were missing, much less retrieve them. The hand became infected, then gangrenous, until finally he had to have the whole arm off.

Pushing himself out in his wheelchair every day with his one remaining arm, glaring at his cats, staring them down as they were put through their paces. Until finally he returned to the ring left-handed, relying only upon the whip, with no extra hand to reach for his pistol. He took on nine lions at a time, nine cats stalking and circling him around the ring, his empty sleeve flapping as he moved.

In the grand finale, he held them all at bay and trotted out the Black Prince himself Forcing the snapping, hissing beast around and around the ring in tighter and tighter circles, until it was too dizzy to stay on its feet. Then he pushed it over on its side, gentle as a pussycat by now, pulled up its head by the mane, and gave the creature a loud, humbling kiss on the nose.

There were other amazing acts in the Dreamland circus: Mademoiselle Aurora, a brisk, matronly woman in a tutu, who forced her half-ton polar bears up into tottering pyramids with only a wooden staff. Madame Morelli and Her Magnificent Leopards. Herman Weedom and His Pulsating Pumas and Laughing Hyenas—

You could hear them all day, shouting and cursing their animals through their routines, working constantly to come up with something new, something better for the crowds. Barking out their commands in German, the international tongue of obedience, until it felt as if we were living next to a permanent camp of mad drill sergeants.

The worst was a strenuous little bald man named Eckleburg, who preceded Herman Weedom. He affected a monocle and a pair of jodhpurs, and screamed so constantly at the pumas and the rather cowed, mangy hyenas that his audiences rooted for the animals.

One day a young, shaggy-eared African elephant named Lucy, who had helped set up the first Dreamland tents, wandered into his area of the animal circus after a stray bushel of carrots, scaring the pumas and interrupting his rehearsal. Eckleburg struck her over and over again across the trunk with his little whip, raging helplessly at the beast—

“Raus, raus
—can’t you leave us alone?!”

—until Lucy had simply picked him up and thrashed him about. Her trunk snaking out too quick for Eckleburg to even cry out, breaking his back and staving his head in before anyone could intervene, finally dropping his lifeless body in the ring and going back to pick up her carrots.

After that there was some talk that she should be destroyed. Instead, they had put her on display, like everything else on Coney—and a few weeks later she killed a man who tried to feed her a lighted cigarette. In some places a rogue elephant that kills two men might be considered an unacceptable menace, but in Dreamland we liked to look at things from the elephant’s point of view. They only made up a new sign for her, reading belatedly,
STAND BACK! MANKILLER
!—and put her in a cage made deliberately too small for her to turn around or lie down in, so that she would bellow, and pace neurotically up and down in place all day long. Looking the way a mad, dangerous elephant
should
look. Until eventually she really was mad, finally slumping against her bars, great yellow eyes staring furiously out at the circling crowds.

They liked the elephant, and the circus. I took them to see the diving elephants at the Dreamland Lagoon, and the acrobats, and the Flight to the Moon, and Hell’s Gate, and the Doge’s Palace—anything to keep them occupied and under wraps, after the fiasco at the rat pit.

It was impossible, I knew. Sooner or later, someone would see them. I was hardly an anomaly out on Coney Island, and even in Manhattan I could still pass undetected, in my disguise. So long as I was not standing directly under his own, withering gaze, I knew I was safe.

But it was different for them. Any one of their old pals or rivals could have picked them out—and they liked to come down to Coney, gallivanting up and down our own little Bowery in their stolen motor cars. Banging away at the rifle galleries, and picking up the mabs, and trying to wrench the coins out of the floor of the Silver Dollar Saloon with the rest of the rubes. The big one, the dumb one, was still walking around in broad daylight dressed like a dago nightmare, trying to con the bens and sams out of their folding money. It was only a matter of time before he was spotted—if not by one of his old friends, then by another hack driver, or a cop, or any other active citizen who kept his nose to the ground and knew how to cuddle a telephone.