Текст книги "Revival"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

I did. We did.

 • • •

That was our summer of love. We made it in several places—once in Norm’s bedroom in Cicero Irving’s trailer, where we broke his bed and had to put it back together—but mostly we used the cabin at Skytop. It was our place, and we wrote our names on one of the walls, among half a hundred others. There was never another storm, though. Not that summer.

In the fall, I went to the University of Maine and Astrid went to Suffolk University in Boston. I assumed this would be a temporary separation—we’d see each other on vacations, and at some hazy point in the future, when we both had our degrees, we’d marry. One of the few things I’ve learned since then about the fundamental differences between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.

On the day of the thunderstorm, as we were driving home, Astrid said, “I’m glad you were my first.” I told her I was glad, too, not even thinking about what that implied.

There was no big breakup scene. We just drifted apart, and if there was an architect for that gradual withering, it was Delia Soderberg, Astrid’s pretty, quiet mother, who was unfailingly pleasant but always looked at me the way a storekeeper studies a suspicious twenty-dollar bill. Maybe it’s all right, the storekeeper thinks, but there’s just a little something . . . off about it. If Astrid had gotten pregnant, my assumptions about our future might have proved correct. And hey, we might have been very happy: three kids, two-car garage, backyard swimming pool, all the rest. But I don’t think so. I think the constant gigging—and the girls who always hang around rock bands—would have broken us up. Looking back, I have to think that Delia Soderberg’s suspicions were justified. I was a counterfeit twenty. Good enough to pass in most places, maybe, but not in her store.

There was no big breakup scene with Chrome Roses, either. On my first weekend home from school in Orono, I played with the band at the Amvets on Friday night and at Scooter’s Pub in North Conway on Saturday. We sounded as good as ever, and we were now hauling down a hundred and fifty a gig. I remember I sang lead on “Shake Your Moneymaker” and played a pretty good harp solo.

But when I came home for Thanksgiving, I discovered that Norm had hired a new rhythm guitarist and changed the name of the band to Norman’s Knights. “Sorry, man,” he said, shrugging. “The offers were piling up, and I can’t work in a trio. Drums, bass, two guitars—that’s rock and roll.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it.” And I did, because he was right. Or almost. Drums, bass, two guitars, and everything starts in the key of E.

“We’re playing the Ragged Pony in Winthrop tomorrow night, if you want to sit in. Guest artist kind of thing?”

“I’ll pass,” I said. I’d heard the new rhythm guitarist. He was a year younger than me, and already better; he could chickenscratch like a mad bastard. Besides, that meant I could spend Saturday night with Astrid. Which I did. I suspect she was already dating other guys by then—she was too pretty to stay home—but she was discreet. And loving. It was a good Thanksgiving. I didn’t miss Chrome Roses (or Norman’s Knights, a name I would never have to get used to, which suited me fine) at all.

Well. You know.

Hardly at all.

 • • •

One day not long before Christmas break, I dropped by the Bear’s Den in the University of Maine Memorial Union for a burger and a Coke. On the way out, I stopped to look at the bulletin board. Among the litter of file cards advertising textbooks for sale, cars for sale, and rides wanted to various destinations, I found this:

GOOD NEWS! The Cumberlands are reuniting! BAD NEWS! We’re short a rhythm guitarist! We are a LOUD AND PROUD COVER BAND! If you can play Beatles, Stones, Badfinger, McCoys, Barbarians, Standells, Byrds, etc., come to Room 421, Cumberland Hall, and bring your ax. If you like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, or Blood, Sweat, & Tears, stay the f**k away.

By then I had a bright red Gibson SG, and that afternoon, after class, I toted it over to Cumberland Hall, where I met Jay Pederson. Because of noise restrictions during study hours, we played tennis-racket style in his room. Later that night we plugged in down in the dorm’s rec area. We rocked the place for half an hour, and I got the gig. He was a lot better than me, but I was used to that; I had, after all, started my rock-and-roll career with Norm Irving.

“I’m thinking of changing the name of the band to the Heaters,” Jay said. “What do you think?”

“As long as I get time to study during the week and you split fair, I don’t care if you call it Assholes from Hell.”

“Good name, right up there with Doug and the Hot Nuts, but I don’t think we’d get many high school dances.” He offered me his hand, I clasped it, and we gave each other that dead-fish shake. “Welcome aboard, Jamie. Rehearsal Wednesday night. Be there or be square.”

I was many things, but square wasn’t one of them. I was there. For almost two decades, in a dozen bands and a hundred cities, I was there. A rhythm guitarist can always find work, even if he’s so stoned he can barely stand. Basically, it all comes down to two things: you have to show up, and you have to be able to play a bar E.

My problems started when I stopped showing up.

V

The Fluid Passage of Time. Portraits in Lightning. My Drug Problem.

When I graduated from the University of Maine (2.9 cume, missed the Dean’s List by a coat of paint), I was twenty-two. When I met Charles Jacobs for the second time, I was thirty-six. He looked younger than his age, perhaps because when I saw him last he had been thinned and made haggard by grief. By 1992, I looked much older than mine.

I’ve always been a movie fan. During the 1980s I saw a lot of them, mostly on my own. I dozed off on occasion (Heathers, for instance—that one was a nodder for sure), but mostly I’d make it through no matter how stoned I was, surfing on noise and color and impossibly beautiful women in scanty clothing. Books are good, and I read my share, and TV’s okay if you’re stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen. Just me, my popcorn, and my super-sized Coke. Plus my heroin, of course. I’d take an extra straw from the concession stand, bite it in half, and use it to snort the powder off the back of my hand. I didn’t get to the needle until 1990 or ’91, but I got there eventually. Most of us do. Trust me on this.

The thing I find most charming about the movies is the fluid way time passes. You might start off with this nerdy teenager—no friends, no money, lousy parents—and all at once he turns into Brad Pitt in his prime. The only thing separating the nerd from the god is a title card that says 14 YEARS LATER.

“It’s wicked to wish time away,” my mother used to lecture us kids—usually when we were pining for summer vacation in the depths of February, or waiting for Halloween to hurry up and come—and probably she was right, but I can’t help thinking that such temporal jumps might be a good thing for people living bad lives, and between the advent of the Reagan administration in 1980 and the Tulsa State Fair in 1992, I was living a very bad life. There were blackouts, but no title cards. I had to live every day of those years, and when I couldn’t get high, some of the days were a hundred hours long.

The fade-in goes like this: The Cumberlands became the Heaters, and the Heaters became the J-Tones. Our last gig as a college band was the huge and hilarious Graduation Dance ’78 in Memorial Gym. We played from eight until two in the morning. Shortly thereafter, Jay Pederson hired a locally popular chick vocalist who could also play both tenor and alto sax like nobody’s business. Her name was Robin Storrs. She turned out to be a perfect fit for us, and by August the J-Tones had become Robin and the Jays. We turned into one of Maine’s premier party bands. We had all the gigs we could play, and life was good.

Now here comes the dissolve.

 • • •

Fourteen years later, Jamie Morton woke up in Tulsa. Not in a good hotel, not even in a so-so chain motel; this was a roachpit called the Fairgrounds Inn. Such places were Kelly Van Dorn’s idea of economy. It was eleven in the morning, and the bed was wet. I wasn’t surprised. When you crash for nineteen hours, assisted by Madame H., wetting your bed is almost inevitable. I suppose you’d even do it if you died in that drug-assisted slumber, although look at the bright side: in that case you’d never wake up in pee-soaked Jockeys again.

I did the zombie walk to the bathroom, sniffling and watering at the eyes, shucking my skivvies on the way. I made my shaving kit the first stop . . . but not to clear the stubble. My works were still there, along with a taped-down sandwich bag containing a couple of grams. No reason to think anyone would break in to steal such a paltry stash, but checking is second nature to a junkie.

With that taken care of, I addressed the bowl and rid myself of the urine that had accumulated since my nighttime accident. As I was standing there, I realized that something of importance had slipped my mind. I was currently playing with a country crossover band, and we had been scheduled to open for Sawyer Brown the night before, on the big Oklahoma Stage at the Tulsa State Fair. A primo gig, especially for a not-ready-for Nashville band like White Lightning.

“Sound check at five o’clock,” Kelly Van Dorn had told me. “You’ll be there, right?”

“Sure,” I’d said. “Don’t worry about me.”

Oops.

Coming out of the bathroom, I saw a folded note poking under the door. I had a pretty good idea what it said, but I picked it up and read it, just to be sure. It was short and not sweet.

I called the Union High Music Department and lucked into a kid who could play just enough rhythm and slide guitar to get us through. He was happy to pocket your $600. By the time you get this, we’ll be on the way to Wildwood Green. Don’t even think about following us. You’re fired. Sorry as hell to do it, but enough is enough.

Kelly

PS: I guess you probably won’t pay attention to this, Jamie, but if you don’t clean up your act, you’ll be in prison a year from now. That’s if you’re lucky. Dead if you’re not.

I tried to stick the note in my back pocket and it fell on the balding green carpet instead—I’d forgotten that I wasn’t wearing anything. I picked it up, tossed it in the wastebasket, and peeked out the window. The courtyard parking lot was totally empty except for an old Ford and some farmer’s broke-ass pickup. Both the Explorer the band rode in and the equipment van that our sound guy drove were gone. Kelly hadn’t been kidding. The out-of-tune nutbags had left me. Which was probably all for the best. I sometimes thought if I had to play one more drinkin-n-cheatin song, I’d lose what little mind I had left.

I decided to make re-upping the room my first priority. I had no desire to spend another night in Tulsa, especially with the State Fair going full blast down the street, but I’d need some time to think about my next career move. I needed to score, too, and if you can’t find someone to sell you dope at a state fair, you’re not trying.

I kicked the damp skivvies into the corner—a tip for the chambermaid, I thought snidely—and unzipped my duffel. Nothing in there but dirty clothes (I had meant to find a Laundromat yesterday, another thing that had slipped my mind), but at least they were dry dirty clothes. I dressed and trekked across the cracked asphalt of the courtyard to the motel office, my zombie walk slowly perking up to the zombie shuffle. My throat hurt every time I swallowed. Just a little extra something to add to the fun.

The lady on the desk was a hard-faced country girl of about fifty, currently living her life under a volcano of teased red hair. A talk show host was on her little television, chatting up a storm with Nicole Kidman. Above the TV was a framed picture of Jesus bringing a boy and girl a puppy. I was in no way surprised. In flyover country, they have a way of getting Christ and Santa all mixed up.

“Your group has already checked out,” she said, after finding my name in her register book. She had the local accent, which sounds like a badly tuned banjo. “Left a couple of hours ago. Said they were driving all the way to North Cah’lina.”

“I’m aware,” I said. “I’m no longer with the band.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Creative differences,” I said.

The eyebrow climbed higher.

“I’ll be staying another night.”

“Uh-huh, okay. Cash or credit card?”

I had two hundred or so in cash, but most of that liquidity was earmarked for the dope purchase I hoped to make at the fair, so I gave her my BankAmericard. She called it in and waited, phone cocked between her ear and one meaty shoulder, now watching an ad for paper towels that could apparently drink up spills the size of Lake Michigan. I watched with her. When the talk show returned, Nicole Kidman was joined by Tom Selleck, and the country girl was still on hold. She didn’t seem to mind, but I did. The itches had started, and my bad leg was starting to throb. Just as another ad came on, the country girl perked up. She swiveled around in her chair, looked out her window at a blazing blue Oklahoma sky, and chatted briefly. Then she hung up and handed back my credit card.

“Declined. Which makes me dubious about taking cash. Supposing you have it.”

That was mean, but I gave her my best smile, just the same. “The card’s good. They made a mistake. It happens all the time.”

“Then you’ll be able to rectify it at some other motel,” she said. (Rectify! Such a big word for a country girl!) “There’s four more down the block, but they ain’t much.”

Unlike this roadside Ritz-Carlton, I thought, but what I said was, “Try the card again.”

“Honey,” she said, “I look at you and I don’t have to.”

I sneezed, turning my head to catch it on the short sleeve of my Charlie Daniels Band tee. Which was okay since it hadn’t been washed lately. Or even not so lately. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I left my first husband when him and both his brothers took to smokin the rock. No offense, but I know what I’m lookin at. Last night’s paid for—on the band’s credit card—but now that you’re what they call a solo artist, checkout time’s one o’clock.”

“On the door it says three.”

She leveled a chipped nail at a sign to the left of the calendar featuring Puppy-Giving Jesus: DURING STATE FAIR, SEPTEMBER 25 TO OCTOBER 4, CHECOUT TIME WILL BE 1 PM.

“Checkout is spelled wrong,” I said. “You should rectify that.”

She glanced at the sign, then turned back to me. “So ’tis, but the one PM part needs no rectifyin.” She glanced at her watch. “That gives you an hour and a half. Don’t make me call the police, hon. At state fair time, they’re thicker’n flies on a fresh dog turd, and they’d be here in a jiff.”

“This is such bullshit,” I said.

That was a blurry time for me, but I remember her reply as clearly as if she had spoken it in my ear two minutes ago: “Uh-uh, honey, this is reality.”

Then she turned back to the television, where some fool was tapdancing.

 • • •

I wasn’t going to try scoring dope in the daytime, not even at the state fair, so I stayed at the Fairgrounds Inn until one thirty (just to spite the country girl). Then I grabbed my duffel in one hand and my guitar case in the other, and set out walking. I made a stop at a Texaco station around where North Detroit Avenue becomes South Detroit. By then my walk had become a portside limp and my hip was throbbing with my heartbeat. In the men’s room I cooked up and delivered half my goods into the hollow of my left shoulder. Mellowness ensued. Both my sore throat and the ache in my leg began to recede.

My good left leg became my bad left leg on a sunny summer day in 1984. I was on a Kawasaki; the elderly asshole coming the other way was piloting a Chevrolet the size of a cabin cruiser. He wandered into my lane, leaving me a choice: either the soft shoulder or a head-on collision. I picked the obvious choice and made it past the asshole okay. The mistake was trying to swerve back onto the road at forty. Advice to all you novice riders out there: swerving on gravel at forty is a terrible idea. I dumped the bike and broke the leg in five places. I also shattered my hip. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the Joy of Morphine.

 • • •

With my leg feeling better and the itches and twitches at bay, I was able to move on from the gas station with a bit more vigor, and by the time I got to the Greyhound terminal, I was asking myself why I’d stuck with Kelly Van Dorn and his screwed-up country band as long as I had. Playing weepy ballads (in the key of C, for God’s sake) was not what I was cut out for. I was a rocker, not a shitkicker.

I purchased a ticket on the following day’s noon bus to Chicago, which also bought me the right to stash my duffel and my Gibson SG—the only valuable possession I had left—in the baggage room. The ticket cost me twenty-nine dollars. I counted the rest sitting in a bathroom stall. It came to a hundred and fifty-nine bucks, about what I had expected. The future was looking brighter. I would score at the fair, find a place to crash—maybe at a local homeless shelter, maybe outside—and tomorrow I’d ride the big gray dog to Shytown. There was a musicians’ exchange there, as there is in most big cities, with players sitting around, telling jokes, swapping gossip, and looking for gigs. For some this wasn’t easy (accordion players, for instance), but bands were always looking for competent rhythm guitar players, and I was a smidge more than that. By 1992 I could even play a little lead, if called upon to do so. And if I wasn’t too wrecked. The important thing was to get to Chicago and get a gig before Kelly Van Dorn put out the word that I was unreliable, and the pisshead just might.

With at least six hours to kill until dark, I cooked up the rest of my shit and put it where it would do the most good. Once that was taken care of, I bought a paperback western at the newsstand, sat on a bench with it opened to someplace in the middle, and nodded off. When I woke myself up with a volley of sneezes, it was seven o’clock, and time for the former rhythm guitarist of White Lightning to hunt up some of the good stuff.

 • • •

By the time I got to the fair, sunset was just a bitter orange line in the west. Although I wanted to save most of my money for a buy, I splurged on a taxi to get there, because I wasn’t feeling good at all. It wasn’t just the usual coming-down twitches and aches, either. The sore throat was back. There was a high, sour humming in my ears, and I felt hot all over. I told myself that last was normal, because it was one hot bitchkitty of a night. As for the rest, I was sure six or seven hours of sleep would put me right. I could catch it on the bus. I wanted to be all I could be before I re-enlisted in the Rock and Roll Army.

I bypassed the main entrance to the fair, because only an idiot would attempt to buy heroin at a craft exhibit or livestock exhibition. Beyond it was the entrance to Bell’s Amusement Park. That adjunct to the Tulsa State Fair is gone now, but in September of 1992, Bell’s was blasting away full force. Both roller coasters—the wooden Zingo and the more modern Wildcat—were whirling and twirling, trailing happy screams behind each hairpin turn and suicidal plunge. There were long lines at the water slides, the Himalaya, and the Phantasmagoria dark ride.

I ignored these and idled my way down the midway past the food concessions, where the smells of fried dough and sausages—usually enticing—made me feel a little sick to my stomach. There was a guy with the right look hanging around the Pitch Til U Win shy, and I almost approached him, but caught a narc vibe when I got close. The shirt he was wearing (COCAINE! BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS!) was just a little too on-the-nose. I kept moving, past the shooting gallery, the wooden milkbottle shy, the Skeeball, the Wheel of Fortune. I was feeling worse all the time, my skin hotter and that humming in my ears louder. My throat was so sore I winced with every swallow.

Up ahead was an elaborate mini-golf layout. It was mostly filled with laughing teenagers, and I thought I had arrived at Ground Zero. Wherever there are teenagers out for a night of fun, there are dealers in the vicinity who are happy to help them maximize said fun. And oh yeah, I could see a couple of fellows who had just the right look. By their shifty eyes and unwashed hair shalt thou know them.

The midway ended at a T junction beyond the mini-golf, one way leading back to the fairgrounds, the other to the racetrack. I had no desire to go to either place, but I’d been hearing a strange electric crackle off to the right, followed by applause, laughter, and cries of amazement. Now, as I drew closer to the junction, I could see that each crackle was accompanied by a bright blue flash that reminded me of lightning. The lightning on Skytop, to be perfectly specific. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Whatever the gaff was, it had drawn a big crowd. I decided the sharpies hanging around the golf course could wait a few minutes. Guys like that never go away until they shut off the neon, and I wanted to see who was making lightning on this hot and clear Oklahoma night.

An amplified voice cried, “Now that you have seen the power of my Lightning Maker—the only one in the world, I assure you—I’ll give an actual demonstration of the wonderful portrait that one portrait of Alexander Hamilton from your wallet or purse will buy you; one amazing demonstration before I open my Electric Studio and offer you the chance to sit for the photographic representation of a lifetime! But I’ll need a volunteer so you’ll see exactly what you’ll be getting for the best ten dollars you ever spent! Volunteer? May I have a volunteer? It’s perfectly safe, I assure you! Come on, folks, I always heard Sooners were famous in the Lower Forty-eight for their bravery!”

There was a good-size crowd, fifty or sixty, in front of a raised stage. The canvas backdrop was six feet wide and at least twenty feet high. On it was a photograph almost as big as a movie screen image. It featured a beautiful young woman on what appeared to be a ballroom floor. Her black hair was piled atop her head in a series of complicated twirls and tucks that must have taken hours to create. Her strapless evening gown was cut low, the tops of her breasts curving sweetly above it. She was wearing diamond earrings and bloodred lipstick.

Facing the giant ballroom girl was an old-fashioned camera, the nineteenth-century kind that stands on a tripod and has a black drape the photographer can throw over his head. Placed as it was, you would have said it could only snap the ballroom girl from the knees down. Next to it was a flash-powder tray on a post. The black-suited, top-hatted gaffmeister had one loosely curled hand on the camera, and I knew him at once.

All that is clear, but my memory of what happened next is untrustworthy—I freely admit it. I was a longtime junkie who had graduated to the needle two years previous, first just skin-popping, but more and more frequently aiming for the vein. I was malnourished and severely underweight. On top of that, I was running a temperature. It was the flu, and it had come on fast. Getting up that morning, I’d thought I just had the usual case of heroin sniffles, a cold at worst, but by the time I saw Charles Jacobs standing beside an old-fashioned tripod camera and in front of a canvas backdrop with PORTRAITS IN LIGHTNING written over a giant girl, I felt like I was living in a dream. It didn’t surprise me to see my old minister, now with touches of gray at his temples and lines (faint ones) bracketing his mouth. It wouldn’t have surprised me if my late mother and sister had joined him onstage, dressed as Playboy Bunnies.

A couple of men raised their hands in response to Jacobs’s call for volunteers, but he laughed and pointed at the beautiful girl looming over his shoulder. “I’m sure you guys are brave as the devil on Saturday night, but none of you would look good in a strapless.”

Good-natured laughter greeted this.

“I want a gal,” said the fellow who showed me Peaceable Lake when I was but a tyke in short pants. “I want a pretty gal! A pretty little Sooner gal! How ’bout you folks? You down with that?”

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.