Carter Beats the Devil (13 page)

But when he saw the train, his heart sank—caked in last season’s grime, it promised a smell in the compartments that would fade only after three weeks of citronella. His parents regarded the car with the painted-on smiles they’d had all morning.

The train hand, in battered derby and garters on his sleeves, waved his unlit cigar stub at Carter. “Name?”

“Carter. I’m the magician.”

The train hand straightened up. “The magician? Right away, sir.” He snapped his fingers and an assistant took Carter’s trunk from him. “Is this all you’re carrying? We’ll handle this, sir.”

Carter took a step toward the company train, but a gentle hand fell to his shoulder. It was a smartly dressed redcap, who said with a laugh, “Oh, no, sir. Come this way.”

“Well, this is pleasant,” Mrs. Carter said.

“Were you expecting this, Charles?”

Carter made a sweeping gesture to cover his surprise. “Well, I do have a new contract, and magicians are being shown more respect these days.”

The redcap led them down the platform, where they stood alone in front of a polished four-car train. The engine, which sighed a plume of smoke, was painted a royal purple.

“Your train, sir.”

“My—train?”

“It’s the magician’s train, sir. As per your contract.” The redcap’s buttons flashed in the sunlight.

“Mother, father . . . would you like to see my train?”

The first car was dark; the only light came from the front and rear doors, which stood open. Carter, praying his parents would see this as a clear sign of financial advancement, cautioned them to step carefully. There was a narrow aisle down the center; on either side of them were flats and scrim, props and scenery, trunks and packing crates, five tons at
least, Carter thought. He saw markings stenciled on one box, “Property of MYSTERIOSO!!!” He’d never heard the name. As they walked out the back of the car, Carter noticed a cage draped with blankets; something was moving inside, an animal of some sort.

“The next car probably has my sleeper,” he said. But he was mistaken: the car contained a dozen strangers who seemed to know each other. They were all dressed as if for church, and regarded him with suspicion.

“Hello,” he said.

They did not respond. He wondered if he were for some reason traveling with the Russo-Chinese acrobats. He smiled and nodded at them awkwardly as he passed through their quarters—but none of the sleepers had his card posted.

“That’s odd,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the next car,” his father said.

“That must be it.” The third car had a gold plate on its door: DOMUS MAGII, Home of the Magician. This was a sweet touch; Carter was deeply impressed by management’s consideration. He opened the door, expecting a set of sleepers. But what he saw as he stepped in took his breath away. Most of the car had been converted to a single open room. The walls were done over in velvet, and the ceiling draped with silk tapestries. He stood in the most opulent traveling quarters he had ever seen: Louis Quatorze furniture, including a divan and writing desk; a great four-poster bed with angels carved into the headboard; a lounge stocked with pillows and fat candles straight from a Turkish seraglio.

“My goodness!” his father exclaimed.

His mother added, “This will be very comfortable for you.”

Carter almost wanted to give it back—surely, he didn’t deserve such splendor. And then the rear door opened, and in walked a tall man in a dazzling damask vest and shirtsleeves.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m Carter. The magician?” Carter replied quickly.

The man’s eyebrows raised. “The—the magician.”

“Yes. Charles Carter. And these are my parents.” Carter extended his hand.

The man walked toward them. He was huge, well over six feet tall, had glossy black hair, and a mustache waxed to its tips. By the time they were face-to-face, Carter realized the mistake he’d made, but his brain hadn’t yet caught up with his mouth, and so he waited silently for the handshake that never came.

Instead, the man glared at him with the blackest eyes he’d seen. Carter
felt an oceanic contempt swell against him, and then, finding him unworthy, it slipped away. Now, the man acknowledged his parents. “You must be so . . . proud of your card and coin man,” he said.

“Oh, we are,” said Mrs. Carter. She added, proudly, “He performs in-one.”

Having put two and two together, Carter jumped in. “Are you Mysterioso?”

“So few people ever have to ask that question.”

“Are you a magician, too?”

Together, Carter and his new enemy listened to that word,
too,
echo in the splendid train car. “Mr. and Mrs. Carter, why don’t you be Samaritans and help your son find his place in”—Mysterioso waved toward the far tracks—“the other train?”

He ushered them out, politely.

Carter walked in silence, wishing for a distraction, an earthquake, say. He hoped his parents would say nothing.

“The other performers’ train is this way?” his mother asked a redcap.

The redcap nodded.

“All the way at the end?”

“Mother.”

“Where they’re loading the chickens?”

“Mom!” Carter angled his hat down farther over his eyes.

“So. Do they usually book two magicians on the same tour?” his father asked.

Carter shook his head. “My act is just close-up, so he must be a large-scale illusionist.”

“Then you two will be friends,” his mother declared.

Carter glanced at his father, who sucked in his cheeks in the way that showed he’d learned never to disagree.

“I’ll be going,” Carter said. “But I’ll be back—”

“Six months, one week,” his mother replied. “We already have our tickets for the Orpheum that night.”

“Well, the following show would be better rehearsed—”

“We’re looking forward to whatever wonders you dream up,” his father said, a hand on his shoulder, gazing at his son with genuine fondness. “I know you’ll be good with your cards and so on.”

As Carter hugged his mother good-bye, he heard Mysterioso, leaning out of his train, cry out across the platform. “Carter! They’ve loaded your trunk onto my train. Don’t worry. I’ll have it sent to you.”

. . .

As the performers’ train limped out of the station, it paused so that Mysterioso’s regal locomotive could pull ahead of them. Carter watched, his dirty window open as far as it could be to start relieving the smell of mildew, straw, and last season’s desperation. The first, second, and third of Mysterioso’s cars—all painted a purple so rich it seemed enameled—passed him. Then he saw the last car of the train. The decorations on the outside of this final car were so bizarre, they caused much discussion among the other performers. By the time the tour had reached its first destination, Sacramento, Carter had overheard the whole story.

It turned out the fourth train car was the domain of Mysterioso’s rare Chinese crested dog, a palm-sized animal with bulbous, wet eyes like suspicious marbles and an enormous tuft of white hair that made it look like he was raising cotton on top of his flat head. He yapped and shivered and bit people. His name was Handsome.

Handsome’s train car had a featherbed, a gold-plated dish from which he ate steak, and a four-by-six-foot planter overflowing with tall grass imported from China—a place for Handsome to hide his bones. The side of the car was painted with Handsome’s portrait over a phrase written in Latin: “The more I know of people, the more I love my dog.”

. . .

The first show was in Sacramento. An hour before his act, Carter asked the road manager, again, if Mysterioso had returned his trunk; word came back, in the form of a sorrowful, handwritten card, that Mysterioso hadn’t yet found it, suggesting that perhaps it had gotten mixed up with Mysterioso’s five tons of equipment.

Carter, who was not so easily defeated, improvised a show with coins borrowed from the audience. He added a watch-destroy-and-restoration that worked especially well. When he returned to the boardinghouse after his act, he found his trunk waiting for him. Every piece had been examined thoroughly and replaced.

Removing his makeup, he was angry, but more than that, curious: why did this particular ratfink merit forty-five minutes on the stage? He returned to the theatre to find out.

Mysterioso had come from the hell of the five-show-a-day grind, and, before that, according to his program, from India, where he had studied at the feet of holy men whose names could not be revealed for fear of thuggee retribution. He had a buccaneer’s laugh, especially when
he knew people were listening. He seemed to find pleasure in taking up as much space as possible, standing in the cramped backstage, arms akimbo, legs spread. Onstage, he spoke with a British inflection, but Carter guessed from the atonal twang he heard leaking through that Mysterioso was a Cornhusker or a Hoosier.

Carter moved to the back of the house when Mysterioso’s end-of-the-bill program began. After much to-do by stilt-walkers and fire-eaters, a trio of bloodthirsty Indians rushed from the wings with hatchets. Just as the performers looked as if they would be scalped, Mysterioso appeared on horseback, waving the American flag and crying, “This is for Custer! This is for the Alamo!” He swung his cavalry saber, beheading one man and, using a rope that seemed to defy gravity, stringing another up from the rafters. The third Indian managed to manacle Mysterioso and escape with a beautiful woman. A volunteer was called onstage to check the handcuffs and see if it were possible for the magician to escape from them. But regardless of how the volunteer tugged or twisted, the network of handcuffs and chains was seemingly impossible to escape. Seconds later, however, the magician managed to shrug off the bonds, mount his horse, and swear revenge.

After a quick change of scenery, during which the company displayed alacrity and panache with fire-eating (again), the maiden was seen tied to a stake in an Indian camp. The braves showed their gymnastic and juggling skills, much levity occurring when one Indian, in pink warpaint, showed less interest in her than in a fellow brave, who chased him off the stage. The maiden refused to relinquish herself to any of them. Finally, an enraged chief revealed her fate: she was to be married to the lion.

A great cage was rolled onstage, and in it an agitated, pacing young lion. The chief addressed the beast, “Will you have her as your bride?”

In response, the lion let out a terrifying roar.

With seven braves juggling lit torches, tossing them from man to man in a hypnotic pattern, the woman was led to the cage and thrown in; the lion gathered on his haunches to pounce as she cowered against the bars in helplessness. And then, after terrible seconds elapsed, the lion flung himself forward—revealing himself to be Mysterioso in costume.

As the rescuer hugged the woman, a bugle call sounded, and the cavalry, in a spectacular ending, burned the village to the ground, to tremendous applause and standing ovations.

By the second show in Sacramento, Carter understood how all the illusions were accomplished. Had he the assistants and the money, he
could have done them better. He could see exactly the moment the lion and the magician switched places—when the torch juggling was at its most furious, a revolving platform spun around. But try as he might, Carter couldn’t figure out how the lion was made to roar on cue. The roar was what proved it was a real lion, and its timing, in response to the chief’s question, was critical.

What a gulf Carter saw between Mysterioso’s huge production and his own modest tricks. He swore to himself that when it was time for the week twenty-seven pay negotiations, he would have something new and grand-scale, something of his own.

How to swap secrets? Mysterioso was clearly a louse, but some member of his company might like to know variants on cup-and-balls that Carter had discovered. When he approached that night to invite someone out for whiskey, a juggler stopped him. Mysterioso had a special rider on his contract: neither he nor his company was to be “molested” by other acts. This meant any form of conversation whatsoever.

Carter didn’t much care for Mysterioso’s attitude. Still, he wanted to know exactly how the Lion’s Bride effects were achieved; more importantly, the young woman who was rescued every night was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Her name was Miss Sarah O’Leary.

CHAPTER 8

In the next two weeks the tour stopped in Auburn, Reno, and Carson City. With times tough all over, the threat of being shut and sent home was even worse than last season. The Elko Palladium had a sign backstage that read: “Performers: Do Not Send Out Your Laundry Until the Manager Has Seen Your Act.”

Carter was in no danger. Western towns loved magic. Really, the only troupe on the program that had to worry was the most pathetic act Carter had ever seen: Karl and Evelyn Kowaleski.

The Kowaleskis were Polish immigrants who traveled with a piano, a guitar, a cow, a rooster, a sheep, and two pigs. They called their act The Funny Farm. Programs described it as “musical moos, boisterous baaas and oinks to tickle your funny bone.” While Karl played folk tunes on the guitar, Evelyn milked the cow in time with the music. Then Evelyn played chords on the piano—she had never learned melodies—while her husband shook the different animals to get them to make funny noises.

Carter watched their every performance before silent audiences, feeling queasy when he saw the sincere effort the Kowaleskis put into their miserable act. He frequently arrived early, just in case he had to wish them good-bye. In Salt Lake, as The Funny Farm performed, Carter stood in the wings next to Minnie Palmer, who stage-managed Fun in Hi Skule, which starred several of her sons. Carter didn’t need to ask why Minnie was there; her fingers were crossed, and she seemed to hold her breath until the curtain closed on Karl and Evelyn. Then she let out a sigh, and patted Carter on the shoulder. The Funny Farm had made it through another performance.

After he had performed each night and locked his act away, he talked to Chase the monologist and fed Karl and Evelyn’s animals, and then took a short walk through town to buy postcards or a newspaper, returning just in time for the entrance of Mysterioso’s company. Sarah always walked with the men, but never any one man in particular. She wore the same silk scarf, turbanlike, and wool coat, until they hit Denver, when she switched to a rabbit wrap.