Jonah Man (7 page)

You see, ladies and gentlemen, what this man thinks of you.

I’m the elected mayor of this town, and these are the people who elected me. You’re damn right they know what I think of them. My sheriff and his men are out picking up your signs. You can fetch them at the jailhouse, which by god is where you will be if you and your fake Indian don’t move on. You need a permit to hawk your wares in this town.

Sir, Connor said, I was not acquainted with the laws of your city. I would be most happy to apply—

Denied. I’ll have a deputy come by to make sure you’re gone. If you aren’t, I doubt you’ll like your accommodations.

He turned, clucked his tongue at the crowd. People padded off, glancing back now and again to see if anything more would happen. Connor started crating his medicine. I tried to help him pick the crates up into the wagon, but he waved me away.

We’d traveled an hour down the coast before he spoke again.

You agree with that highbinder, don’t you? he said. You’d like to see me in jail?

I wouldn’t.

You would. I see it in your posture. I hear it in your tone. You’re slumming with a fraud until you can gather your nerve. Just remember, you were living like livestock when I found you.

I never—

You haven’t said it because you need me. But a day is coming when you will say it. And I want you to know in advance that you’re wrong. I offer a product whose efficacy has been scientifically proven—if not by chemical science, then by empirical science. For decades now, I have watched it alleviate and often relieve altogether the suffering of countless people for whom orthodox medicine had done nothing. I am not lecturing to you, I am simply telling you the truth. If I adopt the air of a charlatan, if I trick my act, as you call it, with frippery of various kinds, it’s because that is what common people respond to. I debase myself for their benefit. Believe me, if my unique goal were to make money, there are better ways. I want you to take that into consideration the next time you see fit to judge me.

That night we camped in a wooded lot not far from the beach. Connor sat with his back against the bole of a pine tree, sipping from a jug of moonshine and stropping the blade of a twine-handled knife against the underside of a rawhide belt. I lay on my bedroll a few yards off, lamp raised on a rock beside me, reading the crime column from a Gazette I’d picked up in one of the towns we’d passed through.

So, Connor said, you are literate?

You thought I wasn’t?

There are days I forget you can speak, he said. Perhaps I mistook you. Perhaps you’re the brooding, intellectual type? Tell me, apart from local trivium, what is it you like to read?

I don’t know, I said. Adventure stories.

Adventure stories? Heroines in the hands of heathens? Spaniards rescued from Turkish slave ships? That sort of thing.

I guess.

Falderal, he said. It’s time you had a proper education. I’ll fetch you a real adventure story.

He sheathed his knife, buckled his belt around his pants without using the loops, took up his lamp and rummaged through the wagon. He came back with a leather-bound edition, the silhouette of an ancient armada branded into the front cover.

The original, he said. And still the greatest. A book to which all other books make reference.

He handed it to me. I opened to a random page.

It’s poetry, I said.

You do know something. Still, it’s not poetry the way you think of poetry.

He sat again with his back to the tree.

Read it, he said.

Out loud?

Why not?

I’m tired.

Nonsense, it’s early yet.

From the beginning?

Where else?

I closed the book, opened it again, turned past the title page. He stopped me before I reached the end of the first line.

I thought you said you could read?

I can.

Then you should know not to pause after each word. Do you understand the meanings?

Yes.

Then let’s have a little rhythm. Begin again.

He let me go for half a page.

No, he said. That simply won’t do. I understand your stumbling over foreign names, but you’re butchering even the most common nouns. Have you heard of meter? Listen.

He stood, stuck out his chest like a crooner, recited the line I’d read without looking at the book.

You see, he said. Poetry is meant to be spoken, not muttered. Now get up.

I held the book in one hand and my lantern in the other. I tried to start the words deep in my chest, but I couldn’t focus on the page and my voice at the same time.

Worse still, he said. You have no feel for this whatsoever. Again, from the beginning.

We kept going, back and forth, Connor swilling from his jug, calling me a dunce, a lubber, a mutt, a sot, raising his voice when I didn’t flinch. My neck was slick with sweat but I wouldn’t give in. Not even when day broke and Connor was still standing.

 

I’m lying flat on the bed, the last single-notched vial balanced on my chest. The clerk put me in the room next to Jonson’s. I can hear Jonson snoring, the boy singing—something slow and sad, as though he’s singing to keep his father asleep. There’s a blunt throbbing at the center of my head. I close my eyes, arch my back, feel the vial roll onto my stomach. I notice the boy’s gone quiet before I hear the knocking at Jonson’s door.

Go on, Jonson says, get yourself some air.

I hear a woman’s voice in the room, the boy’s footsteps heading down the corridor. I stand, press my ear to the wall. Jonson is talking, the woman laughing. There’s a pouncing on the bedsprings, a sound like a lamp faltering on the nightstand.

I catch up with the boy on the town’s only commercial street, keep a full block behind. The shops are closed for the season. A month ago people were lining up to buy painted seascapes, bracelets made of oyster shells, playing cards with mermaid queens and Neptune kings. Every stool in every bar was taken, every hotel booked. Tonight, the streetlights seem lit for the boy alone.

The stores drop off, the wooden sidewalk gives way to sand. The boy slips off his shoes and socks, keeps walking towards the water. I sit on a bench and watch. The boy looks stenciled into
the foreground. He rolls up his pant legs, steps to the edge of the water, holds his arms out at the sides as the current carries him backwards. The breeze off the water cuts through my coat.

The boy retreats onto the shore, takes up a clump of sea wrack and tosses it to the waves. Facing the water, he bends at the waist, lifts himself into a handstand, raises his right palm inches off the sand. He totters, then falls, tucking his chin to his chest, rounding his back and rolling through a somersault. He tries again and his legs stay raised a little longer. He’s routining his act, bolstering the finish by standing on just one hand. Soon, he stops falling.

After a while, he wipes his feet clean, slips on his socks and shoes. For a moment I think I might stand, block his path, tell him what I know Jonson won’t—that if he wants to see his name in lights he’ll chase down that browser and not look back. But instead I lie on my side with my hook between my knees and watch through the slats until he’s gone.

I take off my own shoes and socks, fold my pant cuffs. The sand cools my feet, catches in the cracked skin around my heels. I reach the area where the boy had been rehearsing. There are handprints layered one atop the other, a patch of sand rolled flat by his spine. I kneel, begin tamping down his tracks with my palm, filling in the depressions, smoothing over every disturbed surface. When I’m done, there’s just a compact and trodden space.

I crouch facing the water, breathing hard, squinting into the distance, trying to separate black water from black sky. Goose pimples riffle up my spine. I pull my knees to my chest but can’t stop shivering. It isn’t the breeze or the ocean air. It’s my body asking for what’s locked in my valise.

At a little after midnight I sit with my back to the bed, hold the vial up to the light. I’m looking for what I know isn’t there, a means of extracting without subtracting, a way to take what I need without weakening the vial. I roll it over on my palm, watch the silver disperse through the blue, gravitate back to the center. I pinch the vial between my thumb and forefinger, hold it straight, then on its side. I shake it gently, observe that the shards will only stray so far, that they always reverse course before touching the glass. I shake the silver with the full force of my wrist, feel the bottom stopper slip free of my thumb, watch the vial strike my knee, rebound into the air. I swipe at it with what I think is my right hand. The glass cracks, shatters against the wall. I watch the blue streaks eat into the paint, disappear into the floorboards. I crawl forward, knock away the glass with my hook, lick at the blue until my tongue turns numb.

Jonson is waiting for me in my dressing room—a room so small we both have to stand.

You want something? I say.

Easy, he says. You ain’t rich in friends.

What I salvaged of the vial is only starting to fade.

I’m guessing you want something, I say.

Listen, he says, you got two jobs, and you got to keep the one to keep the other. Truth is, you’re breaking apart at both ends. There’s some won’t take kindly to it.

They know I’ve been skimming?

I know.

And you’re their spy.

You figured that much. What you don’t know is it ain’t them you got to worry about.

What does that mean?

I told you what I can, Swain. I ain’t being coy.

What about your son?

What about him?

Do they know he’s working for them, too?

You can’t hurt my boy, he says. I’d slit your throat if I thought you could.

It’s not me who’s hurting him, I say.