Carter Beats the Devil (8 page)

Charles said, coolly, “Daddy knows—”

“He thinks Cook and Patsy are here.”

Charles shrugged. “Cook and Patsy know that we’re—”

“No, Charlie, they think Daddy’s back now.”

“Oh, be quiet!”

“Does Mr. Jenks know we’re alone?” James drew a face on the window, right where his breath had made a spot. He tended to trust the
world and had never noticed, when they played outside, the way Jenks loomed at the periphery of the garden, blotting out the sun.

“I don’t know.”

“I think he knows,” James said. “And Daddy was supposed to pay him today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Daddy and I go over the accounts sometimes,” James said.

Charles and Mr. Carter had never gone over the accounts. He didn’t even know what the accounts were. James continued to sketch on the window, making a fat body under the smiling face. Charles felt himself shrinking.

“When do you look at the accounts?”

“We’ll see Mr. Jenks soon. Today was his payday.”

But Jenks did not show himself, and it continued to snow long into the next day.

CHAPTER 4

For almost ten years, the blizzard of 1897 stood as the worst natural disaster to hit San Francisco. Telegraph wires snapped. Water mains burst so that awkward ice sculptures dotted Market Street. Some buildings under construction, like the new civic library, partially collapsed under the weight of the snow. Transportation halted—the streetcars wouldn’t run, and even though horse and buggies could make emergency trips, few knew how to drive in the snow, and there were many accidents. San Francisco’s cobblers, it was said, produced fine shoes for walking, but not for skiing. So pedestrians stayed indoors, waiting out the storm.

Though Jenks was accustomed to snow, he preferred to stay in his cottage, far out of the eye of strangers he might startle.

Years ago, he had looked all over the country for a fortune, and Alaska was supposed to be the last stop. He had prospected for gold, losing three fingers and all of his toes to frostbite. Finally, a stick of dynamite had blown a brass ingot through his cheek.

He sold his claim at a loss, and came to San Francisco, where the Carters took pity on him. Officially, he was the gardener, but he was excused from any sort of adequacy in that regard. He also was available if anything heavy needed to be lifted.

His cottage overflowed with the Carters’ old newspapers, which he burnt without reading, for reading reminded him of how hard it was to think. But the day of the blizzard, when he rolled and bound a hundred pounds of newsprint into dozens of tight logs, a headline caught his eye. How could he miss it—it took up half the front page: GOLD STRIKE! Beneath it, a map of Alaska, showing exactly where the Klondike was.

Involuntarily, Jenks made a small sound, like fabric tearing. Tears welled up in his eyes.

. . .

By the morning of the thirty-first, it had stopped snowing, and had begun to thaw. Across the city, people were taking the first tentative steps back into life. But there was still no sign of Mr. Carter, or Cook, or Patsy.

That day, their third in solitude, was the first that Charles hadn’t performed a hygienic inspection for himself and James. If their faces looked a bit grey, Charles wasn’t sure if he cared anymore.

He began to trespass. He wasn’t listening for imps; he felt instead like a detective looking for clues with which he could punish the guilty for having left him alone. His first area of ingress, his mother’s dressing room, was also his last, for he found something truly baffling there.

It was a wooden box about the size of a dictionary, with twin latches that opened easily. Inside was a metal object with a round head and long nose, and a hand grip. It could almost have been a pistol but for its immense weight—further, it had a cord and an electrical plug. Charles had seen but one object in his life that had an electrical plug: the toaster. His father had explained that one day, there would be an electrical refrigerator and an electrical oven, and that Patsy had an electrical sewing machine upstairs that eased her chores. “Electricity is a marvel,” Mr. Carter said. “It starts here, in the kitchen, and one day will be in every room.”

Charles wondered if this odd appliance was related to sewing somehow. There were a half dozen attachments, which he quickly determined fit over the ball-shaped nose: cones, grids, planes with raised bumps.

Then he found the brochure:

VIBRATION IS LIFE

What woman hasn’t lost her fair share of life to the mysterious ailments that incapacitate her zest and zeal? Feminine complaints can constrict the flow of the vital humors, leading to restlessness, furtive amativeness, a corruption of morals and the downfall of her happy home.

Treat yourself to an invigorative cure! Lindstrom Smith White Cross Electric Vibrators provide 15,000 pulsations per minute, relieving pain, stiffness and weakness. Just five to ten minutes with the Electric Vibrator, and all the pleasures of youth will throb within you. Steady and frequent application treats hysteria, chlorosis, greensickness, neurasthenia and all manner of hysteroneurasthenic disorders, and even simple fatigue and melancholy.

Apply to the area that feels the most congestion, and let the Lindstrom Smith White Cross Electric Vibrator relieve you with its thrilling, penetrating, scientifically-proven action. The application, when pursued for five to ten minutes (time will indeed fly!), leads inevitably to a convulsion of the affected region, followed by blissful relaxation and sometimes a tranquil slumber.

Can be used in the privacy of the dressing room or the boudoir.

The text didn’t help—he still hadn’t a clue what he’d found. Feminine complaints? Corruption? The diseases would no doubt be listed in the dictionary, but he suspected the definitions would, in the maddening way of dictionaries, lead back to themselves with the practiced evasiveness that excluded children.

Then his eyes fell on an electrical outlet. He would have been less surprised to find a zebra grazing off the makeup table. That his mother had an electrical outlet in her dressing room made him breathe shallowly, as he’d stumbled across yet another adult mystery.

Without further thought, he sat on his mother’s fainting couch and plugged the device in. An illustration showed a woman holding it to her cheek. This Charles did, and the sensation was indeed pleasant. He pretended to have come home from a hard day at work.

Gradually, however—in truth rather quickly—he grew bored. After five minutes of studious application to the cheek and forehead had passed, he looked at the brochure again, for he hadn’t proceeded through any convulsions; nor did he wish to slumber. He gave it another minute about his head and neck, and then turned the vibrator off, for his face was beginning to go numb.

A strangely incomplete feeling nagged him as he wound the cord around the appliance and packed it back up just as he found it. The light against the walls felt different, as if he’d peeled back a curtain on the world and found there only more curtains and drapes and odd masking. He wondered how Joe Sullivan had made the nickel vanish.

That afternoon, James read a book and Charles visited the attic, where he was not allowed. It was a well-organized place, free of dust, and illuminated by windows on all sides that today showed friendly slices of blue sky. In one corner, under a bell-shaped glass, was a small marble figurine, a nude that had once been on top of their piano. It was very delicate and cold to the touch. Charles inspected it carefully, running the tips of his fingers around its breasts.

He was proud of how responsibly he held this piece. Admiring it in the light, turning it to better see the details. “This one,” he said to himself, “comes from Italy. It is an Italian woman—note the texture.”

And then, without even seeming to slip, it dropped through his fingers. It hit the floor and shattered.

He gasped. He stooped to see if he could somehow patch it, explain the noise. He paused. Who was going to scold him?

It was New Year’s Eve. Every year, he had been put to bed early and told that when he was old enough, he could stay up to ring in the New Year. And now, he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. As if they had a life of their own, his arms reached out and held a brick over the statue.
This was an Italian sculpture
, he thought, dropping the brick.

He lifted his brick up, then dropped it, then again, and when the statue was reduced like broken bits of seashell, Charles crushed them under his shoe.

In the back of his throat, he felt a miserable longing for someone, anyone, so he could hit them with all of his might. It had stopped snowing; the snow was melting now, and there were people out on the street: still, both his mother and his father were gone. It dawned on him that there was no one coming, no one to stop him from destroying the world.

. . .

Charles miserably joined his brother in his father’s study, where their fire was still going. They had dragged in wood from other rooms and thrown in logs whenever it had threatened to die. Since they had fought that morning over who got to look through the kaleidoscope, and were not speaking now, Charles looked out the bay window. In many different places the color white capped a hundred shades of green: snow on the far ivy cliffs of the headlands, rough water on the bay, frosted branches in the nearby Presidio. Right below him, snow on the eaves of Jenks’s cottage. The wire connecting their houses had survived the snows and a finch sat on it, head twitching, wings fluttering.

James, who lay on top of the tangled blankets on the leather couch,
had a huge old book from their father’s shelves propped on his stomach. He said, “Well, well, what do you know?”

Charles didn’t answer him.

“Well, what
do
you know?” James said, louder, eyes popping at his book.

“I’m not interested in whatever baby book you’re reading.”

“I’m not talking to you. Well, what
do you know
?”

“I’m coming over there and I’m going to hit you.”

James opened his hands. “Ala-ka-ZAM,” he cried. A quarter dropped out of his hand. It rolled in circles on the carpet.

“What’s that book?”

“It’s mine.” But James had to retrieve his quarter from under the carpet and he left the book open on the couch.

Charles stared at it. It had illustrations, like a child’s book, but it also had dense text. The page James had opened to showed a series of diagrams: a hand with a coin in its palm; the hand closing; the hand opening with the coin gone.

Charles had only to take one step toward the book before James slammed it against his chest. “I’m not done,” he said.

“All right,” Charles said, so calmly it surprised him. He felt such a crushing ache to see the book, he was weirdly willing to wait for it.

Making a coin vanish was difficult for James, even when weighed against the promise of annoying his older brother. Charles sat quietly, looking out the window at nothing in particular, until he heard James cry, “This is stupid,” and throw the book to the floor.

Charles didn’t move until he heard the door to the toilet slam shut. Then he picked the book up. It was cloth-bound, with splits in the seams; the pages were yellowed around the edges. The title,
The Practician’s Manual of Legerdemain,
by Prof. Ottawa Keyes, was embossed in metallic gold on the spine.

This book would explain how the giant had taken his Racketeer nickel. He let it fall open randomly, reasoning that he could guide it, magically, to the right page.

He read the line his finger pointed to. “If you purchase used equipment, varnished surfaces may be made to look like new with a pound of wheat bran boiled in a gallon of water.”

Wheat bran? No sentence had ever disappointed him more, not even those in the Electric Vibrator brochure. He flipped a few pages, to a drawing of a candle.

To produce a lighted candle from the pocket, one of the illusions most pleasing to the eye, prepare the candle using a wax match as the wick. The best waxes are tropical in nature. . . .

He shook his head. This was an awful kind of book. But he wasn’t ready to let it beat him, for he had started to sense that the world was at its best moments a place for crafty men to explore. The book had no apparent organization, Professor Keyes intermixing methods for specific illusions with his general philosophy.

A master conjurer must have spirit and will-power. Above all, he is in
control
. How else can he command an audience’s attention?

He read that twice. It sounded better than wheat bran.

When performing the coffin illusion, and you are in that confined space, do not panic, as no magician has ever escaped by panicking.

He held his arms rigidly at his sides. He breathed though his nose, slowly. He decided he would be good at not panicking.

The rarest need in life is the one met suddenly and completely. This is how it was with Charles Carter and the art of magic. Had he easily found the diagrams showing how to vanish a coin, he might have just examined the method, confirmed that it could be done, and moved back to looking out the window. However, looking for an index—there was none—Charles found a page in the back of the book that changed his life.

The page was bordered with a lovely tangle of roses, flags, doves, and decks of cards. Unlike the rest of the book, it was printed with red highlights so that the flowers, the diamonds, and the hearts glowed. At the top, written in tiny cloister text, was a colophon:

If you have diligently worked through this humble tome, perhaps you have the disposition to be indoctrinated into the mystery. Here are the rules—seven positive commands, seven negative—that each master conjurer should follow.

Below were two columns of commands. Carter was sure he could obey if not improve on each rule. But Professor Ottawa Keyes had outsmarted him, for the rules were written in French.