Against the Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

a
streetcorner from which, the conductor assured them, it would be but a short
walk to the Fairgrounds—or, as he chuckled, “depending how late in the
evening, a brisk run,” and went on its way in metaltometal clangor and
clopping. At a distance the boys could see in the sky the electrical glow of
the Fair, but hereabouts all was in shadow. Presently they found a gap in the
fence, and an admissions gate with something of the makeshift about it, lit by
a single candlestub, whose attendant, a scowling Asiatic midget of some sort,
though eager enough to take their proffered fiftycent pieces, had to be pressed
by the scrupulous Lindsay for a duly executed receipt. The diminutive sentinel
then held out his palm as if for a gratuity, which the boys ignored.
“Deadbeats!” he screamed, by way of   introducing them to the quatercentennial celebration of Columbus’s
advent upon our shores.
    From somewhere ahead too dark to see
came music from a small orchestra, unusually syncopated, which grew louder,
till they could make out a small outdoor dancefloor, all but unlit, where
couples were dancing, and about which crowds were streaming densely everywhere,
among odors of beer, garlic, tobacco smoke, inexpensive perfume, and, from
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, somewhere up ahead, the unmistakable scent of
massed livestock.
    Observers of the Fair had remarked
how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits
located closer to the center of the “White City” seemed to be, whereas the
farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the
signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were
making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure
threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of
itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair . . . . As if the halflight ruling this
perhaps even unmapped periphery were not a simple scarcity of streetlamps but
deliberately provided in the interests of mercy, as a necessary veiling for the
faces here, which held an urgency somehow too intense for the full light of day
and those innocent American visitors with their Kodaks and parasols who might
somehow happen across this place. Here in the shadows, the faces moving by
smiled, grimaced, or stared directly at Lindsay and Miles as if somehow they
knew them, as if in the boys’ long career of adventure in exotic corners of the
world there had been accumulating, unknown to them, a reserve of
mistranslation, offense taken, debt entered into, here being reexpressed as a
strange Limbo they must negotiate their way through, expecting at any moment a
“runin” with some enemy from an earlier day, before they might gain the safety
of the lights in the distance.
    Armed “bouncers,” drawn from the
ranks of the Chicago police, patrolled the shadows restlessly. A Zulu
theatrical company reenacted the massacre of British troops at Isandhlwana.
Pygmies sang Christian hymns in the Pygmy dialect, Jewish klezmer ensembles
filled the night with unearthly clarionet solos, Brazilian Indians allowed
themselves to be swallowed by giant anacondas, only to climb out again,
undigested and apparently with no discomfort to the snake. Indian swamis
levitated, Chinese boxers feinted, kicked, and threw one another to and fro.
    Temptation, much to Lindsay’s
chagrin, lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not
nations of the world but Deadly Sins.    Pitchmen
in their efforts at persuasion all but seized the ambulant youths by their
lapels.
    “Exotic smoking practices around the
world, of great anthropological value!”
    “Scientific exhibit here boys, latest
improvements to the hypodermic syringe and its many uses!”
    Here were Waziris from Waziristan
exhibiting upon one another various techniques for waylaying travelers, which
reckoned in that country as a