“I… I have no idea…” Charlie wiped a palmful of blood off his chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Morse, I assure you.”
I had gotten Morse as far as the door, and I didn’t want to lose the ground I had gained. “Let’s discuss this out in the fresh air.”
He let me lead him out. There was a refreshment stand at the edge of the employees’ parking lot, with rusty tables shaded by tattered canvas umbrellas. I bought him a large Coke and handed it to him. He slopped the first inch out on the table, then drank half of the paper cup in big swallows. He set it down and pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.
“I never learn not to take a colddrink like that,” he said. “Puts a nail in your head, don’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, and thought of standing naked in scant moonlight, poking the tines of a fork into my blood-engorged upper arm. Something happened. To me, and, it seemed, to Cathy Morse, as well.
“Tell me what the problem seems to be.”
“That pitcher he give her, that’s the goddarn problem. She walked around with it damn near ever’where. Her friends commenced on to makin fun of her, but she didn’t care. She tole people ‘That’s how I really look.’ I tried to shake the notion out of her one night and Mother tole me to stop, said it would pass on its own. And it seemed to. She left the pitcher in her room, I dunno, two days or three. Went on down to the hairdressin school without it. We thought it was over.”
It wasn’t. On October seventh, three days previous, she had walked into J. David Jewelry in Broken Arrow, a town southeast of Tulsa. She was carrying a shopping bag. Both salesmen recognized her, because she had been in several times since her star turn at Jacobs’s midway pitch. One of them asked if he could help her. Cathy blew past him without a word and went to the display case where the most expensive geegaws were kept. From her shopping bag she produced a hammer, which she used to shatter the glass top of the case. Ignoring the bray of the alarm and two cuts serious enough to warrant stitches (“And them will leave scars,” her father mourned), she reached in and took out a pair of diamond earrings.
“These are mine,” she said. “They go with my dress.”
Morse had no more than finished his story when two wide boys with SECURITY printed on their black tee-shirts showed up. “Is there a problem here?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said, and there wasn’t. Telling the story had finished venting his rage, which was good. It had also shriveled him somehow, and that wasn’t so good. “Mr. Morse was just leaving.”
He got up, clutching the remains of his Coke. Charlie Jacobs’s blood was drying on his knuckles. He looked at it as if he didn’t know where it had come from.
“Siccin the cops on him wouldn’t do no good, would it?” he asked. “All he did was take her pitcher, they’d say. Hell, it was even free.”
“Come on, sir,” one of the security guys said. “If you’d like to visit the fair, I’d be happy to stamp your hand.”
“Nosir,” he said. “My family’s had enough of this fair. I’m goin home.” He started off, then turned back. “Has he done it before, mister? Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?”
Something happened, I thought. Something, something, something.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Like you’d say, even if he did. You bein his agent and all.”
Then he went away, head lowered, not looking back.
In the Bounder, Jacobs had changed his blood-spotted shirt and had a dishtowel filled with ice on his fattening lower lip. He listened while I told him what Morse had told me, then said, “Tie my tie for me again, will you? We’re already late.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to fix her up. The way you fixed me up. With the headphones.”
He gave me a look that was perilously close to contempt. “Do you think Daddy Dearest would let me within a mile of her? Besides, what’s wrong with her… her compulsion… will wear off on its own. She’ll be fine, and any lawyer worth his salt will be able to convince the judge that she wasn’t herself. She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.”
“None of this is exactly new to you, is it?”
He shrugged, still looking in my direction but no longer quite meeting my eyes. “There have been aftereffects from time to time, yes, although nothing quite so spectacular as Miss Morse’s attempted smash-and-grab.”
“You’re self-teaching, aren’t you? All your customers are actually guinea pigs. They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”
“Are you better now, or not?”
“Yes.” Except for the occasional early-morning stab-a-thon, that was.
“Then please tie my tie.”
I almost didn’t. I was angry with him—on top of everything else, he’d snuck out the back way and yelled for security—but I owed him. He had saved my life, which was good. I was now living a straight life, and that was even better.
So I tied his tie. We did the show. In fact, we did six of them. The crowd aaaahhhed when the close-of-fair fireworks went off, but never so loud as they did when Dan the Lightning Portraits Man worked his magic. And as each girl stared dreamily up at herself on the backdrop while I switched between A minor and E, I wondered which among them would discover that she had lost a little piece of her mind.
An envelope sticking under my door. Déjà vu all over again, Yogi would have said. Only this time I hadn’t peed in my bed, my surgically mended leg didn’t ache, I wasn’t coming down with the flu, and I wasn’t jitter-jiving with the need to score. I bent, picked it up, and tore it open.
My fifth business wasn’t one for gooey goodbyes, I’ll give him that. The envelope contained an Amtrak ticket envelope with a sheet of notepaper paper-clipped to it. Written there were a name and an address in the town of Nederland, Colorado. Below, Jacobs had scrawled three sentences. This man will give you a job, if you want it. He owes me. Thanks for tying my tie. CDJ.
I opened the Amtrak envelope and found a one-way ticket on the Mountain Express from Tulsa to Denver. I looked at it for a long time, thinking that maybe I could turn it in and get a cash refund. Or use it and make the musicians’ exchange in Denver my first stop. Only it would take awhile to get that groove-thing going again. My fingers had gone soft and my chops were rusty. There was also the dope thing to consider. When you’re on the road, dope is everywhere. The magic wore off the Portraits in Lightning after two years or so, Jacobs had said. How did I know it wouldn’t be the same with cures for addiction? How could I know, when he didn’t know himself?
That afternoon I took a cab to the auto body shop he’d rented in West Tulsa. It was abandoned and bare to the walls. There wasn’t so much as a single snip of wire on the grease-darkened floor.
Something happened to me here, I thought. The question was whether or not I’d put on those modified headphones again, given the chance to do it over. I decided I would, and in some fashion I didn’t quite understand, that helped me make up my mind about the ticket. I used it, and when I got to Denver, I took the bus to Nederland, high up on the Western Slope of the Rockies. There I met Hugh Yates, and began my life for the third time.