Somehow, with his mother’s many stories about his father, and his father’s complete absence, Leland had decided he was as real as a motion picture star. It wasn’t something he’d articulated, or even understood; the idea was half-conscious. There was something eternal in his father’s almost-but-not-quite presence. Like Dustin Farnum or Chaplin, perhaps, his father was an imaginary friend who might finally appear by his side if only he, Leland, had been good enough and in love enough and loyal enough to him.

When they asked, and they would ask, about his childhood, he would tell them that the worst and the best day of his life were one and the same. He would tell this with no embellishment, but strictly how it had happened, for that was dramatic enough: That his mother and he had been walking along the tidepools, and that she had slipped and fallen. She had knocked herself unconscious, and he had no way to carry her, and then there was a disturbance in the waters, a heaving of bubbles to the surface, which broke open so Leland could see first a length of hose, then the metal cap, and finally the whole suit of a deep-sea diver, who had been hunting for octopi.

Off came the helmet and—it was his father! His father carried his mother to safety, they had a fine lunch together, he told Leland how tall he was getting, and then he had to get back to the Nautilus, for the men would wonder where he had gone. Before he left, he gave Leland a smooth turquoise bottle he had found on the bottom of the ocean.

4

His father wasn’t actually Captain Nemo, nor was he the hero of Les Misérables. He was something else entirely, the last practitioner of a scruffy kind of performance, a handsome man, a man born to wink, a man whose ambition might have been a roadmap or a cautionary tale for young Leland.

Stage performers, who excel at tales of misfortune, were hard-pressed to top the story of the demise of Colonel Wild Duncan Cody’s 101 Wild West Extravaganza Western Roundup. It was an ending so apocalyptic its extinction coincided with many other endings, from which the balance of our tale will flow.

Wild Duncan Cody’s given name was Percy Bysshe Duncan, which did not pop with heroics. Though he could rope and ride with great precision, and he had made legitimate Indian friends, he had no real business running a Wild West show. A drunk, a cad with the ladies, unable to hold ten complete dollars in his hand for ten consecutive minutes, he was untrustworthy to the core of his character—even those who liked him best sought a second opinion after asking him what time it was.