And then his grandfather was gone, leaving Hank standing alone in the dark as the fires went out and rain began falling around him.
Seven
When Hank opened his eyes, a pink sky filtered through the flimsy shades on the windows. He grunted, sitting up, figuring it was dawn. He swung his legs around so his feet touched the floor, wincing as every muscle he moved throbbed and ached.
“You’re awake!” Nadya was instantly beside him. Her brow was creased with worry. “I thought you’d never get up. I was getting scared. I nearly called for the doctor.”
He touched her cheek. “But it’s still early,” he said. “Did you think I’d sleep the day away?”
“But you have,” she assured him and stared, head cocked, as if he’d missed the punch line of a well-told joke. “The day is all but gone. It’s already sundown,” she said, and he realized she was wearing her corseted magician’s assistant costume with the bustle, short enough to show off her long legs in fishnet stockings. “You’ve been out like a light for almost twenty-four hours. Even Coonts came in and tried to wake you. You missed the matinee, and he was furious! The crowd almost started a riot!”
“I missed a show? How could that be?” Hank had never missed a show in all the months he’d been traveling with Coonts’s company.
Unnerved, he got up and switched on the bedside lamp. Then he turned and caught his reflection in the mirror. “What the devil—” he started to say, touching his head, his eyes widening at the sight of a white streak running through his hair from scalp to ends that hadn’t been there before. And the teardrop birthmark on his left shoulder itched and appeared swollen. It was definitely larger than it had been.
What had happened to him? Was it the rain dance? Had it affected him physically, aging him as he’d slept?
“Are you all right?” Nadya asked, slim brow creased. “You’re scaring me.”
Hank wasn’t anywhere close to being okay. Something had happened to him. He felt like he’d had no rest despite apparently having dozed through an entire day. But he gave Nadya a smile. “I’m fine.”
“You think you can go on tonight?”
“Yes,” he said without thinking, because he knew Coonts would can him if he missed the evening show, too, no matter if he was the rainmaker.
Despite the shakiness in his limbs and the fog in his head, he got up and showered, put some food in his belly, and donned his costume. By the time they left the room, Hank felt almost as good as new. The sidewalk warmed the soles of his shoes as he and Nadya set off for the theater, walking the handful of blocks through the thick summer heat. Hank could sense the lingering static in the air from the previous night; the vibration made his skin prickle.
As they came around the corner of the building, strolling hand in hand toward the rear entrance, Nadya nudged him, alerting him to the crowd of several dozen gathered there. Some were the grim-faced farmers he’d gotten so used to seeing, begging at once for him to save their drought-stricken crops, promising him everything from land to their daughters’ hands if he’d do it. And there were others who shouted, “Where were you this afternoon, Chief? We paid good money to see you, and we had to watch a dancing dog take your place!”
The farmers may have looked desperate, but the disappointed ticket holders shook their fists and frowned. Money was so very tight, and they were clearly angry. He addressed them first.
“I’ll get you tickets for tonight,” Hank told them as he approached.
“It’s sold out!” a woman cried. “And the troupe leaves tomorrow!”
“I’m sorry,” Hank said, their scowling faces surrounding him. He touched his hair where the white streak had appeared. “I didn’t mean to miss the show, but I was taken ill—”
“Leave the chief alone!”
Suddenly, there was the farmer, Bert Peckinpaw, pushing his way through the scrum, stepping forward in his overalls, his straw-colored hair askew, a grateful smile on his face. “Littlefoot saved my crops last night,” he announced. “And I’ve come today with compensation for his services.” He fixed his deeply lined eyes on Hank. “You never gave me a dollar sum, and we’re a bit tight right now until the harvest. But I hope you’ll take what I offer as a small token of my gratitude.”
With that, he looked behind him and whistled. The crowd shifted as two boys came forward, one towing two goats on rope leads and the other holding a pair of squawking chickens by their feet.
Hank stood without speaking, uncertain of what to say. He thought of his grandfather and all the times his efforts at healing had brought him beaded moccasins, whiskey, woven blankets, and, even once, a half-tamed wolf.
“Thank you,” he finally uttered, taking the tethered goats from one boy while the other proceeded to stuff the pair of chickens into Nadya’s arms. “I’m honored to accept your gifts.”
“Hell, Chief, you’ve given me a second chance,” Bert Peckinpaw told him with a pat on his back. “You saved my family.”
In that moment, Hank understood what his father had been trying to tell him before he’d left the reservation. The gift his grandfather had passed down to him was deserving of more than a few minutes in the spotlight of a vaudeville stage.
That night after his performance—when he’d left the theater with Nadya, sharing his umbrella in the rain—Hank realized with sudden clarity that his days with Coonts’s traveling show were numbered. Over multiple cups of coffee, he and Nadya sat in a booth at the nearest diner and began to make plans, deciding they would stay on just long enough for him to visit more farms along the road, to see if what he’d done for Bert Peckinpaw could be repeated, to save enough money so they could begin a family. Hank wanted nothing more than for Nadya to put away the corseted and bustled costumes forever and marry him. He would take only enough money to plant the seeds for their new life. He would not become greedy, as his grandfather had warned in his dream.
Once he had squirreled away a sufficient nest egg, he could retire his “gift” and settle down. He wanted nothing more than to be out of the public eye so he could own some land on which he could grow both a crop and a family.
But getting out from under Coonts’s thumb might prove even more difficult than getting in.
Eight
Six months later, after a hundred more vaudeville shows and a dozen privately arranged rain-making ceremonies in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, Hank’s black hair had gone completely white. The teardrop stain on his shoulder had become darker and larger, so much so that Nadya worried that it was infected. His taut cheeks became weathered, pinched at the corners of his mouth and eyes. He had the countenance of a much older man when he was not even thirty.
But Hank understood his power now. He knew what he could do and how to control it. He had learned how to call up the lightning and thunder, how to make a gentle rain or even a downpour if he so desired. And more amazing still, he had twice conjured up a beast of a storm, full of such fury that the wind spun in funnels, stirring black clouds that kicked up plumes of dirt where they touched the earth.
Had his grandfather been able to summon the spirits in such a way? Or were Hank’s powers even stronger? Perhaps his gift was greater than he knew.
“You can’t do this much longer. Your body can’t take it,” Nadya said one day, confessing her concern for him. “This isn’t normal, Hank. Who knows what could happen to you?”
Hank didn’t have an answer. Anything could happen. Nothing could happen. All he knew was that each ceremony took something from him that he never regained: a mix of his strength and energy, even his youth. Every rainmaking drained him beyond reason, and he would collapse afterward, falling into a weary stupor, sometimes for hours but often for days. The past few times when he’d awakened, he couldn’t remember where he was or who he was. Even if Nadya reminded him, it was often an hour or more before the missing pieces returned, falling back into place. He understood all too well how much that worried the woman he loved. He had to admit that it worried him, too.
But she looked like she didn’t believe him. “If you don’t stop soon, I’m afraid it will kill you. There is nothing else to prove, is there? And we have enough money to leave. We don’t need much to live on besides.”
Hank knew she was right. These days, he hardly recognized himself in the mirror. He seemed to have turned into an old man overnight. And what did he have to prove at this point? He had become a big draw in the world of vaudeville, so much so that Coonts began dropping hints about giving Hank a show of his own, a Wild West troupe of which he’d be the star. But Hank wasn’t about to sell any more of his soul, not even for buckets of money. It was more about getting his due and then getting out. He’d had stories written about him in small-town newspapers, had received telegrams from women he hadn’t met proposing marriage, and had been presented with enough livestock that he could have populated his own farm. Instead, he’d sold each and every goat, pig, duck, hen, and burro, tucking away the cash in a leather belt he wore around his waist and rarely took off.
Inside the money belt, he kept something else as important: the deed to land in Walnut Ridge, Missouri, given to him by a grateful farmer whose crops he’d saved with a good hard drenching. “It’s a parcel I inherited from a cousin, but I can’t do nothing with it. I’m stretched enough as it is,” the man had told him. “Besides, it’s all I have that’s worth something.”
It was more than enough as far as Hank was concerned. It gave him the chance to make plans, real plans, which didn’t include going back to the reservation. He had never fit in with his people; he’d always dreamed of leaving for somewhere better, a place he could make his own. Not only did the deed to the Missouri farm give him that, but he intended to take Nadya with him as soon as they could leave, especially since her costumes were becoming noticeably snug. When he helped to corset her in, he had to leave the stays wider and wider. She wasn’t far along into the pregnancy—two months, by her best estimate—but then she was slender, leaving little room to mask her growing waistline. Soon it would be impossible to hide, at which point the jig would be up whether they were ready to leave the troupe or not. There was no room for a woman with a baby in vaudeville.
When morning sickness struck Nadya so badly she could barely stand and smile, faking her way through the magician’s set without running off the stage to puke, Hank decided it was time to talk to his boss. On the morning after the first of three sold-out shows in Omaha, he determinedly knocked on Coonts’s hotel room door, hoping he’d find him in a generous mood. He meant to ease into the conversation, but it didn’t work out quite the way he planned.
“I appreciate my time with the show, but my run is nearly over,” he said without prelude, instinctively touching the newfound lines on his face. “I can’t keep up the pace, and I’m not sure I want to. I’m growing old before my time, and I need to live my life before it’s too late.”
“On the contrary, son, I believe your run with the show has barely begun. As for that white hair and shopworn look”—Coonts shrugged, hardly appearing as upset as Nadya about Hank’s transformation—“they only make you appear more legit. It’s time you let me convince you that this Wild West show is your future. Our future,” his boss told him, flushed and bright-eyed from counting the previous night’s receipts. “There’s a lot of money to be made before the tide turns and the crowds want a dancing pig instead of a rain-making Injun.”
Hank’s mouth went dry. He didn’t care about the money. He was tired, plain and simple: tired of performing and of using a sacred tradition as entertainment. Maybe it hadn’t bothered him so much in the beginning when he was hell-bent on making a name for himself, but it weighed on him now.
“You have your dreams,” he told Coonts, “and I have mine. They’re not one and the same.” He shook his head. “I’ll stay with the troupe through this last leg and finish the dates, but that’s it.” He wasn’t willing to risk any more than he already had simply to plump Coonts’s bank account. “After Omaha and Des Moines, I’m done and so is Nadya.”
“Is that right?” His boss clasped fingers over the straining vest buttons on his belly, his thick eyebrows coming to a peak as he stared at Hank point-blank. “Our deal was that you’re in my act as long as I’m happy, and I’m happy as a pig in swill. We shook on it. You’re not going back on your word now, are you, Chief?”
“But it was all on your terms! I don’t remember getting a say in things,” Hank said, frustration rattling his voice.
“That’s right, boy. You didn’t.” Coonts’s eyes narrowed on Hank, as if daring him to put up a stink. “So get any wild ideas of running off out of your head,” he added, waving a hand dismissively. “You and your gypsy whore are staying put until I say otherwise. You got that?”
Gypsy whore?
“What did you say?” Hank blinked.
“You think I don’t know what’s going on with you two? Hell, boy, I’ve got eyes.” Coonts laughed. “I know she’s in the family way. She doesn’t exactly fit her costumes the way she used to, and don’t think I haven’t noticed how green she is around the gills, too. I’m already casting for her replacement.”
“You’re firing her?”
“You heard me,” Coonts said and smiled in a way that proved he’d gotten the reaction he wanted. “Pretty girls willing to show off their gams and hold magicians’ props are a dime a dozen. I may just wake up tomorrow and decide she’s out on the street. And if you don’t want my lawyers dragging your red-cheeked ass into court for breach of contract, you’d better put up and shut up until I decide otherwise.”
Hank stood mutely, so incensed he couldn’t speak.
“Now get the hell out of here and grab some sleep.” Coonts gave a nod, as if Hank’s silence meant he’d given in. “I think we’re done yapping.”
Oh, I’m done all right, Hank decided and left the room, taking off as fast as he could before his heart leaped from his chest, before his hands somehow ended up around Coonts’s neck. How had the fat man turned the tables so quickly? Instead of allowing Hank to peacefully resign, Coonts had made it all about control.
And Hank didn’t appreciate being reminded that he wasn’t the one who held the cards in this particular game.
Of course, he told Nadya nothing of the confrontation. Instead, he acted as if Coonts had given them both the green light to electively depart the caravan and start their new lives.
“I think we should pack our bags now,” he said as she pressed her small hands to his chest, such an eager smile on her face that Hank hated to lie. “If all goes well, we may leave tonight.”
That evening when he performed onstage, he was keenly aware of Coonts in the box seats on the balcony to his left. As he chanted and danced, the same anger that had arisen within him in Coonts’s hotel room swirled inside his blood like a fever. The more he tried to bury it, the larger it got, until a mounting pressure swelled in his head as words came out of his mouth that he’d never meant to say, ancient phrases that came from somewhere deep in his subconscious, pleas for the sky and earth to feel the same fury he felt, for the spirits to rise up and assert their true power over man.
Answering his call, the theater lights began to flicker and thunder rumbled through the building, swaying the lamps above and shaking the stage beneath Hank’s feet. The audience gasped and applauded, awestruck, as if it were all part of the act, concocted purely for their enjoyment.
Until the air inside picked up strength and lifted paper programs and wayward kerchiefs, flinging them upward and rotating them like a twister. Above Hank’s head, the velvet curtains billowed and the fog from the dry ice blowers dissipated in the swirl of wind. As a white-hot choler seared his heart, Hank begged the Great Spirit for lightning to strike Coonts’s box. His final, unforgettable act.
Within seconds, a ball of fire appeared out of nowhere, hitting the pil
lar positioned just beneath Coonts’s box. The flames licked at the painted column below, spitting upward toward the balcony as smoke belched and the audience coughed.
“Help!” people screamed, but Hank barely heard them. He focused solely on Wilbur Coonts, suddenly on his feet and backing away from the gray clouds billowing from below. The man’s mouth moved, cursing him, but his voice was lost in the howl of wind and the frantic cries of the audience.
Hank willed the wind to toss Coonts over the brass rail and into the fire below. As he watched, an invisible hand bent Coonts over the banister while the frightened man desperately tried to hang on.
“Stop this!” Hands grabbed at Hank’s arm, and there was Nadya’s voice, sharp in his ear. “Please,” she begged him, “stop it now!”
Somehow the touch of her hand and the fear in her tone doused the fury inside him, and Hank went still, breathing hard, the swirl of air settling down until the conflagration went out and the howling winds ceased. Though the panicked audience still cried out as they pushed their way toward the exit doors, inside Hank’s mind, all went deathly quiet.
Though the silence existed only for a moment before Coonts began to shake his fist and yell, “You’re done, Chief, you hear me? You’re finished in vaudeville!”
Hank met Nadya’s eyes, and his own filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he meant to say, only no sound came out. Still, she seemed to know just what he said.
“Let’s go,” she whispered and reached out her hand.
Hank nodded, doing as she bid and hurrying after her as they slipped out a side door to avoid any crowds gathered outside the stage door. Huddled together, heads ducked against the torrential rain, they hurried back to the hotel.
The Truth About Love and Lightning Page 8