He had just completed his repairs when, looking up, he noticed Chick Counterfly by the fire, brewing a pot of coffee.
“Care for some?” Chick offered. “Or don’t they let you drink this stuff yet?”
Something in his tone suggested that this was only the sort of friendly teasing a fellow Darby’s age had to expect and put up with. “Thanks, wouldn’t mind a cup at all.”
They sat by the fire for a while, silent as a pair of drovers camping out on the western prairie. Finally, to Darby’s surprise, “I sure do miss my Pop,” Chick confided, abruptly.
“I guess that must be awful tough for you, Chick. I don’t think I even remember mine.”
Chick gazed dolefully into the fire. After a moment, “Thing is, I believe he would have hung on. If he could have. We were partners, see? Always had something going. Some swell little moneymaker. Not always to the sheriff’s liking, but enough to keep beans in the pot. Didn’t mind all the midnight relocations, but those small-town courtrooms, I never could get used to them. Judge’d take one look at us, up went that hammer, whiz! we were usually out the door and on the main road before it came back down again.”
“Good exercise, I bet.”
“Well, but it seemed like Pop was starting to slow down some. Wondered if it was me somehow. You know, the extra trouble or something.”
“Sounds more like it was all that Chinese foofooraw you mentioned,” said Darby, “nothing you caused. Here, do you smoke these?” lighting up a species of cigarette and offering one to Chick.
“My Great-Aunt Petunia!” exclaimed Chick, “what is that smell?”
“Say, it’s cubebs. Medicinal use only. No tobacco allowed on board, as you might recall from your Chums of Chance Membership Oath.”
“Did I swear off? I must’ve been all confused in my mind. No tobacco! Say, it’s the goldurn Keeley Cure around here. How do you people get through your day?”
Suddenly what sounded like a whole kennelful of dogs began to bark furiously. “Pugnax,” explained Darby, noting Chick’s alarmed expression.
“Him and what else?”
“Just ol’ Pugnax. One of his many talents. Guess we’d better go have a look.”
They found Pugnax up on his feet, clenched and alert, watching the outer darkness intently—from what the boys could tell, poised to launch a massive counter-assault on whatever was now approaching their perimeter.
“Here you go,” called an invisible voice, “nice doggy!” Pugnax stood his ground but had ceased barking, apparently judging the visitors nasally acceptable. As Darby and Chick watched, out of the evening came a giant beefsteak, soaring in an arc, slowly rotating, and hit the dirt almost exactly between Pugnax’s front paws, where he regarded it for a while, a single eyebrow raised, one would have to say, disdainfully.
“Hey, anybody home?” Into the firelight emerged two boys and a girl, carrying picnic baskets and wearing flight uniforms of indigo mohair brilliantine with scarlet pinstripes, and headgear which had failed to achieve the simpler geometry of the well-known Shriner fez, being far more ornate and, even for its era, arguably not in the best of taste. There was an oversize spike, for example, coming out the top, German style, and a number of plumes dyed a pale eclipse green. “Howdy, Darb! What’s up and what’s down?”
Darby, recognizing them as members of Bindlestiffs of the Blue A.C., a club of ascensionaries from Oregon, with whom the Chums of Chance had often flown on joint manœuvres, broke into a welcoming smile, especially for Miss Penelope (“Penny”) Black, whose elfin appearance disguised an intrepid spirit and unfaltering will, and on whom he had had a “case” for as long as he could remember. “Hello, Riley, Zip . . . Penny,” he added shyly.
“That’s ‘Captain’ to you.” She held up a sleeve to display four gold stripes, at whose edges could be seen evidence of recent needlework. The Bindlestiffs were known and respected for granting the loquacious sex membership on a strictly equal footing with boys, including full opportunities for promotion. “Yeahp,” Penny grinned, “they gave me the Tzigane—just brought the old tub in here from Eugene, got her berthed down past that little grove of trees there, nobody worse for wear.”
“W-wow! Your first command! That’s champion!” He found himself shuffling nervously, and with no idea what to do about his hands.
“You better kiss me,” she said, “it’s tradition and all.”
Even with the chorus of hoots it evoked from the other boys, Darby found the fleeting brush of her freckled cheek against his lips more than worth the aggravation. After introductions, Chick and Darby brought out folding camp chairs, the Bindlestiffs opened their baskets of delectables, and the colleagues settled down to an evening of gossip, shop talk, and sky-stories.
“Coming in over ‘Egypt,’ downstate Illinois to you, Darb, we caught us an upriser off a cornfield by Decatur, thought we’d be onto the dang moon by now—’scuse me”—pausing to sneeze—“icicles o’ snot down to our belt buckles, goin all blue from the light of that electric fluid, ‘s whirlpoolin round our heads—ahh-pffeugghh!”
“Oh, Gesundheit, Riley,” said Zip, “but last time you told that one, it was strange voices and so forth—”
“We’d picked up a little galvanic halo ourselves by the time we got here,” said Chick, “what with the speed and all.”
“A-aw that’s nothin,” cried Riley, “next to dodgin tornadoes all day! You boys want real electricity, git on out to Oklahoma sometime, get a treat for your ears into the bargain that will sure’s hell drownd out any strange voices in your neighborhood.”
“Speaking of voices,” said Penny, “what have you heard about these . . . ‘sightings’ that keep getting reported in? Not just from crews up in the air but sometimes even from civilians on the ground?”
“You mean aside from the usual,” Darby said, “fata morgana, northern lights, and so forth?”
“Different,” Zip in a low, ominous voice. “There’s lights, but there’s sound, too. Mostly in the upper altitudes, where it gets that dark blue in the daytime? Voices calling out together. All directions at once. Like a school choir, only no tune, just these—”
“Warnings,” said Riley.
Darby shrugged. “News to me. Inconvenience, we’re only the runts of the Organization, last at the trough, nobody ever tells us anything—they keep cutting our orders, we follow ‘em, is all.”
“Well we were over by Mount Etna there back in the spring,” Penny said, “and you remember those Garcons de ‘71, I expect.” For Chick’s benefit, Darby explained that this outfit had first been formed over twenty years ago, during the Sieges of Paris, when manned balloons were often the only way to communicate in or out of the city. As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the infamous pétroleurs of Paris. When the Sieges ended, these balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly only to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, never-ending state of siege.
“Nowadays,” Penny said, “they’ll fly wherever they’re needed, far above fortress walls and national boundaries, running blockades, feeding the hungry, sheltering the sick and persecuted . . . so of course they make enemies everyplace they go, they get fired at from the ground, all the time. But this was different. We happened to be up with them that one day, and it was just the queerest thing. Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was . . . a kind of force . . . energy we could feel, directed personally at us. . . .”
“Somebody out there,” Zip said solemnly. “Empty space. But inhabited.”
“This making you nervous, Chick?” teased
Darby.
“Nawh. Thinking about who wants that last apple fritter there.”
Meantime Miles and Lindsay were off to the Fair. The horse-drawn conveyance they had boarded took them through the swarming streets of southern Chicago. Miles gazed with keen curiosity, but Lindsay regarded the scene with a peevish stare.
“You look kind of glum, Lindsay.”
“I? no, not at all—beyond an unavoidable apprehension at the thought of Counterfly with full run of the ship and no one to supervise him, I am as cheerful as a finch.”
“But Darby’s there with him.”
“Please. Any influence Suckling could exert on a character that depraved would be negligible at best.”
“Oh, but say,” reckoned the kind-hearted Miles, “Counterfly does seem a good skate, and I bet you he’ll soon get the hang of things.”
“As Master-at-Arms,” muttered Lindsay, perhaps only to himself, “my own view of human nature is necessarily less hopeful.”
At length the car deposited them at a street-corner from which, the conductor assured them, it would be but a short walk to the Fairgrounds—or, as he chuckled, “depending how late in the evening, a brisk run,” and went on its way in metal-to-metal clangor and clopping. At a distance the boys could see in the sky the electrical glow of the Fair, but hereabouts all was in shadow. Presently they found a gap in the fence, and an admissions gate with something of the makeshift about it, lit by a single candle-stub, whose attendant, a scowling Asiatic midget of some sort, though eager enough to take their proffered fifty-cent pieces, had to be pressed by the scrupulous Lindsay for a duly executed receipt. The diminutive sentinel then held out his palm as if for a gratuity, which the boys ignored. “Deadbeats!” he screamed, by way of introducing them to the quatercentennial celebration of Columbus’s advent upon our shores.
From somewhere ahead too dark to see came music from a small orchestra, unusually syncopated, which grew louder, till they could make out a small outdoor dance-floor, all but unlit, where couples were dancing, and about which crowds were streaming densely everywhere, among odors of beer, garlic, tobacco smoke, inexpensive perfume, and, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, somewhere up ahead, the unmistakable scent of massed livestock.
Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the “White City” seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. . . . As if the half-light ruling this perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but deliberately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the faces here, which held an urgency somehow too intense for the full light of day and those innocent American visitors with their Kodaks and parasols who might somehow happen across this place. Here in the shadows, the faces moving by smiled, grimaced, or stared directly at Lindsay and Miles as if somehow they knew them, as if in the boys’ long career of adventure in exotic corners of the world there had been accumulating, unknown to them, a reserve of mistranslation, offense taken, debt entered into, here being re-expressed as a strange Limbo they must negotiate their way through, expecting at any moment a “run-in” with some enemy from an earlier day, before they might gain the safety of the lights in the distance.
Armed “bouncers,” drawn from the ranks of the Chicago police, patrolled the shadows restlessly. A Zulu theatrical company re-enacted the massacre of British troops at Isandhlwana. Pygmies sang Christian hymns in the Pygmy dialect, Jewish klezmer ensembles filled the night with unearthly clarionet solos, Brazilian Indians allowed themselves to be swallowed by giant anacondas, only to climb out again, undigested and apparently with no discomfort to the snake. Indian swamis levitated, Chinese boxers feinted, kicked, and threw one another to and fro.
Temptation, much to Lindsay’s chagrin, lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins. Pitchmen in their efforts at persuasion all but seized the ambulant youths by their lapels.
“Exotic smoking practices around the world, of great anthropological value!”
“Scientific exhibit here boys, latest improvements to the hypodermic syringe and its many uses!”
Here were Waziris from Waziristan exhibiting upon one another various techniques for waylaying travelers, which reckoned in that country as a major source of income. . . . Tarahumara Indians from northern Mexico crouched, apparently in total nakedness, inside lath-and-plaster replicas of the caves of their native Sierra Madre, pretending to eat vision-producing cacti that sent them into dramatic convulsions scarcely distinguishable from those of the common “geek” long familiar to American carnival-goers. . . . Tungus reindeer herders stood gesturing up at a gigantic sign reading SPECIAL REINDEER SHOW, and calling out in their native tongue to the tip gathered in front, while a pair of young women in quite revealing costumes—who, being blonde and so forth, did not, actually, appear to share with the Tungus many racial characteristics—gyrated next to a very patient male reindeer, caressing him with scandalous intimacy, and accosting passersby with suggestive phrases in English, such as “Come in and learn dozens ways to have fun in Siberia!” and “See what really goes on during long winter nights!”
“This doesn’t seem,” Lindsay adrift between fascination and disbelief, “quite . . . authentic, somehow.”
“Come over here, boys, first time for free, find the red get a pat on the head, find the black, get nothin back!” cried a cheerful Negro in a “pork-pie” hat, who was standing behind a folding table nearby, setting down and picking up playing-cards.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was one of those monte games,” murmured Lindsay, politely suppressing his disapproval.
“No, boss, it’s an ancient African method of divination, allows you to change your fate.” The sharper who had addressed them now began to move cards around with bewildering speed. At times there were too many cards to count, at others none at all were visible, seeming to have vanished into some dimension well beyond the third, though this could have been a trick of what light there was.
“O.K.! maybe it’s your lucky night, just tell us where that red is, now.” Three cards lay face-down before them.
After a moment of silence, it was Miles who announced in a clear and firm voice, “The cards you have put down there all happen to be black—your ‘red’ is the nine of diamonds, the curse of Scotland, and it’s right here,” reaching to lift the sharper’s hat, and to remove from atop his head, and exhibit, the card at issue.
“Lord have mercy, last time that happened I ended up in the Cook County jail for a nice long vacation. A tribute to your sharp eyes, young man, and no hard feelings,” holding out a ten-dollar banknote.
“Oh, that is . . .” Lindsay began tentatively, but Miles had already pocketed the offering, amiably calling out, “Evening, sir,” as they strolled away.
A surprised expression could be noted on Lindsay’s face. “That was . . . well executed, Blundell. How did you know where that card was?”
“Sometimes,” Miles with a strangely apprehensive note in his voice, “these peculiar feelings will surround me, Lindsay . . . like the electricity coming on—as if I can see everything just as clear as day, how . . . how everything fits together, connects. It doesn’t last long, though. Pretty soon I’m just back to tripping over my feet again.”
Presently they had come within view of the searchlight beams sweeping the skies from the roof of the immense Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—a miniature city, nested within the city-within-a-city which was the Fair itself—and began to see caped Columbian Guards on patrol, a reassuring sight,
to Lindsay at least.
“Come on, Lindsay,” Miles flourishing the banknote they had acquired so unexpectedly. “Long as we have this windfall, let’s go get us some root beer, and some of that ‘Cracker Jack,’ too. Say, what do you know! We’re here! We’re at the Fair!”
MEANWHILE RANDOLPH ST. COSMO, though out of uniform, was still on duty. The detective agency he sought was located in a seedy block of the New Levee district, between a variety saloon and a manufacturer of exploding cigars. The sign read WHITE CITY INVESTIGATIONS. Randolph tugged the brim of his hat a bit lower, looked swiftly up and down the littered and shadowy street, and sidled in the entrance. A young lady typewriter who managed to act prim and bold at the same time glanced up from her florally-appliquéd machine. “It’s after bedtime, sonny.”
“The door was open—”
“Yeah, and maybe this ain’t the Epworth League.”
“I was supposed to see Mr. Privett?”
“Nate!” she screamed, causing Randolph to jump. Her smile was not unmischievous. “You bring a note from your parents, kid?”
In Nate’s office were a combination sideboard, bookcase, and filing cabinet with assorted bottles of whiskey, a bed-lounge over in the corner, a couple of cane-bottom chairs, a curtain desk with about a thousand pigeonholes, a window with a view of the German saloon across the street, local-business awards and testimonials on the dark-paneled walls, along with photos of notable clients, some of them posed with Nate himself, including Doc Holliday, out in front of the Occidental Saloon in Tombstone, Doc and Nate each pointing a .44 Colt at the other’s head and pretending to scowl terribly. The picture was inscribed, More of a shotgun man myself, regards, Doc.
“Since the Haymarket bomb,” Nate was explaining, “we’ve had more work than we can handle, and it’s about to get even more hectic, if the Governor decides to pardon that gang of anarchistic murderers. Heaven knows what that’s gonna let loose on Chicago, the Fair in particular. Antiterrorist security now more than ever will be of the essence here. And, well, you boys enjoy the one perspective that all us in the ‘spotter’ community long for—namely, a view from overhead. We can’t pay you as well as the Pinkertons might, but maybe we could work out a deferred arrangement, small percent of profits down the line instead of cash right now. Not to mention what tips or other off-the-books revenue might come your way.”
Against the Day Page 3