Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith Read Free Book Online

turns curious and appalled?
    When they left the Fisheries Building it was almost nine. Owen offered to buy Adelaide a late dinner but she declined. He insisted on buying her a cherry-flavored soda and listened to her hiccup all along the Grand Basin, past the orb-bearing goddess of the Republic. The belching was retribution for the terror of the sharks, he told her. He walked her back to the Anthropological Building where Professor Putnam’s assistant, Franz Boas, was waiting to escort her home on the streetcar. They stood outside for a moment.
    â€œWhen are you on brain watch again?” he asked.
    â€œIt changes every day. It might be the psychology experiments tomorrow.”
    â€œBut always the same building?”
    She nodded, tightened her shawl.
    â€œYou can tell Putnam and Boas that there is no need for the tomahawks. You’re in one piece.”
    â€œFor now,” she said, turning, dashing up the stairs. He added the word
now
to his mental catalogue of the day. It lay wedged between the sight of her prostrate beneath the whale skeleton and the otherworldly stare of the sharks. More than amulets and bamboo tinderboxes it was these moments that would stay with him, something in the way they hovered just beyond the grasp of plain reckoning—like apartments glimpsed from the El at night. The strange orbit of other lives. He walked back through the fairgrounds and bought a hamburger at the first place he could find. He sat on a bench in front of a bandstand, not far from where he’d witnessed the bloody Sun Dance, and ate with abandon, like an invalid back from the brink. He was sure his two-year slump was about to end.
    They fell into a steady rhythm of afternoon walks and early suppers, working around her schedule at the fair. Over meals in which Adelaide described her charity work—teaching immigrants to read at Hull House, taking an elderly neighbor to church each Sunday—Owen marveled at the way she ate soup, bowl tilted carefully away, spoon idled and de-dripped at the ceramic curb before making its ascent to her lips. He could watch her do this for hours. The long, pale line of her neck was something he thought about on the streetcar or crossing the street. She was so remarkably decent and kind and her refinement came off as care—even grace—rather than privilege. Owen felt himself pulled by the promise of future shared meals, by the thought of loosening her braided hair so that it spilled—smelling of rosehips—over her delicate collarbone. He had to remind himself of his seagoing ambitions, of the need for a livelihood and the tin shed squalor in which he lived. Forcing himself to be practical, he asked her for voyage leads. She told him about the men who showedup at the ethnographic exhibit with bones and artifacts in burlap sacks. Word that a Chicago museum was forming had traveled far and wide. They came from all over: German copra traders, New England clipper mates, brig captains. They’d forged careers in the South Seas, hauling sulfur, felling teak, ferrying sugarcane recruits, but most of that had given way to wool and transport. They traded with the islanders for ethnographica as they went. A fathom of calico, a sack of glass beads, a steel-bladed knife, each of these could buy fine native weapons or artifacts. Owen listened and took notes, mesmerized as much by Adelaide’s mouth as by the words spilling from it.
    In search of a hiring captain, Owen frequented the barrelhouse saloons in Little Cheyenne, the levee district. Some of his father’s men had come here on weekend benders—the
grand tour
they called it—spending their way from saloon to dance hall to brothel. They hocked wedding bands and fob watches at pawnshops and posed for midnight portraits with street waifs in tintype galleries; they ate oysters from the shell and bought virility potions at voodoo apothecaries. One Saturday morning Owen found Otto Bisky, a crapulous