B008J4PNHE EBOK (19 page)

“An important movie,” said Booth. “A true movie.” The large man in the black suit extended a hand to the golden-bearded dropout.

The Mayor’s hands remained at his sides. “Yeah? What’s so true about it?”

“Everything, every second of it, though especially the part where we show that this war, and everything to do with it, is a dirty damned farce. A farce played by a few evil men who jerk us all around for their personal amusement, like puppets.” Booth kept the hand in place.

“Pleased,” said the Mayor, finally raising his hand. They shook.

Adam lit a spliff and walked over with a milk crate, set it down, sat on it. Brittany came over, too. She hopped up on a discarded radiator. Randall’s voice leaked from the holes in the trunk in an agonized whisper: “Don’t trust him! He sounds like a weirdo!” Mayor Paul told Randall to be cool; his objections had been entered into the public record. The disembodied voice fell silent. A few others approached. Someone said, “Tell us more.”

The stranger removed his wrinkled jacket, draping it over his forearm. He propped a foot atop a battered icebox, leaned forward, knee on elbow, and without saying anything, cast an unhurried look from one member of the audience to the next, all the way around.

When Booth’s gaze lit on Allie, she found herself abruptly transported to an illustration in a storybook that she had spent many hours contemplating as a child. The illustration depicted a man in a coat with
tails, holding a long orange cat by the head and legs as if the animal were an accordion, and playing it as if it were an accordion; musical notes swirled from the cat’s ears. Listening nearby, a beautiful woman in a bright red dress swooned. The musician and the cat stared off the page with eyes like Booth’s eyes, wide and bright, eyes of absolute conviction. It was, she would have been embarrassed to admit, the most romantic image she knew, an image Allie had kept in her heart for years, calling it ridiculous to herself but loving it anyway.

She scoffed again and looked away. But she did not leave.

The morning was mild for October. A bird called, less a song than a cackle, rippling through the air above their heads.

“It begins,” said Booth, “with a medicine show.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

The story is set in the town of Nix-on-Avon, where a group of young men and women have taken to helping the elderly and infirm for no money at all. These peace lovers, inspired by the example of Jesus Christ, help in the fields, paint houses, and even serenade sleepless children with windowside folk songs, steadfastly refusing any attempts at financial remuneration. If there’s plenty of food, they accept a bite to eat or, if it’s a cold or rainy evening, the shelter of a shed or hayloft, but not money. They are called “the Young Americans.”

For the magnates of Nix-on-Avon, the movement is catastrophic: commerce has ground to a halt because of the sudden fad for bartering and trade; the banks are desolate; the now unnecessary police force spends the day playing cards and napping in the empty jail cells.

“But what can we do?” asks Mr. Jones, the owner of a rifle factory, worrying his emerald ring. The burg’s titans have convened a meeting. Mr. Jones’s beautiful daughter, Daughter, is one of the Young Americans.

“What we need is a war!” one man barks. A few of the men chuckle mirthlessly. War is the best business in the world! They should be so lucky!

From outside comes the tinkling of a bell and clopping hooves, alerting them to the arrival in the street of a novelty—an old-fashioned horse-drawn cart.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“There it is: the medicine show. Dr. Archibald ‘Horsefeathers’ Law’s Mobile Hospital! Horsefeathers Law, Purveyor of Rejuvenating Liniments,
Healthful Syrups, Wake-up Powders, and General Remedies! I will play Dr. Law! I am the villain.” Booth winked conspiratorially at the gathering. A few people giggled.

Booth raised a finger to signal that there was more. “And did I mention that you, all of you here, you’re the Young Americans? You see, all I want is for you to be yourselves.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Dr. Law offers his services to the businessman. It will be no great difficulty, he claims, to “cure” the Young Americans. His fees are very reasonable, he adds, especially for this kind of work. He invites them to please call him “Horsefeathers.”

Mr. Jones asks if he’s cracked. “How could such a thing even be possible, Dr. Law—er, Horsefeathers? How can you ‘cure’ do-gooding?”

“Pshaw! There’s a cure for everything!” Dr. Law climbs on a chair and looks down on the rich men. “Why, it so happens that I have, after a great deal of study—and a long sojourn in the deepest jungles of South America, where monkeys speak and the wisest of men walk on their hands—
concocted an antidote for peace!
”

That night, when Dr. Law arrives at their encampment, he addresses the Young Americans with an altogether different pitch. “I am not a miracle worker!” he warns. “I am a physician specializing in the deeper body. There is no magic about this. My medicine is, quite simply, a scientific treatment for the soul!”

After a clanking search among the many pockets of his topcoat, Dr. Law produces a pickle jar filled with inky liquid. Here, he says, is his special Curative of the Inner Aura Juice—CIA Juice, for short—guaranteed to cleanse the spirit of all physical weakness.

“I will offer a free sample to anyone who would like one”—he grins to reveal his several gold teeth, and angles the jar so they can see how prettily the black liquid oozes—“so long as you call me Horsefeathers!”

The Young Americans are weary; the work they’ve been doing for their neighbors is hard on the back, on the knees and the feet. A cure for physical weakness sounds good. It’s probably just grape juice, but since it’s free, what’s the harm?

Except for those six or seven who are away helping to plow a widow’s turnip patch, all of the Young Americans accept the free samples of CIA
Juice. They take turns sipping from the inky jar. “Sure is bitter,” notes the rifle magnate’s lovely daughter, Daughter Jones. “Say, what’s in it, anyhow?”

“Oh, a great, great many things!” says Dr. Law.

“Like what kind of things, Horsefeathers?” she asks.

“Well, for one thing, dreams!” The doctor explains that he grinds them up into a fine powder using a special mortar and pestle.

The next morning the Young Americans awaken in hypnotized states.

One girl goes to a train track and sprawls on the rails. Another youth picks his way carefully down a steep riverbank, pries a large stone free from the mud, and wades out into the middle of the river until his head disappears beneath the surface. Daughter Jones digs a neat grave and climbs down inside.

She is pulling the loose dirt in on herself when Horsefeathers rushes to stop her. “My dear, my dear!” he cries, dragging her from the hole. “What kind of a gentleman allows his wife to bury herself? I consider it a matter of principle that I should bury all my wives personally!”

The rest of the Young Americans return home to their parents. They proceed directly to the nearest mirror. The boys hack off their long hair and shave their beards; the girls hastily apply fresh makeup. They open their parents’ closets and take out suits and ties, ankle-length dresses and Sunday shoes.

In the middle of Main Street, the Young Americans make a pile of their old rags—torn jeans and sleeveless blouses and sandals—and light a bonfire.

The bankers and business owners look on, delighted—except for Mr. Jones. After refusing to accede to the very reasonable price for Dr. Law’s services—Daughter’s hand in marriage—his fellows locked him inside a basement.

Finally, Mr. Jones manages to break the lock and dashes into the street. “He took her! You’ve got to help me! Law took my daughter!” Mr. Jones grabs the arm of a newly sheared Young American. The boy shakes him off, straightens his tie. Mr. Jones turns to a girl in a high-collared black dress. “Please, I’m begging you!”

This Young American grimaces. She reaches out and touches Mr. Jones’s lapels. His face opens in relief. Her fingers tighten. A hard push sends him stumbling backward into the bonfire. The narrative climaxes
in a brief civil war between the “New” Young Americans and the outnumbered “Original” Young Americans.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“The forces of community and fellowship seek refuge in a church, barricade the doors and the windows against assault! There are so many attackers, though, so many of the hateful armed with their shiny new rifles! They are about to beat down the walls!” Booth threw up his arms. “Except—!”

His listeners twitched as if he had thrown grit in their faces. The Mayor was clutching his scraggly-haired chin. Adam, seated on the egg crate, had nibbled his spliff down to a blackened quarter inch. Brittany was chewing her nails. From the trunk of the DeSoto came a moan of despair.

“Except . . .” Booth fussed over the word this time, cocking his head to the side, lowering his voice. He let his hand sift slowly through the air, orchestrating in slow motion.

“Don’t be obnoxious,” said Allie. “Just tell us what happens.” He had sucked her in, too, the bastard.

She supposed that her room back home in Buffalo was the same as always. She pictured the robin’s-egg-blue wallpaper and the upright piano, the snapshots of her friends from the high school band on the corkboard, and the vaguely poignant glossy photograph of an unsmiling Van Cliburn with his otherworldly hair, seated at a baby grand. It would be so easy to go home. Allie’s parents had been uneasy about her going so far in the first place. “Are you sure you’re ready for
this
?” asked her tiny, cement-skinned, wheelchair-bound grandmother, an eighty-seven-year-old woman who had sent eight sons off to conflicts in foreign lands and who at this late date was suffering from not one or two but a whole grab bag of terminal ailments, and yet whose hushed voice betrayed that the notion of her seventeen-year-old granddaughter attending college, living in a dorm on her own, opened the door to depths of existential dread so grave that even to speak of it aloud was frightening. “Yes,” Allie had said, “I’m ready,” but she was having doubts now. At home, her bed was a bed, not a Pontiac. At home, no one wanted to “gain” her while she played Beethoven. In Buffalo, peculiar men didn’t just wander up and inflict upsetting stories on her. If she went home, her parents would take care of her.

“Except that just before the final moment, just before they break in”—though he spoke to them all, Booth had fixed his eyes on Allie and was giving her his magician-with-an-accordion-cat look—“the CIA serum wears off. The Young Americans wake up. They put down their weapons and gaze at the wreckage that surrounds them.” He made a show of wiping his hands. “The end.”

There was shifting inside the DeSoto’s trunk, followed by a belch and a sigh. Adam picked the nub off his lip, flicked it into an engine block sprouting brambles. Mayor Paul said, “Yeah, yeah.” Marty patted Booth on the shoulder. Anissa said it was a neat story. Brittany said she could see the whole thing. A consensus had formed: the big guy in the suit was all right.

“Good, good. It’s settled.” Booth bowed. “I’ll be in touch.” He stepped off the icebox and departed the way he had come.

Allie stalked back to the Pontiac. “What am I going to do?” she asked the interior of the car. The urge to weep was strong, but she managed to beat it back. She sniffed, and the smell of leaves and burn filled her nose. An odd thought surfaced.

Allie returned to the group; they had stayed around the icebox to fire up a fresh joint. “But what about the girl and the creep with the medicine show?” she asked.

There were murmurs of assent. Oh yeah, what about that part?

Randall spoke up from the hood of the DeSoto. “You should go ask him. I’m pretty sure that guy works at the Nickelodeon in town. I’d recognize his fat voice anywhere.”

Allie stood on the opposite side of the street to stake out the movie theater.

A narrow brick-faced two-story structure, the theater building was belted by a lit marquee of yellow and white lights, which on this night promised
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
but no titles. The ticket booth was empty, and the poster frames that bracketed the double doors were blank. But around five o’clock, people began to show up and go inside.

The sun was descending, the moon pinned to a jagged reef of maroon in the left quadrant of the sky, the air turning from cool to frosty. Allie
paced. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to achieve by confronting Booth about the story’s loose end. You didn’t have a wicked charlatan kidnap some poor girl and not explain what had happened to her—but it was only a story, right? Maybe chasing after this Booth Dolan person was just an excuse to avoid the real issue, which was that she was avoiding the real issue. Allie had fled. Professor Murton had spoken to her the way he had spoken to her, and she’d run. Was that how it was going to be? But if it was—if that was who Allie was; if she wasn’t, as her grandmother had feared, ready for
this
—why was she bothering with Booth? Wouldn’t it be simpler to find an old DeSoto and hide in the trunk?

Allie jerked her army jacket tight and swiveled, strode the other way. It was damned thoughtless, leaving a story unfinished like that!

The people entering the movie theater appeared older—stiff-gaited men, women wrapped in shawls. She didn’t see Booth. A few minutes passed and the arrivals ceased. Allie crossed over.

A handwritten flyer was tucked into the corner of one of the poster frames:
REPUBLICAN PARTY OF ULSTER COUNTY, BINGO FUND-RAISER, 5:30 PM
. In the side window of the ticket booth was another sign, professionally printed:
THIS SPACE AVAILABLE FOR RENT
, 555-3237.

Allie loitered indecisively under the marquee. From a distance, she must have looked like a girl who had been stood up. A chill tickled her nose, and she turned her head to sneeze.

At the corner where South Acorn intersected Main, there was a light. A blue VW Bug idled before a red. While he waited, Professor Murton, who was tapping his fingers against the wheel and had his pipe dangling from his mouth, happened to stretch his neck so that his gaze shifted to the parallel side of the street. That was when he saw Allie, and she saw him jump in his seat, like someone had pinched him.