This is a wonderful trick, a splendid effect. It is dangerous, too, the trick that killed my mentor. Fire flows forth like a horizontal column, a fallen pillar, and a single inward breath proves fatal. I kept it going as long as I could, the flames dancing a full foot in front of my face. As I had hoped, they were so awestruck by this display that when I stepped offstage between my first and second bows, they did not think to question my brief moment from their sight. They left, examining the real tin cup, nodding soberly, apologizing for their earlier suspicions. I stood aloof, relief flooding through me like the cool, clean air.
THE AFTERNOON was pretty, one of those blue midwestern days when the sky is so clear and so large that it nearly hurts to look at it. You feel your own insignificance, is what I mean. We had a few more hours before the final show, and I was mixing up a batch of Storaxine, the salve I used to keep from getting burned. I’d rub it all over my mouth and hands before a show, gargle some vinegar to set it, and I was ready, impervious to fire.
The formula was secret, naturally, but I did sell Storaxine on a limited basis for treating scalds and burns. After becoming a human volcano my sales were up, my supply just about depleted. While I waited for the water to boil I carved up Ivory soap and tossed it in. Now and then I paused to skim some fallen leaves off the top of my preparation, which was starting to foam, the water going opaque as the soap dissolved. I tossed in sugar, cup by cup, aware all the time that there was someone standing in the foliage on the far side of the creek. I waited some, and finally I said, “Eli, you left me in the lurch yesterday, deserted a friend when he truly needed your help. Now what do you have to say for yourself about it?”
The bushes rustled, and after a minute he came out, walking carefully along the river’s edge, placing his bare feet just so on the rocks. I caught his eyes, their fading blue, and thought of Jubilee.
“Well?” I said once he stood beside me.
“I thought they were going to run you out of town.”
“Well, they might have, Eli, except that I was so quick thinking.” I poured the liquid storax into the pot and stirred.
Eli squatted down on a stump nearby. He picked up a sharp stick and started drawing patterns in the soft earth. He wouldn’t look at me.
“Do you love her, then?” he asked at last.
The question took me by surprise. Love. What could I say to this boy? That most of the time love boiled down to another word for loss, or for getting what you wanted? I wanted Jubilee to meet me in my dressing room, to shed her camisoles like leaves. I wanted to touch that tender skin of hers, watch her eyes go from innocence to knowing. I’d have done it, too, in the trees beside the mirror, if Eli hadn’t followed me, then gone running to the preacher. I thought of the angry crowd the day before, of my own fear, rising like a burn in the back of my throat.
“Eli,” I said. “You still interested in being an assistant of mine?”
“You mean it?” he asked, looking up at me at last.
“Well, if you’re good enough,” I said. “Then yes. We’ll start with Brimstone on the Palm,” I went on. “When you get good at that, you can graduate up to Brimstone on the Tongue. That’s the real crowd pleaser. Here’s how it’s done, Eli. You watch close.”
I took three small round pieces of sulfur, looking an angry yellow against the white saucer, doused them with kerosene, and set them on fire. Then I tipped them into my right palm, which was slathered with Storaxine already. I held those burning bits of rock for nearly a minute, and all the time Eli watched me, wonder and apprehension mingled on his face.
“Okay,” I said, slipping the coals back into the saucer. “Your turn.”
He looked scared, but nonetheless he poured the burning brimstones into his hand. Good, I thought, seeing the pain hit his face, learn a lesson. I expected him to drop the coals right away, but though his hand shook and sweat ran down his cheeks, he cupped his fingers and held on to those bits of burning rock as if they were the most precious thing he owned.
“Drop them!” I said. “Eli! It’s a mistake!”
But he did not. I finally had to grab his wrist and jar the brimstones out, thrusting his hand into the cold water of the river. His palm was raw and red, blisters already rising on his skin. I applied Storaxine and bound his burns with clean cloths from my bag, studying his hands as I worked. For all their callouses, their nicks and scratches, Eli’s hands were smaller than my own, not yet finished with their growing.
“I tried,” he said after a while, his voice still tight with pain. “I wasn’t good enough.”
“Eli,” I said. “You did just fine. The fault was mine. I tricked you.”
He got quiet then, and I felt myself grow smaller, reduced from the Fire King to the mean mortal that I was. I saw that even angry, even disillusioned, Eli had believed in me till now.
“Why?” he asked.
“To teach you a lesson,” I said.
Now his eyes were a deep blue, steady on mine, like the edge of a flame. “Tell me how you did it, then.”
“I do not owe you anything,” I said. But his hand seemed small beneath the bandage, and his fingernails were dirty. A boy’s hand, this was. I thought of Jubilee, her stillness, her sudden kiss, and wondered what she’d be doing now, just how she’d feel, if Eli hadn’t chased her off. I thought of her soft skin, the way her hands had rested on my shoulders, and remorse twisted through my heart like a dark curl of smoke. I started talking. I lined up the ingredients for Storaxine and explained the process. I demonstrated Brimstone on the Palm, and Brimstone on the Tongue. I gave away the cherished secrets of a Fire King.
“You’ll travel with me now,” I said, surprised at the relief I felt, unburdened of my secrets. “You’ll work for me, as long as you like.”
But Eli didn’t thank me, or even speak. He just stood up and walked away, leaving me standing in the silence, in a shaft of light, the vat of Storaxine steaming at my back.
IT’S EASY TO SAY, in retrospect, that I should have known. That Eli with his envy and desires was not a force to trust. But though I was shaken by the incident, though I lingered over the bottling of my Storaxine until just before the final show, I did not foresee the consequences. The night was much as usual, clear and windy, alive with lights and music, the bright chatter of hawkers, the murmurs of the crowd. Phillipa, luminous in her butterfly costume, was coming from her dressing room just as I drew near. When I stepped aside to let her pass, she raised her painted eyebrows high.
“Somebody,” she said, “thinks you really are the Fire King.” Then she reached into her bodice and handed me a folded note.
Wait for me, it said. Tonight. I am coming to your show. And after. I am coming. Jubilee.
The handwriting was loopy, childish. I went into my dressing room and sat down, imagining her spelling the words out carefully, tearing away the strips of paper that held her small mistakes. I imagined her getting dressed, the clean petticoats and camisoles and undergarments, soft cotton brushing every surface of her skin. I had ruined such girls before and never cared. I had filled them full of fire and left them longing, I’d been gone before light flared on the horizon, and I had not looked back, not once. No reason, none at all, why Jubilee was different. A country girl with pretty eyes, who would fall all the harder because she thought she had been saved. I could take her anywhere and she would have me. In my dressing room, in the copse of trees, waist high in the river. That preacher was nothing to her now. But instead of feeling satisfied, I heard young Eli asking, Do you love her? And I thought of her sweet smell, the softness of her skin, and wondered.
Outside, the opening theme song rose above the voices of the hawkers and the crowds, and I knew that Ogleby was in the center of the tent, the audience agape as the python and the boa constrictor wound themselves around him. My own act would not start for another hour, and on an impulse I made my way inside the tent, slipping beneath the canvas near the back. I climbed high into the bleachers and stood on the uppermost seat, sc
anning the crowd for a glimpse of Jubilee.
I found her easily. She was sitting directly across the ring, on the second bleacher from the top, wearing the blue dress she’d been saved in and a matching hat, her feet resting on a small valise. Everything she owned was in that case, I knew. It made my heart constrict, thinking of her skin, so soft, so hidden, thinking of Eli’s burns, the way his eyes had changed when he learned that I had tricked him. Like the rest of the crowd, Jubilee was staring down at Ogleby, but unlike them, she wasn’t really watching. Her expression was serious, her thoughts turned inward, preoccupied with the magnitude of what she was about to do. I reached into my pocket, fingering her note.
Ogleby finished, took his bows, and I sat down. Next would be Phillipa and the other butterflies, the sequence of the acts so familiar that I paid no attention. My thoughts were on Jubilee, the scent of warm canvas reminding me of her sweet smell, of her wrists beneath my fingers as I helped her with the mirror.
Yet something was amiss. The music that began was not for the butterflies, after all, but for me. For the Fire King. I felt a surge of confusion, because these notes meant one thing and one thing only: that I should be standing ready in my cape, heart thrilling, curtain rising, about to make my entrance. I felt a nightmare panic as a flaming hoop, my hoop, descended from the ceiling.
The curtain lifted then, slowly it seemed, and a new Fire King bounded over the sawdust and leaped through the flaming hoop, my silk robes nearly catching fire, billowing and pooling at his ankles as he landed. He bowed, and the crowd laughed, thinking he was a parody. I knew better; I saw the determination on his face. His hand was still bandaged, making him clumsy, but nonetheless Eli managed to light the coals, to pick up a fork and put the burning embers in his mouth. His hands were trembling and some of the coals slipped off into the ring. Sawdust flared, and Eli interrupted his act to stomp out the little flames. The audience laughed again. Except for Jubilee, who was leaning forward with a frown of concentration.
Normally, people do not laugh at a Fire King. They gasp, they hold their breath, they sigh in relief, but they do not laugh. Thus, as I pushed my way downward, each roar of those around me let me know things were progressing badly, even when I could not see him. I was furious at Eli, at his audacity, his mockery, but more than that, I was afraid. I had seen the bottles of kerosene lined up carelessly beneath the table. I knew better than anyone how quickly sawdust could ignite, how fast a tent like this could disappear in flames.
The crowd around me laughed again. People jostled, standing on their toes. And then softly at first, but then more forcefully, I felt a pressure, as if everyone around me had taken a deep breath at once. I was standing on the ground now and could not see the ring for the press of people, but I felt the panic rising, felt the pressure as people turned to flee. The music was still playing. I pushed hard and broke through into the center ring. The sawdust on the floor had all caught fire, was shimmering in the heat like a field of grass. Eli was standing on the far side of the flames, trying to stamp them down with his feet, my silk cape discarded, already curling at the edges, the smell of burning silk pungent in the air.
Fire gone wild is like a seeking hand, grasping at the air in search of something dry. These flames moved quickly, pulling themselves up the canvas walls, crackling and hissing, catching on the dry kindling of the bleachers. Waves of heat rose off the flames, shimmering, and the thick black edges of the smoke drifted high, dissipating into hazy gray. I searched for Jubilee, but I could not see her. Within a few moments there was fire on every side, and the light grew eerie, flickering and bright, the air so hot my lungs went dry with every little panting breath I took. People swirled around me in the smoke, faces surfaced, disappeared, and the tent was filled with a determined silence as people pushed and struggled for an exit. I watched the flames climb high, leap and flare, turning green-edged as they consumed the canvas, bluer as they fed on wood.
Jubilee. Here to meet me. I wondered if the flames frightened or compelled her now, if she’d have the courage to push past them to safety, or if they’d hold her still and mesmerized, as I had done. I pushed against a surge of the crowd to try to find her, but I got knocked off my feet, trampled and kicked until I was pushed into a narrow stream of fire. My palms hit the flames and pain shot up my arms. I smelled the sickening scent of burning flesh. Remembering my mentor’s words, I curled myself into a ball and rolled. In this way I escaped the flames, reaching the sawdust on the perimeter, which had already burned to ash. I thought of Eli as I started crawling, my hands burning on the still-hot earth, and like him I kept going despite the pain. Behind me, through veils of fire, I saw the surging shadows of the crowd, but I did not stop, not until I felt the air change suddenly, not until the grass grew damp and cold beneath my hands, not until I was a dozen yards from danger.
The tent burned for nearly two more hours, eating through the edges first, then flaring up, fluttering like a burning scarf, before it settled to the ground. A great crowd had gathered to watch this happen, and after a while I stood and joined them, my own hands throbbing as I watched them staring at the flames. There was a beauty to this fire, to all fire, a strange pleasure to be taken in danger and destruction. I was a Fire King and this pleasure was the source of all my power, but on that night I lost forever my taste for conflagration.
Seventy-nine people perished, and Jubilee’s name was listed among the dead. Eli had escaped, I heard, though no one could find him. All that night, as my hands blistered and swelled, awash in waves of heat, I thought of her, of Eli, and the life that I had lost. Ended now, and as the preacher had foretold: in fire.
THE FLAMES ARE IRRESISTIBLE to those who see them, and if I found my destiny in conflagration, then it was, finally, Eli’s fate to succumb to the preacher’s missionary fever. The disaster he called forth must have shaped him absolutely, for many years later he came to the town where I was living, traveling with his own revival tent and an entourage of devotees. His face jumped out at me from a poster hung up on the pole outside my shop. I was by then a blacksmith, a trade where skill with fire is useful and delicate sensation in the hands is not essential. I feel things, certainly, their dull outlines, their density and weight. But I could not tell a feather from a razor on my palm, and even after all these years the slightest heat—a shaft of sun, the swell of living flesh—will radiate a deep aching in my hands.
The people of this town conjecture. I dropped hints, early on, and now they attribute my reticence, my strange scars, to my having fallen from a train on which I was a fireman. No doubt many of them believe that I was, and am, a drunk. No matter. They leave me alone. My life is simple, on the surface good, but for these last many years I have lived it around the image of Jubilee, sitting high up in the bleachers, her feet balanced on her old valise.
I went to the revival, though I had not set foot at a religious service since I traveled with the preacher. I heard the whispers, felt the looks of surprise as I walked into that tent, the smell of hot canvas and too many sweating bodies raising the memories of my dead life. Two women got onstage and swore they had been crippled once, and healed by Father Eli. A ringer in the audience began to speak in tongues. I saw the crowd swaying, saw how deeply they wanted to believe. By the time Eli came onstage he had them hooked and thrashing, desperate to rise up and let the air of their ordinary lives burn them clean.
He was older, of course, heavier, and he had grown some too. His voice had changed as well, thickened and roughened, as if the smoke he must have inhaled that night had seared his vocal chords. But he talked better than the preacher ever had, better than I had myself, filling the revival tent with a fervent cadence. He’d grown rich with the things of this world; his clothes were elegant, beautifully cut. I kept one hand securely on my wallet, but the other wandered to my chest, where the heat of my own flesh radiated an aching in my smooth palm. I thought of Jubilee, her skin warm beneath this same hand as we stood together by the mirror. Eli stood up on the stage,
his face so like hers, his eyes so like the blue of a fading sky, that my throat went dry with memory, with desire.
Eli talked on. He got the crowd around me in a fervor. When he spoke of paradise, I held my peace. When he got going on sin and then redemption, it got a little harder. But when he started quoting Revelations, I stood up. I’d heard it all so many times, the beast, the burning lakes of fire. I heard his voice, and the voice of the preacher before him, and I could contain myself no longer.
“Eli,” I called out, stepping into the aisle. “Eli, speak louder now, for surely you know everything there is to know about the brimstone and the fire.”
He stopped then and looked straight at me. His hands were raised in benediction and I saw the scars I had given him. Slowly, his arms fell. A silence had descended on the audience. I felt the pressure of their eyes. And I waited, just as they did, to see what Eli would do next.
To my surprise, he merely smiled. And as he did so his eyes left mine and moved to the edge of the stage, where a little group of his followers—the gospel singers, the healed—stood gathered. She was in the midst of them, still unaware of the commotion I had caused, laughing up at a tall, bearded man who, just moments earlier, had claimed his sight had been restored. The child on her hip was patting her face, and she reached without looking to catch the little hand, press it with a kiss.