AS MERLE WATCHED HER SLEEP, an unmanly warmth about the eyeballs would surprise him. Her hearth-colored hair in a careless child’s snarl. She was somewhere off wandering those dangerous dark fields, maybe even finding there some version of himself, of Erlys, that he’d never get to hear about, among the sorrowful truths, being lost, being found, flying, journeying to places too detailed to be anything but real, meeting the enemy, dying, being born over and over. . . . He wanted to find a way in, to look out for her at least, keep her from the worst if he could. . . .
Waiting out there for them each daybreak, green and wet or leafless and frozen, was always that map crisscrossed with pikes and highways and farm-to-market roads, for their scratchy eyelids to open and regard as if from above, as if having risen into the orange dawn skies and hovered, scanning like journeyman hawks for the next day’s work, which more and more turned out to be some street-corner picture operation in another little prairie town to get them through a couple more meals. As years went along, the film got faster, the exposure times shorter, the cameras lighter. Premo came out with a celluloid film pack allowing you to shoot twelve at a time, which sure beat glass plates, and Kodak started selling its “Brownie,” a little box camera that weighed practically nothing. Merle could bring it anywhere as long as he held everything steady in the frame, and by then—the old glass-plate folding models having weighed in at three pounds plus plates—he had learned to breathe, calm as a sharpshooter, and the images showed it, steady, deep, sometimes, Dally and Merle agreed, more real, though they never got into “real” that far.
There was always plenty of bell-hanger work—a sudden huge demand was spreading throughout the Midwest for electric bells, doorbells, hotel annunciators, elevator bells, fire and burglar alarms—you sold and installed them on the spot, walked away down the front path counting out your commission while the customer stood there with her finger on the buzzer like she couldn’t get enough of the sound. And shingle-weaving, and mending some fence, and always frog-bonding work in the towns big enough to have streetcars, and plenty of machinery to see to in the powerhouses and car barns. . . . One summer Merle put in a hitch as a lightning-rod salesman, which he quit after finding himself at last unable to misrepresent as shamefully as his colleagues the nature of electricity.
“Any type of lightning, friends—fork, chain, heat and sheet, you name it, we’ll send it back to ground right where it belongs.”
“Ball lightning,” somebody said after a silence. “That’s the kind we worry about here. What’ve you got for that?”
Merle immediately grew sober. “You’ve had ball lightning out this way?”
“Nothing but, we specialize in it, we’re the ball-lightning capital of the U.S.”
“Thought that was East Moline.”
“You fixin to be around for a while?”
Before the week was out, Merle had his first, and as it turned out only, ball-lightning job. It was haunting the upstairs of a farmhouse, persistent as a ghost anyway. He brought in all the equipment he could think of, copper grounding spikes, cabling, an insulated cage run up on the spot and hooked to a sal ammoniac battery to try and trap the critter in.
It moved around the rooms, up and down the hallway, and he watched carefully and patiently. He made no threatening moves. It reminded him of some wild night-animal that was being extra wary around humans. Little by little it came closer, till at last it was right up in his face, spinning slowly, and then they stayed like that awhile, in the small wood house, close, as if they were learning to trust each other. Out the curtained window, long grass blew just like every day. Chickens pecked around the yard and compared notes. Merle thought he could feel a little heat, and of course his hair was standing on end. He was of two minds about starting a conversation, since it didn’t seem like this ball lightning could talk, or not the way a human does. Finally he took a chance and said, “Look, I’m not about to do you any harm, and I hope you’ll return the favor.”
To his surprise, the ball lightning replied, though not exactly out loud, “Sounds fair. My name is Skip, what’s yours?”
“Pleasure, Skip, I’m Merle,” said Merle.
“Just don’t send me to ground, it’s no fun there.”
“O.K.”
“And forget that cage.”
“Deal.”
Slowly they became sidekicks. From then on the ball lightning, or “Skip,” was never far from Merle’s side. Merle understood that he was now committed to a code of behavior as to whose details he was almost completely in the dark. Any small violation that displeased Skip could send the electrical phenomenon away, maybe for good, maybe not before first frying Merle in his tracks, Merle had no way to tell. It seemed to Dally at first he’d finally slipped his trolley in some fashion she could see no way back from.
“Other kids have sisters and brothers,” she pointed out carefully. “What’s this?”
“Sort of the same, only—”
“Different, yes but—”
“If you’d give him a chance—”
“‘Him’? Sure, of course, you always wanted a boy.”
“Foul ball, Dahlia. And you got no idea what I always wanted.”
She had to admit Skip was an obliging little cuss, got their cookfires going in a snap, lit Merle’s cigars for him, climbed inside the railroad lantern hanging off the back of the wagon when they had to travel in the dark. After a while, some nights, when she was up late reading, there’d be Skip up next to her, lighting the page, bobbing gently, as if reading along.
Until one night, during a fierce lightning storm out in Kansas someplace, “They’re calling me,” Skip said. “I have to go.”
“Your family,” Dally guessed.
“Hard to explain.”
“Just getting to like you, too. Any chance—”
“Of coming back? You get sort of gathered back into it all, ‘s how it works, so it wouldn’t be me anymore, really.”
“Guess I better just blow you a kiss, huh?”
In the months that followed, she found herself thinking more than she ever had about brothers and sisters, and whether Erlys and Zombini the Mysterious had had any more children, and how many, and what kind of a home situation that might be like to live in. It never occurred to her not to share these thoughts with her Pa.
“Here,” Merle producing a pickling jar and dropping in two bits. “Now, every time I act like a damn fool, I’ll drop in another one. Some point we’ll have you the fare to wherever she is.”
“No more’n a couple days, I calculate.”
One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, “There’s your gold, Dahlia, the real article.” As usual, she threw him a speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none of that shifty crew ever spoke straight—their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the “something else” really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world. She watched the invisible force at work among the million stalks tall as a horse and rider, flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies, the necessary rhythms of a sea hidden far from any who would seek it.
They found themselves presently across the Colorado line, moving on into coal country, over toward the Sangre de Cristos—and they kept bearing westward until one day they were in the San Juans and Dally came walking in through some doorway or other and Merle looked up and saw this transformed young woman and knew it was only a matter of time now before she was out the chute and making life complicated for every rodeo clown that crossed her path.
AND AS IF that wasn’t enough, one day in Denver Merle had happened to go in a cigar store and noticed there in a rack of magazines a Dishforth’s Illustrated Weekly from back east and months ago, with an article in it about the celebrated magician Luca Zombini and his lovely bride, formerly his stage assistant, and their children and their warm and wonderful home in New York.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of silver in Merle’s pocket at the moment but he found enough to buy the magazine, forgot about the Cuban panatela he was fixing to smoke and settled for a three-cent domestic instead, lit it up and went outside to read the story. Most of the photographs, printed by what looked to be some new kind of gravure process, in a grain so fine that squint as he might he could find no evidence of screenwork, featured Erlys, surrounded by what looked like a dozen or so kids. He stood there in the corner of an alleyway, just out of a wind meaner than any he could remember since Chicago, full of ice crystals and hostile intent, and imagined it was telling him to wake up. He had no illusions about what could be done in the darkroom to enhance a human image, but Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was way beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she had loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been “his” than the unfortunate Bert Snidell’s, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.
His next thought was, Dally better not see this, and then immediately, sure Merle, good luck. And when he caught sight of her just about then coming up the street to find him, her hair in the wind a banner flown by the only force he had ever sworn allegiance to, he added, reluctantly, and it’ll have to be me that tells her.
She was a sport about the whole thing, stepped careful around his feelings, read the whole article through, and though he never saw it again he understood she’d put the magazine away safely among her possessions. And from then on, like a charge slowly building up on a condenser plate, it was going to be only a matter of time before she was off to New York in a great irresistible surge of energy.
In Colorado they found a farm outbuilding, forgotten years earlier after the farm went under and the farmhouse burned down, leaving this overgrown shed, which Merle managed to fill up to the rafters with photographer’s or, if you like, alchemist’s stuff—containers ranging from banged-up vegetable cans to jugs and bottles holding liquids or powders of different colors, to gigantic glazed crocks, fifty gallons and more, that you might be able to lift empty but wouldn’t necessarily want to, carefully bent glass tubes and copper coils running everyplace, a small forge over in one corner, an electric generator hooked to an old bicycle, battery cells dry and wet, electromagnets, burners, an annealing oven, a workbench littered with lenses, developing tanks, exposure meters, printing frames, magnesium flash-lamps, a gas-heated rotary burnishing machine, and other stuff Merle had almost forgotten he had. Berry vines crept in the crevices, and spiders adorned the sashwork with webs that when the early daylight was right could cause you to stand there just stupefied. Most folks who showed up thought he was running a still, Sheriff’s boys liked to come by at odd hours, and sometimes, depending how the day was proceeding, Merle would bring out the heavier science talk, which hypnotized them into going away, disappointed as always. Other days the visitors were as likely to be polarized the other way, legally speaking.
“Couldn’t help smellin what you’re cookin in here. Back over the ridgeline and across the creek, ‘s a matter of fact. It’s ‘at there nitro, ain’t it?”
Merle had seen enough back-country insanity by now to keep a piece of his eye on the shotgun under the table. “Almost. In the nitro family. Distant relative, the kind you pay to stay out of town.”
“Run into it in my work, time to time.”
“That’d be . . .”
“Sort of mine engineer. Not as well paid as that, but same idea. Little Hellkite works over by Telluride?”
He was on the abbreviated side, packing no firearms Merle could see, and got around to introducing himself as Webb Traverse.
Dally came in scowling, some encounter out in the brush having put her in a mood. “Why Father, I’d no idea there were guests. Let me go and see to the tea and biscuits. I’ll only be a moment.”
“But say,” Webb giving her a wary look, “what was I thinkin here, you must be kind of occupied at the moment—”
“Bloviating, getting in the quota for the week. Stick around, I can see you have a legitimate curiosity.” Merle beaming like a tent-meeting preacher at a promising sinner.
Webb nodded at a jug of store-bought quicksilver on the table. “See a lot of that up at the assay office.” Carefully, as if expecting a countersign.
“The old-timers,” Merle as well feeling his way, “used to believe that if you took away from mercury everything not essential, the liquid-metal business, the shine, the greasy feel, the weight, all the things that make it ‘mercury,’ see, you’d be left with this unearthly pure form of it the cupel ain’t been made that can hold it, somethin that would make this stuff here seem dull as traprock. Philosophic Mercury, ‘s what they called it, which you won’t find anyplace among the metals of metallurgy, the elements of the periodic table, the catalogues of industry, though many say it’s really more of a figure of speech, like the famous Philosopher’s Stone—supposed to really mean God, or the Secret of Happiness, or Union with the All, so forth. Chinese talk. But in fact these things, they’ve been out there all along, real material things, just not easy to get to, though alchemists keep tryin, it’s what we do.”
“‘Alchemist’ work, that’s what you’re doin up here? Well but mercury now, there is this one interesting compound I keep runnin into, fulminate I believe it’s called. . . .”
“Basic ingredient of the du Pont blasting cap, not to mention our everyday well-known .44 round. There’s also silver fulminate, not quite the same thing as ‘fulminating silver,’ which’ll blow up if you touch it with a feather. Fulminating gold, too, if your tastes happen to be more expensive.”
“Hard to cook up?”
“Basically you take gold and ammonia, or silver and nitric acid, or mercury ore and fulminic acid, which is just good old prussic acid, the suicide’s friend, patriarch of the cyanide family with an oxygen tacked on, and just as poisonous to breathe the fumes of.”
Webb shook his head as if in dismay at the world and its ironies, but Merle had seen some unguarded-henhouse gleam in his eye. “You mean to say gold, silver, these shinin and wonderful metals, basis of all the world’s economies, you go in a laboratory, fool with em a little, acid and so on, and you get a high explosive that all you got to do’s sneeze at the wrong time and it’s adios, muchachos?”
Merle, with a fair idea where this was going, nodded. “Sort of the infernal side to the story, you could say.”
“Almost makes you think, if there’s a Philosopher’s Stone, there might not also be—”
“Careful,” said Merle.
Webb peered at him, almost amused. “Somethin you fellas don’t talk about?”
“Can’t. Or that’s the tradition.”
“Easier that way, I guess.”
“For who?”
Webb may have caught some wariness in his tone but went ahead. “Case a man ever did get tempted . . .”
“Hmmn. Who says men never do?”
“Wouldn’t know.” A moment of reflection, then, as if unable not to pursue the thought, “But if the one’s a figure of speech for God and salvation and all that good stuff, why then the other—”
“All right. But do everybody a favor, say ‘Anti-Stone.’ It has another name, but we’d just get into trouble sayin it out loud. Sure, there’s probably as many lost souls out lookin for that as regular alchemists. You think of the power you stand to gain, why the payoff’s way too hard to resist.”
“You’re resistin, ain’t you?”
“Am I.”
“Nothin personal.” Webb let his eyes slide around the little shed.
“This is temporary,” Merle explained, “the mansion’s got mice and our agents are out looking for a new one.”
“And if a nightshirt for a elephant cost two cents,” Dally put in, “we couldn’t buy a baby bonnet for a piss ant.”
“You know your way around quicksilver? Ever done any amalgamator work?”
&nbs
p; “Time to time,” Merle said carefully. “Leadville, couple other places, fun while it lasts, not sure it’s much of a career.”
“Little Hellkite they’re lookin for an amalgamator, seein ‘s how with the altitude and breathin in those fumes, the current one’s got it into his head he’s the President.”
“Oh. Of . . .?”
“Put it this way, he has this nipper with a harmonica foll’n him around everwhere playin ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Out of tune. Goes off into long speeches nobody can understand, declared war on the state of Colorado last week. Needs to be replaced and quick, but nobody wants to use force, bein that these cases are said to have superhuman powers.”
“How true. That’d be up by Telluride, you say.”
“Dandy little town, churches, schools, wholesome environment for the young lady.”
Dally snorted. “Hell with electric lights is more like it, and school ain’t exactly my glass of beer either, mister, if I wanted to waste my time I’d be lookin more for powder-monkey work, wouldn’t I.”
“Sure they can fix you up with that,” said Webb. “But no need to mention my name around the Little Hellkite, O.K.? I ain’t exactly no miner of the month up there right now.”
“Sure thing,” said Merle, “long as the alchemy part of it don’t come up either.”
The two men looked at each other, each pretty sure who the other was. “Mine engineers take a dim view,” Merle pretended to explain, “old-time superstition from back in the Dark Ages, nowhere near’s scientific as modern-day metallurgy.” He paused, as if to catch his breath. “But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.”
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