Runaway

“Maybe you were thinking of a drink?”
    Nancy said quickly that she’d done enough drinking on the boat to last her for a while.
    “I’ve done enough to last me my whole life,” said Ollie. “I’ve been off it for fifteen years. Fifteen years, nine months, to be exact. You always know an old drunk when he counts the months.”
    During the period of the experiments, the parapsychologists, he and Tessa had made a few friends. They got to know people who made a living from their abilities. Not in the interests of so-called science but by what they called fortune-telling, or mind reading, or telepathy, or psychic entertainment. Some people settled down in a good location, operating out of a house or a storefront, and stayed for years. Those were the ones who went in for giving personal advice, predicting the future, doing astrology, and some sorts of healing. Others put on public performances. That might mean hitching up with Chautauqualike shows made up of lectures and readings and scenes from Shakespeare and somebody singing opera and slides of travels (Education not Sensation), all the way down the ladder to the cut-rate carnivals that mixed in bits of burlesque and hypnotism and some near-naked woman wrapped up in snakes. Naturally Ollie and Tessa liked to think of themselves as belonging to the first category. Education not sensation was indeed what they had in mind. But there too the timing was not lucky. That higher-class sort of thing was almost done for. You could listen to music and get a certain amount of education on the radio, and people had seen all the travelogues they needed to see at the church hall.
    The only way to make any money that they discovered was to go with the travelling shows, to operate in town halls or at fall fairs. They shared the stage with the hypnotists and snake ladies and dirty monologuists and strippers in feathers. That sort of thing, too, was winding down, but the war coming along gave it an odd sort of boost. Its life was artificially prolonged for a while when gas rationing stopped people from getting to the city nightclubs or the big movie houses. And television had not yet arrived to entertain them with magic stunts while they sat on their couches at home. The early fifties, Ed Sullivan, et cetera— that really was the end.
    Nevertheless there were good crowds for a time, full houses—Ollie enjoyed himself sometimes, warming up the audience with an earnest but intriguing little lecture. And soon he had become part of the act. They had had to work out something a little more exciting, with more drama or suspense to it, than what Tessa had been doing alone. And there was another factor to be considered. She stood up to it well, as far as her nerves and physical endurance went, but her powers, whatever they were, didn’t prove so reliable. She started to flounder. She had to concentrate as she never had done before, and it often didn’t work. The headaches persisted.
    What most people suspect is true. Such performances are full of tricks. Full of fakery, full of deception. Sometimes that’s all it is. But what people—most people—hope for is occasionally also true. They hope that it’s not all fake. And it’s because performers like Tessa, who are really honorable, know about this hope and understand it—who could understand it better?— that they can begin to use certain tricks and routines, guaranteed to get the right results. Because every night, every night, you have to get those results.
    Sometimes the means are crude, obvious as the false partition in the box of the lady who is sawed in half. A hidden mike. More likely a code is used, worked out between the person onstage and the partner on the floor. These codes can be an art in themselves. They are secret, nothing written down.
    Nancy asked if his code, his and Tessa’s, was an art in itself?
    “It had a range,” he said, his face brightening. “It had nuance.”
    Then he said, “Actually we could be pretty hokey, too. I had a black cloak I wore—”
    “Ollie. Really. A black cloak?”
    “Absolutely. A black cloak. And I’d get a volunteer and take off the cloak and wrap it around him or her, after Tessa had been blindfolded—somebody from the audience did that, made sure it was a proper blindfold—and I’d call out to her, ‘Who have I got in the cloak?’ Or ‘Who is the person in the cloak?’ Or I’d say ‘coat.’ Or ‘black cloth.’ Or, ‘What have I got?’ Or ‘Who do you