by H. P. Wood
She takes a few more steps down Surf Avenue when a man appears out of the shadows and blocks her path. “Evenin’, pretty lady,” he sneers.
Kitty’s breath catches in her throat. The young man is not wearing a shirt—startling to a proper girl who never saw her own brother undressed, much less a stranger. But he has nothing but suspenders on his bare, sinewy shoulders. Instead of a shirt, the man’s entire upper body is decorated with a massive, intricate tattoo of a castle. A long stone wall crosses his abdomen, and turrets and flags reach up to his neck. Below the castle wall, the beginnings of a moat peek out above his belt buckle. He smirks. “I got an alligator in my moat. You wanna see?”
“What? No, I…I’m sorry. I’m very late…” She tries to leave, but he grabs her wrist, hard, and yanks her close. The tallest tower of the castle is tattooed up his neck and across the entire left side of his face, disappearing into the bowler hat on top of his head. His bright-green eye peers out one of the castle windows. Stones from the castle wall are tattooed across his forehead and nose. They fly across his face and fall into a pile of debris running along his jawbone. The tattoo has captured the precise moment when the barbarians arrived to lay waste to the kingdom.
Kitty tries to wrench herself away. “I insist you release me!”
“Aha!” His grip on her wrist gets tighter. “You sound English. You English?”
“My friends are waiting for me, and they’ll be terribly upset if—”
“Fancy English, sounds like. You a princess or something?”
Kitty jerks her arm again but can’t get free. She looks around—there is no one else on the street. The man pulls her so close she can smell his whiskey breath.
“Whaddya say, princess? You wanna have some fun?”
“My friends will be along any moment!”
He laughs and puts his other arm around Kitty’s waist, pulling her into an awkward waltz. “You know what? I don’t think you’ve got any friends, do you? Don’t lie to Crumbly Pete, now. That’s what my friends call me. Crumbly Pete. You wanna be Crumbly Pete’s friend?”
“Stop it right now! You let me go this instant!”
“Come on, now, princess…” He pulls her closer, and Kitty spits directly into one of his gleaming green eyes. Caught by surprise, Pete lets go, and Kitty takes off down Surf Avenue as fast as she can.
Crumbly Pete’s laughter echoes. “Princess! Was it something I said?”
Chapter 3
Sitting with Shakespeare
In the morning, Zeph assumes his usual position at Magruder’s entrance, hoping to greet as few customers as possible. He is about halfway through his new book and dreads the thought of being interrupted. Du Bois’s words rip through Zeph’s mind like bolts of lightning.
America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
Zeph underlines this sentence. Twice.
But it’s Saturday, the busiest day of Coney Island’s week. The chance of a full day of undisturbed reading is slim. And sure enough, it isn’t long before Zeph hears a youthful quartet loitering on the other side of Magruder’s oak door.
First, a young man’s snide voice: “An ’abinet? Would someone please explain to me what an ’abinet is? And why I should want to see one?”
Zeph whispers a quiet prayer. “Don’t come in, don’t come in, go away, go away, go away…”
Then an irritated female voice speaks up. “It clearly says ‘Cabinet,’ Mr. Tilden. The sign’s just a bit faded.”
“Theophilus P. Magruder’s Curiosity Cabinet and Theatron Prodigium.” The first voice, Tilden, spits the words out like they taste bad. “And about this other sign, over here? ‘The Race to Death. The Racers Are Small, but the Mayhem Enormous. No Dogs Allowed.’ Sounds like a bunch of hooey. Tell me, Miss Celik, how’d you hear about this ridiculous place anyway?”
The irritated lady answers, “I read, Mr. Tilden. You might try it sometime.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“Now, now,” says another male voice, more assured than his friend and painfully genteel. “We promised Miss Celik we’d visit this…museum, cabinet, whatnot, and we shall.” The door cracks open.
Zeph groans. He unties the knot in his hair, and his locks descend over his face like a curtain. He stares down at his book and hopes it will be over soon.
Four people enter—two young ladies on the arms of two young men. From behind his hair, Zeph watches them peer into the museum like a pack of moles, their eyes adjusting to the gloom. They look to be about Zeph’s age, early twenties roughly. The one called Tilden is easy to spot. The only thing about Tilden more pompous than his voice is his everything else: the sideburns and waxed mustache, which would be more appropriate on a man three times his age; the short, baggy pants pinned at the knee, which would be more appropriate for foxhunting than beach-going; the stiff felt hat known as a homburg, which hasn’t been appropriate on anyone since 1880. Attached to his arm like a barnacle is a boringly pretty white girl, her nose in a permanent scrunch of distaste.
The second couple is more interesting. The young man is clearly their leader; he has that gilded air about him. The ease of his attire—slicked-back hair, clean-shaven white face, his shirt and trousers very simple but pointedly, breathtakingly expensive—only makes Tilden more clownish by comparison. This young man was born at the front of the line. He knows it, and he knows you know it too.
But his date. She can only be Miss Celik, with the irritated voice. Unlike Tilden’s pallid blond barnacle, she is raven-haired and olive-skinned. And not wispy and underfed like the other girl—she’s curvy and sturdy like a woman ought to be. She’s neatly dressed, but her long skirt has been mended more than once. And she apparently declined to wear a proper ladies’ hat, practically a revolutionary act. What, Zeph longs to know, is a fine gal like her doing with a trio of braying asses like these?
“Ten cents a head,” he mutters without looking up.
The leader of the pack reaches into his billfold, while Tilden the clown leans over the counter. “What’s that Race to Death you’re advertising?” he demands. “Whose death?”
“Special show, once a day only, 2:00 p.m.,” Zeph says. “For connoisseurs.”
Tilden whistles. “Connoisseurs… That’s quite a fancy word for a boy like you.”
Boy. There’s no chance Zeph is a minute younger than any of them. He looks up, his brown eyes gamely meeting Tilden’s blue ones. “The Race to Death is ten cents extra…but I doubt a boy like you would appreciate it.”
“Don’t you dare speak to me that way, you little—”
“All right, now, Gibson.” Tilden’s friend claps him on the back. “Don’t get all steamed up.”
“Spencer, you heard what he—”
“Yeah, and you heard what I said: don’t get all steamed up.” Spencer smiles beneficently at Zeph and tosses a dollar on the counter. “We’re busy at 2:00, so this’ll just be the regular admission. We’ll have to Race to Death some other time.”
Zeph looks at the dollar and sighs. Regretfully, he turns over a corner page of his book and pulls a cigar box from underneath the counter. He roots around in the box, removes some coins, and frowns. “Y’all don’t have no change?”
“Sorry,” the young prince says. “No change.”
“Trouble is I only got fifty cents here.” Zeph makes a vague “oh well” gesture. “I don’t know what to tell ya…”
Tilden growls. “Mr. Reynolds gave you a dollar. Ten cents apiece means you owe him sixty cents, not fifty. So get to it—we don’t have all day, boy.”
That word again. Zeph stares at Tilden with murder in his eyes.
Miss Celik glances from Zeph to Tilden and back again. To Zeph, she mouths, “Sorry.” And then, turning to her companion, she says, “Mr. Reynolds, it’s just ten cents.”
“You know what they say, Miss Celik: look
after the cents, and the dollars take care of themselves.”
Zeph sighs. He really, really did not want it to come to this. Here goes nothing. He pulls on his leather gloves, reaches up with both arms, and grabs the shelf ledge. The visitors boggle as he clambers up the shelves, revealing a perfectly normal torso with no legs underneath. His trousers, having nothing to cover, have been cut short and pinned underneath his backside. Zeph scales the shelves toward the ceiling.
Miss Celik watches, dazzled. Then she glances at her companions, who also stare at the half man scrambling up the wall. But they look less dazzled than revolted.
Zeph’s abbreviated body swings beneath him and then angles outward as he dives deep into one of the shelves. He gropes around, searching for something. Victoriously, he pulls out a dusty piggy bank. “There you are!” He holds up the bank with one arm, keeping himself balanced against the shelf with the other. Then his arm arches back, and suddenly piggy is airborne, sailing just inches past Tilden’s head and crashing into pieces on the floor.
“Good God!” Tilden cries. “What do you think you’re doing?”
From his perch, Zeph shrugs with his whole body. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding especially so. “Lost control of it, I guess.” He climbs back down and settles on his stool. “Anyhow, there’s your change. Go on and look after it.” He returns to his book.
Spencer glowers but gets down on one knee to retrieve his sixty cents from the coins rolling around on the floor. Miss Celik looks away, ashamed for him.
Tilden glares at Zeph. “That must be one funny book,” he says dangerously, “because you sure do look like you’re grinning under all that hair.”
Zeph holds up the thin volume. “W. E. B. Du Bois,” he says. “It’s about how the most talented tenth of my people are gonna rise up and kick y’all’s backsides. It’s hilarious.”
“Are you laughing at me, boy?”
“Good book,” Miss Celik says, swiftly placing herself between the young men. “Although it’s a little short on backside kicking.”
Zeph stares at her. “You telling me you read this?”
“Yes.” She smiles. “I’m telling you I read that. Not the chapter where his son dies, though. That was too sad for me.”
Spencer stands, pockets his change, and kicks the rest of the coins away with his boot. “This has been fascinating,” he says, “but we have a lunch reservation at the Palmetto at 1:00 and big plans this afternoon.” He pulls back the velvet curtain. “Who can tell what wonders await us inside Magruder’s Curiosity ’abinet?”
As they disappear into the museum, Zeph sighs. Keeping one finger on the page he’s reading, he flips to the table of contents.
Chapter Eleven. On the Passing of the First Born.
He looks at the space where Miss Celik just stood. “Well now…I’ll be damned.”
• • •
The white alligator glistens in the half-light, its mouth stretched wide, its razor teeth dripping with blood.
Or wait. Nazan Celik looks more closely. Red paint actually. Nice effect, though.
She and her companion, Spencer Reynolds; Spencer’s friend Gibson Tilden; and Gibson’s date, Chastity Poole, all stand in a large, rectangular room. The room has been divided and subdivided and subdivided again by giant, glass-fronted cabinets that scrape the ceiling. The floor plan of Magruder’s is like a hedge maze, forcing visitors to turn right, then left, then left again, then right, around and around in a dizzying spiral of mismatched furniture.
But although they vary greatly in style, Nazan notices that the cabinets all do have one feature in common: lines of iron handles bolted to the side of each cabinet, starting at about waist height and continuing to the top. She thinks of the young man up front, swinging his shortened body along the bookshelf. This is not just a room of cabinets, she realizes—it’s a room of ladders, all of it jerry-rigged for a caretaker with no legs.
Trinkets and gewgaws are all stuffed in together with no apparent logic. The jawbone of a saber-toothed tiger partly obscures a tiny oil painting of Buckingham Palace, which sits beside an anatomical model of the human heart. A large jar of glass eyes sits on top of a thick book titled Ought I Be Baptized? One large cabinet by the front houses several terrariums full of insects, some alive and some not, with tags like Orchid Mantis and Madagascar Spitting Cockroach. Over here are sets of shackles that once bound the witches of Salem, Massachusetts. Over there, a sign assures its reader that yes, it really is Abe Lincoln painted on that grain of rice.
A larger cabinet is home to the skeletons of conjoined twin girls, Daisy and Maisy. A smaller cabinet next to the twins houses a narwhal horn, a collection of thimbles, a pair of ladies’ boots made from peacock feathers, and a family of fruit bats carved out of wax. Beside the grasshoppers, a baby pig with two faces floats in a jar of murky, yellow liquid, right behind a human thighbone on a gold-leafed stand. Kangling, the sign says. Thigh Trumpet from Deepest Tibet.
Everything about the Cabinet is grimy and fusty and strange.
Nazan smiles. It’s everything she’d hoped it would be. It’s perfect.
But then Chastity cries, “Eww,” and Nazan sighs. The Cabinet is perfect. The company leaves much to be desired.
Nazan knows she shouldn’t be so petty about the company. In fact, she should consider herself lucky to even be here. Men like Spencer usually pass their time with the beautiful ladies, the ones with wasp-thin waists and peaches-and-cream complexions, with pale blue eyes and straight, blond tresses. Nazan is darker and curlier and curvier, and to make matters more challenging still, she has a mole hovering over her left eyebrow. Her mother insists on calling it a beauty mark, but as far as young men are concerned, it may as well be a tattooed stop sign.
So when the wealthy Spencer Reynolds showed a glimmer of interest, Nazan’s family practically turned cartwheels across the living room floor. “Son of a senator!” her mother had said breathlessly.
Nazan shook her head. “Son of a state senator. Very different from a senator senator.”
“You’re twenty-one years old! In the old country, you would have three children by now! It’s time to get your head out of those books and find a—”
“But isn’t that why we left Constantinople for a new place, so that your daughter could—”
“Meet a senator’s son! Exactly! What does it matter whether his father is state senator or senator senator? Perhaps we will not be so picky? Perhaps we—” Her mother stopped, suddenly alarmed. “You aren’t going out dressed like that, are you?”
In his defense, Spencer had been kind enough to include this trip to the museum on the day’s agenda. He certainly didn’t need to—Magruder’s was Nazan’s interest and hers alone. She thinks, Things could be worse. Then she hears Chastity’s shrill carping.
Not much worse.
• • •
Back at the museum entrance, Zeph hears and tries to enjoy the squeals of the terrified blond. Tries but fails. After all, moments ago, she’d squealed the same way at the sight of him.
Sure, sometimes it’s fun, torturing the pretty ones. The more privileged Magruder’s customers are—the stronger the hand that life has dealt them—the more appalling the dark relics of the Cabinet tend to be. It’s been Zeph’s experience that Normals have no idea how much most Unusuals like him enjoy the discomfort of spectators. Normals, even the well-meaning ones, think things like: How sad to be so strange; it must be terrible. How tragic they are, who can never be like us.
Not necessarily. Unease, disquiet, fear? Heebie-jeebies? This is the daily bread of the Unusual. This, Unusuals understand, is power. However fleeting, however meaningless, this is the only power Unusuals will ever know, and most of them drink it down in big, thirsty gulps.
But Zeph tends to choke on it. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t born an Unusual; he had been, in fact, utterly average until bad luck interven
ed. Maybe it’s just not in his nature to take pleasure in the displeasure of others. Or maybe, as his mama would have said, he just reads too damn much.
Because when he looks down at his book, there is W. E. B. Du Bois, speaking Zeph’s heart in black and white.
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas… Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?
Zeph frowns. Brother, Shakespeare never got a look at me.
• • •
Among the cabinets, a shaft of daylight cuts through the shadows—someone has pulled aside the velvet curtain and stepped inside. Nazan hears very light footsteps, like the approach of a timid cat. She turns a corner around one of the cabinets and sees that a small boy, nine or ten at the oldest, has entered the museum. Startled, he looks up at Nazan and freezes in place. The newsboy cap on his head makes him look very young, but the eyes peering out from underneath look very old indeed.
“Hello there,” Nazan says gently. She smiles, hoping not to startle him further.
The boy just stares.
“Are you visiting? Or do you work here?”
He still doesn’t move. Or blink.
Nazan’s frozen smile starts to feel a little awkward. “Can I…help you?”
Slowly, the boy approaches a cabinet. Inside is a small, stripy circus tent. But the boy pays no attention to the little big top. Instead, he opens a drawer underneath and pulls out a pickle jar. From his back pocket, he removes a dirty handkerchief, which he puts on top of the jar. He slides his hand underneath the cloth, unscrews the lid, and sticks his hand into the jar. Then he looks up at Nazan.
“Do you… Are you trying to show me something?” The boy doesn’t respond, so Nazan approaches, the way one might approach a stray animal. “What have you got there?” Inside the pickle jar are a dozen or so fleas, bouncing around inside the jar and biting the boy’s hand. He lets them. “Are these…pets?”