Alexander recognizes the little man skulking at the back of the crowd right away, and his heart falls. Not again, he thinks. Shit, not again. He interrupts his patter to make a quick glance around the tent, looking for Oliver. There’s no sign of the Black Hercules, which means that he’s likely outside Fan’s. Damn it, Alexander thinks, I need him here; Fan’s fine. They have to get that man away before Lyman sees him. The last time had been bad enough, but this time Lyman will just kill the little fellow and be done with it.
The dentist is moving furtively in the dim lamplight, ducking from person to person in a way that he no doubt thinks is stealthy but, in reality, just makes it apparent that he’s trying to stay hidden. Besides, the whole effect of stealth is spoiled by the man’s direct, piercing gaze, right at Alexander, those mad, too-wide eyes that never move from him. Hatred in them, and something else. The eyes of a zealot. It’s enough to throw Alexander off his pitch, and he stumbles through the long recitation of maladies that the Sagwa will supposedly cure, a specious list he can normally rattle off in his sleep. Somewhere between agues and catarrhs he feels his own cough rumbling back to life, and has to duck his head in an effort to hide it. When he lifts it back up, the little man is gone. Shit.
Dr Potter hurries through the rest of his spiel, looking around distractedly, repeating several lines more than once until he just gives up and announces a two-for-one sale; he offloads a few bottles as quickly as he can, promising that the lovely soprano Mercy Rhoades would be onstage again soon to sing the beloved arias of European opera. Alexander locks up the crate of Sagwa while the crowd listlessly mills about and then he ducks out of the back of the stuffy tent. He’s jogging through their little camp, looking for Oliver, when he quite literally bumps into Ridley.
“Go get Mercy, boy,” he says, “tell her she’s on.”
“Ain’t it a little early, Doctor?”
“Goddamn it, Ridley, just fucking go get her! You hear me?”
Ridley is slightly taken aback at Dr Potter’s tone. The doctor never yells at anyone, not often anyway. He gets crabby and will snap and grumble at people from time to time, but not like this. Plus he’d about run him down, just now, and didn’t even apologize. “You bet, sir,” he says, as the doctor trots off again. “I’ll just go find her, then,” he calls after him. Ridley wonders what the hurry and fuss is all about, when Dr Potter abruptly turns around and jogs back.
“Listen, if you see Lyman, don’t say anything about the change in schedule. I’ll deal with it. Just go tell Mercy.”
“What if he’s with her?”
“Damn it, just tell her,” Alexander says, realizing that the request makes little sense, but whatever, the boy can figure it out. “Say I’m not feeling well. Just say something. I said I’ll deal with it.”
“Yes, sir,” Ridley says, confused.
Alexander starts off again and then stops a third time. “If you see a weedy little guy about this high,” he raises his hand, “who looks a little scruffy and crazy, come find me. Immediately. Trust me, you’ll know him if you see him. Just keep clear of him and come see me straightaway. Understand?”
“But what about Mercy?” Ridley is thoroughly baffled now.
“Goddamn it, Ridley, just come get me!” Alexander trots off to Fan’s tent and is dismayed to find that Oliver isn’t there. He stands there, outside the tent, looking around stupidly for a moment, ready to head back to the main stage in case he’d missed him there, when Oliver steps into the ring of lantern light.
“Where the fuck were you?” Alexander yells.
“Hey now, I was pissing, old man. That all right with you?”
“Listen, that little dentist is back. We need to find him before Lyman does.”
“What little dentist? Who are you–”
“From Boise!” Dr Potter interrupts.
Oliver’s eyes widen. “Oh, shit. Lyman will kill that boy.”
“Which boy is that, Mr Wilson?” Lyman steps from behind Fan’s tent, arm in arm with Josiah McDaniel. Josiah’s wide-eyed, crazy stare is dazed now, and he walks along meekly, unseeing and absent. Beside him is a pretty young girl, wearing a similarly foggy look. Alexander doesn’t know if Lyman somehow drugged them or if their state is the result of another of Lyman’s talents. They seem unaware of their surroundings; the girl doesn’t move when Lyman rubs a hand slowly up her arm. The dentist is breathing fast, harsh little gasps, and is weaving a bit on his feet.
“Gentlemen,” Lyman says, smiling. “Allow me to introduce Miss Elizabeth McDaniel. I’m sure you recall her brother. Fortunately I found them a few moments ago – a purely serendipitous accident – because I’m afraid they’re not feeling very well. Not very well at all. No doubt they need a doctor.” He smiles wider, slowly, and his eyes fix on Alexander. “No doubt some of the Sagwa will fix them right up.”
Josiah is in the nightmare again, even though he knows, or thinks, he’s awake. A man is holding his arm. There are words he hears but doesn’t understand; he can’t catch a breath, can’t think. Mary is calling.
– Run, love! she is saying, or had said, months ago. Run, love!
They’re somewhere outside Boise. Josiah staggers into the little circle inside the rocks, holding a pocketknife, a pitifully small thing. He gasps for air; his eyes are wild and white and he calls to his wife, over and over, his voice hoarse from shouting.
He’d followed her, after she’d taken to her bed, after she’d died, after she’d gotten up, red-faced and staring, after she’d run out into the night, faster than a sick girl should be able to run. She hadn’t been dead. She’d been sick, that was all, sick, and whatever she’d taken in that bottle of medicine had only made her sicker. She’d fooled the doctor, she’d fooled him, her husband, a medical man of sorts himself. She hadn’t been dead.
She wasn’t well, though; she shouldn’t be able to run like that. She shouldn’t. Josiah wishes he’d thought to grab a horse, because she’d run for miles without stopping, so fast he simply couldn’t keep up. His breath is jagged in his throat, now, and his legs feel as if they will collapse. More than once he’d feared he’d lost her, only to catch some far glimpse of her slender form in her white nightdress, reflecting the light of the moon. She couldn’t hear him, or she wouldn’t; she was just running and running towards whatever was calling her. She was so fast. For a long time, hours maybe, he thought he’d lost her completely, but then had seen the faint glow of firelight in a little tuck in the rocks.
There are men there when he reaches it; his Mary is in the center of them. One of the men is huge and black, one is old, and the third is chanting something over and over. Calling a demon, maybe, a devil. Not his wife. Not his wife. Why is she here? They’re good Christians, the both of them, not devil-worshippers. When Josiah calls to her, though, she doesn’t answer. Her eyes are wide, vacant, lost in the chanting and odd-smelling smoke.
He tries to go to her, still shouting her name, when the huge black man wraps him in meaty arms. Josiah tries to struggle, but it’s useless. Don’t look, the man says, strangely gentle. You just don’t look. He turns him away from the fire, from Mary. Even when she starts screaming, a horrible, wordless scream, Josiah can’t turn around; the man holds him tight. Josiah is screaming himself, weeping, struggling futilely for escape.
– Get him out of here! another voice says, the old man. Just get him away!
– What about –
– Just go! Get him out! I’ll deal with –
And then the huge black man is dragging Josiah away from the fire. Finally, Mary seems to hear her husband’s calls, seems to know that he is there. That he’s come for her, to rescue her. To save her.
– Run, love! she screams, Run! Her voice sounds strangely thick, throaty, as if the words are barely escaping her lips. Run, love!
At the last instant, before the black man drags him out of the rocks, Josiah is able to turn for just a second. He sees Mary, his slender, beautiful Mary, reaching towards him, still screaming words that twist together, a plea for him to save himself, her words slurred and blurred until Run love Run love Run love piles up and elides into something that sounds like Rula, Rula, Rula.
“Damn it, hurry up, Ag,” Sol is saying. “We’re going to fucking lose them if we lag-about much longer.”
“Listen, it ain’t my horse that come up lame, Sol,” Ag says. “I can only walk so fast. And I told you to just take my horse and go if you’re in such a fired-up hurry to get there.”
“Jesus, we’ve been over this, Ag. I can’t trust you to not get lost, dipshit. You know how you are.” Really, Sol just feels like he wants Ag with him; his brother is useless, but he reckons it more prudent not to rush off into an unknown situation without at least one person he trusts at his back, useless though that person might be. When Josiah had gone galloping off, Elizabeth had followed and so had he, only for his goddamn horse to pick up a sharp rock in its hoof and pull up lame after less than a mile. At first Sol was in a fury, just wanting to get after the McDaniels as quickly as he could, but the doctoring of his horse gave him a chance to think things through a bit more thoroughly. If Josiah had gone off in such a hurry, that could very well mean that the man they’re looking for might somehow be near, and Sol isn’t quite yet ready to blindly run into a killing that he still has little interest in doing. Maybe something worse waits for them up there. A little caution would not be fucking remiss, just now.
Sol hasn’t yet entirely thought all the way through this latest development. He’s not certain just what they should do. They already have the money, after all, so maybe they should just turn around and head back the way they’d come, or go somewhere else entirely. It technically isn’t even robbery, really, this situation; it’s more along the lines of breach of contract, a fuzzy legal proposition if ever there fucking was one, to his mind.
Ag himself doesn’t see what all the rush is about. They know where the McDaniels are going and, after all, it’s getting dark. If they just sprint ahead like idiots, dragging their horses along behind them, one of them will turn an ankle or step in a hole and then where would they be? In trouble, that’s where. Ag has no desire at all to limp to Baker City on one foot, or to carry his heavy, broke-legged brother over a shoulder, after the fool trips over a rock in the dark. He wishes Sol would just shut up and take his horse, already, and let Ag come along at a more reasonable pace with Sol’s own, if it’s so important for Sol to get there fast.
“The hell’s the dang hurry, Sol?” he says, yet again.
“We been hired to do a job, brother, let me remind you of that,” Sol replies, disgusted at the question, for which he has no good answer and, more so, at the situation in itself. “Where is your fucking work ethic, boy? Mama raised us to be diligent.”
Ag mutters something unintelligible.
“That you said, Rideout?”
“I said, Mama didn’t raise us to break our legs running off into the dark like fools. Pretty sure of that.”
Things continue on in this vein as darkness falls. The moon is climbing by the time they reach the outskirts of Baker City, along the Powder river. Baker City is half the size of Boise, but still they wonder just how they’ll find the McDaniels, now that they’re here. One of the first things they see, though, after they tie up their horses, is a small collection of brightly colored, brightly lit tents, in a meadow their side of the river, just north of where they stand. When they get closer, they hear music; a high clear voice is singing in a language that isn’t English, the sound climbing over the babble of the small crowd outside the largest of the tents. People mill around, waiting their turn to go inside. A tatty banner placed between two poles reads:
DR POTTER’S MEDICINE SHOW
Wonders of Nature
Illusions & Musical Delights
Medical Miracles
THE CHOCK-A-SAW SAGWA TONIC
Cures Complaints of Mind and Body
Low Price
VITAL FOR HEALTH
“I reckon this is the place, then,” Ag says, reading the sign.
“Oh, you fucking reckon so, do you?” Sol says. Now that they’re here, he’s nervous, jittery, and irritable. He fiddles with the pistol at his side, the one he’d inherited from his father, wondering if he would have to use it to kill another man, just like he’d done in Twin Falls. “Well, go on then, fool,” he says, eventually, waving a hand at his brother. “Don’t just stand there. Let’s go find those goddamn McDaniels.”
When he follows Ag, though, something makes Sol stop before he crosses the banner’s arbitrary boundary. If I go in there, he thinks, I’m committed to whatever might happen. The pause grows longer until, finally, he steps outside the poles and just goes around, which makes him feel the slightest bit better.
Ag is already moving through the crowd, working his way to the music tent. He loves music, but what he hears now is strange; he’s more used to fiddle tunes or church hymns. Whoever is in the tent, singing in that high, bright voice, isn’t saying much he can understand, in the way of words, that is, but there is a longing and sadness in her song that makes him listen closer. He wonders if the meaning would become clear if he concentrated harder or, instead, if he just relaxed his ears, he’d get it, the way that when you watched rain you had to relax your eyes to see it fall, sometimes, staring past and through it. Ag tries to listen through the music, past it, but all he hears is that sadness, until his brother nudges his arm.
“You see her, Ag?”
“Of course not, Sol, she’s inside the tent, genius,” he says, irritated that the spell of the music has been broken. “Just shut up and listen. You ever hear a song like that?”
“Goddamn it, Rideout, not the singer gal: Elizabeth. Or Josiah. You seen them?” Sol himself is looking around, wishing, not for the first time, that he had a bit more of his brother’s lank to him. He sees a lot of shoulders and hats, and that’s about it. “Let’s split up. Meet me back here in an hour or so.”
Ag sticks out a hand. “Give me some money.”
“What? I’m not your mama.”
“Damn it, Sol, you got all our money.” Ag pokes his brother in the chest. “Now give me some. Half of it is mine and I might see something I fancy.”
Sol knows that it’s useless to argue, that they have more important issues to hand, even though the lion’s share of that money is by rights his and he would disperse the remaining share as he fucking saw fit. Ag will only blow it on fripperies and foolishness, the simpleton. Standing here looking at hats is making him jittery, though, not knowing if he might have to shoot the man under one of them. And then who knew what the hell would happen? Running from yet another posse, most likely, is what he expects, but it could be worse than that. Either way, he wants to be moving now, to see if he can find the McDaniels and head off whatever might happen, before it does. Besides, he thinks better while in motion. Sol slaps a wad of bills at his brother and says, “One hour. Right here, son.”