Revival: A Novel Page 14

  They clapped their hands to show how down with it they were. And Jacobs, who had surely already picked out his mark, pointed his cordless mike toward someone in the front of the crowd. “How about you, miss? You’re about as pretty a gal as anyone could want!”

  I was at the back of the tip, but the crowd seemed to part before me as if I were possessed of some magical repelling force. Probably I just elbowed my way forward, but I don’t remember it that way, and if anyone elbowed me back, I don’t remember that, either. I seemed to float forward. All the colors were brighter now, the tootling of the carousel calliope and the screams from the Zingo louder. The humming in my ears had escalated to a tuneful ringing: G7, I think. I moved through an aromatic atmosphere of perfume, aftershave, and discount store hairspray.

  The pretty Sooner gal was protesting, but her friends were having none of that. They pushed her forward, and she mounted the steps on the left side of the stage, tanned thighs flashing beneath the frayed hem of her short denim skirt. Above the skirt was a green smock that was high at the neck but left a flirty inch of midriff revealed. Her hair was blond and long. A few men whistled.

  “Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge!” Jacobs told the crowd, and swept off his tophat. I saw him clench the hand holding it. For just a moment I felt sensations I hadn’t since that day at Skytop: gooseflesh on my arms, hair standing to attention on the nape of my neck, the air too heavy in my lungs. Then the tray beside the camera exploded with something that was certainly not flash powder, and the canvas backdrop lit up in a dazzling blue glare. The face of the girl in the evening gown was blotted out. As the dazzle faded I saw in her place—or thought I saw—the fiftysomething country girl who had kicked me out of the Fairgrounds Inn some nine hours earlier. Then the girl in the low-cut spangly gown was back.

  It wowed the crowd and it wowed me, too . . . but it didn’t completely surprise me. Reverend Jacobs up to his old tricks, that was all. Nor did it surprise me when he put his arm around the girl, turned her to face us, and for an instant I thought it was Astrid Soderberg, once more sixteen years old and worried about getting pregnant. Astrid who sometimes used to blow smoke from her Virginia Slims into my mouth, giving me a hard-on for the ages.

  Then she was just a pretty little Sooner gal again, in from the farm and ready for a night of fun.

  Jacobs’s assistant, a kid with zits and a bad haircut, trotted out with an ordinary wooden chair. He put it in front of the camera, then made a comic business of dusting off Jacobs’s old-fashioned frock coat. “Sit down, honey,” Jacobs said, ushering the girl to the chair. “I promise you a shockingly good time.”

  He waggled his eyebrows and his young assistant did a little electric jitter. The audience yukked it up. Jacobs’s eyes found me, now in the first row, passed on, then came back. After a second’s consideration, they moved on again.

  “Will it hurt?” the girl asked, and now I saw she didn’t look much like Astrid, after all. Of course not. She was much younger than my first girlfriend would be now . . . and wherever Astrid might be, her last name was almost surely no longer Soderberg.

  “Not a bit,” Jacobs assured her. “And unlike any other lady who dares to step forward, your portrait will be . . .”

  He looked away from her, back at the crowd, this time directly at me.

  “. . . absolutely free.”

  He seated her in the chair, continuing with the patter, but he seemed a little hesitant now, as if he had lost the thread. He kept glancing at me as his assistant fastened a white silk blindfold over the girl’s eyes. If he was distracted, the crowd didn’t notice; a petite pretty girl was about to be photographed at the feet of a giant beautiful girl—while blindfolded, no less—and all that was very interesting. So was the fact that the live girl was showing a lot of leg and the one on the backdrop was showing a lot of cleavage.

  “Who wants”—the pretty girl began, and Jacobs promptly put his microphone in front of her mouth so she could share her question with the whole crowd—“a picture of me wearin a blindfold?”

  “The rest of you sure ain’t blindfolded, hon!” someone yelled, and the crowd cheered good-naturedly. The girl in the chair pressed her knees tightly together, but she was smiling a little, too. The old I’m-being-a-good-sport smile.

  “My dear, I think you’ll be surprised,” Jacobs said. Then he turned to address the crowd. “Electricity! Although we take it for granted, it’s the greatest natural wonder of our world! The Great Pyramid of Giza is only an anthill in comparison! It’s the foundation of our modern civilization! Some claim to understand it, ladies and gentlemen, but none understand the secret electricity, that power which binds the very universe into one harmonic whole. Do I understand it? No, I do not. Not fully. Yet I know its power to destroy, to heal, and to create magical beauty! What’s your name, miss?”

  “Cathy Morse.”

  “Cathy, there’s an old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You and I and everyone here is going to witness the truth of that saying tonight, and when you walk away, you’ll have a portrait you can show your grandchildren. A portrait they’ll show to their grandchildren! And if those as-yet-unborn ancestors don’t marvel over it, my name’s not Dan Jacobs.”

  But it isn’t, I thought.

  I was swaying back and forth now, as if to the music of the calliope and the music I was hearing in my ears. I tried to stop and found I couldn’t. My legs had a strangely meaty feel, as if the bones were being extracted, inch by inch.

  You’re Charles, not Dan—do you think I don’t know the man who gave my brother back his voice?

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you may want to shield your eyes!”

  The assistant theatrically covered his own. Jacobs whirled, puffed up the black cloth on the back of the camera, and disappeared beneath it. “Close your eyes, Cathy!” he called. “Even beneath the blindfold, an electrical pulse this powerful can be dazzling! I’ll count to three! One . . . and . . . two . . . and . . . three!”

  Once again I felt that strange thickening of the air, and I wasn’t alone; the crowd shuffled back a step or two. Next came a hard click, as if someone had snapped his fingers beside my right ear. The world lit up in a blue burst of light.

  Aaaahhh, went the crowd. And when they could see again and realized what had become of the backdrop: AAAAAAHHHHHHH!

  The evening gown was the same—low-cut spangled silver. The inviting curve of bosom was the same, as was the complicated hairdo. But the breasts were now smaller and the hair was blond instead of black. The face had changed, too. It was Cathy Morse standing there on the ballroom floor. Then I blinked, and the pretty little Sooner gal was gone. It was Astrid again, Astrid as she had been at sixteen, the love of my days and the eventually requited lust of my nights.

  The crowd exhaled a low gust of astonishment, and I had an idea that was both crazy and persuasive: they were also seeing people from their own back pages, those either gone or changed by the fluid passage of time.

  Then it was just Cathy Morse, but that was astounding enough: Cathy Morse standing twenty feet high in the sort of expensive gown she would never own in real life. The diamond earrings were there, and although the lipstick of the girl in the chair was candy pink, that of the giant Cathy behind her was bright red.

  No sign of a blindfold, either.

  Same old Reverend Jacobs, I thought, but he’s learned some tricks a lot flashier than Electric Jesus walking across Peaceable Lake or a cloth belt with a toy motor inside it.

  He popped out from beneath the black cloth, tossed it back, and pulled a plate from the back of his camera. He showed it to the audience, and they went AAAAHHHHH again. Jacobs bowed, then turned to Cathy, who was looking mighty puzzled. He held the plate out to her and said, “You may take off the blindfold, Cathy. It’s safe now.”

  She slipped it down and saw the picture on the plate: an Oklahoma girl s
omehow transformed into a costly French courtesan of the demimonde. Her hands went to her mouth, but Jacobs had the mike right there and everyone heard her Oh my God.

  “Now turn around!” Jacobs cried.

  She stood, turned, looked, and reeled back at the sight of herself, twenty feet high and tricked out in high-class glitter. Jacobs put an arm around her waist to steady her. His mike hand, which was also concealing some sort of control device, clenched again, and this time the crowd did more than gasp. There were a few screams, as well.

  The giant Cathy Morse did a slow fashion-model turn, revealing the back of the gown, which was cut much lower than the front. She looked over her shoulder . . . and winked.

  Jacobs did not neglect the mike—he was clearly an old hand at this—and the tip heard the real Cathy’s follow-up exclamation as clearly as they had the first: “Oh my fuckin God!”

  They laughed. They cheered. And when they saw her bright crimson blush, they cheered even harder. Above Jacobs and the girl, the giant Cathy was changing. The blond hair grew muddy. The features faded, although the red lipstick remained bright, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in Alice.

  Then it was the original girl again. The image of Cathy Morse had faded out of existence.

  “But this version will never fade,” Jacobs said, holding up the old-fashioned plate again. “My assistant will print it and frame it and you can pick it up before you go home tonight.”

  “Watch out there, Slick!” someone in the front row yelled out. “Girl’s gonna faint!”

  But she didn’t. She only swayed a little on her feet.

  I was the one who fainted.

  • • •

  When I next opened my eyes, I was in a queen-size bed. A blanket was pulled up to my chin. When I looked to my right, I saw a wall done in fake wood paneling. When I looked to my left, I saw a nice kitchen area: fridge, sink, microwave oven. Beyond it was a couch, a dinette with four chairs, even an easy chair in the living area facing the built-in TV. I couldn’t crane my neck far enough to see the driving compartment, but as an itinerant musician who had traveled tens of thousands of miles in similar rigs (although few as squared away as this one), I knew where I was, anyway: a large RV, probably a Bounder. Someone’s home away from home.

  I was hot, burning up. My mouth was dry as road dust. I was also jonesing like a motherfucker. I pushed the blanket down and immediately started shivering. A shadow fell over me. It was Jacobs, holding out a beautiful thing: orange juice in a tall glass with a bendy straw sticking out of it. The only thing better would have been a loaded hypo, but one thing at a time. I held my hand out for the glass.

  He pulled the blanket back up first, then took a knee beside the bed. “Slow, Jamie. You’re one sick American, I’m afraid.”

  I drank. It was wonderful on my throat. I tried to take the glass and chug it down, but he held it away from me. “Slow, I said.”

  I dropped my hand and he gave me another sip. It went down fine, but on the third one, my belly clenched and the shivers came back. That wasn’t the flu.

  “I need to score,” I said. This was hardly the way I wanted to re-introduce myself to my former minister and first adult friend, but a junkie in need has no shame. Besides, he might have a skeleton or two in his own closet. Why else would he be going under the name Dan Jacobs instead of Charles?

  “Yes,” he said. “I saw the tracks. And I intend to maintain you, at least until you’ve beaten whatever bug you’ve got running around in your system. Otherwise you’ll start throwing up whatever I try to feed you, and we can’t have that, can we? Not when you look to be at least fifty pounds underweight as it is.”

  From his pocket he brought a brown gram bottle. It had a small spoon attached to the cap. I reached for it. He shook his head and held it away from me.

  “Same deal. I do the driving.”

  He unscrewed the cap, dipped out a tiny spoonful of grimy white powder, and held it under my nose. I snorted it up my right nostril. He dipped again, and I treated the left nostril. It wasn’t what I needed—not enough of what I needed, to be exact—but the shakes began to subside, and I stopped feeling like I might hurl up that nice cold orange juice.

  “Now you can doze,” he said. “Or nod off, if that’s what you call it. I’m going to make you some chicken soup. Just Campbell’s, not like your mother used to make, but it’s what I’ve got.”

  “I don’t know if I can hold it down,” I said, but it turned out I could. When I’d finished the mug he held for me, I asked for more dope. He administered two very stingy snorts.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked as he tucked the bottle back into a front pocket of the jeans he was now wearing.

  He smiled. It lit up his face and made him twenty-five again, with a wife he loved and a young son he adored. “Jamie,” he said, “I’ve been working amusement parks and the carny circuit for a long time now. If I couldn’t find drugs, I’d be either blind or an idiot.”

  “I need more. I need a shot.”

  “No, a shot’s what you want, and you’re not going to get it from me. I have no interest in helping you get high. I just don’t want you to go into convulsions and die in my boondocker. Go to sleep now. It’s nearly midnight. If you’re better in the morning, we’ll discuss many things, including how to detach the monkey currently riding on your back. If you’re not better, I’m taking you to either St. Francis or the OSU Medical Center.”

  “Good luck getting them to take me,” I said. “I’m two steps from broke and my medical plan is convenience store Tylenol.”

  “In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, we’ll worry about that tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.”

  “Fiddle-de-dee,” I croaked.

  “If you say so.”

  “Give me a little more.” The short snorts he’d doled out were about as useful to me as a Marlboro Light to a guy who’s been chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings all his life, but even short snorts were better than nothing.

  He considered, then parceled out two more hits. Even stingier than the last pair.

  “Giving heroin to a man with a bad case of the flu,” he said, and chuckled. “I must be crazy.”

  I peeked under the blanket and saw he’d undressed me down to my skivvies. “Where are my clothes?”

  “In the closet. I segregated them from mine, I’m afraid. They smelled a trifle gamy.”

  “My wallet’s in the front pocket of my jeans. There’s a claim check for my duffel bag and my guitar. The clothes don’t matter, but the guitar does.”

  “Bus station or train station?”

  “Bus.” The dope might only have been powder, and administered in medicinal quantities, but either it was very good stuff or it was hitting my depleted body especially hard. The soup was warm in my belly, and my eyelids felt like sashweights.

  “Sleep, Jamie,” he said, and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “If you’re going to beat the bug, you have to sleep.”

  I lay back on the pillow. It was much softer than the one in my Fairgrounds Inn room. “Why are you calling yourself Dan?”

  “Because it’s my name. Charles Daniel Jacobs. Now go to sleep.”

  I was going to, but there was one other thing I had to ask. Adults change, sure, but if they haven’t been struck by some debilitating disease or disfigured by an accident, you can usually recognize them. Children, on the other hand . . .

  “You knew me. I could see it. How?”

  “Because your mother lives in your face, Jamie. I hope Laura’s well.”

  “She’s dead. Her and Claire both.”

  I don’t know how he took it. I closed my eyes, and ten seconds later I was out.

  • • •

  When I woke up I felt cooler, but the shakes were back bigtime. Jacobs put a drugstore fever strip on my forehead, held it there for a minute or so, then nodded. “You mi
ght live,” he said, and gave me two more teensy snorts from the brown bottle. “Can you get up and eat some scrambled eggs?”

  “Bathroom first.”

  He pointed, and I made my way into the small cubicle, holding onto things. I only had to pee, but I was too weak to stand up, so I sat down and did it girly-style. When I came out, he was scrambling eggs and whistling. My stomach rumbled. I tried to recall when I’d last eaten something more substantial than canned soup. Cold cuts backstage before the gig two nights ago came to mind. If I’d eaten anything after that, I couldn’t remember it.

  “Ingest slowly,” he said, setting the plate on the dinette table. “You don’t want to bark it right back up again, do you?”

  I ate slowly, and cleaned the plate. He sat across from me, drinking coffee. When I asked for some, he gave me half a cup, heavy on the half-and-half.

  “The trick with the picture,” I said. “How did you do that?”

  “Trick? You wound me. The image on the backdrop is coated with a phosphorescent substance. The camera is also an electrical generator—”

  “That much I got.”

  “The flash is very powerful and very . . . special. It projects the image of the subject onto that of the girl in the evening dress. It doesn’t hold for long; the area is too large. The pictures I sell, on the other hand, last much longer.”

  “Long enough so she can show it to her grandchildren? Really?”

  “Well,” he said, “no.”

  “How long?”

  “Two years. Give or take.”

  “By which time you’re long gone.”

  “Indeed. And the pictures that matter . . .” He tapped his temple. “Up here. For all of us. Don’t you agree?”

  “But . . . Reverend Jacobs . . .”

  I saw a momentary flicker of the man who had preached the Terrible Sermon back when LBJ was president. “Please don’t call me that. Plain old Dan will do. That’s who I am now. Dan the Lightning Portraits Man. Or Charlie, if that’s more comfortable for you.”