“Ma’am?”
“I thought you were my son. I was dreaming. I took him to the circus when he was three.”
“You weren’t dreaming, ma’am. That was the circus out there. Every kind of wild animal you can think of.”
She tried to see beyond the caboose of the train, her breath fogging the glass. When she looked back at the soldier, she realized one of his sleeves was pinned to the shoulder. “Were you over there?”
“Yes, ma’am, I sure as heck was.”
“Did you know Captain Ishmael Holland? He commanded colored troops.”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t. But I heard they done right well.”
“How far are we from San Antonio?”
“We’re fixing to pull into the station any time now. Are you all right?”
“Why, yes, I am.”
“You were having a bad dream. That’s what the cold will do to you. You cain’t be getting that Spanish influenza, either. It can flat put you in a box.”
“You’ve been very kind,” she said.
“The Harlem Hellfighters, that was their name. Did your son come home okay?”
“No, he was wounded badly in both legs.”
“I’m sorry. I hope things work out for y’all.”
“I hate to ask you such a personal question, but maybe you can help me. When you were recovering from your injury, did you have trouble with any of the drugs you had to take?”
His eyes went away from hers. “I didn’t learn anything over there but one lesson, ma’am: You get shut of the war as soon as you’re able.”
He retook his seat at the head of the car with two other enlisted men. One was asleep; one was reading a newspaper. The man who was asleep had a pair of crutches propped next to him; the man with the newspaper wore a rubber mask painted with flesh tones and a neat mustache.
ISHMAEL COULD NOT remember with exactitude how he got to the carnival. Maybe in a jitney or maybe a driver in a Model T picked him up on the side of the road. He remembered the loud ticking sound the engine gave off, like a clock mechanism working against itself, gnashing its own cogs and teeth into filings. He remembered the driver placing him in the front seat, sticking his canes snugly by his side. He remembered unstoppering the bottle of brandy again and working on the second half of its contents, his voice too loud inside the confines of the car, his allusions to Mexico and France and pulling a mule uphill loaded with two wounded men lost on his benefactor.
He saw the carnival through a brightly lit haze of dust, the Ferris wheel printed in multicolored electric dots against black clouds. “There,” he said.
“You sure?” the driver said. “I think maybe you better go to a hospital. You were a soldier?”
Ishmael studied the driver’s profile. “I didn’t get your name. Do I know you?”
The driver looked at him and seemed to smile, not wanting to injure or offend. “I’m the fellow who picked you up.”
Ishmael nodded as though a profound truth had been told him. “By that patch of weeds. That’ll be good.”
“Don’t let the police get you, buddy. They can give you a hard time. I’d throw the bottle away.”
The Model T stopped and Ishmael got out on the road, supporting himself with his canes. He stared back through the window. “Were you at Carrizal?”
The driver shook his head, his eyes sad, and drove away.
Ishmael walked through a pine grove, the needles as soft as a sponge under his canes, the brandy swinging in his coat pocket. He entered a clearing and passed horse trailers and tents and trucks held together with wire, and people cooking on hot stones and sheets of tin, their faces firelit, as supple and impassive as warm tallow, shadows leaping behind them.
He stopped and rested, leaning against a tree, and drank from the bottle, closing his eyes as the brandy slid down his throat and seeped like an elixir through his system and touched all the nerve endings in his legs with magical fingers. He worked his way up a path and across a railroad spur to the fairgrounds, sure that he was smiling, because the skin of his face was as tight as the stitching on a shrunken head. He could also smell his odor, similar to a horse blanket that had soured in a tack room, or the pot liquor in a jar of spoiled fruit.
He moved as stiffly as a straw man down the midway, surrounded by the popping of .22 rounds in the shooting gallery, calliope music, a barker describing the freaks on display in his tent, aerial rockets bursting into pink foam, the hand-carved facial starkness of the carousel horses rotating round and round, the squealing of the children, the smells of hot dogs and candied apples and buttered corn, the ventriloquists and magicians and hypnotists on the stages, fire-eaters blowing flame and the stench of burning kerosene into the night, the rattling of the mesh on the geek cage.