by Tom Lin
Mumbling unintelligibly the man stumbled up and onto the stage.
The ringmaster steered him firmly before the caged pagan. “On my cue, you will look Proteus in the eye and move about.”
“Move about?” the hapless volunteer mumbled.
“Aye, move about,” the ringmaster replied. “Wave your arms, tap your feet.”
The drunk shrugged. “If ye say so.”
“Behold!” the ringmaster called. He snapped his fingers and at this cue the first man stepped to the cage and waited. After a moment Proteus turned his gaze to the man who had approached him. The tattooed pagan grasped the iron bars of his cage and leaned forward. The men stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity. Hesitantly the volunteer raised his arm in a kind of strange salute. Proteus moved his arm to mirror the volunteer’s, lagging behind, like a slow reflection in uncertain glass. Now the man lowered his arm and Proteus did the same, the delay between them diminishing. Together they blinked, opened and closed their mouths, raised and lowered their limbs. Each was becoming more attuned to the other’s movements. And then it happened.
It was so quick that at first Ming didn’t notice anything and by the time he might have been able to articulate what, precisely, had taken place, the effect had already vanished. In the cage stood Proteus as he had always been, and outside it the volunteer as he had always been. But it was undeniable that for a moment it had not been Proteus in the cage, that for a moment this naked and tattooed pagan had become a precise duplicate of the man outside his cage, such that Proteus had disappeared altogether.
The volunteer staggered backward in shock and fell to the stage floor. Beside Ming the former priest sat motionless, his mouth open in awe. Several men in the audience cursed and leapt up, their pews skidding across the dirt. One man drew his gun and waved it about, though even in his drunkenness Ming knew this was activity without purpose or aim. The ringmaster called for the men to settle, settle, and one by one they took their seats. The man who’d drawn his iron returned it to its holster. Proteus stood serenely in the cage unchanged.
“Thank you, good sir,” the ringmaster said, helping the drunk on the stage to his feet.
The volunteer’s expression was fearful and the ringmaster motioned with his cane, indicating that the man should find his seat again. From the wings came the stagehands again and with low grunts they dragged the cage back into the shadows.
Now a small figure walked onto the stage into the lantern light. It was a young boy. The ringmaster tucked his cane under an arm and with both hands guided the child by the shoulders to center stage.
“This here is Hunter Reed,” the ringmaster said. “He represents the second miracle you will see with your own two eyes tonight.” The ringmaster stooped low so his face was level with the boy’s, inspecting his face for a moment before again addressing the audience. “As you will soon find, Hunter Reed’s miracle is one to be heard rather than seen. For this here boy is the world’s first and only true ventriloquist.” The ringmaster moved his hands through an inscrutable series of designs and the boy nodded and held his thin arms aloft, palms open toward the audience. “You can see for yourself that he comes to us empty-handed, bearing no puppet, no props to fulfill his promise of ventriloquism. This for good reason.” The ringmaster smiled broadly and now his hands traced out a second, more complex gesture that Ming could scarcely follow.
The boy lowered his arms and nodded again. “My name is Hunter Reed,” he said. Or seemed to say, for his lips did not move. “When I was a child I fell ill with ague. My parents made preparations to bury me. But my fever broke on the fourth day, and with the grace of God I made a full recovery. My dear mother and father were not so fortunate. They took ill with my same fever and died hours apart, soon after.”
The words were coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The boy’s voice sounded high and clear in Ming’s head. The ex-priest beside him wore a confused and fearful expression.
“The fever left me deaf and dumb,” the boy said. “But I found I could still speak, and people might still hear me.”
“Gentlemen,” the ringmaster boomed, “you are not deceived. This is no trick of the ear. This is the second miracle, the true ventriloquist.”
The boy bowed. Someone in the audience called out to him, to ask whether he had any brothers or sisters like him, but he gave no reply.
“He can’t hear a damned thing,” someone else said in wonderment. Another man marveled how awful silent it must be inside the boy’s head.
Next the boy demonstrated singing, and he sang a song that played in Ming’s mind. He demonstrated whispering, and shouting. He demonstrated how he could choose to speak to only one person, or two or three, or the whole lot of them. When he was finished the ringmaster caught his gaze and signed something to him and at this the boy bowed once more and bid the audience good night.
Now the ringmaster called for the third miracle. Their last miracle, he said, was also their most impressive. It had caused men and women alike to faint, horses to scatter, and observers to utter cries of witchcraft and terror. From the dark wings of the stage emerged the woman who had first called Ming to the magic show. She was dressed in a diaphanous gown and she carried in one hand a torch and in the other a crystal decanter that glinted in the inconstant light of her torch. Ming sat transfixed.
“Gentlemen,” the ringmaster said with a twirl of his cane, “I present to you, for your consideration, the third and final miracle which you will see with your own two eyes this evening.” With an outstretched hand he motioned to the woman with the torch and decanter and began to retreat toward the wings. “The fireproof woman,” the ringmaster announced.
The fireproof woman swept her torch in an arc, describing a curve of heat and light. She brought the flame down close to the earth, where it spilled and licked over the dirt. And now she waved it before the men sitting closest to her, who shrank away from the fire. A stagehand carried out a small pyre of kindling and brush and set it down on the stage. The fireproof woman lofted her torch into the air and theatrically she strode over to the pyre.
“I test the reality of the flame,” she said. She touched the torch to the kindling and shortly the pyre erupted in gouts and swaying tongues of fire. “Real fire,” she said. She set the crystal decanter down by her feet and holding the torch close to her body she danced her free hand through the flame, slower than seemed possible, a slowness lingering at the edge of believability. She smiled at the audience and Ming’s breath caught in his throat. “I do not burn,” the woman said, bending down to collect the decanter. “I cannot burn,” she declared, her voice firm.
In a single smooth motion she uncorked the decanter with her thumb and upended it over her head. The wet contents poured out and saturated her gown heavy and translucent, so that the curves of her body were visible in the wavering firelight. It took only a second for the fumes to travel to the pews and when they reached Ming he knew that it was kerosene. He was gripped by an unconscious urge to leap up and stop her. Dripping in kerosene that shimmered gossamer over her body the fireproof woman dropped the torch at her glistening feet and in an instant she was afire. The men in the front row kicked backward reflexively and nearly toppled their pews. The audience cried out in earnest.
Ming stared, paralyzed, as wreathed in flames the fireproof woman touched a burning finger to her incandescent lips—hush now, look, she was all right. Her gown was burning away into drifting embers and she stood naked and utterly untouchable before her shocked audience. She clasped her hands together and bowed low, picking her torch up again. At this precise moment the fire began to sputter along her lithe body, snaking and writhing in twisting sheets of flame. And then she clapped a hand over her torch and snuffed it out. In an instant woman and torch together were extinguished, leaving a darkness total and cold. Someone had turned out the lanterns and the stage lights. In that sudden darkness Ming heard her quiet footsteps receding from the stage and then the shuffling of stagehan
ds followed by the booted feet of the ringmaster returning to the stage.
One of the stagehands relit a lantern and the ringmaster appeared before them in dim relief. “Thank ye,” he said simply, and with that, the show was over. The man seated beside Ming broke into cheers and the other spectators soon followed.
Ming sat for a while as the audience thinned and filtered out. He had half a mind to go and speak to the fireproof woman, to tell her how familiar she was to him already, to hold her in his arms and call her by a different woman’s name. Ming rose from his pew and at once was forced back down by a wave of nausea. He was still blind drunk. Again he tried to stand but again he had to sit, breathing slow and deep. He closed his eyes and the world reeled. He wondered if the fireproof woman would understand if he told her how much she reminded him of his Ada, whose face he could not quite remember anymore anyway. Besides it was not that the two women looked alike, exactly, but rather that they seemed to be iterations on similar forms. He felt himself falling, or perhaps sliding, whether forward or backward he did not know, did not care to know, all movement tended downward at close of day, all movement everywhere has always tended downward. His head came to rest on the cool earth with a muffled and painless jolt. A moment or a thousand moments passed; then hands were tugging at his arms—he was pulled upright—and with one arm draped around a small figure at his side he began to walk.
12
Shaken awake, Ming opened his eyes to the prophet looming over his bed, an ancient hand resting on his aching shoulder. He was back in the inn, back in the bed. The room was awash in a dim blue glow. Predawn. How had he come home?
“Quickly, my child,” the prophet said. “Violence is seeking her. You must go.”
Without asking Ming knew the prophet was speaking of the fireproof woman. He stood and found he was still wearing his gun belt. Instinctively he passed his hands over the reassuring cold metal of his revolver, his railroad spike. “Stay here,” he told the prophet.
“It is necessary that I accompany you,” the old man insisted.
Ming began to protest but caught himself. There wasn’t time.
They left the room and went down the stairs and out the door, the prophet leading and Ming following. In the strange light that filters down before each desert morning the shapes of those buildings and the signs upon them seemed artifacts of some other, subtler world. Blurs at forty paces resolved to hieroglyphics at twenty and became words at five. They passed the saloon and the courthouse, the school, the church. The prophet took turns down alleyways unfamiliar to Ming. Or perhaps he had only been drunk and could not remember. At last they came upon the canvas door of the magic show’s tent and the prophet bade Ming draw his weapon—not the gun, the spike—and move without sound. Ming obliged. Together they parted the flaps of the door and ducked inside.
The tent was dark but for a single lantern burning sedately center stage. By its dim light Ming could just make out the empty pews where only a few hours earlier he had sprawled in liquored nausea. He moved down the aisle and crossed the stage, past the darkened blot of earth still damp with kerosene from the third miracle. The prophet hung back, lingering by where they had entered. Ming had a memory of the fireproof woman aflame, so beautiful it hurt to recall.
He was interrupted from his reverie by muffled mutterings coming from behind the curtain. They belonged to a man’s voice that lingered just beyond recognition. He parted the black cloth and slipped backstage. A slurred mantra became clearer as he stole through the darkness. Here and there he could pick out the words the man was saying. “Blasphemers. Devil’s work.” At last Ming saw the source of the voice. A slouching figure with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, lurching unsteadily about. Ming recognized the shadow’s voice now. It was the ex-priest, his collar and frock in disarray. He was stumbling toward the canvas-walled rooms by the rear of the tent. The performers’ quarters.
“Kill him,” came an urgent whisper.
Ming whipped his head around but the prophet was nowhere to be seen.
“Kill him,” the voice repeated. Ming glanced around in the darkness. There was no one but him and the ex-priest. In a flash he realized it was the disembodied voice of the second miracle, the boy Hunter Reed, the only true ventriloquist.
“Please, sir,” the boy said. “You must kill him. Or he will kill her. Us.”
The ex-priest fell quiet and stopped in his tracks, as though he too had heard. He swung his head about in broad, lazy arcs. “Mind playin tricks,” he grumbled, then raised his bottle of whiskey and drank deeply, gasping when he was done. Again he looked around and again finding nothing he set off once more in his murderous ambitions, breathing slow and heavy. What was left of his whiskey sloshed as he moved and his steps crunched softly on the dirt floor.
Crouching low Ming approached the man from behind, stepping when he stepped, matching him footfall for footfall.
“Blasphemers,” the ex-priest said. “False priests, abhorrent to him and his glory.”
Ming adjusted his grip on his railroad spike. The iron was beginning to warm where his hand was wrapped around it.
“And ain’t I still a man of God?” the ex-priest said. “Ain’t I still holy?”
When Ming was two strides away he uncoiled from his crouch and sprang upon the man, looping an arm around his neck and squeezing his windpipe as he pulled him backward and down onto the waiting point of the railroad spike. The ex-priest gave only a little gasp as Ming drove the spike through his tattered vestments and deep into his back. Bottle and gun slipped from the man’s fingers and fell to the ground. His eyes were wild and his feet kicked more and more slowly, pushing up little dunes in the dirt, and finally his eyes glassed and Ming let him fall deadweight onto the ground. Ming reached down and pulled his spike free and wiped it clean on the dead man’s blood-ruined shirt.
His head was still aching from his earlier drunkenness and he sat down beside the body of the ex-priest. “Prophet,” he called. “Where are you?”
“Thank you,” someone said. Hunter Reed.
The door to one of the canvas-walled rooms opened, letting out a slice of lanternlight. Ming holstered his spike and rose to his feet. Seven figures emerged—the ringmaster, the tattooed pagan, the boy, the fireproof woman, two stagehands still clad in black, and, to Ming’s surprise, the prophet himself.
“Old man, how in the hell—?” Ming began.
“Ming Tsu,” the ringmaster interrupted. “Pleasure.” He strode forward, hand outstretched.
In an instant Ming drew and cocked his pistol. “Stop walking and start talking,” he said.
“Of course, Mr. Tsu,” the ringmaster said, still walking forward. “I’m sure this is an unexpected—”
Ming fired into the ground three paces ahead of the ringmaster’s feet. “Stop moving, man.”
The ringmaster halted and smiled. “My apologies, Mr. Tsu. I’m simply pleased to be formally making your acquaintance tonight.”
Ming recocked his pistol, keeping his sights trained squarely on the ringmaster’s chest.
“Your companion came to us,” he said, gesturing at the figure of the prophet standing behind him in shadow. “Hazel Lockewood here helped you to your inn after the show. She delivered you to the care of your companion.”
The fireproof woman nodded.
“It is the nature of miracles to attract more of their kind,” the ringmaster said. “The miraculous recognizes its own.”
“I knew the prophet was no ordinary man,” Hazel said, her voice so familiar to Ming. “He told me of his gift and I told him of mine. He said we would pass within death’s compass tonight.”
“Death’s compass?” Ming asked.
“He said we might very well die tonight,” said the ringmaster gravely.
Ming tapped the barrel of his gun lightly with his finger. “Might still.”
“Enough,” said an ancient voice. The prophet stepped forward. “Put away the iron.”
“Pro
phet—”
“You and I are among friends, my child.”
Ming did not move.
The prophet walked out from the group, past the ringmaster, past the divot in the earth where Ming’s warning shot had buried itself in the dirt. He stopped in front of Ming and resting a gnarled finger on the barrel he lowered Ming’s gun. “Man out of bounds,” he said, “our services are requested.”
“We’re headed to Reno,” the ringmaster said. “Our party is six: myself, Hazel Lockewood, Hunter Reed, Proteus, and my two stagehands, Antonio Gomez the Mexican, and Notah the Navajo.” He gestured to each as he named them. “But we have none among us who can properly fight. I’m willing to pay more than a fair price for your company and protection on our travels. I’m told you know better than anyone here the dangers that may present themselves between this tent and Reno. Outlaws. Indians.” He glanced down at the crumpled form of the dead ex-priest. “Disillusioned zealots, armed lunatics.”
“Who told you I was bound for Reno?” Ming said sharply.
“Californie,” Hazel interjected. “He’s headed for Californie.”
She was staring straight at Ming. The prophet must have told her, he guessed.
The ringmaster studied Ming’s face a moment with an expression of faint curiosity. “What’s in Californie?”
“Ain’t your place to know,” Ming said.
The ringmaster smiled politely. “Regardless. There’s no better way over the Sierras, Mr. Tsu, than going west from Reno by that selfsame railroad you helped to build.”
“I’ll need money for horses and saddles,” Ming said, “and ammunition.”
“Of course,” the ringmaster said, clicking his tongue and tucking his cane beneath his arm. He darted a hand into his breast pocket and extracted a packet of bills. “I can secure any supplies and provisions you require. As for your compensation,” he continued, counting out a number of bills, “I can offer you eight hundred dollars.” The ringmaster held the money out to Ming.