Timebound(96)
Unlike the rest of the fair, where the visitors were mostly white, the Midway looked more like a modern city, with a wide array of races and nationalities. I looked a bit farther down the street and watched a man in Arabic dress pulling a camel toward us along the main road. A middle-aged woman was sitting sidesaddle atop the camel’s hump, clutching tightly to the edges and looking as though she was quite ready for the ride to end.
Mick followed my gaze. “That’s Cairo Street, down there. You should come back here when they do the Arab wedding this afternoon. It’s really—”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to have much of a chance to sightsee, Mick,” I said. “I’m here on assignment and I don’t have much time.”
I was a bit surprised to realize that I was genuinely sorry about the need to rush, since there was a lot that I would have loved to see if this were a pleasure trip. I felt a surge of jealousy for Katherine’s job, which had simply been to learn as much as she could.
“Too bad,” he said. “You c’n spend a week here an’ not see all of it. Not that you could really spend a week now, with it closin’ an’ all. It’ll be cool to walk through here again when all the people have gone—like it was when they was buildin’ it. I don’ really like the big crowds. An’ then ever’body here will get to start tearin’ it all down, I guess, and then go home.”
“Where’s home for your family, Mick? I mean, before you came to America.”
“County Clare—tha’s in Irelan’,” he said. “Town called Doolin. Pretty place me mom says, but the only work is fishin’. We been here since I was three or four. I kinda remember comin’ over on the boat, but not Irelan’.”
“So where will you go?” I asked. “I mean, soon there won’t be much work here for you and your mom, right?”
He nodded, with a rueful twist of his mouth. “Lady at church is tryin’ to talk me mother into movin’ back to the big farm we worked at when we first came to America, and she’s thinkin’ ’bout it. I can tell she is.”
“But you don’t want to go?”
He shook his head. “It was clean and we had more space an’ all, an’ it was great workin’ in the open air, but I don’ wanna go back there. Me dad didn’ wanna be on that farm—he didn’ trust ’em an’ neither do I. I’d rather stay in the city to work the fac’tries, even if it means bein’ cooped up all day.”
“What about school?” I asked, sipping the lemonade, cool and nicely tart, through a tall paper straw.
“Done with that,” Mick said, rubbing a line in the dust with his shoe. “Went to classes for ’bout two years on the farm before the fair started and me dad died. I c’n read an’ write just fine. C’n do my numbers, too. Anythin’ else I need to know I c’n learn on me own. I’m old enough now to help earn me keep.”
He lifted his chin proudly as he spoke and I was struck by how hard he was trying to be all grown-up. “When did your dad…,” I began hesitantly.
“Back in July,” he said. “After the fair started and the buildin’ work was finished, he got a job puttin’ out fires. You get a lot of little fires in the rest’rants and some of the ’lectrical buildins. Then there was a big fire in the Cold Storage Buildin’—weird to have a buildin’ with so much ice inside catch fire. Don’ know what caught it, but the flames was huge. All of the firefighters workin’ for the Exposition died and a bunch of those who came in from the city died, too. Took a long time, but they put it out, so none of the other buildins went up.”
“I’m sorry about your dad, Mick.”
“Yeah, me too. I miss him.” He was silent for a moment, and then he finished off the lemonade, his straw making a loud slurping sound as he pushed it around the ice to get the last few drops.
“I’m really not all that thirsty,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true—the air was dusty and I would have happily finished off the last half of the glass if not for the looming specter of trying to navigate a bathroom while wearing a bustle and ankle-length skirt. “You can finish mine, if you’d like.”
That earned me another grin. “You’re nicer than me other boss. She only gave me a peppermint one time, and that was ’cause she said me breath smelled like onions. Which prob’ly was true.” He quickly polished off the last few ounces in my glass and took the two empties back to the booth.