After going through all the possible silver compounds, Merle moved on to salts of gold, platinum, copper, nickel, uranium, molybdenum, and antimony, abandoning metallic compounds after a while for resins, squashed bugs, coal-tar dyes, cigar smoke, wildflower extracts, urine from various critters including himself, reinvesting what little money came in from portrait work into lenses, filters, glass plates, enlarging machines, so that soon the wagon was just a damn rolling photography lab. He grabbed images of anything that came in range, never mind focus—streets aswarm with townsfolk, cloud-lit hillsides where nothing seemed to move, grazing cows who ignored him, insane squirrels who made a point of coming right up to the lens and making faces, picnickers out at Rocky River, abandoned wheelbarrows, patent bobwire stretchers left to rust under the sky, clocks on walls, stoves in kitchens, streetlamps lit and unlit, policemen running at him waving day clubs, girls arm in arm window-shopping on their lunch hours or strolling after work in the lakeside breezes, electric runabouts, flush toilets, 1,200-volt trolley dynamos and other wonders of the modern age, the new Viaduct under construction, weekend funseekers up by the reservoir, and next thing he knew, winter and spring had passed and he was out on his own, trying to make a living as a circuit-riding photographer, sometimes taking the wagon, sometimes just traveling light, a hand camera and a dozen plates, keeping to the interurbans, Sandusky to Ashtabula, Brooklyn out to Cuyahoga Falls and Akron, playing a lot of railroad euchre as a result, and posting a modest profit each trip out.
In August he happened to be in Columbus, where the papers were full of Blinky Morgan’s impending execution at the state pen and various last-ditch efforts to prevent it. A sweltering somnambulism possessed the town. It was impossible to get a decent meal, or even snack, anywhere, burned flapjacks and vulcanized steaks being as appetizing as things got. It also quickly became evident—horribly evident—that no one in the city knew how to make coffee, as if there were some sort of stultified consensus, or even city ordinance, about never waking up. Bridge-rails were crowded with people watching the Scioto move sluggishly along. Saloons were full of silent drinkers, who drank very slowly till they collapsed, typically around eight in the evening, which appeared to be closing time here. Day and night, thousands of petitioners milled at the gates of the Capitol seeking admission to the hanging. Souvenir stands enjoyed a remunerative trade in Blinky poker decks and board games, watch-fobs and cigar cutters, Blinky lockets and charms, commemorative china and wallpaper, Blinky toys including stuffed Blinky dolls which each came suspended by the neck from its own little toy gallows, and a great favorite, Blinky thumb-books, whose pages, showing full-color artist’s renderings of the bloody murders in Ravenna, if flipped rapidly with your thumb appeared actually to be in motion. For a while, fascinated, Merle wandered the booths and pitches, setting up his camera and taking plate after plate of these Blinky Morgan keepsakes, displayed by the identical dozens, until somebody asked him why he wasn’t trying to get in to photograph the execution. “Why, you know,” as if coming to his senses, “I don’t know.” There were people at the Plain Dealer he could have wired, he supposed, cashed in a favor maybe. . . . Alarmed at what seemed a dangerously morbid lapse, he uncovered all the plates he’d taken and left them out in a vacant lot under the daylight, to return to blankness and innocence.
As if the light of Heaven had performed a similar service for his brain, Merle understood that he must never if he could avoid it set foot within the limits of this place again. “If the U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness.”
MERLE NEVER DID get to use Professor Vanderjuice’s letter of introduction to Michelson. By the time he got what he would have called back on track, the Æther-drift experiment was all written up in the science journals and Michelson was away teaching at Clark University, and too famous to be giving itinerant technicals the time of day.
Just like that, as if some period of youthful folly had expired, it seemed time to move on—Madge and Mia had both found rich beaux, the police had turned their attention to Anarchism in the streetcar workers’ union, the Blinkyites had left town, many of them bound for Lorain County, where it was rumored Blinky and his gang had buried a huge treasure, the Ætherists and otherwise light-obsessed had dispersed to resume whatever lapses of balance had brought them here—including Roswell Bounce, who had been subpœnaed to appear in Pittsburgh regarding some patent dispute. And it was exactly in this blessed lull in the daily discombobulation that Merle met Erlys Mills Snidell, and found himself unexpectedly miles up some unfamiliar road, as if in the dark he had encountered an unmapped fork. “The Æther might’ve still been an open question,” he told Dally, years later, “but there was never no doubt about that Erlys.”
“Then—”
“Why’d she leave? Say, my little eggplant, how would I know? come back one day, she’s just up and gone, was all. You on the bed blissfully deep in the first colic-free sleep of your young life—”
“Wait. She made me have the colic?”
“Didn’t say that. Did I say that? Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Your Ma stuck as long as she could, Dally, brave of her, too, considering the life we were trying to lead, deputies with court orders way before breakfast, patent lawyers, vigilantes with shotguns, and worst of all those town ladies, herds o’ locusts, no end to em, torchlight rallies waving signs on sticks, ‘Beast Without Shame,’ so forth—she could soldier on when it was just the men after me, but them sisters in indignation, why, she couldn’t bear much of that, it’s women beware women when that starts rolling down the pike. Oh but beg pardon, you’re all but about to be one yourself ain’t you, so sorry there—”
“Wait, wait, go back a little, tell me how that Zombini bird fits in to this again?”
“Oh, him. Wish I could say he’s this evil interloper come swooping in and made off with her, alienation of affections and all, but I figure you’re old enough to hear the truth, that’s o’ course if I knew what that was, seein’s I’d have to speak for your Ma as far as inner feelings and them, which’d be not only unfair to her but also impossible for me—”
“All right, Pa. Don’t go gettin tongue-tied, I can wait to ask her in person someday.”
“I mean—”
“It’s O.K. Really. Someday.”
Piece by piece, though, she got some of the story. Luca Zombini back then had been pursuing a modest career in stage magic, playing local variety circuits in the Midwest. One day in East Fullmoon, Iowa, his regular stage-assistant Roxana ran off with a tenor sax player from the pit band at the local opera house, with little hope on the horizon of this remote town for any replacement. Then, just to make the day complete, one of Luca’s magnetic stage gadgets broke down. At his wit’s end, ready for anything like a piece of luck, he spotted Merle’s wagon parked out at the edge of town. Erlys looked up from darning a sock to see him perched on the doorsill, holding his hat. “I don’t suppose you’d have a spare electrical coil around?”
Merle had been down to the opera house and recognized him. “Look around, take what you need—what’s it for?”
“Hong Kong Mystery Effect. Show you the work if you like.”
“Rather be puzzled. Just having lunch if you’d care to sit.”
“Smells like minestrone.”
“Think that’s what they called it back in Cleveland, when they were showing me how to do it. Fry everything first, basically.”
“Murray Hill? Eh, I got cousins there.”
Both men were aware of a silence audibly fallen over Erlys, though each interpreted it in his own way. It never occurred to Merle that Zombini the Mysterious might be the cause, especially as he showed none of those classic Italian warning signs, ringlets, dark flashing eyes, oily courtesies—none of that, just an average-looking gent who as far as anybody could tell hadn’t even noticed Erlys till the matter of the magician’s-assistant vacancy came up, when he abruptly turned to her, simmering li
ke a pot of soup down the end of the table—“Excuse me, signora, what may seem a peculiar question, but . . . have you ever felt that you wished to suddenly disappear, even from a room full of people, just”—tossing his hands to suggest smoke vanishing—“gone?”
“Me? All the time, why?”
“Could you stand perfectly still while somebody throws knives at you?”
“Been known to hold still for worse’n that,” flicking a glance, then, in Merle’s direction. At which point Dally woke up, as if she’d been keeping track and chosen just that moment.
“I’ll see to her.” Merle brushing past, voice in a mumble, painfully aware of the beauty that had swept upon the young woman, as it did now and then, always unexpected, like a galvanic shadow, her face, that is, while her long body did not brighten but took on a vibrant dark density, a dimension you had to observe directly, with care, when that might’ve been the last thing you were ready just then to do. He didn’t know what was happening. He did know.
Roxana, possibly at the urging of the sax player, had taken her costume along with her, so for that night’s performance Erlys had to put one together, borrowing tights from one of the dancers and a short sequined dress from one of the acrobats. When she appeared in the stage-light, Merle felt himself hollow out from neck to groin with desire and desperation. It might have been only the lip-rouge, but he thought he saw a smile, almost cruel, he hadn’t much noticed before, self-sufficient to be sure, but determined enough now, no denying it, on a separate fate. From her eyes, the lids and lashes darkened elaborately with chimney soot and petrolatum, he could read nothing. Next day, without mystical words or special equipment, she and the magician had vanished, and Dally stayed behind with a note pinned to her blanket, I’ll be back for her when I can. No “Good luck” or “Love always, Erlys,” nothing like that.
Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could, waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan—with Erlys gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike anyway—and that long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just staying within the contours of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise.
AFTER THE CLOSING of the Columbian Fair, once out of Chicago and into the land again, Dally and Merle began to catch sight of refugees from the “national” exhibits which had lined the Midway Plaisance, all these non-midwestern varieties of human, some teamed up together, some going it alone. Merle would run for a camera trying to grab a snap, but by the time he set up they were usually gone. Through the falling snow, Dally thought she saw dog teams and Eskimos in silent recessional ever northward. She invited Merle’s attention to Pygmies looking out at them from among the trunks of birch forests. Down in the riverfront saloons of the towns, South Sea Island tattoo artists whose faces seemed to her obscurely familiar inscribed the biceps of riverboat men with hieratic images that someday when least expected would be good for small but crucial acts of magic. Dally assumed these wanderers had all been banished for no good reason from the White City, too, making her and her Pa just some different kind of Eskimo, was all, and the country they moved through never about to be better than a place of exile. Rolling into city after city, St. Louis, Wichita, Denver, she caught herself each time hoping that somewhere in it, some neighborhood down the end of some electric line, it’d be there waiting for her, the real White City again, lit up all spectral and cool at night and shimmering by day in the bright humidity of its webwork of canals, the electric launches moving silently through the waterways with their parasoled ladies and straw-hatted men and little kids with Cracker Jack pieces stuck in their hair.
As years piled on, it came to seem more like the memory of some previous life, deformed, disguised, stretches of it missing, this capital of dream she had once lived in, maybe was even numbered among the rightful nobility of. At first she begged Merle, tearfully as she knew how, to please bring them back, please, and he never quite found the way to tell her that the fairground was most of it surely burned down by now, pulled to pieces, taken away to salvage yards, sold off, crumbled away, staff and scantlings at the mercy of the elements, of the man-made bad times that had come upon Chicago and the nation. After a while her tears only reflected light but did not flow, and she dropped into silences, and then these, too, gradually lost their resentful edges.
Planted rows went turning past like giant spokes one by one as they ranged the roads. The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.
Merle had put in some time at this thankless job, argued with botanical jobbers out on warehouse docks, learned a couple of the indications but never found in himself the gift the true wildcrafters had, the unerring feet, the sure nose.
“There. Smell that?”
A scent at the edge of her memory, ghostly as if a presence from a former life had just passed through . . . Erlys. “Lily of the valley. Sort of.”
“It’s ‘seng. Fetches top dollar, so we’re gonna eat for a while. Look. Little red berries there?”
“Why are we whispering?” Peering up from under her flowered bonnet-brim.
“Chinese believe the root is a small person, who can hear you coming and so forth.”
“We’re Chinese?”
He shrugged as if he wasn’t sure. “Don’t mean it ain’t the truth.”
“And cash crop here or whatever, we still aren’t going to use the money to try and find Mama, are we?”
Should’ve seen that coming. “No.”
“When then?”
“You’ll get your turn, Trooper. Sooner than you think.”
“Promise?”
“Ain’t mine to promise. Just how it works.”
“Well, don’t sound so happy about it.”
They pushed out into morning fields that went rolling all the way to every horizon, the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring, and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish, and the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or Kansas City—the farmhouses and towns rising up along the journey like islands, with girls in every one, Merle couldn’t help but notice, the extravagantly kept promises of island girls, found riding the electric trolley-lines that linked each cozy city to each, or serenely dealing cards in the riverside saloons, slinging hash in cafeterias you walked downstairs into out of the redbrick streets, gazing through doorscreens in Cedar Rapids, girls at fences in front of long fields in yellow light, Lizas and Chastinas, girls of the plains and of profusely-flowered seasons that may never quite have been, cooking for threshers far into and sometimes all through the nights of harvest, w
atching the streetcars come and go, dreaming of cavalry boys ridden off down the pikes, sipping the local brain tonic, tending steaming washtubs full of corn ears at the street corners with radiant eyes ever on the move, out in the yard in Ottumwa beating a rug, waiting in the mosquito-thick evenings of downstate Illinois, waiting by the fencepost where the bluebirds were nesting for a footloose brother to come back home after all, looking out a window in Albert Lea as the trains went choiring by.
In the towns, iron-rimmed carriage wheels rang loud on the paving stones, and Dally one day would recall how the horses had turned their heads to wink at her. Brown creepers strolled whistling up and down the tree trunks in the parks. Underneath bridges, struts rang when the riverboats whistled. Sometimes they stayed for a while, sometimes they were on their way again before the sun had moved a minute of arc, having shone down on soot-black trolley tracks and bridge rails, clockfaces high on the fronts of buildings, everything they needed to know—though after a while she didn’t mind even the big towns, was even ready to forgive them for not being Chicago, enjoyed the downtown stores smelling like yard goods and carbolic soap, black linoleum parquetry, went down sandstone steps to have her hair cut in fragrant barbershops in the basements of hotels, brightly lit against the stormy days, smelling of every grade of cigar, witch hazel brewed and distilled in the back rooms, leather-cushioned chairs with elaborate old footrests wrought in the rosebuds-and-bluebirds intertwining of the century about to pass, as if poised among the thorned helixes of vines. . . . Next thing you knew, the haircut was done, a whisk-broom all over her back, and clouds of scented powder in the air. A palm out for a tip.
Against the Day Page 9