Jonah Man Read Online Free Page B

patients, diagnosing their conditions, prescribing doses, scribbling on labels.
    I balanced a tomahawk on my nose, juggled others behind my back, then passed them between my legs. Counterfeit weapons, the stone a clay-painted foam. Connor bought them at a penny a piece from a theater that was shutting its doors. I finished my first set, took a slight bow with my shoulders. A small, tow-headed child asked if he could try. His mother tugged him away.
    Connor’s plan was working. The sideshow held the crowd. The crowd itself drew more people. We’d been playing for hours before the square cleared.

    I’ve never had a better day, Connor said once we’d quit the town. Never in all my years. You did a fine job, son. A fine, fine job.
    He drew back on the reins, looked up and down the roadway as though people might be watching from behind the pepper trees.
    By God, I’d believe you were pure native, he said. Even at this distance. Damned authentic.
    He slapped at the horse to quicken its pace, drove on.

    You think you’ve failed, but you haven’t. No one is a failure because of a single fall.
    I know.
    No, you don’t. People have it wrong: yours is the oldest profession. There were jugglers on the streets of Jericho and in the Forum at Rome, in the stalls of Aztec and Assyrian marketplaces, in the courts of European monarchs and Arabian caliphs. The costumes and objects may change with time, but the juggler has always been with us, and always will be. Do you understand me?
    I think so.
    Let me put it this way: You were right in refusing to speak. I didn’t understand, but now I do. You tap into an essential mystery. You stand out of time, a figure from the past and present and future, a fixed point in the full sweep of history. Nobody knows why you do what you do, no more than they know why they watch. You move people from a mundane plane of existence to a sphere beyond the everyday. As they stand there watching you, they cease to be clerks, dentists, lawyers, politicians, vagabonds, thieves. They are not thinking about how to pay the rent or when they are going to die. There is only the mesmeric whirl. You meet a fundamental need, a need as fundamental as food or sex. You put a stop to the mind’s ceaseless chatter, if only for a moment. I want you to consider that.
    OK.
    Promise me.
    I promise.
    All right, he said. Now, let’s celebrate the day’s fortune.
    He pulled a bottle of medicine from his blazer pocket, uncorked it with his teeth, spit the cork onto the road. We passed the bottle back and forth, taking short drags, then long swallows. We’d emptied a third bottle before we made camp. When I woke the next morning, my face was still painted, the head-dress still strapped beneath my chin.

Sioux City, Iowa
    September 9, 1922
     
    Everything in and surrounding the town is flat, sheered fields on one side of the tracks, squat buildings on the other. A few yards up the platform Jonson and his boy are fussing with their luggage. I watch them fasten their barrels to a dolly, strap their bindles to their backs. Jonson sees me watching, smiles. He waves me over, but I stay back, wait for them to trundle their barrels away. I feel the whiskey thinning in my blood.
    I find a coffee shop on my way to the theater. The inside is meant to look rustic, the floor and ceiling made of the same light-grained wood, the walls decorated with paint-by-numbers of waterfalls, forests, native-Indian faces. The place is empty except for a wall-eyed kid at the counter who keeps staring at my trunk. He’s a shine, the type who wants to talk his way onstage. I take the booth nearest the door, sit with my back to him, my trunk propped on the opposite bench.
    A man in an apron jots down my order. I roll my neck, shut my eyes. My tongue’s furring over and my gut’s churning. I think in pictures, everything right on top of me, blotting out whatever’s behind. The Porcine Child nodding off a snarl of flies. Jonson spraying saliva through the