The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

  He had logicked this out: If his Chaya was going to marry that slippery rich man with the smooth jackets, the checkered cape, and the pink hands—he did not like those soft palms, those long delicate fingers, or the friendly voice you could use to soothe your dog—he knew what he needed to do. He would bring home enough money so that she would not have to go with any man. He knew—she had said—that all she wanted was to find a better house for them with real beds in it, give him warm dinners made of fine foods, dress him in warm woolen clothes, buy new shoes for him, for herself. (His toes were sore from hitting the street. He’d have thought Gregory might notice and bring him new ones the way he had brought Chaya that dress but his glance was—no surprise—only on Cinderella.) If he wanted the university, she would send him to an academy and ready him. Mrs. Gottlieb would come with them.

  He would find the money, earn it or steal it—stealing was so easy, it made him ripple with pleasure every time he hid, in the bottom of his one untorn pocket or his sack, what he had taken from someone who didn’t need it, someone who had an endless supply of everything. Winter was over; there were no more poor people sleeping in City Hall who deserved it. He could keep it, bring it home, let her see it; then he could take it to pawn. Robin Hood feathers his own nest. It was the best game of all. She would not see him until he had a little pile of fortune for her, like the pasha whose glittery clothes he was wearing. He knew he could do anything; he had wriggled like a cat through every opening.

  When he closed his eyes at night, it was the soft curve of her cheek that he saw, round like the edge of the earth. Her nose was as small as a thumb. Her hair was his dark blanket. No Gregory Stillman could steal her—Still-man, Steal-man—away from him. No Steal-man would make her as happy as he could.

  WHEN HE was tired of sitting and being stared at, he leaped off his throne—a big step down—and took off like a rabbit. No one could make him work when he didn’t want to work. The Dahomeyans were milling, a mahogany forest. Hagenbeck’s wild animals made jungle noises that came sailing right out over the wall and you could smell their stink, like pins in your nose. Who said bad smells were bad? What if you called them good? Across the road, quite close, that new university was only a few gray buildings, very plain beside the clamor and color of the show. Quiet was built into their heavy stone. On the other side, just outside the Fair, every night a man named Buffalo Bill (from the city in New York State or a herder of animals otherwise known as bison?) was throwing a rope in a dirt circle and riding on a black horse to the whoopy noise of cheering. Dressed in hides, a woman named Annie Oakley shot at birds that dropped from the sky in pieces, like broken flower pots.

  He had saved for last the thing he most wanted to see up close, not the half-naked ladies wriggling their bellies, not Hagenbeck’s giraffes and elephants. It was that magic wheel built by a man named George Ferris. For this he needed fifty cents; he could not inch his way onto it, sneaking. It was the tallest thing he had ever seen, firm on its metal legs but delicate, like a toy you could build with sticks and watch fall. It was more air than anything. How did it stand? There were thirty-five railroad cars hanging in a circle, wooden, glassed-in, shining. They barely swayed. Carefully—he was looking straight up at it—they moved up, up, over the top, down again. The space between them didn’t change, they didn’t bunch up or tear loose the way he feared they would. Children shrieked, and possibly adults, once a woman fainted, but they were all safe, flying—dangling in emptiness!—and setting slowly down.

  He had no twenty-five cents, let alone fifty, but he could shuck his fancy costume, stow it behind his throne, and stand wailing beside the ticket counter, howling that he had lost his quarters, had dropped them in the crowd, and now he would never get to ride. “Little boy,” a white-haired gentleman asked him, bending down to engage his eyes. He had eyebrows like scrub brushes. “What has happened? Where are your parents?”

  This was the first of his inventions. He was here with his sister, who had left him alone to ride while she went to the police office with the Columbian Guard to report that her money had been stolen from her closed purse. He was here with a distant uncle who had abandoned him, perhaps to go in to see Little Egypt because she seemed to be all he could talk about, her “danse du ventre” that he would never encounter in Boise, Idaho. (It would never have occurred to him to pronounce it Boy-z. He knew some French: Bwahz.) He waved his hands helplessly and charmed a crowd. The first time he collected a dollar, donated twenty-five cents at a time by sympathetic motherly and fatherly hands who seemed to enjoy helping him, and one girl his own age dressed in many layers of lace like a decorated cake, who timidly came toward him to drop a ticket in his palm and pull her hand back fast as if he were one of Hagenbeck’s jabbering beasts.

  He had heard from Chaya’s “sweetheart” that eighty percent of Chicago came from some other country. Who would even bother to doubt him? Gibberish, more amusing, would do, salted with Yiddish and bits of anything else he had picked up along the way. Even Elizabethan English baffled people, if he said it very fast. He got himself a heavy pocket.

  But, helpless to resist, he spent it all on this ecstasy. A conductor in a uniform who rode in every car called out the names of the buildings below. He could not imagine sitting down. The seats turned to one side and then the other. Face to the window, trying each side, he was rapt. They lurched to a stop while others climbed off, climbed on. Then they started again, two circuits to a ticket. It was not about words. Words stopped up there. Roofs, more complicated than he had imagined from the ground (towers, doors, stripes of black tar where repairs made random designs). Streets slicing through dark brick, through grass, the winding cement lanes of the Fair, hedged and flowered. That sidewalk that moved very slowly like water creeping forward while people, amazed, stood and were carried along, stone-still. To the south the repeated silver sluice of many train tracks, and then, east, the lake! The endless lake, so big he felt his knees buckle at the sight of it, more serene than sky. Each time he went up, it was different, flowing lapis to turquoise, once or twice a gray-brown the color of dirt, edged with white ruffles. It was flat as solid earth or roiled with anger, a furious sea-god blowing down at it. Once, at sundown, the horizon turned to flame.

  No wonder: Looking up, wasn’t he closer to the sun? His breath caught in his narrow chest—could people live as high, as far from the earth as this, without catching fire? Icarus fell in flames. But he wasn’t doing the flying here, he was safe in Ferris’s machine, and there was glass, sometimes clear, sometimes smudged, between him and the glowing open blue of the sky. Nothing was ever like this swooping rise and fall, a pressure as if someone had placed a hand at the back of his head. He had to force his mouth tight closed or he would cry out. This was the first time he wasn’t driven to count or name or alphabetize what he was seeing for the comfort it gave him, sopping up his energy to keep it from spilling over. This was what God saw, looking down on creation, all of it at once, an intricate geometry, so calm, so orderly, so clean and small, and he—all the people on the wheel with him—smaller than a point on a line. At home, he remembered, they raised a little glass and drank, l’chaim, to life. Here it was, finally. To life, to life, to life!

  He had heard from Mr. Bloom that the Fair was going to be here only for a short time. Then what? It would disappear, he said. But Asher looked north, looked south and east and west, and then at the latticework of his castle in the sky as it made its slow circuit, and knew that everything he could see would stay exactly where it was. It was hard—rock, brick, wood, too heavy to move. The wheel was rooted in earth, miles and miles down. Those stone goddesses held a building on their heads. The bridges were solid enough to hold hundreds of people who weighed thousands of pounds. The water was deep. On the wooded island, orioles slashed the air, and tanagers, and plain little sparrows too; at night he heard crickets scraping out their country voices. He had forgotten crickets. The great wheel turned patiently, like the earth, keeping time, never slow, never
hurried. He needed to assure Mr. Bloom: It would be there forever, all of it, like the Sphinx or the Parthenon.

  WHEN BIG Dog, the barker, who was also the ticket taker, was engaged in deep conversation with a pretty—he supposed pretty—young woman in pink and white who twirled her parasol first clockwise, then counterclockwise, trying to drill a hole in the air, Asher placed himself, smiling amiably, close to the money tin. The barker, who wore a bowler, a shimmering vest, and a huge polka-dotted bow tie, had turned and was pointing down the Midway and the woman was squinting alongside him, ready, even though he looked preposterous, to take some kind of advice. Asher’s hand darted out, scooped up what could fit in his palm, and was gone by the time the barker turned back in his direction. The voluminous gold pants—pantaloons—of the pasha’s outfit were perfect for secreting almost anything. When the barker discovered his loss, he staggered a moment and asked Asher if he’d seen anything.

  “I saw a lot of things—three rolling cars, a Turkish palanquin with two brown-skinned women in it, a feeble old man in a wheelchair that was being pushed by a monkey. I saw, I think they were sisters, nine of them, all dressed up in matching yellow dresses, but each hat had a different color ribbon. I saw—”

  “Shadow, pal, you talk too much. Did you see somebody with his fingers in the till?” The barker picked up his hat, wiped his whole sweating head with a rag, and replaced it.

  Asher looked at him blankly. Till. Until? Soil was tilled. The barker was shaking the box; a few left-behind coins clanked against each other dully. “Didn’t see anyone near it.” True. Words could mean many things, but he would not lie.

  The barker looked in every direction at once, his eyes flitting like swallows.

  Picking coins out of people’s pockets was better. He pushed through the thickest crowds which, every minute of the day, seemed to be cheering and hooting at one of the dancing girls, veils on, veils off, as if she were a parade. Her white belly jiggled, ripples on the lake, and her hips made circles while the rest of her stayed totally still. She appeared to have two different bodies, joined in the middle. Why all these men—women too, but mainly men—found this exciting was one of the many mysteries, but it was very convenient. It felt peculiar—a mite too personal—to push his fingers into rear pockets almost right up against someone’s warm flesh, but it was like Opening Day, he left with twenty-two dollars and two money clips, four leather wallets which he emptied and left conspicuously in the dust in front of the building so that they might be found, and one lady’s reticule that contained nothing but a handkerchief embroidered with the initial K and a modest border of yellow roses.

  For a few days, until a guard threatened him and appeared to mean it, he approached the most helpless-looking people he could find and offered his services as a guide. A few couples straight from the farm thought this was an accommodation of the Exposition, albeit an odd one. They followed close behind him, listened to his explanations regarding the construction of their state’s building—he made certain to find out where they were from and take them directly to it: South Dakota, Tennessee, whichever it was. These constructions looked like real buildings but they were better from afar because up close and inside, they turned out to be shells over simple framework. The only real thing, he thought, was the wheel. You could not fly up in a car made of this thing called “staff,” only jute and plaster. How backwards: the flying thing weighed tons. The buildings were no better than cardboard. It made him laugh with superiority, as if the wheel were his own invention. People pooled up around him, listening gratefully. Many tipped him.

  One morning, passing the Children’s House, he saw a knot of women, noisily distraught, and bored his way into the center of their little circle of pacers and grumblers. They were angry because the nursery was already full and their children would have no place to spend the day except clamoring at their sides.

  Asher gave them his most engaging smile. “I will keep them and tell them stories,” he offered. “For one dollar each, I will keep them occupied all day.”

  The women laughed and clicked their teeth. One of them, commanding in a slithery dark blue with a hat that looked alive, said, “My son is older than you are!” and coldly laughed.

  “Age,” Asher announced, looking up at her, sniffing, “is a coincidence of the alignment of the stars. Can you name the six highest mountains of Asia? Can you itemize the parts of a horse or tell me who Sappho was and where she lived?” Examples of things the woman would not know leaped lightly into his mind like bubbles. They tickled; he had to exercise restraint not to blow them out into the air.

  The woman had stopped in her tracks, her hand on her son’s shoulder. The boy glared at Asher as if he had been challenged to a fight. “What is your name, young man? Do you work for the Exposition?”

  “I do.” He was not lying. And he had better get back to work. “My name is Asher Shadow. I will be sitting with your children on the Midway between the Javanese house and the Zoopraxographical building.”

  “The Zooprax—”

  “Ographical. Full of running men and horses leaping hurdles with attention to the action of their legs. Zoopraxographical. I will take good care of your children. You may visit them, if you like. And if you will give me twenty-five cents now—twenty-five for each—I will take them on the great Ferris wheel. I promise they will love it.”

  The women looked at each other in some confusion, but when the one in blue gave him a firm nod, which made the feathers on her crown seem about to fly off—she ushered her boy to his side: “This is Germaine. I will be back for him at three o’clock”—three others followed suit, two quiet little blonde girls who seemed struck dumb by his confidence, and another boy, tiny, probably too young to want to hear his stories. He would think of something. “Everyone hold hands,” he instructed. “We are going to be a snake.” They wound in and out of the skirts and trouser legs of the crowd, making a hissing sound, and when they arrived at Asher’s throne, he gathered them around like his courtiers, and began at the beginning of the Arabian Nights.

  BUT AT the end of the day, he saw where his booty was going to go.

  He was walking near the south gate when a rhythmic chanting filled his ear. It was no song. Dozens of men were walking with signs on a forest of sticks and each sign was painted with fury: NO JOBS NO FAIR! NO WAGES FOR GOODWORKERS!!

  They had built this magnificence. Now—could this be?—they were expected to disappear. Asher, inside, peered out through the fence at them, watched them pace, felt the soles of his feet tingle. They marched back again, right past him, shouting, faces stony with anger. None of his friends from the Barracks was marching, but he could easily imagine those good men here among them.

  The sleepers had left City Hall, now that the wind was down, but this was a crueler wind. Jesus was right, though he wasn’t supposed to think about Jesus: The poor ye shall always have with thee. He ran to the exit where oblivious families strolled licking ice cream cones, chattering, heading home exhausted by pleasure, and joined the marchers, arrowed in between their stamping feet, no sign to carry but a scheme to empty his sack for them: Robin of the Fair.

  A fairgoer, standing beside him, pulled off his hat, waved it in triumph, called out, “Fucking unions! Lock ’em all up, fellas!”

  But another man, rougher-looking, as though he could have been on that line, spat at his feet. “They ain’t union, pal. You don’t got a job you don’t got no union behind you.” He spat again, a bigger gob that quivered on the concrete like something alive. “Those poor suckers are starvin’ one by one.”

  Asher studied him. He had heard Chaya talk about the cigar union, how she and her friends had gotten no help from whatever a union was. Women betrayed, she had said. You have to have power to get any power. His sackful of goodies was too light, too frivolous. Trivial, that beautiful word that sounded like a flower. There was nothing he could steal that would give him power.

  Still, he tapped one man on the arm and held out a pilfered watc
h and muttered, “Here, take this and hock it.” The man turned on him. Large in the bone but fleshless, red-faced, the man hissed, “What the hell’s that for? Can I eat it?”

  “No,” Asher insisted. “But you can get a little mazuma for it. It’s worth—” The man knocked it out of his hand and moved on, scowling. Asher picked up the watch, inspected it to make sure its face wasn’t broken, and closed it in his palm.

  Then—though he was watching he didn’t see them coming—around the clot of men swirled police, their darkness, and where Asher stood he could see arms upraised, which meant batons, their fat sticks, their official sticks coming down on the men’s heads. The commotion—shouting, threatening—pulled him toward them, reeled him in too close to the bent backs, bared teeth, curses. It was like standing beside a fire that threatened to escape its circle and singe them all. He stepped back, feeling oddly guilty. Even there he heard the swish of air as a nightstick thrashed down and opened a head. Caught a blood splash on his bare arm and shook it to be sure it wasn’t his own. One copper—he used to like the sound of copper—flailed at anyone he could reach, waving his arm like he was trying to put out that fire but no, he was fanning it, making it worse. Howls fled upward. Asher didn’t know men could scream like that. Steer bellowing in the stockyards, trapped. Then the high screech of a stuck animal. He had seen a pig once, back home, in someone’s yard, and it sounded like that having its throat cut. He had been glad they didn’t keep pigs.

  He watched the men shoved into a police wagon, flung in, tripping over each other, the door slammed hard. A sharp whistle and the wagon was gone with a snarl, its horses kicking up stones.