with it damn near ever’where. Her friends commenced on to makin fun of her, but she didn’t care. She tole people ‘That’s how I really look.’ I tried to shake the notion out of her one night and Mother tole me to stop, said it would pass on its own. And it seemed to. She left the pitcher in her room, I dunno, two days or three. Went on down to the hairdressin school without it. We thought it was over.”
It wasn’t. On October seventh, three days previous, she had walked into J. David Jewelry in Broken Arrow, a town southeast of Tulsa. She was carrying a shopping bag. Both salesmen recognized her, because she had been in several times since her star turn at Jacobs’s midway pitch. One of them asked if he could help her. Cathy blew past him without a word and went to the display case where the most expensive geegaws were kept. From her shopping bag she produced a hammer, which she used to shatter the glass top of the case. Ignoring the bray of the alarm and two cuts serious enough to warrant stitches (“And them will leave scars,” her father mourned), she reached in and took out a pair of diamond earrings.
“These are mine,” she said. “They go with my dress.”
• • •
Morse had no more than finished his story when two wide boys with SECURITY printed on their black tee-shirts showed up. “Is there a problem here?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said, and there wasn’t. Telling the story had finished venting his rage, which was good. It had also shriveled him somehow, and that wasn’t so good. “Mr. Morse was just leaving.”
He got up, clutching the remains of his Coke. Charlie Jacobs’s blood was drying on his knuckles. He looked at it as if he didn’t know where it had come from.
“Siccin the cops on him wouldn’t do no good, would it?” he asked. “All he did was take her pitcher, they’d say. Hell, it was even free.”
“Come on, sir,” one of the security guys said. “If you’d like to visit the fair, I’d be happy to stamp your hand.”
“Nosir,” he said. “My family’s had enough of this fair. I’m goin home.” He started off, then turned back. “Has he done it before, mister? Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?”
Something happened, I thought. Something, something, something.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Like you’d say, even if he did. You bein his agent and all.”
Then he went away, head lowered, not looking back.
• • •
In the Bounder, Jacobs had changed his blood-spotted shirt and had a dishtowel filled with ice on his fattening lower lip. He listened while I told him what Morse had told me, then said, “Tie my tie for me again, will you? We’re already late.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You need to fix her up. The way you fixed me up. With the headphones.”
He gave me a look that was perilously close to contempt. “Do you think Daddy Dearest would let me within a mile of her? Besides, what’s wrong with her . . . her compulsion . . . will wear off on its own. She’ll be fine, and any lawyer worth his salt will be able to convince the judge that she wasn’t herself. She’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.”
“None of this is exactly new to you, is it?”
He shrugged, still looking in my direction but no longer quite meeting my eyes. “There have been aftereffects from time to time, yes, although nothing quite so spectacular as Miss Morse’s attempted smash-and-grab.”
“You’re self-teaching, aren’t you? All your customers are actually guinea pigs. They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”
“Are you better now, or not?”
“Yes.” Except for the occasional early-morning stab-a-thon, that was.
“Then please tie my tie.”
I almost didn’t. I was angry with him—on top of everything else, he’d snuck out the back way and yelled for security—but I owed him. He had saved my life, which was good. I was now living a straight life, and that was even better.
So I tied his tie. We did the show. In fact, we did six of them. The crowd aaaahhhed when the close-of-fair fireworks went off, but never so loud as they did when Dan the Lightning Portraits Man worked his magic. And as each girl stared dreamily up at herself on the backdrop while I switched between A minor and E, I wondered which