Free The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert Page B

block entry while giving the crowds a peek at the carnival’s beasts. I would eventually come to know the little family that managed this zoo, just as I got to know everyone who worked the midway. A yellow-haired girl in hair ribbons, one of the daughters of the circus barker, wore a python around her shoulders like a fox stole. Another daughter, probably four years old, sat locked in the cage with the sleeping lion, one hand wrapped in the cat’s mane. The barker’s wife, peacock feathers rising from her headpiece, kept a panther on a leash, letting it prowl and pace. A grizzly bear wore a clown’s neck ruffle. And atop the elephant, standing on the creature’s back, was the barker himself, barking his guts out, in tall black boots and long red coat, boasting loudly of all the terror he’d tamed.
    I stepped back into the court, realizing the midway would have to wait, and stood at the railing at the edge of the lagoon.
    The gondoliers steered their boats through the still water of the canal, and swimming among them was the one shaped like a swan. Phoebe had told me about these gondolas and gondoliers sailing up the river in the winter, boats full of actors. I had pictured Cecily bundled in furs on a gondola’s pillowed bench, beneath a candy-striped awning, a kettle of hot tea on a tiny gas stove, like some Russian duchess. And I’d pictured a swan gondola as elegant as the birds themselves.
    That wasn’t quite the case. This swan boat, though pretty with its frail, curved neck, needed paint. The yellow was nearly all chipped off its beak, and the white of its wooden feathers was faded to the color of a dirty egg. There was hardly any blue left in its eyes. The bench at the bird’s tail feathers had a heart-shaped back, like on a lovers’ swing, and even that looked battered, with faded velvet cushions.
    And yet I saw myself with Cecily sitting on that bench, sharing a bottle of wine. The boat’s ruin had a shabby romance, like it had jumped the track of some cheap midway carousel, sneaking into the court’s precious waters. It was an honest wreck, and it was a welcome sight.
    After looking away from the swan, all I could see was the toil of illusion. I followed the promenade toward the band shell, where speakers had already begun to speechify. I passed a patch of garden where a few women in aprons across their black skirts tended flowers, carrying what looked to be large bottles of perfume. They pinched at the bulbs of atomizers, enhancing the scents of the petals with floral extract.
    Nearby, a man wrestled with a tangle of wires in a lamppost. I could almost feel the electricity, as if it buzzed unharnessed in the air, singeing and bristling the hairs on the backs of my hands. I could taste sulfur on the tip of my tongue.
    This
was the magic of the Fair for me. The Grand Court had been built only to be torn down and would never survive a single Nebraska winter. It all even seemed
of
the winter, like the mists that rose over the river in early December, those columns of steam and cloud that hover over the water like a ghost city. Cecily and I would fall in love at the Fair, I determined. We would lose the whole summer as we stared at each other, and then we’d let the White City collapse behind us. The place could turn to cloud and fade away like Avalon.
    Already, the gondolas had passengers. As I looked down on them from a bridge, they looked up above my head. They pointed at the sky behind me. When I turned, I saw the hot-air balloon that rose from the hidden midway, its basket tethered with a rope to keep it from floating off.
    The balloon was a pale yellow with a few large square patches, like patches on the knees of a boy’s trousers—I thought I could even see the
x
’s of the stitching. One patch was green, another blue, and one seemed a pattern of plaid. And draped across the balloon was a giant purple banner with only one word—
Omaha
. And the