"So what does it mean?"
She closed her eyes a moment, concentrated. "There is someone—someone you need to find. Not now. You will know when it happens. Something with water. And loss." She stopped.
"Great. That's it?"
"I'm sorry."
"Take another one."
"What?"
"Another card. Come on."
She sighed. "I don't think that it will—" She stopped as she picked up the next card, looked at it, then dropped it as if it was on fire. "What the fuck?" she said.
"Christ," Jack said. He looked down at an ornately dressed woman riding in a chariot drawn by a pair of swans. A crown adorned her head, and in her outstretched hand she held an enormous eye that seemed to stare at the viewer. "Don't tell me," he said. "Another card that doesn't exist?"
"Yes," she whispered. Then, her voice rough, "I don't know what this is. I've never even heard of it."
Jack said, "Well, gee, let me guess. She's wearing a goddamn crown, and holding an eye, so maybe she's the Queen of Eyes."
Clara said "What did you do to my cards?"
Jack threw up his hands. "That's it. Enough of this shit. You can't tell me anything, can you? But even as he got up to leave, he knew it wasn't true. In his mind, he heard her say "You're one of them. A Traveler."
Outside the booth, a small line of people were waiting for their fortunes to be told. "Don't waste your time," he said. "She's nuts." They all stared at him but didn't step from their places.
Jack found Mr. Green standing next to one of the rides. Green smiled at him. "Well? Did Clara give you a reading?"
"Oh yeah. It was terrific." He took a breath. "Look, um, Mr. Green." He almost added "Sir," but stopped himself. "I want to go with you. Tomorrow. When you leave. I want to travel with you." He waited to see if Green would react to the word, but if it meant anything, Green didn't show it.
Instead, Green looked at him a moment, then said "How old are you, kid?"
"Eighteen."
Green laughed. "First rule of carny life. We con them, not each other."
Jack said "Sorry," but he didn't look away from Green's sharp eye.
"Here's what you have to do. We leave tomorrow, nine AM. Get back here by then, with a letter signed by each of your parents, saying it's okay for you to ride with us."
"What?"
"You heard me. And no forgeries. I want their real signatures."
"Why can't I just stay here and help you pack up, then take off with you? I could write them or something, tell them what's happened."
"And get us all busted fifty miles down the road? No thanks, kid."
"But how am I supposed to—" Jack stopped. He saw Green's eyes on him and realized there was more going on here than legal issues. It was some kind of test, though he wasn't sure about what. He said, "Sure thing. I'll be back to help you pack up."
Green nodded. "Good." As Jack turned to go, Green said "One more thing. Am I going to have trouble with Clara if she finds out you're coming with us?"
"How should I know? She's the fortune-teller. Ask her." Green laughed.
Jack caught the bus home, which was good, since he didn't want to hitchhike. He needed to think how he would get his parents to sign that letter.
At home he said a quick "Fine" to his dad's "How was the fair?" Ignoring his mother's offer for something to eat he went up to his room and typed the letter he'd been composing on the bus. In high school that year they'd learned how to write a proper business letter, and Jack now made it as correct as he could, with a letterhead on top, a "To whom it may concern:" line, and at the bottom two signature lines, with his parents' names typed under them. He'd decided to keep the content simple. No mention of dropping out of school, but no mention of coming back either. Just permission to go with the carnival, right now. When he'd finished he packed a small duffel bag with some clothes and a few things he figured he could not just pick up along the way.
He went downstairs, set the bag quietly by the door, then went and stood in front of the television. His father said "Hey!" and tried to look around him. His mother said "Jack? Is something wrong?"
Jack said "I want to travel with the carnival for awhile. It leaves tomorrow and you have to sign this letter." He handed it to his father, and his mother leaned over to read it with her husband.
Jack's father said, "Is this some kind of sick joke?" and his mother joined in, "Why would you want to travel with a carnival?"
"It's just for awhile," Jack said, and "There's nothing to do here."
"Then get a damn job," his father said. "A real one. Here in town."
"Is there something wrong?" his mother asked him.
Now came the tricky part. He closed his eyes a moment, trying to remember just what those women in the street had sounded like when they told him to leave, and he immediately ran home. It wasn't just the tone, it was a kind of . . . undertone, a level of assurance that left no cracks for resistance. He said "Mom and Dad, this is something I need to do. And you need to sign this letter. Right now."
Later, Jack would learn that this voice was called Basic Persuasion, and people trained for years to do it correctly. Right now, all he cared about was that it worked. His parents tried to say something but couldn't seem to do it. They looked confused as they signed the letter, and even more so as Jack took it from them and went over to pick up his duffel bag. "Jack?" his mother said. "You'll be back home for school, won't you?"
"Sure," he said. He didn't like to lie to them, but he was afraid that when the hypnosis, or whatever it was, wore off they would come after him. And besides, it wasn't entirely a lie. Maybe whatever he was looking for, he'd find it by the end of Summer.
Jack traveled with Marty Green and the carnival for six years. For the first couple of months he kept waiting for some kind of revelation about why he was there. He would glance at Mr. Green, or some of the older workers, but all he ever got was orders and instructions. The obvious person to ask was Clara, but she wouldn't even look at him if their paths crossed, so he left her alone.
Over time he just seemed to settle into life in the carnival. He set up and took down the rides, he helped with the booths, he cleaned up. He shared a trailer with a man in his forties, Bernardo, who seemed to like Jack well enough, which was how Jack felt about him.
That first Summer he called his parents often enough that they wouldn't send the cops to drag him back, but not enough to encourage fantasies he was homesick. As the Summer wore on, they began to talk about when he would come home. The last week end of August his Dad told him he had to stop fooling around, and come home right away. This is it, he thought. He said he wasn't returning, he would get his GED later and go to college, but right now he was where he "needed to be," and would stay.
His mother cried, his father yelled "Enough is enough!" and similar things, and Jack realized he would have to do that trick again, with his voice. He was scared he wouldn't remember how to do it, or it wouldn't work over the phone, but it actually came easier this time. "Mom, Dad," he said, "It's all right. I need to do this now."
Sounding a little dazed, his father said, "Oh. Well, I guess that's okay then. I mean, it's good, I guess. If it's what, you know, you need."
His mother was crying, but decorously. "Will you promise to take care of yourself?" she said.
"Of course," Jack said.
"We love you," Mom said. Jack said he loved them too, and then it was done.
Calls from the staff were made from a phone in Mr. Green's office. It was a cell phone, rare in those days, and it had some kind of lock on it that meant you had punch in your personal code before and after use. That way, Marty knew who was racking up minutes. The first time Jack had used the group phone to call his folks, they'd offered to buy him a phone and send it to him, but he managed to convince them it was impractical.
Now, as
he logged out of the phone, Jack wondered about what he'd told his parents. It was true, he realized. He did need to be there. He just didn't know why. Well, at least it was better than school.
Much better, he decided over the next few days, as Green asked the guys who ran the games to show Jack how they worked. Jack had already figured out most of it, but he'd learned it was not good to be a smartass. The Summer season of state and county fairs was ending, and soon things would slow down enough for Jack to learn the practice as well as the theory. There would still be things like town festivals, and church carnivals, especially in the South, but more time off. Jack discovered he enjoyed the gimmicks and tricks that made it all look natural. Soon Green began to let him run a couple of the games for short periods, to give the regular guys a break.
One night Green called Jack into his trailer. The trailer was divided into Green's bedroom, which Jack had never seen, and his office, which was bare and simple, just a wooden desk, a few chairs and lamps, and a large file cabinet. The only decoration was a framed poster from some old carny freak show. This evening, however, Green had set up a small wooden table in front of his desk. A Green and black checkerboard cloth covered the surface and went down to the floor. On top of the cloth lay a group of small objects—three small metal cups turned upside down, a gold-plated metal star small enough to fit under one of the cups, three old-looking cards—a queen of hearts and the two red jacks—a large white feather, a black knife, and a pair of antique dice. Jack stared at it all, trying not to look nervous. He had no idea what this was, or why Green was showing it to him.
Green said, "Ever see a set-up like this before?"
Jack was about to say "No," when a memory clicked into place. "That card," he said. "When Clara did that reading for me. This stuff's like what he had on the table." He concentrated a moment. "The Juggler. That's what it was called."
Green looked at him a moment. "I wondered if that might come up." He waved at the table. "This is the classic Juggler's set-up. And by the way, that word didn't use to mean someone who threw things in the air. It meant this, moving things around so people can't follow where they are." He turned the cards face down and slid them in and out of each other. "Which one's the queen?" he said.
Jack pointed to the card on the left. When Green turned it over, and it was indeed the queen of hearts, Jack realized he'd been holding his breath—not for fear he'd get it wrong, but that it would turn into that other queen, the one with the giant eye.
"Very good," Green said. "Let's try again." He shifted the cards much faster this time, and meanwhile kept looking at Jack and talking to him, about the carnival, the people, asking questions—suddenly he stopped and said, "Where's the queen?"
Jack realized he had no idea. He was about to guess the one on the left when he stopped, and for no reason he could have explained, closed his eyes a moment, then opened them and pointed at the middle card.
Green looked at Jack so intently, Jack found it hard not to look away. Green said, "You didn't know, did you?" Jack didn't answer. "Your hand knew, but your brain had no idea, right?" Jack hesitated, then nodded. "What matters is that you trusted your hand."
"I guess," Jack said.
"Okay," Green said. "Now pay attention. The cards are important because they're on the up and up. A good juggler can make it difficult by doing what I did, distract the mark by talking, sometimes using subtle aggression or flirting, but essentially the game is straight. So people trust it, even if they lose. And sometimes you want them to win, especially if there's a crowd watching." Jack nodded. "But this—" Green pointed to the cups. "This is different." He put the star under one, moved the star around a little, then said "Which one has the star?"
"Huh?" Jack said, "it's the middle."
"Lift it up."
Jack did and discovered it empty. "What the fuck?"
"Lift up the others." Jack did so, and the star was nowhere to be found. He could feel his mouth hanging open, and shut it.
"Come round this side," Green said. When Jack did so, Green lifted the curtain to show him a foot pedal attached by a pair of cables to the underside of the table. Green moved the middle cup aside and stepped on the lever. A small trap door opened to reveal a narrow chute. Green reached under the table and palmed the star.
Jack realized that the pattern of the table cover concealed the very fine cuts that hid the trapdoor. "Cool," he said.
Green laughed. "Lining up the cup and opening the trap is half the skill. Lift up the cup on your right." Jack did so and saw the star. Or rather, another star because Green still held the original one. Green said, "That's the other half, slipping another star from your hand to another cup. The mark's confusion helps."
Jack didn't like being called a mark, but he only said, "Why are you showing me this?"
Green said, "I'm not sure. To tell you the truth, we usually don't run this. Too easy for some smart cop, or one who's been around, to catch on. But something—fact is, a good Juggler is hard to find, and I just have a feeling about you."
Jack tried not to swell up with pride. "Thanks," he said, "so I'm going to do this?"
"We'll see."
Jack nodded. "Okay." He was about to leave when he asked, "What's the other stuff for? The knife and the feather and the dice."
Green frowned. "To tell you the truth, I don't actually know. It's kind of a tradition. Give the crowd something to look at beside the juggler's hands."
Around that time Jack started playing poker with some of the guys. He'd played a little in school and usually won, but he expected that the guys who played a couple times a week would think him too young. But in fact they welcomed him, made sure to get a chair for him, even offered him beer. He soon figured out why. The first night he played he lost his entire week's pay in just under an hour. "Come back next week," one of them called after him, and everyone laughed. To their surprise he did, and that time he lasted most of the evening, and the time after that he broke even. He was starting to get how each one played, the hands they went for and the ones they folded. And he became aware of his own tendencies, his tells and his blind-spots. Slowly he began to win, steadily enough that he had to back off at times to make sure they would let him stay in the game.
And he began to see someone as well. Green didn't go much for the old-fashioned freak acts—"People see weirder stuff on television" he liked to say—but he did feature one sideshow marvel, "Edwina, the Bearded Lady." Her real name was Abby Borger, and she usually sat in a small booth between the roller coaster ride and the games, as a way to lure people towards the money-makers.
When Jack first met her he assumed the beard was fake. She grinned and let him pull on it, then explained it was some kind of hormone thing. When it started, she and her mom had freaked out. She'd tried pills, electrolysis, shaving and plucking several times a day. Finally she became sick of fighting it, and when she saw the signs for a carnival coming to town she let her beard grow in, dressed up in her hottest, shortest dress, and went to find the boss to tell him he needed her. "I'm a tradition," she said. "What kind of carnival is it if you don't have a bearded lady?" Green hired her on the spot.
The thing was, apart from the beard, Abby was sweet, sexy, with long blond hair, a cute smile, and a great body. And she was smart. That was the thing that really drew Jack to her, that he liked to hear her talk. Science, politics, art . . . She seemed to respect his intelligence even if he didn't know that much. She was also older than him, by seven or eight years, so he figured she just saw him as a mascot. Then one evening, when they'd been drinking wine and talking about some book, she suddenly said, "Have you ever been kissed by a girl with a beard?"
"Uh, no," he said, feeling like a jerk.
"But you're curious, aren't you? What it feels like?" He stammered something and she laughed, then pulled him to her. The beard was softer than he'd expected—if he didn't shave for a couple of days his face fel
t like it could sharpen knives—and when she opened his mouth for her tongue, and pressed her breasts against him, he understood exactly why he'd dumped poor Becky Rubin.
Later, when they were lying in Abby's bed (she had her own trailer) she looked at him and giggled. "Hey," she said, "I just thought of something."
"Yeah? What?"
She whispered into his ear, "Once you've tried beard, nothing else is as weird." For a moment Jack didn't know how to react, and then the two of them started laughing, and soon they were starting everything else all over again.
Jack did well as a Juggler. They set him up in a booth with a backup of magical symbols, shooting stars, a silly-looking red devil kneeling down before a magician, and a sign that read "Do you dare to try your luck against Xoltan the Younger?"
"Xoltan?" Jack said, when Mr. Green showed him the sign. "Really?" And then, when he saw his costume, a dashiki and a turban, he almost said "No fucking way, man." But then he noticed Abby trying not to laugh, and he thought of the fake tiara she would wear, and the low-cut dress and push-up bra to show up the contrast with the beard, and how she had to let little kids pull on it sometimes, and he just grinned and said "Xoltan the Younger it is."
Jack had been doing his Juggler act for most of a year, and had gotten so good Green had to remind him to lose now and then, when one night Green summoned everyone to a meeting outside Green's trailer. It was late April, and they'd just finished a church fair in Georgia. Some of the guys looked nervous, Jack thought. It was too early to gear up for the county fair circuit, so what was this about? He said to Abby "What's going on?"
"I don't know," she said, "but I think people are scared we're closing down."
"Jesus," Jack said, "what will you do?" Being part of the carnival was important to Jack, though he couldn't say why, but for Abby it was her life.
"Oh, I don't know," she said, not looking at him. "Probably join some feminist empowerment freak show." She turned to grin at him, and a moment later they were both laughing.
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