THE ADVENTURES OF GENERAL
HENRICO DARGERO,
OF THE GEMINI AND THE BLACK BROTHERS,
AND OF THE GIRLS ARMY
THAT FOUGHT BESIDE THEM
IN THEIR BATTLE AGAINST THE
CONFEDERACY OF THE
CLAN OF THE AGIVECENNIANS
By Henry Joseph Darger
The author of this exciting story
He ran a finger beneath the string, but didn’t undo the knot yet. Too soon and you’re a loon.
He reached into the drawer, removed a votive candle and a box of matches. He’d pocketed both in the hospital chapel, where he attended Mass every day.
He lit the candle, then untied the string binding his manuscript. He’d begun it four years ago, working on it in every spare moment. He turned the pages, stopping to peruse a picture he’d drawn of an outsize, misshapen hand clutching someone’s throat. The someone was meant to be a girl but looked more like a turnip. Not one of his better efforts. He continued shuffling pages until he came to one filled with more blocky writing:
Never had General Dargero encountered such a foe as that evil General Forestor. “My heart fills with pity for those brave Girls” he thought. “How they will escape i cannot imagine. He has defiled this once beautiful countryside and when he lets the floods loose there will be no safe refuge for anyone, Least of all these brave Girls. Brave though they may be they are shockingly outnumbered.”
The page needed an illustration. From the drawer he withdrew a cardboard folder that contained dozens of pages from newspapers and magazines culled from trash bins. Pictures of children, all of them girls. Dotty Darling from the Woman’s Home Companion. Illustrations from The Little Girl’s Sewing Book. A holy card depicting Saint Joan in armor, leading an army of blond angels. The Kewpies.
He traced their faces with a calloused finger. Only here were they safe. Only here could he truly protect them.
As a boy at the asylum, he’d secretly traced illustrations he found in books. He copied countless pictures of Dorothy Gale and her friends, especially Princess Ozma, the girl who turned into a boy. There was a good illustrated book about the Battle of Gettysburg, too. He traced its fierce generals and brave soldiers and began to combine these drawings with those of the girls from Oz. The girls brandished firearms and sabers. The Scarecrow and Tik Tok took their places among the generals.
All of this came to an end when he was discovered one afternoon by the asylum’s school librarian.
“I wondered who’d been vandalizing all those books!” Knocking the volume from his hands, she slapped him so hard he fell from his chair. “Who’s going to pay for that, you imbecile?”
He attacked her as she snatched up his drawing, and ended up being beaten with a hose, then left alone in a concrete cell for two days. It was only since he’d arrived at the Workingmen’s House that he’d begun writing and drawing again.
He traced Princess Ozma’s mouth, but his pencil was dull and the paper kept tearing. In a rage, he balled it up and shoved the picture of Ozma back inside the folder.
DAMN OH DAMN YOU CLUMSY SHIT LOOK WHAT YOU DID NOW YOU’LL GET IT, OPEN AND SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO
He slapped himself, trying to calm down; frantically sorted through his papers until he found a scrap of newsprint that felt like velvet, so worn was it from handling. His most precious possession, even more precious than his manuscript: a newspaper photograph of a five-year-old girl, blond, her face bleached out so that only her eyes and mouth could be clearly seen. Elsie Paroubek. She looked otherworldly, elfin, her expression one of slight alarm.
She was no longer alive. His eyes welled; the image blurred as he brought it to his face and pressed it against his mouth.
“Dearest one,” he whispered.
He shut his eyes and saw her floating before him, her tiny mouth and dark eyes. He bent over the picture, hands in his lap, and waited for the happy spell to come. Afterward he rocked back and forth, weeping as he prayed for forgiveness. When his grief subsided, he replaced the newspaper picture in the folder and gathered up the pages of his manuscript. He tied them back together with the piece of string, his clumsy, damaged fingers fumbling with the knot, opened the drawer, and put everything back inside.
Last of all, he blew out the candle, set it with his other things, and closed the drawer. He stood and undressed, folding his clothes before pulling on his nightshirt. He knelt beside his bed and said his prayers, fingering the scapular. When he finished, he made the Sign of the Cross and crawled under the covers. Within a few minutes he was sleeping soundly.
Chapter 24
THERE HAD BEEN a girl—Maura, a friend of his sister Ellen’s, dark haired and buxom, with freckled cheeks and breasts. A laughing girl. They’d been courting for almost a year when it happened: not the usual fumbling in the dark with a whore, but a stolen afternoon in a hotel room. Lying beside her afterward had been even sweeter than what had gone before.
“Will you marry me?” Francis had whispered.
“Of course,” she’d whispered back, her face still wet from crying. Happiness, he’d thought at the time. Two weeks later she was dead, bled out on an abortionist’s table. Not his child, of course. Ever since he’d tried to balance it in his head: Would it have mattered? If he’d known the choice was another man’s child or her lying in bed beside him now, warm and laughing? Most days he believed he might have lived with it. Other days, he did not. And some days, thinking of her freckled limbs tangled with those of another man, he almost wished he’d killed her himself.
Chapter 25
SHE HAD A ritual for nightfall at Riverview, and not even the urgency of talking to Clyde would change it. Unless it was pouring rain, she’d find a spot where she could clearly see the Hippodrome. Once the sun dipped below the horizon, colors bled from the world like dye from untreated cloth. The Hippodrome’s pale façade darkened to grey, its shadow angel, more mysterious and sinister: a guardian angel, but whom was it protecting? The fading light tinted women’s white dresses and shirtwaists lavender, turned the miles of red, white, and blue bunting into ashy ribbons.
She staked out a patch of grass and stared across the Lagoon. People streamed toward the Velodrome, eager for the evening’s cycle races, and crowded into the Waterdrome’s bleachers to watch the diving elephants. She made a tunnel of her hands, mimicking a camera’s lens, moved around till she found an angle that eliminated the crowds and other buildings, and gazed at the Hippodrome’s angel.
The world contracted to what she could see, what she wanted to see. She pretended she was back in the studio. That light on the Hippodrome needs to be hotter, she thought, and held her breath.
A cry went up from the people thronging the Pike as the Hippodrome burst into white flame, the angel no longer sinister but glorious: invincible. Every building and ride shivered with light, the coasters’ scaffolding and the Gyroplane flaring like a gigantic box of matches tossed into a fireplace, the Bob’s chute a shining knife plunged into the Lagoon. The Aerostat’s tower, five stories high, blazed like a torch that could be seen from twenty miles away.
Or so she’d been told. Pin had never been that far. She shoved her hands into her pockets and rejoined the crowd. No one paid her any mind. She was just another footloose boy, not big enough to pose a threat unless you found his hand in your pocket. After a few minutes she reached the Ten-in-One building. Garish canvas banners advertised what was inside:
ENGLISH SKELETAL GIANTESS: 7 FEET TALL, 90 LBS!
LOLITA THE SNAKE CHARMER
ESCAPEO, THE MAN WHO DEFIES LOCKS AND BOLTS
IDA, THE LIVING MERMAID! EIGHTH WONDER
OF THE WORLD
LORD CLYDE, THE HOO-DOO KING
There were six more acts, all part of Armstrong’s Freak Show, and Pin had seen them all. Gaffed freaks—fakes, except for Mildred the giantess and Flossie the fat lady, who weighed six hundred pounds and had a one-hundred-two-inch waist. The four-legged woman was real, even if she was dead and flo
ating in a jar. And Lolita was very much alive—her real name was Alice—and so beautiful it hurt to look at her, wearing a slithery dress, a pair of poison-green boa constrictors named Honey Bunch and General Villa wrapped around her arms.
Lord Clyde, though, was the big draw. He did only two shows a night, at eight and nine-thirty. By now, someone else would have taken over for him as Satan at Hell Gate. Clyde spent his winters on an island off the South Carolina coast, fishing and crabbing, took the train up to New York City for an occasional show in Harlem.
“I got a good life,” he’d told Pin. “No matter I’m colored or a white man, it’s a good-enough life.”
She went around back and slipped inside the door used by the performers.
The door to Clyde’s dressing room was open, and she saw him lacing one elegant black goatskin shoe. In a bamboo cage, a trio of white doves fluttered as she walked in. Clyde glanced up and nodded.
“You staying out of trouble, boy?”
He picked a white feather from his dress trousers and stood. He was the tallest man she’d ever known, also one of the best looking. After each performance, he did a brisk business selling photographs of himself, to Negroes and even some white people. Pin had one tacked to the wall of the shack, alongside a picture of the dead aviator Harriet Quimby:
LORD CLYDE, THE HOO-DOO KING, MASTER OF MYSTIC AMAZEMENT
He’d signed it To Pin, with regards, in an expansive, swooping hand. She’d spent an afternoon copying the way he’d written her name, in hopes she might develop a star’s signature, too.
“Doing my best,” she said. She watched as Clyde straightened his celluloid collar—a new collar for every show, an extravagance Pin couldn’t even imagine. Ikie said Clyde and his family lived in a house with four bedrooms and an indoor toilet, down in Bronzeville.
“What do you want, boy?” Clyde shrugged into his jacket, picked up his bow tie, and looped it around his neck. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Were you working Hell Gate a few hours ago?”
He nodded. “I was.”
“Did you see a man in one of the boats with a girl? About four o’clock, I think. A white man with a white girl.”
“I see a lot of white men with a lot of white girls.” Clyde’s voice was so deep he didn’t need a megaphone. Pin once heard a grown man shriek like a woman when Clyde reared out of the darkness at Hell Gate and brandished his pitchfork, shouting Welcome, sinner! “You talking about a little girl, or a grown woman?”
“No, a girl. Eleven or twelve, wearing a yellow dress. Big yellow bow in her hair.”
“You know how many girls in yellow dresses I see every day in Riverview? Five hundred and ninety-seven. And that’s just white girls. How come you asking?”
“This man, when he got into the boat, he had a girl with him. When he came out of the tunnel, he didn’t. He was alone.”
Clyde shook his head. “Hell if I know. You say four o’clock? I left right about then to come back here. But no one came around asking for a lost kid. Did you talk to Horace? Or Larry?”
“I figured I’d ask you first. You were in the tunnel with them.”
“Them and one thousand nine hundred and twelve other folks.”
He tugged at the tails of his jacket. Clyde was a dandy. Black swallowtail jacket, matching pants with a stripe of black ribbon down the sides. Immaculate white shirt and purple tie, secured with an emerald stickpin, white carnation in his buttonhole.
“How do I look?” he asked, adjusting the stickpin. “Not too flossy?”
“Not too flossy.” She peered inside the dove cage, cooing softly at the birds. “I ain’t mistaken,” she said. “I saw Charlie Chaplin at the studio this morning. The man at Hell Gate looked like him.”
“Charlie Chaplin?”
“Yeah. He was meeting with Spoor, they’re trying to get him to come back from California. He was with the same girl—Chaplin, I mean. He was kidding around with her on the movie stage.”
“You sure it was the same girl?”
She shrugged. “Pretty sure. I got a pretty good look at them at Essanay.”
“Huh.” Clyde stared at her thoughtfully. “That is peculiar, I agree. Have you told Bacon or any of the police?”
“I told you, I wanted to ask you first.”
“I’m not the police, boy.” He gave a barking laugh. “Not even close. That’s who you need to talk to. And you should find yourself an honest job, instead of hanging round Max.”
“You’ve smoked his dope.”
“I’m not denying it. But women cause more trouble than dope ever did.”
“So you don’t remember a man and a girl in a yellow dress?”
Clyde let his breath out in an impatient huff, shut his eyes for a moment.
“No,” he said at last. “But there was a white man, I remember him because he was the only person riding alone. I saw him in the tunnel, right before I got ready to leave when Lemuel came on—that’s who was spelling me. Clean shaven, with a hat. Couldn’t tell you what color hair. No girl that I saw. Now I got to run.”
Clyde stooped beside her. His fingers grazed the hair behind her temple.
“Forgot to wash behind your ears again,” he announced, and handed her a wooden token. “Tell the cops. If she’s gone missing, they’ll have been looking for her. You shouldn’t have waited till now,” he added. “That kid’s ma will be worried sick.” He picked up the dove cage and sauntered off.
Pin inspected the wooden disk. One side was stamped with Hell Gate’s winged devil. The other read GOOD FOR ONE TRIP TO HADES. Pin flipped it into the air and caught it. “Thanks,” she said, though Clyde was long gone.
Chapter 26
LARRY HAD ALREADY left for the day, and the skinny, pock-faced white man named Rubbery Moe had taken over the ticket booth. Screams and nervous laughter echoed from inside the Hell Gate pavilion, along with recorded groans and shrieks from hidden phonographs. Pin craned her neck to see if Horace was still on duty in back. He was. She swore and got in line, keeping an eye out for any sign of the man she’d seen that afternoon.
Clyde had seemed to remember him, too. So that made three of them: her, Henry, Clyde. Yet Clyde hadn’t seen the girl in yellow. She must have scrambled from the boat once the trip was under way and tried to run off. But why would she have run? She’d gone with the man willingly, sat on his lap like she knew him.
Unbidden, the image of her sister came to Pin, Abriana smiling as the German baker handed her a cruller, Abriana who trusted everyone who smiled at her or offered her a treat. Pin dug her fingernails into her palm until the pain drove the picture from her mind and she was back in the sticky warm night outside Hell Gate.
The line moved quickly with Rubbery Moe behind the ticket booth. He used to work the Derby Racer coaster, with its motto Sixty Miles an Hour in Sixty Seconds.
“Ten cents, one thin dime, watch’er heads, ladies, might want to remove your hats. No refunds, the management is not responsible for medical emergencies.”
In front of Pin stood two girls, arms linked. One wore a sailor cap, the other a hat with a white froth of willow plumes.
“You might want to keep that on your lap, miss.” Rubbery Moe jabbed a thumb at the mass of ostrich feathers. “That’s a real nice hat, shame to ruin it.”
The girl looked at her friend. “What you think? I should take it off?”
Her friend nodded. “Better safe than sorry.”
The two stepped over to the waiting boat, a four-seater. Rubbery Moe turned to Pin. She held out her token. He took it with a grunt, pointing to the plank seat behind the girls. Pin started toward the boat, then asked, “Hey, Moe—did you see a man here today? He was with a girl in a yellow dress, she was maybe twelve.”
“I seen a thousand men.” He gestured at the line behind her. “I got paying customers. Get in or skedaddle.”
Pin hopped into the back of the boat. The two girls turned to stare at her.
“Damn, it’s a kid.” The gir
l in the sailor cap looked past Pin, to where a group of young men shelled out dimes to Rubbery Moe. “Say, Mister, how’s about fixing us with a couple of those fellas instead of this kid?”
Without waiting for an answer, the two girls extricated themselves from the boat and hurried to join the young men. Moe glared at Pin, now alone in the boat. “You’re losing me money,” he said, and pushed her off.
Pin quickly hopped to the front seat, grabbing the sides of the vessel as it coasted along the canal’s spiraling path. The rank water appeared as thick and black as machine oil. Her boat followed the canal’s circular route, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the spiral tightened and the little vessel approached the central chute. In the boat behind hers, the two girls were already canoodling with the boys they’d just met. In front of her loomed the tunnel, its entrance an enormous mouth surmounted by a pair of huge eyes, red and angry looking. Flame-colored streamers billowed around it, blown by hidden electrical fans. From inside, recorded shrieks and moans drowned out the voices of couples in the other boats.
Streamers whipped Pin’s face as the prow of her boat slid forward and, for a second, hung over empty air. It dropped in a sickening rush, and she was thrust backward, barely catching herself as she frantically clutched the plank seat. Spray spattered her cheeks as the boat splashed down, hard, at the bottom of the chute. After bobbing precariously and bumping against the wall, her boat righted itself and began to glide through the tunnel.
The din momentarily deafened her. Screaming girls and women, whooping men. Sounds of hollow laughter and clanking chains boomed from phonographs tucked into plywood grottoes. Flashing red and blue lights illuminated wax dummies, skeletons, disembodied skulls, bedsheet ghosts dipped in luminous paint so they glowed like toadstools. An electrical motor turned the waterwheels so the canal flowed past all of them. Devils stabbed a wax policeman with pitchforks. Two turnip-headed goblins tugged at the skirt of a papier-mâché woman, exposing broomstick legs and a bare electrical bulb. Pin gasped as a skeleton dropped from the ceiling, its fingers scraping her scalp before it was yanked back up to await the next boat.
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