pricking the garter

Al Shaw brings his magic supplies back from California, locked up in their stenciled wooden trunks — the better part of his belongings are locked up in a storage unit in Santa Barbara, wrapped up in tarps, but there are some things he can’t bring himself to leave behind. Some of this stuff’s coming back home too, bits and pieces of paraphernalia he picked up as a kid. There’s a deck of cards Al bought down at the liquor store that still has the paper slip in the box advertising war bonds — he’d sat up late one night marking each one by hand and gotten a hiding when dad spotted the beam of his Eveready flashlight spilling out under the bedroom door. Fanning powder, his very first catalog purchase, and the catalog of conjuring sundries he’d found it in — flashpaper, trick coins, all small-timer stuff made dingy with time and storage. All of your junk, mom called it — from a woman who’d never thrown away a scrap of paper or a torn-off shirt button in her life, all this junk of yours. She’s dead now and Al can do what he likes.

He can’t bring himself to carry them down to the basement.

The boiler needs replacing and in the winter the pipes all freeze. The garage is packed with newspapers still and he’ll need to arrange to have them hauled away; whoever did the plasterwork in the basement did a lousy job, and probably overcharged mom for it too. The basement’s only half-finished and the pipes need to be insulated. It’s cold at night. He barely sleeps.

When he collects the mail, there’s a sheaf of bills and the yellow paper envelope that heralds the quarterly issue of The Scarlet Imp — six mimeographed sheets of industry news and smudgy diagrams, letters to the editor and the familiar grid of personal advertisements for mail-order catalogs and strangers in search of company. The ad he’d placed for Abracadabra is right where he paid for it to be, upper left-hand corner. They got the new telephone number right, so that’s not why no one is calling — he checks it digit by digit, running his thumbnail along the line. Then something else catches his eye in the next column over, a thumbnail-sized illustration of a grinning devil.

There’s an estate sale out in Boulder; the estate of the Great Ross is offering up his equipment for sale and auction. In the old days, they’d put it in the industry papers. It is reported that Mr. A.J. Shaw has purchased the paraphernalia of the great so-and-so, who died recently in Denver. He’s seen this routine before, he’s seen these tricks, only the magician in question hadn’t been the Great Ross then. He’d been using some other name, but Al hadn’t known that, hadn’t known that stage names were a thing you could put on and take off again at the end of the night. It’s like kismet. All of this is happening for his benefit.

The magician must have lived and died in an impossibly ugly Tudor Revival heap — the style had a vogue back in the Jazz Age but there can’t have been much money put back into this particular property since. There’s a couple of young boys playing basketball in the driveway of the next house over; Al looks away as he passes. He’s leaving all that behind him in California.

Whoever’s running the sale doesn’t have much flair for the supernatural — the first floor is taken up with card tables strewn with porcelain dishes and a half-dozen sets of flatware in their gilded leather cases, all the usual stuff nobody wants and nobody wants to pay for. He’s starting to think he’s gotten here too late, passing from room to room, until he catches out of the corner of his eye an open door and a narrow flight of stairs leading downward.

The pitch of the staircase is impossibly steep and he still has to stoop to keep from bumping his head — Al scents the air, smells mildew, and grimaces.

It’s a crying shame, leaving these things all crated up down here — there are index cards stapled to each box stating their contents but the curt captions pique curiosity more than they satisfy it. There’s a stack of framed lithographs for long-dead entertainers, their satanic reds and midnight blacks all as vibrant as the day they were printed, but the paper sign perched on top says Sold and Al isn’t about to hazard a better offer.

Several objects have been plucked from storage for special display — three silk hats, a banker’s box cluttered with tarnished metal hoops and triangles, and a seance cabinet with its doors still crisply locked. A pair of stuffed doves, an old box of Christmas ornaments nobody wanted, and all the unimpressive junk a man leaves behind when he dies. There’s nothing worse than a carpeted basement floor, and Al is itching to tear it all up.

There’s an ordinary filing cabinet in the mix, drawers full of old receipts and typewritten packets, and he’s about ready to settle for the linking hoops (no such thing as too many) when he sees it and his heart stops — there at the bottom of a metal drawer, a cardboard box full of sheeted wax paper, nestled atop its ragged lid. It’s a familiar face, and all at once, his throat feels tight. His mouth is suddenly dry.

Al had been a boy then, escaping to the picture house when Max wasn’t old enough yet to tag along — there’d been dozens of them then, cheap little movie theaters nestled in their disproportionately grand exteriors, and a kid could have their pick of the batch. There were detective pictures at the Victory, Dr. Jekyll and the Wolfman down at the Aladdin, and deep into October, you could see a real magician conjure skeletons and rattle spirit cabinets. Spooks, ghosts, shivers, shudders, thrills — don’t be a sissy! — someone might be hypnotized, tied up and struggling, sawn in half. Al liked the printed posters, all the skulls and chains and dripping daggers; he liked the implicit challenge and the frisson of risk. It felt better, being scared on purpose, and it gave him something to think about.

It’s funny how some smells bring you right back again — cheap wine, Vaseline — but the smell of autumn in those years is wet wool theater seats, popcorn and wax paper. He’d been a ghost in the audience once, part of the midnight show — wide-eyed peering down from the balcony with phosphorescent paint smarting on his cheeks. No more the genial men behind the curtain who’d given him a pack of cigarettes and painted him into a junior ghoul, who had told him where to sit and when to stand, men who’d shown him the luminous pinprick-marks of tape to navigate the stairs by in the blackout. Instead, there was a master magician in a black suit with tails, and beautiful girls with hardly anything on, and a walking skeleton.

A dozen cheap portable tricks and then the power goes out. But it’s not the show he remembers best — he must have seen two dozen of them over the years, each cheaper and more vulgar than the last — but before, being singled out and led up the steps to a space he never knew existed until that night. The narrow corridor behind the balcony had had the thick, close atmosphere of grown-up things, hair oil and pipe tobacco and stale adult bodies — it made Al feel funny, sort of small, there like a conspirator in a place he had no right to be. There were other boys, each of them chosen just as he was, and still, it was like none of them ever existed. It felt like being the only one.

During the blackout, watching the specters twisting like flags in the dark air, he’d smiled to be among them. Instead of stripping away the mystery from the whole thing it only heightened the fascination — he knew how to do that now, he knew how the trick was achieved, he’d been let in on the secret world of adults. And when the magician was gone and a grinning devil took his place, the audience gasped and squealed and shivered, and Albert felt something electric shoot through him. He’d seen it and known — it had felt like mortal fear. It had felt indistinguishable from falling in love.

The devil mask is worse for wear after thirty years — turning it over in his hands the mechanism of attachment is clear, the sticky pegs that held both grin and scowl in place, and the grimy surface is pockmarked. Maybe it’s not the same mask at all, but what are the odds? It’s not like he remembered it, but maybe that’s just part of getting older — seeing things up close, seeing the seams in them. He’s the showman now, and not the audience.

He doesn’t even pay for it. He means to, it isn’t as if he doesn’t have the money, but it’s like it just slips his mind — leaving all the other tricks and ephemera behind, all the other visitors with their paper shopping bags, and all he’s thinking about is the old North Denver Orpheum in the fall of 1941, the smell of pipe tobacco and phosphorescent paint. He carries it with him back to the van like he’s in a daze, like something else has taken control of his legs and is making him walk. It feels right to do it. Someone should have stopped him.

He brings the box home and carries it down to the cellar with the rest of his things — the unsent catalogs and the boxes of yellow envelopes printed with the Abracadabra name, unopened. It’s like planting a seed in the ground, like a hook to hang all his troubled desires on. That night, Al Shaw dreams.