As her beloved reached this apex of his hopes, the Spectacle woke from the trance of adoration in which she lived, and reached out to pat his hand. This gesture had no effect on the others, who maintained their silence with great determination, but it did at least prompt Natty into speaking again.
“And the Rider?” she asked, without taking her eyes from his face. It was clear that she expected Boss to answer, but in fact the man himself did the honors.
“I met Boss in the harbor,” he said, in good English but with a Spanish accent. “He needed a guide.”
“Oh, but horsemanship as well,” Boss cut in quickly, like a general who does not want his soldiers to have opinions of their own. “Magnificent horsemanship. Magnificent.”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Natty with a little smile. “And before that?”
“To the east, as Boss said. But my people are not there now.”
“Because…”
But Boss was in flood again and would not let Natty finish. “My dear young lady,” he said loudly, and then, turning to me, “and my dear young man. Permit a stranger to offer you advice. A stranger, and although not a parent, a man with the sympathies of a father, and a father’s solicitude for those young enough to be his offspring…”
He gulped, and seemed once more to forget where his words were heading, or perhaps had drowned in them, then surfaced again and carried on. “My dear young people: do not continue in the direction you are heading. Do not, I beg you. Abandon your original plan and reconsider.”
“Why?” I said, which seemed like the longest word I could fit between his own.
“Why?” Boss repeated, puffing out his chest. “Why? Do you not comprehend, Mister Jim? Do you not see the dangers that lie before you? If you continue in the direction you are headed, and come to the place we have recently left, you will be ground into mincemeat. Mincemeat which is diced and pounded, then minced again and chopped this way and that and eventually tipped into a hot pan and fried until it turns into grit and then is pounded some more, until it has become dust and is ready to blow away.”
I felt so battered by this description, I could only gasp “I do, sir, I do understand you!” when really all I wanted to know was how he and the rest of his troop had survived in this place they had recently departed, if it was really so diabolical.
Natty was more straightforward. “Are you suggesting we join you?” She switched from the Rider and looked directly at Boss as she put the question, then back to the Rider again. I saw him nod, just enough to tip a triangle of dark shadow down his chest; there was so much intensity in even this little gesture, I wondered why he had attached himself to these bubbles. Because of what he had said about leaving his own people, I thought. Because they were the best of all the bad options he had known since then.
If Boss noticed me thinking this, or the quick exchange of looks between Natty and his horseman, he did not show it. “My dear girl!” he exclaimed, with a fresh burst of enthusiasm. “My dear girl, why, you are reading my mind. Reading my mind! Of course I am suggesting you join us. More than suggesting. I am encouraging. Insisting. Demanding…” His eyes rolled in their sockets as he searched for ways to extend his welcome still further, then a new idea struck him and he put on his hat again, pointing a forefinger toward the sky as though he had suddenly received another communication from above.
“A mind reader!” he went on. “A mind reader! That will be your business with us; that is why you have been sent to join us. To be a member of our Entertainment and to read minds.”
Boss lowered his hand and began waving it to and fro as though sculpting the air; I think he hoped to suggest something like a tent and a crystal ball and a Gypsy costume. Then, as these things appeared in his mind’s eye, he continued more slyly, “And what other skills shall we see, I wonder? What about Mister Jim here? What about you, sir? What is your…expertise?”
He rolled the word around his mouth so appreciatively I almost forgot that to go along with his plan would mean reversing the decision I had made a little while before and heading north, not south to the coast. What did Natty think of this? I could not see; her face was turned away from me because she was looking at the Rider again.
“I can shoot, sir,” I said, but with no eagerness whatsoever.
“Shoot!” came the response immediately. “Perfection! Why did I not think of that myself! Shooting! You can be the partner of the Wee Man here, who is also a shooter of incomparable skills—are you not, my good fellow?” Here Boss twinkled over his shoulder, but the Wee Man did not blink or budge. “A regular sharp shooter I should say, the sharpest of them all. Together you will puncture the bull’s eyes; puncture them. And dazzle the crowds!”
Boss paused to swallow the saliva that had filled his throat, flung his arm forward to point into my face, then swung it behind him to indicate the Wee Man, as though he was tying us together with an invisible rope. I felt too bewildered by this performance to do anything except nod my head, as though I happily accepted the connection. The Wee Man was not so willing, but at least did me the courtesy of removing the rifle from his knees and dropping it into the wagon behind him. When he turned toward me again he bunched his face and spat out a thick jet of tobacco juice.
“Do not mind him,” Boss went on, leaning toward me in confidence, but still speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, including the Wee Man. “He is a gentleman of few words—few but wise.” Then he straightened again and reverted to his usual cheerful self, beaming at each of his charges in turn until finally coming to rest, and most affectionately, on his wife. “But this is all well, is it not, my love? Very well, and very good. Excellent in fact. Manna in the wilderness. Where we looked for nothing, we have been fed.”
Now the Spectacle spoke for the first time, or rather made a sound. “Oh yes.” It was nothing more than a whisper, but conveyed a whole universe of agreement and admiration.
The effect was remarkable. Boss seemed entirely to forget where he was and leaned forward in his saddle until he had brought his red face close to her own shining moon, so that he could feast on whatever mysteries he found there to fascinate and reward him.
Now it was Natty who interrupted again, and made formal what she had decided for both of us. “Mr. Boss,” she said, slowly turning away from the Rider. “We’re grateful for your hospitality. We accept. We’ll come with you. Though I rather doubt we’ll be able to help in the ways you imagine.” She paused, and looked at Rider again, as if she was speaking directly to him. “I have no skills as a mind reader, and Jim here—I have never seen him shoot. But perhaps there’ll be other things for him to do.”
“Natty…” I began, stretching out a hand and hoping we could speak quietly for a moment, because I still would have preferred to stay as we were—heading south and alone together.
But she would not look at me. “Jim,” she said quickly. “You heard what he said. Surely you can’t think it’s sensible for us to continue as we were?”
“I have—”
“Do you want to ignore them? That would be ungrateful.” She spoke with a kind of hiss, which would have made me blush if my face had not already been so burned and dusty. Even as it was, I thought the others were bound to notice the difficulty between us.
“This is the desert after all,” Natty went on. “Aren’t you grateful to have friends in the desert?”
I stared at the ground, at the grains of red fine dust blowing among the larger stones, and gray thistle-seeds, and the light lying in fragments. I knew I must say something to Boss but I could not think of anything. I was already defeated. And then defeated again when Natty rode forward and turned her pony and settled in beside the Rider. A moment later Boss signaled for me to take my place at his own right hand, and so we continued together, into the next part of our adventure.
CHAPTER 19
My Confusion
I have known loquacious men all my life. Drinkers buzzing in the taproom of the Hispaniola. Barge-men bellowing on th
e Thames. Schoolmasters talk-talk-talking. Ferrymen. Stevedores. Sailors. My own father, God bless him, storming continually around the Island with Mr. Silver and Ben Gunn and the rest. But these were nothing compared to Boss. From the moment we rode forward again, I doubt whether he drew breath more than once or twice through the whole of our first day together, only occasionally taking a swig from his water-bottle to turn his tongue back into a river. And in this once or twice there was barely a chance to ask the two questions that lay uppermost in my mind, namely: how well had I guessed where we were; and how accurate was my calculation of the time that had passed since our shipwreck? Perfectly accurate I was told, perfectly accurate—we were in Texas, a little to the right of center; and we were enjoying the year of our Lord 1805; the merry month of March to be precise. To which I murmured under my breath that now two and a half years had passed since we first came ashore in the Black Bay.
I suppose by talking so incessantly Boss meant to distract us from any dangers lying round about, and to this extent was behaving kindly. Yet he took such pleasure in the swoops and swerves of his own voice, which he often accompanied by swats of his hand, or by doffing his hat, or by puffing out his chest, or by twisting to gaze on the Spectacle and asking “Do you not think, my love?” or “Is it not so, my love?” without pausing to hear her reply, that I soon let my attention drift, so that I could make a space for myself behind the torrent of his talk, as if I was hiding in a cave behind a waterfall. Here I had the opportunity to think, and to notice the scenery as we continued north from the point where we had discovered the trail, and traveled through more red country, past more red boulders, toward a distant horizon where red at last softened into pearly gray.
In so far as I paid proper attention to any of the thousand subjects that Boss introduced, pursued, forgot, then found again, I remember the following: how he had met all the members of his troop except the Rider in England; how they had decided to try their luck in the Americas; how they had squeezed across the Atlantic without any injury from the war that continued between our country and the Frenchies; how they had come to Florida expecting peace but had found all manner of disturbance between competing interests; how they had settled on Mexico as an alternative—but been prevented from reaching there by the storm, as I already knew; how they had taken refuge in the port of Swaffington, of which I had never heard; how they had found there a great confusion of travelers from the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and African nations; how these people worked as missionaries, mariners, milliners, barbers, bar-traders, shopkeepers, cheats and tricksters, slaves and slave-owners; how the need for pleasure was all the greater, because of the hardships created by so much coming and going, and chopping and changing, and losing and keeping; how these hardships were our own fault, dear boy, our own fault, because it was our own people who had swarmed though the Caribbean, and our own people who were now creeping west and north into territories that did not belong to them.
I was a little surprised by this self-criticism, because in his appearance Boss resembled a strange and peripatetic relation of John Bull. Yet once again he proved to be a man of cross-currents, for he ended his lesson by pressing one hand to his chest in a mournful gesture, and informing me, “We consider ourselves enlightened but we are not. We are rascals—worse than rascals. Nibblers and gnawers. Thieves and traitors. And our Rider is proof of this. Torn from his home, Mister Jim, torn from his home!”
While Boss paused at this staging-post in his disquisition, he hung his head to reflect on the cruelties he had seen, and the others he expected to find; because I thought this might be my only opportunity to make a contribution of my own, I seized it.
“I’ve seen some of this myself,” I said, intending to speak a little of Black Cloud and the Painted Man, though not to mention the necklace. “I know…” I began, tucking my satchel inside my tunic, but Boss had no interest in what I was doing, or what I was about to say, or what I had just finished saying, and immediately charged off again.
“And this reminds me to draw your attention to another thing…” he began, in the same headlong way as before—but I cannot tell you what this other thing might have been, because my mind was already so choked with his previous subjects, and the heat of the sun on my head was so great, I did not listen. I amused myself instead by once more admiring the tracks of rabbits or racoons in the dust beside me, or the marks of snakes that proceeded sideways, and left behind a figment of themselves in little curling waves. The additional reason for this, which I do not enjoy making specific, is that it distracted me from looking at Natty and the Rider, who so far as I could tell were trotting along quite happily together, sometimes talking like old friends and sometimes keeping silent just as easily.
In this way, half-watchful and half-dozing, I was treated by Boss to innumerable stories of scalping and skewering; and yet more of men buried in sand up to the neck and then left to die of thirst and starvation; and yet more of men disemboweled and tortured with fire, which of course I could have told myself but did not have the opportunity.
As this catalog continued, and the sun rolled through the afternoon and began to sink in the west, I roused myself sometimes to wonder how Boss himself felt about these stories. On the one hand he described even the most gruesome events with such relish, it was difficult not to think that a part of him enjoyed them. On the other, he seemed so determined to prove our new world was bristling with dangers, and already half-ruined by mountebanks and worse, I thought his decision to stay here was very puzzling. I could only conclude that everything he described was in a sense incredible to him—was in fact a kind of Entertainment.
In this spirit I made my peace, and felt content that we had decided to join his troop when we made our camp for the night, with Boss finding a smooth patch of ground between two large boulders beside our trail, and the Wee Man driving our wagon so as to make a barrier along the third side of the place, which meant we felt snug and protected even before we lit our fire. Once the flames had taken hold Clown filled a pot with some dried meat and beans (all the while wearing a very melancholy expression), and the rest of us sat in a ring expecting that soon everything would follow in order: we would eat, then sleep, then wake and continue our journey.
But immediately there was a disturbance, which was the Rider lolloping into the shadows, finding a clump of cacti, and gathering a handful of their fruit; I noticed that Boss rolled his eyes when the Rider showed them to him in the firelight, but thought nothing of it, except he must have tasted them before, and did not like their flavor.
I had often seen these fruits growing in the country near Hoopoe and White Feather, but it had never occurred to me to eat them, since their bulbous shape and milky skin, which was fissured with small black veins, as though they were some sort of tumour, made them look nauseating. Neither had I seen anyone else in the village taste them: they were reckoned to be dangerous.
The Rider, however, clearly considered them a delicacy. Having displayed the collection he had made, he placed it in a separate pan from the rest of our food and cooked it until the fruit was reduced to a pulp, whereupon he scooped it out with his fingers as though he felt no pain, and squeezed the liquid into a cup. He did not drink this himself but offered it to the rest of us, still perfectly silent.
Boss, the Spectacle, the Wee Man and Clown all shook their heads and continued with their eating. Natty, to whom he offered the cup next, took a sip and immediately spat it out again, which the Rider did not seem to mind, since he only smiled and nodded. When he next gave the cup to me, however, his smile vanished; he looked straight at me, staring until I felt he was searching through my head and finding all my secret thoughts about Natty. My thoughts about him. My thoughts about them together. My thoughts about the Entertainment and about Boss. My thoughts about everything that had brewed inside me all day, which I did not like to admit.
For this reason I took the cup and drained it in a single gulp; to show him I was the master of my fate, and u
nderstood everything perfectly well.
As I passed it back, and saw something like amusement shining far down in his eyes, I heard Boss choke on a mouthful of his food. “My goodness, my goodness!” he spluttered. “Now we shall have some sport, shall we not, my love? Now we shall have some sport. Well done, dear boy, well done.”
As I remember it, nothing that came next felt in the least like sport—starting with my impression that the light had suddenly vanished from our fire and my mind as well, and I had gone blind. When my sight returned, accompanied by a hideous banging inside my skull, the world was no longer the wide and spacious place I knew, but pinched very tight around me. As if I could only see it by squinting through the eye of a needle. Squinting and not finding anything real, but only whatever and whoever my brain had decided to invent.
My father, as he appeared the last time I saw him, when he did not know it was me and stood pouring water onto our roses as I sailed past him on the Nightingale.
Mr. Silver rubbing the map of the Island over the white and prickling bristles of his face.
Smirke bolt upright in the canoe, his face boiling with snake-bites and his swollen tongue babbling of old England.
Black Cloud and the Painted Man swimming below me on their bed of loose cloths. Black Cloud and the Painted Man roaring up together and lunging at me, fiddling open the satchel around my neck and desperate to have their silver back—now! Now! They must have it, they must…
I suppose this was when I struggled to my feet and swooped on the Rider, because I had convinced myself he was Black Cloud, and it was my duty to murder him and protect Natty.
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