“I said let’s go,” his father said. “I said let’s get out of here.”
“Before I’ve shown you your daughter?” the big man said. “Before I’ve brought her back to speak to you?”
His father was holding the door open. “George?” he said. “Nancy?”
“Can’t we just see her first, George?” his wife said.
“Can we?” his son asked. He had an idea she was somewhere in the house, the old man keeping her for them like shoes brought in for repair.
“Go on,” the man told them gently. “I’m sorry,” he said to his father. “It’s near dark. If you leave now you can walk back to the highway while there’s still some light left.”
“How do you know one of those cars parked outside isn’t mine?”
“You have no automobile.”
“Sure we do. It’s parked a few houses down.”
“You have no machine,” the old man said.
“You hear that, Nancy?” his father said shrewdly. “That’s the man you’d let show you the child we lost. An old woman who ain’t got nothing better to do than hide out behind his curtains and spy on folks.”
“If you had an auto you’d have locked that suitcase in it.”
“All right, Reverend,” his father relented, “I guess you got me there. There’s no car. But here’s where I got you. We ain’t got any money for your medicine show. We’ve put a little by for milk and bread and a buck or so for a clean kip once in a while till we get settled, but we failed to set anything aside for apparitions or haunt house card tricks, so unless you work free like those orange picker murderers, you might just as well lift the charm or spell off Nancy and the kid and let us all get going.”
“A dollar?” the man said.
“Sure,” his father said, “if you start acting like a proper landlord and just keep the tables from rapping so we can get some sleep. If the ouija boards are all put away and the sheets are fresh. I’ll give you a dollar. What do you say, old Merlin?”
“Stay the night. I won’t charge you.”
“Here’s your buck,” his father said.
“I won’t charge you.”
“You ain’t my uncle,” his father said, pressing money into the man’s hand.
“I invited you,” he said.
“And I’m obliged to you,” his father said, “but near as I can tell you’re just some working stiff like me and George too will be someday if we can only just get him the proper sleep every so often. Don’t worry about the money. You’d have taken that, and more too, I guess, if only we’d agreed to look into that crystal ball of yours.”
“You think I’m a fake,” the big man said, slipping the dollar his father had given him into a pocket in his robe.
“Well,” his father said mildly, “at least a rotten businessman. I see lots more cars parked in front of them other congregations.”
The big man made their bed up for them in what they did not know yet was the master bedroom. Then he went downstairs to his dimly lighted parlor, waiting, they supposed, for someone else to come to his door. Later, George Mills heard his heavy step on the stairs when he came up again to make up his cot and lie down in the small spare bedroom down the hall.
In fact, the loose dark robe was a sort of dressing gown, not Wickland’s working clothes at all. These, like those of most of the psychics, parapsychologists, clairvoyants, and occultists in Cassadaga, were ordinary business suits, the customary browns and grays and faintly baggy wool garments of traveling salesmen or reporters, say — vested, fobbed, long and thickly flied. He was given to brightly colored sleeve garters. Otherwise his clothing was sober, the color of fedoras or suits in snapshots. Nor was there much in the way of paraphernalia about the house, little of the gear George or his parents might have expected. Though they were to see this stuff too, plenty of it, during their long sojourn in the queer town, George, before Wickland found other uses for him, a sort of errand boy, as the only kid in town a community asset, his services on call, available to everyone, all of them, like the Fire Department they did not have or the doctor they did not need.
Meanwhile his father found work, underbidding the prison officials for the contract on the town’s small square and streets. He did other things too of course, driving one or another of the spiritualists’ cars the fifteen miles into De Land each day — where the circus had its winter quarters — to pick up their mail at the PO boxes they rented there, mailing the parcels and pamphlets they sent out, the letters and phonograph records with their special messages from the dead, to almost all of the forty-eight states. And working in the darkrooms, taught to develop the blurred photographs he was told were auras, bringing out the burning images of spirit photography in sharp detail so that he became almost a technician, driving with their copy all the way to the Orlando printers and, after a while, choosing the stock, selecting the font, sometimes even suggesting the layouts, the color of the boards, a sort of agent ombudsman who dickered with the printers about the proper discount when mistakes were made, the proofreading off or the bundles mismanaged. And a kind of constable too, without the powers of arrest of course, but a sort of agent for the town here too, like a volunteer in a tourist booth, actually wearing a badge with a four-digit number on it, like a code stamped on a tin can, and from time to time getting actually physical, servicing the town the way a bouncer might vigilante a bar or roadhouse, though these occasions were rare, the grief-stricken and mentally ill being by and large a docile lot, wonderful folks to do business with.
In less than three months the spiritualists, though to use the term was to paint with too broad a brush, there being as much difference between a clairvoyant and clairaudient as there was between a holy roller and a bishop, wondered how they had ever gotten along without him. Bill J. Pierce, a Spirit Photographer who’d been photographing auras for over fifty years, said Mills had been sent to them.
He made enough to pay Wickland for their room and board. He made more in fact than he’d ever made in his life and was actually able to bank a part of his earnings. He forgot all about orange picking as soon as he returned to the hoarding at the entrance to the small square, studying the board, reading the rubrics he had at first only glanced at, assuming it to be the town’s directory of churches, knowing only now where he was, what the fine-sounding titles, the “Doctors” and “Reverends” and “Professors” with their long tail of high-toned initials, really meant.
It was not no-man’s-land but one of those places like Hollywood or Broadway, or Reno, say, or somewhere offshore, beyond what was still the twelve-mile limit, where gambling ships dropped anchor and the high rollers had to take into account not just ordinary house odds but the pitch and yaw of the salon, too. It was a district, as Covent Garden was a district, as the Reeperbahn was, given over to a singleminded commerce not with no real reason for it to be, but with no real reason for it to be there, or none that anyone understood, not even Pierce, the aura photographer of fifty years. It was evidently famous — Mills checked off the license plates; more were from out of state than from Florida — as something is famous only after you discover you have a need for it, as when you take up tennis or golf and find out that there are magazines that advertise not only racquets and clubs, but devices for restringing racquets, bulk catgut-like balls of twine, tees specially designed to stand straight in sandy earth. (Or if you need an abortionist, his father thought, and discover all the abortionists are within a two block area a quarter mile from the Milwaukee Zoo.)