“W-where am I?”
“I reckon we’re still in Texas. Yesterday I went through Vermilion, so we’re at least fifteen miles west of there.…”
Massaging my bruised skull, I sat down on an uprooted tree. “You said you were in Vermilion?”
“What there is of it, rather. Twister didn’t leave nothin’ but a greasy piece. No one left alive but a couple of Meskins. Had to leave. It don’t pay to play to a crowd that small and that poor.”
“Play at what?” I frowned.
Praetorius smiled again and tugged on his lapels. “Why, my good man—I sell my very own Patented Hard Luck Miracle Elixir! Guaranteed to cure neuralgia, cholera, rheumatism, paralysis, hip disease, measles, female complaints, necrosis, chronic abscesses, mercurial eruptions, epilepsy, scarlet fever, cancer, consumption, asthma, scrofula, diphtheria, malaria and constipation! Good for both external and internal use!”
“Is it the same as Mug-Wump Specific?” I asked warily.
“Heavens no! My Patented Hard Luck Miracle Elixir is a thousand times more efficacious!”
I grunted and got to my feet, doing my best not to wobble. I felt like a shirt that’d been beaten clean on a rock. Every muscle and joint ached, and my guts were full of filthy water. Praetorius grabbed my elbow and helped keep me steady. He was so short I found myself peering over the top of his stovepipe hat.
“Dame Fortune has led me to find you, Billy!” he said, steering me toward the covered wagon. I was too weak to argue, and didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway. “Obviously, the Fates decided that it was not yet time for you to die—they knew you had work to do! Important work! They saved you from drowning in that horrible flash flood in order for you to help me!”
“Help you?”
“That’s right, my boy! I’ve been in dire need of assistance for some time. I require a partner, if you will. I lost my last helpmate a couple weeks back—poor Jack’s horse stepped in a gopher hole and threw him.” Praetorius shook his head sadly. “Broke his neck clean through.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
Praetorius shrugged. “No use crying over spilt milk, I say. Especially now that Providence has been so kind as to deliver you to me! Here, you sit in the shade next to the wagon while I go find you some clothes. We can’t have you walkin’ about with your johnson hangin’ out.”
The Professor disappeared into the back of the wagon, where I could hear him shifting things about. I noticed there was what looked to be a cage of some kind fixed to the wagon, balancing out the barrels of fresh water and supplies strapped to the other side. The cage was roughly four by four feet, protected from both the rays of the sun and prying eyes by a carefully draped tarp. Curious, I reached out and flipped back the canvas. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but I was definitely not prepared for what I saw.
There was a little man about the size of a five-year-old child in the cage. He wore a rag over his loins, and his twisted and stunted limbs were as filthy as any creature could possibly be without being all dirt. He had a large, long nose that connected with the top of his small skull without the interruption of a brow, making it look as if his head actually came to a point. This effect was magnified by his skull being shaved except for a patch about two inches in diameter at the top, which was bound into a tiny knot with a piece of red yarn. The little man looked at me with permanently crossed eyes and smiled like an imbecile. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. If a child was born with such deformities amongst the Comanche, it was immediately put to death, as their way of life did not make allowances for those incapable of providing for themselves.
“What is it?” I asked, pointing at the little man in the cage.
“That’s it exactly,” he smiled.
“That’s what?”
“His name. ‘Whatisit’. He’s my side attraction, in case no one’s interested in a medicine show. I display him for a nickel a peek.” He shoved an armload of old clothes at me. “Here, I found you some duds. Used t’belong to old Jack, rest his soul.”
As I struggled into his late partner’s clothing, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the creature in the cage. Praetorius opened up one of the provision coffers and took out some bread and an apple and passed it through the bars to Whatisit, who chewed them with the complacency of livestock.
“Is it human?” I asked.
“Well, in the lecture I give the rubes, he’s a man-monkey.” Praetorius’s voice suddenly took on a surprisingly deep, authoritative timbre as he launched into his spiel. “‘A most singular animal, which though it has many of the features and characteristics of both human and beast, is not, apparently, either, but in appearance, a mixture of both—the connecting link between human and brute creation.’”
“Is that true?”
“Hell no!” he snorted. “But you can’t tell people, ‘Now I’ve got this idiot in a box here; take a good look at ’im.’ That’s bad for business. People want something exotic and mysterious for their nickel.”
“He’s not dangerous is he?”
“Poor Whatisit don’t have the brainpower to be mean,” chuckled Praetorius, reaching between the bars to give the pinhead a scratch behind the ears. “Ain’t that so, old fellow?”
Whatisit giggled and, as if in answer, hurled a handful of shit at me, dirtying the front of my new shirt and splattering my chin.
“I thought you said he was harmless!” I snapped, brushing the idiot dung from my face.
“No. I said he wasn’t dangerous. There’s a difference. ’Sides, tossin’ turds is his only vice. I can’t deprive a man of his solitary pleasure, can I?”
And on that auspicious note, I began my tenure as a full partner in Professor Praetorius’ Hard Luck Elixir Traveling Show.
It turned out the Professor was as crazy, in his own way, as the Reverend, but I liked him a whole lot better. Where the Reverend had been brooding and pensive, obsessed with sin and guilt and divine retribution, the Professor was interested in one thing and one thing only—making a dollar. He knew he was a charlatan and did not pretend to be respectable—at least with me. Another big difference between him and the Reverend was that while the Professor pushed his patented cure-all on everyone from babies at the teat to old men with beards tucked in their belts, he himself never once put lips to it.
The Professor’s way of making a living was unique, to say the least. Traveling from one pissant settlement to the next, peddling cure-alls to illiterate sodbusters and syphilitic townies, hardly guaranteed a steady or stable income, but it was exciting. And, in its own way, it reminded me of my boyhood, wandering from place to place on the plains.
Every now and again, we’d catch distant glimpses of Comanche hunting parties in pursuit of buffalo and antelope, but they never offered to come near us. I’d watch from the wagon, part of me aching as I wondered if my adopted father, Eight Clouds, or my old childhood friend, Quanah, was riding past.
But back to the medicine show: People didn’t get much in the way of outside entertainment in those days, so even the lamest of diversions was apt to draw a crowd and generate some interest. The Professor did business this way: We would camp well outside the city limits of his intended venue. He’d ride in and pay the sheriff a visit and offer him a dollar or three for permission to stage a show. If the sheriff wasn’t agreeable, we’d set up shop just outside the town’s dividing line and do it anyways.
Then he’d hand a stray kid two bits to paste up handbills advertising Professor Praetorius’ Hard Luck Elixir Traveling Show’s imminent arrival, and give it a day or two for the news to percolate amongst the locals via word of mouth. Then we’d ride into town.
Most of the Professor’s wagon was taken up by a portable wooden stage he’d had made special back in Philadelphia that was designed so it only took fifteen minutes to set up (a half-hour if it was raining), so he could address the crowd from a platform almost as high as their heads without leaving the safety of the wagon. There were holes drilled in
the stage so you could fix poles with banners stretched in between them that advertised the Hard Luck Elixir and Whatisit.
One such banner read: PROF. PRAETORIUS’ HARD LUCK ELIXIR—STRONG MEDICINE FOR THE WEAK! $1-FREE TO ALL VETERANS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR. But seeing how this was the late 1850s, the Professor rarely had occasion to part with a complimentary bottle of his precious snake oil.
The show would begin with me coming out onto the stage dressed in a bright blue frock coat with a double row of brass buttons and shoulder epaulets, a pair of shiny Wellington boots, and a brushed beaver high hat with a bedraggled peacock feather tucked in its brim. (That last touch of theatricality virtually begged to be shot off my head—and was so, on more than one occasion.) I would then take up a drum and begin beating away on it, drawing a crowd as I did. Once the crowd was of a decent size, I would stop drumming and announce, as loudly as I could: “Ladies and Gentlemen! It is my honor to present to you the one! The only! The esteemed Professor Praetorius!”
The Professor, who’d been waiting inside the wagon behind a blanket curtain, would then step out, accompanied by a drum roll. The Professor had a special white linen suit he kept stowed in a trunk and only wore for shows. He kept it clean by boiling it in so much starch it could damn near stand up on its own. At every show, he’d present himself to the audience as an immaculate tower of medical knowledge, his elbows and knees crackling like dead leaves with every movement.
Of course, the damned suit chafed like a bear. After each show, when the crowds had left and we were on our way to our next destination, the Professor would be busy smearing salve on his neck, johnson and other tender parts that had been rubbed raw during his presentation.
Watching the Professor work a crowd was a real education. He definitely knew how to talk a man into reaching into his pocket and handing over hard-won money for what amounted to rotgut whiskey mixed with horse liniment. I credit most of his success to his way with words. Only the Professor could get away with calling a simple glass of water “a chalice of Adam’s ale.” And for those unwilling to part with a dollar for a bottle of Hard Luck Elixir, there was always a nickel’s worth of amazement in the form of Whatisit.
In order to lure the townies into surrendering their change, Praetorius puffed up Whatisit’s pedigree from pinheaded imbecile to captured ape-man. To hear the Professor tell it, you were a cast-iron fool is you missed this chance of a lifetime to gaze upon such a unique specimen from Borneo, or Sumatra, or Tierra del Fuego or wherever the hell the Professor decided Whatisit was from that day. He made coughing up five red cents to stare at a caged freak sound not only educational, but morally uplifting to boot.
In order to show Whatisit, the Professor rigged up a special canvas enclosure to one side of the stage large enough to allow up to twenty people to pass through at a time. Those foolish enough to crowd too close usually ended up splattered with pinhead shit, to the amusement of their companions. It was my job to be sure that the line kept moving and that no one did anything to Whatisit while they took their peek, like poke him with sharp sticks or give him broken glass to play with.
After the Professor had finished his pitch and wrested what money he could out of the crowd, we packed up and got moving to the next stop as fast as possible. The Professor’s official motto was “Always leave the customers happy,” though the practical translation was closer to “Always leave them before they find out what they’ve really bought.”
Although Whatisit and I had gotten off on a bad foot, I soon grew fond of him. As far as the Professor could tell, Whatisit was probably in his late twenties, which was fairly old for a pinhead. By and large, he was easy to control and wasn’t hard to feed. The only time he got out of hand was when he had to be washed, but that wasn’t often. Every now and again, I’d take him out of his cage and put him on a leash so he could exercise, but he didn’t seem to like being outside his box. He’d scuttle about on his hands and knees like a dog and make a high-pitched whining noise, occasionally clinging to my pants leg and walking semi-upright.
The Professor told me Whatisit’s lack of enthusiasm for the outdoors was on account of his natural parents keeping him in what amounted to a crate ever since he was a baby, showing him at fairs and carnivals from the back of a wagon. They sold Whatisit to the Professor a few years back in order to clear a debt. Whatisit’s parents weren’t too broke up over parting with their only son since they had a younger daughter with a parasitic twin that could clog. (The daughter, that is, not the parasitic twin.)
I traveled with the Professor for close to two years, doing things like tending the mules, mending the banners, walking and washing Whatisit, decanting the foul-tasting Hard Luck Elixir into bottles and pasting labels on them. The elixir itself varied from brewing to brewing, depending on what the Professor could lay his hands on at the time. Often it was little more than watered-down rotgut, but I recall a couple of times when oil of turpentine and green vitriol were tossed in to the mix—not to mention the occasional rattlesnake to give it some extra “bite.”
During the time we were together, we traveled throughout most of Texas and into Oklahoma, putting on shows wherever there were enough folks with coins in their pockets to make an audience. As I stood on the stage before an endless parade of poverty-stricken farmers, illiterate ranchers and pig-ignorant townies—each of them watching me, listening to my every word, memorizing every gesture and nuance so they could repeat it, verbatim, to their kin stuck back on the homestead—I came to see myself through their eyes. I was no longer a skinny teen-aged boy dressed in outlandish clothes that did not belong to him, but the herald of miracles, transformed by the glamour found in even the tattiest of traveling shows. It was the same magic that could turn a con man into the wisest of sages and a congenital idiot into a missing link from a nameless land.
With all this folderol about cure-alls and tribes of monkey-men, no one knew—not even the Professor—that locked within me was a genuine miracle. I kept my condition to myself during my time with the traveling show, occasionally slipping away in the dead of night to hunt rabbits or howl at the moon. Once I shapeshifted in front of Whatisit’s cage without checking to see if he was asleep. Whatisit frowned at me and sniffed the air, looking more confused than usual. When I reached between the bars to scratch him behind the ears, he whimpered and drew away. After that I made a point of waiting until I was several hundred yards away from the camp before changing.
Professor Praetorius was careful to keep a step ahead of irate customers. We’d done our share of time in jail, here and there, none of it coming to more than a day or two. But jail was actually the least of our concerns, since most of the towns we visited didn’t even have proper law. What the Professor was more worried about were angry customers who would show up with a bucket of tar and a sack of feathers. And when our time finally came, being tarred and feathered would have seemed like a pretty fair shake.
I don’t recommend getting lynched.
Even for folks such as myself, who are notoriously difficult to kill, being hung is hardly a picnic. While a werewolf can’t die of a broken neck, I am here to tell you it hurts like hell. Besides, whoever’s doing the lynchin’ doesn’t know his onions, you’re more apt to get your head yanked off instead of a snapped neck. And that’ll kill anything, human or not.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We were camped in the Oklahoma territory, near the Red River. We spent a lot of time crossing the Red in and out of Texas and Oklahoma, as it tended to put off dissatisfied customers intent on reclaiming their money. Two days before we’d sold twenty bottles of Hard Luck Elixir in Turkey Creek, Texas, and the Professor had considered it prudent to cross back into Oklahoma. Just in case, mind you.
We were feeling pretty good about that little bit of salesmanship. So good, in fact, we’d elected to give ourselves a break and rest an extra day. We’d found a nice little campsite, sheltered by a copse of trees, with plenty of game nearby. It was spring and the wild
flowers were in full bloom, carpeting the banks of the river for as far as the eye could see. It had been such a fine day I’d taken Whatisit for a little walk, which he actually seemed to enjoy.
It was getting dark, and the Professor and I were eating supper by the campfire. I reached out to pour myself some coffee, when there was this sound like the devil hacking into a spittoon and the coffee pot leapt four feet into the air.
“Put yore hands in the air and keep ’em that way!” thundered a voice from somewhere in the trees.
The Professor and I did as we were told. A half-dozen men emerged from the surrounding twilight, each of them pointing a rifle in our direction. I recognized most of them as being members of the audience in Turkey Creek.
“What’s the meaning of this?” The Professor demanded, doing his best to keep a waver out of his voice.
A tall, grizzled man in buckskin pants and a homespun shirt stepped forward and pointed his rifle square at the Professor’s head. I knew right then these unhappy customers weren’t going to be satisfied with just getting their money back.
“I’ll tell you what the meaning of this is about, Mister Perfesser!” he snarled. “It’s about how that elixir of yores poisoned my little gal!”
“That is—unfortunate,” the Professor admitted. “However, did you follow the directions on the label? I definitely draw a distinction between adult and child dosages—”
The man’s face turned red as he cocked his rifle. “Shut up! I don’t wanna hear no more of yore fancy talkin’! You done enough talkin’ already!”
A second man, this one with watery eyes and carrying a burlap sack, stepped forward. “Jed’s girl ain’t the only one you hurt, neither! My Doris paid good money to see that freak of yores—we weren’t home an hour when she went into labor! And look what she delivered me!” He took the sack and dumped its contents onto the ground in front of the Professor. “You did this!” he sobbed, pointing at the stillborn pinhead lying in the dirt. “This is yore doin, mister’!”
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