Wizard of the Pigeons

Cold tension rushed up from the children. The little girl made herself smaller. She took a carrot stick in both hands, like a chipmunk, and quickly nibbled it down. She refused to look at her father or brother. The boy Timmy had ceased trying to squirm away from Ted’s white-knuckled grip. He picked up his hamburger half and tried to finish it. His breath caught as he tried to chew, sounding like weeping, but no tears showed on his tight face.

The woman’s face flushed with embarrassment, but Ted was too focused on his dominance to care if he caused a scene. The stranger was oblivious, anyway. His long narrow hand had fallen to the table, where he toyed with the candle in its scarlet holder. He lifted it and swirled it gently, watching the flame gutter and leap as the wax washed around the wick.

‘It’s a very big hamburger for such a small boy.’ The stranger did not speak in his self-effacing country twang. His tone made him an interloper at the table, drew Ted’s eyes to him and refocused his anger. Wizard’s eyes met his. Their stares locked. Wizard’s eyes blazed an unnatural electric blue. Abruptly he switched his gaze to Timmy. Ted’s startled gaze followed his.

Wizard had continued to toy with the candle. The light from his candle faded, then leaped up with a white intensity. It became the only important light in the dimmed restaurant. It licked over the boy’s face, playing games with his features. His round child’s chin jutted into the firm jaw of a young man; his small nose lengthened; the brows on the ridges above his eyes thickened, and deepened the eyes themselves into a man’s angry stare. The anger and hurt in his face were not the emotions of a wilful brat. Ted was looking into the eyes of a young man being forced to act against his own judgement and resenting it keenly. One day he would have to justify himself to that man. His hand dropped limply from his son’s shoulder.

The candle flickered down, but Ted’s vision did not pass. How long since he had last looked at this boy? There had been a baby, like an annoying possession, and then a toddler, like an unruly domestic pet. They were gone. This was a small person. Someday he would have to confront him as an adult. Ted’s jaw gave a single quiver, then stiffened again. Wizard set the candle down on the table.

‘If you’re full, Tim, don’t eat the damn thing. But next time, tell me before I order it for you. It’ll save us both a hell of a lot of trouble.’ Ted leaned forward angrily to grind out his cigarette on the untouched hamburger half. Wizard flinched slightly, but made no remark. The woman was looking from face to face in consternation. A message had passed, a change had been wrought; she knew it, but she also knew she had missed it. She began helping her daughter into her coat. She gave the stranger a long look from the corners of her eyes. He met it full face and nodded to acknowledge her uneasiness. Ted was moving to leave, almost fleeing. She rose and gathered her purse and bags. Nodding to the stranger, she managed, ‘Best of luck to both of you.’

‘And to you, also,’ Wizard replied gravely. He watched them walk to the door, the girl holding her mother’s hand, the boy walking out of his father’s reach. They would need more than his luck wish. He gave a small sigh for them, and turned his attention to more immediate matters. Nina was busy taking orders; the aproned girl had just carried a tub of dirty dishes back to the dishroom. Wizard assembled his lunch.

Only the top of Tim’s hamburger had been fouled. He discarded it and placed the rest on the woman’s plate beside the handful of crisply dark french fries she had rejected. Both the children had been served from the salad bar. Their two plates were a trove of broccoli spears, cauliflower florets, sweet pickles, and garbanzo beans. They had devoured the more prosaic radishes and carrot sticks, but left these adult-bestowed vegetables for him. Ted’s plate donated a wedge of garlic toast, one corner slightly sogged with spaghetti sauce, and two sprigs of parsley. Not a feast, he reflected, but certainly far from famine. And he needed it. The candle business had drained his reserve energies. It hadn’t been wise. If Cassie heard of it, she’d call him a meddler, even as her eyes sparkled with the fun of it.

He ate without haste, but he did not dawdle. He had to remember that he was the man who had arrived late for a lunch date. No reason to rush. In the course of his meal, he refilled his mug four times, feeling with pleasure the hot rush of caffeine that restored him. During his fifth and final cup, he neatly stacked the dishes out of the way. He drew his newspaper from his shopping bag, folded it to the want ads and studied it with no interest. He had possessed the paper for several days now. It was beginning to look a little worn; best replace it today. So essential a prop was not to be neglected.

As he gazed unseeing at the dense black type, he reviewed his morning. The Celestial Seasonings Sampler was the high point today. He had found the box of tea bags in the dumpster in the alley behind the health food store. The corner of the box was crushed, but the tea bags were intact in their brightly coloured envelopes. The same dumpster had yielded four Sweet and Innocent honey candy suckers, smashed, but still in their wrappers. In a dumpster four blocks away, he had found two packets of tall candles, each broken in several places, but still quite useful. An excellent morning. The magic was flowing today, and the light was still before him.

Wizard drained his mug and set it on the table. With a sigh he folded his paper and slipped it once more into his shopping bag. The bag itself was an exceptionally good one, of stout plastic and solid green, except for the slogan, SEATTLE, THE EMERALD CITY. It, too, had come to him just this morning. Rising, he glanced around the place and left his best wishes upon it.

He paused at the pay phone on the way out, to put the receiver to his ear, then hit the coin return and check the chute. Nothing. Well, he could not complain. Magic was not what it once had been. It was spread thinner these days; one had to use it as it came, and never quite trust all one’s weight to it. Nor lose faith in it.

He stepped back into October and the blueness of the day fell on him and wrapped him. The brightness of it pushed his eyes down and to one side, to show him a glint between the tyre of a parked car and the kerb. He stooped for a shining silver quarter. Now, two more of these, and a dime, and he could have his evening coffee in Elliott Bay Café, under the bookstore. He slipped it into his shirt pocket. He took two steps, then suddenly halted. He slapped his pocket, and then stuck his fingers inside it and felt around. The tarot card was gone. Worry squirmed inside him. He banished it. The magic was running right today, and he was Wizard, and all of the Metro Ride Free Zone was his domain. He believed he would find two more quarters and a dime today.

A sidewalk evangelist with a fistful of pamphlets caught at his arm. ‘Sir, do you know the price of salvation in Seattle today?’ He flapped his flyers in Wizard’s face.

‘No,’ Wizard replied honestly. ‘But the price of survival is the price of a cup of coffee.’ He pulled free effortlessly of the staring man, and strolled toward the bus stop.

CHAPTER TWO

Rasputin sunned himself on the bench, making October look like June. He was wearing sandals, and between the leather straps his big feet were as scuffed and grey as an elephant’s hide. His blue denims were raggedy at the cuffs, and the sleeves of his sweatshirt had been cut off unevenly. His eyes were closed, his head nodding gently to the rhythm of his music, one long-fingered hand keeping graceful time. Black and Satisfied, Wizard titled him. Blending in with the bench squatters like a pit bull in a pack of fox hounds. The benches near him were conspicuously empty of loiterers. Wizard shook his head over him as he sat down at the other end of the bench.

Rasputin didn’t stir. Reaching into a pocket, Wizard drew out a crumpled sack of popcorn fragments. He leaned forward to scatter a handful. Rasputin shifted slightly at the fluttering sound of pigeon wings as a dozen or so birds came immediately to the feed.

‘Don’t let them damn pests be shitting on me,’ he warned Wizard laconically.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it. Don’t you think you should carry a radio or something?’

‘What for? So folks would quit looking for my headphones? Ain’t my fault they can’t hear the real music. They too busy covering it up with their own noises.’

Wizard nodded and threw another handful of popcorn. Rasputin’s hand danced lazily on the back of the bench. Muscles played smoothly under his sleek skin, sunlight played smoothly over it. The day arched above them, and Wizard could have dreamed with his eyes open. Instead, he asked, ‘So what brings you to Pioneer Square?’

‘My feet, mostly.’ Rasputin grinned feebly. ‘I’m looking for Cassie. Got a present for her. New jump rope song. Heard it just the other day.’

Wizard nodded sagely. He knew Cassie collected jump rope songs and clapping rhymes. ‘Let’s hear it.’

Rasputin shook his head slowly in a graceful counterpoint to the dance of his hand. A passerby slowed down to watch him, then scurried on. ‘No way, man. Not going to repeat it here. Sounded new, and real potent in a way I don’t like. Gonna tell it to Cassie, but I’m not going to spread it around. Won’t catch me fooling with magic not mine to do.’ Rasputin’s words took on the cadence of his concealed dance, becoming near a chant. Wizard had known him to speak in endless rhymes, or fall into the steady stamp of iambic pentameter when the muse took him. But today he broke out of it abruptly, the rhythm of his hand suddenly changing. A grin spread over his face slowly as he gestured across the square to where a woman in a yellow raincoat had just emerged from a shop.

‘See her? Walking like rain trickling down a window glass? She makes love in a waltz rhythm.’ A black hand waltzed on its fingertips on the bench between them. Wizard glanced from it to the tall, graceful woman crossing the square.

‘That doesn’t seem possible,’ he observed after a perusal of her swinging stride.

‘The best things in this life are the ones that aren’t possible, my friend. ’Sides, would I lie to you? You don’t believe me, you just go ask her. Just walk right on up and say, “My friend Rasputin says you can make a man’s eyes roll back in his head while your thighs play the Rippling River Waltz.” You go ask her.’

‘No thanks,’ Wizard chuckled softly. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Don’t have to, man. She’s one generous lady. Picked me up off the bus one rainy night, took me home and taught me to waltz horizontal. Kept me all night, fed me breakfast, and put me out with her cat when she left for work. Best night of my life.’

‘You never went back?’

‘Some things don’t play well the second time around; only a fool takes a chance at ruining a perfect memory. ’Sides, I wasn’t invited. Kinda lady she is, she does all the asking. All a man can say to her is “yes, please” and “thank you kindly.” That’s all.’

Wizard shifted uncomfortably on the bench. This kind of talk made him uneasy, stirring places in him better left dormant. ‘So you’re looking for Cassie,’ he commented inanely, looking for a safer topic.

Rasputin gave a brief snort of laughter. ‘Did I say that? Stupid way to put it. No sense looking for her. No, I’m just waiting to be found. She’ll know I got something for her, and she’ll come to find me. Don’t you know that about her by now? Think on it. You ever been looking for Cassie and found her? No. Just about the time you give up looking and sit down someplace, who finds you? Cassie. Ain’t that right?’

‘Yeah.’ He chuckled slightly at the truth of it. ‘So what you been doing lately?’

‘I just told you. Getting laid, and listening to jump rope songs in the park. How ’bout you?’

Wizard shrugged. ‘Not much of anything. Little magics, mostly. Told a crying kid where he’d lost his lunch money. Went to visit Sylvester. Saw an old man hurting on a street corner. Asked him the time, the way to Pike Place Market, and talked about the weather until he had changed his mind about stepping in front of the next bus. Was standing in front of the Salvation Army Store and a man drove up and handed me a trenchcoat and a pair of boots. Boots didn’t fit, so I donated them. Trenchcoat did, so I kept it. Listened to a battered woman on the public dock until she talked herself into going to a shelter instead of going home. Listened to an old man whose daughter wanted him to put his sixteen-year-old dog to sleep. Told him “Bullshit!” Old dog sat and wagged his tail at me all through it. That’s about it.’

Rasputin was grinning and shaking his head slowly. ‘What a life! How do you do it, Wizard?’

‘I don’t know,’ the other man replied in a soft, naive voice, and they both laughed together as at an old joke.

‘I mean,’ Rasputin’s voice was thick and mellow as warm honey, ‘how you keep going? Look how skinny you getting lately! Bet Cassie don’t appreciate that in the sack; be like sleeping with a pile of kindling.’

Wizard shot Rasputin a suddenly chill look. ‘I don’t sleep with Cassie.’

The big man wasn’t taking any hints. ‘No, I wouldn’t either. No time for sleeping with something that warm and soft up against you. You don’t know how many times Euripides and I sat howling at the moon for her. Then you come along, and she falls into your lap. Her eyes get all warm when they touch you. First time she brought you to me, I saw it. Oh, oh, I say to myself, here come Cassie, mixing business with pleasure. Now you telling me, oh, no, ain’t really nothing between us. You sure you wouldn’t be telling me a lie?’ An easy, teasing question.

‘I don’t do that.’ Wizard’s voice was hard.

‘Don’t do what?’ Rasputin teased innocently. ‘Screw or tell lies?’

‘I tell lies only to stay alive. I tell the Truth when it’s on me.’ Ice and fire in his voice, warning the black wizard.

‘Say what?’ Rasputin sat up straight on the bench, and his fingers suddenly beat a dangerous staccato rhythm on the bench back. Wizard felt his strength gather in his shoulders and watched the play of muscles in the black hand and wrist on the bench back. He felt the edge and dragged himself back from it. This man was his friend. He forced his voice into a casual scale.

‘Remember who you’re talking to, Rasputin. I’m the man who knows the Truth about people, and when they ask me, I’ve got to tell them. I have my own balancing points for my magic. One of them is that I don’t touch women. I don’t touch anyone.’

‘That so?’ the black wizard asked sceptically. Wizard looked at him stony-eyed. ‘You poor, stupid bastard,’ Rasputin said softly, more to himself than to his friend. ‘Drawing the circle that shuts it out.’ He flopped back into his earlier, careless pose, but his dancing fingers jigged on the bench back, and Wizard felt his awareness digging at him.

The pigeons roared up suddenly around them, their frantically beating wings swishing harshly against Wizard’s very face. Cassie stood before them, slender and smiling. She was very plain today, dressed all in dove grey from her shoes to the softly draped cloth of her dress. Her hair was an unremarkable brown, her features small and regular. But when she flashed Wizard her smile, the blue voltage of her eyes stunned him. She proffered him a couple of grey tail feathers. ‘Nearly had myself a pigeon pie for tonight,’ she teased, tossing the feathers in his face. Wizard winced, fearing there was more truth in her jest than he approved. ‘Come on,’ she cajoled, sitting down between the men. ‘If lions are majestic and wolves are noble and tigers are princely, what’s so cruddy about a person who snags a few pigeons for a meal now and then?’

She bent suddenly to wipe a smudge from her shoe, and Rasputin grabbed Wizard’s eyes over her bent back. ‘Stupid shit!’ he mouthed silently at Wizard, but composed his face quickly as Cassie sat up between them. She gave her brown bobbed hair a shake, and the scent of wistaria engulfed Wizard and threatened to sweep him away. But she had fixed those eyes on Rasputin and pinned him to the bench. ‘Give it to me!’ she demanded instantly.

‘Right here?’ His reluctance wasn’t feigned. ‘It’s a heavy one, Cassie. Bad. I didn’t like hearing it, and I don’t like repeating it.’

‘All the more reason I should have it. Out with it.’

‘It was these two cute little girls, one in pigtails, down in Gas Works Park, and they were jumping rope, and I was hardly listening, cause they was doing all old ones, you know, like “I like coffee, I like tea, I like boys, why don’t they like me?” and “Queen Bee, come chase me, all around my apple tree…”’

‘Oldies!’ Cassie snorted. ‘Get to the good stuff.’

‘It didn’t sound so good to me. All of a sudden, one starts a new one. Scared the shit out of me. “Billy was a sniper, Billy got a gun, Billy thought killing was fun, fun fun. How many slopes did Billy get? One, two, three, four…”’ Rasputin’s voice trailed off in a horrified whisper. Wizard’s nails dug into his palms. The day turned a shade greyer, and Cassie rubbed her hands as if they pained her.

‘It has to come out somewhere,’ Cassie sighed, ripping the stiff silence. ‘All the horrors come out somewhere, even the ones no one can talk about. Look at child abuse. You know this one, so it doesn’t bother you anymore. But think about it. “Down by the ocean, down by the sea, Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me. I told Ma, Ma told Pa, and Johnny got a licking with a ha, ha, ha! How many lickings did Johnny get? One, two, three,” and on and on, for as long as little sister or brother can keep up with the rope. Or “Ring around a Rosie” that talks about burning bodies after a plague. Believe in race memory. It comes out somewhere.’

‘“When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,”’ whispered Wizard.

‘“Take the key and lock her up,”’ Rasputin added.

The day grew chillier around them, until a pigeon came to settle on Wizard’s knee. He stroked its feathers absently and then sighed for all of them. ‘Kids’ games,’ he mused. ‘Kids’ songs.’

‘Jump rope songs they’ll still be singing a hundred years from now,’ Cassie said. ‘But it’s better it comes out there than to have it sealed up and forgotten. Because when folks try to do that, the thing they seal up just finds a new shape, and bulges out uglier than ever.’

‘What do you do with those jump rope songs, anyway?’ Rasputin demanded, his voice signalling that he’d like the talk to take a new direction.

Cassie just smiled enigmatically for a moment, but then relented. ‘There’s power in them. I can tap that magic, I can guide it. Think of this. All across the country, little girls play jump rope. Sometimes little boys, too. Everywhere the chanting of children, and sometimes the rhymes are nationally known. A whole country of children, jumping and chanting the same words. There’s a power to be tapped there, a magic not to be ignored. The best ones, of course, are the simple, safe-making ones.’

‘Like?’

‘Didn’t you ever play jump rope? Like “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, go upstairs. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say your prayers. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say good-night. Good night!”’

The last words she shouted as gleefully as any child ever did. Both men jumped, then smiled abashedly at one another. The simple words were full, not of awe-inspiring power, but of glowing energy. When Cassie chanted them, her voice made them a song to childhood and innocence, suggesting the woman’s magic she wielded so well. Wizard and Rasputin exchanged glances, nodding at the sudden freeness in the sky and the fresh calm that settled over them. They settled back onto the bench.

‘Something bad’s come to Seattle,’ Cassie announced suddenly.

Rasputin and Wizard stiffened again. Rasputin’s feet began to keep time with his hand, to dance away the threat that hovered. Wizard sat very still, looking apprehensive and feeling strangely guilty.

‘What you want to be saying things like that for?’ the black wizard abruptly complained. ‘Nice enough day, we all come together for some talk, like we hardly ever do, I bring you a new jump rope song, and then you go “Boogie-boo!” at us. Why get us all spooked up when we just got comfortable?’

‘Oh, bullshit!’ Cassie disarmed him effortlessly. ‘You knew it when you came. That jump rope song scared the shit out of you. You knew it didn’t mean anything good when kids in the city start singing stuff like that. So you brought it to me to hear me say how bad it was. Well, it’s bad.’

‘Just one little jump rope song!’

‘Omens and portents, my dear Rasputin. I have seen the warnings written in the graffiti on the overpasses and carved on the bodies of the young punkers. There are signs in the entrails of the gutted fish on the docks, and ill favours waft over the city.’

‘Just a strong wind from Tacoma,’ Rasputin tried to joke, but it fell flat. The small crowd of pigeons that had come to cluster at Wizard’s feet rose suddenly, to wheel away in alarm. Startled at nothing.

‘What kind of trouble, Cassie?’ Wizard asked.

‘You tell me,’ she challenged quietly.

‘Ho, boy!’ Rasputin breathed out. ‘Think I’m gonna dance me off to somewhere else. Give a holler when the shit settles, Cassie. I’ll tell the Space Needle you said hi!’

She nodded her good-byes as Wizard sat silent and stricken. Rasputin stroked off across the cobbled square, his gently swaying hips and shoulders turning his walk into a motion as graceful as the flight of a sea bird. He vanished slowly among the parked cars and moving pedestrians. Wizard was left sitting beside Cassie. Her body made him uneasy. It had taken him a long time to accept that every time he saw Cassie she would be a different person. Today she seemed too young and vibrantly feminine, radiating a femaleness that had nothing to do with weakness or docility. He wished she had come as the bag lady, or the retired nurse, or the straggly-haired escapee from the rest home. Those persons were easier for him to deal with. Looking at her today was like staring into the sun. Yet anyone else passing by their bench might have tagged them as a very nondescript couple. He suddenly wished desperately to be somewhere else, to be someone else. But he was Wizard, and he was sitting beside Cassie, and he felt like a small and scruffy kid in spite of his magic. Or maybe because of it.

‘Your den is the storm’s eye,’ she said without preamble. ‘Whatever it is, it’s coming for you. You want to tell me about it, so I can at least warn the rest of us?’

Wizard shook his head, trying to breathe. ‘I can’t. Not because I won’t, but because I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I don’t know anything about it. Not exactly. Anyone with any magic at all can tell that there’s something hanging over the city. But I don’t know what it is, and –’

‘It’s coming for you.’ Cassie’s voice brooked no denial. There was a chill in it that was not the absence of feelings, but the hard edge of emotions kept in check. ‘Whatever it is, it’s yours. If it has a balancing point, only you will be able to reach it. The sooner you stop it, the better for us all. But you can’t stop it until you give it a name. Do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I know you’re scaring the hell out of me.’

‘Good. Then you do understand. Be on your toes. Keep your rules.’

‘I do. You know I do.’ He added the last reproachfully.

‘Yes. As I keep mine. I suppose I know that best of all.’ There was regret in her words. It stung him.

‘Cassie. I’m not holding out on you. If I knew anything, wouldn’t I tell you?’

She leaned back on the bench, not speaking. Silence fell between them. Thin Seattle sunshine, a mixture of yellow and grey, cautiously touched the uneven paving stones. A sea bird flew overhead, too high to be seen against the sun’s glare, but its mournful cries penetrated the city sounds to echo in Wizard’s soul. A terrible foreboding built within him, forcing words out.