Rust and Bone (26 page)

“Pass the pepper, Dad.”

“What pepper, Jessica darling?”

“The pepper that was on the table a minute ago.”

“Well, it's not there now, is it?”

“You palmed it.”

“Palmed it? My dear, palming's a shameless trick practiced by street-corner hustlers.”

“Fine. You made it vanish.”

“Perhaps so. Say the magic word and I'll make it reappear.”

“Please.”

“The butcher says
please,
darling. The garbage man says
please
.”

“Ugh.
Floobidoo
.”

Moments later she'd feel the pepper mill's sudden weight in her pocket. The first time was amusing. The second time, less so. Times three through three thousand were abject misery. Which was why, as her brother milked the moment as her father had, Jess snapped, “Turn this horrible music off.”

“You don't like it?”

“Another minute and I'll slit my throat.”

Herbert hunted through the jumble of remote controls at his elbow, found the corresponding unit, pushed a button.

“Now,” Jess said, “what the hell is going
on?
”

Herbert rooted through a sagging tower of newspapers—copies of the
St. Catharines Standard, New York Post, Calgary Herald,
a dozen more—coming up with a section of the
Sault Ste. Marie Star
. “Look.”

The local news headline read:
Magician Dazzles Patients at Institution
. A grainy black-and-white snapshot captured a tuxedo-clad man in mid-flourish, a loose horseshoe of housecoat-clad and wheelchair-bound spectators gathered round. She squinted at the photograph intensely, until the image dissolved into its composite black-and-gray dots.

“So?”

“
So?
It's him! The magician—Dad!”

“I can see that.”

“Oh, I see. You don't care, is that it?”

Why
should
she care? He'd forsaken them. It took two years to convince Herbert he hadn't banished him to a horrible parallel universe, two years during which Herbert suffered nightmares of his doomed
pater
reeling and shrieking in a fathomless void. Jess had developed a pragmatic outlook: some fathers skipped out for cigarettes and never came home; her father stepped into a tea chest and vanished. Though carried off with more panache than the average abandonment it remained a crude and everyday act. “Same shit, different dad,” she'd told friends.

“You have no desire to contact him? None whatsoever?”

“He's no part of my life. He left us.”

“The man had his reasons.”

“Don't start on that again.”

“He
did,
” Herbert persisted. “He was driven into hiding by vengeful magicians upset about the book.”

That damn
book
. The only renown Herbert T. Mallory, Sr., ever garnered came with the publication of
Hexers, Charlatans, and Miracle Mongers: An Exposé
. A compendium of “fakeries,” the book revealed the science and deception behind illusions practiced by inner-city con men, India's famed god-men, and famous stage magicians. It was purchased by skeptics, hustlers, and the type of people who delighted in peeking through keyholes or leafing through strangers' diaries.

“What are you talking about? What did anyone ever
do?
”

“Well,” Herbert picked a fluffball off his robe, “what about the prank phone calls? And the time our house was egged?”

Jess tried to envision the ridiculous scene: a carful of magicians rumbling down the block decked in rhinestone vests and peacock feathers and bright satin turbans with cut-glass gems set in the centers, slewing around a hairpin curve, screeching curses and incantations while hurling eggs at their dilapidated bungalow.

“He abandoned us, Herbert. He's a coward.”

“Believe what you want,” he said, chin set at a supercilious angle. “You don't want anything to do with him, fine. I do.”

“Then hop in your car and drive.”

“You know I can't.”

She shrugged and went to the fridge. Every rack and tray was stocked with cans of something called Sagiko Chrysanthemum Drink.

“Don't have any beer?”

“It's Korean. Very refreshing.”

Jess cracked one and took a sip. “Delightful.” She scraped her fingernail over a grimy windowpane, letting in a weak sickle of sunlight. “So, if you're not leaving the house, how …?”

“Well, I thought maybe you'd track him down—”

“Oh, is that what you thought? Herbert's little errand girl?”

“No, not like that—”

“I don't care whether the man lives or dies—”

“Jesus, would you let me—”

“If you want to see him so bad, take off that ridiculous robe and leave this hermitage—”

“You're one to talk!”

“At least I'll set foot outside my door!”

Herbert pushed out of his chair and came at her. Jess flashed back to the days when he'd wrestle her to the ground, straddle her chest, and rap his fingers on her breastbone until she named ten chocolate bars— the dreaded
rooster peck
. Her only defense had been the fearsome
purple nurple,
which she administered with the sadistic glee of a gulag torturer. She wondered if this would end with them rolling about on the floor, pecking and pinching.

But he pulled up short, eyes filled with an uneasy mingling of shame and resentment. He turned his hand over in the weak sickle of light.

Jess looked at his fingers. Long and tapered, nails bitten to the quick. She'd seen those fingers do things no other fingers on earth could do, make cards and coins and tiny Egyptian swallows appear and disappear with the flickering swiftness of stop-motion photography. Yet taken out of their element and set to mundane tasks, those same fingers were inept and clumsy.

After his father's disappearance, Herbert threw himself into magic. He carried a deck of cards everywhere, practicing tricks in the schoolyard, on the bus, in the bathtub. He bought a straitjacket from a medical supply company and learned how to dislocate his shoulders; Jess vividly recalled the meaty
tok
of his clavicle popping from its cup of bone. Soon he had cups and saucers, even the pot roast vanishing from the dinner table. Although Sam lauded Herbert's abilities, as he felt was his role, it was with the disconcerting sense one gets watching history repeat itself.

At the age of eighteen Herbert rode the bus to Toronto. He picked an agent's name from the phonebook, walked to the Bay Street address, barged past the secretary into his office and ran off a series of rapid-fire illusions, culminating with a Fiery Orb. The agent, face sweat stung from the lingering heat, inked Herbert to a contract on the spot.

“I'm sorry,” Jess said as her brother turned his hand in the soft light coming through the window. “Shouldn't have said that.” She sipped her chrysanthemum drink. “Gets better the more you drink.”

Herbert's rise was, to use the industry parlance, meteoric. He embarked on a cross-Canada tour. “A latter-day Houdini,” the
Toronto Star
raved; “Destined to be the hottest name in magic!” heralded the
Montreal Gazette
. Europe came next, Herbert playing on the great Old World stages where Robert-Houdin once caught bullets between his teeth and made the floorboards seep blood. He rode a gathering groundswell into America, playing to packed houses at Radio City Music Hall, the Emerson Majestic Theater, and the Los Angeles Orpheum.

He flew Jess and Sam in for his New York performance. Jess remembered sitting in a balcony box with her uncle, who looked uncomfortable amidst red velvet and shadowy silhouettes of wealthy men and women.

But mostly she remembered Herbert.

He seemed so small in the footlights' austere glare, a stagehand startled by the curtain's rise. But as he worked into his act, materializing playing cards by the dozens and flicking them with such force they ricocheted off lobby doors and balcony rails, Jess realized she was witnessing a man in his element. Sometimes he responded to the applause with an indulgent smile; other times by scorning his audience altogether. Herbert was forgiven his open disdain. The audience felt privileged to be witnessing a bright new star at the dawn of his career.

There were television specials—
Herbert Mallory's Cabinet of Illusions!; Herbert Mallory: Upside Down in the Water Torture Cell!
— and a string of well-publicized relationships, starlets, and supermodels and an adult film star. There were drunken fracases outside Hollywood nightclubs and the inevitable paparazzi scuffles. There were the grand gestures, such as the day Jess found a Mercedes convertible in her driveway. He developed the manner of a prince among commoners. He dispensed favors like gold and expected to be deferred to at any and every moment.

His career ended live on national television, in front of an estimated seventeen million viewers, in a span of less than four minutes.

“I'm not saying I wouldn't try to find him,” Jess said. “It's just, I won't go alone. I've got my own problems.”

Herbert nodded towards the pyramid of television screens. “I saw the news reports. Wasn't right, what they did. Suspending you.”

“I asked to be suspended.”

“You did?”

“I don't belong there.”

The stunt—or “personal challenge,” as Herbert called it—was a recreation of Houdini's famous Buried Alive, in which the straitjacketed magician was sealed in a casket then lowered into a vault, which was then filled with sand. Escape was relatively simple: after wriggling out of the jacket, Herbert had only to slide open a panel in the casket's base and dig through a foot of sand to a trapdoor.

Jess was at home when it happened, watching on TV. It had all seemed so strange. The sand had been poured in but the vault was still open. Then a deep muted crack, the sound a bone makes fracturing deep underwater. The surface stirred a little; air from the ruptured casket vented in a series of sandy puffs. The cameras pulled back, as though ashamed of their intensity. As she sat in front of the television holding Ted's hand, part of Jess hated Herbert for the manipulation.

One of the producers came onstage, hollering, “Get him out of there—get him
the hell out!
” Workmen rushed out with crowbars and screwdrivers, attacking the vault seams. The cameras zoomed in. An audience member clambered onto the stage, wedging his car key into a seam and prying with what little force he could muster. A technician tore at the vault with his bare hands.

Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds passed before they were able to break the vault apart. The retaining wall gave way, washing a tide of sand into the front row. Jess saw Herbert's arm turning over and over as his body tumbled down the grade of sand, his tuxedo jacket—he must've escaped his straitjacket before the casket fractured—rucked up to his elbow, gold cufflink glinting in the overheads. His body rolled until it hit the footlights.

Paramedics dragged him from the sand and administered mouth-to-mouth. For thirty seconds there was only the artificial rise and fall of his chest, a fragile bellows. One shoe on, the other yanked off. A hole in his sock. Shirt singed from the white-hot foots. He sat up abruptly, arms jerked out, fingers grasping at nothing. His eyes wide, grains of sand adhering to the lashes.

“Are you all right?” the producer asked. “Herbert? Herbert?”

“It's eternity in there,” was all he said.

The network cut to a rerun.

Jess sat down. “As far as I'm concerned, our father deserted us. But if you want to track him down, I'll tag along. I don't want to speak to him, or even look at him. But I'll go.”

Herbert stared out at the world as he'd known it for nearly two years: vague and filtered, kept at bay by bricks and mortar and filthy window glass. “So you're saying I have to go?”

“Know what Sam calls this place? The Fortress of Solitude.” Jess raised the soda can to her lips, mildly surprised to find it empty. “I don't know what happened in that casket. You never told me—I don't know you've told anybody. I imagine it was horrible. And I know you've got money, enough to build this place and pay for that Jag and keep you in foreign soft drinks the rest of your life. But you need to get out.”

Herbert gave her a look—a funny, diverted glance, turning away from her as you might from someone who is sick. “You know why I've never talked about it? Nobody's ever really asked. My agent, my publicist, they were always telling me to get over it, forget it, it's the past. Do you really want to know?”

“Do you really want to tell me?”

After a moment, he said, “It was dark. It was dark and I could hear the casket creaking. The sand was imported from Egypt. Powdered bones, mostly, animals who'd died in the desert; supposedly more airy, lighter. I felt the pressure building as they poured it in—my ears popped. I knew it was going to shatter. That was the worst part. It was dark and I knew it was going to shatter. I called out a few times— screamed, I guess. Four tons of sand. That's like, two and a half elephants.” He shook his head wonderingly, as if the weight, stated in plain physical terms, shocked him. “It buckled. A shard of wood cut my cheek. That's all I really remember. My life didn't flash before my eyes. All I remember is darkness and pressure. This hard, featureless pressure.”

For a long time neither of them spoke. Why would anyone squirrel himself away after something like that, Jess wondered. She'd never want to be cooped up again—sleep in an open field under the stars, no walls, no roof. No pressure.

“A lot of luck in my life, up 'til then.” Herbert shrugged. “Streak was bound to end.”

For the first time in many years Jess thought of walking home from school with him in the winter twilight, their flesh an oyster-gray color against the snow, Herbert animated beyond all reason, circling her like an excited dog until she'd wrestled him down and given him a snowy face wash, the two of them tumbling over the clean white ground like shirts in a dryer. She couldn't connect the man sitting across from her to the boy she'd known years ago. There wasn't even a vague outline, a silhouette.