Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham Page A

for?” She turned it out, then saw the book. “Lord’s sake, kid, ain’t you been to bed at all?”
    Stan rubbed his eyes and stood up. “Ask me a number. Any number up to a hundred.”
    “Fifty-five.”
    “Will my mother-in-law always live with us?”
    Zeena sat down beside him and ran her fingers through his hair. “You know what I think, kid? I think you’re a mind reader.”
    The carny turned south and the pines began to line sandy roads. Cicadas drummed the late summer air and the crowds of white people were gaunter, their faces filled with desolation, their lips often stained with snuff.
    Everywhere the shining, dark faces of the South’s other nation caught the highlights from the sun. They stood in quiet wonder, watching the carny put up in the smoky morning light. In the Ten-in-One they stood always on the fringe of the crowd, an invisible cordon holding them in place. When one of the whites turned away sharply and jostled them the words “Scuse me,” fell from them like pennies balanced on their shoulders.
    Stan had never been this far south and something in the air made him uneasy. This was dark and bloody land where hidden war traveled like a million earthworms under the sod.
    The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.
    The carny changed its tempo. The outside talkers spoke more slowly.
    Zeena cut the price of her horoscopes to a dime each but sold “John the Conqueror Root” along with them for fifteen cents. This was a dried mass of twisting roots which was supposed to attract good fortune when carried in a bag around the neck. Zeena got them by the gross from an occult mail-order house in Chicago.
    Stan’s pitch of the magic books took a sudden drop and Zeena knew the answer. “These folks down here don’t know nothing about sleight-of-hand, honey. Half of ’em figure you’re doing real magic. Well, you got to have something superstitious to pitch.”
    Stan ordered a gross of paper-backed books, “One Thousand and One Dreams Interpreted.” He threw in as a free gift a brass lucky coin stamped with the Seal of Love from the Seventh Book of Moses, said to attract the love of others and lead to the confusion of enemies. His pitch picked up in fine style. He learned to roll three of the lucky coins over his fingers at once. The tumbling, glittering cascade of metal seemed to fascinate the marks, and the dream books went fast.
    He had learned the verbal code for questions not a day too soon, for the people couldn’t write or were too shy to try.
    “
Will
you
kindly
answer this lady’s question
at once?
” Stan had cued the question, “Is my daughter all right?”
    Zeena’s voice had taken on a deeper southern twang. “Well, now, I get the impression that the lady is worried about someone near and dear to her, someone she hasn’t heard from in a long time, am I right? Strikes me it’s a young lady— It’s your daughter you’re thinking of, isn’t it? Of course. And you want to know if she’s well and happy and if you’ll see her again soon. Well, I believe you will get some news of her through a third person before the month is out.…”
    There was one question that came up so often that Stan worked out a silent signal for it. He would simply jerk his head in Zeena’s direction. The first time he used it the question had come to him from a man—massive and loose-jointed with clear eyes smoldering in a handsome ebony face. “Am I ever going to make a trip?”
    Zeena picked it up. “Man over there is wondering about something that’s