Carter Beats the Devil (79 page)
The couple was turned into a regular hardware store of chains and restraints. They were helped into a black and red lacquer cabinet decorated with dragons and Chinese sages, and finally, a huge iron ball was rolled into the cabinet, and its length of chain wrapped around them both.
“Maestro,” Thurston signaled, and a snare drum began to roll. Thurston shut and bolted the cabinet. There was a puff of smoke, and as he threw the door open, there was a loud clang as manacles hit the floor: Carter and Phoebe were gone!
Thurston rolled back his sleeves and extended his magic wand toward the road by the lawn, and there was the sound of an engine starting and a clatter of tin cans as a brand-new Willits-Overland convertible pulled into view. It was frosted with wedding wishes, and wisecracks, and was chauffeured away, its backseat overflowing with three passengers: Lili Marlene, nose into the breeze and, looking behind them and waving until they could no longer be seen, Charles and Phoebe Carter, waving good-bye, good-bye everyone, on the road to performing the greatest trick of them all, that of living happily ever after.
And here this story of Charles Carter comes to an end, but for one detail:
On November 20, 1924, with the newspapers obsessing over Calvin Coolidge winning the general election, Florence Harding, the Duchess, died.
There was little notice. She was by all accounts an unknowable woman, and with so few clues to go on, the obituary artists reserved both judgment and comment. Her death marked yet another end to the troublesome Harding reign, so: the sooner she was gone, the better. There was no funeral train, there were no hymns sung by strangers. Services were brief and private.
Like her late husband, she was cremated and, like her late husband, there was no autopsy; the death certificate promised she had died of myocarditis and chronic nephritis. A funerary urn was placed in a crypt in Marion, Ohio, next to the urn that was etched “Harding, Warren Gamaliel,” and that was still guarded, as a courtesy, by the Tenth Infantry detachment.
Soon after, workmen chipped her final resting date into a marble slab, and this was the quiet end of the Hardings’ sad public dynasty.
. . .
History records that in 1925 the Mergui Archipelago, east of the Andaman Sea, was the twilight habitat of the pirate Tulang. He was no longer the man who had faced down Charles Carter. Ravished by syphilis, his skin withered as if aging a decade for every human year that had passed, Tulang had good days and bad. His crew was tired.
In late January 1925, a poorly armed narrow-seas ocean freighter was about to drop anchor in the leeward bay of a small island off the Thai peninsula when it was seized by Tulang. He pointed the tip of his sword to the Captain’s chin, and for that moment, it was as if the old days were back, but then a fog settled onto the pirate, and he had to be led through the manifest twice before remembering what he had come aboard for.
“Your wares!” cried Tulang. “We will help ourselves to what you bring to the market.” Because the ship had come all the way from the United States, the men were excited—who knew what treasures might be aboard? The pirates brought the crew to the deck, along with an elderly woman who was being sent away from America to live with distant relations.
Tulang’s second in command, Samuel, a newly Christian Thai with genuine fondness for his leader, took control here, grabbing the Captain of the ship by the neck and rough-handling him belowdecks, past the sweltering heat of the engines, boilers, and fuel bunkers to the cool, stale air of the cargo hold. Reluctantly, the Captain took him to the packing crates containing the majority of their shipment: fifty gross of rake heads.
Samuel pried open the first crate with a crowbar. He didn’t know what a rake was. The Captain demonstrated—when the factory in Thailand fashioned the right kind of dowel, it would fit here, and when you needed to make a pile of leaves, it worked like so.
“That’s all you have? Oh, Jesus Christ!” Samuel cried. “These rakes aren’t even complete? Just the heads?”
“Just the heads.”
“Jesus Christ! What else do you have? Guns?”
The Captain shrugged. “We were supposed to get fifty gross of hoe heads, too. They were too late.”
“What’s in there?” Samuel waved at another part of the hold, which was padlocked.
The Captain jangled some keys.
When the metal door opened, Samuel winced from the odor of dung.
Inside the hold was an elephant. “You’re bringing an
elephant
to Thailand?” The Captain solemnly nodded. Samuel said, “Who brings an
elephant
to Thailand? They have enough elephants.”
The Captain explained that this was a retired animal owned by a magician who would no longer use her in his act. They were anchored at this island, in fact, to drop the elephant here. The elephant and the old woman.
Moving into the hold, but still keeping his distance from the elephant, for he was unsure how well it was trained, Samuel noted it had no tusks, which meant no ivory, and if it were retired, it was too old to work, so what use was it?
He touched his hand to his pistol. Shooting it would teach the captains of freighters to carry better things in their holds than rake heads and elephants.
The elephant raised one foot, which was shackled to a length of chain, and stamped it on the floor of the hold. If he shot and killed it, how would the freighter crew ever get it out of the hold? The effort would be immense. It would make the crew very angry. This ship might next time travel armed.
Still, the idea of shooting it was attractive, for Samuel couldn’t remember the last time he’d shot his pistol, and Tulang would be excited to know what he’d done.
“There’s also wine,” the Captain said, grudgingly.
“What?”
“A case of it. But it’s from America. It isn’t from France.”
Samuel considered this. “What kind of wine?”
The Captain took Samuel across the hold, to a packing crate that had on it, like all wine from America, the stenciled notation “For Sacramental Use Only.”
“Jesus Christ! This is—is this for communion?”
“I don’t know. It’s also from the magician.”
“It says
sacramental.
That’s holy wine.”
Samuel felt a light growing inside of him. Cracking open the crate, as gingerly as a crowbar would allow, brushing aside the straw bedding, it was like a manger scene to him. The glint of glass. He pulled forth a bottle, with its strange cabalistic markings, and felt a hand on his shoulder that he could only call divine. There was plunder in this world, and then there was the world beyond this one. What were the odds of finding a case of communion wine? The air in the hold suddenly smelled sweet.
This wasn’t luck, it was a blessing to share. He wanted to spare the elephant’s life, and the lives of everyone he could.
“Help me with this,” he said to the Captain, squatting down to better get a grip on the crate.
On deck, Tulang was asleep in the sun. His crew and the freighter’s stood in small groups, telling stories of misfortune, while the elderly woman, who had found shade, cored and ate an apple.
When Samuel brought up the wine, there was rejoicing all around, for the pirates had seen little alcohol recently. Samuel tried to describe why this wine was different than the rest, that they shouldn’t gulp it, but as his mates seized bottle after bottle from the packing straw, breaking them open and singing old songs as they drank, even he had to admit that God’s plan was infinitely odd—the most mysterious element of them all, joy, could enter this life profanely.
Soon, the pirates felt friendly enough to share their wine with the freighter’s crew, and by the time the sun had swollen at the western horizon, the two crews had begun to visit each other’s ships. There were rowdy bunches of newly made friends wrestling playfully on both ships’ decks and card players were in both sets of crew quarters, and someone on the pirate’s ship broke out guitars and accordions and drums that were passed around so all the old songs could be played. The ships were anchored side by side, and the tide was waning so that the bay below them grew a paler blue with each passing moment. Tiny Koh Pheung Thawng was the site of the largest party it had ever witnessed.
As for the witnesses themselves—the only spectators at first were goats and dogs and pigs who came out of the tangle of palm trees and tall grasses to scratch themselves and watch the commotion with puzzled eyes. Then the island’s few human residents, a married couple and another man, all elderly, all white people who’d been baked brown by the sun, came to the beach.
Finally, when the heat had given way to a cooling breeze, and torches were lighted on the beach, the pirates and the freighter crew decided in the spirit of cooperation that now was the perfect time to send the elephant on its way.
Getting an elephant from a freighter at anchor to a beach was a surprisingly simple task. The ship’s pilot, who had been a mahout in youth, brought the elephant from the hold and walked her to the bow of the ship, where he climbed onto her shoulders and waited for exactly the right wave to pass. He prodded her outward, into the waves, and then
man and elephant fell together into the ocean with a tremendous splash that doused the groups on the ship and caused those on the beach to cheer.
She swam the remaining hundred yards while, at the same time, a dinghy was lowered from the ship and crewmen began to row the old woman to shore. In the end, it was a good-natured race: which would get to the beach first? It was a busy beach now, as the dogs and pigs were in a frenzy of early evening play. There was a campfire, and the husband played guitar as the wife clapped her hands to the simple tune that rolled across the bay, “Three Blind Mice.” And there was the other man, the one with a high stomach, a nut-brown and happy man with a thicket of grey hair, waving and smiling. Walking into the surf, the breakers foaming past his hips, he waved at the pirates and the freighter crew, at the elephant and the woman in the dingy, he waved at everything in his view.
. . .
At the same time, on the ship, Tulang slept. Exhausted into dementia, he’d been carried to his bed, and his men had lovingly placed a bottle of wine next to him.
He awoke to the familiar throbbing of the engines. At this moment, his mind was back, completely, with an acuity that alcohol had once brought him in his youth. He was unsure what year it was. His eyes fixed on the wine bottle, and from this angle, he could clearly see the phrase: Charles Carter, Magician.
Carter the Great, he mused, now drifting out of clarity and into the past. “Bring up the package,” he said aloud. Then, grinning, “Life in Jakarta would be hard on her.” With a chuckle, Tulang slowly fell back into his dream, one he had almost nightly, about a day so many years ago, the day of the greatest magic show he had ever seen.
All of the magic appearing herein was performed (or attempted) during the craft’s golden age, the 1890s to the 1920s. A nod and a word, however: key details have sometimes been poeticized. If, for instance, you use Carter’s methods to escape from a packing crate, you should expect a less felicitous outcome.
Likewise, I’ve subjected history to vanishes, immolations, and other acts of misdirection. You’d be surprised, however, at how often history was far more interesting than anything I could have made up. Should you wish to read a more sober view of such adventures as Philo Farnsworth’s, I direct you to the biography section of your local bookstore.
Though you’re never supposed to show how you did a trick, it would be folly not to pull back the curtain and lead a hearty round of applause for
Carter the Great
by Mike Caveney, an astonishing in-depth biography of the real Charles J. Carter. Mike is an excellent historian, collector, and gentleman. Every book by his company, Magic Words, is wonderful reading.
The past five years have been a blur of microfiche, used-book stores, arcane libraries, and eBay bidding wars in the service of better understanding the world of Charles Carter. A few of the magicians whose writing I consulted include Nevil Maskelyne, David Devant, Robert-Houdin, Howard Thurston, F. B. Nightingale, Augustus Rapp, T. Nelson Downs, James Randi, Harry Kellar, Ottawa Keyes, Ricky Jay, and Walter Gibson. A complete list of resources combed over, and in some cases scrupulously ignored, would fill its own book. However, some works so influenced me that I’d
like them to get their day in the sun (if the sun can be said to be shining for anyone other than the author at the end of a 760-page manuscript):
Milbourne Christopher,
The Illustrated History of Magic
; Alice Morse Earle,
Curious Punishments of Bygone Days
; Curt Gentry,
The Madams of San Francisco
; Rachel P. Maines,
The Technology of Orgasm
; Harpo Marx,
Harpo Speaks
; David Price,
Magic: A Pictorial History of Conjurers in the Theater
; Francis Russell,
The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times
; Kenneth Silvermann,
Houdini!!!
; Edmund Starling,
Starling of the White House
; Herbert Yardley,
American Black Chamber
.