08 Illusion (15 page)

Now the hard part. She got this to work a few times back at the halfway house, enough to take the chance here. She kept her eyes on Burt, her head nodding to follow his bounce, then held Baxter at just the right height for Burt to contact him at the top of his bounce. Bump! Baxter bounced upward, Burt bounced downward, Burt bounced off the floor at the same moment Baxter fell back from his bounce, they met halfway: bump! Now they were bouncing in a perfect column, Burt off the floor, Baxter off Burt, bump, bump, bump!

She had the crowd. They were in that zone where they didn’t laugh or applaud, they gasped, marveled, bent, and craned, trying to figure out how in the world … !

For this one moment when Burt and Baxter were doing most of the work, she could look at the faces. The college guys were back and had brought girls. Mia was there, along with Rhea, Darci, and the Durhams. They were marveling, too, but so happy, so proud.

Enough of bouncing Burt and Baxter.
She plucked Baxter from the air, then Burt, then struck a pose, a ball in each hand. Now the applause came, wild and excited.

Time for the spinning quarters.
Megan brought out a small round table, and Eloise went to work, materializing two quarters between her spread fingers and giving them a spin on the table. The quarters danced together, spinning around the table like a pair of figure skaters. It looked great, but …

Ehhh …
only the closest tables could really appreciate the trick. The people seated farther back were having to stand, crane, try to see what was going on.

Bummer! Too small.
The energy from the crowd was sinking like a bad air mattress. She was going to die up there.

This better be good.

Come on, come on, spread it out. Make it big.
She got amid the tables, reached behind a lady’s ear, and brought back a quarter—she rolled her eyes a little:
Riiight, as if you’ve never seen that one before.
She set the quarter on the lady’s table, flicked it to get it spinning, then let it spin onto her fingertip and held it up for all to see.

Ah, they were amazed again.

Keep it close, right before their eyes… .

She went to the other side of the room and picked out a cute, buzz-cut ten-year-old. With clownish gestures she had him hold out both hands palm up, then place one hand atop the other, palm to palm. She mimed,
Now lift your top hand away!
He lifted his top hand away, and there was a quarter in his other hand. She got it spinning, perched it on the end of his finger, and now he was feeling great, a magician himself.

She pointed to the shirt pocket of one of the college guys. He checked, and there was a quarter. She perched it spinning on his fingertip, and he and his buddy immediately began studying it inches from their noses. They passed their hands around it, feeling for wires or strings; the buddy got out a pocketknife and held it close to feel for magnetism. Nothing there. They looked at her and she just shrugged a showy shrug:
Beats me.

A fourth quarter came from the shoe of an older lady three tables back. The lady had long fingernails, but the quarter managed to stay on the end of one without slipping off. Now those folks back there had something to watch.

She pulled a quarter from her nose and milked the gag, wiping it on her coat sleeve and trying to get it to quit hanging and dragging from her fingers by an invisible “string.” Everybody was laughing so hard it made
her
crack up. Finally she got it spinning on a table. One of the college girls sitting there was brave enough, and Eloise passed the spinning quarter to her upraised index finger. That got a response; the girl held her hand high to show everyone. She and her friends were totally enchanted.

Following Eloise’s lead, they all held their spinning quarters high like the Statue of Liberty and then gave them a little uptoss and caught them in their hands.

The tip can. Good idea.

She grabbed her can labeled TIPS from the counter and passed it around to collect the quarters, blowing kisses as everyone applauded. Hopefully they’d get the hint for later.

Okay, these nice folks were still hers.

She brought out the deck of cards—and her heart sank. She’d learned a lesson from the quarters routine, which was a heck of a time to learn it: the card tricks, like the quarter routine, would have worked fine for one table, just a few people at a time, but what about all the other folks in the room? Boy, they didn’t call it close-up magic for nothing.

She smiled, fiddled with the cards, fanned them, shuffled them… .

She did a waterfall, cascading the cards from one hand to the other, then switched hands and did it the other way.

She kept raising her feeder hand higher so the cards would drop farther to her other hand. It was getting
very
sporty.

The folks were still watching, still with her but only because they were expecting something.

She held her hands higher and waterfalled the cards in front of her eyes, one hand to the other, that hand to the other, over and over, her hands wider apart each time.

Could she do it? Would the cards do it?

Even though the cards had to be a blur to everyone else, as they flew past her nose she could see each card in perfect detail. She could touch the card’s edges without touching them, sense its weight, feel the air swirling around it, hear the little slap as it landed on its fellows in her lower hand. Was all this just part of being crazy? She had no time to think about it. The folks were waiting and she needed something.

She held her hands close together, palms up, deck of cards in her right hand. Eyes locked on the cards, she flexed the deck, building the tension.

She let them riffle loose, they sprang into the air in a stream and flew in a little arc to her other hand.
Fffffflipppp!
And that quick, it was over.

She made them arc again, from left to right, right to left, left to right, back and forth, then started spreading her hands, widening the arc. When her hands were two feet apart she started getting gasps and oohs from her audience.

She extended her hands out past her shoulders, and the cards sailed higher in a fluttering arc. Her eyes, her mind, every nerve ending in her body were locked on the cards, feeling, knowing, energizing.
Flipflipflipflipflip
the cards riffled out of one hand;
plaplaplaplaplaplap
they landed in the other.

When her arms were spread wide and the cards were soaring through an arc high above her head, over and back, over and back, she held the pose and the ta-da moment came. The audience applauded, cheered, whistled. They loved it.

She riffled off the last card, it sailed through the air after its fellows like the caboose on a train and landed in her other hand—plap! Her fingers, quivering a little, wrapped tightly around the deck as she wilted with relief. She made it clowny, but she wasn’t kidding.

While the folks were still shaking their heads, cheering and clapping, she caught a quick glimpse of Mr. Calhoun. He wasn’t smiling, but only because he was too dumbfounded.

She was trembling, but it wasn’t nervousness as much as raw adrenaline coursing through her, the power, the energy, the pure
psych
of being in this place in this moment, and now she wanted more.

The coin toss routine was next, mixed in with some cool surprises.
Just remember, Eloise, reach out, make it big, draw them in.

She produced a quarter and zeroed in on a grandfatherly-looking gentleman at a front row table… .

She sat on her bed in her room at the Durhams’, dazed with exhaustion, too excited to sleep. It was going on ten o’clock. She was still in her Hobett outfit, her hair was matted from sweating under her hat, she hadn’t even washed off the whiskers, and now many of the little black dots were smeared.

She’d emptied the contents of her tip jar on the bed and counted out the money: $312.75. Now
she
was the astonished one.
Of course,
she told herself more than once,
you won’t do this well every night.

But making $312.75 in a half hour was quite affirming, to say the least, and she couldn’t stop replaying the evening in her head.

She could have kept going, but wrapped up her show right around 7:28
P.M.
with a big finish and a final bow. Having nowhere to go to get “offstage,” she let Hobett talk in a goofy, bummish voice she borrowed from Red Skelton—one of her favorite TV shows only weeks ago—and visited with people. They loved her show, loved her, shook her hand, raved up one side and down the other, and—happy, happy, happy—they dumped tips into her tip jar hand after hand, the coins clinking, the bills … well, all that quiet was nice to
watch
for sure.

“Do you do birthday parties?” a mom asked.

Was the pope Catholic? “Sure!”

They found an available date—for Eloise that was easy enough.

“Oh, and what do you charge?”

She scrambled around her brain for a figure and blurted out, “Fifty dollars.”

Sold. It was a date.

And then she thought—what was she going to do for a bunch of little kids? And how was she going to get there? She didn’t have a car or even a driver’s license.

Roger—he said she could call him that—finally got a few minutes with her after most of her public had gone out the door. “That was good,” he said. “Gooder—better than good.” He was still a little dazed and having to adjust. “What are you doing next weekend?”

He offered her half an hour on Saturday and half an hour on Sunday. She took it.

And she could walk to McCaffee’s. It only took about twenty minutes from the halfway house.

Mia, Darci, Rhea, Micah, and Sally gathered around her at the house and had a little celebration with apple juice and Oreo cookies. They were all blown away and just couldn’t believe what they’d seen, and all of them voiced the same sentiment: Eloise Kramer would not be a “hobo” for long.

Of course, the question came up as it always did, and probably should if she was doing things well: “How did you do that?” And she just shrugged teasingly and said it was a trick.

And now, sitting by herself in her room and thanking God for a great evening, she faced that question once again:
How
did
I do that?

chapter

15

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY NIGHT
October 16 & 17
7–7:30 P.M.
Enjoy the incredible
ELOISE “The Hobett” KRAMER
Magician Extraordinaire
Astounding.
Astoundingly Funny.
Bring the Family.
You won’t believe your eyes!

N
ow the poster was larger, done with poster paints, featured a digitally printed, taped-on, color photo of Hobett doing the Rainbow Bridge—her name for her new card routine—
and
it appeared in the front window on Monday. Roger was becoming a believer and Eloise was becoming a performer, which turned out to be good news and, well, challenging news.

Okay, great, I get to perform, but … what? I need new stuff!

With the kind and loving indulgence of Mia at the thrift store and Sally Durham’s offer to drive her until she could get a license, she went to work full-time on new material, anything she could think of, starting with what in the world to do for a kid’s birthday party.

There were twelve kids, ages six to eight, sitting all over that living room as if they’d been thrown in there, party hats on their heads, cake crumbs and ice cream on their faces, laughing like adults breathing helium.

The spinning quarters worked great because they were so magical and the room was small. Burt and Baxter not only bounced among the kids, driving them wild as the kids tried to grab them, they also sat on a little table up front through the rest of Eloise’s act, upstaging her at key moments.

Card tricks? Too slow for this bunch.
She opted for an old standby, balloons, and made balloon doggies, giraffes, dinosaurs, and anything else she’d learned from books and videos just that week. Of course, a balloon let loose in the room and guided to zip right by the kids’ heads—and bonk Eloise right between the eyes—kept things lively, and with just the right kind of attention she could make some of the balloon creatures move.

October 16, at 7:00
P.M.
, McCaffee’s was full and folks must have heard about the spinning quarters; they seemed a whole lot more attentive, even moving in closer to see for themselves what their friends were so gaga about.

October 17, at 7:00
P.M.
, a whole new set of folks came through the door, which was cool; Eloise could do all the same stuff, which meant she could get better at it.

Of course, every gig led to more gigs, and Sally Durham, a real saint, continued as Eloise’s chauffeur, taking her to every one.

Gerry Morris’s eleventh-birthday party: these kids, mostly boys, were tougher to please, and the goofier she got the less they bought it, so she eased back on the goofy and played mostly herself. They loved the quarter pulled from her nose—apparently they were into snot and boogers and such. Eloise discovered she could stretch a balloon’s neck and make it hum “Happy Birthday.” If she’d played it on her armpit that would have gone over just as big. A creative milestone.

Melinda Flowers’s ninth birthday was just-us-girls, and Eloise loved it. She ventured boldly into new territory for this one: she reddened her cheeks instead of her nose, left off the whiskers, and came as a semiclownish girl in a fluffy white blouse with a red scarf, black shorts with loud, flowery suspenders, and red-and-white-striped knee highs. It was her first performance working under her own name and her first time working with flowers, making them appear in her hand, in little girls’ hands, and best of all, in little girls’ hair. Boys wouldn’t have cared for that trick, but
every
girl had to get a flower. She could have filled the whole time just doing that.