Ishmael stepped between two tents and leaned against a pole and drank again from the bottle, then entered the midway afresh, metabolically sealed and protected from the crowds of people parting in front of him like waves against a ship’s bow. A frightened mother pulled her child from his path. A man flipping meat patties with a spatula looked up from his grill and said in a Down Under accent, “You’re about to run aground, mate. Better find a dry dock.”
The Ferris wheel was at the end of the midway, the gondolas painted with polka dots, lines of people with cotton candy waiting to board. That’s where he would go, he told himself. He had more than eight dollars in his pocket. He would seat himself in a gondola and be subsumed into the sky, the heat and pain in his legs evaporating, the canes resting across his thighs in a dignified fashion, the last few swallows in the bottle available whenever he wanted them. He would remain in the gondola until his money was gone, rising again and again into gold-veined black clouds of which he had no fear.
That was when he tripped on a rubber power cord and fell headlong into a puddle formed by the overflow of a dunking machine on which a Negro sat dressed in the striped jumper and cord-tied pants and sockless work boots of a convict, his hair bejeweled with drops of water, his grin as self-abasing as the slice of watermelon and the Little Black Sambo painted on a sign above his head.
Somebody helped Ishmael to his feet and even fitted his palms on the canes. Ishmael gazed at the black man and at the onlookers and at the concessionaires and family people bunching up to see what was happening in front of the machine that allowed people to throw a baseball at a metal disk welded to a lever, sending the Negro plummeting into a horse tank.
“Men like this fought for our country,” Ishmael said.
The onlookers made no response. Their faces were ovals, the eyes and mouths and noses little more than hash marks, neither good nor bad. The young boys wore slug caps, vests, knickers, dress shirts, ties, and Buster Brown shoes. There was nothing mean about any of them. Why couldn’t they understand what he was saying? “You’ve been taught to disrespect the colored man. Don’t let others use you like this,” he said.
“You don’t like it, go back where you came from!” someone at the back of the crowd said.
“All of you are better than you think you are,” Ishmael said. “This is a poor man. He should be your friend.”
“Nigger lover!” another man shouted.
“A colored man can’t fight back. You let others make cowards and bullies of you.”
A dirt clod flew out of the darkness and hit Ishmael in the eye. He raised his forearm in front of him, squinting into the brilliance of a spotlight a carnie worker had turned on his face. Inside the glare, he saw the silhouettes of three hatted men heading for him. One held a club; all three had badges pinned to their shirts. They grabbed him by the arms and led him behind the tents. He heard someone spear a baseball into the metal disk on the dunking machine and, a second later, the sound of mechanical release, like the heavy wood-and-steel trapdoor on a scaffold dropping, followed by a loud splash and the laughter of the crowd.
Ishmael freed one arm and ripped his elbow into the nose of the man holding him, cleaning the glasses off his face. The injured man cupped his nose, blood leaking through his fingers, inadv
ertently crunching his glasses under his boot. He removed his hand, his lower face smeared as though a burst tomato had been rubbed on it. “Bad choice, shitbird.”
Another man pushed him to the ground; or maybe he just fell. One man stripped off his coat and searched it. He shone a flashlight on Ishmael’s arms. “He’s a dope addict.”
Ishmael tried to get up and fell down again.
“What’s wrong with your legs?” another said.
“Shrapnel,” Ishmael said.
“Where?”
“On both legs, up to my hip.”
“Here?” the man with the bloody nose said. “Or here? Sorry. How about here?”
Ishmael felt a sensation like a series of knife thrusts work its way up his thighs into his groin and turn his rectum to jelly.
“Where y’all want to put him?” one of his warders said.
“Good question. I don’t want to babysit him till the drunk wagon comes by.”
“I saw the Missing Link passed out behind the jakes.”
“Put him in the cage?”
“He’s a stewbum. Let him sit in his own shit. Maybe he’s selling dope or white-slaving for the Cantonese.”
“Is that right, you’re on the hip?” the man with the ruined nose said. “That’s what they call opium smokers these days. Chinamen that smoke it do it on their hip.”
For the first time in his life, Ishmael knew what a black man felt when he listened to the rhetoric of the men uncoiling a rope, knotting it neatly, enjoying the oily pull of it through their palms.
THAT SAME EVENING Ruby Dansen took a jitney from her hotel to the address of Maggie Bassett, just outside the city limits, not far from a Spanish mission whose glassless windows had become red eyes in the last remnants of the sun. Maggie Bassett’s house was built of purple and brown brick and gray river stone, with dormers and walls thick enough to ensure the house was cool in the summer and warm in winter. There were chairs and a table on the porch, chimes on the eaves, a garage with a motorcar inside, a Dutch oven in the side yard, a two-seat bicycle under the porte-cochere, a vine-threaded gazebo inside a grove of pomegranate and orange trees. It was the kind of home that advertised its excess and told others that necessity and need were never factors in the lives of those who resided there.
Ruby twisted the handle on the doorbell. She fingered her cloth purse and gazed at the mission and the tall grass blowing on the slope below it and wondered how much blood had been mixed in the earth here, how many Indians and Spaniards and Mexicans and white colonists and missionaries were buried anonymously in these hills, voiceless, their stories untold, their deaths not worth an asterisk, their last thoughts known only to themselves.