by Jeff Chapman
The Black Blade
A Huckster Novel
Jeff Chapman
The Black Blade: A Huckster Novel
Jeff Chapman
Copyright 2017 by Jeff Chapman. All rights reserved.
This eBook or any portion of it may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author—except for brief quotations in reviews.
The story contained within this eBook is a work of fiction. All material is either the product of the author's imagination or is used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) or to actual events is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Katie L. Carroll.
Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com.
Contents
The Black Blade: A Huckster Novel
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
“Now lay your fingers across my palm,” coaxed Orville. “And touch your other pretty little hand to the crystal.”
Standing behind a curtain, I watched the young woman through a pair of eyeholes. Sitting below me, Orville nodded his turban-wrapped head. Orville the Oracular was practicing his magic, scratching aside the cobwebs of uncertainty, revealing roads not yet traveled to anyone willing to part with some coins. The tents and stalls of the fair made a jumbled town, alleyways weaving through the hodgepodge. I’d been walking all over the fair that morning shouting Orville’s advertisements. “Roads not yet traveled” rang in my head, but we’d had a steady stream of customers so maybe my sore throat was worth the discomfort.
Orville’s red turban bobbed as he hummed a monotone. Probably shouldn’t call his turban red, though I suspected it was a bright red once. Now it was more akin to milky tomato soup. Orville always placed his fortune-telling table outside our tent. Better to attract casual interest from passersby, he claimed. The fading turban attested to many afternoons spent under the sun.
The woman across from Orville sucked in breaths through her nose, her eyes screwed shut like she was giving birth. Straw-colored hairs poked out beneath a corn-flower blue bonnet. She’d look real pretty with her hair down and when she didn’t look to be in pain. The veins and muscles in her neck stood out something fierce with each nod of her head. Whatever she wanted from the future, she was straining real hard to grasp it. A man stood beside her and grimaced as he scratched his head, nudging his hat aside. A stem of grass bobbed between his lips and shortened as he chewed it. None too impressed with the proceedings I reckoned.
The note of Orville’s humming changed. That was my signal. It was amazing what we did with a cleverly placed lever and a hinge. I pressed on the board at my feet. The table jerked and shuddered as it rose an inch off the ground.
“The table,” said the woman. “Wilbur, it’s risen.”
“Do not break concentration,” said Orville in a monotone, drawing out the long vowels like he was singing.
“Sorry,” she muttered. Didn’t take but an instant to don her pain again.
“What?” said Wilbur.
I wiggled the lever, jiggling the table. Orville had said I should give them a show and I aimed to please.
That’s what we are, Orville reminds me now and again. Showmen. I think my grandma would have a different name for us. Hucksters. I ain’t quite decided. We do put on an entertaining show and ain’t no one gives over their money unwilling, but Orville has a way of stretching the truth. Every now and then we make a difference in the world for the good, and I like to think the good we do makes all the showmanship or huckstering worth it.
Orville changed his humming note again. I wiggled the table another inch higher. He’d commence to talking soon. The real trick that took all my practice wasn’t raising the table but letting it down slow and gentle, without rocking the crystal ball out of its porcelain bowl onto the ground. It wasn’t as simple as it looked.
Wilbur’s jaw was hanging loose, so low his grass had plum fallen outa his mouth. He waved his arms above the table, looking for wires I supposed. I grinned. He wasn’t gonna find any. Wilbur was one of them people that wore their thoughts on their face, bold as a rooster’s comb. He bent low and lifted the cloth covering the table to the ground. I’m not sure what he was looking for, but he frowned and shook his head, so I figured he didn’t find it. The table only had one leg and the metal rod attached to the lever was inside it.
“I see tears in your future,” said Orville.
That was my signal to lower the table. Orville wanted it to settle on the ground more or less the moment he finished his prognosticating. Trouble was I never knew how long he was going to yammer on. If Orville possessed one great gift, it was for yammering.
“Much crying.”
The woman whimpered.
“Come on, Nellie,” said Wilbur. “I’ve had about enough of this charlatan.”
“But it’s a good kind of crying, mixed with laughter.”
“Is it a baby?” shrieked Nellie. “Oh, please be a baby.”
“It is a child. A healthy, kicking infant. Rosy cheeks and plump with health. And I see a fresh start. More land perhaps. And I see.... The vision is fading. So cloudy. Ah, there it is.”
“A boy or a girl?” said Nellie.
“A new horse,” announced Orville, who slumped back in his chair, looking like a man who had spent his day stooped over bean plants.
From my hiding place behind the curtain, I released the last of the tension from the lever. The table settled on the ground and the crystal rattled in its bowl but didn’t roll off. I let go my pent up breath. I’d done my part.
The tent across the way from us sheltered Ed’s Purgatives and Exhilarating Elixirs. Through the eyeholes in the curtain, I’d been watching Ed do his business all day. What struck me as odd was the man standing beside Ed’s cases of bottles. I couldn’t rightly see his eyes under the shadow of his wide-brimmed black hat, but I was near as could be certain he was not studying Ed’s cures. Prickles rose up the back of my neck. He was staring at us, with all the predatory intensity of a wolf.
“A baby. Did you truly see a baby?” Nellie shook her clasped hands beneath her chin. Her joyous exclamations sundered my curiosity with the man in black across the way.
“As certain as we’re sittin’ here and the sun is shinin’,” said Orville.
“You’ve brought such joy. Did you hear, Wilbur?”
Her husband grunted.
Nellie stretched open a calico cinch purse dangling from her wrist. I was expecting some pennies, but a silver coin thumped the table.
Orville snatched it on the first bounce. “Your gratitude overwhelms me.”
“Hey!” cried Wilbur. “That there sign over your head reads five cents. How bouts some change?”
Uh-oh. I didn’t fancy breaking up a fight with Wilbur. He had the shoulders and arms of a sod-buster. I suspected Orville was thinking along the same path as he was hemming and hawing like a sinner before the Almighty. Trade hadn’t been bad today but no one liked to throw back a fat fish.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Orville said to Nellie. “Forgive an old mystic. I mistook your meaning.”
Nellie stood. “Wilbur, this is the most encouraging news I’ve had in months and it’s worth every penny. I’d give him a half-dollar if I had it.” She took Wilbur’s arm and pulled him away from our table into the stream of fair goers, but not before he shot Orville a glare that would have scared a starving coyote off a calf carcass.
Orville knifed between the curtains to join me behind them. “What do you think of that, boy?” He held up the silver dime. “I do believe our luck is turnin’.”
“I don’t know, Orville. Should
you have told her she’s gonna have a baby? Appears to me she wants it awful bad.”
“Precisely, Jimmy. When are you gonna learn? You give the customer what they want. Women want a beau and if they got him, they want a husband, after that, they want a baby. You gotta read the customer’s mind, boy.” Orville tapped his turban-bound head.
Orville was lucky he’d never met my aunt Emily. She was a dedicated spinster, and all the prayers she’d ever sent were for bumper crops of raspberries. Emily was mighty partial to raspberry wine. “What if that woman can’t have babies?”
“That filly! Didn’t look like no mule to me. No, sir. Now her husband.” Orville guffawed, jiggling the fat of his double chin. “Mark my words, boy, I’ve done them more good than any quack or snake-oil tonic. Positive thinking. They’ll go home and try harder but with renewed hope. We’ve done a good deed today.” He slapped my shoulder. “And profited.”
You couldn’t argue with Orville when he commenced talking business, and who was I to argue as I would gladly eat the grub that ten cents would buy. Pontius Pilate might have washed his hands, my grandma said, but the dirt had borrowed clean through his skin to the bone.
I peered through the pair of holes in the curtains. “Another customer.” The man with the black hat crossed to our booth. I didn’t like his looks from across the way, and they didn’t improve on nearer inspection. His face was all angles and sharp edges, a broken whiskey bottle made flesh. Diamondback-skin boots poked out beneath his black overcoat. He stared at the curtains. Stars, planets and astrological symbols packed the blue curtains, so many swirls and whorls that the eye couldn’t focus. At least that was what Orville claimed. I peered through the eyes of Taurus. I couldn’t as yet see the man’s eyes properly, but I swear his gaze was locked on mine, and it felt as slippery as the snakes encasing his feet.
“A deluge of fortune, boy.” Orville rubbed his hands together. “The tide of our luck has changed. Yes it has. Feel it in my bones, I do.”
As Orville moved to part the curtains, I laid my hand on his shoulder.
“Maybe we oughta let this one go. Don’t know what it is precisely but my grandma would say he’s got the marks of a Cain.”
Orville rolled his eyes. “Hang your grandma. I’ve had enough of her homespun hogwash.”
“Ain’t you hungry? My stomach’s been growlin’ like a bear wakin’ from winter.”
“First law, boy. Never turn away a customer.” Orville flicked away my hand and plunged between the curtains.
“A fine day to you, sir. Orville the Oracular at your service.” Orville swept back one arm as he bowed. Mr. Snakeskin watched with all the animation of a cigar-store Indian struck with rigor mortis. “What’s your pleasure on this gloriously sunny day? Palm reading? Your horoscope? Or are you bold enough to venture into the crystal?”
I grinned. Orville was appealing to the man’s pride, and the crystal reading cost more.
“How’d you make that table rise?” Mr. Snakeskin spoke in a flat, tense rasp. Reminded me of a boiling kettle rattling a lid. You expected the contents to blow out the top at any moment.
Must have caught Orville off guard because he didn’t say a thing for several ticks of a clock. With his back to me, I could only imagine the consternation screwing up his countenance. Always the showman, he soon recovered.
“When the spirits see fit to reveal the future, their presence is manifested. Perhaps you wish to peer into your own future. Discover what fortunes await you.”
“My house is cursed with a knocker. Can you do something about such a nasty creature?”
I stiffened at the word. Shortly after Orville and I met we had dealings with a fiend that fed off cattle blood. I’d had as much as I could stomach of that sort of work. Made hauling horse manure and purging a pig sty as appealing as a Sunday brunch. And I figured Orville had too, but like he told me, you never turn away a customer. And that was what set my heart to rattling my ribs and my face to weeping sweat.
“What was that?” asked Orville.
“A knocker. Keeping me up all hours of the night. Taps walls and shakes windows. Damnable thing. Without doubt you’ve heard of them. Someone in your line of work.”
“Of course,” said Orville, “but a witch-hunter might be, er, better equipped, a more advisable choice. However, we could consult the stars to determine the most propitious time to rid yourself of this nuisance.”
I sighed, and a sniff of breeze brushed my face, chilling the sweat of a moment before. Orville might try every persuasion to wrangle some coins out of the situation, but at least we weren’t going after the thing. Considering Mr. Snakeskin’s dark scowl and demeanor, I commenced to wondering what sort of creature would dare bother to trouble him.
Mr. Snakeskin dropped something on the table. I couldn’t see through Orville, but from the heavy clunks and clinks, I knew these were coins, and they weren’t coppers. At least silver and maybe gold. Restraining Orville from a pile of gold coins was akin to holding a slippery pig back from a full slop trough.
“Well,” said Orville. “I, uh—”
“No,” I hissed through the curtain. “Orville, say no. The cattle slasher. Remember?”
“What’s that?” said Snakeskin. “Sounds like you’ve got your own bothersome spirit behind yonder curtain.”
Orville thrust his fist backward into the curtain, catching me in the gut. I grunted, more out of surprise than pain.
“My apprentice,” said Orville. “Don’t mind him. He’s a bit squeamish. Now about the offer on the table...”
“Half down. The rest when you’ve expelled it.”
“That’s a fair pile of coin. I’m tempted, but the scales are about even.”
Another clink.
“They’ve just tipped in your favor, Mister...?”
“Marzby. Doctor Manessah Marzby.”
“You’ve got a deal, Doctor Marzby.” Orville thrust his hand forward.
I’ve never seen two hands more different. Orville’s stubby fingers complemented his thick, ruddy hand. But Marzby’s. I’ll never expurgate that image from my mind until the day I die. The extra-long sleeve of his coat fell back and from it emerged an unusually pale and bony hand. Didn’t appear he’d ever worked a day outside in his life. And the fingers. My stomach turned at the sight. They were twice as long as his palm. Marzby’s hand wrapped all the way round Orville’s, like a spindly-legged spider grasping a fat fly it wants to eat.
Chapter Two
Orville and I waited on a bench outside the telegraph office, listening to the tappity-tap of the Morse key. Marzby had arranged to meet after six to take us out to his ranch. Orville fished his watch out of his vest pocket. No longer wearing the turban and robes of the soothsayer, he had donned a green derby with an upturned brim on the sides and a tweed suit wrapped his corpulent frame. He frowned before closing his watch.
“Late?” I asked.
“Most disconcerting. I expected him to be a punctual man. We’re livin’ through a black era of decline, boy. No one respects a man’s time anymore.”
“Maybe we oughta just give up and head back.”
“What’s wrong with you, boy? Has the sun finally baked that brain of yours? Each of those gold pieces is worth ten dollars. And after all that bluffing to raise his offer? We’ll wait here all night. I’d fight a pack of rabid dogs to keep this appointment.”
“We don’t know the first thing about oustin’ a knocker.”
“Last I heard, you’re the apprentice. Learn from the master, boy. We’re assessing the lay of the ground tonight, not doin’ battle.” Orville must have read the doubt lathered thick across my countenance like shaving cream. He frowned. “I know a man who knows a witch hunter. He can tell us what to do when the time comes, if there truly is a knocker.”
“You think there ain’t one?”
Orville tipped his hat in greeting to a woman passing, who found some dirt clod in the street to hold her gaze while she ambled past. Frowning, Orville
grumbled something about people not appreciating good manners in these modern times. I let it slide, practicing the good manners my grandma taught me. “He may be rocking with half a rocker for all I know, which would suit me just fine,” said Orville.
“Didn’t you think his hands were somethin’ strange? Unnatural?”
“Cold, clammy, grotesquely long fingers? I’m not insensible, boy. But his gold was real enough.” Orville stuck out his neck to peer down the street. “Ah, speak of the devil.”
A fine-looking black buckboard rolled toward us, drawn by two black trotters. I was none too happy to see old Marzby, his overcoat buttoned round his chest and his black hat squashed low on his head. Orville stepped into the street.
“Well come along, boy. Look lively.”
Marzby brought the wagon to a stop in front of the telegraph office.
“Good evening,” said Orville. “Fine weather for a ride through the country.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Weather is capricious.”
“Yes. Like a.... Yes,” stammered Orville.
I hadn’t seen many who could derail Orville’s chitter-chatter but Marzby had done it twice now.
The front corner of the wagon dipped as Orville heaved himself onto the bench next to Marzby. With the movement, I finally managed a peek under the shadows of Marzby’s hat. My heart lurched, and the blood in my face froze. I glimpsed red in his eyes, and then they were draped again behind inscrutable shadows. I hoped they were just bloodshot. Maybe rheumatism kept him awake at night. Happened with my grandma. But that wasn’t what my gut was screaming. Orville and I met a girl with red rings in her eyes once. Orville plumb near died.
“Climb on in, boy.” Orville pointed to the back of the buckboard.
Upon grasping the side of the wagon, every bone and sinew ached for me to take off running. I’d done my best to dissuade Orville. Seeking gold blinded many a man. Didn’t have to read the Bible or sit at the knee of my grandma to learn that lesson. But the Good Book and my grandma also taught me to stand by your friends through thick and thin. No matter what sort of evil demon Marzby was throwing us to, it wouldn’t be right to leave Orville to face it alone.
