The Nine Pound Hammer (5 page)

Ray drifted in and out of consciousness. His skull felt inches too thick and pulsed painfully. The world seemed muted and hazy. He forced an eyelid open and saw the forest floor bouncing below him. He closed his eye and tried not to be sick.

“… and I don’t think we should be taking him with us,” someone said.

“He’s hurt. We have to.” Ray could feel the rumble of the voice reverberate through his body. He was being carried over someone’s shoulder, and whoever it was must have been huge because the ground looked a long ways down. The other voice sounded like a girl, but Ray felt too nauseated to turn his head and check.

“But Nel sent us to collect herbs. He didn’t say anything—”

“He’d say the same as me. The boy’s hurt. He needs help.”

“Pirates?” Ray whispered.

“What did he say?” the girl asked.

“Not sure.”

Ray mumbled, “Are you … Big Jimmie? You taking me … to the
Snapdragon?
”

“I think he’s knocked squirrelly,” the giant said.

Ray’s vision swirled, and he passed out.

*  *  *

When Ray next came to, he was lying on the grass. He squinted at the rosy halo of a sunset. The trees were gone from overhead; he was out of the woods. The giant was wiping Ray’s forehead with a wet handkerchief.

“I think he’s got a fever,” the giant said in a voice so low that it rumbled and vibrated more out from his body than from his mouth.

The girl snorted. Ray turned to look at her. She was sitting in the grass looking away from him, down a stretch of railroad track.

In certain neighborhoods of the cities where Ray had grown up, there had been Chinese immigrants, many running groceries or employed as laborers. It seemed strange to Ray that he should find someone Chinese out here in the middle of nowhere, and without the slightest tinge of an accent.

Ray looked up at the giant’s earthy brown face. His jaw was wide and his features chiseled, but his curly eyelashes and friendly dark eyes eased Ray’s worries.

“Where are you taking me?” Ray asked.

“To our train,” the giant said. He spoke in a slow, calculating drawl, as if his mouth were full of sticky sweet molasses.

Ray listened for the sound of a train, a whistle or a rattling of the track. But the world was quiet except for a chorus of katydids. There was no train coming, and they must have been miles from a depot.

“Where is it?” He was growing dizzy again. He struggled to keep his attention on the giant and the girl.

The giant chuckled and looked at the girl.

Ray followed his gaze. The girl gave a scowl either to Ray or to the giant or to both and tucked her hand into the fold of her tunic.

For a moment, Ray thought her hand had been black. Or was it a tattoo? He thought he saw on the dark skin of her hand an unearthly glittering, a shimmering and swirling cosmos of faint sparkles. But Ray decided—before he slipped into unconsciousness again—that he must have been addled from the fall.

R
AY WOKE WITH THE GAUZY MORNING SUNLIGHT ON HIS
face. The straw-tick mattress beneath him was soft, but the threadbare sheets were wet with perspiration. A woman leaned over him. She was pleasantly plump with small, pinched features. Her misty-brown hair was pulled into a knot at her nape, with loose strands dangling about her face.

Gently she slid an arm under Ray’s neck and lifted his head. Something cool and wet touched his lips. “Take a bit more, dear,” she said. “Fever’s near broke, but you need rest. Drink and sleep.”

Ray swallowed. It was spicy on his tongue, causing a little tingling as it went down.

“Where am I?” Ray whispered. The room felt as if it was moving, swaying and jolting beneath him.

“Safe, now shhh,” she said, lowering his head back to the damp pillow. Ray’s eyes fluttered, and he fell back to sleep.

Morning light filtered in again, but the quality was different enough to make Ray believe it was not the same morning as the one he last remembered. Ray felt under the sheets and realized he was wearing only his underclothes. He rolled over and noticed a bundle on the floor next to the tick mattress: his cap, belt, and jacket stacked neatly on top of his tattered leather brogans. He reached a weak hand to lift his cap. Under it, he was relieved to discover the lodestone lying next to the silver dagger.

He ran his fingers to the back of his head and felt a scabbed wound. Standing brought a brief wave of dizziness, and he steadied himself against the walls of the curiously skinny room. It was little more than a bed and the floor beside the bed. At the foot of the bed was a window showing a sunny green field of corn. Turning, Ray saw a door with a curtained window.

Beside the door was a tin plate draped with a red cotton napkin. Ray lifted the napkin from the plate, revealing biscuits, greasy pieces of chicken, and cold potatoes. He set the food aside. First he wanted to figure out where he was and where his clothes were. Ray picked up his wool cap and noticed that the top was torn open from his accident. His brogans were in no better shape. The toes were
worn nearly to little oval holes and the leather soles were swollen and cracked. Were they really that abused from the trek through the Lost Wood? Ray slid them on his feet, took a cold biscuit from the plate, and went in search of the woman.

Opening the door, Ray looked right and then left down a narrow hallway lined with windows on one side, more doors on the other, and a vestibule at each end. This was a train, he realized. The train was no longer moving, but out the window he did not see a depot or a station, only a sun-dappled clearing, bordered by a forest. People were walking around outside. Maybe one of them would know where the woman was with his clothes.

Ray began down the hallway toward the vestibule. Although he had never slept in one, he had wandered enough trains to recognize this car as a sleeper—much messier, however, than any sleeper car he had ever seen. To reach the vestibule, Ray had to maneuver across a jumble of crates and trunks scattered about the hallway. Strings of blue, red, and green bottles, rusty hardware, and bundles of drying herbs hung from the ceiling. Ray kept banging his head against the bottles, causing a clanking chorus that sounded like a gypsy tinker wagon.

Through the windows, he saw people erecting a long canvas tent and carrying boxes around a clearing. Where had they stopped the train? Surely not on a main line. He decided that this must be some sort of secondary rail, the
sort that breaks off around towns to connect with mills and factories. He had lived in enough neighborhoods around smaller rail lines to know.

Where was the plump woman? He couldn’t go wandering around in his underwear.

As he reached for the vestibule door, somebody beyond opened it first. A girl looked up and gasped,
“Caramba!
” touching her hand to her throat with a start.

Ray was startled, too, but not for the same reason.

The girl was quite possibly the most beautiful he had ever seen. She had large black eyes, long fluttering lashes, and honey-colored skin. Her hair fell in thick black ringlets over her shoulders. She wore a fluted layered dress of exotic reds and purples, stitched with shiny spangles.

He was equally surprised by the rattlesnake draped about her neck. The serpent swayed out from her shoulder, poking its tongue to inspect Ray and shaking its rattles. Ray jerked back.

The girl’s eyes went from Ray’s face down to his attire, and then she erupted into laughter. Ray looked down at his gray woolen underclothes and bare chest, his pale, skinny legs protruding from the unlaced boots. He did his best to cover himself, more from embarrassment than modesty, but she had already looked away, giggles rippling out from the vestibule.

“Está despierto,
” she called. “He’s awake.” She gave him one last look up and down, snorted, and closed the door.

A moment later the door opened again and this time it
was the warm brown face of the giant who had carried Ray from the woods that looked in. As he saw the giant now, Ray realized he was a boy not much older than himself.

“You’re up. You feeling all right?” he said.

“Yeah, where am I?”

“Welcome to the
Ballyhoo
. It’s our train.” He blinked several times and chuckled. “Where’s your clothes?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you!”

A pained expression crossed the giant’s face, and he slapped a hand to his forehead. “Forgot … I’ll be right back.”

Ray’s appetite had returned with a sudden complaining growl. He went back to his room and sat on the edge of his bed, devouring the plate of food. As he was licking the remnants from his fingers, the giant squeezed into Ray’s room.

Tossing the shirt, trousers, and socks into Ray’s lap, he said, “Still a little damp. Ma Everett decided to wash them for you, and I was supposed to hang them up. I forgot. My mind seems to wander sometimes. Sorry they ain’t dry. Meet me outside when you change.” He squeezed back into the hallway, and Ray heard him curse as he stumbled on the wreck of crates and clattering bottles.

After dressing and lacing up his brogans, Ray picked up the lodestone, retied the twine to his belt, and began slipping the stone in his pocket. He stopped and then slowly took the lodestone back out. He stared down at the dark rock. It wasn’t moving.

“You ready?” the giant called.

Ray went out into the hallway, narrowing his eyes at the odd assortment of people busily working outside. He tossed the lodestone a few times in his hands, waiting to see if it would begin moving again. It didn’t.

With a frown, Ray dropped the lodestone in his pocket and stepped out onto the vestibule.

“Never seen anything like it. That bear was bucking, and you were flopping all around like a catfish,” the giant laughed.

He was leading Ray past the busy people—nearly a dozen—carrying rolls of canvas, dragging platforms, and hoisting banners above the clearing. As Ray had suspected, the train had stopped on a weed-tangled secondary rail line. Fields, ripe with high summer, extended on the back side of the
Ballyhoo
. On the side of the train where the tent was erected was a clearing of grass, bordered halfway by trees, then a burned-out factory. Beyond were the first clapboard houses on the edge of a town.

The
Ballyhoo
had none of the elegance or beauty of Mister Grevol’s train. This was a working train—a squat old eight-wheeler locomotive, rusty in places, with only six cars behind the tender. Ray doubted it could pull much more than that.

“You had a good ride on that old bear before she threw you,” the giant continued. “But what I can’t figure is why
that bear didn’t maul you! All she did was sidle up and lick you like you was her baby.”

Ray narrowed his eyes with confusion. “I don’t really remember much after I hit my head.”

“Well, she did. Beats all, don’t it? What’s your name anyhow?”

“Ray. What’s yours?”

“They call me Conker. That girl you met in your drawers—that’s Marisol.” Conker pointed toward a tent several yards away. The black-haired girl was laughing as she talked to two boys putting up a makeshift fence of ribbon and pine poles.

“She has a snake on her shoulder,” Ray said.

As if it somehow answered Ray’s question, Conker replied, “She comes from the desert, out in Sonora, if I recollect.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “She’s a snake dancer.”

“A what?” Ray said.

Conker kept walking, and Ray had to hurry to catch up to the giant. Conker nodded to his right, not slowing his pace. “There’s Si. You remember her?”

The Chinese girl who had been in the forest with Conker was unwinding a heavy coil of rope with the help of a soot-faced young man. As she spied Ray, she turned away quickly, snapping the long ebony braid on her head like a whip.

“She?” Ray asked.

“Yeah, Si.”

“Her name’s
She?
”

“Not like ‘she.’ Just Si, spelled
s-i
. Sounds the same, I reckon. You’ll have time to meet her properly soon, but our pitchman wants to see you first.”

Ray was somewhat surprised at the strange people working. They were an exotic group. Not even in the cities up north, even among the sailors and dockworkers, had he seen so many different kinds of people working together.

“What’s a pitchman?” Ray began, but they had reached an area where a number of crates were stacked in various states of being opened and sorted.

“Nel,” Conker called.

An elderly black man popped up from behind a crate. He had bright manic eyes shining from his exceptionally dark face. His wide plume of silver hair was capped with a burgundy fez and a long tassel.

“Yes, yes,” he chuckled, clapping his hands together as he stood and stomped toward Ray. “Here he is, alive and well. Welcome to Cornelius T. Carter’s Mystifying Medicine Show and Tabernacle of Tachycardial Talent!”

Ray’s eyes hurt momentarily from the man’s screaming orange and red plaid suit. On one foot, the man wore a tall leather riding boot. The other leg was a polished mahogany peg extending from below the knee.

“Tabernacle of Tacky-what?” Ray mumbled.