The Rambling

by Jimmy Cajoleas

  “Stop gawking and shuffle,” he said.

  We exchanged decks, Boss Authority and me. I touched his and yanked my hand back. It was like the cards had moved, they had flinched under my touch, they were a living thing, like a spider or a rat. I was scared the sucker had teeth. Boss Authority sat there grinning at me.

  It only then occurred to me just how outmatched I truly was.

  What in the heck was I even doing? This was a terrible idea. I was gonna die, Pop was gonna die, Tally would probably die. Heck, the whole swamp would fall under the control of a maniac with a magic problem.

  Well, it was too late now. Might as well make a good show of it, go out with some kind of a bang.

  The cards sailed through the air in a flurry, Boss Authority hardly even touching them as they scattered and mixed themselves. I had to do it the old-fashioned way, shuffling them same as I would any old deck. It was humiliating, it was, so I tried to do the accordion-thing. All the cards fell scattered on the table. Cecily Bob and Mr. Hugo busted out laughing. Even Drusilla Fey cracked a grin.

  “Lawrence, I do believe we are doomed,” said Johnson, trying to whisper.

  This did not make me feel any better. And yet, as I scooped the cards up, there was Tally, lingering a little too close to the table. She put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes.

  “I believe in you,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I whispered. “Glad somebody does.”

  I turned to my daddy, hunkered over in a chair, nursing his wounds. He looked red-eyed and drained, nothing but terror and a sort of manic worn-outness drawing wrinkles all over his face.

  “Wish me luck?” I said.

  Pop grinned at me. “Buddy, I thought you’d never ask.”

  He slipped the vine from around his neck and snapped it quiet in his palm.

  I felt it then, the hex break. It was like someone dumping cold water onto me on a hot day, like running outside bare-chested in a snowstorm. It shivered me scalp to toes, it did. I felt like I’d had some kind of supernatural bath, like the stars and moon had finally come out in the great black sky of my life. I hadn’t known how bad that hex had felt, it had been so long since I’d been usual. I had forgotten what being uncursed even felt like. For the first time since I was just a little kid, I finally felt like myself again.

  It made me real mad at Pop, to be honest with you. No, not mad. That ain’t the right word at all. Bitter is how it made me feel, just a little bit, that I had suffered all that time and it was his doing. Pop knew it, too, I could tell, the way he hunkered back down in his chair and wouldn’t hardly look at me.

  “Someone’s let a piece of magic loose in here,” said Drusilla Fey. “An old hex has been broken, I can smell it for miles. They’re cheating, they are. You want me to call it off, Boss?”

  “Let them cheat,” he said. “Might at least make this duel interesting.” He looked at me, his weird eye turning loops in his head. “Go ahead then, Buddy boy. Draw.”

  This was it then. I shut my eyes and said a prayer.

  Please let it be the Fish Boy. Please oh please let it be the Fish Boy.

  I drew my card and flipped it over and there he was. The awkward kid, a little slouched, his hair all mussed and wild, his eyes full with wonder—more and more like me he looked, more even than back on the skiff—holding a little wooden cup in his hands, that big old catfish half leaping out, whiskers flaring, as if he’d popped up to ask a question.

  I’d gotten this far before, sure, but it was still a relief to do it when it really mattered. I’d drawn the Fish Boy. My card, more than any other card was mine. That was a start, it was.

  Boss Authority just sat across from me and smiled, that blank eye of his boring right down into my soul it felt like, seeing into the deeps of me, into my stomach and heart and bones. It was like I could feel him, crawling through my skin, poking at my dreams and desires. Like he was knowing me, Boss Authority was, seeing all kinds of stuff he had no right to.

  I felt a burning feeling right in the back of my head, and Boss Authority flinched a little.

  “Keep your eye on yourself,” hissed Marina.

  I nodded her a thank-you, but I don’t think she noticed.

  I Orated then. It wasn’t the same thing I told Radegar, but it was close. About how this Fish Boy never fit in anywhere, about how all he wanted to do was be somewhere else, back to the river, back to anywhere, and his hope was always that this magic catfish could lead him home, to where he belonged. That it would lead him back to his daddy.

  By the end of my talking, I realized the catfish had only one eye on his head, right there in the center. Now that was something.

  “My magic, that is,” said Drusilla Fey. “That was me plucking the strings of fate, trying to call all Boss’s possessions back to him.”

  “You’re the one who sent all them one-eyed creatures at me?” I said. “Even the toad that mesmerized me and got my mom’s bakery all burned down?”

  She laughed, a high shrieking thing, and a weird eye sprouted in her forehead, all horizontal-like, and blinked three times. Then it sank bank into her noggin like it never was there at all.

  “I sent out a call to gather back into the swamp all things that were owed to Boss Authority,” she said. “And here you came!”

  “But why?” I said. “You could have called Pop to you whenever you wanted. Why now?”

  “I’ll tell you why she waited,” said Marina. “He wasn’t strong enough. That’s the truth of the matter. Sure, he had the power to lock me up in this house, but that was just because of your stupid daddy over there. One on one, Bobby Felix couldn’t take me, not even with his pet witch here at his side. Same with Baudelaire Quatro. His was the last Parsnit house standing, Bobby Felix had made good and sure of that, but he didn’t have the power in him to burn it to the ground. It’s only now, after he’s hoarded those piddly little enchantments of his, after he’s cheated and swindled and flat bullied the magic out of every witch and mystic and Parsnit player this side of the river, did he have it in him to try and take over the swamp. That’s why he waited, Buddy. He was too durn weak.”

  Boss Authority slammed his fist down on the table so hard I thought it’d crack.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t strong enough, yeah I was weak!” he roared. “But that ain’t all it was. No, sir, that ain’t the half of it.” He pointed his big metal finger up at Pop. “It was him! I wanted him to see it! I wanted Davey Boy to see me in my glory, to watch as I took all that was once his and made it mine. I wanted to see Davey Boy humiliated. So I had Drusilla Fey cast her spell upon the waters, to call back to me all I’d won. You wouldn’t believe the riffraff that’s been floating up to my shores, all the scoundrels swirling in the muck.”

  Boss Authority turned his weird eye on me in a stare so hard I could feel it, like something invisible in him reached right out and grabbed me by the collar.

  “But Buddy boy,” said Boss Authority, “I tell you what. Of all the things that came drifting my way, you are the prize piece. Your blood will be the trophy I wear around my neck for the rest of my life. That and the beautiful look of terror on your daddy’s face while he watches me drain it right out of you.”

  Oh boy, not a thing on this earth could have made me madder than that. But I had to stuff that anger down deep. It wouldn’t do to get furious, not quite yet. I still had a Parsnit duel to win.

  “Your play, Boss,” I said.

  Boss flipped his card next. I figured it would be something mighty, like Old Redbeard or King One Eye or even the Hobble Mystic. Some card to strike fear in me, some warlord card to pummel my little Fish Boy to smithereens.

  But nope, Boss Authority flipped the Fish Boy, same as me. Except of course his Fish Boy looked a little different. The kid was shorter than mine, squatter too, like God took a normal-sized kid and squished him down a little with His thumb. He had sandy hair and zits all over his face, and he stood in a messy kitchen with pots and pans tossed all over the floo
r, spilling stinking-looking food everywhere.

  And Boss Authority began to Orate.

  As he spoke, his voice lost its snarl, it lost all the meanness and grit. It got softer, it did, gentler. Boss Authority was speaking like a normal person, like a kid even. I looked back at my daddy and I could see it right there, in all the anguish on his face, like he was remembering something that gave him pain all over. Boss Authority wasn’t talking like a Boss anymore. No, he was little Bobby Felix all over again.

  He spoke of a lonesome home, of a wretched mom and a no-account daddy. He spoke of holes in the floor and rats in his bed. He spoke of waking up in the night to a snake trying to swallow a bat, a fight to the death right in the corner of the room.

  I saw the card begin to shimmer and glow as Boss told the story of it. I realized then that I could smell the food on his table, rotten and putrid, that I could hear the flies buzzing all around it. These cards were powerful, they were. The Fish Boy held not a goblet or a cup but a big metal pot, and rising up from it was an alligator gar, long-snouted, fang-toothed, and ornery. It was coming for the Fish Boy, it was. It looked like it was about to bite his nose off.

  It made me feel bad for Boss Authority’s Fish Boy, like there was nothing that kid could ever do right, like every time he tried it all just went wrong for him. You could feel his loneliness right then and there, in your bones, you could feel the big empty deep in your own heart.

  I guess what I mean is I could relate to that Fish Boy, I really could. I knew all about loneliness, about having nobody to talk to, nobody to play with, everybody running off and hiding whenever you take a walk outside. My whole life in Collardsville had been just the same way. Boss Authority’s card told the truth, it did, and maybe I related to it even more than I did my own.

  I shook it off. It was time for me to flip another card, my Home card.

  I remembered my last failure at Baudelaire Quatro’s, where all I did was embarrass myself. Here the penalty would be much more severe. I didn’t even want to think about that, if you want the honest truth. I was sweating so bad my shirt was drenched through and I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest. I reached my hand toward the deck and it was shaking so bad I couldn’t hardly get hold of a card.

  In my mind I wanted the Staggerly Road, the meanest, snarliest patch of earth you ever dreamed of, something easy for the Fish Boy to be heroic on. Or maybe the Wayward River, nothing but the rambling life for this kid, his true home not some wooden shack somewhere but the wild free air under the bright and roving stars, be it land or water or any other kind of world the Good Lord created. That’s the Home card for this Fish Boy, I’m telling you what.

  But neither of those were the cards I drew. No sir.

  My first card was the Bone Queen, definitely not a Home card. Next was the most durn useless card in the whole deck, the Bilious Chef, holding his swollen belly. No Home card there either.

  I flipped the top card and laid it down.

  But my third card most certainly was a Home card. I’d done it.

  Yes sir, I’d gotten further now than I had with Radegar, and I was surely grateful for that. When I laid it down on the table I heard Tally let out a big relieved sigh next to me, and it didn’t even bother me any, I was so glad I hadn’t just doomed us all. I started to feel a little better, I did. Not good, mind you. Just better, like it wasn’t all lost yet, like there might be some hope out there after all.

  Except guess what Home card I drew? Not the Wayward River, no sir, a card I could talk for days and days on end about. Not the Far Yonder Mountains neither, not the Staggerly Road, which was something I could cast some dreams on. I did not even draw the durn Bramble. You know what card I turned?

  The Sleepy Town.

  Yep, that’s right, the single most boring card there is. It’s a morning sunrise, a tumbleweed rolling down a road, maybe a drowsy dog yawning in the early light. Just a bunch of buildings, maybe one with some smoke in the chimney, a tall brick place like what Mom’s bakery should have been. You know what else is going on in the Sleepy Town? Nothing. I mean it. Even the dog looks bored to tears. That couldn’t be my Fish Boy’s Home card, no way no how. But that’s the card I flipped and there was nothing else for me to do except Orate it as good and wild as I could.

  I took a deep breath and got to it.

  “Fish Boy’s waking up in Sleepy Town, he is, up even before the rooster crows, up before there’s anything except a big-eared dog lazing around. Yes sir, the Fish Boy is wide-awake, and he has been for hours.”

  I could see it, the Sleepy Town forming out of the haze in my mind—Collardsville, in all its sad boring glory. But the more I began to talk about it, the more it started to matter to me. I remembered what it was like, waking up those early mornings, wishing I was somewhere else. Wishing I was on an adventure.

  “You wanna know why that Fish Boy’s awake?” I said. “I’ll tell you why. He’s been daydreaming. He’s been daydreaming of this wild world he knows exists out there, far beyond the town. The world he was born into, a world of magic and action, a world of chance, of gamblers and knife fights, the roving roaming world, yes sir, that’s the world he’s dreaming of. But dreaming don’t get him there, not even close. Dreaming ain’t good for much of anything.”

  The Sleepy Town seemed to flicker and vanish in the air, and then it was gone. My first round of Orating was over.

  Okay, so I hadn’t exactly done great, but at least it was a start. The tension in the room relaxed a little bit, like it wasn’t just me who was relieved. I could Orate, I knew that now. Me and the cards were working up the beginnings of a story.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harlen the dog-man crouched low, his beard scraping the floor, all tense, ready to move. Then he leapt out Marina’s side window, busting right through the glass. Drusilla Fey was up from her chair in a second, hollering hexes hard as she could through the night.

  “I’ll send rabid bats after him,” she said. “I’ll call down lightning to fall, won’t be more than a smudge of the beast left.”

  “No you will not,” said Boss Authority. “I need your magic here, Drusilla. I need your attention on the duel, especially with this one sitting witch next to you.” He pointed a metal finger at Marina, who sat with a fierce grin on her face, like she’d just gotten away with something. See, I knew everyone was hustling, I knew everyone was up to something, especially Marina. I just didn’t know exactly what it was yet.

  “Want me after him, Boss?” said Cecily Bob.

  “Let the man-dog go,” said Boss Authority. “He don’t concern me.”

  “I don’t like it, Boss,” said Drusilla Fey.

  “If I ever give one hoot about what you like or don’t like,” said Boss Authority, “I shall kindly let you know.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and hissed. Boss Authority chuckled, his clockwork fist creaking like an old rusty door hinge.

  “Still, perhaps y’all are right,” said Boss Authority. “Maybe you better track that dog-fella, Cecily Bob, if you can manage it.”

  Cecily Bob nodded at Boss. “I’m on it,” he said, and walked on out the front door. I saw Pop relax a little, now that only one set of knives was on him.

  Boss Authority popped his iron knuckles and drew his Home cards and threw down the Night Shack.

  In Pop’s deck, the Night Shack was some kind of clubhouse hidden off in the woods, and there was a fire burning and you could see folks dancing in the windows, light gleaming bright and casting its glow on the dark night outside. It was a happy place, Pop’s Night Shack was, a place of joy and contentment, like your own special hiding place where you can do whatever you want and feel secret about it. You know that feeling? It’s one of the best there is, at least in my estimation of things. It’s how I felt every time I held that card in my hand and studied it, that adventure feeling.

  Well, listen here. Boss Authority’s Night Shack wasn’t anything like that. For one, the place was wrecked, with a
big hole in the roof, a porch that sagged, and a railing that fell in, and all the windows busted. The house was dark, and coyotes roamed outside of it, howling at the cruel Heaven stars. And peeking out the window was the saddest little kid face you ever saw in your whole life.

  “That Fish Boy never belonged at home,” said Boss Authority. “He never belonged anywhere. He’d sit up at night waiting, waiting, hoping someone would come home for him. And they never did.”

  It went on like that, on and on. And the thing was, the more Boss Authority talked, the more I felt it. How that was me growing up, staring out the window at night, hoping Pop would come for me. That was me, night after night, way into the deepest darkest moonless nights, waiting and praying and hoping, and none of those prayers or hopes coming true. I felt so lonely, I did, my bones ached with it, my little kid heart just broke over and over and over again.

  I was crying, I was. Right there at the Parsnit table, in front of Pop and Tally and everyone else. But I wasn’t crying for Boss Authority, I was crying for me.

  And that’s when I understood what true Orating was. It isn’t just about telling your own story. It’s about telling your story in a way that makes it someone else’s story too, maybe even more theirs than yours when the telling’s all over. It’s inviting someone else into the tale and letting them live there awhile, letting them put their own hearts and feelings and lives into it, and then saying, Here, you can keep it, it’s yours now. That’s what Boss Authority did every time he opened his mouth. His words might as well have been mine. They would have been mine too, if I was half the Orator he was.