by Brad Barkley
“Now, get the makeup kit.”
I take the kit from clown alley and set it on the bed beside him.
“Give me a shot, and do my face. When is the show? Tell me again.”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Good. We got time.” He pats the bed. “Sit here and do your job. I ever tell you the Hobo Ned face is legally mine? Any other clown ever uses my design, I can sue his ass here till Tuesday.” I put the drug in his vein, and everything in him settles and relaxes. My hands shake worse than his.
“I have to go out,” I say. The itch covers me like a fur coat.
“Like hell. We got work.”
“I need more money.” I toss the jar of pancake on the bed.
“I just gave you a c-note. You want dough every time you take a breath? Do my face, and be careful, do it right.” He closes his eyes, presses his lips together.
“Forget it, Ned, I’m going out.” I stand and move toward the door.
“You’re going nowhere unless I say so.” I pull open the door, and grit blows into my eyes. Ned raises himself in the bed.
“Don’t come back if you leave here. I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to see your ugly mug. You’re out of the will, not a dime.” The tube in his neck faintly whistles as he breathes.
“Go on then and get the hell out of here. Go die, for what I care.” His voice follows me through the thin wall and down the stairs into the street.
When I come back, my arms are bleeding, my head floating in jelly. Ned is asleep and wheezing, the jars and tubes of greasepaint scattered around the bed sheets. He has tried to do the makeup himself. His face is dashed with streaks of white, clumps of the pancake stuck in his hair. The darker colors smear along the front of his pajama top and across his shoulder. His chin instead of his nose is red. I can imagine his attempt, confused, his weak arms failing him, the tubes of paint dropping out of his reach. While he sleeps I fix his face, bring Hobo Ned back out of the mess.
When he wakes, I am holding his hand, touching the raised veins, the yellowed nails.
“I thought I told you not to come back.”
I squeeze his fingers and laugh. “What would you do without me, old man? You wouldn’t last a day.”
“So you’re laughing, funny boy? Let me tell you, when Ned Samuelson finishes business, he finishes business. Now get out, and stop leeching off me.”
“You’ll die, Ned. You’ll never get through the show.”
He angles the lid of the makeup kit so he can see himself in the mirror. “Perfect,” he says. “Did I need your help in ‘61, when I did Ed Sullivan? Up yours.”
“Ned…”
“Out, loser, or I’ll call the cops.”
I stuff my things into a grocery sack and head out the door, taking as I go everything I can hock. The last thing I hear is Ned practicing his lines, getting all of them wrong, forgetting them in mid-sentence or interrupting himself with wet coughs.
I scrounge enough for a room, one of the dives on Lombard. Before I can get there I spend the money in the shadows, a quick, fat pop behind the dumpster. It is cold and damp out at night, the steam grates all taken. I walk, feeling my eyes move like eels, hearing the sound of blood in veins. I keep circling the block without meaning to. The time, the deadness of the night, seem to roll back and back on themselves, repeating like ocean waves.
By the time I make it back to Ned’s I am out of money, and have lost somewhere my sack of clothes. The Carolina is polished up for the next day’s ceremonies, the front of the building draped with a thick, red ribbon. Hobo Ned’s name shines on the marquee. There is numbness in the tips of my fingers, moving up my arm.
Inside, Ned is on the bed, propped on the pillows, wearing his makeup. On the floor, in the light from the marquee, glitter the broken shards of a glass syringe and the nalprozene vial. Beside them, Ned’s top hat has fallen out of his reach.
Ned has managed his makeup by himself, but again everything is wrong. This time he has forgotten the pancake completely, and has painted his mouth with a huge, white, maniac smile instead of his gray frown with the whiskers. The shaky, black outline of his smile extends to his cheekbones and below his chin. It takes up half of his face.
“You stupid old man,” I say. “You don’t even look like a hobo. You don’t even look sad, for godsakes.” He does not stir, and there is no nalprozene to rouse him. A strange noise invades the tiny room, and I realize it is the absence of the wheezing from the tube in Ned’s neck. When I touch him he is stiff. My thumb on his tube makes no difference. I sit on the bed and lean across his lap for the rag and cold cream. In the tilted lid of the makeup kit, the streaked mirror catches my face, my own dark eyes. Instead of the cold cream I watch my fingers dip into the white pancake. For that moment I think of wearing it, of disappearing in the grease. Around me, the vaudeville faces look down at us. A great gag, they tell me, a classic. Their yellow glossy eyes never close.
ESCAPING
OCTOBER had arrived, the season of typhoid, when the women and children withered as quickly as leaves on the trees. All the beds and the overflow cots on the ward where Anna Privitte worked were full, the emaciated bodies in tremors, the blues and greens and browns of the children’s eyes set like stones in their faces. For twenty hours she had sat with the boy, his name already lost to her, spooning him boiled eggs and stewed fruit, combing with her fingers his sweat-matted hair and cleaning the fever sores on his mouth, before the hemorrhaging finally took him. He died that morning with his fingers curled against his cheek.
She moved now through the early afternoon along Eutaw Street toward Lexington Market, away from the hospital, drawing her cape tight to her against the autumn wind that found spaces in her shoes where the buttons had fallen away. Her back stiffened from the hours in the iron chair at the boy’s bedside, her arms sore from turning him. In the streets around her the ladies from town in their finery alighted from carriages, followed by servants carrying baskets. A fat man with blond hair and thick mustaches touched Anna’s arm. “Plump rabbits today, ma’am.” His voice boomed. “Fresh killed, twenty-five cents.” She frowned at him, pulling away from his touch, and drew off the sidewalk into the street, stepping between the drays loaded with barrels of oysters, with watermelon and lumber. Anna raised her hand to her mouth and nose against the smell of the coal oil lamps that burned for the Saturday night market. It was early, hours yet from dark. The boy’s body would still be laid out in the hospital mortuary, where she, like every nurse, delivered her dead. In that tiny room with its stained-glass windows and terrible silences, she washed his papery skin, wrapped him in winding sheets, and covered his blank face.
In the street children darted between the legs of horses while the poor bartered for cuts of shin and neck and tail. Along the sidewalk people shouted in her ears, offering vegetables and butchered meats. Anna could not tolerate the crowds, the press of noise, the flies still thick this late in the year. She would go home to rest, and make do without the potatoes and cabbage and soup bones for the stew she and her mother shared. Most evenings they ate together standing in the kitchen, then let their food run cold while they practiced songs together or read books in the quiet house. They had lived this way since Anna was nine and her father had died of blood poisoning.
Lately, at night, she would be awakened in her bed by the shouts of their new-married neighbors in the rowhouse next door, by the dull slam of Mrs. Dombrowski thrown against the wall. Anna was twenty-seven now, and when she closed her eyes to hear those thumps that rattled the pots from the kitchen shelves, she thought it just as well that she would never marry, that the chance would never arise. Already, the boys on the corners would whisper old maid as she walked past them toward the hospital, reaching out their greasy fingers for the touch of her skirts.
As she rounded the corner at Calvert Street, a crowd of people rushed past her, men pulling their women by the elbows, mothers snatching up their children, shouting at one another to hurry or they w
ould miss the show. Before she could turn and start toward the alley the throng drew her in like fast water, her feet nearly lifted off the bricks. Elbows jabbed into her ribs, shoulders and hands buffeted her spine and trapped her arms by her sides. She felt the tug of her skirts as children bumped into her legs. She had to force herself to breathe. Someone shoved into her hands a pamphlet, Harry Houdini: The Adventurous Life of a Versatile Artist. As she slowed to read, she was butted across the back of her head by a forearm or elbow, her face smothered into the wool mackinaw of the man before her.
“Don’t,” she said. The harsh wool scratched her cheek as she fought to keep her footing beneath her. She pushed against the man to right herself, her cold face chafed and stinging. Beside her, a boy led a monkey tethered to a thin brass chain. She saw an elderly man drop his eyeglasses and reach for them as the crush of shoes and brogans took them. Discarded oyster shells broke against the paving stones beneath her feet. From the basin of Baltimore Harbor sounded the thunderclap of lumber being unloaded from ships and tossed in stacks on the docks. She focused on the sound as she gave herself up to the press of people. Strands of her hair came unpinned and fell around her face. Somewhere, she had lost her tulle cap.
The forward push of the crowd along Calvert Street slowed and then ceased, and here and there pockets of space opened. Anna moved toward one of these, where men stood circled, smoking cigars. She watched them count up bets, then fasten the money with a gold clip. They asked a boy to hold the pooled money, and he stuck it away inside his cap. The boy’s face glowed with pink blotches across his cheeks. Fever, she thought, her breath catching, then realized it was only the boy’s healthiness, his excitement. Around her, fingers pointed at the afternoon sky, and everyone there, the men and ladies and children, and even the stray dogs, looked up.
From a beam atop the Fidelity Building there hung a block and tackle, a braided rope that looped through the pulleys disappearing among the hats and oiled hair of the crowd. The rope tightened and quivered, a loud “Heaveho!” rose up, and a voice laced with Scottish accent told everyone to “stand away, clear away.” As the cadence rang out and the pulleys on the block and tackle scraped and whined, a man—Houdini, she realized—lifted up over the heads of the throng, tethered to the rope by his ankles, swaying. Anna raised her hands to her mouth. She watched this Houdini swing bound in a straightjacket, the brass buckles along his back glinting in the afternoon sun. She had seen the jackets before, men brought into the hospital chewing their tongues, shouting in spit and blood. Houdini’s face darkened, and he spoke words she could not hear as the men let him down again. When the crowd pulled back, Anna found herself to be one of those forming the circle around Houdini. She turned to look behind her toward town and saw nothing but faces; in the distance, boys and girls stood on the fenders of the automobiles.
“Now watch,” Houdini said, his voice raspy with the constriction of his lungs from the canvas and leather bindings. “This you have not seen before.”
He lay on his back, the rope holding his bare feet half a yard off the pavement. As he moved, Anna heard the buckles of the straightjacket scrape the cobbles beneath him. A thick-chested man, the man with the Scottish accent, snapped his fingers in the air and a younger man with browned, gaping teeth led forth a horse pulling a small dray. On the boards of the dray steamed a large copper kettle. Using his handkerchief, the young man lifted the pot handle and poured the steaming water over the straightjacket. Anna thought back to that morning, when she had car-bolized the heavy rubber sheets from the boy’s bed, her last task after every death.
“Be careful of his face, now, his legs,” the Scotsman shouted. A steam cloud rose up with the smell of boiled cotton, and the dray horse snuffled and stepped. The water hissed as it ran between the cobbles, and the canvas of the straightjacket darkened with the wetting. Somewhere behind Anna, a woman said, “That’ll shrink it right down.” The men with cigars took back their money from the boy and strengthened their bets, counting the bills aloud, writing on slips of paper. Houdini directed his Scottish helper and two other assistants to hoist him back into the air. As he rose up, people in the crowd waved hats and handkerchiefs. A shower of brass souvenir coins rained down, and boys scrambled after them, tearing the knees of their pants. A short, skinny man leaned against Anna, laughing, smelling of whiskey and tobacco. She suppressed the urge to run away.
Houdini inched up fully the height of the building, twisting on the rope like a caught fish. People shielded their eyes against the bright sky. The men who had bet withdrew and opened their pocket watches. Houdini kicked against the air and fought the jacket in spasms that rang the block pulleys. The only sound now was silence, dimpled here and there by shouted encouragements and the chattering of the monkey hidden in the crowd. Anna looked around her, all the faces lifted. By now her mother would be praying out loud, frantic that Anna had not returned from work.
Then Anna noticed the Scotsman, watching her, his eyes narrowed. She felt herself blush, like a school girl caught daydreaming. She looked away and pulled the cape tight around her, the smells of the boy on her. When she turned back, the Scotsman still watched her, not smiling, his hat tipped back on his head, his silver hair even across his forehead, his face ruddy and jowly. Though she could not stand to look at him, neither could she make herself look away. She remembered, years before, the first dawn after the night of the Great Fire, when the sun lay buried in the smeared sky. Late that morning ambulances brought in the men hurt in an explosion at the Steiff Paint factory. The nurses worked cutting off the clothes of the men where the fabric had not melted to the skin. The men cried out, naked on their stretchers. Their cut-away leather aprons and suits, bright with the greens and blues of the explosion, red with their own blood, quilted the cold floor of the emergency area. Anna knelt among the men, her stomach buckling inside her. She bandaged a man who had lost his eyes to flaming turpentine, and was beside him a week later when the doctor removed the bandages and the man ran his fingers over his face, lightly, as if brushing away rain water. He heard her there and turned to the sound of her, his face peeled, his empty sockets inflamed tissue. He took up her hand in his.
“Please tell me you’re pretty. A pretty girl,” he said. She was seventeen then, and had worked as a probationer for only a week, sterilizing the towels and dressings and instruments in the operating room. He nodded a little, tilting his head. His fingers were calloused. He had been handsome. The doctor and head nurse smiled and nodded to her as well. She swallowed.
“No. I’m plain,” she told him. “I’m an ordinary girl.” She had dropped his hand then, she remembered, had run back upstairs to the children on her ward.
As Anna looked up, Houdini began swinging in a pendulum are, his hair hanging down. Beneath the straight-jacket he wore only a white bathing suit, the muscles in his thighs like the flanks of horses. Houdini strained and grunted, the cords in his neck thickening. His head jerked, and drops of moisture umbrellaed out to catch the afternoon light. As Anna began to believe he had made no progress in his escape, she saw his left arm slide further up under his armpit. He pushed again, spinning and huffing with each breath. The men with cigars tapped their pocket watches and passed around more money and shouted profanities. The Scotsman whispered into the ear of his assistant, his eyes still on her. She buried her hands in her cape. Houdini twisted and swayed, his white breath expelling in bursts. He looked in the rhythm of his struggles like some mechanical device, like the clocks her father had collected. As she watched, his elbow wrenched down across his face and his right arm pulled free.
The crowd started up its noise again and surged against her back. She heard in their words the twin hopes that he would escape and that he would not, that he would triumph from his efforts or die from them, dangling and spinning. She thought of the worst sound she’d heard in the hospital, at night on the women’s ward during typhoid season, when the delirious asked for water they could not keep down by banging on their nightstands with
tin cups. Banging until they wore down and gave up.
The sun pushed shadows from the scaffolded buildings surrounding the street, the repairs to the city ongoing still, ten years after the Great Fire. Houdini shouted as his other arm wrenched loose. He pulled with his teeth at the leather straps along his fists. His arms loosed from one another and the shouts in the crowd began to rise. Reaching behind he unhasped two of the buckles along his spine, pinching them through the stiff canvas. He swung out over the crowd, nearly hitting the Fidelity Building on backswings. He twisted once inside the straightjacket, and again, then the jacket pulled down off his shoulders and he was free of it, holding it by its sleeve and waving it at the crowd. The noise of the people rose up beyond hearing, the roar like water against her eardrums. Someone threw a bouquet of flowers; cap pistols popped, making the dogs bark. Houdini extended his arms and took his bow upside down in the air.
The circle pushed back as the assistants lowered Houdini to the cobbles and the men with cigars handed money around, wetting their fingers to count it. The crowd gathered tightly, straining to see, and the Scotsman shouted for his assistants to keep everyone back. Then Houdini leapt atop the dray, resting his bare foot on the handle of the copper kettle, and he tossed the straightjacket to the reporters standing about with their notebooks and flash cameras. He wore no shirt, only the white cotton bathing suit, and in the cold his skin puckered and turned red in blotches along his legs. His chest and shoulders had bruised from his struggle with the straightjacket, some of the bruises as wide as hands. Out of breath, he invited the reporters to inspect the jacket, to come collect a thousand-dollar reward if they found anything amiss. The cheers eased away and the people applauded now as if at the theatre, the boys jumping from the fenders of cars, some of the women crying. Without meaning to, Anna found herself applauding as well. Houdini shouted for all to return in two hours, a block away at water’s edge where he would “challenge the icy depths of the harbor.” Anna looked for the Scotsman, but he was gone.