The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert Page B

fright. I would’ve been better off with a sock for a puppet, I thought. August and I wanted to simply be fairgoers like everyone else, just a couple of blokes on holiday. We deserved to be entertained.
    I needed to find Cecily. She could be anywhere, playing any part, I realized. I feared it could take me all summer to find her, and even if I did find her, what if I didn’t know her? She could be all decked out something awful, slathered in greasepaint, hidden by wigs.
    Crossing the bridge was like crossing the ocean—the two worlds had little in common. The midway’s road was hard-packed dirt, while the Grand Court’s promenade was paved with bricks that shimmered in the sun a yellow gold. The buildings of the Grand Court were dedicated to Electricity, Fine Arts, Agriculture, and Government, to Horticulture and Invention, while the midway’s devotion was to the devil, to hypnotists, fortune-tellers, belly dancers, swallowers of swords. On the midway were Turks racing camels, fakirs charming snakes. There was an Indian camp with wigwams, and a Filipino Village where cannibals were said to salivate every time a fairgoer passed.
    To me, the midway was heaven, or at least some hell-bent spin on it. When we first set eyes on it, on that very first day, it wasn’t ready to be seen. Workers scrambled to slap it all together on nothing but a lick and a promise—unlike the pristine whiteness of the court, the haphazard shacks ahead clashed in color and stripe, some tall, some short, each roof at an awkward angle to the other. Everybody seemed so roostered and frantic, you couldn’t tell if everything was going up or coming down.
    But many of the exhibits, even those that were only half-built, were ready to take your ticket. A dark-haired woman, her eyes painted with a Cleopatra swish, sat on a settee in front of the Streets of Cairo to puff on a hookah as a dervish whirled and whirled in front of her. A Chinese illusionist made his wife disappear with the spin of a mirrored wheel. An ostrich pulled a buggy in which was seated the Living Doll, a Cuban singer only twenty-six inches in height, and she sang a war tune called “The Belle of Havana.” Overhead were strings of Chinese lanterns of pink and baby-blue paper.
    There were buildings shaped like foreign shrines, with onion domes. There were thatched-roof huts of mud. There were the tall walls of Western forts and the short ones of sharecroppers’ shacks. There were cupolas with candy-striped shingles and parlors with polka-dot eaves. There were railroad tracks that curved and twisted, rising high to swoop and bend, promising danger of collision and derailment, the ground far below. There were stages without theaters. On one, a clown on a unicycle juggled cats. On another, a thrower of knives aimed for his wife. On yet another, an actor stood on a fake gallows, his future widow already in weeds, sobbing her eyes out, a trick noose snug on his neck. The smell of sausage carried from a cottage shaped like a cuckoo clock. There was a beer garden and a greenhouse full of hummingbirds that buzzed so close you could almost feel their wings flutter your lashes. The bees had already fled the apiary, filling the air with threat, thumping into hats and catching in the folds of skirts.
    Down the center of the midway were all kinds of sordid enterprises, the whole endeavor bringing out the city’s thugs and hucksters. Riggers set up their sweat cloths, betting the kids they couldn’t pick the thimble that hid the dried pea. You could lose bets on marked cards, on loaded dice, on bones and feathers. You could have your palm read by a blind beggar.
    People lined up to be fleeced. The flush you felt when you lost to thieves wasn’t far from the rush of love, was it? When a pretty girl flirted, you could feel that same heat in your cheeks and fast beat of blood in your veins.
    That’s what
I
felt anyway, that rush and pulse, when I