The Nine Pound Hammer (6 page)

“Tachycardial. Means
heart-pounding!
” he explained.
“Son, I found the surest way to establishing credibility with the yokels—i.e., our customers—is to be flamboyantly verbose.”

Ray looked at Conker.

“He likes to talk fancy,” Conker said.

“And are you Mister Cornelius T. Carter?” Ray asked.

Waving his hands from his head down toward his foot, he said, “I am. I can see that despite your reticence to fully embrace the more ornamental aspects of speaking that you are no simpleton. They call me Nel. Peg Leg Nel. And what is your … er, moniker? What name do you go by, son?”

“Ray Fleming.”

Peg Leg Nel shook Ray’s hand heartily and clasped his shoulder.

“Not a provocative name for an entertainer, but a durable name I’m sure. I did hear however that you gave quite a performance to Conker and Si in the forest. Bear-riding! How … uncustomary! You may yet grow to overtake your name, dear Ray.”

Nel tilted Ray’s chin up with a finger and inspected his face. “I trust that you are recuperating from your injury?”

“Yes,” Ray said. “I’m feeling better.”

Nel nodded his head vigorously, saying, “Well, we are quite busy as you can see. Much to be done to be ready by two in the afternoon.”

“What’s the show? Is it a circus or something?” Ray asked.

“Circus?” Nel’s wooly brows nearly covered his eyes
as he frowned. “No, son. You must have drifted during my introduction. We are a medicine show, Ray. Tonics. Salves. Nostrums. The like. Not the proprietary medicines of a common pharmacologist, mind you. I’m a root worker. But it takes more than a quality product and mere hawking to draw in the customers. People like a show. That’s how the masses are enticed, and we have the talent here to provide first-rate entertainment on par with the finest revues and rigmarole around. What we lack in splendor, we make up for in sheer audacity. I trust that you’ll do us the honor of viewing a performance?”

“Sure,” Ray said.

“Blunt, a little taciturn, but certainly not curt, are you?” Peg Leg Nel smiled down at Ray with a vast mouthful of glistening teeth.

“Come on, Ray,” Conker said. “You can help me get things set up.”

Nel wagged a finger. “Well, don’t forget, you’ve been indisposed with an injury, young Ray. So restrain from overexerting yourself. Now, if you’ll excuse me …” Stomping away on his peg leg, he added with an ear-jarring laugh, “Bear-rider. Ha! My goodness.”

R
AY LEARNED THAT THE MEDICINE SHOW WAS SET UP JUST
outside the textile town of Hillsboro. The timing had been selected to coincide with the cotton market, which was to close in a few days. Nel had paid some travelers a week earlier to post pasteboard signs on trees and telegraph poles around Hillsboro to announce the show. Farmers from the surrounding community were in town to auction their bales. If the season had been good, they’d have money to spend, and Peg Leg Nel was happy to relieve them of a few bits.

Nel’s crew was busy rushing about the performance space, getting the show ready. Nel was directing two men as they carried supplies from the train. Marisol and some others Ray didn’t know yet were setting up gasoline torches. Curious glances were cast toward Ray, but everyone was too busy to be interrupted.

Conker introduced Ray to Eddie Everett, the grimy young man Ray had seen earlier with Si. His face, neck, and hands were blackened and smudged with soot, which contrasted oddly with his clean outfit and the crisp derby cocked on his head.

Ray helped Conker and Eddie carry pieces of the stages to the open-sided tent, which was erected in full above the clearing and against the side of the train. The tent was partially fenced off, as Ray had noted earlier, with long bands of satin ribbon. They set up the three stages against the side of the train and hung a moth-eaten velvet curtain from the sleeper car as a backdrop. From the center stage Peg Leg Nel would pitch his tonics.

“See how this middle stage is set closer to the ground,” Conker explained to Ray as they worked. “Nel says it’s more persuasive if the tip—that’s what we call the crowd—is closer to him. Builds trust with the customers, he reckons. Other two platforms on either side are taller. They’re for the performers. Better that they’re higher. Makes the show more exciting.”

Conker waved his hand around the shaded interior of the tent after setting down a pair of tables on the center stage. “No chairs either, see. Nel used to put out chairs for folks. But he figures it’s best they ain’t too comfortable. Keeps them paying better attention. Also makes the tip seem bigger than it is. Audience gets more excited if it’s harder to see and a little too crowded.”

Ray nodded, taking it all in. “Sounds like he’s trying to trick them,” he said, and Eddie laughed.

“No.” Conker smiled. “Ain’t trickery exactly. People like to be entertained. And for Nel to entertain, he’s got to use a little gimmicking. That’s what I believe they come here for.”

“They want to be tricked?” Ray asked.

“No. They want something unbelievable. And we give it to them. Nel’d like to think it’s the tonics, which are really good, mind you. You ought to know! Cured your concussion, didn’t he? No, it ain’t why they come. Not really.”

“And all without the usual ploys,” Eddie added.

“Like what?” Ray asked.

“Like geeks.”

Ray raised an eyebrow. “What’s a geek?”

“Performers who bite the heads off live snakes and such.” Eddie smiled, relishing the look of disgust on Ray’s face. “Ha! Marisol, she’d hate that, wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Conker nodded. “No. We got no geeks, no hootchy, no blackface. We got talent enough without all those … Hey, there’s Buck. Buck!”

Ray turned to see a cowboy passing beside the stage, staggering slightly with slow steps. The man was hard-faced and ragged as a cedar tree. His eyes had a sunken quality, the heavy lids barely cracked. He wore a fringed doeskin coat and tall, decoratively stitched cowboy boots—each deeply oiled and rubbed smooth but discolored in patches from wear and weather. Between the crisscross of gun belts slung across his waist and the tall, flat-brimmed hat, he
was the very image of the Wild West gunslinger Ray read about in penny Westerns.

The cowboy cocked his head at the sound of his name, his gaze passing back and forth across the three of them. It struck Ray as strange the way his head swiveled so loosely on his neck. His eyes seemed shut, and after giving a sniff he strode on, not stopping for introductions.

“That’s Eustace Buckthorn. Don’t mind Buck,” Conker whispered. “He’s just a bit crotchety sometimes.”

“What’s wrong with him? He seemed … drunk.”

“Drunk!” Conker laughed. “He ain’t drunk. He looks that way on account of he’s blind.”

“He is!” Ray looked back at the cowboy. “What’s he do?”

“I reckon you’d have telled from his outfit. He’s our sharpshooter. Good one, too.”

“How’s he shoot when he’s blind?”

“Got me,” Conker said, and began walking back toward the entrance to the tent.

Eddie took Ray’s elbow as he added, “I’ve heard that he murdered his own brother.”

“He wh-what?” Ray stammered.

“And didn’t he take up once with a band of pirates, Conker?”

Conker nodded. “Say he was in love with one of the pirates, too. Their queen, way I heard it.”

The Pirate Queen! Hobnob’s boss and tormentor. Ray looked once more with curiosity at the sharpshooter. Buck
was just reaching a car—the third from the end. As he started up the steps, Ray noticed long silver and black hair falling from his cowboy hat.

“Ray!” Eddie called. “Lend a hand?”

Shaking the thoughts away, Ray ran over to where Eddie was pulling a canvas roll across the lawn. As he took a corner of the canvas roll, Ray asked, “Do you perform, Eddie?”

“Not me, I’m what they call the bakehead. That’s the name for the fireman on the trains.” Eddie nodded toward the low, flat car just behind the locomotive. “See the tender? It’s where the coal is stored. I shovel it into the tender-box up in the locomotive—keep the engine running. I hate my stinking job! Always getting burned. I wish Redfeather would let me borrow his copper.”

“You ought just to ask him,” Conker said.

“He won’t.” Eddie sighed.

“What’s the copper?” Ray asked.

“Oh, just some Indian charm Redfeather wears on a necklace. Keeps you from getting burned. He doesn’t even need it! I’m the one that needs it. And this stinking filth! I can’t ever get clean of all this coal grease.” He frowned as he continued, “Pa says I’ve got to work my way up. Maybe to brakeman next if my brother ever moves on. Then one day … engineer, like Pa.”

“Your father drives the
Ballyhoo?
”

“Ox Everett,” Conker interrupted as he dropped an armload of blue painted poles. “That’s him over there.” Ray followed Conker’s nod toward a tall, portly man with
a long walrus mustache. Mister Everett wore a shiny engineer’s cap and blue striped denim suit. He was talking to Peg Leg Nel and a young man a few years older than Eddie who was nearly a twin of the bakehead, if you scrubbed Eddie down in a bucket of hot water and dressed him in more suitable work clothes.

Eddie and Ray put down the canvas roll at the entrance of the tent and began helping Conker put together the poles. Eddie explained, “That’s my brother, Shacks, and you met my ma, didn’t you?”

“Not properly,” Ray said.

“Well, she already’s taken a liking to you, but watch out for Pa,” Eddie said meekly.

“Don’t listen to him, Ray,” Conker chuckled. “A little hard sometimes, but Ox Everett’s a fine engineer and an old-time friend of Nel’s. Fought in the war together. He and Nel love playing music. You’ll hear come showtime. Eddie and Shacks are hot shots, too. But couldn’t have the show without Mister Everett. He does all the arranging. Talks to the local officials, persuades or pays them. Whatever it takes to get things set proper.”

“One day, the
Ballyhoo
will be mine,” Eddie added with a wistful expression as he started driving the metal poles in the ground. “She’s the greatest train around!”

Ray looked again at the flaking paint and rust, the leaking oil from the axles, and the weathered wood paneling the cars. “Is she fast?” Ray asked, assuming her better qualities lay beyond appearances.

The proud look faded slightly from Eddie’s soot-covered face. “Well, no. Not particularly.”

Securing the framework of poles to the ground with guidewires, Conker smirked. “She breaks down all the time.”

“So by greatest train around,” Ray said, “you mean the greatest train here … sitting right in front of us.”

Conker roared with laughter as Eddie made a face.

Then Conker added, “She may not look like much, Ray, but she’s home.”

Steering the conversation away from the
Ballyhoo
so as not to offend Eddie further, Ray asked, “What do you do, Conker? Are you a performer or do you help on the train?”

The giant turned around, dwarfing Ray in the shadow of his height and scowling face. “Can’t you tell? I’m the strongman.”

“Oh,” Ray said, cowering a moment. But Conker broke again into his easy laugh and clapped a coal-shovel-sized hand on Ray’s shoulder.

“Come on, I’ll show you my handiwork. Grab ahold of the other side of this roll and we’ll get it hung up at the front gate. Painted the sign myself.”

After attaching the corners of the canvas roll to the framework of poles, Conker let it unfurl. Ray stood back with Eddie to admire the ten-by-twelve-foot sign introducing
CORNELIUS T. CARTER’S MYSTIFYING MEDICINE SHOW AND TABERNACLE OF TACHYCARDIAL TALENT
. If Conker hadn’t already found his calling as a performer, he could have been an artist.

The spitting image of Peg Leg Nel, although with a few less wrinkles and not quite so wild-eyed to Ray’s mind, peered down from the center. Below the oval-framed portrait, a scrolling banner announced
CORNELIUS T. CARTER
along with the title
ROOT WORKER
.

“That’s me.” Conker pointed to a bare-chested likeness of himself lifting a globe, like Atlas from the old myths. If anything, Ray thought Conker had been too humble in his self-portrait. The real Conker was much more imposing.

Ray scanned the other images. He found the
SNAKE DANCER
, Marisol, her torso and arms covered in slithering pythons. Buck was there, too, sporting an outstretched pistol above the label
BLIND SHARPSHOOTER.
Below him was a young man in a turban swallowing a sword.
SWORD SWALLOWER.
There was an Indian with a feathered headdress. Flames encircled him.
FIRE-EATER.
A Chinese girl, who must have been Conker’s friend Si, was twisted in a knot and encased in a ridiculous number of locks and chains. She was listed as the
ESCAPE ARTIST
.

“Think you’ll stick around, Ray?” Eddie asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ray said.

“Well, you ought to stay here with us,” Conker said. “We can use a hawker out front and help setting up and breaking down. Always plenty of work.”

Ray looked around at the medicine show’s tent and the rickety train. Conker put his hand to Ray’s back, directing him toward the train. “Come on. Nearly lunchtime.”