Unbury Carol(33)

Rinaldo reached for the pipe again.

Today those questionable relations were renewed.

How did this happen? he mused, flummoxed, smoke rising from his lips.

The ceiling of the shed gave him no concrete response.

Rinaldo had no doubt that what James Moxie did in Abberstown was real magic. Of course, by now he’d heard the same theories everyone had. Men loved to talk about it over cards, at the bar, waiting for a coach. Most tried to dissect the moment; toothless drunks called it sleight of hand; lawmen claimed another shooter; young outlaws couldn’t guess how to practice it. But hardly a man saw it happen like Rinaldo had.

James Moxie faced Daniel Prouds over a ditch on Dunkle Street and Prouds’s chest exploded in deep rose before Moxie moved his hand. The blood bursting from Prouds’s pink shirt would forever remain fixed in Rinaldo’s memory: a sudden flight of red ravens; a rising cardinal corpse.

Oh, how many times had Liliana listened to Rinaldo blabber, stoned, about Abberstown! His wife rolled her eyes at him so often he was surprised they weren’t loose. Smoking now, he remembered well the early years. When he and Liliana first moved to Griggsville, when he bought the Disappearing Box and Liliana agreed to step inside. But try as he might, he could not make her vanish until she explained it to him.

Mirrors, she’d taught him.

And so did Moxie use mirrors? Under a sun so bright? In front of a crowd of so many? Rinaldo learned many tricks in those days, trying hard to emulate the great James Moxie. And as the years passed he accumulated many toys, many cards, the games and tricks that gave him infinite pleasure in the large shed, smoking from his pipe, often re-creating Moxie’s stance in Abberstown. Yes, there was a marginal flash, a gun fired, and yet…none drawn?

Rinaldo pondered this once again. But the good cheer he usually felt was difficult to find.

“Guilt,” Rinaldo said, watching the smoke dissolve into the candlelit ceiling.

Because guilt was indeed what he was wrestling now. The ugly back-and-forth swinging of the heavy pendulum.

“Guilt.”

Today Rinaldo had delivered a message. Today he had taken a piece of paper to the post office and seen to it that the words he now saw by the shed’s candlelight were sent far south, to Mackatoon, where James Moxie called home.

“Moxie!” he suddenly screamed.

How did this happen?

Earlier, Rinaldo had been walking the streets of Griggsville when he saw the man named Mutton gesturing to him from across the road. Mutton, a snow-cold man whom Rinaldo never liked even when he himself was in the loving throes of booze, gestured with a gloved hand. And winked.

Hell’s heaven, Rinaldo thought, already the old familiar sensation of his youthful tryst at the bawdy house returning. Don’t go to him.

But cross the road he did, unable to feign the ignorance he now so wished he had.

“Thought you didn’t recognize me there for a second, Rinaldo.”

Mutton looked worse than Rinaldo remembered. The skin of his face like orange rinds.

“Of course I recognized you,” Rinaldo responded. Always wanting to be accepted. Always wanting to be liked.

They exchanged false pleasantries before Mutton eyed Rinaldo a second longer than was comfortable and said, “Look here, Rinaldo. I’m in something of a bind. It seems I’m wanted yonder.” He fanned a gloved hand to a saloon door, where a heavy woman was looking their way. “Yet I have some work to do.” Rinaldo felt suddenly as if he was at a place he shouldn’t have come. “You remember the old days, don’t ya, ’Naldo? You remember how it used to be…” Mutton pulled from his vest pocket a folded piece of paper. Rinaldo observed but did not speak. “What say you deliver this message for me? It’s an easy gig, really, all’s you got to do is step into the post office and send these six or seven words. I’d very much appreciate it…seeing as I’m wanted yonder.”

Rinaldo looked at the paper and thought of Liliana. He thought of the children.

“Of course,” the bad man continued, “there’s a coin or two in it for you.” Then he leaned forward and Rinaldo smelled rat on the man’s breath. “Just like we used to do.”

Rinaldo continued to stare at the paper as if it were an invitation to his past, to a time before he met Liliana. To the days before love and family and his shed of magic.

“Now, you haven’t changed, have you, ’Naldo?”

Rinaldo felt trapped by Mutton’s gaze. And yet what harm could it do, to do something he’d done so many times before?

Abberstown was, after all, magic for Rinaldo. Reliving a sliver couldn’t hurt…too badly?

“No, of course not. I’ll deliver your telegram.”

The people-pleaser. The yes-man. Still.

Rinaldo took the paper. Mutton smiled, his gums black with smoke.

“Thatta boy, ’Naldo. Just like we used to do.”

After delivering the message, unable to shake a vision of Liliana wagging a finger at him, and halfway home, Rinaldo stopped walking and decided to do something he’d never done before.

He pulled the folded paper from his pocket and read the message he’d delivered.

Then he read it again.

And again.

“Hell’s heaven,” Rinaldo said. And his voice sounded like it did twenty years ago, as he na?vely fluffed pillows.