John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“That’s a mean way to do him,” the negro kept saying, shaking his head and dabbing at the cuts the stones had opened on the horse’s hide. “That’s a mean way.”

Once Diving Dobbin has climbed out and been led off, shaking himself dry, the Shoot-the-Chutes is back in business.

“Would ye like to try it?” asks Brigid, squeezing his arm and with a hopeful glint in her eye. He hesitates, a lifetime of embarrassments holding him back, and she senses it, adding, “But of course I’d hate to get wet, wouldn’t I?”

They settle for the bleachers and watch the flat-bottomed skiffs sluicing down the channels then flying off the final lip to smack and skitter across the surface of the Lagoon, passengers shouting and laughing and sprayed with water as they desperately grasp the sides and try not to spill out.

“They must have made quite a number of tests for this,” says Harry. “Deciding on the slope of the chute, the design of the boat.”

“Dangerous,” says Brigid, “but not fatal.”

“I’ve never been much of a dare-devil,” Harry admits, then regrets pointing it out.

“There’s not many who are,” says Brigid, rising to leave. “Which is why your fillums are such a sensation.”

They pass under the obscenely grinning Funny Face then, demonic eyes and tombstone choppers gleaming, and into Steeplechase Park. It is another machine with too many moving parts, thinks Harry, and at first he is frozen with indecision, finally allowing Brigid to tug him to a booth where a nickel buys you a dozen chances to break a china plate by throwing a hard black ball. They are a far cry from actual china, of course, but Brigid squeals with glee at each of the three she manages to shatter.

“I knocked one over in a lady’s cupboard last year,” she says, “and it was a day’s wages lost.”

He had thought at first that the plates were prizes, not the object of pleasurable destruction, and is impressed with her skill. “I’d never have hit as many.”

“Oh, we Irish are known for our hurling,” she says, teasing him. “It’s bricks through the landlord’s window and on from there.”

The Steeplechase horses come whizzing around a curve in the track above them, trailing excited screams from the riders. Harry is still smarting from his cowardice at the Shoot-the-Chutes. “There’s not much of a line,” he says, pointing. “We should go.”

Brigid stops to look at him. “Are ye sure?”

“ A half a mile in half a minute ,” he says, quoting the painted advertisement at the entrance gate. “We have to experience that.”

They climb the stairs, Harry pulling himself up the railing, and are in the second group of eight couples waiting to mount. The height and the steep decline of the first section of track begin to work on his nerves, and he calms himself by imagining what alterations would allow a camera operator to ride with the device in hand and crank film through the aperture. Certainly an assistant behind to keep him from falling off, and a special housing to reduce the bulk of the apparatus. But would the image be only a blur? Would the spectator in the theater grab his hat, gasp in fear, suffer a queasy stomach?

“Who’s first?” barks the loader, a slightly cross-eyed man in shirtsleeves.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” says Brigid.

“But I’ll block your view.”

“Ladies first, then,” says the loader and taps his foot with impatience as Brigid anchors her hatpin securely, then steps onto the box and takes his hand, deftly arranging her skirt to throw her leg over the back of the hobbyhorse. Harry has a moment of panic but the loader squats down without comment, offering his shoulder for leverage, and he is able to drag his bad leg over the saddle and get himself centered as the other couples arrange themselves. He feels ridiculous for an instant, a grown man on a wooden horse, but then the starter yells “Ready?!” and he puts his arms the only place they can go, snug around her waist, and the nape of her lovely neck close to his lips, the smell of her hair — he has half closed his eyes with the rapture of it when the bell rings and the horses are released, eight across, eight couples screaming as they plunge down and veer sharply this way and that, Brigid clasping his wrist with one of her hands and he can’t tell if that’s her heart beating with excitement under his fingers or his own, pounding his blood out into his extremities, bits of track and safety wall and sky whipping across his eyes, his hat blowing off his head, squeezing the wooden horse between his knees to keep from being flung out into space and then they are falling abruptly and speeding down the final straightaway, second across the finish line and coasting hoarse-voiced to a stop.

They are helped off the wooden steed, Harry reeling with dizziness and taking her hand as they step through the exit tent and all of a sudden there is air blasting up from the floor lifting Brigid’s dress up over her stockings and a negro dwarf in clown paint and horns poking him with a staff that gives him a jolt while a taller white clown jabs a pitchfork at him, trying to separate him from her, Brigid holding her skirt down with her free hand and the other couples around them now receiving the same, the blowholes flouncing colorful lacy undergarments and the men’s hair shooting up at the dwarf’s electric prod and then Harry hears the laughter and realizes they are on a raked stage, being tormented for the jollification of the people who have just come through the ride themselves.

They escape the Blowhole Theater to the bright outdoors together, both blushing, Harry not letting go of her hand and Brigid not asking him to.

“We almost won,” she says finally.

“All else being equal, the heaviest couple will always win.”

“Well, then I certainly did my part.”

She is perhaps an inch taller than Harry, with broader shoulders, but slender of waist and ankle.

“It felt like more than half a minute.”

“If ye hadn’t been there to hold me,” she says, talking loudly over the shouts and music from the Wonder Wheel to their left, “I’d have fainted dead away.”

There is a bin full of hats by the exit gate, and Harry recovers his own.

They wander then, hand in hand, past the pushcart vendors with their clams and corn, their pretzels and red hots, through the Bowery with its penny arcades and Kill the Coon games, its slot machines and dime museums and kinetoscope parlors, Harry cranking the machine to demonstrate how it is the same but different than his motion-picture camera, past the side show with its lackluster freaks of nature slouching out front, settling finally at a restaurant deck overlooking Tilyou’s Bathhouse and the crowded beach beyond. Harry orders clam chowder and crackers for them and they watch the bathers cavort in the waves.

“One of our earliest numbers was taken here,” says Harry. “ Cakewalk on the Beach . There are new copies going out every week.”

“You turned a camera on the poor souls.”

Women and men jump and somersault and splash each other in their wet wool costumes, shrieks of joy carried over the steady crash of the waves.

“They were enjoying themselves. You can see that in the view.”

“But they’re being photographed while they’re at it. That changes everything.”

“Does it?”

“Without a doubt. People become shy or they prance about like fools. But they don’t act naturally.”

“Then I suppose we should use a lens that can see from a great distance, like field glasses. Or hide the camera somehow—”

“That would be indecent.”

“To share the joy of these bathers with those who live far from the sea—”

“The story you showed me in the box just now—”