Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Listen, I know,” said Rocky, “but careful you don’t spend all night persuading him, and forget about me. I like a little persuasion myself.”

She laughed dirtily and leered at him.

“Christine!” said Rocky. “And me so meek and mild. The Professor’s the one you need to watch out for. He’s a heartbreaker.”

“Lucky for me, I got an anthracite heart. Hard and black.” She rapped her breastbone to prove it, though she had to push her knuckles through her cleavage to manage.

I cleared my throat. “‘Says Phoebe Snow, the miners know, that to hard coal, my fame I owe, for my delight, in wearing white, is due alone, to anthracite.’ ”

“Poetry!” Christine clapped her hands. “He’s a professor of poetry!”

Rocky said, “You know, I’ve been here five minutes and I haven’t seen a bottle yet.”

Someone knocked on the door behind us. “That’ll be Jack, I bet,” said Rocky, and it was, our friend the monopede dancer. He jumped over five stairs at once and grabbed Rocky’s shirt collar.

“All right,” Robertson said.

Rocky assumed a pose of fraudulent innocence. “Jackie! Jack, my lad! What brings you here?”

“What doesn’t bring me here, more like. Where is it?”

Rocky opened his mouth. Robertson’s hand began to gather more and more of Rocky’s shirtfront. “O- kay ,” Rocky said. He pulled Robertson’s crutch from under the back of his coat. I could not figure out how he could have stolen it without me noticing, never mind sneaking it here. “We just wanted to be assured of your presence.”

Robertson tucked the crutch under his arm. “There’s liquor here, is there?” he asked in his Scottish mortician’s voice, as if politely wondering the location of a corpse. Christine kissed him; that was the toll she demanded of everyone. She didn’t punch him in the stomach though. I thought he’d push her away, but suddenly he smiled shyly. They looked like initial letters in a book of fairy tales, Jack for In the day of kings , Christine for Once upon a time .

“Excuse my manners,” Jack said. “Pleasure to meet you. There’s liquor here, is there?”

Onstage he wore an acrobat’s unitard, tailored to minimize what was left of his leg and arm. Now he had on a tight single-legged pair of pants, a one-armed sweater, one pull-on boot. His red hair was shorn in a military brush cut that showed the base of his skull but got thicker over his ears. He looked like an aging college football player caught in a stripe of light. He nodded at me.

“You lose your limbs in the war?” Christine asked.

“No, miss. I knew their exact location the whole time. Stepped on a mine.” Somehow, he made it seem like he was just a different model of man, a coupe instead of a sedan.

“And they couldn’t be saved?”

“Probably were,” said Jack. “Probably stuffed like a trout over some doctor’s fireplace. A drink?”

I don’t know when the night began to get out of hand, though I do know that it grieved Christine to see a guest with an empty glass. She served good smuggled Canadian whiskey and bad home-brewed beer that tasted like pound cake, and a little absorbent food so her guests could keep drinking. Eventually half the bill showed up: the entire house orchestra, several of the flash-act sisters. The basement filled up with cigarette smoke, which must have floated though the floorboards to the mysterious house above, climbing the spirals of bed springs, filling coffee cups. Rocky and I sat on stools at Christine’s bar; Jack Robertson lifted himself onto the bar top.

“Didn’t your mother teach you manners?” Rocky asked him.

“She did na. She taught me this—”and then he started a long song that mostly had no words but involved knifing a man in his sleep. When he finished, he said to Rocky, “Yeh don’t know how to drink.”

“ I don’t?”

Robertson shook his head and stretched out on the bar. “Backache,” he said to me as he reclined. Rocky set his whiskey glass in the space where Robertson’s right leg should have been.

“Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, fingering the fabric over Robertson’s leg stump.

“Yeh dirty bastard,” said Robertson. “I’m missing what it looks like I’m missing, and that’s all. Don’t go looking. You,” he said to me. “Where did you find this thief? Last time I saw you, you had a girl. Pretty big-nosed girl.”

“She’s a boy now,” I said.

He nodded and polished the bar with the back of his head. “I heard. What did this one used to be?”

“Sober,” said Rocky, waving his glass at Christine, who had for some reason pulled Jack Robertson’s boot off. “But that was a long time ago.”

Christine fingered Robertson’s toes. “Only five,” she said sadly.

“I have an average of five toes,” he answered. “Less than most, more than some.”

Archie Grace the ventriloquist came in with the violet sister instead of Sammy. The other girls — Daisy and Rose — had changed, but Violet hadn’t; when she sat down, her crinoline-filled skirt flounced up in front like a broken accordion. She must have been under the impression that Grace had been beguiled by the outfit, and was afraid that in street clothes she’d look like what she was: a chapped-looking teenager, no better or worse than the rest of her sisters.

“Hello,” Grace called to us.

Jack Robertson pushed himself up on his elbow. “Yeh know I don’t talk to yeh when you’re alone. Where’s your little friend?”

“At the hotel,” said Grace.

“Asleep!” said Robertson.

“Stored,” said Grace.

“Asleep,” said Robertson, “and you shouldha stayed there, and Sam shouldha come with us.”

“His body’s in a box,” Grace said, “and his head’s in the chest of drawers. Well, one of his heads.”

“Jesus,” said Robertson, as though Grace had just confessed to a particularly grisly murder. I shivered myself. Grace, despite his name, was graceless, a man with a terrible temper and no talent for small talk, but Sammy — I feel dumb even saying this — was a panic. He wore a tweed cap and painted eyeglasses, like Bobby Clarke; he could do a great double take; he laughed like a bird. He chased after girls, and liked a drink now and then, and movies and nightclubs (or so he said), and I realize that I am talking about a couple of pounds of wood, but you never met him. Sammy was a star. It was a shame he had to work with such a dullard. Imagine what he could have been with the right partner!

“Listen to me, Professor,” Rocky said in my ear.

“Okay,” I said, though it was hard. Grace was talking to Jack Robertson in Sammy’s voice, and Robertson had hopped off the bar and coiled and hissed, “Now yeh’re just mocking him.” I wanted to see what would happen.

Rock kicked my calf. “First thing we do, is we work on your concentration.”

“Uh-huh.”

He grabbed the rim of my barstool and turned it. “Here I am.” He had a cigar in his hand, which he smoked in a series of short sudden puffs. Mostly it was a prop. He brought the cigar up, parked it a quarter of an inch from his lips, and said, “Listen: I’m Annie Sullivan, and you’re Helen Keller.”

Another night, I thought, I wouldn’t understand it, but tonight! No. Wait. I didn’t understand it. “Sorry?”

“You’re Helen Keller. We’re starting from scratch. I’m going to teach you everything I know, so the first thing to do is forget everything you know.”

“But, Rocky.” I elbowed the bar in an attempt to prop myself up. “I don’t want to be Helen Keller.”

“Neither did Helen Keller, but look how well that’s turning out.”