what it’s called. I will pay you one-third the price of every bottle of tonic we sell. I’m afraid I can do no better than that.”
“Thank you!” Lloyd smiled, imagining, in his naïve enthusiasm, the residents of St. Louis lining up for miles.
“Come back this afternoon and I will have written some patter for you to memorize and we will rehearse the code. But be warned, young Lloyd, show business is a difficult business. So keep your mind clear and your wits about you, or we may both find ourselves in a situation that no tonic can cure.”
Lloyd ran back to the stables and the showman slipped into the tent, where his wives were debating in their personal sign language and the Ambassadors from Mars were clicking wildly. “Well,” Mulrooney told himself. “At least the boy will be safer with me than roaming the streets.”
Lloyd returned that afternoon as ordered. In but an hour he mastered the speech the showman had composed and a host of variations, all the intricacies of the mind-reading code, and some simple ways of integrating his calculating and spelling abilities—along with various musical improvisations on the mouth organ, squeezebox, and an old dimpled bugle that the showman had kept from his own boyhood. Lloyd had not had much direct exposure to music; he had been too busy with his inventions. But he quickly, intuitively grasped the system of music, and if his instrumental technique was raw that actually worked in his favor as far as performance theatrics went—or so Mulrooney thought. On the squeezebox, he became an imp of melody with astounding rapidity. “Damn me if that boy couldn’t be a musical genius if he turned his mind to it,” Mulrooney told his wives.
Then Lloyd had to decant a large cask of transparent liquid that gave off fumes that brought tears to his eyes into a series of little bottles with corks in the end. The magical-memory and mind-strengthening tonic was 140-proof alcohol laced with juniper and spearmint and could not have been more effective at clouding memory, although Mulrooney dubbed it LUCID! (He was particular about the exclamation mark.)
While working to fill the bottles, Lloyd listened to Urim and Thummim, and the more certain he became that, as freakish as they were, there was something about their language that was beautiful and subtle.
The showman retained his reservations about putting the boy “up on the stump,” and if Mabel Peanut, Lloyd’s sometime teacher back in Zanesville, could have seen him in St. Louis, performing on the medicine-show wagon, she would have felt confirmed in all her predictions about the family’s errant ways. But for Lloyd the experience of being THE MIRACLE MIND READER & MYSTIFYING CHILD OF VISION was as invigorating as a whiff of ozone or the taste of sarsaparilla—a brazen vindication of his special abilities, all the things, or at least some of them, that he had had to cloak or to be ashamed of back home. It chuffed his pride to be able to help his family, when he felt that, for all his singular gifts, he had caused them distress in the past.
Yet it also piqued his native rebelliousness and his no longer secret contempt for his parents, try to hide it deep down in his heart though he did. The stinking hobnailed boot was on the other foot now. They were of necessity grateful for his earnings, and gratitude is a double-minded emotion that can snake in many directions.
The Spirit of Independence may have departed without the Sitturds, and Texas may have slipped farther out of their grasp, but the youngest family member at least began traveling all around—from Spanish Lake and the Missouri Bottoms to the other side of the river on the smoking ferries, wherever Mulrooney thought they could draw a crowd.
From the self-named Professor of Teratology, Lloyd learned a plethora of new words (such as “plethora,” “pinguid,” “paludal,” and “uliginous”), not to mention the more utilitarian skills of how to make change, short change—upsell, distract, hoodwink, and hornswoggle a crowd into being an attentive audience. And a great success the arrangement was, at least at first. For a couple of golden weeks, the showman began to have Barnum-like aspirations. With a little luck, maybe he could get the boy to travel with them to Chicago. The Ambassadors would eventually be incorporated into the act, and with the proceeds he would begin to build himself an empire of novelties—a true touring odditorium featuring headhunters from lost islands and