“Don’t get too wedded to the job,” Charlie Jacobs advised me. “I intend to move on. When the fair closes down, attendance at Bell’s goes into the toilet.”
“Move on where?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ve gotten used to traveling alone.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Just so you know.”
I already did. After the deaths of his wife and child, Charlie Jacobs was strictly a solo act.
The visits he made to his workshop grew shorter and shorter. He began bringing some equipment back and stowing it in the small trailer he’d tow behind the Bounder when he resumed his rambling. The amplifiers that weren’t amplifiers didn’t come; neither did two of the four long metal boxes. I got the idea he meant to start fresh, wherever he ended up. As if he’d gone as far down one road as he could, and meant to try another.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my own life, now drug-free (and limp-free; that, too), but traveling on with the King of High Voltage wasn’t it. I was grateful to him, but since I could no longer really recall the horrors of heroin addiction (any more, I suppose, than a woman who’s had a baby can recall the pain of childbirth), not as grateful as you might think. Also, he scared me. So did his secret electricity. He talked about it in extravagant terms—secret of the universe, path to ultimate knowledge—but he had no more idea of what it really was than a toddler has of a gun he finds in Daddy’s closet.
And, speaking of closets… I snooped, okay? And what I found was a photograph album filled with pictures of Patsy, Morrie, and the three of them together. The pages were well thumbed, and the binding was loose. It didn’t take Sam Spade to know he looked at those pictures a lot, but I never saw him do it. The album was a secret.
Like his electricity.
In the early-morning hours of October third, shortly before the Tulsa State Fair shut up shop for another year, I suffered another aftereffect of the brain-blast Jacobs had given me. Jacobs was paying me for my services (quite a bit more than the services actually merited), and I had rented a room by the week about four blocks from the fairgrounds. It was clear he wanted to be alone, no matter how much he liked me (if he did like me), and I felt it was high time he got his own bed back.
I turned in at midnight, about an hour after we wrapped the last show of the evening, and went to sleep at once. I almost always did. With the dope out of my system, I slept well. Only that morning I woke up two hours later, in the weedy backyard of the rooming house. An icy rind of moon hung overhead. Beneath it stood Jamie Morton, naked save for one sock and with a piece of rubber tubing wrapped around his biceps. I have no idea where I got it, but above it, the blood vessels—any one of them perfect for shooting up—bulged. Below it, my forearm was white and cold and fast asleep.
“Something happened,” I said. I had a fork in one hand (God knows where that came from, too), and I was poking my swollen upper arm with it over and over again. Blood was beading up from at least a dozen pricks. “Something. Happened. Something happened. Oh Mother, something happened. Something, something.”
I told myself to stop, but at first I couldn’t. I wasn’t out of control, exactly, but I was out of my control. I thought of Electric Jesus trundling across Peaceable Lake on a hidden rail. I was like that.
“Something.”
Stab.
“Something happened.”
Stab-stab.
“Something—”
I stuck out my tongue and bit it. The click came again, not beside my ears but buried deep inside my head. The compulsion to speak and stab was gone, just like that. The fork tumbled from my hand. I unwrapped the makeshift tourniquet, and my forearm began to prickle as the blood rushed back into it.
I looked up at the moon, shivering and wondering who, or what, had been controlling me. Because I had been controlled. When I got back to my room (grateful not to be seen with my wingwang dangling in the breeze), I saw I had stepped on some broken glass and cut my foot quite badly. It should have awakened me, but hadn’t. Why? Because I hadn’t been asleep. I was sure of it. Something had moved me out of myself and taken over, driving my body like a car.
I washed my foot and got back into bed. I never told Jacobs about that experience—what good would it have done? He would have suggested that a gashed foot suffered on a little midnight stroll was a small price to pay for a miracle cure from heroin addiction, and he would have been right. Stilclass="underline"
Something happened.
Closing Day at the Tulsa State Fair that year was October tenth. I arrived at Jacobs’s Bounder around five thirty that afternoon, in plenty of time to tune my guitar and tie his tie—a thing that had become a tradition. While I was doing it, there was a knock at the door. Charlie went to answer it, frowning. He had six shows to do that night, including the final one at midnight, and he didn’t like being interrupted beforehand.
He opened the door, saying, “If it’s not important, I wish you’d come back la—” and then a farmer in bib overalls and a Case cap (a pissed-off Okie if ever an Okie there was) punched him in the mouth. Jacobs went staggering back, got tangled in his own feet, and went down, narrowly avoiding giving his head a good whap on the dinette table, which might have knocked him unconscious.
Our visitor barged in, bent down, seized Jacobs by the lapels. He was about Jacobs’s age, but a lot bigger. And he was in a rage. This could be trouble, I thought. Of course it was already, but I was thinking of the kind that ends with an extended stay in the hospital.
“You’re the reason she got took in by the police!” he shouted. “Goddam you, she’ll have a record that’ll follow her around for the rest of her life! Like a tin can tied to a puppydog’s tail!”
I didn’t think, just seized an empty pot from the sink and bonked him briskly on the side of the head. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the Okie let go of Jacobs and looked at me in astonishment. Tears began leaking down the grooves on either side of his considerable beak.
Charlie scooted away, propped on his hands and propelling himself with his feet. Blood was pouring from his lower lip, which was split in two places.
“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I asked. Hardly reasoned discourse, I know, but when we find ourselves in that sort of confrontation, how the schoolyard comes back.
“She got to go to court!” he shouted at me in that out-of-tune banjo Okie accent. “And it’s that sucka’s fault! That sucka rah-chair, scuttlin like a dadburn crab!”
He said dadburn. He really did.
I put the pot on the stove and showed him my empty hands. I spoke in my most soothing voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I’m sure”—I almost said Charles—“I’m sure Dan doesn’t, either.”
“My dotta! My dotta Cathy! Cathy Morse! He told her the pitcher was free—because she got up onstage—but it wa’nt free! That pitcher has costed her plenty! Rooned her dadburned life is what that pitcher did!”
I put a cautious arm around his shoulders. I thought he might clobber me, but now that his initial fury had been vented, he only looked sad and bewildered. “Come on outside,” I said. “We’ll find a bench in the shade and you can tell me all about it.”
“Who’re you?”
I was going to say Mr. Jacobs’s assistant, but that sounded like pretty weak tea. My years as a musician came to my rescue. “His agent.”
“Yeah? Can you gi’ me compensation? Because I want it. The lawyer’s fees alone are ’bout to half kill me.” He pointed a finger at Jacobs. “On account of you! Your dadgum fault!”