The Nine Pound Hammer (8 page)

Nel smiled, striding toward Ray in his bandy-legged walk. Clasping a hand to Ray’s shoulder, the pitchman said, “If we arrest the first crowd properly with our heart-pounding performance, they’ll spread the word for a bigger evening arrival. Come, let’s discuss the nitty-gritty of the money collection.”

Ray looked back. Buck’s blind eyes could not have seen him, but he had somehow known that Ray was there. At that moment, the midday shadows cast Buck’s face in a strange light. With his hat removed and his long silver-streaked hair falling about his face, Ray realized he had seen Buck before.

Ray’s eyes fell to the silver pistols at Buck’s belts. The nightmare. Buck had been there, with the girl and the other man, running from the monstrous hound.

A
S
THE EVERETT MEN BEGAN PLAYING MUSIC, A CROWD
gathered in the muggy shade beneath the worn old canvas tent. A bench was set at the back of the lower, center stage, where the three Everetts ripped through tune after tune. Mister Everett played a blond violin and Eddie a dark mahogany parlor guitar. Shacks rapped his fingers across a gut-string banjo.

At the front of the stage, Peg Leg Nel danced about, tapping his pegged leg in time with the beat and leading the melody on a harmonica. At times he’d release his hands from the harmonica, suck it entirely into his mouth as he continued to play it, and then spit it back out, never missing a note from the song. He would occasionally—and seemingly on a whim—jerk the harmonica from his lips and begin singing in a warbling tenor voice. Ray wondered
if these were the intended lyrics or if Nel just generated lines on the spot.

The side stages were empty for the moment, but as Ray had noticed earlier, they were strategically set up against the
Ballyhoo’s
sleeping car so that the performers could wait inside and come out the door at either end onto the two performance stages. Several displays of Nel’s various tonics were set up on the center stage.

Ray sat behind one display next to Shacks, his thoughts whirling. Buck had been in his dream! Ray shuddered. Did that mean that the nightmare was real?

“You ever worked a show before?” Shacks asked.

Shacks was older than Eddie, maybe nineteen or twenty, Ray guessed, judging from the scrap of hair sprouting from his chin and atop his lip. Like Eddie, he had Ma Everett’s small features but wore his father’s serious expression.

“No, never. Seen plenty in the city but never this … fancy,” Ray said. “You like working for the medicine show?”

Nel switched from a minstrel song about golden slippers to a rollicking version of “Arkansas Traveler.” Shacks looked over to note the key from the position of Eddie’s fingers and then turned back to Ray.

“Show life’s all right,” Shacks said, knocking his thumb rhythmically along his banjo strings. “Like picking music. But the train life, that’s for me.”

Ray turned his attention to the crowd. Men and boys,
both black and white, in dirty farm clothes were clearly visitors in town for the cotton market. He saw families, most likely the citizenry of Hillsboro, who were out for the entertainment and the hope of buying something that would cure their varying ailments, both real and imagined. Men in ascot-stuffed vests and ulster coats and women in bustle dresses and bonnets seemed to be of more affluent means, while others—barefoot or in little more than rags—couldn’t have come with a penny in their pockets or to their names.

Nel ended the breakdown with a wild flourish of his hand, pointing to the three musicians on the stage. “The Everett Family String Band!” he announced as the audience applauded. Mister Everett alone stood, bowed as the representative of the band, and then gestured to Nel.

“Our illustrious pitchman, Mister Carter. Take it away,” Mister Everett announced.

Having been introduced to the crowd as the pitchman, Nel began. Ray recognized that, although ceremonial, this gesture by Mister Everett was intended to legitimize Nel to an audience that might not otherwise accept the Negro pitchman. The effects and sentiments of the War—although it had been twenty-five years since Appomattox—still lingered strongly in these rural towns.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Cornelius T. Carter’s Mystifying Medicine Show and Tabernacle of Tachycardial Talent. Today you will be astounded, amazed, abased, and abducted by our arousing
acts. I hope you enjoy our perplexing and prodigious performances, but we are here today not only to de light the senses but also to bolster the body and soothe the soul.

“How many of you felicitous folks have come here today on sore feet? Are you suffering from corns, blisters, busted toenails? Shoes squeezing your toes together like too many sardines in a can?”

As Peg Leg Nel went into his spiel about various foot and knee ailments, Ray felt he immediately understood a large portion of the logic underlying the medicine show. Ray saw various people toward the front of the stage, from hobble-backed old men to small pink-cheeked girls, twisting and squirming in their shoes. Ray felt even his own feet become particularly sore and swollen with each sentence of Nel’s pitch.

“Apply amply before going to bed each night and you are guaranteed to be remedied within a week,” Nel concluded before striking the band back into a song. “Allow me to introduce our first performance of the afternoon. Kidnapped by Bedouin slave traders as his family crossed the Sahara … he was sold to a Turkish sultan, who passed on his people’s ancient art of combat and swordplay. … ” The pitchman directed the audience’s attention to the stage on the left, where a pair of tall candles were sitting in golden candelabras. “The dexterous, the dynamic, the deadly … Prince Ottmon of Arabia.”

Dressed in a Turkish caftan and turban, Seth strode out
onto the side stage with a rectangular case about the size of a guitar. He set the case down on a stool between the candelabras and opened it, allowing each latch to click dramatically. First he took out a wide scimitar, turning it back and forth to sparkle in the candlelight. Then he removed a smaller cutlass, the blade intricately etched with Arabian designs.

With a shout, Seth flipped forward, over his sword case on the stool, to the front of the stage, startling the audience. Then he leaped away, swinging the scimitar over and over at the thick burning candles. The sword went through the candles each time, but left them seemingly intact. Then stopping between the candelabras, he swung the swords out wide and tapped the candles with the blades. The candles toppled and rolled to the floor of the stage like diced sausages.

Seth speared the stage floor with his cutlass and, making a flip, landed with his hands on the hilt of the sword, balancing himself upside down as the crowd roared with applause. Somersaulting off, he kicked the sword into a whirl. Catching the tip on his upturned finger, Seth suspended the cutlass as if it were held up by a string. Ray looked closely, but the sparkling blade did not draw a single drop of blood.

For his finale he slid a long, slender sword from his belt into his mouth, nearly to the hilt. His head tilted back and his arms outstretched so that he no longer held the sword.
The audience burst into a frenzy of cheers, shrieks, and whistles.

As Seth bowed over and over and over, Nel tried to draw the audience’s attention back to the center stage. “Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Does your stomach hurt? Feel like knives are poking your esophagus? Gastric discomfort got your bowels speared with distress? Then try
Baron Bayonet’s Bonbons
. … ”

Ray sold out of the tablets in less than a minute.

“Friends, you’ve heard of the great gunslingers of Dead-wood and Dodge City,” Nel continued after pitching various other stomach and bowel tonics. “The cold steel of Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, and Wyatt Earp bloodied many a Wild West street. You’ve heard of the amazing Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok. They were all dead-on shots with a six-shooter. But, friends, they all had two things that our next performer did not.”

Peg Leg Nel paused, then slowly pointed to each of his eyes in turn. He gave a hard stomp to the wooden stage.

“Yes, friends, the gift of sight,” the pitchman said. “From the high-plain sagebrush prairies of the Wild West. Don’t be alarmed, folks. He may be an eagle-eye shot, but he’s completely blind. May I present: Montana Hodder.”

Eustace Buckthorn walked out on the right stage, tapping his way with a worn oak cane that Ray could only assume was to play up Buck’s blindness to the audience.
Buck’s outfit was no different than the one he had been wearing an hour earlier when Ray had been caught listening to his conversation with Nel. His slate-gray, wide-brimmed hat contained Buck’s rowdy hair, but long silver-streaked locks fell over his eyes.

Buck dropped the cane to the floor of the stage. His hands went to the twin holsters slung low across his hips. Ray could hear the whispers from the crowd.

“Is he really blind?”

“Sure, look—he ain’t got no eyes.”

“He’s got eyes. I see them under his hair, but they’s white as milk.”

Ray felt a rush of awkwardness and irritation at the way the crowd discussed Buck’s blindness with no regard to whether the cowboy could hear them. But to watch Buck’s raised chin and firm stance, he was either used to the treatment or keeping his own anger stoically hidden.

Nel hopped up to the opposite stage, where a stack of cheap porcelain plates had been placed. “Ready!” he cried, and tossed two of the plates up toward the top of the tent. A pair of sandalwood-handled pistols flashed from Buck’s holsters and fired in rapid succession. The plates splintered into tiny shards raining down on the stage. Several people in the vicinity tucked their hands over their hats and went scurrying for the thick of the crowd.

Cheers burst out, but Buck’s expression remained placid. Nel began throwing more of the plates, sometimes
a high one, sometimes a quick series of plates. Each of Buck’s bullets met its mark.

“Can we have a volunteer from the crowd?” Nel called.

There was general murmur but nobody came forward.

“Come now, brave people,” he cajoled. “Let my assistant demonstrate.”

Nel waved Ray up to the front of the stage. Peg Leg Nel hadn’t said anything about being a part of the performance! As the eyes of the audience shifted to Ray squatting at the back of the stage, he had little time to let his fear stop him. Ray walked hesitantly to the spot where Nel situated him.

“Take off your cap,” Nel whispered. “Keep a straight back. Don’t move and you’ll be fine.”

The pitchman gave him a wink and placed an apple on his curly head. As Nel backed away, Ray kept his shoulders back and stood motionless. He felt certain that Buck had done this hundreds of times. Nel wouldn’t have brought Ray up if there was any danger.

But a sudden image came to his mind—a flash of Buck’s face when Ray had been caught listening to his conversation with Nel. Although Buck had been trying to assure Nel, the pitchman had seemed scared. They were in some sort of danger. What if the secret of what they were hiding in the locked car was something terribly important, important enough to want to keep Ray quiet … permanently?
This was irrational, at least Ray hoped, but as Buck drew his pistols, all the worst possibilities erupted in his mind.

Buck never turned to face Ray. He just gave a quick sniff. Buck drew back the hammer on the pistol, extended his arm out to the side, and fired. The apple exploded into sticky confetti.

Ray sputtered a few pieces off of his lips and brushed the apple bits from his shoulders. The crowd applauded, and Ray smiled gingerly, feeling proud that he hadn’t flinched in the face of fear. He wished Conker could have seen it. As he reached the spot at the back of the stage, Ray saw that someone had noticed. Buck’s face was turned slightly toward Ray, a curious expression flickering on the cowboy’s brow.

“I’ll do it!” a man shouted from the front. Nel smiled and motioned for the man to come onto the stage. The man had a stringy beard that extended under his chin, more on his neck than on his face. He was laughing and showing off a gap-toothed grin to the men who were with him.

“You’re nuts, Lenny,” his friends laughed and goaded from the crowd.

“Not as batty as him.” Lenny pointed at Buck and sniggered. “Get it? Batty.”

His friends contorted their faces in confusion.

“Bats is blind,” Lenny explained.

His friends howled.

When Lenny came up on the stage, he strolled right up
to Buck, pointing in his face and waving his hands in front of the cowboy’s nose. “Sure you can’t see?” he laughed.

“Put the apple on your head,” Buck said in his unexpressive gravel voice.

Lenny danced over to the table and took a pair of apples. Rather than removing the ratty porkpie hat from his head, he placed one of the apples on the top of his hat and slipped the second into his coat pocket as a snack for later.

“Alrighty, Mister. Don’t miss.” He chuckled. “You sure you don’t want my granny’s spectacles?”

Buck slowly stepped around, facing the guffawing man. His boots thumped with each step. “You might want to take that hat off,” he said.