Even as I watched all this my mind was hurrying to understand what Boss had done. He had not put Natty and the Rider into a room together. But at the same time he had not exactly forced them apart. He had given them a room each, and with that sort of separation he had also allowed them the chance to move from one to the other, to be together in secret.
I wanted to think more about this, while at the same time dreading what conclusions I might reach, but Boss was in flood again. “Come come, now,” he called. “Come come. With me now, with me. Go to your places, and find your beds, and close your eyes, then rise up again, and wash your faces, and meet me—” he jabbed at the carpet rippling beneath his feet—“here in an hour, so we can proceed with our business.”
He did not wait to explain what this business might be. He merely jerked his head a few times when he had finished speaking, to show that what he had said was the law, then stamped up the stairs that rose at the end of the lobby, dragging the Spectacle behind him. She had a way of covering the ground with small and rapid steps; these, combined with the baldness and smoothness of her large head, and the glamour of her dress (though now very dusty), made her seem not like an earthly thing at all, but a visitor from the clouds whose natural tendency was to return there.
I dare say I ran this little fantasy through my mind as a way of preventing myself from thinking how Natty had reacted to her instructions. When I turned away from the Spectacle I found her hoisting a blanket-roll onto her shoulder; her face was flushed.
“We’re the lucky ones,” she said.
“We are?”
“A room of our own? We’re very lucky. When did we last have a room of our own? Not since before we stepped on board the Nightingale. And goodness knows how long ago that was. We have luxury here, Jim, luxury.”
I suppose this was well meant; it seems so, when I think of it now. At the time it felt like a dismissal. A denigration of all the time we had spent together. A humiliation. And because I did not want to show as much in front of our friends, I immediately swung off and followed Boss upstairs.
Quick as I was, I thought everyone must surely have seen what was in my mind; I felt their amusement and their pity and their curiosity all burning into me as I disappeared, and stumbled when I reached the top step.
Natty laughed when she saw this—I heard it, but I did not look back. I pressed on down the corridor and shut the door of my room smartly behind me. In one part of my mind were thoughts I detested: Natty and the Rider trotting side by side, talking together, turning to one another in the darkness while I was drugged and ignorant. In another part: voices telling me I had nothing to fear, I was inventing things, I was exhausted, I had been away from home too long. Both sides feinted and dodged, advanced and retreated, locked and gripped, with nothing to prove which was the wiser, and no one to resolve them.
I shook my head and told myself to concentrate on here and now, on this room, which was the first I had seen for a lifetime. For two years and more. To look at the plain plaster walls and the plain ceiling. The single window. The curtains made of brown sackcloth. The heavy afternoon light soaking through. The bare table beside the bed. The white pitcher and basin, on another table by the window. The metal bed, with its stained bolster and yellow shawl stretched over the mattress.
I threw myself down expecting to lie awake until Boss needed us, and to torture myself by grinding my thoughts together—but I did no such thing. I closed my eyes. I lay in darkness for a moment, and then I slept.
When I awoke again there was no more sunlight seeping through my curtains, and no more gentle day-noises, but shadows blackening my room, and laughter and singing from the saloon below. I scrambled to my feet, splashing water into the basin to wash my face, pulling my tunic straight, tucking my satchel inside it, then tumbled downstairs into the lobby.
But there was no sign of Boss and the rest, only Mr. Vale simpering behind his desk. Although it was dark outside, he was still wearing his eye-shade.
“I expect you are wanting your friends,” he said; his voice was a whispering drawl, and when he finished he wiped his mouth as though his American accent was an embarrassment to him.
I told him I was.
“They are in Cat’s Field,” he said.
“Cat’s Field?”
“At the edge of town, where tomorrow they will perform the Entertainment. They are rehearsing; they will be waiting for you.”
“I know they’ll be waiting for me.”
“Because you are a performer,” he said, looking me up and down and apparently surprised to see me still wearing my dusty Indian costume.
“You could say that,” I told him. Then I suggested, “Perhaps you’ll direct me?”
“I will do better than that.” Mr. Vale laid a hand on my bare arm. “I will take you.” He stared into my face and blinked rapidly, as if dazzled by even the small amount of candlelight that shone around us.
Although I found this disconcerting, because it made him so plaintive, I said I was grateful and asked him to lead the way. He seemed grateful in turn, rubbing his damp hands together and muttering, “I shall, I shall,” before giving a loud holler—a surprisingly aggressive noise—which produced a lanky boy I had not seen before.
“My nephew,” said Mr. Vale. “He will mind things while we are gone.”
This made it seem we were about to set out on a great undertaking, but the nephew did not mind. He merely bowed as we passed into the darkness and wished us goodnight, in a voice even more sibylline than his uncle’s; when I looked round he had already slipped behind the reception-desk as though he owned the place.
This little ceremony was so strange, so insignificant in the scheme of things yet so elaborated, I felt I had merely stepped from one kind of confusion to another. Everything I saw seemed larger than life; every behavior was like a performance. And remained so, when we turned out from the stableyard into the street, and found its shopfronts and houses patched with lamplight, each of them showing a little scene of families eating, or men smoking, or grandmothers watching the bustle and traffic of the street. Real people, I kept reminding myself. But everyone just an inch away from the wilderness, and the night-breeze prowling over the empty places, and the moonlight that stretched to infinity.
We had walked only two or three yards when I discovered that Mr. Vale, who had seemed very shy when we first met him in his hotel, became almost as voluble as Boss when he left it. With the acceleration of a man running downhill, and before I could ask any questions of my own, he launched into a history of the town (brief and turbulent, as I hardly needed to be told), of local characters (farmers, cattle-men, precious beauties, rustlers and murderers), of the weather (hot, and sometimes hotter), and of memorable emergencies (fires, mostly), all of which he remembered with equal excitement. And once he had painted the scene in this way he built the frame around it, giving a disquisition on the whole of Texas, and explaining in the year of our Lord 1803 it had been sold by Napoleon to America in the same bundle as the neighboring state of Louisiana, but still contained a great many interested parties from France and Spain, not to mention Indians from tribes living round about, and might therefore be considered a very competitive sort of place, full of large areas of nothing which were apparently valuable to all and sundry.
Such a comprehensive lesson had a curious effect on me, and not just because it was so unexpected. It made me feel that Mr. Vale’s strenuous efforts to establish himself in the town, and so become a citizen of the New World by means of hard work, were really a sort of oppression—because they had smothered his true nature, which I now saw was open and easy.
This made me warm to him, despite the great difference in our appearance and age and manners, because he reminded me of myself—of the happiness I had felt with Hoopoe and White Feather, which had diminished as soon as I left them. Although I did not say as much, in my heart I knew I would have preferred to be back with those dear companions, lying under the stars with nothing but their light
and the winds of heaven for my covering.
When we came to Cat’s Field at last Mr. Vale made me stop still and admire it for a moment. I did not need much encouragement: the field was about fifty yards across, cleared of trees and bushes, and now illuminated by a circle of torches on long stakes that Boss and the others had driven in the ground. I suppose these torches were burning some sort of tar or pitch, for really the whole area was bright as day, only more beautiful because the air had turned a soft yellow, which seemed to gild everything it touched.
The Spectacle sat on top of a platform at the dead center of the ring, like a pupil at the center of an eye, except a pupil is dark and she was glowing in a pure white sugar-puff dress that she had previously kept clean in the wagon. This alone would have made her radiant, but she had also coated the skin of her bald head and bare arms with some kind of glittering powder. Everything strange about her appearance, everything that might have been alarming, was softened and stilled and polished. Now her entire reason for being was to display herself, which she did by no more extravagant means than sometimes turning her head from left to right, and sometimes twisting her body a little, but always with a blank expression on her face, so some new cascade of light was continually pouring across her cheek, or down her neck, or along the exposed skin of her shoulder. As a performance it was next to nothing; as an effect it was wonderful.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” whispered Mr. Vale.
This was too quiet for Boss to hear, but he would have paid no attention in any case. He was prowling to and fro across the ring in a bright red topcoat and silk top hat, holding a riding whip in one hand, occasionally glancing at his beloved in order to feel amazed all over again by her incandescence, but otherwise concentrated on Clown, who wore the same yellow costume and face paint as usual, but had colored his eye-sockets a blacker black, and his nose a redder red, and his mouth a deeper carmine. The two of them were apparently playing a game, a very silly game as it seemed to me, which required Boss to pretend that he meant Clown some harm (by sometimes slashing at him with his whip), which Clown could only escape by apologizing for himself with some ridiculous whining and cowering; his costume was soon coated with dust and his expression so wretched it suggested he was about to be tortured to death like a gladiator.
As for Natty and the Rider: I could see no trace of them at first—although once I had scoured the darkness beyond the lights I found them beside the Wee Man’s wagon on the farthest side of the ring, almost lost in shadow. They were leaning together again, with their shoulders touching; although Natty was still dressed in her Indian costume as before, the Rider had equipped himself with a headdress made of long white feathers that swept upward from his brow, then folded into a sort of tail that twisted down his naked back and shone very brightly against the charcoal smeared over his skin.
I told myself there must be a reason for their closeness: they needed to discuss their performance. But the explanation was not good enough—not for such intimacy. I could not look away. I wanted to, but I could not.
Then they broke apart because Boss was tired of making his victim sprawl in the dirt and beg for mercy, and gave a much fiercer snap with his whip. At this, Clown hobbled off and the Rider swung onto the bare back of his pony, riding slowly toward the center of the ring with Natty walking at his side.
It was a very un-theatrical sort of entrance compared to some that I had seen in circuses at home, with no drum rolls or barking from the ringmaster—but the effect was powerful all the same. The Spectacle stopped her writhing; Boss stepped backward and stood on the farther side of Mr. Vale, whose shoulder he gripped in a passion of encouragement; and I—I folded my arms across my chest, and shook my head to clear it of what I had seen, and composed myself to watch.
I thought at first that Natty’s job was simply to stand and admire the Rider while he galloped around her. But as she came into a patch of brighter light I saw she was carrying a collection of properties, including a dozen or so wooden rings about a foot across, which she then laid on the ground in a circle within the larger O described by the torches.
When this was done she advanced toward the center of this circle, where I could not help thinking her dark skin and her nimbleness made a pretty contrast with the Spectacle. But if this had been one part of Boss’s plan, it was soon made insignificant by another. For once Natty had reached her place, the Rider dug his heels into his pony and began galloping around the perimeter of the ring at top speed.
Remember, all this took place in a very confined area—about fifty yards across, as I say—so the pony had to be very neat in his movements, and the Rider also very handy, which he managed by somehow making himself smaller and more efficient, tucking in his elbows and gripping tightly with his knees. For one or two rotations his whole purpose seemed to be no more than that, to move as fast and tidily as possible, but then he became more ambitious. Letting go of the reins and swooping first to his left and then to his right, he skillfully snatched up all the hoops that Natty had laid on the ground, flinging each one back to her with a whoop so that she could catch them; as she did this she gave a little cry, shaking her head to make her hair swarm around her face.
I have made this business of throwing and catching sound simple; in fact it required an almost miraculous sense of balance, with the Rider seeming really to hang in thin air every time he bent down to pluck a hoop from the ground. And the same when he ran through the rest of his repertoire. First he continued to gallop in a circle while Natty placed the wooden rings back on the ground so that he could fetch them up again—this time on the point of a small spear that she gave him; then he took the reins of his pony in his teeth and climbed onto his back to ride while standing upright; then he sat himself down again, but only to slip off one side, bounce his feet hard on the ground, and leap astride again before doing the same the other side.
I suppose his pony was tired when the Rider had finished all these tricks, and was moving more slowly; this was as well, in view of what happened next, and came as the climax to the whole display. After Natty had passed the Rider a small bow and a quiver full of arrows which he slung around his neck, she returned to the center of the circle where she lifted in front of her face a target painted with brightly colored rings—blue, red and black. While the Rider continued to gallop around the outer limit of the circle, Natty then began to spin on her heels, which allowed the Rider to have the target before him at all times, and to fire his arrows at whatever speed he chose.
This turned out to be as quickly as possible, fitting one arrow to the string of his bow as soon as the last had flown, so for a minute or two the whole area of the ring was continually shot through. It was a wonderful feat of skill, but not one I could enjoy in the least. If Natty had lowered the target even a little she would have been killed; if the Rider had missed his mark—the same result.
For all this, I clapped just as loudly as Boss and the Wee Man and Clown and Mr. Vale, when the performance was finished; and when Natty rested the target on the ground, and showed her face glowing and smiling, the Rider slowed to a trot, and then to a walk, and we gathered together in the center of the ring where Boss lifted the Spectacle down from her platform, and I congratulated everyone on their brilliance, which I said would surely dazzle our audience tomorrow.
The Rider was breathing fast, and when he took off his headdress I noticed his hair was saturated with sweat. He did not reply to me, which I thought showed he was hiding something in his mind. Natty was also short of breath but not so guarded. She pressed her hand to the base of her throat, her eyes wide.
“Did you see?” she asked me.
“I saw.”
“Every one safe and on the target!”
“Every one.”
She did not hear me echo her like this; she had already turned away to fling her arms around the Rider. He closed his eyes, holding her tight and resting his cheek on her hair; how long they stayed like this I cannot say, for I immediately began helping the We
e Man to extinguish the torches around the perimeter of the ring, so we would have enough fuel to light our performance the next day.
Boss came to join us then, which I am sure was meant to comfort me. “We must find a role for you in this little drama,” he said. “Do you not think, Mister Jim? A role of some kind, a role—but you say you are not a shooter after all?”
“No, sir, not, to be truthful.”
“No matter.” His voice was much softer than usual and he laid a hand on my arm. “Something else, then.”
“I should like that, sir,” I replied, without looking at him. “If you think there’s anything suitable.”
“I am sure there is.” He took his hand away and placed it in the small of his back, rubbing the base of his spine while he stared into the surrounding darkness. “Now, what can it be? Let me see.”
CHAPTER 21
The Performance
When we left Cat’s Field I already knew how I would spend the next few hours. A sleepless night hearing Natty sneak from her room to the Rider’s, or him creeping into hers; a day pretending to be pleased with the Entertainment; an evening smiling at strangers.
But nothing happened as I expected. When I reached my room I heard Natty pause on the landing to say goodnight to one and all, then go to her bed alone; when my head touched the bolster I spent a minute wishing it was more comfortable—or less: that it was bare earth—then dropped into a sound sleep; when I woke again and took myself downstairs to breakfast, I found Boss holding forth to Natty on one side of the table, with the Rider and Clown sitting in silence on the other.
I stared at them, thinking my torments would now surely begin again. But the sight of my friends sitting together like this was a kind of rebuke. I had no evidence for my distrust, no foundation for it. And I knew in my heart I would be wise to end it; if I stayed as I was, I would not be myself; I would be a kind of jailer, locking myself in a prison on my own devising.
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