Mr. Vertigo (16 page)

He said: “So long, sister. We’ll see you in a month and three days.” And she said: “Off you go, boys—into the wild blue yonder.” There was an awkward silence after that, and since it made me feel uncomfortable, I opened my big mouth and said: “What do you say, ma’am? Why not hop in the car and come with us?”

I could see her eyes light up when I said that, and sure as
dog
and
god
are the same word spelled backwards and forwards, she would have given six years off her life to chuck everything and climb aboard. She turned to the master and said: “Well, what do you think? Should I go with you or not?” And he, pompous oaf that he was, patted her on the shoulder and said: “It’s up to you, my dear.” Her eyes clouded over for a second, but even then all was not lost. Still hopeful of hearing the right words from him, she gave it another shot and said: “No, you decide; I wouldn’t want to be in the way.” And he said: “You’re a free agent, Marion. It’s not for me to tell you what to do.” And that was that. I saw the light go out in her eyes; her face closed up into a taut, quizzical expression; and then she shrugged. “Never mind,” she said. “There’s too much to do here anyway.” Then, forcing a brave little smile to her lips, she added: “Drop me a postcard when you get a chance. The last I heard, they still go for a penny apiece.”

And there it was, folks. The opportunity of a lifetime—lost forever. The master let it slip right through his fingers, and the worst part of it was, I don’t even think he realized what he’d done.

W
e traveled in a different car this time—a black secondhand Ford that Mrs. Witherspoon had picked out for us after our return from Larned. She’d dubbed it the Wondermobile, and though it couldn’t match the size and smoothness of the Chrysler, it did everything it was asked to do. We set off on a rainy morning in mid-September, and one hour out of Wichita I’d already forgotten about the hearts-and-flowers fumble I’d witnessed on the porch. My mental beams were fixed on Oklahoma, the first state booked for the tour, and when we pulled into Redbird two days later, I was as keyed up as a jack-in-the-box and crazier than a monkey. It’s going to work this time, I told myself. Yes sir, this is where it all begins. Even the name of the town struck me as a good omen, and since I was nothing if not superstitious in those days, it had a powerful effect on my spirits. Redbird. Just like my ball club in Saint Louis, my dear old chums the Cardinals.

It was the same act in a new set of clothes, but everything felt different somehow, and the audience took a shine to me the moment I came on—which was half the battle right there. Master Yehudi did his cornpone spiel to the hilt, my Huck Finn costume was the last word in understatement, and all in all we knocked them dead. Six or seven women fainted, children screamed, grown men gasped in awe and disbelief. For thirty minutes I kept them spellbound, prancing and tumbling in midair, gliding my
little body over the surface of a broad and sparkling lake, and then, at the end, pushing myself to a record height of four and a half feet before floating back to the ground and taking my bow. The applause was thunderous, ecstatic. They whooped and cried, they banged pots and pans, they tossed confetti into the air. This was my first taste of success, and I loved it, I loved it in a way I’ve never loved anything before or since.

Dunbar and Battiest. Jumbo and Plunketsville. Pickens, Muse, and Bethel. Wapanucka. Boggy Depot and Kingfisher. Gerty, Ringling, and Marble City. If this were a movie, here’s where the calendar pages would start flying off the wall. We’d see them fluttering against a background of country roads and tumbleweed, and then the names of those towns would flash by as we followed the progress of the black Ford across a map of eastern Oklahoma. The music would be jaunty and full of bounce, a syncopated chug-chug to ape the noise of ringing cash registers. Shot would follow shot, each one melting into the other. Bushel baskets brimming with coins, roadside bungalows, clapping hands and stomping feet, open mouths, bug-eyed faces turned to the sky. The whole sequence would take about ten seconds, and by the time it was over, the story of that month would be known to every person in the theater. Ah, the old Hollywood razzmatazz. There’s nothing like it for hustling things along. It may not be subtle, but it gets the job done.

So much for the quirks of memory. If I’m suddenly thinking about movies now, it’s probably because I saw so many of them in the months that followed. After the Oklahoma triumph, bookings ceased to be a problem, and the master and I spent most of our time on the road, moving around from one backwater to another. We played Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, dipping farther and farther south as winter came on, and I tended to fill in the dead time between performances by visiting the local Bijou
for a peek at the latest flick. The master generally had business to take care of—talking to fair managers and ticket sellers, distributing handbills and posters around town, adjusting nuts and bolts for the upcoming performance—which meant he seldom had time to go with me. More often than not, I’d come back to find him alone in the room, sitting in a chair reading his book. It was always the same book—a battered little green volume that he carried with him on all our travels—and it became as familiar to me as the lines and contours of his face. It was written in Latin, of all things, and the author’s name was Spinoza, a detail I’ve never forgotten, even after so many years. When I asked the master why he kept studying that one book over and over again, he told me it was because you could never get to the bottom of it. The deeper you go, he said, the more there is, and the more there is, the longer it takes to read it.

“A magic book,” I said. “It can’t never use itself up.”

“That’s it, squirt. It’s inexhaustible. You drink down the wine, put the glass back on the table, and lo and behold, you reach for the glass again and discover it’s still full.”

“And there you are, drunk as a skunk for the price of one drink.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said, suddenly turning from me and gazing out the window. “You get drunk on the world, boy. Drunk on the mystery of the world.”

Christ but I was happy out there on the road with him. Just moving from place to place was enough to keep my spirits up, but when you added in all the other ingredients—the crowds, the performances, the money we made—those first months were hands down the best months I’d ever lived. Even after the initial excitement wore off and I grew accustomed to the routine, I still didn’t want it to stop. Lumpy beds, flat tires, bad food, all the rainouts and lulls and boring stretches were as nothing to me,
mere pebbles bouncing off the skin of a rhinoceros. We’d climb into the Ford and blow out of town, another seventy or hundred bucks stashed away in the trunk, and then mosey on to the next whistle-stop, watching the landscape roll by as we chewed over the finer points of the last performance. The master was a prince to me, always encouraging and counseling and listening to what I said, and he never made me feel that I was one bit less important than he was. So many things had changed between us since the summer, it was as if we were on a new footing now, as if we’d reached some kind of permanent equilibrium. He did his job and I did mine, and together we made the thing work.

The stock market didn’t crash until two years later, but the Depression had already started in the hinterlands, and farmers and rural folks throughout the region were feeling the pinch. We came across a lot of desperate people on our travels, and Master Yehudi taught me never to look down on them. They needed Walt the Wonder Boy, he said, and I must never forget the responsibility that need entailed. To watch a twelve-year-old do what only saints and prophets had done before him was like a jolt from heaven, and my performances could bring spiritual uplift to thousands of suffering souls. That didn’t mean I shouldn’t make a bundle doing it, but unless I understood that I had to touch people’s hearts, I’d never gain the following I deserved. I think that’s why the master started my career in such out-of-the-way places, such a rinky-dink collection of forgotten corners and crevices on the map. He wanted the word about me to spread slowly, for support to begin from the ground up. It wasn’t just a matter of breaking me in, it was a way of controlling things, of making sure I didn’t turn out to be a flash in the pan.

Who was I to object? The bookings were organized in a systematic way, the turnouts were good, and we always had a roof over our heads when we went to sleep at night. I was doing what
I wanted to do, and the feeling it gave me was so good, so exhilarating, I couldn’t have cared less if the people who saw me perform were from Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. Every now and then, of course, we encountered a bump in the road, but Master Yehudi seemed to be prepared for any and all situations. Once, for example, a truant officer came knocking on the door of our rooming house in Dublin, Mississippi. Why isn’t this lad in school? he said to the master, pointing his long bony finger at me. There are laws against this, you know, statutes, regulations, and so on and so forth. I figured we were sunk, but the master only smiled, asked the gentleman to step in, and then pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his coat. It was covered with official-looking stamps and seals, and once the truant officer read it through, he tipped his hat in an embarrassed sort of way, apologized for the mixup, and left. God knows what was written on that paper, but it did the trick in one fast hurry. Before I could make out any of the words, the master had already folded up the letter and slipped it back into his coat pocket. “What does it say?” I asked, but even though I asked again, he never answered me. He just patted his pocket and grinned, looking awfully smug and pleased with himself. He reminded me of a cat who’d just polished off the family bird, and he wasn’t about to tell me how he’d opened the cage.

From the latter part of 1927 through the first half of 1928, I lived in a cocoon of total concentration. I never thought about the past, I never thought about the future—only about what was happening now, the thing I was doing at this or that moment. On the average, we didn’t spend more than three or four days a month in Wichita, and the rest of the time we were on the road, bee-lining hither and yon in the black Wondermobile. The first real pause didn’t come until the middle of May. My thirteenth birthday was approaching, and the master thought it might be a
good idea to take a couple of weeks off. We’d go back to Mrs. Witherspoon’s, he said, and eat some home cooking for a change. We’d relax and celebrate and count our money, and then, after we were done playing pasha, we’d pack up our bags and take off again. That sounded fine with me, but once we got there and settled in for our holiday, I sensed that something was wrong. It wasn’t the master or Mrs. Witherspoon. They were both lovely to me, and relations between them were particularly harmonious just then. Nor was it anything connected to the house. Nelly Boggs’s cooking was in top form, the bed was still comfortable, the spring weather was superb. Yet the moment we walked through the door, an inexplicable heaviness invaded my heart, a murky sort of sadness and disquiet. I assumed I’d feel better after a night’s sleep, but the feeling didn’t go away; it just sat inside me like a lump of undigested stew, and no matter what I said to myself, I couldn’t get rid of it. If anything, it seemed to be growing, to be taking on a life of its own, and to such an extent that by the third night, just after I put on my pajamas and crawled into bed, I was overcome by an irresistible urge to cry. It seemed crazy, and yet half a minute later I was sobbing into the pillow, weeping my blinkers out in an onrush of misery and remorse.

When I sat down to breakfast with Master Yehudi early the next morning, I couldn’t hold myself back, the words came out before I even knew I was going to say them. Mrs. Witherspoon was still upstairs in bed, and it was just the two of us at the table, waiting for Nelly Boggs to come out of the kitchen and serve us our sausages and scrambled eggs.

“Remember that law you told me about?” I said.

The master, whose nose was buried in the paper, glanced up from the headlines and gave me a long blank stare. “Law?” he said. “What law is that?”

“You remember. The one about duties and such. How we wouldn’t be human no more if we forgot the dead.”

“Of course I remember.”

“Well, it seems to me we been breaking that law left and right.”

“How so, Walt? Aesop and Mother Sioux are inside us. We carry them in our hearts wherever we go. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”

“But we just walked away, didn’t we? They was murdered by a pack of devils and demons, and we never did nothing about it.”

“We couldn’t. If we’d gone after them, they would have killed us, too.”

“That night, maybe. But what about now? If we’re supposed to remember the dead, then we don’t have no choice but to hunt down the bastards and see they get what’s coming to them. I mean, hell, we’re having a fine old time, ain’t we? Barnstorming around the country in our motor car, raking in the dough, strutting before the world like a pair of hotshots. But what about my pal Aesop? What about funny old Mother Sioux? They’re moldering in their graves is what, and the trash that hung them’s still running free.”

“Get a grip on yourself,” the master said, studying me closely as the tears sprang forth again and started running down my cheeks. His voice was stern, almost on the point of anger. “Sure, we could go after them,” he said. “We could track them down and bring them to justice, but that’s the only job we’d have for the rest of our lives. The cops won’t help us, I’ll guarantee you that, and if you think a jury would convict them, think again. The Klan is everywhere, Walt, they own the whole rotten charade. They’re the same nice smiling folks you used to see on the streets of Cibola—Tom Skinner, Judd McNally, Harold Dowd—they’re
all part of it, every last one of them. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. We’d have to kill them ourselves, and once we went after them, they’d go after us. A lot of blood would be shed, Walt, and most of it would be ours.”