“You can stay so long as you don’t tell anybody what you see here. None of it, good nor bad. God knows you’ll be seeing enough of the bad,” he said more to himself than to the boy.
“I won’t tell nobody.”
The old man resumed his spot by the stump, and the boy followed. “I saw you make those things disappear.” He tried to suppress his smile and gave up.
The old man shot him an appraising look. He shrugged and tapped the stump. “Thank the Almighty I can still do something. There was a time, my young friend—I could make this stump disappear.”
“How?”
Harley Fitzroy looked off into space and a dreamy look came into his eyes. “There is no way to explain. Actually, it was what you might call ‘magic.’ I just can’t find it now.”
“You lost it?” Charlie frowned in confusion.
“No, no, I…It is still there, still here, you see. I just cannot seem to…” He studied the boy for a long moment. “Some other time I will explain. But now I really must get on with this. So go on and let me do my work, give me some peace.”
“Yes, Mr. Fitzroy.”
“When nobody’s around, call me Harley,” the old man said, and made a wave of his hand to show that the conversation was over.
For the better part of an hour, the old man went through the sleight-of-hand portion of his act—nothing audacious, in his professional opinion, just solid showmanship—and it was clear to his youthful audience both from the old man’s face and his odd little murmurs that he was modestly pleased with himself.
In truth, Harley Fitzroy was coming slowly to accept the state of affairs. Every day, things came back to him, hand movements and illusions and slight variations on old standbys, twists that he’d invented and passed on to other magicians over sixty years of performing. He realized that no matter what else had changed, despite the constant disappointments and humiliating missteps, he could yet call himself a magician. He could still earn his keep in Lewis Tully’s show. As for the other thing, it was clear that he’d lost most of it. Not all, but enough so that he could no longer control it, could no longer call it up. He could make a bird appear from the empty sleeve of an old coat, he could lift the unhappy Xenophon inches off the ground and transport a toad ten feet, but the power had left him for good.
What he’d said to the boy was true, it was still present, he knew it still lived and breathed as always in the very air around his ancient head. But it would no longer respond to his command, no longer inhabit his person.
He sighed and fought to shake off a sudden wave of loneliness, an ache in his old heart for a time long gone and the people who’d inhabited it. He was not surprised that the power had fled: he understood what it meant, that he was nearing the end of a long, long path, and the power, a vibrant living energy that sought a like spirit, could find nothing in him to attach itself to. He had come full circle in his age and was now not much different from the small boy at his mother’s side who knew nothing and had no power.
One day in the not-so-distant future, he would even die. Not in the normal human sense of the word, no sad scenes from Tolstoy, and not soon: his innumerable physical complaints seemed to have fled, and he felt better than he had in years. Rather, his end would be a slow, quiet weakening that others might not even notice. He would simply not wake one morning.
He shook his head to clear the thought. “Time to earn your keep, Old Man. Can’t let old Tully down,” he muttered and felt a wave of affection and gratitude that an old friend had taken him on without the least assurance that he could still pull his weight.
Yes, the tricks were all coming back—rust-encrusted, a few of them, some of them hampered not by fogbound memory but by something as earthbound as arthritis—but they were coming back, and that, as the roguish Jacob Roundtree would have said, was “better than a sharp stick in the eye.”
At day’s end he would lie in his narrow bunk and let the relief wash over him. The old man smiled. He had his tricks yet, and there was still the other, the one thing that had never fully left him.
Of course I knew you were here, boy, he could have said. I could feel you.
He shot a guarded look in the direction of the child and smiled. In truth, the boy’s presence delighted him, the presence of any child would have, but this rag-tag, unwanted boy foisted off on Lewis Tully reminded him of the very young Harley Fitzroy almost eighty years earlier. He never went long without thinking of that boy, not a waif or orphan like this one, at least not until the cholera came, but always a boy apart from the others, a homely boy with unruly hair, a long, egg-shaped head, and eyes that made adults uneasy.
“You’re different, like me,” his mother had said once, brushing his hair. “It’s in your eyes and it spooks folk. You can’t do anything to change it. You see things others don’t, you know things before they’re told you.”
“I don’t want to be different.”
“But you are. And it’s the Lord’s will. So it must be all right.”
After she died, he’d been raised by his brothers, but they had had neither time nor much use for his odd nature, and he had taken to the road at fourteen.
His Maker or his fate had arranged an odd journey through life, and within a year he had made the acquaintance of the gentle and possibly crazed Hendrick Barnswallow, seer and healer, saintliest and wisest of men.
Later, through Hendrick, he had come to know others in this shadowy brethren: Riley James, who could communicate with animals; Blind Bill, who could read a man’s face and his heart despite having no sight; Little Jeff Tomkins, whose fingers could perform small, showy miracles of levitation, and Jacob Roundtree, the showman and adventurer of the lot, traveling around the West in his gaudy wagon, irascible and fearless, selling nostrums and occasionally doing good in spite of himself.
But it had been Hendrick Barnswallow who had understood the boy immediately and explained to him what gifts he had been given, and what those gifts meant. From Hendrick he had learned a few of the tricks of healing, from the others he had come by his ways with animals, his knowledge, and the feats of legerdemain that allowed him to earn his uneasy living. He had learned that magic as he had always understood it was merely shallow tricks and illusions, but that there was a magic in the world, and that strange talents and weird gifts allowed a random handful of human beings to use this magic, to tap into it like a man collecting tree-sap, and that he had not one but several of these gifts.
For a time, he dreamt the young man’s dreams of using these talents for advancement, his notions of success and individual achievement dizzying him and blurring his path, until one evening over a dying fire Hendrick told him, “Sometime in his life, a human being must justify his existence. Man or woman, a person has to leave behind an explanation of why he was here.”
The young man had no doubt that Hendrick was reading his mind, and he looked away, suddenly finding great interest in the fire where Hendrick had just burnt their dinner beyond recognition.
“How do I do that?”
Hendrick gave him a lopsided smile. “Oh, there are many ways. Some raise and care for a family, some do good works, some achieve things on behalf of the race—inventions, medical discoveries, and the like. Some serve as conduits to man for the Almighty’s goodness. Some are healers. Some care for the people they meet along their life’s journey and touch just a small handful of them, those that need it most. I sense that you are such a one, Harley. A fellow who can read men’s hearts is of great value.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“You will. Shall I boil us some coffee?” Hendrick asked, clearly pleased with the idea.
“None for me, Hendrick,” Harley said, for the old man’s coffee was said to have once killed a stray dog.
He thrived in the companionship of these odd men and soaked in the benefits of their long experience like a sponge, and when he was
a few months short of his seventeenth birthday, he realized that he need never puzzle over his true calling, for it had been given to him at birth. He would travel the world as a magician; as far as his unwanted “power” was concerned, he would let his Creator show him when and where to use it. From that day forward, he made his living by magic, but demonstrated his worth in subtler ways.
They were all dead now, those solitary men of the road—except perhaps for Roundtree, a man just stubborn enough to go on living. Many times over the last five years it had occurred to him that the greater part of all humanity that he had known was gone now. At such moments, he had felt poised at the edge of the world of the dead, living in a bleak room with his memories, unknown, unwanted, his disappearance unlamented. As he had told Lewis, he had become one more untidy old man on a bench, dozing in the sun, buffeted by the cold.
In the center of the little circle between the trees, the old man performed, and the boy watched, ignored hunger or thirst or nature’s call, refused to give up his spot or his moment, for when the old man packed up his things each morning, a little chill fell on the boy again. He shifted in the dirt, moved a bothersome pebble from beneath his ribs, and put his chin in his hands. He stared at the old magician with his boxes and wonderful tricks, completely unaware that many of the tricks were for him alone.
SIXTEEN
The Blue Moon Circus
Late one morning the first week of May, they finished the last wagon. Shelby stood back, looked it over quickly, and sent a man for Lewis. Two minutes later Lewis Tully strode out to the wagon, face impassive but eyes alight. His gaze rested for a second on the wagon, but he gave away nothing.
“You wanted to see me, Mr. Shelby?”
Shelby nodded toward the wagon. “She’s finished.”
Lewis raised his eyebrows. “Oh? And how many more we got to go?”
Shelby smiled. “’Less you got one you’re hiding in the outhouse, this is the last one. They’re all done, Mr. Tully.”
Lewis looked slowly around at Shelby’s work crew, all of them looking as though they’d just beat the British Navy. He made it a point to meet each man’s eyes and then, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, he looked over at the last wagon.
He held his breath and allowed a quiet, “Well, now,” and hoped he wouldn’t break into a hornpipe. At the edge of his field of vision he could see the men crowding in to have a look at his face and he refused to give anything up. He rocked back on the balls of his feet and thrust his hands in his pockets and stared at his wagon.
From a field full of wagons, this was his favorite: like Lewis, the wagon was a gypsy; like Lewis, an antique. A cage wagon with compartments for several big cats or half a dozen lesser beasts, it had served in Al G. Barnes’s Circus and the Hagenbeck-Wallace show, and it had belonged for a time to old Adam Forepaugh, who would have been the greatest of all circus men had there never been a P.T. Barnum, and for a few seasons this museum piece on wheels had been a part of Dan Rice’s circus. He fancied even that old Rice had touched this wagon with his own hands.
And here it was, resuscitated in a little hollow in Oklahoma, a tomato-colored spectacle so red it hurt the eyes, with little chubby angels at the four corners, lovingly made by German woodcarvers long dead, and painted anew by Shelby’s surprising crew. The gilt had been restored with cheap gold paint, the details picked out in half a dozen bold colors probably undreamt of by the original artisans, the bars silvered, and across the top and the back, in white letters backed by yellow, the legend THE LEWIS TULLY BLUE MOON CIRCUS AND MENAGERIE, and a small blue painting of the moon.
From Dan Rice to Lewis Tully, he thought. Hell of a pilgrimage for one wagon.
Beside him, Shelby pretended to dig paint out from his nails and held his breath. He stole a glance at Lewis and noted with satisfaction the slightly shocked look on Lewis’s face. In all the thousand and one things that went into this show, they were partners, each one working as tirelessly as the other, sharing the work as well as the trouble of making this show come alive. But in this one thing, they were not partners. Of all his many roles, what some might even call his talents, J.M. Shelby understood that this transformation of a heap of dried wood and broken wheels into a glory of a wagon, this was something he alone could perform. This was his gift to his friend, and Lewis knew it.
And now Lewis gave in to the men, shaking his head and staring at his red wonder of a wagon and grinning. Lewis turned to Shelby and just nodded. “Knew I had the right fella on this one. Line ’em all up tonight and let’s have a look.”
Shelby shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
That night after dinner, Lewis led a little procession of his circus people, his canvasmen, the performers and their families, all of them, and brought them out to a narrow ridge at the edge of the pecan grove. There Shelby had mustered the wagons in a long, gaudy line, in parade the way a town would see them. In the copper light of a dying sun Lewis Tully’s wagons shone as they had the day they had come out of the carver’s shops, bright-glistening spots showing where the paint was still wet. Up and then down the line of wagons the circus people made a slow amazed progression.
A few feet off to the side, Lewis Tully stood with Shelby and stared lovingly at his wagons.
Just a long line of used-up circus wagons, he told himself.
Just one more gathering of the worn-out and played-out and good-for-nothing-in-particular. And I’m Lewis Tully and I’ve seen ten dozen like this.
But this one’s mine, he thought. Says “Tully” on every wagon.
He looked at Shelby again and then looked away.
“Well?” Shelby said, sounding petulant.
Lewis found himself studying the muddy tips of his boots, and finally he gave up. He nodded at the wagons. “Couldn’ta been done better.” He was silent for a moment, conscious of the stiff-backed man beside him and then added, “By anybody.”
Shelby made a sharp nod and walked away.
Gradually they all went back to their quarters, all of them, and Lewis took a final look at his wagons. As he turned to go, he realized that the boy was still here.
“Well, what do you think?”
Charlie tried to say something that made sense, but all he could muster was, “It’s magic.”
Lewis smiled. “I don’t know about that, but it’s something pretty special.” He patted Charlie on the back and said, “Let’s get on back.”
The boy nodded and followed him. He wanted to say something about the wagons, about the wonderful talents of Mr. Shelby, but he could see that Lewis had nothing more to say.
He could still feel where Lewis’s hand had rested on his back, and realized this was the first time Lewis had done such a thing. He wanted to talk, he wanted to ask questions, but he looked again at Lewis’s face and contented himself with trying to match Lewis’s long strides back to the hut.
Later that week, Lewis drove to Tulsa and returned with an automobile overflowing with boxes and bundles of paper—handbills, flyers, and posters. He took a poster from one of the stacks and tacked it up on the trunk of the big cottonwood at the entrance to camp and stood back to study the effect. As he had planned, a small crowd soon gathered to admire his handiwork. It was done in six colors and proclaimed the coming—SOON—of THE LEWIS A. TULLY BLUE MOON CIRCUS AND MENAGERIE.
In the morning, Shelby and a small crew would set out in the “bill car,” and begin the long process of papering the towns on their route, pasting Lewis’s new posters on every available surface. Lewis gazed at his posters and told himself with some satisfaction that they were sure to evoke comment but rode that fine line between circus ballyhoo and outright lies. Behind him, Harley Fitzroy studied the bills.
“Colorful yet dignified, Lewis.”
“Pleasing to the eye, it seems to me. Rex makes the whole picture.”
“He’s a real eye-catcher, Lewis.”
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Lewis clapped Shelby on the shoulder. “You about ready for tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I’m taking Emmett and two of his men. We’ll sing all the way.”
“And be careful.”
Shelby shrugged. “Where’s the fun in that?”
***
Captain Walling led Lewis to the truck, and before they were within twenty yards of it, Lewis could see that the hood had been opened.
“I don’t think he had time to cause any mischief, Lewis.”
Lewis peered into the engine for a moment, examined the hoses, unscrewed the gas cap, sniffed at the tank, and ran his finger around the mouth.
“I think you’re right, Marcus, but just to be safe, I’ll drain a little and see if whoever it was put sugar in it.”
“Whoever it was?” Marcus Walling said, smiling.
“Or whatever,” Lewis said, and patted him on the back. “I’m thinking it was a snake, Marcus,” he said, and walked away.
Lewis made a long slow circuit of his camp, starting from the outer circle of the trucks and wagons and moving inward, but saw no further sign of what he was certain had been another visit from Hector Blaney’s people.
Yes, sir, I’m sure it was a snake, he told himself.
SEVENTEEN
A Legend of the West
One night later, Lewis paused at the stock compound. He spent a moment puffing on a cigar and studying his herd. A couple of the older horses moved closer to the fence and one stuck her head over the top log to let him stroke her.
He moved on past his zebras and llamas, past the black bear and the Dostoevskis’ Russian version, past the tiny shack where Mr. Patel slept in dubious intimacy with the venomous beast who tried to kill him at least once a day.
At the reinforced corral where they kept Jupiter, Lewis paused and studied the sleeping elephant. A lonely beast, he thought, once accustomed to working with two dozen elephants in the Sells-Floto Circus and now all by her lonesome in the Lewis Tully show. He had to admit that Jupiter was, for all her size and frightening strength, a rather dull performer, with none of the personality he’d seen in some others. He suspected that her natural contrariness and her endless attempts at escape over the years had drained her of interest or energy for other pursuits.
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