I felt my pulse speed up. I felt the sweat bead up on my brow and trickle its salt in my eye. Once the thought had entered my head—the thought of putting her in her coat and taking her away—I felt sick with it. I felt feverish.
I moved forward without thought. I didn’t think how I’d get out of the house with her, or down the hill, or out of town. I didn’t think at all.
I was Doxie’s father. The only father who’d ever loved her.
I’d never been so afraid in my life. But I wasn’t afraid of getting killed. I’d heard tell of men shot for taking babies from cribs, and though that worried me more than a little, it wasn’t what frightened me most. I was afraid I didn’t know right from wrong anymore. I heard Wakefield’s voice in my head. As much as I hated him, his words rang true. What could I give a rich little girl but my poverty?
That was the good angel on my right shoulder talking. When the bad angel over on the left spoke up, he got all my attention. Doxie belonged with me, not in this necropolis. I’d give Doxie such a life. The rich girl she might be would envy the poor girl I’d make her into. We’d have an act, for one thing. I’d finally become a master ventriloquist, my lips as still as a corpse as my dummy did all the talking. I’d follow Mrs. Margaret’s recipe for woodenness, draping Doxie’s face with cheesecloth and patting it with powder. I’d draw lines around her eyes to make her lids look hinged. I’d plop a ratty wig on her head. And she’d sit on my knee and pretend to be speaking with my voice, a lively contraption of strings and joints.
I set Doxie on a stool and put on her coat. I then wrapped her in a quilt and held her close. I put my lips to her ears as I walked down the stairs. “Sh-sh-sh-sh,” I said, over and over, to keep her hushed. She played with Oscar’s fingers at my throat. I even took off my shoes and stuck one in each of my back pockets, so I could slip across the floor in stocking feet.
Doxie conspired with me nicely. “Sh-sh-sh-sh,” she said to me too, into my ear.
They’d drawn closed the curtain at the doorway to the parlor and I could hear the faint ruckus of the séance resuming—it seemed the table might be trembling. I heard Phoebe, with her awful accent, calling for Cecily. Seeeee-seeeee-leeeee.
And I stepped out the door and right to the coach that had brought us up the hill. The driver sat inside drinking something brown from a bottle. “Get me out of here!” I barked, and he jumped up and corked his bottle. “To the city!” He took his place at the reins, and we jolted and stuttered forward.
I sat perched on the edge of the bench, careful not to bust up Oscar any more than he’d already been. The ride seemed endless, even just to get to the end of the winding road of the orchard. The gate to the estate had fallen off its hinges in the terrible winter, and it now lay in the bushes next to the wall, warping from its own weight. We rode on through, and picked up speed on the road down the hill. Doxie fell fascinated with the tassels of the curtain at the coach window, and she watched them swing, and she played with the fringe.
“Where can we hide until we can sneak out of town?” I asked her. They would notice her gone soon enough, if they hadn’t already—Pearl and the servants could have easily heard the horse’s hooves and the creak of the coach as we’d pulled away. For all I knew, the police were not far off. Maybe there was even a new ballad being sung in some saloon—“Wakefield’s Latest Heartbreak.” Already I could be the worst there ever was, as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
I would direct the driver to take me to August’s. There I could take a loan from the cash register and pay the driver to keep mum about where he dropped me off. And Doxie and I would hide in the basement.
But then I began to worry, and when I began to worry, I became all the more befuddled. August’s might be the first place they looked, and I hated the idea of dragging him down with me. The Fair, I thought. We’d find a place at the Fair. We could build ourselves a yurt in a corner of an exhibit hall, and burn the broken columns of plaster and wood for heat. We’d have a crèche, with Doxie nestled in the straw of a fruit crate. It would do, until things quieted, and we’d make our way out to the Egan farm, to the places the maps didn’t chart.
No. It was too cold to sleep outside. My mind stumbled over all kinds of rotten ideas. Seek the mercy of the evil nuns of St. Joseph’s? Check into the smallpox hotel, where no one would come near?
The coach slowed before we even passed Wakefield’s shuttered resort by the lake. It stopped. I was about to lean out and yell, when the door was pulled open, Doxie was snatched from my lap, and I was dragged to the ground and punched at the back of the neck. I couldn’t tell if I was falling, or if I’d already hit the dirt. Everything up was down, and down was up, and all went black to the sound of Doxie crying.
44.
I WOKE IN A JAIL CELL ALONE, flat on my back on a moth-bitten blanket on the floor. Whoever had knocked me down had worked me over. There was pain in my ribs and in my neck, and both my eyes were swollen half-shut. I could feel the promise of a limp, like an itch, working up the leg I’d broken before.
“Stand up,” a deputy yelped. “There’s a lady present.”
My skeleton felt to be without gristle, all bone against bone as I tried to move my joints.
“I said, stand up,” he said, and he banged on the bars with a club. “You’re not allowed any visitors, but I never could listen to a lady weep without getting my heart in a knot. So you show the poor thing some kindness. You tell her you’re no good and that she needs to find a man on the right side of the law.”
I put a finger and a thumb to my one eye to peel it open. On the other side of the bars, standing in the corridor was the deputy, a homely young wretch with arms as thin as a broomstick, and next to him was a woman in an old-fashioned dress of wine-colored velvet. The dress was fat and frilly, the skirt of it looped and draped. There was fringe and tassel and buttons of gold. The deputy flirted, a sneer on his face, as he pushed a lock of the lady’s hair back behind her ear.
But this was no lady. I would know August Sweetbriar anywhere, even with my blinkers knocked and bruised.
“Is it today?” I said, my voice hoarse and sore in my throat. “Or tomorrow?” The cell was all brick, with no window.
“Is what today or tomorrow?” August said.
“Now,” I said. “Is now today or tomorrow?” I sat up on the blanket and pressed my fingers at the pain in my temples.
“It’s the morning after yesterday,” August said. He didn’t disguise his voice much—he gave his words a little more breath and music than he might have otherwise, and a proper-sounding lilt and lift. Moooorning . . . yistir-dee . . . He clutched his handkerchief at his chest and feigned a tearful sigh that shook his breath. “Pearl was nervous all evening long, wondering where you’d gone off to,” he said. “She figured you were snooping through all the rooms. We heard the coach’s wheels during the séance, and she flapped around like a hen. She ran upstairs, saw Doxie was gone. She went out for Wakefield, and he came into the house in a rage. He tossed the table over. He threw us all out. We had to walk down to the streetcar, in the wretched chill, to take it back to town.”
“How’s Doxie?” I said. I brought myself to my feet, pressing my hands against the wall, climbing my way up, and feeling every bone snap into place with a stab.
“We didn’t see her again,” August said.
I took a few steps toward the bars of my cage, but the deputy banged the metal again. “You stay where you are,” he said. “And keep your hands back. They make guns so tiny they can fit in a lady’s ring. A blade can be passed in a handshake. And then you use that blade to cut the vein in my wrist when I’m doing something kind for you, like passing you a cup of water. No, sir,” he said, “I know all your cowardly ways.”
At that, August burst into phony sobs he buried in his hankie, and the deputy tut-tutted, patting his shoulder. Though the deputy was at least a head shorter than August, A
ugust fell into the deputy’s arms. The deputy’s sneer returned, and I could tell he was pleased to fondle my lady friend in front of my eyes. But for all the deputy’s molestation—petting August’s side, close to his padded breast, and stroking his back down low and lower and lower still, until he was rubbing August’s ass beneath the bustle—he didn’t catch on to August’s disguise. The deputy even nuzzled August’s wig and didn’t smell the dead yak in it.
The deputy also didn’t notice August fiddling with the keys in the iron ring hooked to his belt loop. As August sobbed into the deputy’s collar, he worked his arm around the deputy’s back, and spidered his fingers over all six keys, testing their lengths and points, determining the one most likely to open the cell door. When his fingers landed on the one he wanted, he sobbed louder, right into the deputy’s ear so he wouldn’t hear the jinglejangle as he slipped the key off the ring and into his palm.
I was curious as to what would happen next—the whole exploit seemed like something right out of the dime novels August sold in the shop—some prairie tale of Deadwood Dick. Omaha Sweetbriar; or, The Damsel’s Got a Trick Up Her Skirts.
August wrapped the key in his hankie as he pulled himself from the deputy’s arms.
“Can’t I at least kiss Ferret good-bye?” he said. The deputy worked his jaw around, thinking. “You can hold my hands behind my back,” August said. “I’ll just lean in. We’ll only touch lips.”
“Only if you give me a little kiss too,” the deputy said, with a pout. “I’ve been awfully sweet to you, you know.”
“And you have,” August said, and he puckered up. The deputy leaped for it, grabbing the back of August’s head with one hand and pressing his lips hard against his. I heard their teeth knock together. It looked as if the deputy had never kissed a woman properly in all his life.
When the deputy finished with a smack, August leaned back and held his hand to his own jaw, wiggling it around on its hinges, working the feeling back in. And while the deputy seemed to be waiting for some kind of compliment, August returned to his sobbing, lowering his face into his hankie. It was then that August fed himself the key.
“I’ll show you how it’s done, pip-squeak,” I told the deputy, and I leaned forward for my kiss. August leaned in too. He gave me a wink, and I winked back. We touched lips. I opened my mouth, and he opened his, and I waited for the key. But the key didn’t come. He kissed tenderly, and I felt a whimper tremble his lips, and felt the breath of a sigh. I would let my friend have his kiss. And I kissed back. He just kept kissing me, his keyless tongue sliding around with mine. Finally, I tapped my tongue against his teeth to let him know I was impatient. Still no key. I went in for it myself, my tongue darting around his, working the key away from where it was tucked into the inside of his cheek. I’d only just licked it into my own mouth when the deputy pulled August away with a jerk.
“Enough violation,” the deputy said. He took August by the arm and escorted him down the short hall and around the corner, to where the office was. I sat on the floor, the key in my hand, wondering what good it was. I contemplated the particulars of my escape as the deputy continued to flirt at his desk. I heard some clucking and cooing, and the clinking of glasses. I heard him do a ventriloquism act for August, telling jokes with Oscar on his knee. I heard August leave. Ten minutes later came a crashing of glass and the bang of a chair falling over.
I didn’t know the deputy’s name. “Kid,” I called out. No answer. “Hey, kid.”
I reached my hand around to the lock and stuck the key in the keyhole, half expecting August to have lifted the wrong one from the ring. At first I could feel it not fitting, tumbling inside like the key in the lock to the room with the swans. But fit it did, and out I was. One of the benefits of being an outlaw is you have outlaws for friends—friends who know their way around a jailer’s collection of bones.
I crept around the corner into the office. The deputy was passed out on the floor, a glass and a bottle of whiskey broken at his side. August had put all his talents to work for me—he’d flashed the drag, fingered the key, and played chemist, dropping some sleeping potion in the boy’s liquor. Poor Oscar hung from a hook by the door. I took him into my arms and stepped right out of my prison, into the street. I walked deeper into the city, and I moved among the men and women going about their guiltless lives.
45.
AUGUST SAT AT HIS VANITY, his wig on the floor. He still wore his dress, but he’d unbuttoned the back and the dress hung on him limply.
“Oh, Ferret,” he said when I walked in. “Wasn’t I wonderful?”
“Why didn’t you give him the knockout drug first?” I said. I paced as I undressed, dropping my ripped jacket and shirt to the floor, and kicking off my shoes. On the walk back, I’d worked myself into a panic, worrying over all the ways everything could’ve gone wrong. “It would’ve been easier. You could’ve knocked him out, and there’d have been no risk of getting the wrong key.”
August sighed. “You’re such a stickler for plot,” he said. “He wouldn’t trust me at first. I’d brought along a little breakfast of doughnuts and tea, but he refused to let me see you. So I offered him the doughnuts and tea, and then some whiskey, but he wouldn’t touch any of it. So I cried and cried, and I wouldn’t stop until he let me see you. And when I let him kiss me in front of you, he sensed I was a bit of a cotton top. So he agreed to some whiskey before I left.” He uncorked a bottle and dampened his hankie with some sharp-smelling unguent. He came to me to dab the medicine at the undersides of my eyes.
“Cotton top?” I said.
“Respectable in appearance but cheap beneath it all,” he said. “Like stockings of cotton with silk at the feet.”
“He don’t know the half of it,” I said. August helped me pack my carpetbag, folding some clothes, knotting up some socks, tucking in a bottle of booze and a slim tin of Turkish cigarettes. I stuck in the morning’s newspaper—the front page ran an artist’s sketch of me sneaking from the Wakefield house with Doxie in my arms. We’d made the paper, me and my girl, and it wasn’t a bad likeness of either one of us. With a gasp, I remembered the little tin book I’d taken from Cecily’s room, and I stuck my hand in my pocket. I felt such relief when I felt the book still there.
I suspected I’d make the evening paper too, and probably the next day’s edition, and the day’s after that, for a week or so, until somebody cut somebody’s throat or something equally awful happened. The Omaha Bee loved to pile on the agony, to turn a common man’s mistakes into vaudeville. The tattered little newsboys would get a nice boost in street sales when word of my escape hit the papers.
Rosie brought over his beaver fur coat, and it was so big that Oscar and I could easily disappear into it. The front-page illustration had made much of the wild curls of my hair, so I concealed them by shoving them up into Rosie’s giant derby hat. I pulled the brim down past the tops of my ears.
I headed off to the Old Sisters Egan again, this time on foot, and this time with purpose.
• • •
I FOLLOWED THE PAVED STREET until it became a dirt road, and then followed the dirt road until it stopped in an empty lot. I crossed the lot into the next lot over, and into the next, until I was crossing the fields of the countryside, the city falling small behind me, the filthy clouds above the smelting works growing fainter with my every glance back. The frozen snow cracked like burnt sugar under my shoes. After dark, I lucked on an abandoned farmhouse with a stone hearth, but I didn’t sleep a wink—every snap of the fire sounded like twigs and ice under the sneaky steps of wolves prowling.
I left the house before morning, and once the sun came up we finally got an inch of spring. I took off Rosie’s fur coat and carried it over my arm until it got too heavy, and then I dragged it by its collar. I left the derby hat in a ditch.
When I reached the Platte River, I discovered I’d walked too far and was nowhere near the bridge. I
did what I could to lessen my load, to make myself featherlight to cross the ice. I left the fur coat on the riverbank, and my carpetbag. I kept only the clothes on my back, and my shoes. And Oscar.
I closed my eyes as I crossed, to better sense the threat beneath my steps. It seemed I could feel the thump of fish bumping their heads as they swam. I could feel water rushing, the unlikely warmth of it coming up through the soles of my shoes. I thought of all the hot springs that couldn’t save Cecily. I tried to give myself faith in magic. I tried to make myself vanish. I pictured myself up off the ground, in the hot-air balloon, no heavier than a cloud of ether. I kept my eyes closed, and every time I opened them, I seemed even farther from the shore.
Finally, I survived. I reached the other side, blew the ground a kiss, and soldiered on. I stayed terrified of the river and its thin ice, as I walked and walked, as if it might curl around and strike again, like a serpent. Or maybe it was more like a hunter in the woods, dodged once but still on your trail. I had no compass, no pioneer’s instinct. To be only streetwise was to be unwise in everything that mattered.
The hunger in my gut reminded me I hadn’t eaten anything since that coconut cake at Phoebe’s, and that had been a few days before. August had packed me a little tin of eats when I’d left, but I hadn’t looked inside. He’d said something about a pickled egg and some hog jerky. I entertained myself by inventing the feast I’d left behind. In my daydreaming, I sat down to a turkey leg and a mutton chop. Gingerbread. Johnnycake. Boiled fish. Lima beans. I sang it all in a hearty song and marched to the beat of it.
It was still daylight when I saw the little red spot of Hester and Emmaline’s barn. But the sun went down and I still wasn’t there. The terrible cold returned, needling up my pant legs and down my sleeves.
The Swan Gondola Page 39