“N-no,” Lloyd admitted. “Not yet.”
“And I assume they would not approve if they did. So we know where we stand. All right, then. What about this? I believe we could fabricate… a mentalist attraction. In a word, mind reading. Hmm? We will ask questions of the audience and have you secured in such a way as not to hear. Then I shall ask you questions and you will tell everyone what it was the person said.”
“How will I know that?” Lloyd inquired.
“Because of the order of the questions that I ask you and certain key words I will use. We will have a code. With your quick head, we will fool and enlighten many. The rest will be amused. Then you can do some calculating feats and we can sell some special mind-strengthening tonic, for sharper wits and clearer thoughts.”
“Do you have some of that?” the boy asked.
“My little friend, I have but three tonics to sell, and they all have the main ingredient in common. The secret to tonic is not how it’s made but how it’s sold and therefore what it’s called. I will pay you one-third the price of every bottle of tonic we sell. I’m afraid I can do no better than that.”
“Thank you!” Lloyd smiled, imagining, in his naive enthusiasm, the residents of St. Louis lining up for miles.
“Come back this afternoon and I will have written some patter for you to memorize and we will rehearse the code. But be warned, young Lloyd, show business is a difficult business. So keep your mind clear and your wits about you, or we may both find ourselves in a situation that no tonic can cure.”
Lloyd ran back to the stables and the showman slipped into the tent, where his wives were debating in their personal sign language and the Ambassadors from Mars were clicking wildly. “Well,” Mulrooney told himself. “At least the boy will be safer with me than roaming the streets.”
Lloyd returned that afternoon as ordered. In but an hour he mastered the speech the showman had composed and a host of variations, all the intricacies of the mind-reading code, and some simple ways of integrating his calculating and spelling abilities-along with various musical improvisations on the mouth organ, squeezebox, and an old dimpled bugle that the showman had kept from his own boyhood. Lloyd had not had much direct exposure to music; he had been too busy with his inventions. But he quickly, intuitively grasped the system of music, and if his instrumental technique was raw that actually worked in his favor as far as performance theatrics went-or so Mulrooney thought. On the squeezebox, he became an imp of melody with astounding rapidity. “Damn me if that boy couldn’t be a musical genius if he turned his mind to it,” Mulrooney told his wives.
Then Lloyd had to decant a large cask of transparent liquid that gave off fumes that brought tears to his eyes into a series of little bottles with corks in the end. The magical-memory and mind-strengthening tonic was 140- proof alcohol laced with juniper and spearmint and could not have been more effective at clouding memory, although Mulrooney dubbed it LUCID! (He was particular about the exclamation mark.)
While working to fill the bottles, Lloyd listened to Urim and Thummim, and the more certain he became that, as freakish as they were, there was something about their language that was beautiful and subtle.
The showman retained his reservations about putting the boy “up on the stump,” and if Mabel Peanut, Lloyd’s sometime teacher back in Zanesville, could have seen him in St. Louis, performing on the medicine-show wagon, she would have felt confirmed in all her predictions about the family’s errant ways. But for Lloyd the experience of being THE MIRACLE MIND READER & MYSTIFYING CHILD OF VISION was as invigorating as a whiff of ozone or the taste of sarsaparilla-a brazen vindication of his special abilities, all the things, or at least some of them, that he had had to cloak or to be ashamed of back home. It chuffed his pride to be able to help his family, when he felt that, for all his singular gifts, he had caused them distress in the past.
Yet it also piqued his native rebelliousness and his no longer secret contempt for his parents, try to hide it deep down in his heart though he did. The stinking hobnailed boot was on the other foot now. They were of necessity grateful for his earnings, and gratitude is a double-minded emotion that can snake in many directions.
The
From the self-named Professor of Teratology, Lloyd learned a plethora of new words (such as “plethora,” “pinguid,” “paludal,” and “uliginous”), not to mention the more utilitarian skills of how to make change, short change-upsell, distract, hoodwink, and hornswoggle a crowd into being an attentive audience. And a great success the arrangement was, at least at first. For a couple of golden weeks, the showman began to have Barnum-like aspirations. With a little luck, maybe he could get the boy to travel with them to Chicago. The Ambassadors would eventually be incorporated into the act, and with the proceeds he would begin to build himself an empire of novelties-a true touring odditorium featuring headhunters from lost islands and living skeletons, with scientific displays to delight and inspire all ages!
After the second successful performance, Lloyd invited his parents along to watch him work. He was proud of himself. Meanwhile, Rapture had humbled herself and found employment as a scrubwoman for a fetid old wharf doctor who sold laudanum and performed abortions on the sly. She was upset to learn of Lloyd’s exploits, but grateful that her son had risen to the occasion.
However, the boy’s new career did not sit at all well with Hephaestus. Lloyd’s dressing down of him had yanked him out of his blither for a day or so, but without any inventions to occupy his mind, with Micah and Texas now seemingly out of reach, and with a growing sense of impotence as the head of the household, and no house to hold, the former blacksmith soon began to wallow in drink, exaggerating his limp for the purposes of begging, so that he could afford a cheap charcoal-flavored mash that a freedman named Little Jack Redhorse made.
When not moping and sulking in the loft of the stable, where they were forced to remain, he took to panhandling near the main market-and if fortunate in his takings he went in search of companionship and diversion, which he ended up finding at a place called the Mississippi Rose, an apparent chop shop and taproom that was in fact a seedy house of blue lights (a favorite among the preachers and the civic leaders). In addition to five floury white floozies and a very popular quadroon named Black Cherry, the entertainments ranged from cards and billiards to wagers on rat-catching dogs or bouts of barefisted boxing if two Irishmen could be found.
The proprietor was known as Chicken Germain, a Melungeon woman built like a cart horse with straight black hair and steel-blue eyes. She loved fried food and men, especially well-endowed men-and especially well-endowed men who also had some physical deformity. The first night Hephaestus managed to sneak in the door, Chicken was about to have him evicted when she noticed his limp. An hour later she noticed that he was anything but limp, chicken bones and gaudy silk stockings strewn on the floor beside her carved oak bed upstairs.
Despite his age, Lloyd was in his own way tortured by the temptations of desire into which Miss Viola had initiated him. There were not many avenues for sexual fulfillment for a boy of his age-particularly one who was new to town and without spending money, because, unlike Hephaestus, all the money he made he turned over to his mother.
From a street waif named Scooper he heard about a teenage half-breed called Pawnee Mary, who would let you do her if you gave her chewing tobacco. There was also a beefy bucket head named Betty, who would get down on all fours behind the feedlot if you gave her a pig ear to chew on. But the Christian Union rode Betty out of town on a rail (which some local wags claimed she enjoyed), while Pawnee Mary was found floating facedown in the river. Young Lloyd grew ever more restless for company and release, and might well have wandered down a short, dark path himself had his yearning for female affection not found another outlet.
One night after he had fled the stable, where enough rancor was brewing between his parents to set the horses snorting in their stalls below, he happened upon a Lyceum-like institution that called itself the Illumination Society. The establishment was filled with horn-rimmed fusspots arguing about a magic-lantern lecture on the life history of the bee. Was it too bold? Too suggestive? The opinions were hot on both sides of the debate, and no one noticed Lloyd slip into the adjacent library. He was starving for intellectual stimulation in the same way that he craved sex.
In the hushed, stuffy book room he found copies of Shakespeare and Horace. But when he went to look beyond one of the rows, in the darker part of the room, he pulled out a heavy volume on the history of the Punic Wars and found on the shelf behind it another book tucked away, as if in secret. In the dim light, he strained his eyes to take in the contents. The pages were filled with illustrated pictures of men and women. Naked men and women posed in positions that he hadn’t even thought of! His heart leaped. Page by forbidden page, the pictures lubricated his imagination. Fortunately, the members of the Illumination Society were now immersed in an earnest discussion
