Revival (16 page)

They laughed. They cheered. And when they saw her bright crimson blush, they cheered even harder. Above Jacobs and the girl, the giant Cathy was changing. The blond hair grew muddy. The features faded, although the red lipstick remained bright, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat in
Alice
.

Then it was the original girl again. The image of Cathy Morse had faded out of existence.

“But
this
version will never fade,” Jacobs said, holding up the old-fashioned plate again. “My assistant will print it and frame it and you can pick it up before you go home tonight.”

“Watch out there, Slick!” someone in the front row yelled out. “Girl's gonna faint!”

But she didn't. She only swayed a little on her feet.

I was the one who fainted.

 • • •

When I next opened my eyes,
I was in a queen-size bed. A blanket was pulled up to my chin. When I looked to my right, I saw a wall done in fake wood paneling. When I looked to my left, I saw a nice kitchen area: fridge, sink, microwave oven. Beyond it was a couch, a dinette with four chairs, even an easy chair in the living area facing the built-in TV. I couldn't crane my neck far enough to see the driving compartment, but as an itinerant musician who had traveled tens of thousands of miles in similar rigs (although few as squared away as this one), I knew where I was, anyway: a large RV, probably a Bounder. Someone's home away from home.

I was hot, burning up. My mouth was dry as road dust. I was also jonesing like a motherfucker. I pushed the blanket down and immediately started shivering. A shadow fell over me. It was Jacobs, holding out a beautiful thing: orange juice in a tall glass with a bendy straw sticking out of it. The only thing better would have been a loaded hypo, but one thing at a time. I held my hand out for the glass.

He pulled the blanket back up first, then took a knee beside the bed. “Slow, Jamie. You're one sick American, I'm afraid.”

I drank. It was wonderful on my throat. I tried to take the glass and chug it down, but he held it away from me. “Slow, I said.”

I dropped my hand and he gave me another sip. It went down fine, but on the third one, my belly clenched and the shivers came back. That wasn't the flu.

“I need to score,” I said. This was hardly the way I wanted to re-introduce myself to my former minister and first adult friend, but a junkie in need has no shame. Besides, he might have a skeleton or two in his own closet. Why else would he be going under the name Dan Jacobs instead of Charles?

“Yes,” he said. “I saw the tracks. And I intend to maintain you, at least until you've beaten whatever bug you've got running around in your system. Otherwise you'll start throwing up whatever I try to feed you, and we can't have that, can we? Not when you look to be at least fifty pounds underweight as it is.”

From his pocket he brought a brown gram bottle. It had a small spoon attached to the cap. I reached for it. He shook his head and held it away from me.

“Same deal. I do the driving.”

He unscrewed the cap, dipped out a tiny spoonful of grimy white powder, and held it under my nose. I snorted it up my right nostril. He dipped again, and I treated the left nostril. It wasn't what I needed—not
enough
of what I needed, to be exact—but the shakes began to subside, and I stopped feeling like I might hurl up that nice cold orange juice.

“Now you can doze,” he said. “Or nod off, if that's what you call it. I'm going to make you some chicken soup. Just Campbell's, not like your mother used to make, but it's what I've got.”

“I don't know if I can hold it down,” I said, but it turned out I could. When I'd finished the mug he held for me, I asked for more dope. He administered two very stingy snorts.

“Where'd you get it?” I asked as he tucked the bottle back into a front pocket of the jeans he was now wearing.

He smiled. It lit up his face and made him twenty-five again, with a wife he loved and a young son he adored. “Jamie,” he said, “I've been working amusement parks and the carny circuit for a long time now. If I couldn't find drugs, I'd be either blind or an idiot.”

“I need more. I need a shot.”

“No, a shot's what you
want
, and you're not going to get it from me. I have no interest in helping you get high. I just don't want you to go into convulsions and die in my boondocker. Go to sleep now. It's nearly midnight. If you're better in the morning, we'll discuss many things, including how to detach the monkey currently riding on your back. If you're not better, I'm taking you to either St. Francis or the OSU Medical Center.”

“Good luck getting them to take me,” I said. “I'm two steps from broke and my medical plan is convenience store Tylenol.”

“In the words of Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.”

“Fiddle-de-dee,” I croaked.

“If you say so.”

“Give me a little more.” The short snorts he'd doled out were about as useful to me as a Marlboro Light to a guy who's been chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings all his life, but even short snorts were better than nothing.

He considered, then parceled out two more hits. Even stingier than the last pair.

“Giving heroin to a man with a bad case of the flu,” he said, and chuckled. “I must be crazy.”

I peeked under the blanket and saw he'd undressed me down to my skivvies. “Where are my clothes?”

“In the closet. I segregated them from mine, I'm afraid. They smelled a trifle gamy.”

“My wallet's in the front pocket of my jeans. There's a claim check for my duffel bag and my guitar. The clothes don't matter, but the guitar does.”

“Bus station or train station?”

“Bus.” The dope might only have been powder, and administered in medicinal quantities, but either it was very good stuff or it was hitting my depleted body especially hard. The soup was warm in my belly, and my eyelids felt like sashweights.

“Sleep, Jamie,” he said, and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “If you're going to beat the bug, you have to sleep.”

I lay back on the pillow. It was much softer than the one in my Fairgrounds Inn room. “Why are you calling yourself Dan?”

“Because it's my name. Charles Daniel Jacobs. Now go to sleep.”

I was going to, but there was one other thing I had to ask. Adults change, sure, but if they haven't been struck by some debilitating disease or disfigured by an accident, you can usually recognize them. Children, on the other hand . . .

“You knew me. I could see it. How?”

“Because your mother lives in your face, Jamie. I hope Laura's well.”

“She's dead. Her and Claire both.”

I don't know how he took it. I closed my eyes, and ten seconds later I was out.

 • • •

When I woke up I felt cooler,
but the shakes were back bigtime. Jacobs put a drugstore fever strip on my forehead, held it there for a minute or so, then nodded. “You might live,” he said, and gave me two more teensy snorts from the brown bottle. “Can you get up and eat some scrambled eggs?”

“Bathroom first.”

He pointed, and I made my way into the small cubicle, holding onto things. I only had to pee, but I was too weak to stand up, so I sat down and did it girly-style. When I came out, he was scrambling eggs and whistling. My stomach rumbled. I tried to recall when I'd last eaten something more substantial than canned soup. Cold cuts backstage before the gig two nights ago came to mind. If I'd eaten anything after that, I couldn't remember it.

“Ingest slowly,” he said, setting the plate on the dinette table. “You don't want to bark it right back up again, do you?”

I ate slowly, and cleaned the plate. He sat across from me, drinking coffee. When I asked for some, he gave me half a cup, heavy on the half-and-half.

“The trick with the picture,” I said. “How did you do that?”

“Trick? You wound me. The image on the backdrop is coated with a phosphorescent substance. The camera is also an electrical generator—”

“That much I got.”

“The flash is very powerful and very . . . special. It projects the image of the subject onto that of the girl in the evening dress. It doesn't hold for long; the area is too large. The pictures I sell, on the other hand, last much longer.”

“Long enough so she can show it to her grandchildren? Really?”

“Well,” he said, “no.”

“How long?”

“Two years. Give or take.”

“By which time you're long gone.”

“Indeed. And the pictures that matter . . .” He tapped his temple. “Up here. For all of us. Don't you agree?”

“But . . . Reverend Jacobs . . .”

I saw a momentary flicker of the man who had preached the Terrible Sermon back when LBJ was president. “Please don't call me that. Plain old Dan will do. That's who I am now. Dan the Lightning Portraits Man. Or Charlie, if that's more comfortable for you.”

“But she turned around. The girl on your background did a complete three-sixty.”

“A simple trick of motion picture projection.” But he glanced away as he said it. Then he looked back at me. “Do you want to get better, Jamie?”

“I
am
better. Must have been one of those twenty-four-hour things.”

“It's not a twenty-four-hour thing, it's the flu, and if you try leaving here for the bus station, it'll be back full blast by noon. Stay here and yes, I think you'll probably be better in a few days. But it's not the flu I'm talking about.”

“I'm okay,” I said, but now it was my turn to look away. What brought my eyes back front and center was the little brown bottle. He was holding it by the spoon and swinging it on its little silver chain like a hypnotist's amulet. I reached for it. He held it away.

“How long have you been using?”

“Heroin? About three years.” It had been six. “I had a motorcycle accident. Smashed the hell out of my hip and leg. They gave me morphine—”

“Of course they did.”

“—and then stepped me down to codeine. That sucked, so I started chugging cough syrup to go with the pills. Terpin hydrate. Ever heard of it?”

“Are you kidding? On the circuit they call it GI Gin.”

“My leg healed, but it never healed right. Then—I was in a band called the Andersonville Rockers, or maybe they'd changed the name to the Georgia Giants by then—this guy introduced me to Tussionex. That was a big step in the right direction, as far as pain control went. Listen, do you really want to hear this?”

“Absolutely.”

I shrugged as if it didn't matter much to me one way or the other, but it was a relief to spill it out. Before that day in Jacobs's Bounder, I never had. In the bands I played with, everyone just shrugged and looked the other way. As long as you kept showing up, that was, and remembered the chords to “In the Midnight Hour”—which, believe me, ain't rocket science.

“It's another cough syrup. More powerful than terpin hydrate, but only if you knew how to get at the good stuff. To do that, you tied a string around the neck of the bottle and twirled it like a mad bastard. The centrifugal force separated the syrup into three levels. The good stuff—the hydrocodone—was in the middle. You used a straw to suck it up.”

“Fascinating.”

Not very
, I thought. “After awhile, when I was still having pain, I started scoring morphine again. Then I discovered heroin worked as well, and at half the price.” I smiled. “There's a kind of drug stock market, you know. When everybody started using rock cocaine, horse took a nosedive.”

“Your leg looks fine to me,” he said mildly. “There's a bad scar, and there's obviously been some muscle loss, but not that much. Some doctor did a fine job on you.”

“I can walk, yeah. But you try standing on a leg that's full of metal clips and screws for three hours a night, under hot lights and with a nine-pound guitar strapped on. Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don't tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they're on the inside.”

He nodded. “As someone who's suffered . . . losses . . . I can relate to that. But here's something I bet you already know, deep down. It's your
brain
that's hurting, and blaming it on your leg. Brains are crafty that way.”

He put the bottle back in his pocket (I watched it go with deep regret) and leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine. “But I believe I can take care of you with an electrical treatment. No guarantees, and the treatment might not cure your mental craving forever, but I believe I can give you what the football players call running room.”

“Cure me the way you did Connie, I suppose. When that kid clotheslined him with a ski pole.”

He looked surprised, then laughed. “You remember that.”

“Of course! How could I forget it?” I also remembered how Con had refused to go with me to see Jacobs after the Terrible Sermon. It wasn't exactly like Peter denying Jesus, but it was in the same ballpark.

“A dubious cure at best, Jamie. More likely the placebo effect. I'm offering you an
actual
cure, one that will—or so I believe—short-circuit the painful withdrawal process.”

“Well of course you'd
say
that, wouldn't you?”

“You're judging me by my carny persona. But that's all it is, Jamie—a persona. When I'm not wearing my show suit and making a living, I try to tell the truth. In fact, I mostly tell the truth when I'm working. That picture
will
amaze Miss Cathy Morse's friends.”

“Yeah,” I said. “For two years, anyway. Give or take.”

“Stop dodging and answer my question. Do you want to get better?”