The Swan Gondola: A Novel

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Now,” I said. “Is now today or tomorrow?” I sat up on the blanket and pressed my fingers at the pain in my temples.

  “It’s the morning after yesterday,” August said. He didn’t disguise his voice much—he gave his words a little more breath and music than he might have otherwise, and a proper-sounding lilt and lift. Moooorning . . . yistir-dee . . . He clutched his handkerchief at his chest and feigned a tearful sigh that shook his breath. “Pearl was nervous all evening long, wondering where you’d gone off to,” he said. “She figured you were snooping through all the rooms. We heard the coach’s wheels during the séance, and she flapped around like a hen. She ran upstairs, saw Doxie was gone. She went out for Wakefield, and he came into the house in a rage. He tossed the table over. He threw us all out. We had to walk down to the streetcar, in the wretched chill, to take it back to town.”

  “How’s Doxie?” I said. I brought myself to my feet, pressing my hands against the wall, climbing my way up, and feeling every bone snap into place with a stab.

  “We didn’t see her again,” August said.

  I took a few steps toward the bars of my cage, but the deputy banged the metal again. “You stay where you are,” he said. “And keep your hands back. They make guns so tiny they can fit in a lady’s ring. A blade can be passed in a handshake. And then you use that blade to cut the vein in my wrist when I’m doing something kind for you, like passing you a cup of water. No, sir,” he said, “I know all your cowardly ways.”

  At that, August burst into phony sobs he buried in his hankie, and the deputy tut-tutted, patting his shoulder. Though the deputy was at least a head shorter than August, August fell into the deputy’s arms. The deputy’s sneer returned, and I could tell he was pleased to fondle my lady friend in front of my eyes. But for all the deputy’s molestation—petting August’s side, close to his padded breast, and stroking his back down low and lower and lower still, until he was rubbing August’s ass beneath the bustle—he didn’t catch on to August’s disguise. The deputy even nuzzled August’s wig and didn’t smell the dead yak in it.

  The deputy also didn’t notice August fiddling with the keys in the iron ring hooked to his belt loop. As August sobbed into the deputy’s collar, he worked his arm around the deputy’s back, and spidered his fingers over all six keys, testing their lengths and points, determining the one most likely to open the cell door. When his fingers landed on the one he wanted, he sobbed louder, right into the deputy’s ear so he wouldn’t hear the jinglejangle as he slipped the key off the ring and into his palm.

  I was curious as to what would happen next—the whole exploit seemed like something right out of the dime novels August sold in the shop—some prairie tale of Deadwood Dick. Omaha Sweetbriar; or, The Damsel’s Got a Trick Up Her Skirts.

  August wrapped the key in his hankie as he pulled himself from the deputy’s arms.

  “Can’t I at least kiss Ferret good-bye?” he said. The deputy worked his jaw around, thinking. “You can hold my hands behind my back,” August said. “I’ll just lean in. We’ll only touch lips.”

  “Only if you give me a little kiss too,” the deputy said, with a pout. “I’ve been awfully sweet to you, you know.”

  “And you have,” August said, and he puckered up. The deputy leaped for it, grabbing the back of August’s head with one hand and pressing his lips hard against his. I heard their teeth knock together. It looked as if the deputy had never kissed a woman properly in all his life.

  When the deputy finished with a smack, August leaned back and held his hand to his own jaw, wiggling it around on its hinges, working the feeling back in. And while the deputy seemed to be waiting for some kind of compliment, August returned to his sobbing, lowering his face into his hankie. It was then that August fed himself the key.

  “I’ll show you how it’s done, pip-squeak,” I told the deputy, and I leaned forward for my kiss. August leaned in too. He gave me a wink, and I winked back. We touched lips. I opened my mouth, and he opened his, and I waited for the key. But the key didn’t come. He kissed tenderly, and I felt a whimper tremble his lips, and felt the breath of a sigh. I would let my friend have his kiss. And I kissed back. He just kept kissing me, his keyless tongue sliding around with mine. Finally, I tapped my tongue against his teeth to let him know I was impatient. Still no key. I went in for it myself, my tongue darting around his, working the key away from where it was tucked into the inside of his cheek. I’d only just licked it into my own mouth when the deputy pulled August away with a jerk.

  “Enough violation,” the deputy said. He took August by the arm and escorted him down the short hall and around the corner, to where the office was. I sat on the floor, the key in my hand, wondering what good it was. I contemplated the particulars of my escape as the deputy continued to flirt at his desk. I heard some clucking and cooing, and the clinking of glasses. I heard him do a ventriloquism act for August, telling jokes with Oscar on his knee. I heard August leave. Ten minutes later came a crashing of glass and the bang of a chair falling over.

  I didn’t know the deputy’s name. “Kid,” I called out. No answer. “Hey, kid.”

  I reached my hand around to the lock and stuck the key in the keyhole, half expecting August to have lifted the wrong one from the ring. At first I could feel it not fitting, tumbling inside like the key in the lock to the room with the swans. But fit it did, and out I was. One of the benefits of being an outlaw is you have outlaws for friends—friends who know their way around a jailer’s collection of bones.

  I crept around the corner into the office. The deputy was passed out on the floor, a glass and a bottle of whiskey broken at his side. August had put all his talents to work for me—he’d flashed the drag, fingered the key, and played chemist, dropping some sleeping potion in the boy’s liquor. Poor Oscar hung from a hook by the door. I took him into my arms and stepped right out of my prison, into the street. I walked deeper into the city, and I moved among the men and women going about their guiltless lives.

  45.

  AUGUST SAT AT HIS VANITY, his wig on the floor. He still wore his dress, but he’d unbuttoned the back and the dress hung on him limply.

  “Oh, Ferret,” he said when I walked in. “Wasn’t I wonderful?”

  “Why didn’t you give him the knockout drug first?” I said. I paced as I undressed, dropping my ripped jacket and shirt to the floor, and kicking off my shoes. On the walk back, I’d worked myself into a panic, worrying over all the ways everything could’ve gone wrong. “It would’ve been easier. You could’ve knocked him out, and there’d have been no risk of getting the wrong key.”

  August sighed. “You’re such a stickler for plot,” he said. “He wouldn’t trust me at first. I’d brought along a little breakfast of doughnuts and tea, but he refused to let me see you. So I offered him the doughnuts and tea, and then some whiskey, but he wouldn’t touch any of it. So I cried and cried, and I wouldn’t stop until he let me see you. And when I let him kiss me in front of you, he sensed I was a bit of a cotton top. So he agreed to some whiskey before I left.” He uncorked a bottle and dampened his hankie with some sharp-smelling unguent. He came to me to dab the medicine at the undersides of my eyes.

  “Cotton top?” I said.

  “Respectable in appearance but cheap beneath it all,” he said. “Like stockings of cotton with silk at the feet.”

  “He don’t know the half of it,” I said. August helped me pack my carpetbag, folding some clothes, knotting up some socks, tucking in a bottle of booze and a slim tin of Turkish cigarettes. I stuck in the morning’s newspaper—the front page ran an artist’s sketch of me sneaking from the Wakefield house with Doxie in my arms. We’d made the paper, me and my girl, and it wasn’t a bad likeness of either one of us. With a gasp, I remembered the little tin book I’d taken from Cecily’s room, and I stuck my hand in my pocket. I felt such relief when I felt the book still there.

  I suspected I’d make the evening paper too, and probably the next day’s editio
n, and the day’s after that, for a week or so, until somebody cut somebody’s throat or something equally awful happened. The Omaha Bee loved to pile on the agony, to turn a common man’s mistakes into vaudeville. The tattered little newsboys would get a nice boost in street sales when word of my escape hit the papers.

  Rosie brought over his beaver fur coat, and it was so big that Oscar and I could easily disappear into it. The front-page illustration had made much of the wild curls of my hair, so I concealed them by shoving them up into Rosie’s giant derby hat. I pulled the brim down past the tops of my ears.

  I headed off to the Old Sisters Egan again, this time on foot, and this time with purpose.

  • • •

  I FOLLOWED THE PAVED STREET until it became a dirt road, and then followed the dirt road until it stopped in an empty lot. I crossed the lot into the next lot over, and into the next, until I was crossing the fields of the countryside, the city falling small behind me, the filthy clouds above the smelting works growing fainter with my every glance back. The frozen snow cracked like burnt sugar under my shoes. After dark, I lucked on an abandoned farmhouse with a stone hearth, but I didn’t sleep a wink—every snap of the fire sounded like twigs and ice under the sneaky steps of wolves prowling.

  I left the house before morning, and once the sun came up we finally got an inch of spring. I took off Rosie’s fur coat and carried it over my arm until it got too heavy, and then I dragged it by its collar. I left the derby hat in a ditch.

  When I reached the Platte River, I discovered I’d walked too far and was nowhere near the bridge. I did what I could to lessen my load, to make myself featherlight to cross the ice. I left the fur coat on the riverbank, and my carpetbag. I kept only the clothes on my back, and my shoes. And Oscar.

  I closed my eyes as I crossed, to better sense the threat beneath my steps. It seemed I could feel the thump of fish bumping their heads as they swam. I could feel water rushing, the unlikely warmth of it coming up through the soles of my shoes. I thought of all the hot springs that couldn’t save Cecily. I tried to give myself faith in magic. I tried to make myself vanish. I pictured myself up off the ground, in the hot-air balloon, no heavier than a cloud of ether. I kept my eyes closed, and every time I opened them, I seemed even farther from the shore.

  Finally, I survived. I reached the other side, blew the ground a kiss, and soldiered on. I stayed terrified of the river and its thin ice, as I walked and walked, as if it might curl around and strike again, like a serpent. Or maybe it was more like a hunter in the woods, dodged once but still on your trail. I had no compass, no pioneer’s instinct. To be only streetwise was to be unwise in everything that mattered.

  The hunger in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten anything since that coconut cake at Phoebe’s, and that had been a few days before. August had packed me a little tin of eats when I’d left, but I hadn’t looked inside. He’d said something about a pickled egg and some hog jerky. I entertained myself by inventing the feast I’d left behind. In my daydreaming, I sat down to a turkey leg and a mutton chop. Gingerbread. Johnnycake. Boiled fish. Lima beans. I sang it all in a hearty song and marched to the beat of it.

  It was still daylight when I saw the little red spot of Hester and Emmaline’s barn. But the sun went down and I still wasn’t there. The terrible cold returned, needling up my pant legs and down my sleeves.

  When I finally arrived, the Sisters Egan were eating a late supper. Hester threw a quilt over me fast, like dousing a fire, and Emmaline held a jelly jar of whiskey to my lips.

  “You’re blue,” Emmaline said.

  “I am,” I said. She could see my sadness. It felt so good to be known so well. I began to cry.

  Emmaline dabbed the tears on my cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve. She wiped my nose with her hankie. And Hester said, “She means your color. Your skin is blue.” She covered me with another quilt, and led me to the stove.

  They stayed up with me as I slept. They kept touching my head, hoping for warmth. I would wake every time to their whispers. “Feels a smidge warmer to me,” I heard Emmaline say. Then Hester would test my temperature with the back of her hand at my cheek. “Wouldn’t you say so?” Emmaline said. But Hester wouldn’t. She’d offer no hope.

  “We’ll know he’s better when we stop worrying,” Hester said.

  Hester fixed a pot of a chilblain’s cure, to rub on my red, frozen feet. She recited the recipe, like reading a poem or singing a lyric, and I fell back to sleep to the sound of it—“oil of sweet almonds, lanoline, beeswax, Venice turpentine.”

  But in the morning I had to leave my place by the fire. Detectives had been by the day before—in my letters to Cecily’s ghost, I’d spoken of the Sisters Egan. The detectives had been rude. They’d made Emmaline so sick, she’d spent the day in bed. We feared the detectives would be back, again and again, and they did return a few more times. But I was hiding within the Emerald Cathedral. I was able to burrow in like a pack rat, to build a nest of my own, at the risk of sending the whole shrine crumbling by shifting, unknotting, shoving. I hammered and dismantled. I lived in the narrow quarters of a monk. I mined my chamber with booby traps. If someone were to try to get in uninvited, they might be crucified, a nail in a foot, a hook in a hand. They might be knocked in the head with a hot-water bottle filled with cement. They might be kicked in the groin with a steel-tipped boot on a spring.

  I learned how to worm in and out without tripping any of my wires. It became instinct, my wriggling around the triggers.

  Mr. Crowe once gave me a book about wolf boys; and when I’d been eight or nine, whenever I’d had a wish coming (from blowing a fallen eyelash off my fingertip or from seeing a newborn calf), I’d begged fate that I’d be snatched from the orphanage by wild dogs and kept in a cave in the country. Some nights in my bed, when I’d closed my eyes tight, I’d felt myself go lupine, my skin tingling with hairs sprouting on my cheeks. I had run my tongue over my teeth, certain the edges were sharper than before.

  I lived now like the wolf boy I’d longed to be, leaving the barn only to squat in the dry creek and to piss in the patch of Russian thistle. The neighbors cooked, and they left their pots and casseroles at the foot of the shrine, like offerings to the beast. I gorged myself. I licked the pots clean and sucked the marrow from the bones. I worried my pants had shrunk, but they hadn’t been washed for days. They didn’t fit, because I was growing fat. I imagined myself getting too fat to fit through my tunnel.

  Instead of leaving food at the door, Eulalie, the librarian, brought books. She brought novels at first, but I sent them back out with a note stuck in, requesting texts on spiritualism. She brought me back a stack of ghost stories, and I returned those unread too. The facts and fallacies of spiritualism, please, I wrote in my next note to her.

  She brought me The Spirit World Unmasked and Spiritualism and Nervous Derangement. I read each one three times, by the light of a lantern, writing page numbers on my hand and observations on my cuffs and sleeves. I wrote names on my trousers. Madame Blavatsky, Eusapia Palladino, Annie Eva Fay.

  I didn’t quite know at first what I was looking for. But I came to realize I wanted to learn all the tricks, so I could convince myself I’d not been tricked at all. I’d not been fooled by fishing line, by a hankie made to float and wave farewell, by a self-squeezing accordion playing a sad polka behind a closet door. I read the books so I could dismiss their explanations.

  And now that the letters from Cecily had stopped, I considered her presence in everything else around me. In my hovel, I had much time to watch the things that didn’t move. I lay back on my mattress situated in the shell of a broken grand piano, and studied the rusty spigot, waiting for a tear to drop. I caught sight of her step in a peg leg, the rise and fall of her breath in the breasts of a corset form.

  • • •

  I LIVED IN the Emerald Cathedral for two weeks, until the manhunt was called off with little fanfare. I was no threat, it seemed. There was no longer any warrant for my
arrest. Wakefield, always the gentleman, would not have me hanged after all.

  I liked to think he was afraid of me, that he was scared of ghosts and of retribution. He could’ve killed me a thousand times over, but he feared what I’d do when I was dead. Once I was a phantom, there’d be no end to the grief I could give him.

  Though I moved back into the house, I rarely left the farm. I became a deadbeat nephew, not even lifting my head from my book to eat. I’d sit at the kitchen table, a book in one hand, a fork in the other, to the gentle annoyance of the sisters.

  Hester said, “Who knew this rabid tomcat would cook up so good?”

  Emmaline said, “Ferret, don’t you love it with the mouse droppings baked right in with the rat gizzards?”

  “Mm-hm,” I said.

  Eulalie tracked down books for me, and pamphlets and articles, borrowing them from other libraries and ordering them from publishers. And August sent some from his bookshop, along with long florid letters, mostly in defense of his own psychic, Mrs. Bertha Long, who helped him dig up memories of the lives he led before he was born. His favorite self was a spirit guide, a girl-boy who grew up to be a woman-man, whose kiss could promise a warrior victory.

  August also sent a clipping—Wakefield to Marry, the headline read. It was to be a long engagement of nearly two years, the article said; the wedding was scheduled for December 31, 1900. On the night the century turned, Pearl would become the third Mrs. Wakefield. And I prayed she became the first Mrs. Wakefield to live.

  Somehow, I wasn’t shocked by the news. I did worry about Pearl, but I was pleased for Doxie. Pearl would be a good mother.

  What somehow struck my heart harder was news of August’s affection for a wounded soldier of the First Nebraska Regiment. Despite peace treaties and cease-fires, our wars still raged. A man named Maddox had been shot in the lungs by insurgents in Manila, and he returned to Omaha, and lived in a boardinghouse around the corner from August’s shop. He visited the shop every day to read about the war he’d just fought. And he studied maps of the places he’d been, and books about the Philippines.