Читать книгу Jonah Man - Christopher Narozny - Страница 9

Marion, California

May 1902

We arrived in town early on a weekend morning. I sat on the back flap of Connor’s covered wagon, the balls of my feet brushing the ground while he drove the main street. At each corner I hopped off, pitched a double-sided placard with the same message painted on either side: FOLLOW THE CLARION CALL AND BE CURED.

We parked in a stone-walled square, set a card table before the fountain, weighted the table legs with medicine bags, covered the top with a paisley cloth and lined rows of bottles on either side of a signboard listing the ailments Connor’s brew could cure. The last entry read, MANY, MANY MORE.

I changed in the back of the wagon while Connor readied his voice, repeating the same nonce word up and down the scale, stretching his jaws wide and pushing out his tongue. My costume was thick for summer, the deerskin sleeves taut at the elbows, the moccasins too small. I coated my hands, face, and neck with a deep-red base, added black and white war-stripes beneath my eyes, applied a light powder to keep the base from melting. I fitted tomahawks into loops along the belt, pulled on a feathered headdress and tied the strap beneath my chin.

By mid-morning the sky was starting to brighten, the air to warm. Connor fetched his bugle from the jockey box, gestured for me to take my place beside the table. I stood with my arms stiff at my sides, a tomahawk locked in each fist, feathers dangling from the handles.

Remember, Connor said. Just keep your eyes fixed on a spot in the distance. Nothing to it.

The hawkers, carters and vagrants who frequented the square were the first to gather round. Then came clerks, construction workers, boys who’d been playing stickball in a nearby alley, tourists and retirees, the sick and lame. The square filled. People raised up on tiptoes, stood on the stone coping surrounding the fountain. Connor set aside his trumpet, addressed the crowd.

Ladies and gentlemen, he started, what I offer you today is a cure-all discovered by my grandfather, refined by my father, and further refined by me. An ancestral brew known to cure the sick and bolster the strong. I would be betraying my ancestors’ memory were I to name the ingredients, but I can say this: the components are pure and the formula patented. I carry the patent with me should you need convincing. This is no potion, and I am no alchemist. What’s more, should it fail to treat your ills, simply keep the empty bottle and when I return this way in a month’s time, I will refund your money, every cent.

How about you come back in a month and if it worked we pay you then?

I’m a patient man, Connor said. But not that patient.

What does it do, exactly?

A fine question, Connor said. A very good question indeed. When I said it was a cure-all, I meant just that. Allow me to provide an example. A woman, a school teacher, told me she’d never gone a day in her life without an ache or a pain of some kind—a stiff back, a bum knee, a sore tooth, a strained neck, and any other discomfort you might name. A migraine every evening and nausea the next morning. She bought a bottle, figuring she had nothing to lose. Well, when I came back around just one month later, she was waiting for me, eager to purchase the next month’s supply. Another woman, a widow, told me she could not sleep, could not so much as shut her eyes without seeing her husband as he appeared in the final, agonizing moments of his life. Well, one tablespoon and not only was she able to sleep, but she could see her beloved again as he was on the day they met: young and strong, with color in his cheeks, the hero of her youth. If you doubt me, I have their written testimonies, along with many others, in my possession. Long term, this fortifying brew has been known to cure microcephalis, quinsy, rachitis, cleptomania, and diptheria, to name a few. It’s been known to shrink benign and malignant tumors alike. It purges the system of parasites, thickens thinning blood, and clears skin of boils and other blemishes. It has repeatedly healed where all other remedies have failed. I have seen it cure husbands of their lust and wives of their frigidity. It provides the weary with stamina, the fearful with courage. A mere teaspoon has produced a sustained bout of studying in the most undisciplined of children. At a dollar a bottle you have everything to gain, and what’s more, I will discount the price by a percentage of ten for the first five patrons. A ninety-cent investment in your health and well-being.

Is there anything it can’t do?

It cannot bring the dead back to life, make the old young, the poor rich, or the talentless talented. Apart from that, I have yet to discover its limitations.

A man stepped forward, held up a knurled hand, the tips of the fingers forking backward at the joint.

Arthritis, the man said. Got so my hand’s no better than a paper weight.

An awful predicament, Connor said. I suffered from a similar affliction, only in my toes. It was this very recipe that cured me. Tell me, sir, have you any hobbies?

I write poems.

Professionally?

Wouldn’t be a hobby if I did it professionally.

I mean have you published.

No sir. I handpick the people I share them with.

A wise practice. Tell me, can you make a fist?

What you see is what you get.

And is that the hand you write with?

It was. I do my writing in my head now.

Like Homer.

OK.

Well, let’s see if we can’t get your verse from head to paper.

Connor crouched down, took up a bottle, wrote directions on the label while he spoke.

A teaspoon at breakfast, another at dinner, he instructed. If you want to accelerate the healing process, I’d recommend you rub a cotton swab’s worth on each knuckle before bed. Allow the medicine to soak directly into the bone and you’ll see a difference when you wake.

The odor won’t keep me up nights?

Quite the contrary. It’s dulcet scent will work on you much like a lullaby.

And that’s ninety cents?

Ninety cents for the first five purchasers. Now, for a man whose condition is in such advanced stages, I’d recommend two, possibly three bottles.

Like you said, I got nothing to lose.

People began to queue up. There was a pregnant woman who’d miscarried twice before, a man who’d had the same case of hives for more than a year, another man who’d just turned thirty though his skin was wrinkled and his hair gray. When the people on line outnumbered the people in the crowd Connor gestured toward me, said:

Ladies and gentlemen, now for a bit of native entertainment.

I broke my pose, lunged forward, hollering war cries and hurling tomahawks. Children darted behind their parents, began inching back out.

Don’t be afraid, Connor said. He’s quite tame. I liberated him from his depraved existence on an Apache reservation outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father rode with Geronimo. A proud people living in squalor. This one calls himself Wet River. His name is all the language he knows.

Connor stood watching as I edged off to the side, bringing the children and some parents with me, then returned to his patients, diagnosing their conditions, prescribing doses, scribbling on labels.

I balanced a tomahawk on my nose, juggled others behind my back, then passed them between my legs. Counterfeit weapons, the stone a clay-painted foam. Connor bought them at a penny a piece from a theater that was shutting its doors. I finished my first set, took a slight bow with my shoulders. A small, tow-headed child asked if he could try. His mother tugged him away.

Connor’s plan was working. The sideshow held the crowd. The crowd itself drew more people. We’d been playing for hours before the square cleared.

I’ve never had a better day, Connor said once we’d quit the town. Never in all my years. You did a fine job, son. A fine, fine job.

He drew back on the reins, looked up and down the roadway as though people might be watching from behind the pepper trees.

By God, I’d believe you were pure native, he said. Even at this distance. Damned authentic.

He slapped at the horse to quicken its pace, drove on.

You think you’ve failed, but you haven’t. No one is a failure because of a single fall.

I know.

No, you don’t. People have it wrong: yours is the oldest profession. There were jugglers on the streets of Jericho and in the Forum at Rome, in the stalls of Aztec and Assyrian marketplaces, in the courts of European monarchs and Arabian caliphs. The costumes and objects may change with time, but the juggler has always been with us, and always will be. Do you understand me?

I think so.

Let me put it this way: You were right in refusing to speak. I didn’t understand, but now I do. You tap into an essential mystery. You stand out of time, a figure from the past and present and future, a fixed point in the full sweep of history. Nobody knows why you do what you do, no more than they know why they watch. You move people from a mundane plane of existence to a sphere beyond the everyday. As they stand there watching you, they cease to be clerks, dentists, lawyers, politicians, vagabonds, thieves. They are not thinking about how to pay the rent or when they are going to die. There is only the mesmeric whirl. You meet a fundamental need, a need as fundamental as food or sex. You put a stop to the mind’s ceaseless chatter, if only for a moment. I want you to consider that.

OK.

Promise me.

I promise.

All right, he said. Now, let’s celebrate the day’s fortune.

He pulled a bottle of medicine from his blazer pocket, uncorked it with his teeth, spit the cork onto the road. We passed the bottle back and forth, taking short drags, then long swallows. We’d emptied a third bottle before we made camp. When I woke the next morning, my face was still painted, the head-dress still strapped beneath my chin.