“If it’s about our little adventure in West Tulsa, I’d rather not discuss it. Why don’t we just wait and see if you remain as you are now, or if you relapse into craving . . . damn this tie, I can never get it right and Briscoe is utterly useless.”

Briscoe was his assistant, the fellow who mugged and distracted the audience when it needed distracting.

“Hold still,” I said. “You’re making a mess of that. Let me.”

I stood behind him, reached over his shoulders, and tied the tie. With the shakes gone from my hands, it was easy. Like my walk once the brain shot had worn off, they were Steady Eddie.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

“After my accident, when I could stand up and play for a couple of hours without falling down, I worked with a group called the Undertakers.” It hadn’t been much of a group. Any band where I was the best player wasn’t. “We wore frock coats, stovepipe hats, and string ties. The drummer and the bass player got into a fight over a girl and the group broke up, but I came out of it with a new skill.”

“Well . . . thank you. What did you want to ask me?”

“About the Portraits in Lightning gig. You only take pictures of women. It seems to me that you’re losing fifty percent of your business that way.”

He grinned his boyish grin, the one he’d worn when he was leading the games in the parsonage basement. “When I invented the portrait camera—which is actually a combined generator and projector, as I’m sure you know—I did attempt to do both men and women. This was at a little seaside amusement park in North Carolina called Joyland. Out of business now, but it was a lovely place, Jamie. I enjoyed it greatly. During my time on the midway—which was called Joyland Avenue—there was a Rogues’ Gallery next to Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion. It featured life-size cardboard figures with cutouts where the faces belonged. There was a pirate, a gangster with an automatic, a tough Jane with a tommygun, the Joker and Catwoman from the Batman comics. People would put their faces in and the park’s traveling photographers—Hollywood Girls, they were called—would snap their pictures.”

“That gave you the idea?”

“Yes. At the time I was styling myself Mr. Electrico—an homage to Ray Bradbury, but I doubt if any of the rubes knew it—and although I had invented a crude version of my current projector, it had never crossed my mind to feature it in the show. Mostly I used the Tesla coil and a spark generator called Jacob’s Ladder. I demonstrated a small Jacob’s Ladder to you kids when I was your minister, Jamie. I used chemicals to make the rising sparks change color. Do you remember?”

I did.

“The Rogues’ Gallery made me aware of the possibilities inherent in my projector, and I created Portraits in Lightning. Just another gaff, you’d say . . . but it also helped me to advance my studies, and still does. During my stint at Joyland, I used a backdrop featuring a man in expensive black tie as well as the beautiful girl in the ball gown. Some men took me up on it, but surprisingly few. I believe their shitkicker friends laughed at them when they saw them dressed to the nines like that. Women never laugh, because women love dressing to the nines. To the tens, if possible. And when they see the demonstration, they line up.”

“How long have you been gigging?”

He calculated, one eye squinted shut. Then he opened them both wide in an expression of surprise. “It’s almost fifteen years now.”

I shook my head, smiling. “You went from preaching to huckstering.”

As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized it was a mean thing to say, but the idea of my old minister turning tips still boggled my mind. He wasn’t offended, though. He just gave his perfectly knotted tie a final admiring look in the mirror, and tipped me a wink.

“No difference,” he said. “They’re both just a matter of convincing the rubes. Now please excuse me while I go and sell some lightning.”

He left the heroin on the little table in the middle of the Bounder. I glanced at it from time to time, even picked it up once, but I had no urge to use any. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand why I’d trashed so much of my life over it in the first place. All that crazy need seemed like a dream to me. I wondered if everyone felt that way when their compulsions passed. I didn’t know.

I still don’t.

 • • •

Briscoe lit out for the territories, as gazoonies so often do, and when I asked Jacobs if I could have the job, he agreed at once. There really wasn’t much to it, but it spared him the task of finding some local yokel to tote the camera on and offstage, hand him his tophat, and pretend to get electrocuted. He even suggested that I play some chords on my Gibson during the demonstrations. “Something suspenseful,” he instructed. “Something that will put it in the rubes’ heads that the girl might actually get fried.”

This was easy enough. Switching between A minor and E (the foundation chords of “House of the Rising Sun” and “The Springhill Mining Disaster,” if you’re interested) always suggests impending doom. I enjoyed it, although I thought that a big slow drumbeat would have added something.

“Don’t get too wedded to the job,” Charlie Jacobs advised me. “I intend to move on. When the fair closes down, attendance at Bell’s goes into the toilet.”

“Move on where?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve gotten used to traveling alone.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Just so you know.”

I already did. After the deaths of his wife and child, Charlie Jacobs was strictly a solo act.

The visits he made to his workshop grew shorter and shorter. He began bringing some equipment back and stowing it in the small trailer he’d tow behind the Bounder when he resumed his rambling. The amplifiers that weren’t amplifiers didn’t come; neither did two of the four long metal boxes. I got the idea he meant to start fresh, wherever he ended up. As if he’d gone as far down one road as he could, and meant to try another.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my own life, now drug-free (and limp-free; that, too), but traveling on with the King of High Voltage wasn’t it. I was grateful to him, but since I could no longer really recall the horrors of heroin addiction (any more, I suppose, than a woman who’s had a baby can recall the pain of childbirth), not as grateful as you might think. Also, he scared me. So did his secret electricity. He talked about it in extravagant terms—secret of the universe, path to ultimate knowledge—but he had no more idea of what it really was than a toddler has of a gun he finds in Daddy’s closet.

And, speaking of closets . . . I snooped, okay? And what I found was a photograph album filled with pictures of Patsy, Morrie, and the three of them together. The pages were well thumbed, and the binding was loose. It didn’t take Sam Spade to know he looked at those pictures a lot, but I never saw him do it. The album was a secret.

Like his electricity.

 • • •

In the early-morning hours of October third, shortly before the Tulsa State Fair shut up shop for another year, I suffered another aftereffect of the brain-blast Jacobs had given me. Jacobs was paying me for my services (quite a bit more than the services actually merited), and I had rented a room by the week about four blocks from the fairgrounds. It was clear he wanted to be alone, no matter how much he liked me (if he did like me), and I felt it was high time he got his own bed back.

I turned in at midnight, about an hour after we wrapped the last show of the evening, and went to sleep at once. I almost always did. With the dope out of my system, I slept well. Only that morning I woke up two hours later, in the weedy backyard of the rooming house. An icy rind of moon hung overhead. Beneath it stood Jamie Morton, naked save for one sock and with a piece of rubber tubing wrapped around his biceps. I have no idea where I got it, but above it, the blood vessels—any one of them perfect for shooting up—bulged. Below it, my forearm was white and cold and fast asleep.