But he’d felt a chill at the way Spoor had paused before enunciating the word notions. Because it was true, back in New York he had been able to hide his tastes even while indulging them; had learned to recognize men whose expressions, at once avid and fearful, mirrored his own. He knew his stories and photoplays were efforts to disguise his desires—obviously futile efforts, to judge from Spoor’s icy stare. He had grabbed his pages and left the studio, choosing to walk rather than take the streetcar, in hopes that his anger and fear might burn off.

They hadn’t. Thus, the hashish.

He took another puff, then hid the photoplay in a drawer alongside the notebook where he wrote down his ideas, leaned back in his chair, and gazed at the stained ceiling; its pattern of cracks and bulges gradually transformed into a counterpane and a girl floating in the air, a girl who fragmented into hundreds of Kewpies, their tiny hands and tiny feet pattering against his face like rain as they melted away, one by one.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

DARK RIDES LIKE Hell Gate or the Old Mill weren’t popular on hot afternoons. Visitors preferred the Thousand Islands, where they rode outdoors in canoes, or the Scenic Railway, which wasn’t a railway but a coaster that whizzed past painted backdrops of the Alps and North Pole. The line for the Thousand Islands stretched almost to the park’s entrance, dozens of crying babies and fighting children, parents at the end of their rope.

Hell Gate towered above the opposite end of the midway, the only attraction devoid of the red, white, and blue flags and bunting that fluttered from every other building in the park. Hell Gate’s ominous white pavilion looked more like a church than a ride: a church with an enormous red devil perched on its roof.

The devil was plaster and lath, but Pin’s mother still crossed herself every time she walked past. It had black horns, a leering mouth and enormous eyes, immense bat wings that shaded the ride’s entry like a black umbrella. Horace, a sour man who’d served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, ran the dark ride. When an imperious suffragist once confronted him about the lack of flags on the pavilion, he spat in the canal and said, “Ain’t no American flags in hell, ’cause there ain’t no Americans there.”

Today, only a few dozen people waited in line beside the canal. Pin removed her cap and flapped it at her face. Goddamn it was hot. Squinting, she tried to see who was behind the ticket booth: Larry, a bespectacled college boy, one of the only Negroes at the University of Chicago. Larry read the same kinds of magazines that Pin liked and passed them on to her when he’d finished reading them.