by Sean Wallace
One glance at her lover’s face and Lisette knew the day’s troubles had only begun. That smile, so slight, so distant; she must be worried . . . Could Lisette in some way help?
But as it transpired, Daisy wasn’t all that concerned about Matty’s influence on the Mote. “My approach is direct. I will say exactly how I believe we ought to act. They’ll hear and understand me clearly, no mistake. And I have a vote.” Only one vote, but one more than Matty possessed.
They arrived at the loading dock just as the Mbuza untied. Its giant shadow shrank, second by second. They watched it climb the softly straying winds. This ship’s outsized balloon was a mottled green.
“So, then, what is the matter?” Lisette would not let silence divide them. Or anything. Not any longer. Not distance – Lisette would retire, cease touring. They’d always be together. Not time. Not that man’s ghost. “Come, sit.” She led Daisy to the bench beside the mooring pole, deserted now the dirigible had gone.
“It’s the prospect of their marriage,” said Daisy, looking back at the warehouse. “If the scandal can’t be quashed. Neither of you seem to take it seriously.”
“But my dear, I grant you’ve lived in Everfair longer, more continuously, so you no doubt have a better idea of what is and is not acceptable. But surely their ages don’t signify so very much—”
“No! Not that! Only think – Fwendi will want to have a baby – several!”
Lisette didn’t want to understand. But she did. “Their races.”
“Oh, not that alone. For themselves it would be fine. In God’s eyes we are equal. But think of the consequences, the miscegenation. The children.”
Lisette could say nothing. She wanted to rise up, to walk away. This again. This hurt, this blow to the bruise on her heart, which she had thought healed. By the numbness radiating out of this moment she knew the pain, when it came, would be bad.
For a while she was unable even to move. Her face must have shown something of what she was realizing. Daisy took her limp hand.
“Why should any of this matter to us? It shouldn’t. We’re not—There’s no way we could have children with one another, chérie. We can’t cause those sorts of problems.”
“But George and Mrs Hunter, they might have.” George had never outgrown his schoolboy crush on the Negro missionary.
“Yes. You remember how upset I was, ready to disown him? Who’d wish such a burden on anyone, especially a poor innocent: to be part of neither world, not black, not white, an orphan even though both parents live.”
Le Gorille, Grandpère, had wished such a burden on Lisette’s mother. This miscegenation of which her love spoke so contemptuously? Of that, of those sorts of problems, Lisette herself had been born.
She glanced skyward. The Mbuza was yet visible, its gondola a swaying trinket attached to the balloon by silvery chains. She had memorized the schedules. It would return at midnight to depart for Kisangani again at dawn.
Daisy would have to be on board. So would Matty. So would Rima. And so would Fwendi and Lisette.
She would have to go. But not as Daisy’s lover. Not any longer.
Fortunately, she had other options. Rima was young and imperfect, but incapable of reaggravating this particular injury.
Gently, Lisette removed her hand from Daisy’s grasp. Slowly, she stood up. Daisy was asking questions she couldn’t answer. Without another word, Lisette returned to the hotel. Locked in her room, she drew down the barkcloth shades, suffusing the walls with a rosy twilight, and did her best to rest. When that proved impossible, she got up again and packed.
On the Lot and In the Air
Lisa L. Hannett
The crow’s talons gouged new gashes into Jupiter’s enamel as the orrery revolved a clockwork orbit beneath him. Gaslights incandesced from the base of the carnival booth, projecting the solar system’s rotations onto the canvas dome above the crow’s head. Light strobed into his eyes each time Jupiter completed a rotation, which did nothing to improve the crow’s temper. He lifted an articulated wing to shade his eyes; when he dropped it a moment later, he saw a gawking crowd congregating on the midway, its collective attention captivated by the golden gear held steady in his beak.
The midway’s makeshift stalls had sprouted like rank weeds, hell-bent on doing damage before they were uprooted. As evening slid into pungent night, the carnival had colonized the city’s neglected streets, transforming them with its garish gaslights and flea-bitten draperies. Tents had whorishly spread themselves along all surfaces, like the cheap skin show dames who plumped and corseted their wares in the fair’s liminal spaces.
Now the thoroughfare teemed with noxious odours, secreted by a horde of notorious bodies, all crammed into collapsible houses of ill repute. The buildings supporting the carnival’s crooked pavilions dripped constantly, as if a giant pig was spitted in the sky, its juices left to fall like fatty rain onto the scene below. By morning, discarded candy wrappers and flocks of shredded ticket stubs would papier-mâché every tent, signpost and tree, leaving archaeological layers of rubbish to congeal in the city’s slime.
This whole place reeks, thought the crow.
“Forget cheap arcades with rubber-limbed benders! Forget dime museums, string-shows and flea powders! What y’all need is to let off some STEAM! Step right up and have a FREE shot at this Foul Fowl! Sock him in the block and win a plethora of prizes!”
The crow snorted as the sprocketed showman jangled out from behind a threadbare curtain. His stovepipe hat belched steam as he clanked over to the bally platform, which was girded in dusty organza. The showman’s pliable tin shanks were clad in darted velour leggings; aluminium tails grafted onto his torso lent his outfit a certain panache, as far as tarnished suits go. Small beads of humidity or grease drip-dropped down his pockmarked cheeks and neck, watermarking the collar of his ruffled shirt with gray splashes. Leaning on a bamboo walking stick atop the dais, he surveyed his flock for a heartbeat. On the second beat, he raised a gloved hand to his breast and bowed like a courtly gentleman.
“Robin Marx, at your service,” he said to rapt listeners, “on behalf of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association. That’s right, folks – you’ve heard the rumours, and I’m here to prove ’em true – Robin Marx always gives the first shot for free! Win on that shot and the prize is yours! It’s no sin to be a winner, my friends; so come and collect an easy dinner.”
Revellers were drawn to Marx’s stall faster than you could say shine-on spit. He had greased more than a few palms to score such a choice locale; his bird-show was the first thing people would see when they came in, set up as he was on the right-hand side of the midway, only two paces away from the carnival’s main entrance. The showman smiled, and blessed the corruptible lot man as he surveyed his coffer-filling patch of turf.
It was proving to be the prime location for shooting marks.
Ladies and gents disembarked from a motley collection of dirigibles – steam-powered and boiler-driven, with leather balloons or finest silk, depending on the owner’s station – directly outside Sideshow Alley’s hastily erected plyboard fences. Two guineas were extracted from each heavy purse by way of an entrance fee; once inside, the gullible masses would sure as sugar leave a goodly portion of their remaining shillings to Robin Marx, proprietor and entrepreneur extraordinaire.
Pockets jingling, Marx wove through the crowd as if he were the lord mayor hisself; winking at the ugly girls and pinching the cute ones’ bottoms; shaking hands with the gents and slapping sharpies on the back as he progressed. In the midst of his campaigning, Marx made his way over to the crow’s slowly orbiting perch.
Night clung to the bird’s mangy figure; his wings hung sodden tissue-like by his sides. The crow felt like a feathered showcase for their racket, a curio cabinet with an aching beak and flea-bitten wings. A cabinet that would do anything for a day off. He sighed, making sure not to knock the gear out of his beak as he did, and listened to the sideshow dames singing to their Johnnies:
“—one fire burns out another’s burning, One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another’s languish . . .”
“Why don’t you ever sing like that, bird?” Marx bent over and turned the ornate key jutting out of the orrery’s bulbous base, and forced the slowing planets to rev into dazzling motion once more. The crow flapped his discontent. He growled down at the showman’s oxidized head, much to the crowd’s insipid delight. A mechanical band organ began to caterwaul across the thoroughfare, drowning out the crow’s curses.
“Ah,” said Marx, pausing before giving the key a final firm twist, “the only sound more haunting than the calliope is the music of money changing hands, my friend.” And with a pseudo-sincere wink to his partner, he turned on his heel and directed his attention to the burgeoning audience.
Robin Marx hoisted his walking stick, jabbed it skyward to reinforce his ballyhoo. “The winner of the day will get the key to the midway, straight from my two hands!” He flashed a large bank roll – A carny roll, thought the crow, or I’ll be buggered – and made sure to expose the cash reward for only the briefest second before squirrelling it away in his waistcoat pocket.
“Get the bird to release his bootlegged prize! Five pence a shot,” the showman cried.
The crow made sure to tilt his head as Marx worked the bally; the golden gear winked in the gaslight, catching more than one poor sap’s eye. As his roost lifted him skyward, he scanned the faces milling in the throng below him. Tried to guess which unfortunate sucker would reveal hisself – for it always was a bloke – to be Marx’s front-worker.
Could be him, the crow thought, as a stocky gentleman in a bowler hat disembarked from a locomotive rickshaw and stepped onto the midway. But he changed his bet as the skin-show dames peeled away from the shadows, snagging the bowler hat and its owner with their lurid insinuations. (“Me they shall feel, while I am able to stand: and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh,” sang the dames down the way.) He’ll be there for hours, the crow realized, or until his pockets (and other things) are sucked dry.
Jupiter convulsed on its brass frame, lurching further upward. The crow overcompensated for this movement and pitched forward at a precarious angle. His tomfoolery earned a round of raucous laughter from the carnival anemones swaying on the polluted floor beneath him. As he regained his balance, he saw a frogman wobble his way out of the ale den four stalls down, ribbetting up his dinner and the keg of piss-weak beer he’d consumed on a dare. Next door, a seedy looking weasel in patched plus fours emerged from the sky-grifter’s tent. He slid across the frogman’s spew, leaving a trail of putrid footsteps as he zigzagged his way up the noisy thoroughfare towards Robin Marx’s stall.
The weasel’s shifty eyes didn’t blink twice to see the team of spontaneously combusting phoenixes bouncing on rickety trampolines in the centre of the midway. His listless mouth didn’t so much as twitch towards a smile, even when a row of constructs whirled a metallic dervish for his pleasure and coin. No, the weasel had the expression of a man on a mission. He had a job that wanted doing, just as sure as Old Cranker’s sausages weren’t stuffed with bona fide cud-chewer.
That’s him all right, the crow thought. That’s the shill.
He watched the weasel’s stilted progress, humming a fiddley snippet one of the lads from Labrador had played while the caravan steam-rolled its way across barren plains the previous night. The crow tried to ignore the ornamental gear whose jagged spokes were doing their utmost to bash his beak into a less functional shape. Agonizing moments passed; the crow’s eyes began to water; his ears felt downright clogged with the midway’s hubbub. Finally, the weasel stepped up and placed his grimy paws on the footprints Marx had painted on the cobblestones, no more than spitting distance away from the crow’s orrery.
“Al-a-ga-zam, capper. Give the crowd a wave, and tell us your name,” said Marx in a voice as slick as the carnival’s boulevards.
“Trouper,” said the weasel.
“Well, Trouper, as I’ve just been telling these here folk, this bird’s a scoundrel of the nineteenth degree. That’s right: this rotten crow is flaunting stolen merchandise in his good-for-nothing beak. He pinched that gear right out of my pappy’s precious timekeeper—” he withdrew an unremarkable watch from his breast pocket and dangled it mid-air, just as he’d seen hypnotists do “—and now it’s ticked its last tock. Irreplaceable, that’s what this piece is. You’ve got to help me, Trouper! Help me get it back from that vicious crow so I can get my pappy’s ticker started again!”
The crow pretended to bow his head in shame at hearing Marx’s accusations. He swept his wings up before him in a gesture of mock supplication – his least favourite part of the act – and in so doing deftly swapped the golden gear for a confectioner’s imitation while Marx explained the rules of the game.
“The first shot’s always free, folks. Trouper, give it your best go. If you’re a real lucky son-of-a-gun, you’ll be the one to empty my purse after one sweet shot.” As if of its own volition, Marx’s hand stroked his waistcoat pocket while he spoke; and with each tender caress, the counterfeit bankroll bulged for all to see.
The crow gripped Jupiter more tightly as the weasel drew a jacked-up slingshot out of his leather satchel. Trouper braced hisself. He cranked the miniature catapult until its arm was fully cocked and in assault position. He took aim, his furry finger extending towards the trigger on the slingshot’s wooden handle, and fired. Across the midway, a group of girls squealed as their teetering seats topped the Ferris wheel’s luminous peak; the crowd at Marx’s stall gasped as the slingshot snapped into action with an ear-splitting crack of released carbon dioxide.
The crow mimed he’d been hit. He creaked his sooty wings around in comical circles, then swallowed the confectioner’s gear with a tinny gulp. The orrery shuddered to a halt. From beneath cracked eyelids, he watched his performance drain dollar signs away from the sea of greedy faces beneath him. He chuckled as he righted hisself on his now-stalled perch.
“Take that, you old shit,” he squawked at Marx, ruffling his oil-slick plumage. “Try and get your precious gear now.”
“You see, folks? You see what pain he gives me? Please, someone – anyone – step right up! Help me shut that miserable trap of his for good!” Right on cue, the bird started wheezing, hacking and choking, reeling the crowd in with faux suffering. He covered his beak with a wing – as all polite crows should do when they cough – and replaced the dissolved candy gear with its golden counterpart. Beams of golden light twinkled out of the crow’s mouth as the clean gear was reinstated, wedged between the upper and lower sections of his beak.
The crowd fell quiet at Marx’s feet. A chorus of accordions droned down the midway; coal-burners roared with delight as they powered bumper cars next door; whistles sporadically announced winners all across the carnival’s crooked landscape; (“—yet I cannot choose but laugh; To think it should leave crying—” wafted out of the skin-tents); but the group that had pressed in close to witness the crow’s imminent demise was shocked into distrustful silence by the weasel’s apparent failure, and the crow’s derring-do.
Venus chose that moment to add insult to the audience’s injury. The rose-coloured globe, two prongs away from the crow’s own Jupiter, flared on the orrery with a sudden brightness that blinded the already mute crowd, throwing the midway into unflattering relief. Yet when the yellow-blue after-images faded from the spectators’ eyes, their hands sprang together with gleeful applause. Tiny wind-up fireflies had escaped their Venusian cage: on Marx’s command, they buzzed into formation, their minute bodies spelling out Golden Guinea in a bewitching message of fortune.
“Never fear, my friends. What did I tell you? Everyone’s a winner at Robin Marx’s.” The showman beamed with feigned magnanimity from his position on the stall’s counter. He released the hidden lever that had unleashed the automatic fireflies, and blew contented smoke ring
s from his hat as he coddled the ersatz pocket watch. “Yes, the crow’s still a crook, but good Trouper here shook him up a good one, didn’t he?” Catcalls and wolf whistles punctuated general expressions of good humour in response.
“And as the Lady Venus wills, the gentleman shall receive,” Marx said. A newly struck gold coin instantly appeared in Marx’s hand, and disappeared just as quickly in Trouper’s. The weasel snatched the throwaway as if it were the first and last coin he’d ever see, then forced a retreat through the jostling herd now vying to knock the crow senseless.
Mark after mark placed feet on painted footprints, squared their shoulders and threw, but none seemed blessed with Trouper’s luck. Children began throwing tantrums instead of projectiles. One snivelling whelp kicked up such a stink that Marx gave both boy and mother a few ducats to go and see the Marx Brothers’ Rocket-Powered Penny Farthings. This one tactical freebie was all it took; a deluge of five pence pieces avalanched across the countertop, and into Marx’s purse.
More stones were launched the crow’s way amid showers of minor coins; the first of these missed, but the latter staunchly met their target. “Sorry, matie,” Marx said to one sour-breathed contestant, whose chest heaved against his sweat-soaked shirt after another pebble hurtled wide of its mark. “Your robust bear-huggers are just too strong for this game! You threw that one so quick, I reckon an African cheeter couldn’t have caught it.”
“C’mon, Marx. Give me a rehash. I’ll slip you a free strudel next time you come past my bakery,” said the blubbery man through his long mustachios.
Marx walked behind the counter, tilted his bulk forward on the orrery’s concealed pedals, and said, “Tell you what I’ll do for you, matie: if you win on the next go, I’ll give you back every penny you’ve gambled. Guaranteed. Peg this wretched bird with all your impressive might and you’ll have more dough than you could ever knead at that bakery of yours.”