perfect his new innovation and, as the showman knew so well, magic did not just happen.
Mulrooney plunged into the dumps over Lloyd’s news, believing that the lad, in an attempt (probably encouraged by his parents) to show that he was wise to the ways of show business, was holding out for a larger share of the takings. The old salesman sensed that he had reached the terminus ad quem of their commercial relationship and began making mental preparations to depart the city before the summer heat became any more oppressive (which did not seem possible). For the moment, however, he did not feel safe buttoning his pants all the way. Lloyd said goodbye without further comment or any questions about the condition of the wives or the Ambassadors. It was clear to Mulrooney that the boy had some pet scheme of great pitch and moment in mind, but his curiosity was temporarily overmastered by digestive discomfort.
Life in the mission house brought the Sitturds to serious grief. For Lloyd there was a constant threat from the inmates, many having bounced between the jail and the insane asylum. For Rapture there were endless smiles to fake, chamber pots to clean, and boils to lance. But Hephaestus suffered the worst in the Cold Water Army. While he craved succulent hams glazed with brown sugar and sweet fat orange-peel muffins, he was served sinewy gruel and biscuits as hard as musketballs—then told to wash the dishes. Lloyd would spare him no pocket money from his accumulating savings, and Rapture refused to sneak into the pews with him after lights-out to spoon and nuzzle. The gimpy blacksmith found himself brooding over the providential letter from his brother—and dreaming of his forge in Zanesville, of toad-sticking and fishing in the Licking River with a jug of his elderberry wine beside him. There was no place for him in St. Louis—no place for him in the family anymore. He had sold what tools he had left from their earlier misadventures. Little Jack Redhorse’s mash was pestering his kidneys and giving him the shakes. Now all the prayer-meeting hubbub and the sudden interruption of his escalating alcohol consumption drove him into a hallucinatory frenzy, so that Brother Dowling was forced to threaten him with ejection from the refuge. Then he was gone. Just like that, one morning.
Rapture, who felt that all her “speritual” links and secret skills had run dry (in the same way that Lloyd’s mystic connection with his ghost sister had been severed), returned from a foot-swollen day of drudgery for the sawbones who patted her rear end to find that her husband was not curled in his sweaty cot in the men’s dormitory and in fact had not been seen since what passed for breakfast (which often did not pass for several days). How I hate my father sometimes, Lloyd thought. If only I did not love him.
Rapture cried herself to sleep that night, missing the garden back in Zanesville, her herbs and remedies, the cooking, the animals, the life they used to have. Lloyd took the news in apparent stride, keeping his hurt and worry to himself. He dared not tell her about the Spirosians or the Vardogers, and if his father was bent upon his own destruction he saw nothing that he could do at the moment save what he was trying to do—one final show that would be remembered forever in St. Louis. One grand performance that could rescue her.
From the platform of his modest celebrity, he would leap into the rarefied blue of legend and newfound wealth. Statesmen, speculators, and the captains of industry would woo him. He would save his mother and father, and they would not need to go to Texas to live off his uncle’s charity. They could stay in St. Louis. They would eat French cheeses and broiled chicken. They would have a Negro footman and drawers full of patent medicine and ready-made clothes, a snooker table and brass spittoons, and decanters of absinthe, the Green Fairy that St. Ives drank. One day he would track the gambler down and invite him back to work for him. The rooms of their white-pillared mansion would be lined with books, telescopes, armillary spheres, and oil paintings of naked women with breasts like rolling waves. It would be “up tuh de notch,” as his mother would say. If the Spirosians and the Vardogers wanted his loyalty, then let there be a bidding war—not a war of nerves but one that