The Amalgamation Polka

by Stephen Wright

  Inside, wide hallways stretched in every direction, leading to room after room stuffed to the rafters with bizarre exhibits. Liberty and his uncle spent three hours wandering the corridors, gazing in admiration and awe at two-headed chickens, three-legged ducks, monstrous human fetuses with webbed feet and clawed hands and twisted features, a bearded lady who replied sharply to all hecklers, a man who caught hot pennies in his mouth, strolling magicians who pulled crisp banknotes from the air, a dwarf with his head on backward and so much more that Liberty would still be recollecting the pageant days afterward.

  But what fascinated him most was the exhibit displaying a deformed black man in the apparently spontaneous process of turning white. His arms and legs had already made the transition into a sort of ashen pallor while the rest of his body, including his glum face, manifested an arresting mottled appearance, as if the black skin were being progressively invaded by patches of dim white flesh. The strident barker in a bowler hat, gesticulating with a malacca cane, explained that herein lay the solution to the troubled nation’s political problems, Liberty came back twice to stare at this poor soul who lay on a straw pallet, a rag covering his loins, barely stirring, not speaking, refusing to respond even to a direct question, the huge, somber eyes occasionally fixing on one of the more vociferous spectators and reducing him to silence, too. As he stared, along with the others, Liberty experienced a confusion of emotion he found unpleasant but fascinating and difficult to understand.

  For Potter one glance was sufficient. “Lead oxide,” he pronounced emphatically. “Seen a whole troupe of banjo players over in Buffalo once, all painted up like that.”

  Liberty was dubious. To him the skin appeared genuine, unretouched.

  “Lead oxide,” repeated Potter, nodding knowingly and leading his nephew into the next room, where he proceeded to “explain” all the mysteries housed there. It was, in fact, Potter’s delight to debunk every single exhibit in the museum, and with Liberty as captive audience his enthusiasm reached a level that began to draw a modest crowd. All, in his view, could be easily duplicated by the skillful application of theatrical costume and cosmetics. Nonfunctional extra limbs, tails or heads had been merely sewn on the animals. Several of his auditors began to challenge his opinions and then his physical person, and Potter grew perilously heated. A policeman was summoned, whereupon Potter and Liberty were escorted from the premises with a stern warning never to return.

  “People like to be fooled,” declared Potter out on the street. “It is the national pastime.”

  “I think they like to argue, too,” offered Liberty.

  “Ah, no doubt, my boy, no doubt of that at all.” He stood on the sidewalk looking quickly in every direction, then suddenly strode off through the crowd, Liberty struggling to keep up. As they went, Potter dispensed more advice for survival in the urban wilderness. “Let none see your money, ever. Miscreants abound. Saw a huckleberry in a checked suit flash his roll one night in Mother Polly’s doggery and before he got it back in his pocket a gang of b’hoys at the next table left him dirked and bleeding on the sawdust right there in the middle of the floor. Seen it happen other times, too, but that one there was some pumpkins.”

  “Can we go to Mother Polly’s?” asked Liberty.

  “Up for it already, are you, boy? Well, we shall see, we shall see. Let us first procure ourselves lodging for the night. Don’t want to have to sleep out here on the stones with the pigs.”

  The name of the hotel, situated on a back street off Broadway, was Ye Old Oaken Home, walls and foundation of rusty brick, floors of unvarnished pine and roof of crumbling slate. The rooms themselves were the size of a jail cell and stifling hot. An aged black attendant with white hair whom the sallow, sunken-cheeked woman at the desk addressed brusquely as Ned shuffled into the room and with much show of physical labor and heavy grunting attempted to open the window, then turned to face them. “Can’t do nothing about that,” he said, and departed. Later, in the middle of the night, sweating and cursing, Potter would get out of bed and break the window with the butt of his pistol, though even then no air would stir within these oppressive quarters.

  They ate supper at a loud, smoky saloon filled mostly with men and scantily dressed women who strolled from table to table, draping themselves over the men’s shoulders and whispering in their ears until the men laughed and then rose to accompany these fascinating women into small boxlike compartments lining the far wall. A woman sauntered over to their table but Potter told her to go away. “I know of a much better place for that than here,” he said meaningfully to Liberty, who nodded silently as if he knew more of what his uncle was talking about than he actually did. They drank some beer and ate two plates of oysters each, which Potter emphatically declared “the best in the city, the best on the whole eastern shore.”

  At the distant end of the room was a raised stage and, as Potter and Liberty were finishing their meal, the tattered red curtain parted to reveal a line of chorus girls arrayed in bits of clothing that concealed only their secret parts. To the ragged accompaniment of a five-piece band seated below and to the left of the stage, the girls kicked into a graceless but enthusiastic dance. The audience hooted and hollered and clapped and offered verbal suggestions for the next dance and the faster the girls bounced and the higher went their legs, the louder and rowdier the men became. Potter climbed onto his chair for a better view and so did Liberty. There was a wild feeling in the room of something tremendous either happening right now or about to happen momentarily. Then, abruptly, the music ceased, the dancing stopped and the curtain closed. The disappointed audience began shouting even louder, banging their mugs against the tables, but the curtain remained closed and gradually the noise in the saloon subsided to its normal shrieking roar.

  “What do you think?” asked Potter.

  “Do they come back with their clothes off?” asked Liberty, at which Potter erupted into laughter and clapped his nephew on the back. “I like you, Liberty,” he yelled, “I always have.”

  Then, with a tinny fanfare from the band, the curtain parted again, disclosing the stage now set with a row of empty wooden chairs in front of which posed a tall, lean man in a black frock coat, blue satin vest and black pantaloons. Tacked to the rear stage wall was an enormous banner announcing Professor Winslow McGurk’s Laughing Gas Exhibition. The tall man stepped to the edge of the stage and raised his hands for quiet.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he began. “I am Professor McGurk.” From scattered points of the room, great cheers at this information. “I have recently returned from a grand tour of Europe in which many of the more notable crowned heads sampled the demonstration which you are about to witness. What I will show you this evening are the entertaining effects of an exhilarating chemical compound upon the human brain. You will observe your fellows altered and positively transformed and transported beyond the mundane concerns of our dull daily life. This is a metamorphosis perfectly natural, perfectly safe.

  “Now, I am going to require some six or seven adventurous souls willing to risk passage through that delicate veil that obscures us from the numerous delights beyond and who also possess a mere twenty-five cents as the price of admission, Don’t be shy, step forward, everyone who desires to partake of the gas will be accommodated. This, I need not remind you, is the experience of a lifetime. You will not want to miss it.”

  There was a shuffling of chairs as several men rose and advanced toward the stage.

  “I want to do it,” Liberty said suddenly, standing and fumbling in his pocket for a coin.

  “If you go crazy,” declared Potter, obviously amused, “it ain’t my funeral.”

  “Never said it would be,” answered Liberty, heading for the stage.

  “Here’s a bold lad,” said Professor McGurk, reaching down to help him up. “Perhaps he’d like to go first.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Liberty.”

  “Liberty, eh. W
ell, I guarantee you are about to be liberated.” He handed the boy a rubber mask attached to a length of tubing whose other end was fitted into the stopper of a large glass jar. “Place the mask over your mouth and nose, and when I give the signal I want you to breathe in as deeply as you can. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” called a voice from the crowd.

  McGurk fiddled around with the jar, released a metal clamp on the tubing and, nodding his head, said, “Now.”

  Liberty inhaled. He felt something cool and sweet rush headlong into his lungs and even when he stopped inhaling, pulling the mask away from his face, the inward rushing kept on, filling not just his lungs but all the organs of his body. His arms and legs, seemingly emptied of all bone and tissue, were also filling with this most peculiar vapor. Then a most terrific rushing, as loud and rapid as a train, went shooting up his spine into his head and exploded against the roof of his skull, pretty flecks of colored light cascading warmly, gently over the rolling meadows of his brain—all these weird sensations occupying no more than a brief moment, but Liberty seemed to have found himself in a new place where “moments” were not only meaningless, they did not even exist. No longer securely lodged in his mind, he was swelling into a pleasant space vaguely bodylike in form that seemed to act as a strange prism upon the world, sharpening its colors, amplifying its sound.

  When the professor asked if he would care to imbibe a second time, Liberty reached into his pocket for another coin. His attention was shifting constantly and haphazardly from the sensations within to the phantasmagoria without, where events occurred in a perpetual past as if he were actually remembering what he was witnessing. It appeared that one of his fellows onstage was engaged in standing on his head while another scurried about on all fours barking like a dog, and at some point he seemed to join in with all for a rousing chorus of “Oh Susannah.” After some unknown passage of time, he discovered himself back at his table, where he quickly downed two beers and informed his uncle that he looked like a lobster.

  Then Liberty was moving through a fog where each flame of each gas lamp stood, haloed, separate, distinct, eyes of fire guiding one on to a catastrophe unforeseen. Faces loomed in and out of the mist like clouds with human features and all the speech around him sounded like Chinese, though he had never heard that language spoken before. It felt like an infinite rain was falling inside his head.

  Then they were seated in a red parlor surrounded by women in silken robes, a sweaty man with a moustache pounding away at a piano and singing in a harsh voice a tuneless version of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” each of the lamp flames swaying in rhythm and singing along in harmony. He realized he had never hated a particular song with such venom. Now his uncle’s face looked swollen and about to explode.

  Then he was in a room with papered walls and on the paper were pictures of birds in flight and he could hear them crying as they passed in ranked formation. Somehow his pants were off and he was seated on the edge of a bed, a girl kneeling between his knees and washing with a warm rag his awakened privates and suddenly it was like he was sneezing at the wrong end of his body.

  Then, the girl was gone, and miraculously, without benefit of balloon and basket, he was ascending upright through a sun-splashed sky; below, the isle of Manhattan, as vivid and unreal as a fairy tale dragon bathing its battered flanks in the cooling confluence of waters; every rooftop a shiny scale; every plume of chimney smoke a dark venting of noxious vapors from the creature’s infernal interior; and the hectic inhabitants of the city itself a plague of mites infesting the great slumbering body. From the dizzying heights he now occupied it was impossible to discern whether such a visitation was salutary or malign, distinctions growing more and more obscure with each elevating second. Imagine then the view from the Maker’s porch. Who to receive the favor of His munificent eye? Host? Parasite? Both? Through the lens of eternity was the difference of any consequence whatsoever? Did He care? The questions themselves seemed trivial. Perhaps these mundane discriminations were symptoms of a profound error, a fruitless sorting of beans with faulty equipment. Even at an angelic altitude, vexatious thoughts. New York.

  When news of Sumter arrived, Roxana promptly took to her room. For five days no one saw her but Thatcher, who carried the meal trays up the stairs and carried them back down again, largely untouched. “Fine,” he’d reply to all inquiries, “she’s just fine.” But his manner grew uncharacteristically abrupt, his temper short, and he seemed increasingly prone to periodic intervals of arrested motion when his body simply ceased to function, the eyes turned inward, and he’d stand fixed as a hunter in a painting straining to hear over the next ridge the awful baying of the hounds.

  Lying alone in his garret in the comfortless dead reaches of the night, anxieties about both parents dancing like devils about his bed, Liberty would listen to his mother crying, sometimes for hours, and pray to a dubious God he could neither fully believe in (behold the gifts He had showered upon this particular family) nor fully reject (matters could be worse, much worse) that whatever obstacles impeding the Fishes’ natural migration be speedily removed so that happiness might be more fairly pursued. Of course it would be Carolina who commenced the big ball, and though Liberty had never met his maternal grandfather or even glimpsed his likeness, he could not help but imagine a pop-eyed, sunken-cheeked Grandpa Asa yanking the lanyard on the inaugural cannon.

  In the morning after the first night of what would be years of perpetual night, a rueful Thatcher studied his son across the neglected breakfast table for some interminable minutes before remarking, “I suspect I know how you may be feeling on this dreaded occasion, but I want to emphasize to you that your mother and I do not wish to see you, despite the understandable pressure of your convictions, stealing off to a recruiting office. I know that halfwits on both sides have been claiming rather vociferously that if the worst did come, the worst would be over in a handful of weeks, so there will no doubt be a terrific rush among certain impetuous hotheads to enter the fray before it abruptly concludes. But I ask you, as your father, to please refrain from such rashness. You are too young.”

  “I’ll be seventeen in a few months.”

  “A foal who’s barely strayed from the barn. Please do not burden your mother with more cares than she already has. You realize how frightfully difficult this time is for her.”

  “As if I would ever require even a gentle reminder. Every tear is a drop of scalding oil upon my own skin, and…and…” He faltered for a moment and had to glance hurriedly away. Outside the half-open window the sun shone idiotically on, the proud maples waved their soft fresh leaves at him and somewhere a dog was barking with great urgency, as if the production of that one grating sound was absolutely vital to the execution of the day’s business. “The situation,” he resumed, “is no less intricate for me.”

  “I understand, and I sympathize thoroughly, but I must ask you now to promise me that you will not even attempt to enlist without the specific permission of your mother and myself.”

  Liberty’s gaze went skittering about the room in a vain attempt at avoiding his father’s steady, unblinking stare. “I’m sorry,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t believe I can, in all conscience, do as you ask.”

  Thatcher gave a brief nod, rose heavily from his chair and left the room.

  Liberty remained at the table, scrupulously warding off any thought whatsoever, and calmly finished his coffee. Then, wandering out into the hallway, he paused at the parlor door from behind which could be discerned a low murmuring and the rustle of quick rodent-like footsteps—Aunt Aroline pacing nervously to and fro and muttering to herself. From upstairs came only a profound silence. Once the sobbing commenced again, he didn’t know if he could restrain himself from fleeing the house. On the front porch he found Euclid planted in Roxana’s chair and rocking to a firm genteel beat, a country squire contemplating the compass of his property on out to the distant hills where the green mottling of s
pring was well under way. Without turning his head to see who had approached, Euclid simply opened his mouth and began to speak: “I saw the dawning of this day long, long ago. I been praying for it nightly since I was a little chap buried in darkness down in Mississip, brushing flies off Master John’s babies. Be patient, says the Lord, a mighty house requires a mighty foundation. But now the good work has finally begun, only there will be storms, Liberty, blows to shake the spirit of the sinners as well as the saints, angry thunders, trickster lightnings and infinite seas of infinite blood all boiling and heaving. I saw all these afflictions as a muffin back on the Twelve Trees.”

  “But they’re saying six weeks, Euclid, ninety days at the most.”

  “That’s man talking and man is nothing but air and noise and the sound he makes never did nobody any damn bit of good. Should hush up now and listen to the Lord. He’s the Grand Projector and His business ain’t necessarily our business. This here is going to be the knockdown of all knockdowns. You say ninety days. Try nine hundred. Try nine hundred and more.”

  “I’m thinking about signing up.”

  Euclid rocked rhythmically on. “Beautiful sky today,” he observed. “Hunter’s sky. That’s the Lord’s Traveling Exhibition up there, Liberty, and oftentimes those passing shows can lay such a powerful peace upon your soul you think you just might drop from the plumb pleasure of it.” He stopped rocking. “What does the voice say?”

  Liberty smiled. “Which one?”

  “Your true voice, baby doll, the one in your heart.”

  “Euclid,” confessed Liberty shyly, “I honestly do not know.”

  “Then you have a confusion upon you. Go out into the woods and set the issue before the rocks and the trees. The leaves will tell you what to do.”