would be fooled by the dummy.
The hard part was going to be getting out of the house without drawing
her attention. He took a few dollar bills from his thirty-two-dollar
kitty and tucked the money into a pocket of his jeans. He also
pocketed one of the carnival passes and stuck the other one under the
glassjar bank that stood on his desk. He carefully opened his bedroom
door, looked both ways along the upstairs hall, stepped out of the
room, and closed the door behind him. He crept to the stairs and began
the long, tense journey down toward the first floor.
Amy, Liz, Buzz, and Richie stopped in front of a sideshow that
advertised a magician called Marco the Magnificent. The come-on was a
large poster that showed a screaming woman being decapitated by a
guillotine, while a grinning magician stood with his hand on the
executioner’s lever.
“I love magicians,” Amy said.
“I love anyone I can get my hands on,” Liz said, giggling.
My Uncle Arnold used to be a stage magician,” Richie said, pushing his
glasses up on his nose to take a closer look at Marco’s lurid poster.
“Did he make stuff disappear and everythingn Buzz asked.
Liz said, “He was so bad that he made audiences disappear.”
Amy was giddy from the spiced-up pot that she had smoked, and Liz’s
little joke seemed hysterically funny. She laughed, and her laughter
infected the others.
“No, now, really, honestly,” Buzz said when they finally got control of
themselves. “Did your Uncle Arnold make his living that way? It
wasn’t just a hobby or something” “No hobby,” Richie said. “Uncle
Arnold was the real thing. He called himself the Amazing Arnoldo. But
I guess he didn’t make much of a living at it, and he got to hate it
after a while. He’s been selling insurance for the past twenty years.”
“I think being a magician would be neat,” Amy said. “Why did your
uncle hate it?” “Well,” Richie said, “every successful magician has to
have a trick that’s all his own, a special illusion that makes him
stand out in a crowd of other magicians. Uncle Arnold had this gimmick
where he made twelve white doves appear, one after the other, out of
thin air, in bursts of flame.
The audience would applaud politely when the first dove appeared, and
then they’d gasp when the second and third ones popped up, and by the
time half a dozen birds had materialized, the audience was cheering.
When the entire dozen had been brought out of their hiding places in my
uncle’s clothes, each presented in a little puff of fire, you can
imagine the ovation the audience gave him.” “I don’t understand,” Buzz
said, frowning.
‘eah,” Amy said. “If your uncle was so great, why’d he quit and start
selling insurance?” “Sometimes,” Richie said, “not often, but about
once in every thirty or forty performances, one of the doves would
catch fire and burn up alive, right there on stage. It hummed out the
audience, and they booed Uncle Arnold.”
Liz laughed, and Amy laughed, too, and Liz did an imitation of a
burning dove trying to slap the flames off its wings, and Amy knew that
it wasn’t really funny, knew that it was a horrible thing to happen to
the poor birds, and she knew she shouldn’t laugh, but she couldn’t help
herself, because it seemed like the most hilarious story she had ever
heard.
“It wasn’t very funny to Uncle Arnold,” Richie said between whoops of
laughter. aLike I said, it didn’t happen often, but he never knew when
it was going to happen, so he was always tense. The tension gave him
an ulcer. And even when the birds didn’t burn up, they shit in his
suit pockets.”
They all laughed again, with renewed vigor, holding onto each other.
People passing them on the midway gave them strange looks, which only
made them laugh even harder.
Richie treated everyone to tickets for Marco’s next show.
The ground inside the magician’s tent was covered with sawdust, and the
air was musty. Brightly colored plastic flags and posters of Marco
decorated the dimly lighted, canvas-walled space.