The Ambitious Card

by John Gaspard

  I shrugged as I munched on the chip. “Well, that’s a short and not-too-interesting story.”

  “Tell me anyway. We need to talk about something until our food gets here. I don’t want to fill up on chips.” She pushed the basket of chips away, out of her reach but well within mine.

  “All right. Well, in addition to being my uncle, Harry is also my godfather. Here’s what you need to know about Harry Marks… He’s a student of the history of magic. Years ago there was another magician named Harry that you might have heard of…Harry Houdini.”

  Megan nodded, her eyes sparkling as she listened. “Everyone’s heard of Harry Houdini. He was a great magician.”

  “Actually, he was a so-so magician, but a phenomenal promoter and showman. If you’re looking for an amazing magician from that era, look at a guy named Howard Thurston.” I realized I was getting off track. “Anyway, Harry Houdini’s godson was a kid named Joseph Keaton…he was the son of a couple Vaudeville performers Houdini had worked with. When the kid was quite small, Houdini nicknamed him Buster…there’s several different versions as to why…and the name stuck. Then the kid grew up and became famous himself.”

  Megan thought through the story so far and finally put the pieces together. “Buster Keaton,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Buster Keaton. Somehow, in Uncle Harry’s twisted brain, it made sense to nickname me Buster, which he did and it’s stuck. At least with him. My aunt always called me Eli.”

  “And they raised you?”

  “Mostly, from about age ten, after my parents died.” I looked up to see that the waitress was approaching with our food. “And, speaking of death, here comes one of the deadliest, hottest tamales you will find this side of Guadalajara. Consider yourself warned.”

  The waitress set our food in front of us and conversation ceased for a few moments. “So, yesterday,” Megan began between mouthfuls, “we started to talk about divorce.”

  I chewed for a moment before answering. “Yes, we did.”

  “Do you ever regret getting divorced?”

  “Well, to be honest, I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. It was over; it was that simple. The divorce was just the paperwork.”

  We continued to eat quietly for a few moments.

  “How about you?” I ventured. “Are you having second thoughts?”

  She immediately shook her head. “I know it’s the right thing,” she said. “I mean, I know in my heart. Plus, I went to two completely different psychics, and they both said that divorce was the right move. Independently,” she added.

  “Sounds like you’ve got it covered.”

  She nodded in agreement. “I guess it’s just a matter of slogging through it.”

  “Is Pete making it hard?”

  “No, not at all. He’s been really good about it. I mean, he’s dragging his feet a bit, because I think he’s still holding out hope. But that’s normal, right?”

  “I guess so. I mean, if we were married, I’d be very hesitant to let you go.”

  This produced a smile from Megan that bordered on shy. The restaurant was now nearly empty and the waitstaff were cleaning tables and getting things set for dinner. Faintly on the sound system I could hear what sounded like a Mexican version of “Seasons in the Sun,” all in Spanish. In case you’re wondering, it didn’t sound any better in that language either.

  After we finished lunch, we walked slowly down the sidewalk, toward our respective retail establishments. It was cloudy and chilly, with a real snap in the air that let you know with no uncertainty that winter in all its glory was just around the corner, thank you very much.

  We stopped in front of Chicago Magic, neither one of us certain what the correct protocol was for ending this, our first quasi-date.

  Megan looked from me to the items Harry had put on display in our small front window. For Halloween he had arranged a couple of jack-o’-lanterns, each with a white stuffed bunny popping out of it. In the background were two skeleton cutouts. It wasn’t exactly Macy’s at Christmas time, but it looked nice.

  Megan turned to me suddenly. “I know what I wanted to ask you,” she said a little breathlessly. “It’s been driving me crazy.” She stepped closer to me, in classic close-talker mode.

  “I’m all attention,” I said.

  “You know, down there, on the parkway,” she said, pointing vaguely over my left shoulder. “It wasn’t here the last time I came to visit my grandmother, and now it is, and it’s the weirdest thing.”

  I waited patiently for her to land on a noun. “What are you trying to say?” I finally asked.

  “What’s the deal with that rabbit?” she blurted out at long last.

  “Oh,” I said, comprehending. “The statue. Of the rabbit.” I nodded along with her. “Actually, no one knows for sure. It just showed up one day. Out of the blue.”

  I shrugged and looked at her with complete seriousness. She cocked her head to one side and then gave my arm a hard but playful slap.

  “You got me,” she said. “You completely got me on that one.”

  Then she took me completely by surprise by leaning in and giving me a warm but impulsive kiss, right on the lips. She tasted soft and sweet and oh-so-slightly of chilies. And then, just as quickly, she turned and headed down the sidewalk toward her store.

  “See you around, Buster,” she said without turning back.

  I stood there, watching her go, and I realized that—although I had never had occasion to use the word or even say it out loud in my entire life—I was now, at this very moment and for the first time, gobsmacked.

  Completely, utterly gobsmacked. And it felt great.

  Chapter 12

  “They still think you’re a murderer? Well, that’s a load of malarkey.”

  “Actually, now they think I’m a double murderer.”

  “Double malarkey, then.”

  Harry and I were having breakfast in his kitchen and I was bringing him up to speed on the death of Dr. Bitterman and my current standing with the Minneapolis Police Department, which could best be defined as just to the right of iffy. I cleared the plates and came back with the coffee pot for refills all around.

  “So what’s your next move?” he asked, adding fake sugar, which he’s allowed to have, and real cream, which is forbidden. The action instantly turned the coffee from rich dark brown to ashen white.

  “I don’t have a next move,” I said, replacing the coffee urn and returning to my chair. “Unless you count doing my darnedest to stay out of jail for a crime – two crimes, now – that I didn’t commit.”

  Harry shook his head. “You need a next move. Times like this call for action, not complacency. You’ve got to be, what’s the term they use nowadays,” he said, searching for the word and finally finding it. “Proactive. Grab the bull by the whatever.”

  I considered this. “So, what steps are you recommending that I take, pro-actively?” I asked, pouring the rest of the cream into my cup to help deaden the coffee’s acidic taste.

  “Oh, the usual,” he said brightly. “Revisit the crime scenes. Interview the witnesses. Evaluate the evidence. Create a hypothesis and then take steps to prove or disprove it. Basic scientific method.”

  “But that could take all morning,” I whined.

  “Don’t be a smart ass,” he said in a grave tone. “That ex-wife of yours can only keep the wolf at the door for so long, and then you’re going to have to pay the piper.”

  “Metaphor police,” I called out. “Metaphor police.”

  “Oh, joke all you want,” he grumbled as he sat back and took a long sip of the beige coffee. “I’m just saying, no one on the police force is looking out for your best interests and if your name is going to be cleared, odds are you’re the one who’s going to have to do it.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments. “Actually,” I said finally, acquiescing, “there are a couple of people I’d like to talk to. Just to clear up some of the questions in my own mind.”
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  “Excellent. That’s the spirit,” Harry said as he got up to take his cup to the counter. This new sense of purpose seemed to take ten years off his normally measured movements. “I’ll go with you. Help you make sure that no stones are left unturned.”

  He set his cup in the sink and began to rummage around in his pockets. “Now where are my keys? Oh, my, I forgot about these.” He pulled two coins out of his pocket and held them up for me. “These are just since yesterday morning,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I found two more dimes. Since yesterday morning. Just walking down to the mailbox on the corner. Can you believe that?”

  “Well, that is interesting. You should hang onto all the ones you find.”

  “Oh, I’m already doing that.”

  He moved past me, toward the stairs, and as he did he deposited the two coins in a small Mason jar that sat on a small knickknack shelf near the doorway. He bent down and straightened the worn, braided throw rug that sat at the top of the staircase, then headed down the stairs.

  “Let’s get a move on,” he said as his voice disappeared down the narrow, steep stairway into the shop below.

  “I’ll be right there,” I called after him, taking my own coffee cup over to the sink, but never really taking my eyes off the Mason jar. The cup deposited, I made a beeline to the jar and studied it for a long moment.

  I’m terrible at those “Guess How Many Jelly Beans Are in the Jar” contests, and so I had no real idea how many dimes were in the Mason jar. But there were a lot of them—they covered the entire bottom of the jar. How many was that? More than ten, for sure. But thirty? Possibly. More than thirty? Also possible.

  I picked up the glass jar and gave it a gentle shake, listening to the coins as they danced around inside, then set it down and headed to the shop.

  The official opening time for Chicago Magic is, at best, a moving target. I can safely say that it occurs at some point in the morning, Monday through Saturday, but you’d be foolish to set your watch.

  In fact, there was one quiet day without a single customer when—at closing time—we went to close up shop and discovered that we’d never actually unlocked the front door. When I pointed out this oversight to Harry, he was sanguine on the topic, reasoning that anyone who really, really wanted to come in only had to knock.

  I was reminded of this as I descended the steps from Harry’s apartment into the store, because I was greeted by the sound of someone knocking on the front door in a manner that could only be described as lackluster.

  At first, I wasn’t even sure that it was an actual knock. It was as if the very act of raising one’s arm and striking one’s hand against the door was simply too exhausting and that attitude was reflected in the knock itself.

  “Nathan’s here,” Harry said as he took down his coat from the hook by the back door. “Sounds like he’s in a good mood, too,” he added.

  Harry was correct on at least one point. It was Nathan, who stood morosely outside the front door with two large shopping bags, one in each hand. He was not dressed as a pirate today, but instead in torn jeans and a t-shirt that I believe was the same one he was wearing when I first met him fifteen years earlier. Over this ensemble he wore a leather bomber jacket, another piece of his clothing that never looked new yet never seemed to age.

  “Morning, Nathan,” I said cheerfully as I swung the door open.

  “Yes, it is that,” he agreed flatly as he passed me in the doorway. “No getting around it.”

  He hefted one of the bags up and set it atop the first display case. The other one he set on the floor. It made a distinctive clank when it connected with the tile floor.

  “I brought back the balloon gag,” he said and he bent down and opened the top of the bag, pointing out the items within. “The tank, the belt, the hose and nozzle, and all the leftover balloons.”

  “Great. How’d it work with the kids?” I was anxious to hear if it had produced the desired effect.

  “Oh, it went okay. I think it went okay,” he droned in his emotionless intonation, his head bobbing rhythmically as he spoke. His manner made it sound like it had been a massive bomb, but then everything he described sounded that way, so in my mind the jury was still out.

  “And…” I said, prodding him for more information.

  “Well,” he said, considering his words, “when I finished the first balloon, I let go of it and the air circulation in the room picked it up and it just gently floated over to the birthday kid. Right to him…it looked like it was planned, you know. It was like out of a movie. It just drifted over to him, just above his head, and sat there. Kids started cheering, moms were crying, dads were asking for my business card, so yeah, it worked pretty good.”

  “That’s great,” I said, picking up the paper bag and carrying it toward the back of the store. “Let me know when you need it again and I’ll make sure that the tank is refilled.”

  I sat the bag down in my “To Do” area, which still included re-stocking the gag gifts. The carton of fart spray sat opened and untouched from several days earlier when I had begun that task. I picked up the carton and set it atop one of the display cases, taking out a couple of the cans to act as a visual reminder of what still needed to get done.

  “Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Nathan said, leaning one elbow lazily on the counter next to his other shopping bag. Seeing that our departure was, for the moment, delayed, Harry sat on a stool by the back counter.

  “I’ve got a gig next week,” Nathan continued. “A birthday party, about twenty kids, out in North Oaks. Turns out it’s the same date as my cousin’s wedding in Park City, out in Utah. I was wondering if you’d like to cover for me? I brought all the stuff,” he said, gesturing to the bag he’d placed on the counter. “Nothing too difficult, nothing out of your league.”

  “Me? Be a kid’s magician?” I asked in mock amazement.

  “Hey, trust me, it’s a lot harder than it looks,” Nathan replied.

  “Of course it is,” Harry echoed from the back of the shop.

  He got off his stool and headed toward us. “It’s a fine and noble tradition, that of the children’s magician. You see,” he said, moving into lecture mode, “the primary difficulty with children’s magic is that…to a child…everything is magic. You put bread in a toaster and out pops toast. That’s magic. You put a plastic card in a machine at the mall and out pops money. That’s magic.”

  “Harry’s right,” Nathan said. “Kids aren’t impressed with magic. What impresses kids is when you screw up. And then screw up again. And then you get it right. They eat that up.”

  I considered what he had said. “Screw up, screw up again, and then get it right?” I repeated.

  Nathan nodded.

  “I can do that,” I said confidently. “Hell, that’s basically a description of my act.”

  I got the details of the upcoming kids’ show from Nathan, and he showed me the pirate costume and the other props that he’d packed into the shopping bag, having anticipated that I would agree to cover the gig for him.

  Then Harry and I locked up the store, which to that point had only essentially been open for about five minutes.

  After an amiable drive during which Harry continued his lecture on the purity of children’s magic, we found ourselves in front of Akashic Records, a funky store on the south edge of downtown Minneapolis.

  The store was visible from the freeway, and although I had driven by it on that same freeway for years, this was my first attempt at finding it via side streets. This involved a couple of wrong turns and the sudden and surprising appearance of a one-way street, but eventually we found the store, parked the car in the adjacent lot and headed toward the entrance.

  A sign on the store’s front door declared ‘This establishment bans dangerous weapons,’ which immediately produced a hearty chuckle from Harry. “But I’m guessing that non-dangerous weapons are welcomed with open arms,” he said wryly as we
pushed open the door and stepped into the shop.

  The first thing that hit us was the smell, followed immediately by the smell.

  Of course there was patchouli, but that was the least of it. In fact, for once the patchouli was almost refreshing.

  Imagine that your grandmother had spent the last forty years assembling every smelly, putrid, flowery candle on the face of the earth. And we’re not talking candles with complementary odors. These are candles that were in a fighting mood, all elbows and attitude. And then imagine that your grandmother had stored all those candles in one cramped closet and one day your overweight, mean-spirited, pimply cousin locked you in that closet for an hour. That comes close to describing the intensity of the olfactory assault, but not entirely.

  It was clear that the store sold candles, we had determined that by the wall of stench that had bombarded us at the door, but the rest of the inventory was a bit mind-boggling and perhaps even schizophrenic.

  Incense, rock posters, jewelry, political posters, meditation tapes, wheat-free muffins and cookies, fresh-ground coffee and shade-grown beans, children’s toys and games, books on spirituality, funky clothing, more jewelry, hand-woven bags and shawls, and finally CDs and DVDs.

  And, oddly enough, bins full of something I had not seen in quite a long time.

  “Vinyl records,” Harry said in a hushed, almost religious tone. “Oh my Lord, look at them.” And with that he was gone, headed over to the rows and rows of bins stuffed with new and used vinyl records.

  Several customers roamed through the sprawling store, but I didn’t see anyone who looked like they worked there. Not that I was clear on what a clerk at Akashic Records would actually look like.

  After several moments of searching, I found the lone cash register and positioned myself near it, figuring that action would tag me as someone interested in a transaction of some kind. Moments later that gambit paid off.

  “Have you been helped?” a voice asked. I turned and found myself face to face with perhaps the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. He was in his late twenties and was wearing a crisp white shirt. He had thick black hair and a dark complexion, making me think he could be Greek or Italian or just really tan. With his perfect teeth, classic day-old beard stubble and high cheekbones, he looked like he had just stepped off the pages of GQ. He was so good-looking it was all I could do not to squint when I looked at him.