in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was
where’d he’d met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they
could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but
nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a
trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just
how it was all donùwhen all the time it was real. They made a good
living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them
together every day.
They’d been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever
after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more
than they loved Jim—or ever got more love given back to them.
They were so close. . . it was impossible to think of them ever being
apart.”
Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.
Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.
They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and
came back.
For a while they kited overhead.
Those dark, jagged forms against the seared sky composed an image that
might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he’d had a
passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his
poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.
The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing,
but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than
she had been by the eerie sound of them.
“And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted
in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new
position.
For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his
stroke-altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on
the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it
back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he
could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he
could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It
was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”
You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.
“They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck
to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so
Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know,
astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his
levitations eventually, but they just hadn’t figured out how to do it
yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck
down in Atlanta. . .
and that was the end of everything.”
Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark
beginning of another.
She realized why the absence of the birds’ screams was more disturbing
than the sound itself The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking
fuse as it burned down toward an explosive charge. As long as she could
hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable.
“And that’s why I figure Jim thought he should’ve been able to save
them,” Henry said. “Because he could do those little things with his
mind, float and move things, he thought he should’ve been able maybe to
jam the bullets in that crazy man’s gun, freeze the trigger, lock the
safety in place, something, something. . .”
“Could he have done that?”
“Yeah, maybe. But he was just a scared little boy. To do those things
with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate.
No time to concentrate when the bullets started flying that day.”
Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuduchuda. . .
“So when we brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a
word or two now and then. Wouldn’t meet your eyes. Something died in
him when Jamie and Cara died, and we could never bring it back again, no
matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried. His power died,