At the Jim Bridger: Stories Read online

  No one moved. Everyone had heard that word, impotent. Everyone was waiting for me to gasp and begin sobbing. And the gasp was right there in my throat waiting to break. I could feel the impeccable presence of Janey Morrow at the desk next to mine. I steadied myself and spoke. “No, sir. It would be a bad idea to mock…” I could not go on.

  “What, Mr. Wesson?”

  “I need this class, Mr. Trachtenberg,” I whispered. The edges of a hot tear seared the rim of my eye.

  “Well, Igor. We’ll see how badly you need it.” He turned to the board. And so began the hardest ride in mathematics in the history of Orkney High School. I received that afternoon from the hand of Mr. Trachtenberg the supplemental text I would complete before June, a thick maroon hardback called Advanced Concepts in Trigonometry.

  Evil Eye and I had several jobs right after our flyer appeared—house parties, a birthday—and after we did the half hour intermission at the junior prom, our calendar filled into the summer. Suddenly, for the first time since my paper route, there was money; we charged forty dollars and then fifty (and there were tips). When Evil Eye would hand me my half, he’d say, “You’re going to college.”

  Our act opened with me coming out in my red vest and white dress shirt buttoned to the collar, setting up our card table and covering it with a black tablecloth. Then Τ would light the fat black candle in the center and place the Mysterious Objects around it, showing each object to the crowd first. I would hold up some aviator sunglasses and set them down, a pink plastic shoehorn, a bucket handle, a pair of brass door knobs. Sometimes there were other objects.

  “What are these for?” I asked him the first time we practiced.

  “These are the Mysterious Objects.”

  “What are the Mysterious Objects for?”

  “That’s right.” He was busy tugging at; the sleeves of his cape. It was an old graduation robe he’d found at the thrift shop and then gone at with a pair of pinking shears. “They’re Mysterious Objects, which means there is no answer to your earnest question. The Objects have mystery.”

  “Do you know the mystery? I thought you got these things down at the Salvation Army.”

  Here he stopped hauling at the heavy garment and turned to me. “Mystery,” he said. “Mystery.” He wanted the word to be its own explanation. When I just looked at him dumb as the doorknob before us, he went on. “Igor. There are things beyond our knowing.” He rolled his head in a big slow circle and brought it back to bear on me: “Do you know what we’re doing?”

  “No,” I said.

  Evil Eye crouched down and then rose onto his toes, framing his face in his hands, to announce: “I don’t either.” He put one hand over his eyes and waved the other in the air. “Do you think the unknown has power?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Then,” he said, looking at me, his hands now on guard for everything, “this room is full of power, because I don’t know what any of this junk means, either. We’re going to put on a show and try to find some things out!”

  I sat down on the couch. “All I have to do is put out the stuff and stand behind you and hand you something if you need it, right?”

  “Right. That and look worried. Look worried all the time.”

  Well, that wasn’t hard. 1 was worried all the time. I was worried about Mr. Igor Trachtenberg and passing trigonometry, and thereby high school; I was worried about getting admitted to college and how I would afford it; I was worried about something else, some unnamed thing, which hovers about me still as a worrying person, and I was particularly worried twice a week about wearing a red vest over my long-sleeved white oxford cloth dress shirt and placing the Mysterious Objects on a card table in front of thirty people in somebody’s living room.

  The house parties were the worst for worry, because every one was so close. At the junior prom, for which we received two hundred dollars, there were four hundred people and I couldn’t see one of them out there in the dark. I stood at the edge of the spotlight, set out the Mysterious Objects, and looked worried the whole time, but it was easier than standing in front of eighteen people in Eddie Noble’s living room or Harriet Middleton’s den. But to Evil Eye it was all the same. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to set out the Mysterious Objects and then look worried. He had to come out in his hefty gown and wait until the audience, big or small, grew nervous, tittered, and then after a good long dose of silence, he would begin with his routine for the Evil Eye.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he would start. “No one here, not you, not me, not my able assistant Igor, knows what the next few minutes will bring. Do you understand? No one knows what is about to happen. I’m serious.” With that sentence, Fm serious, he could make everyone sit up a little; it was clear that he meant it. “I,” he’d continue, “am sometimes called the Evil Eye, because of what my look can engender…” And then it would all begin. He would cruise, drift, float the perimeter of the stage whether it was a forty-foot circle, as it was at the junior prom, or the width of three folding chairs, as it was at Harriet Middleton’s birthday party. From where I stood I always saw the audience sit up and grow still and then imperceptibly at first begin to sway with Evil Eye as he floated, drifted, cruised back and forth before them. When he would stab a foot down and stop and stand straight up like a snake about to strike, I could see the audience sit up, lean back, prepare for the worst. He’d hop backward sometimes and I could see heads bob; and when he spun, everyone flinched; and when he stopped, the shadow of the spell was spilled over us all.

  When the room was changed that way, sometimes a boy or sometimes a girl would rise and step forward, standing by the Mysterious Objects, and then the rest would happen in a flurry Evil Eye would hand them one of the Mysterious Objects, the doorknobs, or the sunglasses, and make a request: “What do you feel?” or “Tell us what it’s like.” And that was really it. Just the picture of the two of them—some stunned boy standing there in a madras shirt with Evil Eye in his monstrous robe—was the climax of the act. Everyone would be leaning forward. And when the boy said, “I’m glad I got my car running,” or “This is weird,” or “I can be scared and happy at the same time,” it would have taken on a layer of danger and importance that made it amazing, and that’s what people were really, amazed, and they applauded wildly and the subject would sit down and as the evening was retold in the weeks to corne, the things the subject said would grow into dire predictions and ponderous epigrams, which only magnified Evil Eye’s reputation. After every show, more kids called him Evil Eye, but his name was not carved in stone yet.

  Mr. Igor Trachtenberg, the only thing between me and college, continued to try to drum me out of trig. I was doing double assignments anyway, our homework and ongoing chapters in Advanced Concepts in Trigonometry, and he would hand back my papers with a little pencil check at the bottom. A check. When I asked him what it meant, he said, “Are you still roving about doing the devil’s handiwork?”

  “No, sir,” I told him, because I’m fairly sure that was the only answer to that question. “I’m doing problems in trigonometry three hours every night. I’m keeping the devil at bay.”

  Mr. Trachten berg looked at me, his eyebrows in a dark, threatening arch. “Γ11 be the judge of that.” Then he took my paper and drew a quick circle around the check and put two lines under that and handed my homework back to me. That was all the explanation I was going to get. Check, circle, underlines. It looked like his secret code for F. It looked like an evil eye.

  Then Janey Morrow’s dad called. “I didn’t even know she had a dad,” Evil Eye told me. “He wants to give Janey a birthday party.”

  “I hope this isn’t anything but a nice birthday party for the most beautiful girl either of us will ever see on earth,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “I hope this isn’t some special way of incinerating two teenage idiots in a fire of their own design. I hope she’s not out to get us.”

  “I am Evil Eye,” he said to me. “It�
��s way too late to get me, and you’re a writer, so you’re always safe.”

  Regardless, now charging eighty dollars for parties, we went out to Janey Morrow’s for her seventeenth birthday party, the party that became the most retold of all of Evil Eye’s outings, and the one that gave him his name once and for all because something else happened there that was permanent. If everyone who has told of the night at the little house on Concord Lane had actually been there, it would have been by far our largest crowd, but in fact there were only a dozen people. These were all the kids from school who dis tinguished themselves by knowing how to dress and knowing the first names of the faculty. I mean, one of the guys wore a sweater vest. These were kids who when they put their hands in the pockets of their slacks to lean against a cornice for a photograph, they felt a fifty-dollar bill. It was this small group that stood around in Mr. Morrow’s kitchen about twilight on the day Janey turned seventeen.

  It was as odd a gathering as you might imagine. I mean, this was another kind of girl, a girl above and distant from us, and this was her party. She moved quietly among the girls and boys while we all talked to Mr. Morrow in the kitchen as he set out paper cups and a bowl of punch and a small tray of crackers. He was glad we had come. He was happy to meet Janey’s classmates. He worked at the Texaco refinery. On and on he talked. I realized that he wasn’t used to talking, that this was all a kind of spillage brought on by the clear relief that anyone at all had come to Janey’s party. This was fun, he said. A party. With the famous Evil Eye! He smiled. He was proud of Janey, her schoolwork; after all, she worked so hard, and being without a mom and all, and he was glad, well, to meet her classmates. We all nodded at him and finally the girls came and got the tray of crackers and poured everyone a cup of the red punch and it was enough to shake everybody up and have them go into the little living room, and when the girls had sat down in the chairs, and the boys had piled in on the floor, and Mr. Morrow had come into the doorway with his glass of punch, someone turned off all the lights but one, a desk lamp under which Janey Morrow must have been doing her trigonometry homework for the first eon of her life without knowing the next was about to begin. When all these things were accomplished, I came forward, looking worried, and unfolded our little table before the assemblage, shook out the tablecloth, and set out the Mysterious Objects.

  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 sh
e 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.