Magic Street (11 page)

It was a play, now he remembered. A group of college students came to their elementary school and put on a play that started with the queen of the fairies falling in love with a guy with a donkey head, and then a bunch of stupid guys acting out a play about a boy and girl who fall in love and then kill themselves because one of them was torn by a lion or... or something.

That's all this is. I'm asleep somewhere and dreaming that play they put on for us when I was in fifth grade.

Only he knew that he wasn't dreaming, that he was very much awake.

Until, a moment later, he wasn't.

CAPTIVE QUEEN

Mack awoke in the first light of morning, cold and covered with dew, but not uncomfortable, not even shivering except one quick spasm when he first bounded to his feet.

Only when he was standing did he realize that the panther had slept close to him all night, and from the sudden chill of evaporating sweat he knew that the beast had been pressed up close to his back. Now it lazily rose up and stretched and padded away from him, back toward the clearing where two lanterns hung suspended in the air.

Mack wasn't interested in going back there now. Miz Smitcher would worry and he didn't want her to be unhappy or worried, though truth to tell she probably wasn't, since she was bound to assume he had spent the night in somebody's house.

Alone now—for the panther felt to him like more than an animal—Mack did as his body required, stepping right out of his pants in order to empty his bladder and then squat down to hold on to a sapling trunk while he emptied his bowels. It had been a long time since he'd done it outdoors, but his body was so healthy and worked so naturally that his turd came out dry and he didn't even need to wipe himself, though he scooped up some old leaves and made a pass at his butt just to be sure.

Then he stood up and took a step and then snatched back at the sapling, because his foot didn't find the ground, it hung out in the air, and he realized that the trees and saplings here leaned out over the ravine or grew up from inside it. He had slept on the edge of a cliff last night, the cat between him and death, and the turd he laid had fallen down into nothing.

It knocked the breath out of him, but not the sense—he knew as he slid down toward the water that he had to stop himself or he'd be caught up in the current and battered to death against the banks and stony bottom of the stream, if he didn't drown first.

He caught a tough root growing right at the water's edge, as his legs went into the water. It was so cold, right up to his waist, that it knocked the breath out of him all over again—not that he'd had even a moment to catch it after the fall—and the shock was so great he almost lost his grip.

But he held on, and even though the water tore at him and held him out almost horizontal in the water, he was able to get a leg up into the roots of another tree and then climb up out of the water.

He sat on the bank, still without his trousers, trembling with the cold of the water and the pain and bruises of the fall and the fear of having come so near death.

Far above him, he knew, were his pants. And his shoes? He couldn't remember if he had been barefoot yesterday when he went to take a look at the strange spot between Chandresses' and Snipes'. He wore shoes more and more these days, and he might have been wearing them, but he couldn't remember taking them off last night when he went to sleep. Main thing was, he was naked from the waist down, and somehow he had to get home, only a block or so but that was a long way when your butt was naked and the neighbors all knew where you lived and how to call and tell Miz Smitcher.

Should he climb back up and get those pants?

The ravine was a lot less steep on the other side. And Mr. Christmas—or Puck, if that was really his name, and why would the house lie to him?—might have something he could wear. At least a towel he could wrap around himself as if he was coming back from somebody's swimming pool.

So he rested a little more, then jumped the stream and climbed up the other side. Then he just walked, trusting that he'd run across the path and know it when he saw it. And sure enough, he did.

It was still that faint light of earliest morning when he saw the back of the Skinny House. Mr.

Christmas was no longer standing at the door, of course, as Mack lightly ran along the mossy path until his feet touched brick. And in a few steps the house was itself again, and the patio was concrete with the rusty barbecue and the umbrella clothesline stand and the old screen door that stood just the tiniest bit ajar.

Mack opened it, and turned the knob and the door into the kitchen opened, and there was Mr.

Christmas, looking like himself again—or not like himself, depending on which version was really him.

The dirty dreads, anyway, and the clothes he was wearing, and he sat at the kitchen table sipping something that wasn't coffee but Mack didn't know what.

"Forget something out there?" asked Mr. Christmas.

"Somebody steal your pants or you give them to a beggar? Or have you decided to go au naturel today?"

So he wasn't going to answer, and Mack wasn't interested enough to keep pushing. "I need something to wear."

"As I was saying."

"Got anything that would fit me?" asked Mack. He looked at Puck's thickish body and said, "Or something that won't fit me unless I tighten a belt really tight and roll up the pantlegs?"

"I got nothing that fits me, if you haven't noticed," said Puck. "But you're welcome to look in the closet and see what I got. Seeing how this house responds to you a lot better than it does to me."

Mack walked into a bedroom that didn't look like anybody had ever slept in it, considering that there weren't even sheets or blankets or a pillow on the bed, and the bed was just a bare mattress on the floor.

He went to the closet and slid the cheap sliding door open and there were six pairs of pants hanging there on hooks, each one identical to the pants he had left behind on the wrong side of the ravine. Four of them were clean, but one was damp and muddy, and another was torn as if by savage claws and covered in half-dried blood.

"Guess things might have turned out a few different ways," said Puck.

"But they turned out this way," said Mack. He took one of the clean pairs of pants out of the closet and put them on.

"You know how these pants would have gotten so wet and muddy?"

"I almost fell into the stream at the bottom of a canyon," said Mack.

"So these torn and bloody ones..."

"The panther," said Mack.

"Panther?"

"The one guarding the lamps."

"Ah," said Puck. "Lamps."

"They just hanging there in the air."

"Oh, they got something holding them up," said Puck.

"Duh," said Mack. "Magic, of course."

"So if you come close, this panther..."

"You never gone there?" said Mack. "You never saw that dead man? With a donkey head?"

Puck chuckled and shook his head. "Once she loves you, you never forget, you never give up."

"He ain't trying no more," said Mack. "Whatever it is he was trying to do."

"He was trying to set her free."

"Set who free?"

"The queen."

"I don't know what you talking about. I got to go home now."

"Why you pretending you don't want to know?"

"Cause whatever I ask, you don't tell me nothing. But when I don't ask, you full of information."

"She's the most beautiful woman who ever lived," said Puck. "But her soul's been captured and locked in a glass cage."

"The queen."

"The Queen of the Fairies," said Puck.

"And the dead guy with the donkey head, he was in love with her."

"Shakespeare, that asshole, he never understood anything. About love or magic. Always had to

'improve' the story." Puck winked. "He couldn't take a joke."

"You don't like Shakespeare?" asked Mack.

"Nobody likes Shakespeare. They just pretend they do so they look smart."

"I like Shakespeare," said Mack.

"You never read Shakespeare in your life."

"Some college students, they put on a play for us. I liked it."

"Yeah, yeah, cause they told you to like it. And cause they didn't put on Othello with some white dude with his face painted black."

"So it was Shakespeare locked a queen's soul in a lantern in the woods?"

"No," said Puck scornfully. "Shakespeare wouldn't have the power to pick his own nose, he come up against the queen."

"Himself," said Puck. "If you think I saying his name in this place, you crazy."

"What about the queen. What's her name?"

"She has so many. Mab, some call her, and that's closer to her true name. But also Titania.

Shakespeare knew those names but he didn't think she was the same person."

"So why don't you go out into the woods and set her free? Guy can make a whole house disappear from the street, you got to be more powerful than a panther."

"How far off the ground was that lantern?" asked Puck.

Mack held his hand out, about shoulder high.

Puck laughed bitterly. "So he didn't shrink you."

"Shrink me?"

"I step off the bricks into the woods, I shrink down to fairy size. Small enough to ride a butterfly.

Only they's no flying across that ravine. You think you had a hard time climbing down and up again?

Crossing that water? How hard you think it be, you this high." He held up his hand, his thumb and fingers about four inches apart.

"You? That tall?"

"In those woods."

"And you can't do anything about it?"

"That my natural size," said Puck. "When I'm home."

"Is that home for you, in there?"

"It's part of home. A corner of home."

"So what's it called?"

"Faerie," said Puck. "Fairyland."

"Not Middle-earth, then," said Mack. "Not Narnia?"

"Made-up bullshit, that stuff," said Puck. "There's no lion in that place, making people be good.

There's just power, and those who got more of it and those who got less."

"And in that place, you're little." get me if I try to fly. I can't get in to set her free."

"But I could," said Mack. "I'm tall enough."

"But you scared of that panther."

"Only a little," said Mack. "What I'm scared of is dying."

"Same thing."

"Don't care how," said Mack. "Just don't want to do it. Panther no worse than any other way."

"What did she look like?"

"If it was her, and you not just shitting me, then she was this little bit of light bouncing around inside the glass. Bright, though."

"Couldn't look right at her, could you."

"Burned a spot in my eye, didn't wear off till morning. Saw her in my sleep."

"Ah," said Puck. "You had her dream?"

Mack shook his head. "Not like that. I just dreamed about that point of light."

"Ah," said Puck, clearly disappointed.

"So who's the other one?" asked Mack.

"Other one?"

"Two lanterns, two lights. One of them might be this queen, but who's the other?"

"A prisoner of love," said Puck, and then he started singing it.

When grownups started singing old rock songs, the conversation was over. Mack had his pants on, and he better get home.

"You going to set her free?" asked Puck.

"You get me a can of panther repellent and a big stick, I get that glass open."

"Is that a lie or a promise?"

"If she's really in one of those jars."

"That's a good point," said Puck. "What if you open the wrong one."

"I told you."

"You told me nothing. You always tell me nothing."

"I told you it was Queen Mab in that jar."

"That's probably just another lie."

"I don't lie," said Puck. "These days, I don't even spin." He demonstrated how slowly he moved when he tried to turn himself around.

Mack didn't wait to watch. He headed out of the bedroom and out of the house. When he reached the sidewalk, he turned around to look, and the Skinny House was gone.

Mack reached down into his pants pocket and found the five-dollar bill he carried around in case of emergencies. Like having a magic wand. You have a five-dollar bill and you want a drink or some candy or a bus ride, then you got it. Small magic, but magic just the same.

Puck's magic—now, that was big time. But it seemed to Mack that maybe Puck wasn't the one did that magic. He didn't seem all that powerful. Couldn't make Mack do anything. Maybe he was trapped in that house the way that fairy queen was trapped in the lantern in the woods.

If he wasn't lying about what those lanterns were about. Had he really been there and seen the lights? Was he really so small and flightless that he couldn't get to either lantern? When Mack was telling the story, Puck nodded his head like he knew all about it, but then from his questions it seemed like he'd never been there, had no idea what it took to get there from here.

Puck hadn't even known that Mack would have pants in the closet. And did each one of those pairs of pants have his five-dollar bill in the pocket? If he was ever running short of money, could he come back here and get another Lincoln from the extra pants? Or would they be gone if he ever came back?

Mack turned away from the house and looked up the street and then took a step forward, then back, until he saw the house come into view again through the corner of his eye.

Had to make sure the house wasn't gone for good. What if he wanted to go back? Had to make sure he could.

Then he turned and ran home in the predawn light. A few cars out and running. Dr. Marvin heading out to put big tits into some woman or liposuck the fat out. Mack waved at him, and Dr.

Marvin waved back.

Miz Smitcher was standing by her car when Mack jogged up to the house. Mack remembered that she was covering the early shift this week.

"Where you been?" she asked.

"Don't scare me like that, Mack Street," she said softly. "You all I got."

My mother lives in this neighborhood, Miz Smitcher. Did you know that? Did you keep that from me? You lying to me all my life, or you didn't know?

Out loud, Mack said, "I didn't mean to. I won't do it again."

"Until the next time you don't mean to but it just happens."

Mack hung his head, showing his shame.

She touched the back of his head. Not rubbing his hair, like Mr. Christmas did. Just touching him. Laying her big nurse hand on his head like she laid it on her patients at the hospital. Felt good.

Felt like a promise that everything going to turn out okay.

She took her hand away and his head felt cold without it.

"I be home late tonight, kind of working half a double," said Miz Smitcher.