Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  His brow creased a bit at the last part. I suspected that he wasn’t quite sure what an exclusive was but didn’t want to admit it. “A reporter? Followin’ them other two, right? The man an’ woman who came up before you? What’s he then, a criminal or somethin’? He looked shady, he did—”

  I gave him a sharp look and cut him off. “No questions, remember? Five dollars for the time I’m here,” I continued. “I might be leaving today, but I could be here tomorrow as well, depending on how long it takes to get my story. I’ll pay your expenses, too—meals and the like. And the first stop we make is to the gentlemen’s necessary, and you scrub up—I want an assistant that’s clean and presentable. Then you help me get to the Midway before ten o’clock.”

  He nodded again and grabbed my elbow, pulling me to the left, toward a cluster of large white fountains. “This way, Miss—”

  “It’s Kate,” I repeated.

  “This way, Miss Kate. I know the very bes’ route.”

  As we walked along, Mick flipped into tour-guide mode and it was soon obvious that he hadn’t been padding his credentials. He really did know a lot about the Exposition and had memorized details about the various buildings and displays.

  “This,” he said, as we approached a waterway, one end of which was lined with enormous white fountains, “is what they call the Gran’ Basin.” Mick pointed toward the centerpiece of the fountains as we passed, a large classical sculpture of a ship. “Tha’ one there is the Columbian Fountain—MacMonnies, the guy who designed it, tol’ me it’s s’posed to be a symbol for the country and how much progress we made since Columbus came. Those people rowin’ are s’posed to represent the arts—y’know, like music an’ paintin’ an’ stuff? The big guy there is s’posed t’be Father Time, steerin’ the boat to the future with his big…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Me mom always called it a speal—what d’you call it in English, the thing they cut hay with?”

  “A scythe?” I asked.

  “Yeah, tha’s it,” he said, pulling me slightly to the side to dodge a small pack of middle-aged women who, like me, were looking up at the statue and not paying much attention to where they were walking. “A scythe. I don’ remember what the woman at the front is s’posed to be. Or those cupids. Maybe just decorations.”

  “Now that buildin’ over there,” he said, “is the bigges’ buildin’ in the world—the Manufactures Building. And that one we passed on the way over here? The ’Lectricity Buildin’? There’s stuff in there you wouldn’ believe even if you saw it. Got a frien’ who works over there sweepin’ an’ he says there is this machine called a telautograph where someone can sen’ a picture say from back East and that machine’ll draw it for you here, just like you was gettin’ a telegraph. He also says they have this new thing by Mr. Edison that makes pictures move so it looks like you’re watchin’ this guy sneeze, ’cept you’re just lookin’ into this tiny little box. An’ just wait ’til you see it at night, that place is all lit up—you never seen anythin’ so pretty. Like a million lanterns, but I looked at ’em in the daytime an’ turns out they ain’ nothin’ but these little glass balls with a tiny wire inside.”

  It was odd to think that almost all of the magnificent structures Mick was pointing to were temporary buildings, made of a material slightly sturdier than papier-mâché. The exhibits would be removed and the buildings would be torn down or burned in a matter of months. Only a few buildings would remain, along with the gardens—which were amazing in their own right, since the area had been a swamp less than a year ago.

  We walked around the edge of the lagoon, where several colorful gondolas were docked, boarding their first passengers of the day. Looking across the water, I could see the Japanese Tea House through the trees of the Wooded Island.

  Most of the way, we kept to the sidewalks, passing the U.S. Government Building and the Fisheries Building, where Mick was delighted to give me a full and imaginative description of the huge shark that was on display. He then cut through the grassy area in front of the national exhibits for Guatemala and Ecuador, and I had to walk on my tiptoes a bit to keep the edges of the boots from sinking into the damp sod.

  My right shoe was already beginning to rub a blister on my heel and I was increasingly suspicious that Mick’s “bes’ route” was not the most direct path to the Midway. I could see the Ferris wheel in the distance, and we seemed to be walking past where we should have turned.

  “Yes’m,” he said, when I pointed to the big wheel on the horizon. “But you don’ wanna be usin’ the necessaries over there. They ain’ fit for a lady. The ladies from London were very impressed with the necessaries in the Fine Arts Palace. It’s right up here, the very nex’ buildin’. Said they were the nices’ they ever seen.”

  “But the… ‘necessary’… was intended for you to clean up. I really don’t need to go right now.” I was dreading the thought of trying to negotiate a toilet in my current dress, and had decided that it might be a good idea to just limit my intake of fluids for the rest of the day.

  “Oh… sorry,” he said. “I can use the ones on the Midway where you don’ hafta pay the nickel, but… I thought maybe you just needed to… Some ladies won’ say, y’know. One of the ladies from London never would say and she nearly—”

  “Girl reporters aren’t prissy,” I said, giving him a little smile. “We say what we think. So if I need to go, I’ll tell you straight-out.” I glanced over at the steps leading up to the ornate portico of the building. “We’re already here, so we might as well step inside. I’ll just wait for you in the lobby.”

  We had a brief disagreement with the attendant at the gentlemen’s lavatory. He took one glance down his long nose at Mick’s attire and suggested he find another toilet. Mick argued with him for a moment and then I settled the dispute by handing the guy a quarter—well beyond the nickel charge for using the facilities. His attitude changed, but he still followed the boy inside, as though he was worried Mick might run off with the towels.

  I sat on a black upholstered bench and looked around at the wide variety of statues in marble, plaster, and bronze. According to the clock inside the rotunda, it was only a few minutes after nine. We still had plenty of time, but I was too nervous to sit still, so I wandered over to examine a few of the works on display. One of the larger-than-life statues depicted a man who was about to punch an eagle that was attacking him. Nearby, a smaller bronze work with a French title showed a young child sitting on a riverbank. It was beautifully detailed, and I was surprised to see that the artist was a teenage girl from Boston, Theodora Alice Ruggles.

  Mick emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later and had actually managed to remove most of the grime from his face and arms. His cuffs were a bit damp from his efforts to scrub them clean, but they showed a definite improvement as well. He had apparently made good use of the complimentary toiletries—his hair was now parted neatly down the middle. It was also slicked down with something that smelled like the bergamot oil they use in Earl Grey, and I was reminded of sitting half asleep in my dad’s lap on weekends as a kid, while he read the paper and sipped his morning cup of tea.

  The boy was again standing in inspection mode, so I gave him a quick nod. “Very respectable, sir. I think you’ll pass quite nicely as a journalist’s assistant.”

  He gave me a wide grin, and we left the Arts Palace. This was apparently not an area where Mick had much expertise, as he didn’t say anything about the many statues and paintings we passed on our way outside, but he perked up again as we turned left on the sidewalk.

  “The Midway’s not very far at all, Miss Kate. So how do you know they’ll be there at ten? What were they doin’ over by the Hunter’s Camp anyway? I seen him there before, a coupla times. He’s always comin’ out of those bushes… I nearly tol’ the cops, ’cause some ladies have been disappearin’, but then I noticed it’s the same woman with him each time. An’ she’s here at the Expo a lot. They got somethin’ hidden in there?”

  He
glanced up when I didn’t respond. “Oh, right. You said no questions. Me mom always says I’ll get a lot further in life if I learn to button me lip.”

  “My mom tells me the same thing,” I laughed. “I don’t usually listen to her either. But it probably is good advice, you know.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, but me dad said th’ only way to learn is t’ ask questions. An’ it’s hard to do that with buttoned-up lips. Anyway, I c’n tell that one you’re followin’ is a bad bloke. He has those eyes. He always give me the evil look when he comes up that hill, kinda like you did this mornin’, but I could tell you was jus’ scared. Not mean.”

  “I was not scared,” I said.

  “’Course you were,” he replied matter-of-factly. “You’re new here and followin’ some bad guy. But you got a good guide now, so you’ll get your story and then your boss’ll be happy, right?”

  It seemed pointless to argue with an eight-year-old kid, especially when he was essentially correct, so I just buttoned my lip and followed.

  The Midway Plaisance was already noisy, dusty, and crowded at nine thirty in the morning. The buildings weren’t as immense as those in the main Exposition, but what they lacked in size they made up for in color and design. In the space of a few city blocks, we passed replicas of an early American log cabin, an Irish castle, a collection of Asian-looking huts, and a smaller version of a Turkish mosque.

  We stopped at a small concession stand just past the German Village, where I bought two lemonades. After a few minutes, we found a spot on one of the benches in front of the buildings.

  Unlike the rest of the fair, where the visitors were mostly white, the Midway looked more like a modern city, with a wide array of races and nationalities. I looked a bit farther down the street and watched a man in Arabic dress pulling a camel toward us along the main road. A middle-aged woman was sitting sidesaddle atop the camel’s hump, clutching tightly to the edges and looking as though she was quite ready for the ride to end.

  Mick followed my gaze. “That’s Cairo Street, down there. You should come back here when they do the Arab wedding this afternoon. It’s really—”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to have much of a chance to sightsee, Mick,” I said. “I’m here on assignment and I don’t have much time.”

  I was a bit surprised to realize that I was genuinely sorry about the need to rush, since there was a lot that I would have loved to see if this were a pleasure trip. I felt a surge of jealousy for Katherine’s job, which had simply been to learn as much as she could.

  “Too bad,” he said. “You c’n spend a week here an’ not see all of it. Not that you could really spend a week now, with it closin’ an’ all. It’ll be cool to walk through here again when all the people have gone—like it was when they was buildin’ it. I don’ really like the big crowds. An’ then ever’body here will get to start tearin’ it all down, I guess, and then go home.”

  “Where’s home for your family, Mick? I mean, before you came to America.”

  “County Clare—tha’s in Irelan’,” he said. “Town called Doolin. Pretty place me mom says, but the only work is fishin’. We been here since I was three or four. I kinda remember comin’ over on the boat, but not Irelan’.”

  “So where will you go?” I asked. “I mean, soon there won’t be much work here for you and your mom, right?”

  He nodded, with a rueful twist of his mouth. “Lady at church is tryin’ to talk me mother into movin’ back to the big farm we worked at when we first came to America, and she’s thinkin’ ’bout it. I can tell she is.”

  “But you don’t want to go?”

  He shook his head. “It was clean and we had more space an’ all, an’ it was great workin’ in the open air, but I don’ wanna go back there. Me dad didn’ wanna be on that farm—he didn’ trust ’em an’ neither do I. I’d rather stay in the city to work the fac’tries, even if it means bein’ cooped up all day.”

  “What about school?” I asked, sipping the lemonade, cool and nicely tart, through a tall paper straw.

  “Done with that,” Mick said, rubbing a line in the dust with his shoe. “Went to classes for ’bout two years on the farm before the fair started and me dad died. I c’n read an’ write just fine. C’n do my numbers, too. Anythin’ else I need to know I c’n learn on me own. I’m old enough now to help earn me keep.”

  He lifted his chin proudly as he spoke and I was struck by how hard he was trying to be all grown-up. “When did your dad…,” I began hesitantly.

  “Back in July,” he said. “After the fair started and the buildin’ work was finished, he got a job puttin’ out fires. You get a lot of little fires in the rest’rants and some of the ’lectrical buildins. Then there was a big fire in the Cold Storage Buildin’—weird to have a buildin’ with so much ice inside catch fire. Don’ know what caught it, but the flames was huge. All of the firefighters workin’ for the Exposition died and a bunch of those who came in from the city died, too. Took a long time, but they put it out, so none of the other buildins went up.”

  “I’m sorry about your dad, Mick.”

  “Yeah, me too. I miss him.” He was silent for a moment, and then he finished off the lemonade, his straw making a loud slurping sound as he pushed it around the ice to get the last few drops.

  “I’m really not all that thirsty,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true—the air was dusty and I would have happily finished off the last half of the glass if not for the looming specter of trying to navigate a bathroom while wearing a bustle and ankle-length skirt. “You can finish mine, if you’d like.”

  That earned me another grin. “You’re nicer than me other boss. She only gave me a peppermint one time, and that was ’cause she said me breath smelled like onions. Which prob’ly was true.” He quickly polished off the last few ounces in my glass and took the two empties back to the booth.

  We worked our way down toward the Ferris wheel, which seemed even more enormous as we drew closer. It was easily five times as high as the one I’d ridden on at the county fair last year, and it cast a shadow far down the Midway. I sank gratefully down onto a vacant bench just around the corner of the next building, which afforded us a clear view of the ride’s loading dock. The blister on my heel was becoming annoying and I really didn’t want to stand about while we waited for Katherine’s party to arrive.

  “So we’ll just sit here an’ wait ’til they come? I c’n help keep an eye out… Are we gonna follow ’em when they leave an’ see where they go, or what?”

  He seemed to be growing increasingly impatient with the no questions rule, and I decided it couldn’t hurt to lay out the basic game plan. “Well, I actually need to get close to the woman—the one who’s with him? They’ll be in a big group, about a hundred people, along with the mayor, so it shouldn’t be hard to spot them.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding sagely. “It’s a political story you’re writin’ then. The bad bloke’s tryin’ to buy off the mayor, is he?”

  “No, no.” I shook my head. “I’m not writing about the mayor. I just need to speak with the woman for a couple of minutes without the ‘bloke,’ as you call him, overhearing us.”

  “Okay, tha’s easy enough,” he said. “I’ll get Paulie to put us in their wagon.”

  “In their… what?” I asked. “And who is Paulie?”

  “The wagon on the big wheel,” he said, nodding toward the carriages where people were now entering. “You said there was about a hundred in the group? Twen’y of ’em at leas’ will be too chicken to ride, you’ll see, an’ the wagons hol’ sixty people each. So it’s just a matter of us gettin’ on the right wagon.”

  I looked up to the very top of the wheel and thought he was probably right about the people who chickened out. The pit of my stomach tightened at the thought of going up that high in something that had been built in the 1890s, long before those comforting little signs that show a carnival ride has passed inspection.

  “So Paulie,” Mick continue
d, “he knows me—he can just shove us in wi’ the rest of ’em. The ladies may all ride in one so the men can smoke, but if they’re together, then I’ll distract the bloke and you can have a chat wi’ the lady.”

  “But I don’t think there will be any children in this group,” I said. “It’s a lot of mayors and their wives…”

  He shrugged. “Won’ matter,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “I sneak on all the time withou’ payin’. Lotsa kids do it—just gotta find a coupla ladies wi’ big skirts an’ sorta squeeze between ’em. Paulie don’ care so long as nobody sees me. Most times, the ladies keep your secret when they do notice you, if you ac’ like you ain’ never been able to ride it before. An’ if they do complain, Paulie’ll just yell at me when we get off and call me a buncha names, maybe throw somethin’ at me, so he don’ get in no trouble.”

  “Well,” I laughed, “at least you won’t have to sneak on without paying this time.” I handed him a dollar and a quarter. “Buy us two tickets and give Paulie the quarter as a tip for his help.”

  “Right.” He hopped up from the bench. “You jus’ stay here, since your foot’s hurtin’, an’ I’ll be back.”

  I had to give him credit for being observant. I hadn’t said anything about the blister, and if I was limping, I wouldn’t have thought it was enough that anyone would notice, since I was covered pretty much from head to toe.

  Mick sprinted over to the booth and waited in the short line to buy the tickets, then paused for a minute to talk with Paulie, a boy about my age. They both looked in my direction, and Paulie gave a little wave, then Mick headed back to the bench.

  “All set,” he said with a grin. “If you’re sure they’ll be here at ten fifteen, we don’ have but a coupla minutes, maybe five. When you see the mayor headin’ this way, we’ll go over and you just kinda blend in toward the end of the line. If there ain’ no other kids, I’ll keep outta the way ’til you start t’ get in an’ then slip in beside you.”