Kaleidoscope (15 page)

He leaned over Jacques.

“(Has this happened before?)”

“(Yes, once. A wasp.)”

“(Did they pack him in ice?)”

“(Ice, yes! I had forgotten.)”

Jack looked up to see Luna Chevreaux flanking The Giant at the cottage door. The Giant bending low to peer inside.

“We heard they was sick.”

The first words Jack had ever heard the man utter.

“We need ice,” Jack appealed to Luna. “Lots of it.”

“From the café, Giant. Hurry!”

The big man seemed to glide away.

“When did it start?” Luna entered the shack.

“Don’t know,” Tommy replied. “I just heard Jacques croakin’ and came and got Jack.”

“I’ve got the pen!” Cassandra announced breathless from the door.

“Got it.”

Tommy Speck snatched the cap off Cassandra’s pen.

Jacques reaching over to caress his brother’s face.

“(I will never leave you, Marcel!)”

The siblings hanging each to the other like a life raft.

“(Always I am here! Always!)”

“This do?” Tommy handed Jack the cap.

“It’ll have to.”

Jack slipped the makeshift breather into Marcel’s trachea. He’d have to rig a pledget of some kind.

“You got any gauze?”

“Not sure,” Luna apologized.

“Find out. I need adhesive tape, too. And quinine. Surely with all the fever down here you’ve got quinine?”

“We’ll look,” Luna seemed glad to have a task. “Cassandra, can you check the infirmary?”

“Really important we get that medicine,” Jack grated.

“We will,” Luna assured him. “I’ll go back to Tampa if I have to.”

Back to Tampa?

But at that moment, Jacques reached out to take Jack’s hand.

“(Will we live?)”

“(Of course,)” Jack replied and turned his attention to Jacques’ conjoined twin.

“(Marcel, I need to know if you’re getting enough air. Blink once for ‘yes’, twice for ‘no’.)”

Marcel blinked once and quickly.

“(Good. Now we’re going to ice both of you down and get you some quinine. You can beat this thing, my friends. Just try to relax, that’s important. Let us do the work.)”

“Will they make it?” Luna whispered privately.

“You always tell ’em they’ll make it,” Jack kept a smile for the brothers’ benefit. “The hell is that ice?”

“Coming fast as we can.”

“Sorry, it’s just—I never like to lose a man.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Hell of a time for Doc to run off.”

“He had…business. In Florida.”

“When’s he due back?”

“Could be a couple of days,” she replied as if it were an apology.

“Well, I ain’t gonna brodie ’long as these two are in the woods.”

“Of course not.”

“Put me a cot in here, I’ll be fine. Maybe some coffee.”

“I’ll send over breakfast. How about for the twins?”

“Water’s the big thing. Lots of it. Maybe some broth or consume for nourishment. Nothing they have to chew.”

“Doc should be back in a couple of days,” Luna risked a return to that subject.

Jack pocketed his knife.

“Couple of days it’ll be over.”

Jack sealed the tracheotomy with ordinary adhesive tape and for five nights afterward never left the side of his unusual charges. Every morning one of the performers brought breakfast and coffee, usually with a fresh orange. Jack mixed the quinine got from the carney’s infirmary with orange juice in an attempt to make that prescription more palatable for his patients. He applied warm, dry compresses to the site of the rough surgery. Jacques & Marcel never complained. Occasionally Jack would see the twin heads turn in unison, inches apart, each man inquiring as to his fellow’s disposition, Jacques speaking easily, Marcel stopping the hole in his throat for some hoarse reply. Each brother offering encouragement to the other.

Three times a day, Jack took a temperature. Three times a day he took a pulse.

“(Am I checking one heart?)” he asked his patients, “(or two?)”

Marcel smiled with Jacques’ reply.

“(We share.)”

The pulse was erratic at first and did not settle into any sort of predictable rhythm until the third day. The swelling and fever subsided more quickly; by the second day there was no more need for ice. As would any nurse, Jack urged water or juice at every opportunity. The twins had good appetites, though Marcel was reduced to soup while Jacques could eat anything he liked.

Nothing to do otherwise but watch and wait. Tommy brought the Tampa paper over from the cookhouse each morning. Jack had forgotten how much he looked forward to a paper, even a Tampa paper.

Some news from home made Tampa headlines: President Hoover was set to visit Cincinnati. Jack couldn’t actually give less of a damn. He was more concerned that the Reds finished out their season with a meaningless loss to the National League champs. And who the hell ever played baseball in October—?! At that rate, half the country was going to be following football before the World Series even started.

There was another kidnapping, some millionaire in Detroit got his kid snatched. Just like the Lindberghs, everybody had an opinion about this one. The most recent scandal centered on the prison riot in Denver. Thirty screws taken hostage. Five thousand inmates holding shivs over their guards.

The latest
Tribune
reported that the Denver warden was refusing to negotiate with the prisoners. “They can go to hell,” he said, which pretty much guaranteed that his flatfoots were going to get their throats slit.

Business was running pretty much as usual, Wall Street getting richer and richer though Jack briefly noted a back page editorial that whined about the dangers of trading on the margin. Jack skipped that story. The only stocks he was interested in were certificates that belonged to Oliver Bladehorn.

On the morning of the sixth day, Jack removed a jerry-rigged tube from Marcel’s tracheotomy. There was no sign of infection.

“We’re going to leave the wound open,” Jack informed the twins. “It’ll heal on its own. You can put on a bandage to keep it clear, if you want.”

Jack plopped into his nurse’s cot feeling better than he had in days. He slept through the day and on through the next rose-fingered dawn. When he woke he found Tommy Speck and Luna Chevreaux propped like pigeons on either side of the sleeping brothers.

“How are they?” she asked him.

Jacques’ arm was still thrown protectively over his brother’s chest. Marcel was better, much improved in fact, which Jack was relieved to see. The twin’s face and upper torso were returned to something like recognizable proportions. Jack swung out of his cot and walked stiffly over to the twins. He checked their foreheads one at a time for fever. Nothing obvious. The pulse seemed normal, though there was something underneath, some occasional susurration not encountered in his other experience. But there was nothing he could do about that.

Jack reached for a Pall Mall and a match.

“I think we’ve over the hump.”

Luna rose from her ottoman.

“Thank you, Jack.”

Tommy Speck was grinning ear to ear.

“I never saw a brodie do anything like this!”

A brodie! Speck called him a brodie!

An unfamiliar emotion filled his chest.

“We still need Doc to check them out,” he cautioned. “But everything I can see looks copasetic.”

“Wouldn’t have made it at all without you, Jack.” Tommy squeezing his arm like a familiar.

Jacques stirred awake to see his visitors.

“(How is Marcel?)”

“(He’s fine,)” Jack assured him. “(You’re both fine.)”

“(You saved two lives this week,
mon ami
.)”

“(Can’t afford to lose our musicians, can we? Especially two such distinguished performers.)”

“(We do not play that well.)”

“(Better than any Siamese I ever saw.)”

Luna’s smile lit Jack up from the inside. Something warm, there, that he had not felt in a long, long time.

“Why don’t you grab some chow?” she suggested to Jack. “See me when you’re done.”

Was still early in the morning when Jack approached Luna’s café, and even in the short walk across the street he sensed a change in atmosphere that had nothing to do with climate. Veteran performers who normally disdained even to acknowledge his presence met Jack’s eye squarely as he crossed the street. Some dipped a chin briefly. Jo Jo, “The Russian Dog-Faced Man”, even spoke.

“Mornink to voo, Jock.”

There were a score or more of geeks waiting inside Luna’s café, obviously lingering late over coffees or orange juice. Gregory Lagopolus, the performer who kept the dead-born twin growing out of his chest always fully dressed, greeted Jack from a table he shared with two ordinary boys. Had never even occurred to Romaine that the geek might have sons of his own.

“Bonjour, Jack. Bravo.”

Nods and smiles from every booth and table seconded Lagopolus’s voiced sentiment.

Jack was not accustomed to ever feeling embarrassed, so why, now, in this company, was the color rising?

“We are proud to be associated with you, my boy,” Flambé crossed over to slap him on the back and with that the other performers rose like deacons to lay hands or flippers or some other sort of truncated member on their now-accepted brodie.

“Set yerself down, Jack.” The command came from Half Track.

Jack produced his required two bits.

She pushed the coins back.

“Not this morning.”

For a brief tour of moments Jack gave himself over to the cookhouse bonhomie. The carneys wanted every detail of the twins’ ordeal and Jack’s role in it. Now and then Tommy Speck would take over and you’d think a change of bandage or bedpan was brain surgery. In those moments, Jack could almost forget about Oliver Bladehorn and Arno Becker. He could almost dispel the fear for his family, that cloud hanging over his son and Mamere. He even managed, for a short while, to suppress the plain truth that while he accepted these people’s trust and basked in their praise, he was in truth no more than a confidence man, a thief.

Whatever joy he felt could not last.

And sure enough as Jack devoured his free bacon and eggs and grits and got through his second or third mug of coffee, the feeling grew that his sins were too deep to be sponged away in any baptism. Because no matter what the carneys had come to believe, Jack knew that he was a Judas. He knew that he had been sent with forty pieces of silver not to save these people but to exploit them, to use them.

For a second, he had the overwhelming impulse to come clean, to tell all the gathered citizens that he was here to rat, to steal. That he was here to con the carneys on behalf of a bloodless gangster in Cincinnati.

But suppose he did confess? Suppose Jack threw himself on the mercy of Luna and her fellows—what then? Surely betrayal outranked petty theft on the geek scale of offenses. Wouldn’t the carneys visit an even worse vengeance on Jack than they had on Charlie Blade? And why should Jack expect any mercy?

Jack left the café trying to ignore the knot in his gut. He had already decided to avoid Luna Chevreaux. Better to be shoveling shit than risk unmasking himself in a vulnerable moment. But that decision was taken from his hands when Luna turned from a conversation she was having with The Giant, standing outside her apartment, to greet Jack on the street.

“Jack, you eaten?”

“Ah, yeah. Just.”

“Hold up, I’ll join you.”

The Giant bundled off on some chore and Luna strolled over.

“Thought I might go to the river. Wanta come?”

“I prob’ly should check with Tommy.”

“Tommy’s off today. So are you.”

They followed a sandy rut leading away from the café and apartment, past the sagging awning of the telegraph office.

She gave no hint of her intentions. No explanation. They left the familiar road in short order to reach a winding, single-file path crowded with brambles and blackberry vines beneath walls of cypress and pine. The morning was quiet, except for the fitful breeze. Jack watched the play of Luna’s back as she led the way. The sway of her hips inside those cut-off trousers.

The stride of her legs seemed to pull wires from every other part of body. He watched the small muscles of her spine relax and contract with each step, the cerulean skin softer in the forest-filtered light. Her hair swaying coal black and uncombed.

She scooped a handful of berries off a low-hanging vine without pausing. He followed suit and picked up a swipe of thorns and she laughed. The path terminated at a rotting conglomerate of timber that used to be a pier. A boat badly needing paint was tied off. A motorboat, Jack realized.

“Check the fuel.” She checked a gallon tank and primed the aging Gebhardt’s carburettor, and within moments they were gliding down the Alafia River.

Luna settled at the tiller. Jack sprawled against a bait box amidships. The Moon Lady cut the inboard as soon as the current allowed, so that their boat drifted in silence. A slender mist clung like an orphan to water smooth as glass. Heron and egret plied the tributary for their morning feed. “Over there,” Luna pointed, and Jack saw the v’d wake of an alligator trolling for bass or perch or unwary birds.

Even with the mist it was easy to see that the river was crystal clear, and pristine. There were no signs of human society on the water or riverbank, no homes, no houses, no buildings or camps of any sort. There were not even any fisherman out that morning. Plenty of fish, though, largemouth hiding beneath fallen cypress or in the roots of water oak. Waiting in that ample shade for a waterbug or moth to dimple the surface. Or some other insect. As they idled, Jack lit a cigarette, needing the glow of tobacco. He inhaled. And then a straw of water spat from the river to douse his fire and face.

“The hell was that?” Jack stared at the limp butt in his hand.

“An archer fish.” Luna smiled as she tossed him a rag. “They can take down insects five, six feet above the water. Or cigarettes, apparently.”

Apart from spitting fish and gators there were other hazards. Luna grabbed an oar to push off a cypress knee that ranged like the tusk of a rhinoceros just below the surface. Tear hell out of a boat, he was told. Keep an eye out.