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“I listened to this minister talk about our need to forgive others. He said we don’t get any rest until we forgive. So I said under my breath that I forgave you for whatever you may have done to us, even though I really didn’t mean it.”
“So you’re not true to your own religion?”
“That’s correct. This time I’m going to say it to you and mean it. I forgive you. But that also means you don’t exist anymore.”
“What did you say? Say that again. What did you—”
“Before I go, can I ask you a question? Does the name Hole-in-the-Wall Gang have sexual overtones? I’ve always been puzzled by the name. I thought someone with your background might know the answer.”
Ruby began walking back down the dirt road toward a country store where she could use a phone to call a taxi. The sun was a flickering scarlet diamond that somehow had created a patch of blue on the horizon. When the wind changed, she thought she heard the music of a calliope but knew her imagination was playing tricks on her.
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sp; ONE OF ISHMAEL’S warders held him by the arms and another by the legs. They swung him back and forth to gain momentum, then flung him through the back door of a darkened cage that faced the midway. When he landed on his spine, on a floor made from railroad ties, his mouth shot open and a ball of light exploded inside his head and turned his eyelids to tissue paper. He rolled over, groaning, urine and excrement matting in his hair and painting the side of his face. His warders were looking at him through the doorway. They wore peaked hats probably purchased from an army surplus store and long-sleeved cotton shirts and scrap-metal badges, and he knew he was in the hands of men whose fear was in direct proportion to the level of cruelty they visited on others. One of them released the rolled-up canvas at the top of the bars and dropped it to the floor.
“You got yourself in the honeypot, boy,” he said. “The drunk wagon might be along directly. That’s as good as it’s gonna get.” It was the man whose nose was bulbous and mottled purple and still dripping blood. “Got nothing to say?”
Ishmael lifted his cheek from the floor. “I’m Captain Ishmael Holland, United States Army,” he whispered.
“No, you’re my property and a liar on top of it,” the man replied, unbuttoning his fly. “Relax. This is nothing. Wait till the two of us are alone.” He cupped his phallus in his palm and arched a gold stream of urine on Ishmael’s head and mouth and eyes. “Here’s your canes. My name is Fred. I’m gonna have a hot dog, then I’ll be back.” He pressed an ax handle into Ishmael’s thigh and twisted it. “Want anything?”
Ishmael passed out and went to a place and a particular evening in his childhood he had always associated with disappointment, an evening he had thought he would never want to revisit.
Big Bud had come to their home up a dark valley outside Trinidad, Colorado, with flowers and chocolate for his mother and a whirligig for him. And a promise to take Ishmael on the train to Elitch Gardens in Denver. Not only would he have ridden the roller coaster and pedaled a boat across a lake churning with bronze-backed carp; he would have seen moving pictures filled with Indians trailing feathered bonnets and stagecoaches caroming through clouds of dust, the driver and shotgun guard hanging on for dear life, the passengers firing black-powder weapons out the windows at their pursuers.
He would have been in a theater crowded with children whose mothers and fathers sat next to them, just as he would have been sitting next to his mother and father, the way families did.
But Big Bud and his mother had argued, and Big Bud did not keep his promise and instead went back to Texas on the train and never saw his son again. Now, inside the cage, inside the reek of feces that someone had tried to scrub out of the wood floor with ammonia, he began to create and superimpose a fantasy on his young life.
The sounds and activity outside the cage became the visit to the magical place where the train should have taken him and his father and mother. He saw the three of them spinning in a big teacup mounted on a stanchion that rose and fell against the sky; he saw them eating frozen custard with tiny wooden spoons out of paper cups, and ice cream wrapped inside a waffle, and sausages that were split open and stuffed with cheese and chives and rolled inside a chunk of warm French bread. He saw the three of them walking down the midway, his mother holding one of his hands, his father the other, swinging him over the electric cables that powered the rides. He knew that as long as they held on to each other, nothing in the world would ever be able to harm him.
Where’s that fine-looking little chap? he heard his father say.
Right here, Big Bud, he answered.
I cain’t find you, son. Where are you hiding?
I’ve fallen into a dark place. Why did you leave me?
Just hold on. I’ll be there. I promise.
You promised before and left us. Why would any father do that to his family?
There was no answer.
Tell me where you are, Big Bud. I know you’re out there. Can’t you hear me?
Ishmael saw a work boot close by the corner of his eye. “Told you I’d be back,” said Fred. He squatted down, a hot dog balanced in one hand. He tilted his head so he could look directly into Ishmael’s eyes, and pulled up a chair. “Doesn’t look like the drunk wagon is gonna be back. I told the Missing Link he could relax for a while. Look what I got you. A half-pint of white lightning. Open wide. You might have a future here.”
RUBY WENT TO a café down the street from the hotel where she was staying, and ordered a cup of tea and a plate of black bread with butter and a dish of apricots, and wondered how long her money would last, even if she starved herself.
A day of reckoning was probably at hand, and not the kind the IWW had hoped for. Wilson’s imprisonment of pacifists and draft resisters and critics of the war, along with the jailing of union organizers in the western states and the execution of Joe Hill, had fed the agenda of the anarchists and produced a level of violence and fear that was a gift from a divine hand to corporate America.
Ruby finished eating and left a ten-cent tip for the waiter and went outside. In the next two blocks, she could see bars on both sides of the street, a tattoo parlor, pawnshops, stairs on the side of a decrepit building leading to a taxi dance hall upstairs, the windows open, filled with yellow light, the dancers moving like shadows. Again she thought she heard a calliope. She saw a glow beyond a copse of trees on the edge of the city, and a spotlight shining on a hot-air balloon, someone throwing Chinese firecrackers from the gondola, the electric flashes and strings of smoke out of sync with the staccato popping that was like rain clicking on lily pads.
A policeman was standing on the corner. He wore a high-collared brass-buttoned blue jacket and a lacquered helmet, the kind a British bobby might wear.
“Pardon me, is that a circus over there?” she asked.
