the games in the parsonage basement. “When I invented the portrait camera—which is actually a combined generator and projector, as I’m sure you know—I did attempt to do both men and women. This was at a little seaside amusement park in North Carolina called Joyland. Out of business now, but it was a lovely place, Jamie. I enjoyed it greatly. During my time on the midway—which was called Joyland Avenue—there was a Rogues’ Gallery next to Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion. It featured life-size cardboard figures with cutouts where the faces belonged. There was a pirate, a gangster with an automatic, a tough Jane with a tommygun, the Joker and Catwoman from the Batman comics. People would put their faces in and the park’s traveling photographers—Hollywood Girls, they were called—would snap their pictures.”
“That gave you the idea?”
“Yes. At the time I was styling myself Mr. Electrico—an homage to Ray Bradbury, but I doubt if any of the rubes knew it—and although I had invented a crude version of my current projector, it had never crossed my mind to feature it in the show. Mostly I used the Tesla coil and a spark generator called Jacob’s Ladder. I demonstrated a small Jacob’s Ladder to you kids when I was your minister, Jamie. I used chemicals to make the rising sparks change color. Do you remember?”
I did.
“The Rogues’ Gallery made me aware of the possibilities inherent in my projector, and I created Portraits in Lightning. Just another gaff, you’d say . . . but it also helped me to advance my studies, and still does. During my stint at Joyland, I used a backdrop featuring a man in expensive black tie as well as the beautiful girl in the ball gown. Some men took me up on it, but surprisingly few. I believe their shitkicker friends laughed at them when they saw them dressed to the nines like that. Women never laugh, because women love dressing to the nines. To the tens, if possible. And when they see the demonstration, they line up.”
“How long have you been gigging?”
He calculated, one eye squinted shut. Then he opened them both wide in an expression of surprise. “It’s almost fifteen years now.”
I shook my head, smiling. “You went from preaching to huckstering.”
As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized it was a mean thing to say, but the idea of my old minister turning tips still boggled my mind. He wasn’t offended, though. He just gave his perfectly knotted tie a final admiring look in the mirror, and tipped me a wink.
“No difference,” he said. “They’re both just a matter of convincing the rubes. Now please excuse me while I go and sell some lightning.”
He left the heroin on the little table in the middle of the Bounder. I glanced at it from time to time, even picked it up once, but I had no urge to use any. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand why I’d trashed so much of my life over it in the first place. All that crazy need seemed like a dream to me. I wondered if everyone felt that way when their compulsions passed. I didn’t know.
I still don’t.
• • •
Briscoe lit out for the territories, as gazoonies so often do, and when I asked Jacobs if I could have the job, he agreed at once. There really wasn’t much to it, but it spared him the task of finding some local yokel to tote the camera on and offstage, hand him his tophat, and pretend to get electrocuted. He even suggested that I play some chords on my Gibson during the demonstrations. “Something suspenseful,” he instructed. “Something that will put it in the rubes’ heads that the girl might actually get fried.”
This was easy enough. Switching between A minor and E (the foundation chords of “House of the Rising Sun” and “The Springhill Mining Disaster,” if you’re interested) always suggests impending doom. I enjoyed it, although I thought that a big slow drumbeat would have added something.
“Don’t get too wedded to the job,” Charlie Jacobs advised me. “I intend to move on. When the fair closes down, attendance at Bell’s goes into the toilet.”
“Move on where?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ve gotten used to traveling alone.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Just so you know.”
I already did. After the deaths of his wife and child, Charlie Jacobs was strictly a solo act.
The visits he made to his workshop grew shorter and shorter. He began bringing