“Like children who never grow up,” I said.
“ ‘The indifferent children of the earth.’ ” She let her sentence linger in the air. I fixed my eye upon a single star, hoping to sense the earth or see the heavens move. This trick of staring and drifting with the sky has cured my insomnia many times over the years, but not that night. Those stars were fixed and this globe creaked as if stuck in its rotation. Eyes lifted, chin pointing to the moon, Speck considered the night, though I had no idea what she was thinking.
“Was he my father, Speck?”
“I cannot tell you. Let go of the past, Aniday. It’s like holding dandelions to the wind. Wait for the right moment, and the seeds will scatter away.” She looked at me. “You should rest.”
“I can’t. My mind is filled with noises.”
She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Listen.”
Nothing stirred. Her presence, my own. “I can’t hear a thing.”
But she could hear a distant sound, and her gaze turned inward, as if transported to its source.
? CHAPTER 15 ?
Moving back home from college brought a kind of stupor to my daily life, and my nights became a waking dread. If I wasn’t pounding out yet another imitation on the piano, I was behind the bar, tending to the usual crowd with demons of their own. I had fallen into a routine at Oscar’s when the strangest of them all arrived and ordered a shot of whiskey. He slid the glass against the rail and stared at it. I went on to the next customer, poured a beer, sliced a lemon, and came back to the guy, and the drink was sitting undisturbed. He was a pixy fellow, clean, sober, in a cheap suit and tie, and as far as I could tell, he hadn’t lifted his hands from his lap.
“What’s the matter, mister? You haven’t touched your drink.”
“Would you give it to me on the house if I can make that glass move without touching it?”
“What do you mean, ‘move’? How far?”
“How far would it have to move for you to believe?”
“Not far.” I was hooked. “Move it at all, and you have a deal.”
He reached out his right hand to shake on it, and beneath him, the glass started sliding slowly down the bar until it came to a halt about five inches to his left. “A magician never reveals the secret to the trick. Tom McInnes.”
“Henry Day,” I said. “A lot of guys come in here with all sorts of tricks, but that’s the best I ever saw.”
“I’ll pay for this,” McInnes said, putting a dollar on the bar. “But you owe me another. In a fresh glass, if you please, Mr. Day.”
He gulped the second shot and pulled the original glass back in front of him. Over the next several hours, he suckered four people with that same trick. Yet he never touched the first glass of whiskey. He drank for free all night. Around eleven, McInnes stood up to go home, leaving the shot on the bar.
“Hey, Mac, your drink,” I called after him.
“Never touch the stuff,” he said, slipping into a raincoat. “And I highly advise you not to drink it, either.”
I lifted the glass to my nose for a smell.
“Leaded.” He held up a small magnet he had concealed in his left hand. “But you knew that, right?”
Swirling the glass in my hand, I could now see the iron filings at the bottom.
“Part of my study of mankind,” he said, “and our willingness to believe in what cannot be seen.”
McInnes became a regular at Oscar’s, coming in four or five times a week over the next few years, curiously intent on fooling the patrons with new tricks or puzzles. Sometimes a riddle or complicated math game involving picking a number, doubling it, adding seven, subtracting one’s age and so forth, until the victim was right back where he’d started. Or a game involving matches, a deck of cards, a sleight of hand. The drinks he won were of small consequence, for his pleasure resulted from the gullibility of his neighbors. And he was mysterious in other ways. On those nights The Coverboys performed, McInnes sat close to the door. Sometimes between sets he’d come up to chat with the boys, and he hit it off with Jimmy Cummings, of all people, a fine example of the artless thinker. But if we played the wrong song, McInnes could be guaranteed to vanish. When we started covering The Beatles in ’63 or ’64, he would walk out each time at the opening bars of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” Like a lot of drunks, McInnes became more himself after he’d had a few. He never acted soused. Not more loquacious or morose, merely more relaxed in his skin, and sharper around the edges. And he could consume mass quantities of alcohol at a sitting, more than anyone I have ever known. Oscar asked him one night about his strange capacity for drink.
“It’s a matter of mind over matter. A cheap trick hinged upon a small secret.”
“And what might that be?”
“I don’t honestly know. It’s a gift, really, and at the same time a curse. But I’ll tell you, in order to drink so much, there has to be something behind the thirst.”