Free The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert Page A

tripped me right into her path. My luck was changing for the better. After all, it wasn’t her that pushed me away.
    Up ahead, beneath the arch over the entrance, the ticket booth had opened and the mob pulsed forth like a pack of twitchy rats toward a hole in a boat.
    The summer sunlight harsh against the stark-white arch scorched us all, and those with umbrellas opened them, filling the air with the screech of steel spines and the pop of silk pulled taut. I skirted the fee by ducking in and out of the parasols of others, my accomplices barely noticing me at their sides, though we were nearly cheek to cheek, knocking elbows, as I slipped around in their shade.
    I entered the courtyard tucked in beneath some lady’s ruffled white parasol, my head low to avoid suspicion. The lady took my arm, mistaking me for her gentleman, and she whispered in my ear, with a lovely gasp, “Sugar.” I patted her hand and somehow got away without her noticing that I wasn’t hers.
    Once I was out from under the umbrellas and parasols, I looked up and saw what she meant. The buildings of the Grand Court shimmered with shattered glass that had been dusted over the whitewash, to glisten like something from a confectioner’s shop.
    And those buildings went on and on without end. I was most stunned by the expanse of it, and all its elegance. The rotundas, the columns and pillars, the winding ivy, the rows of flags, the statues of winged horses, of chariots and bare-chested angels and warriors, everything white and shimmering as if chiseled from a salt lick—it was like looking upon an ancient city before it fell. It was not part of Omaha, but something in place of it, something else entirely. In this new place that had risen from the city’s humid summer fog, the breezes seemed blown in from the sea.
    Most of the fairgoers floated slowly across the pavements as if addle-headed from liquor. They seemed to want nothing other than a lazy stroll through this strange, sudden kingdom that might just ripple away in the waves of heat. This was
their
spectacle, and they were determined to be marveled by it.
    I can’t say
I
marveled for long, beyond those first few moments. Soon enough I felt the grit of Omaha’s dirty wind between my teeth and in my eyes. The Grand Court was something I had to get past to get to the midway, to find Cecily. And the court, and all its white mansions, looked like it might go on for miles, as if you could keep walking toward the end of it and never reach the other side. I’d known this lot when it was empty—among my odd jobs over the years I’d been a wharf rat, picking up work at the riverbanks, pulling in barges and loading up wagons. Me and the other boys had climbed to the top of the tall railroad bridge, back before my fear of heights, allowing us to gaze across the fallow fields. I’d imagined the property mine.
Even just a scrap of it
, I’d dreamed.
Even just a dry corner left for dead.
A patch of land, I’d figured, would change everything. I’d get something to grow on it and live a halfway honest life.
    How had they fit this court into that stretch of empty fields? I’d never guessed it’d hold so much. And there, all down the middle of the court, was the lagoon, which itself seemed as long and wide as the river.
    I headed to the east end, toward the bridge with the plaster angels and cherubs with trumpets. The bridge rose up and over Sixteenth Street, over the streetcar line, then down into the bluffs that lined the river, to the midway and all its shuck and jive—despite my tuxedo, I knew the Grand Court wasn’t where I’d be lingering that summer; it was on the midway I’d be able to hustle for tips once Oscar had his wits about him.
    But there was no getting on the bridge because there was no getting past the elephant. The midway wouldn’t open until afternoon, it seemed, and the wild animal show had been enlisted to