At the Jim Bridger: Stories (12 page)

That night, though the story has a thousand variations, there were only three. Evil Eye had worn the sunglasses to a football game the previous Friday and they were lost—another mystery, he told me, when I asked him where they were—and so I set out the pair of brass doorknobs, the metal bucket handle, and the pink plastic shoehorn. I’d learned by now to add a little drama to my part, so after they were set on the table, I went back to my station by the wall and then I returned to the table and I adjusted the doorknobs, the shoehorn, as if they needed to be just right for everything to work. Then I stepped back and gave them a dire look as if I could
see Fate itself. Evil Eye came from behind me, his robe dragging the floor, and handed me our fat black candle, and I set that on the exact center of the table and lit a kitchen match and handed it to him and he looked at the yellow flame as if it were a ragged peephole to the future, that is with a face as serious and blank as he could make it, and he ceremoniously lit the candle, reached back without looking, and handed me the smoking matchstick.

I then pointed to the desk lamp and said my line: “Could we have the flow of electric current to that device interrupted?” As always there was a pause, a “What’d he say?” and finally someone reached up and turned off the light. The light now collapsed to the point of the pulsing candle and back along the still profile of Evil Eye Allen. Something was moving behind his back, flying, flapping toward his face, and it became his hand as it fell across his eyes. He stood there like that, like a man in deep concentration or grief. In the new dark he had our attention again.

Evil Eye turned his head toward the gathering. His hand, as it had so often, stayed right where it had been in space, a disconnected force, a separate thing suddenly joined by another thing, a hand in the dark, and then his hands began to float upward and I could see their movement mirrored by every chin in the room. Heads lifted. Every eye followed the hands to their apex and held there. I mean, this was fifteen seconds and he had the entire room in the palms of his raised hands. From where I stood, I could just see the candlelight on the faces turned toward Evil Eye and the occasional sharp glimmer off somebody’s glasses. This view was cut into by the dark form of Evil Eye himself, that gown, his raised arms, and so I couldn’t see everything he was doing. I knew that he could draw his face into a tight vortex that looked unearthly, bunching his eyebrows down and pulling his mouth up, and
then send the parts of his face to the far corners of the field, creating a look best described as being
inhabited.
I don’t know if he was doing this or not.

But I did see his arms fall and the candle flutter, and then he pulled something from inside his robe and held it up, and this was a large red handkerchief. We could all see it. He knelt. He stood. He waved his arm slowly in a big arc, back and forth. Then he stopped. Everyone was watching that handkerchief, and we saw his hand begin to finger it into his palm, slowly gathering it the way a spider eats larger prey, and the look on the faces I could dimly see was a kind of fear. When it was consumed, his fist closed like a rock. It had a kind of pulse, a beat from where I stood, as if the cloth wanted out, and then I saw his hand tremble and falter and it began to open slowly.

I’m trying to be accurate.

The red handkerchief lifted like a little fire and stood on his open palm with a life of its own. For a moment it seemed the only light in the room.

Then the next part, the famous part, began with a scrape, a knee pop somewhere in the middle of the room, and a figure arose and this was Janey Morrow. Her eyes made two pools of wavering light on her face. This is the part that Evil Eye wanted me to be delicate with, the way the other kids parted to let her drift forward, a look on her face of confidence and ease and utter attention. She came up to Evil Eye and her posture changed in a moment and forever as she straightened up and lifted her face, and I could see her look into his eyes, and what was reflected was something private, and I regret the imprecision of that phrase, but I’m certain of it. The look was something private and I saw her eyes open even wider with it, and then she turned and took the handkerchief from where it stood on his hand. She said, “You’re right. This is mine. Thank you.”

Her voice was already different, clear and tender.

Evil Eye pointed to the table, the candle, the Mysterious Objects. Janey Morrow went to the table and picked up the doorknobs, hefting them into both hands. She turned back to Evil Eye with an expression of unparalleled joy, I’m a writer and careful of such phrases, but I’m using it now because it is the truth. I’m trying to leave nothing out.

He reached out with two fingers and touched the door knobs and said in a whisper that everyone heard, “You are now free to do whatever you like.”

That was it. I’d never heard him say such a thing before. He had said, “What is it you’d like to say?” and “Tell us the headlines,” the responses being various and not without meaning: “My mother has fixed me breakfast all my life,” “It takes years for the right rain to fall,” things like that.

But then Evil Eye said, “You are now free to do whatever you like,” and he stepped back so close to me that the hem of his garment was on my shoes, and Janey Morrow, who was already taller than she’d been a moment before, started to do a little dance, that is turn and step happily as she turned. Her face shone with what I’ll call sureness, and she raised those doorknobs above her head. She was twirling like that, a movement which I’m sure was an expression of happiness, and the twirling was getting a little faster, her skirt in a flate, and we could hear her breath and see her white legs visible in the unreliable light. This was a person who did not dance in front of people, a girl who had never really behaved in such a way. She had never been among us. Now she stopped and her mouth was open and breathing and her eyes looked glad and she went to Evil Eye and handed him the doorknobs.

“Isn’t this why we’re here?” she said, turning back to the group. “Isn’t this why we’re here?” She lifted her black sweater up suddenly over her head, and there against her white skin was the red handkerchief like a bikini top, and
then it billowed and fell. Her breasts lit the room like floating fires. The silence roared. I could see the teeth in Janey Morrow’s gleeful smile. Then her sweater came down on my head and I stumbled against the table.

It was I who bumped the table. It was not Evil Eye or Janey Morrow. Though I’m not sure now it matters. Janey kicks the table in some versions, which is not true, and in some versions she heaves the table over, which is not true, and in some versions the candles catch the curtains and fire chases people from the room, which is not true, and the fire department comes, which they did not, and Janey and her father have to move to Bark City, and Evil Eye, almost consumed in the blaze, is disfigured and still moves among us, a driven ghost, inhabiting our dreams. That last part might be on target.

So now I’ll just say it, what happened. I bumped the table and it shivered sharply and collapsed, spilling the remaining Mysterious Objects and our candle onto our front-row spectators. The flickering light in the room rocked, flared, and slid, and in the new dark we all could still see her breasts, bright ghosts in air.

Mr. Morrow turned the lights on, and the scene may as well have been turned inside out, light to shadow, shadow to light, a dozen blinking teenagers scrambling up in the blooming confusion. “Did you see that?” Benjamin Putnam said. “What was that?” But before he’d finished, two things happened that I witnessed close hand. Evil Eye, stock still and looking surprised for the first time I knew him, locked eyes with Janey Morrow. She had her sweater, that mystery, back on. Their look was as serious as looks get, and I could never read such things, but this one said something like: Something ends here, something begins.

What literally happened next is that Mr. Morrow crossed the room in two steps, pushed me aside and, lifting Evil Eye to his toes in the raw light, struck him in the face. It was this
act that closed the party down. Suddenly there was a lot of scurrying, hauling one another up and out, and we were in the car.

I remember that drive well. Evil Eye was silent, driving the car with one hand over his eye. He turned to me a couple of times as if checking my face for some understanding: Did I see what just happened? Finally, after he’d driven me home, he said to me, “We’ll have to get the table next week. Remember, Rick, we’ve got the Fergusons tomorrow. Four o’clock. Be there.” I wanted to ask him what he’d seen in Janey’s eyes. I wanted to ask him what about our candles and the Mysterious Objects. And somewhere inside of me I wanted to ask him if he’d planned the whole thing, if he’d been in control the entire time. There was something about him that day, something different, beyond the wacky act he’d been doing. I wanted to think it was power, but it might have been sadness.

We did the Fergusons, of course, and after that we were in utter demand and we raised our rates again and worked steadily. He’d appeared there with his left eye swollen shut, a purple thing that made your own eyes water to look at. To peek at it made your eyes water. Evil Eye indeed, Mr. Ferguson said. Everyone said. I wanted people to call me Igor, regardless of Mr. Trachtenberg’s wrath, but no one did. The name appeared in our programs, but everyone just called me Rick. We worked all over the state. Before I left for college we had earned almost nine thousand dollars.

What happened to me that spring is only part mystery to me now. The week of graduation, Mr. Trachtenberg asked for his trig book back, and I thought certainly it was the termination of my hopes for passing, for graduating on time, and I thought I would be six weeks in summer school. He’d given me no clue as to my ranking, my mark, how I was doing. When I brought it in, he thanked me and set it on his desk
beside something I’d seen before: a pair of brass doorknobs. Seeing them gave me a strange feeling that was confirmed on my report card: Trigonometry—A. It is now part of my permanent record, as is the look that Janey Morrow gave me when I returned to my seat. Her face had changed, or so I’ll say, and I looked right at her and asked, “What did you do?”

She smiled and I could see it there in the second smile I’d ever seen on her face, a face I’d barely seen, a face new in the world and held high. “Mr. Trachtenberg must not believe you’re the devil’s assistant any longer,” she said. Her confidence was overwhelming.

That spring I came to know that she and Evil Eye were quietly dating, though I never saw them together. Things swim under the surface of our lives and there are times when you can sense the rhythms and other times when you can’t. Janey sat next to me in trig, and I might as well have been sitting by Evil Eye; all the vibrations came through. When he and I went to our shows, her presence was in the car. He had entered her perimeter. When student body elections came along, Janey ran for student body president. The list was published, and you could hear people in the hallways reading her name and saying, “Why is the snob doing that?” She had been apart from or above everything, and now here she was entering the fray.

Evil Eye and I went to the gym for the election assembly, where each of the kids running for office got to say a little something for two minutes. His eye was better, but he got a reception everywhere he went, signals from boys and girls, odd waves, recognition of his talents. It was almost as if, when we ascended the rows of bleachers, everyone acknowledged him because not to would be to invite harm. Some kids just tugged his shirttail or bumped his leg in passing; everybody touched the Evil Eye.

Onstage were twelve well-scrubbed students acting like
little senators or comedians and sometimes both, telling a joke and then saying, “But seriously, we citizens of Orkney High…” When they called Janey’s name, she stood and came forward on the polished hardwood floor. She was wearing a slim maroon business suit, the skirt a lesson in rectitude, the shoulders of her short jacket flared in a lift that framed her face in a heartbreaking curve. Her speech was one sentence: “I’m asking you to remember that we’re all human.” Then she bowed her head slightly and pulled a red handkerchief from her bodice and waved it twice. Janey walked back to her seat in the loudest ovation ever created in that fine and ancient edifice. I looked at Evil Eye, his grin, the tears rimming his eyes.

It was the first assembly we’d ever attended, and it would also be the last. Our custom was to spend assembly time alone in the middle of the football bleachers. Evil Eye would stretch out over three or four seats and set his hand out as if to hold the gymnasium and all of its occupants, and he would say, “Did I tell you about growing up in Orkney, about going to high school in America?”

“You did,” I’d always say. “We’re still here.”

His face would roll to mine and he’d smile as if at a child and say, “My dear Rick, that would be the wrong answer.” And then he’d begin what I see now was a kind of rambling poem about being seventeen, a word he said was a central part of the code of the unknown, and he would invert himself so his head was far below and his magnificent feet were in my face, and he would go on and offer me all the advice I would need if I was going to be a writer.

AT COPPER VIEW

ON A WARM, BLOND OCTOBER
afternoon years ago, Daniel Hamblin jogged around the cinder track of his high school. His football practice uniform was stained with dirt and grass and soaked with sweat, and the heavy costume felt nothing but good on his young body as he worked through his third of four after-practice laps. He was a boy with words for things, and in the rhythm of his run, he thought, I’m seventeen and I’m in love. Many things will happen this year to me for the first time. When he spoke this way, his buddy Qualls would say, “Right, boss.” Around the oval track his teammates were strung at intervals, their cleats crunching the fine red cinders as they ran. All the forty red helmets were scattered in the end zone where these young men had tossed them, as was their custom before last laps. Daniel Hamblin loved this, the long shadows of the gymnasium falling across the track, the strength he felt in his lungs and legs, his sense of everything happening as he commented on it. “You old building,” he said aloud.