Like it had never been there. He decided that this was a power that he had to be careful with. It was too important to use as a trick. He wouldn’t use it at all. But then a thought began to come on him. He started to wonder if it would work on a person. He’d never got along with his wife. She was a fine woman, but she had a sharp tongue, as the wives of magicians are said to have. She was on him night and day. Even with the new power he was still not bringing any income into the family circle. His wife began to nag him to use the power in his act. He would become the best known magician around, and maybe the richest. He pointed out that not being able to bring back what you made disappear cut into the value of the trick. That didn’t matter to his wife. She went right on picking at him. Plenty of folks, she said, want to get rid of things. Think about all that trash, those busted wagons and such and old barrels you see piled up in people’s yards. You want me to be a garbage collector? I want you to collect a few dollars, she said. Well, finally he decided that he would use the trick one more time. He’d use it to get rid of his wife.
Albert guffawed.
Yes, thass right, the old man said, bending toward his listeners. He licked his narrow black lips. As his wife sat sleeping in her porch rocker one Sunday afternoon he took out his cloth, so they said, and with his daughter and his daughter’s new fyce pup watching, he waved it over his wife. The old man paused. Could you get me another lemon drink there, Sally? he asked the proprietress. And sat back in his chair.
Damnation, Sterling said, what happened? Did she disappear?
Naw.
It didn’t work?
Oh, it worked.
But she didn’t vanish?
Naw.
Albert guffawed as Sterling sputtered. He half-raised a fist in mock attack. You rascal.
It’s a true story, said the old man, smiling behind white store teeth.
There were other stories. A man in khaki clothes, juggling boxes of 20 Mule Team Borax, joined them and told a story of his uncle who walked from California to Alabama, traveling through the desert for hundreds of miles carrying water in two army canteens. He said his uncle, Uncle Dorrit, told him that one night the stars filled the sky so thick they looked like they were poured out of a bucket. They formed themselves as he lay watching them. Took shapes, like clouds on a summer day. They made shapes of houses and horses and absent relatives and the shape of a huge angel right at the top of the sky. The day after this happened his uncle came on a donkey walking loose in the scrub and he rode this donkey through New Mexico and across Texas through the byways and little hamlets and across Louisiana, through Mississippi into Alabama and all the way to his home on the Jemeson farm out from Dothan.
I thought you said he walked, Delvin said.
I did, but I misremembered. He only walked part of the way.
The man in the bathrobe, Albert, told a story of a two-headed child who strangled one of the heads so he could have the whole body to himself.
