When I was a child there wasn’t much organised entertainment. Our small town had no picture theatre, and the local radio station played nothing to interest a young person. Televisions were rare, and there were certainly no computers or cellphones. We spent most of our time outdoors, building treehouses and forts, or begging the butcher for bait so we could go fishing at the river. When travelling shows came through our town, it was a Big Deal, and everyone begged and scrounged for enough money to go along, no matter how awful the performance was.
If you couldn’t afford to go, you’d contrive a way to sneak in, or you’d wheedle every detail of the performance from someone luckier than you; possessing the talent to tell stories in technicolour was a valuable social currency in our playground.
The magic show was advertised months in advance, with a flyer carelessly pasted on the side of the post office. It showed a mysterious masked figure in a cape and tuxedo, flanked by two women wearing not very much at all; my mother used the word ‘indecent’. But as a curious boy of a certain age, the image fired all sorts of primal circuits in my imagination, and I quickly became obsessed with the idea of magicians and magic shows. I fashioned myself a magician’s wand out of paper, ruined the good tablecloth in employ as a cape, and repeatedly tried to turn the family dog into a rabbit – much to the delight of my younger sister. Judith aped everything I did, in that adoring little-sister way, so she became my loyal assistant in these backyard magic shows, Sunday ribbons tied askew in her black curls and a smear of mother’s lipstick on her mouth.
But within a week I’d about had my fill of playing magician – as had our poor dog – and three weeks after that, I’d almost forgotten about the magic show that was coming to town, featuring the masked magician by the name of ‘The Great Volto’.
When he finally arrived, he inspired a maelstrom of curiosity. A black truck appeared on the village green, his name painted along the sides in curlicued gold lettering. Overnight, the truck transformed into a huge, gold-and-black striped tent, squatting in the grass like a fat, mysterious bumblebee. People swore they’d seen nobody leave the truck, and that the tent must have all but put itself up. I imagined the rear doors of the vehicle creaking open in the dark, and the striped bulk of the tent pulling itself out on steel-pole limbs, ropes and stakes whipping about like tentacles as it heaved itself into place, then shook like a dog to settle all the canvas into place.
And there it sat the next day, silent and still. The weather turned sour and rain lashed the edifice, but there was no sign of the masked magician or his sequinned assistants. A few of us curious kids braved the growing puddles to creep around the tent, daring one another to pry up one edge of the heavy canvas and look inside. But when Colby Durham finally did it for a handful of pennies, he reported that there was only darkness inside – no lights, no sounds, just suffocating darkness that smelled like old dust.
Which, of course, made the whole affair infinitely more enticing.
For three long days that tent stayed closed, while an unseasonal thunderstorm shook the town. My father said it was a miracle of engineering that it was able to weather the rain and the wind without blowing away. He told us to keep away from it, swearing that lightning would strike the brass spike sticking out the top and set the whole thing on fire. I couldn’t help wondering if that’s exactly what The Great Volto wanted; that he’d summoned the storm so that lightning would strike, to power up whatever arcane engines he had hidden inside the darkness of his striped marquee. I imagined him standing inside, his gloved hands atop great brass spheres that crackled with blue electricity, the eyeholes of his mask blazing gold.
Everybody was talking about the tent and the magician now; he had become the entire focus of the town. So, when the storm abated and a steel-weighted chalkboard finally appeared outside the tent, announcing the first show, anticipation ripped through the populace like the lightning my father had anticipated.
