Thursday, March 23, 1933

Dear Knowledge-Seeker (they always called me that):

Sorry about missing the movie deal and (it turns out) we sure could have used the money. I hope you understand. Who did you get to replace us? I hope they turned out boffo.

The easiest way to tell you about it is in order the way it happened. We got to Yakima on the hottest tip we'd ever gotten the week of FDR's inaugural. The tip wasn't about Yakima; it was further west, but this is the closest big-train passenger depot. We'd just done the week in Spokane. Coming in on our heels were the Flying Cathars (you remember them from the Midwest), who are now in a circus (where they came from and where they are now back). John Munster Cathar gave us a letter—an answer to someone we'd written to from Denver.

Let's say it was the most concrete clue we'd ever gotten. Our next booking was in six weeks in Seattle, after we'd supposedly gotten back from doing your movie in Hollywood. We called our agent and had him pick up some one-, two-, and three-nighters between Yakima and Seattle. He cussed us a blue streak for missing the movie and having to send the money back. But he got on the horn and got us enough gigs to cover a month of the six weeks anyway.

The first was the next day in a place called Easton, Washington. We went there and did a three-a-day, both acts. Then we got on a spur-line train off the B-N and went to a town called Rosslyn. Which is where we wanted to go in the first place.

An odd thing we noticed as we got there was that there was a priest waiting at the depot. Who he met in fact was another priest, both Catholics. The one he met was young.

Which is strange, since, believe it or not, most of the priests up here are Orthodox—left over from when the Pacific Northwest was Russian, and a lot of Greeks came here around the turn of the century.

Well, we went down to the theater, Rennie's Chateau. We gave the stagehands the drops for the skeleton dance, put our trucks and the horse suit in the dressing room, and asked where we could get breakfast. They told us a block down.

We walked down there. It was cold. Snow was still two feet high off the sidewalks; guys came by talking about how good the salmon run had been last fall. (The only water we could see was a small creek that went off back down toward the Yakima River to the south of us.)

Dybbuk noticed that the two priests were back down the board sidewalk behind us, walking the same way we were, talking with animation and blessing people automatically.

We got to the café, and it was full of lumberjacks, which they call loggers up here. There was a bunch of big tables pushed together in the center of the place, and there were twelve or fifteen of them at it, and they were putting away the grub like it was going out of style. There were plates of biscuits a foot high, and if they had been a family, the guys with the shortest arms would have starved to death.

We sat at the counter on the stools by the pies and cakes and such. Dybbuk got coffee, ham, and scrambled eggs. I got chipped beef on toast, coffee, and a couple of donuts.

The waitress yelled to the cook, "Adam and Eve. Wreck 'em. S.O.S. and a couple sinkers. Two battery acids!"

"Yes, Mabel," yelled one of the cooks, lost in clouds of steam and smells.

"More gravy over here, Mabel!" yelled half the table of lumberjacks.

"Eighty-six the gravy," said the cook, "Unless you wanna wash up. I'm outta big bowls."

"Use that old 'un in the high cabinet," yelled Mabel.

The cook went back and rummaged around. The short-order cook moved to his place at the stove; threw water and flour into the giant skillet the bacon and ham had been cooking in. With his free hand he broke six eggs onto the griddle. The main cook came back, moved exactly into the vacated other cook's place, and stirred the gravy with a big ladle.

He put it into a battered old silver server and passed it through the order-hole to Mabel.

Dybbuk paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips, rolled his eyes, and focused back on the serving bowl.

Wing (me) followed his gaze. The server was what the ancient Greeks would have called a krater: a large, shallow bowl with handles on two sides. There was figurework on the base which extended up the sides of the bowl—it looked like bunches of grapes.

Wing (that's me) nodded to Dybbuk, rolled his eyes, and fixed them on the two priests who had come in and sat down at a window table. They were still talking away and seemed to be paying no attention to anything.

Mabel put the bowl down; six or eight hands filled with biscuits dipped into it and came out with gobs of gravy.

"I s'pose now you'll be wantin' more biscuits?" she asked.

"Mmmmff mmmfmmfs," said the lumberjacks.

"Two doz. hardtack!" she yelled to the cooks.

Back at the dressing room, we thought of a plan. We were going to be at the theater for three days. We got the manager's bill poster to make up a couple of cloth banners advertising the bill. Then we pinned them to both sides of the horse suit. We went out the side door of the theater and up and down the main street, which is called First Street—all the cross-streets are named for states—doing part of the Ham Nag act. We hit the bank, the five-and-dime, the firehouse, the Legion hall; we went past the Masonic Temple across the street from the theater, and of course the café. We went in and bothered Mabel and the cooks. We went back through the kitchen, out the back door, behind the buildings, and back to the theater.

The young priest, who'd been out in front of the theater, gawked at us with the rest of the town (we had quite the little crowd following us down First Street) but stayed in front of the theater, so we figured he wasn't waiting for Dybbuk & Wing.

Later, when we walked back to the hotel on Pennsylvania as ourselves, he followed us as discreetly as a priest can. When we looked outside later, he was still there.

At the theater, Dybbuk went out between our act and the horse act and bought the biggest ceramic bowl the five-and-dime had—it was at least two feet across and weighed a ton. We put it in the cemetery stuff the next performance, leaned it against a tombstone.

The second day the horse suit made more of a nuisance of itself in other parts of town (there were only eight blocks by seven blocks of it, counting Alaska Alley) but ended again annoying the customers and the help at the café.

Once again they were watching the theater—this time the old priest. There was a local-looking kid with him.

When we left for the hotel (as us), it was the kid who wandered that way, and it was either him or some other who stayed outside all night, as far as we knew.

On the third day we took the ceramic bowl with us—me (Wing) carrying it inside his part of the suit. It made for a lumpier horse, I'm sure. After nearly twenty years we move as one, but Dybbuk has to do all the navigating. As they say of huskies, only the lead dog gets a change of scenery.

So we take off down First Street, and even I can tell we're gathering a crowd as we go along. We do some shtick with oil cans at the gas station; I dance around in the back a little, and we move on to the Western Auto hardware store, and then we go down to the café.

This time we came in the back door. "Christ!" says the head cook, "not again!" Dybbuk starts farting with stuff (the laughter was at the Ham Nag flipping pancakes with its front hooves) and rummaging through the cabinets (through the slit in the side of the suit I [Wing] saw everybody in the place up against the counter, looking into the kitchen)—the head cook had taken off and thrown down his apron and walked out into the restaurant in disgust, and then—allez oop!—the ceramic bowl was outside the Ham Nag and the krater was inside, and everybody applauded as we turned and did the double-split bow in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Then we were outside again, at the front door. All I (Wing) heard was Dybbuk say "Trouble!" and grunt before something knocked me off my feet. I jerked back, and some heavy object flattened the suit right between Dybbuk and me. We jumped up and a fist hit me in the jaw and I fell down again. A hand came in the side of the suit and the silver bowl was jerked out of my hands and was gone.

Then something knocked us down again, and we got up and opened the suit to make it a fair fight.

We were surrounded by kids dressed as clowns, including the one I'd seen with the priest. They had what looked like rubber baseball bats and big shoes. There was about half the town around them, clapping and laughing. To them it must have seemed part of the show—the horse suit set on by jokers and clowns. The old priest was standing across from us on the sidewalk, with his hands in his pockets, smiling. He took his hand out and moved it.

I looked way down First Street, and the young priest was just turning out of sight two blocks away with something shiny under his arm.

We got back in the suit and wobbled back toward the theater, the clowns whacking us with rubber bats occasionally. But they hadn't been rubber back in front of the café.

We got back to the dressing room and out of the Ham Nag suit.

"The priest was giving us a Masonic hand signal," Dybbuk said.

Priests don't do that, I (Wing) indicated.

"They do if they're not just priests," Dybbuk said.


• • • • • 

We figured, like you did years ago, the kid had doped out we were the Ham Nag too, and the priests laid a plan for us. I'm not sure they knew what we were doing, but someone saw through our misdirection and kept his eye on what was going on.

As Barrymore said, "Never work with kids or dogs."


• • • • • 

We almost had it, Knowledge-seeker. Now we'll have to start all over again. After all this time, what's a few years more? I mean, the thing has been around for at least one thousand nine hundred and three years …

Here's hoping you and Susie Cue are in the pink of health. We'll be here in Seattle at the Summit on Queen Anne Hill from Thursday til the end of next month. Heard your radio show last week; it was a pip.

Yours in knowledge-seeking,

Dybbuk & me (Wing)