This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  “Sure we are,” Alvin replied, already set for a swell fib. “I’m a lion tamer and my friend here does some juggling in a clown suit. It don’t pay much, but we get by all right, I guess.”

  The waiter looked skeptical. “Sort of late in the season for the circus, ain’t it? We don’t usually see you folks much after Labor Day.”

  Alvin nodded. “’Course it is, but business was scarce this summer. Come wintertime, even circus people got to eat like everyone else, ain’t that so?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Downtown was filling up. Looking out through the window, the waiter said, “Got a swell parade today, do you?”

  “Sure.” Alvin stuck his fork into the lamb like he was starving. “Sells a flock of tickets.”

  A group of homely women dressed in black stopped at the window to peer in. One of them tapped on the glass and held up a placard upon which was written in thick black ink: BOOZE. The stocky woman next to her showed another placard reading: Prisons, Insane Asylums, Condemned Cells! Two more hatchet-faced women stepped forward and pressed tall placards to the glass: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish and DRY or DIE. Their grim focus was directed toward the farm boy and the dwarf. The waiter tried shooing them away, “Go on! Beat it!”

  Not one of them budged.

  The dwarf offered a salute and a pickled beet.

  Flustered by the unwanted attention, Alvin blurted out, “How come them ladies are doing that? Who the hell are they?”

  “Temperance Union,” replied the waiter, waving at them again to go away. “They don’t care much for your sort.”

  The waiter put the bill on the table and left. Most of the customers were watching now with considerable amusement. Several laughed out loud. Alvin had lost some of his appetite. The dwarf, however, ate his chicken fricassee as if he were alone in his own kitchen and hadn’t a care in the world. Soon, after tapping sharply once more on the window glass and displaying their placards, the temperance women moved on. A hearty round of applause from the restaurant patrons cheered their departure. Once they were gone, the farm boy drank his cup of coffee and ate half the plate of lamb and sweet potatoes without any idea at all why he had been given the bad eye.

  Main Street was paved with bricks and its buildings were tall and dignified. Telephone wires crossed above motor traffic along six blocks of prominent enterprise. A loaded trolley ran up the center of the street, bell clanging at each intersection. People shouted and waved and dodged automobiles to reach F.W. Woolworth’s five-and-dime or Piggly Wiggly and the postal telegraph office at Fifth Street. Businessmen in wing collars came and went from the First National Bank as sewer diggers labored to repair a broken water main next to a Rexall drugstore. The farm boy and the dwarf strolled in and out of the late-morning crowd from block to block, admiring show window displays under striped awnings, buying pears from a vendor on Sixth Street and a hot pretzel at a stand on Seventh, stopping briefly in front of a German bakery to enjoy the aroma of hot cinnamon buns, then watching a pack of scrawny dogs struggle over spoiled pork chops in the narrow alley between Clarke & Son’s hardware and the butcher shop. Halfway up Main, the dwarf ducked into Oglethorpe’s Boots while Alvin stared at a group of pretty secretaries and lady typewriters on midday lark by the wide cement steps of Schaick, Pilsner & Allyson-Attorneys at Law. The farm boy walked up the block to the pool hall next door to McKinney’s barbershop and found it jammed with young men in shirtsleeves and suspenders, the odor of cigarette smoke and hair tonic and liquor stiff as a saloon. Earlier, at the Ford garage, Alvin had seen two boys with flasks in their hip pockets, and noticed a box of quart bottles in the passenger seat of a Dodge coupé parked out front of Vickers Apothecary next to the Family Welfare Association at Fifth and Main. He presumed that Icaria was ankle-deep in liquor like any other town. Who had stopped chasing booze when the saloons closed? Most fellows his age thought it was sporting to drink and take joyrides around the county and get a girl going with a bottle of hootch in the dark. He knew a youth named Henry Sullivan from Arcola not sixteen years old who drove a liquor truck for George Remus until a gang of hijackers stiff-armed him one night behind a Diamond gas station in Indiana and broke his jaw. Alvin decided he was allergic to booze himself because of how sick he got after hardly a swallow, worse yet since the consumption; but his cousins of both sexes were drunk on canned heat more than once behind the dance hall in downtown Farrington and none of the adults seemed to care much at all, themselves occupied day and night hiding hootch in the rubber collars of wagon horses or filling empty milk bottles with raw corn whiskey. Not more than a dozen arrests for liquor traffic had been made in Farrington since Christmas, yet each Sunday morning Reverend Whitehead of the United Methodist church and Dr. E.G. Fortune of the Episcopalians reminded their flocks how proud the Lord was of them for staying dry.

  At the corner of Main and Seventh, Rascal stopped in front of a shoeshine shop to admire a pair of Gold Bond oxfords on the work counter. A hand-painted lithograph advertising the circus extravaganza was posted in the window. The farm boy studied a jewelry store across the street and thought about investigating a wristwatch; he had seen a gold-filled Illinois watch back at Stantonsburg for forty dollars that he fancied quite a lot.

  “Why, look,” the dwarf remarked. “There’s the Belvedere Hotel.”

  He directed Alvin’s attention to an elegant four-story brick building across the street in the next block where men in business suits crowded atop the cement steps to the front door and a pack of shiny automobiles were clustered out front. Rascal stepped back off the sidewalk to let a woman pushing a baby stroller get by. “Let’s go scout the rooms. Perhaps we can improve our situation.”

  Watching a flock of pigeons silhouetted on the cloudy sky across the hotel’s rooftop, Alvin shook his head. “Chester ain’t checked in yet. He won’t get here till tomorrow and he didn’t say nothing about us dropping up to see him, neither. He told me that Spud fellow’d let us know when he got into town.”

  A column of black Ford sedans and a loaded melon truck and a blue delivery van roared by, trailing a cloud of smelly black exhaust. People along the sidewalk were staring at the dwarf. So, too, was a crowd across the street under the awning of Brown’s clothing store. Just behind him were a couple of osteopath patients waiting to see Dr. Kessler, their faces pressed to the plate-glass. When the farm boy gave them his own evil eye, they turned away.

  “Well, I still want to go have a look.”

  Alvin shrugged, preferring to remain out of doors in the sunlight. He was sick of hiding in the shadows. “Suit yourself, but I’m staying right here. Parade’s coming any minute now.”

  “We wouldn’t miss a trick.”

  “I ain’t a-going with you.”

  “Well, so long, then.”

  The dwarf gave a farewell salute, and shot off the curb behind a loaded autobus.

  “Hey!”

  Alvin watched him dodge through traffic and disappear into a sidewalk crowd in front of the Lotus Café. Uptown, the trolley bell clanged. A new yellow Oldsmobile rolled by with two men balanced on the running boards smoking cigars. One of them held up a Republican placard. The driver honked the horn as he passed the I.O.O.F. building.

  Alvin walked up the block to the Orient Theater on the corner of Eighth and Main where a freckled young newspaper boy in a flat cap and brown trousers leaned against the lamppost, a scrawny beagle at his feet. People stepped around him as they hurried past. A stack of unsold copies of the Icarian Mercury-Gazette sat on the dirty cement beside the curb. The boy was counting pennies into his front trouser pocket. Feeling a chill, Alvin walked under the marquee to get out of the draft. Framed-in glass next to the polished double doors held the theater program. Tonight, the Orient featured a beauty contest, a minstrel show, two Vitaphone melodramas, and a Western thriller. Beside the program in the glass case, a posted handbill promised wholesome recreation under the new ownership of the refurbished theater. Next week a series of lectures on
current events would be sponsored by the Family Relief Society—Admission 10¢.

  “Are you in the circus, mister?”

  Alvin turned around and saw the newspaper boy standing next to the empty ticket booth, his beagle behind him. The boy’s brown trousers were dusty and his old roundtoed shoes covered with mud.

  For the third time since breakfast, Alvin told his new lie, “Sure I am.”

  The boy’s face brightened. “Gee, that must be swell. Is that one of your clowns?” He pointed across the street to Rascal walking just then under a giant pair of spectacles that advertised an oculist near the Belvedere Hotel.

  “’Course it is.”

  “Why, I bet he’s awful funny, ain’t he?”

  “So long as he ain’t mooning up that ol’ beer jug of his.”

  “Huh?”

  “You never mind him,” Alvin instructed the boy. “He woke with a grouch on today and ain’t talking sense to no one. Say, how come you ain’t in school? Waiting on the parade?”

  The newspaper boy shook his head. “Naw, I got fleas from ol’ Spike here, so Miss Othmar sent me home. My pop says I got to sell all my papers or I can’t go to the circus tonight. We’re busted, I guess.”

  Alvin watched the dwarf enter the Belvedere Hotel. A cold gust riffled the stack of newspapers at the curb. The boy bent down to scratch his dog’s nose. “Can’t you dig up some dough nowhere?” Alvin asked him. “Why, I met a swell girl this morning at a flophouse where we hired a room that might let you do a basket of laundry for her. That’d be worth something, I’d bet.”

  The boy screwed up his face like he’d just swallowed a bottle of castor oil, then spat on the sidewalk. “Nothing doing! I ain’t washin’ for no dame. Momma whipped me last week ’cause Spike got mud on her clean sheets and made me scrub ’em all white again. No thanks!”

  “Well, how come your daddy won’t kick in a nickel or two? Is he a skinflint?”

  The boy gave a shrug. “Pop’s a crapshootin’ fool and he got the craze again. Momma’s fed up, but she don’t want to be a joykiller, neither, so she don’t say much.” His expression changed to an eager grin. “Jeepers, it must be swell to ride all over in a circus wagon. You ain’t got a sideshow for a kid whose dog eats tacks and razor blades, do you?”

  “Naw, we ain’t got nothing like that.”

  The newspaper boy lowered his head and kicked at the dirty pavement. “Aw, gee whiz, me and Spike never get a break.”

  “Tacks and razor blades?”

  The newspaper boy nodded. “Pins, too!”

  “Kid, you’re almost as big a fibber as someone else I know.”

  The boy’s face reddened. “If you got any tacks or pins on you, we can prove it.” He rubbed his dog’s neck. “And how!”

  Alvin laughed out loud, and then coughed till his throat hurt.

  The newspaper boy scowled and knelt down beside the scrawny old beagle and hugged him tightly. Alvin noticed a commotion across the street. A tall clown in greasepaint and blue polka dots encircled by shouting children was distributing heralds along the sidewalk by the Belvedere. Straightaway, Alvin heard the faint song of a steam calliope in the distance.

  He looked back at the scruffy newspaper boy. “I guess a fresh kid like you’ll probably never amount to nothing, huh?”

  “Aw, phooey on you, too.”

  The farm boy took a fistful of dimes from his trouser pocket. “Here, kid.” He put them into the boy’s hand. “Go to the circus tonight. Take your folks with you. Have a swell time.”

  The newspaper boy shot to his feet. “Gee, mister! No kidding?”

  “You said it.” Alvin swatted the boy’s cap. “See you later, kid.”

  Then he rushed across the street to join the crowd at the Belvedere Hotel. People were standing three or four deep now at the sidewalk and Alvin had to shove his way up the cement steps to the entrance. Next door, men and women leaned out from the upper floor windows of a radio and appliance store, shouting and waving to people on the street.

  The lobby of the Belvedere was carpeted in Oriental rugs and rich with palms, stuffed easy chairs, gilded pier mirrors, and china cuspidors. A group of businessmen in black waistline coats stood at the registration desk, chatting with the clerk. Cigar smoke and conversation bloomed from the adjacent dining saloon. A pianist played “Shaking the Blues Away.”

  Alvin crossed the narrow lobby in search of the dwarf. The elevator opened and a young bellboy wearing a crimson monkeyjacket came out with a pair of Louis Vuitton bags. Alvin removed his cap and sneaked around a potted palm into the noisy dining saloon where thirty or forty well-dressed men and women sat enjoying lunch. He looked carefully table by table and past the end of the mahogany bar to where the downstairs toilets were located, but didn’t see the dwarf anywhere, so he went back across the lobby to the registration desk and waited to speak to the clerk. When the gentlemen in waistcoats walked off, the clerk nodded for Alvin to step up to the desk.

  “May I help you, son?”

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine that come in here a few minutes ago, and I was wondering if you seen him at all, a little fellow with suspenders and blue trousers?”

  “Is he a guest here?”

  “No, sir. He ain’t. We already got us a room across town.” Briefly, the farm boy considered lending Chester’s name to the discussion, but thought better of it.

  After the clerk scribbled a series of names and numbers into the ledger, he said, “Describe your friend for me again, please.”

  “Well, like I said, he’s about this high, with sort of—”

  The clerk interrupted. “Is your friend with the circus?”

  Alvin nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Frowning, the clerk shut the ledger. “In that case, I can assure you he’s not here. Our policy no longer permits circus people of any sort at this hotel. I suggest you look elsewhere. Good day.”

  The clerk walked off with the ledger.

  Humiliated once again, Alvin slunk out of the Belvedere. He knew he’d made a fool of himself, but didn’t care this time. He was sweaty and felt his fever rising. He coughed hard and wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. Atop the busy steps, he jostled for a decent view of upper Main Street. More painted clowns mingled along the downtown sidewalks, passing out handbills and distributing free admission tickets to pretty girls and small children. Just across the street, Alvin saw a rangy emerald clown with hair like a cotton candy rainbow seated at the curb by the Orient Theater, his elastic arms wrapped tightly about the newspaper boy and the scraggy beagle. Music from the circus band echoed on the wind. Uptown, the grand parade had begun.

  The farm boy climbed up onto the stone balustrade and balanced against the building façade high above the crowded sidewalk. He held his breath when he saw the great Indian elephants lumbering down the street under black walnut trees three blocks away at Potter and Main. Astride each was a royal Nubian princess in peacock-blue silk and glittering sapphires. Marching ahead of the majestic pachyderms, flutists in green tricorn hats and scarlet plumes led a team of sixteen brown ponies from Lilliput drawing a gilded carriage wild with lavender roses and firebreathing dwarves. The crowd on Main roared with delight as the circus band played “Entry of the Gladiators.” Policemen cleared the street ahead. A big bass drum boomed a martial rhythm as imperial trumpets heralded the arrival of gold-turbanned equestrians performing tumbling tricks atop prancing white stallions, while a curious menagerie of strange caged beasts and terrible human phenomena in painted wagons were tugged along by plodding mule teams and silver-collared draft-horses. From his stone perch, the farm boy witnessed a euphonious parade of the fabulous and the bizarre, an alchemistic history of the known world. No mere child’s torpid dream of Bengal tigers and gypsy sword swallowers: here, Caesar’s grand war chariot salvaged from those dusty storehouses of Leptis Magna rolled again behind proud Arabian steeds under the hand of a dour Russian Cossack as crimson pantalooned dwarves from Cairo and Bombay flung knives and spun
cartwheels between great dancing bears, and a Sultan’s rosy harem escorted a camel caravan of Iberian jugglers and giraffe-necked giants and Chinese magicians and tattooed snake charmers. Next came Gloucester’s sea serpent swimming in a glass turquoise tank wagon with three lovely mermaids rescued from a fisherman’s net off Martinique, then Wellington’s triumphant Waterloo marching band in red dresscoat and gold braid with a rousing chorus of “Rule Brittania,” and thirteen antiquarian bandwagons carved and gilded by druidic gnomes recounting in painted mythological tableaux wondrous stories of golden geese and fairy kings, enchanted nightingales and ancient jinnis, sleeping princesses and shipwrecked sailors. Block after windy block, midget clowns and fat clowns and giant clowns juggled fiery torches and somersaulted off shoulder tops and strode upon stilts and dove through flaming hoops and tossed bags of warm peanuts and fresh Crackerjack to howling children until every zebra, ostrich, llama, buffalo and gazelle had passed in revue, and the Wild West bareback riders and rope dancers and spangled Prussian acrobats had exhibited feats of daring and wonder, and the great thundering steam calliope, Seraphonium, that deafening shriek of melodious pipe whistles, had summoned the brave and the curious to follow the wagon parade of Emmett J. Laswell’s Traveling Circus Giganticus back to Icaria’s showgrounds, and not one solitary child had been left behind on Main Street.

  The dining room was lit with oil lamps for supper. Nine dishes were set at the table and the portières drawn to keep out the hall draft. By six o’clock, all the boarders were seated and grace was spoken by Virgil Platt, a gaunt narrow man with gray whiskers on a weary face whose Bible reading Alvin had heard through the wall that morning. A hint of tears welled in the fellow’s eyes when he thanked the Lord for such daily blessings as the living and penitent require. Seated across from Alvin were the oddest pair of middle-aged twins in Lord Fauntleroy dress: Eugene and Samuel Szopinski. Both wore pince-nez over powdered cheeks and smelled of fresh lilac water and talcum. Next to them was matronly Eva Chase from Vicksburg, dressed in pine-green cashmere and tortoise-shell eyeglasses. Beside the dwarf were two older fellows with slicked-back hair, black dinner jackets and smart linen collars: Percy Webster and Russell James. To Alvin’s left on the parlor end opposite from Virgil Platt was silverhaired Mrs. Celia Burritt, overly elegant in a grenadine dress and satin mantel. Ox-tail soup and haricot mutton and sweet rice croquettes were on the table with hot coffee and a kettle of peppermint tea when Alvin sat down. He bowed his head with everyone else during grace, then listened to introductions by Mrs. Burritt, helped pass the serving plates around the table, and attended to a conversation begun by Eva Chase and the dwarf while Alvin was still upstairs napping after the parade. It was the strangest story he had ever heard.