“Maybe you should have given it to her mother, to hold for her.”
“Naw. She wouldn’t… couldn’t believe in it. She would have thrown it away, or forgotten it.” He cleared his throat huskily. “You know. Wizard, that was the last one I had, too.
God only knows when I’ll be given more. I hate to think it might be wasted.“
“She’ll remember it.” Wizard said comfortingly. “Kids remember the oddest things.”
“Do you Know that?” Euripides demanded of him, eyeing Wizard keenly. “Or are you just talking?”
Wizard couldn’t meet his eyes. “Just talking, this time. The Knowings are like your wishes, fiddler. When you’ve got a wish to give away, you feel it. And when I Know, I just know it- But not this time. I do hope it, though.”
“Me, too.”
“Hey, seen Cassie?”
The fiddler grinned. “Not today. Three, four days back, she was here. She was the Gypsy girl, in a flaming skirt that wouldn’t stay down, and a white blouse that clung to her shoulders like mist. She started to dance, and I couldn’t stop playing.
Played tunes I didn’t even know. My fingers are still sore. I had so much silver in my case, the coins were bouncing off each other and ringing with the music. Some old dude in a black suit and whiskers even joined in the dance, ‘til his granddaughter hauled him away wheezing. And when Cassie was all done, she wouldn’t take a dime. Let me buy her some potatoes and carrots, and a red rose to carry in one hand as she walked down the street, but that was all. That Cassie!“
Wizard grinned. “Sorry I missed it. But if you see her, tell her I’m looking for her.”
“Will do. By the bye, my friend, the garbage truck broke down. It didn’t get to the end of its rounds, and the replacement truck missed a dumpster. That green one, with ‘not alt men are rapists’ spraypainted on it. You know the one. Some good stuff, from the look of it. Everyone cleaned out their Halloween stock.”
“Thanks.”
The clacking of feet coming down the steps sounded. Euripides lifted his bow and set it dancing to the same rhythm.
Wizard merged back into the flow of people and disappeared.
At the top of the Hillclimb, he stopped to survey his domain.
The steps spilled down the open hillside amidst plantings and landings. In the summer, some landings had little white and yellow tables with people laughing and eating. But the chill wind off Elliott Bay had blown away such diners today. A shame, thought Wizard. The wind was juggling seagulls for an empty grandstand. Past the gray chute of Highway 99, there were the piers of the Aquarium and Waterfront Park. The waterfront Streetcar clanged past, elegant in green and gold. Wizard had ridden it once, for the extravagant sum of sixty cents. We had stayed on for the full ninety minutes allowed, touching the shining woodwork and gleaming brass, smelling the past in me vintage 1927 genuine Australian trolley car. They were a recent import to Seattle, but already he loved them as much as he loved Sylvester and the pigeons and the market itself.
At the bottom of the Pike Street stairs, he sauntered along past parked cars to the dumpster. Even from a distance, he could see it wouldn’t yield much. Two men with green plastic trash sacks were working it for aluminium cans. He slowed his pace to allow them to finish. It was painful to watch their pitiful efforts. They had the basic idea of scavenging, but could not surrender their belief in money. There were too many steps to their survival. Find the cans, crush the cans, haul the cans, sell the cans, and go buy a cup of coffee. They wouldn’t have too much luck; the dumpster looked as if it had already been worked several times that morning. Ironically, there would be more in there for a pure scavenger than for a can hunter.
He watched them plod off with their sacks over their shoulders before he approached the dumpster. He gave a snort at Euripides’s idea of good stuff. Fish bones and stray socks. empty cans and crumpled newspapers. A ripped tutu. Seven squished tubes of Vampire Blood, complete with plastic fangs.
Empty cardboard boxes and packing. A plastic fright wig. A box of brown lettuce- A brown paper sack labeled WIZARD.
It was cold, suddenly. Not that the wind came any swifter off the bay. The seagulls were still screaming as they wheeled, the traffic still rushed and rumbled. A breeze, half of power and half gray, stirred his hair. The cold began in the pit of Wizard’s stomach and emanated outward. His ears rang and he cringed from the expected blow.
A pigeon swooped down suddenly to alight on the edge of the open dumpster. He eyed Wizard anxiously. He was very young, his beak still wide and pink. “I’m all right,” Wizard reassured him. “Just give me a moment. III be fine.” The pigeon fluttered closer, to peck at the fish bones, and reject them. A sudden jab of his beak rustled the paper sack. “Yes, yes, I see it. It just took me a bit by surprise, that’s all. Go along now. Popcorn later, at the park. If you see Cassie, tell her I’m looking for her. No, on second thought, stay clear of her. You’re still tender, and you aren’t fast enough to get away from her. Just pass it on to anyone. I’m looking for Cassie.”
The young bird was gone in a clap of wings. A lot of homer in that one. Wizard thought, watching his soaring, careless flight.
He flicked the fish bones away from the bag and extracted it from the dumpster. It was not heavy. He felt it cautiously.
Cloth, perhaps. He walked slowly away with it. He was not ready to look inside the bag. Not yet. It swung ominously at the end of his arm and disturbed him. It didn’t thatch his clothing. It betrayed him. No one in this suit and shoes would carry a dumpster-stained crumpled brown bag. He could get away with trash digging in a suit; people were always throwing things away by mistake and digging through dumpsters for them: lottery tickets and car registrations and phone numbers scribbled on the backs of envelopes. But men dressed as salesmen did not wander around the city carrying dirty paper bags labeled WEARD. He felt the cold touch of the power on him again, both a threat and a consolation. If he could find the balancing point, he could use whatever force was working here.
If he failed to find it, it would smash him.
Today he had had enough of shadows and the rumble of Highway 99 overhead. He needed sunlight. He crossed Alaskan Way recklessly and wandered out onto me pier of the Aquarium.
The sky was overcast, but he sensed the sun behind the clouds and took comfort from it. He sat down on the guard mil of the dock and looked down at the sloshing water. The bag leaned against his leg, rustling secrets whenever the wind touched it.
People were slowing to stare at him. It would be a very stupid place to try to commit suicide, but he felt them wondering if he were going to jump. He rose and took up his bag.
Privacy, he reflected as he strolled down Alaskan Way, was in damned short supply in the city. Whatever was in this bag, it was not something to be poked through on a crowded sidewalk, or investigated in the closed stall of a men’s room. No, it demanded solitude. And the only way to be alone in a city was to be where no one else wanted to be. Someplace cold and windy and smelly with nothing worth looking at- He hiked along Alaskan Way, past the fireboat station and the ferry terminal, past Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Beyond it was a small grab-and-run diner in a sort of kiosk in a bare parking lot.
There was a dumpster behind it, redolent of old grease and fish. Not even the cold wind off the bay could disperse the stink. Wizard stood in the lee of the dumpster and opened his bag.
It took his breath away. For a moment he forgot the stink and the cold and the traffic sounds. He touched with a cautious finger.
The long robe was dark blue, spangled with stars and crescent moons that sparkled silver when the cloth moved. It had long, loose sleeves and a high collar. There was no need to hold it up against himself. He knew it would fit. The cloak was the same blue, but unadorned except for silver trim at the collar and throat. It tied with little silver tassels.
Wizard looked into the bag again. The hat. It was blue, one shade short of black. It had a broad brim, floppier than he had supposed it would be, and a tall, pointed peak. But the tip of this lofty spire was bent. He reached into the bag and attempted to straighten it. The touch of the hat on his hand was like the touch of ice against teeth, like the unfelt slicing of a razor blade against callused skin. Slowly Wizard drew back his hand. The tip would not straighten. It was meant to be bent, and the power in it had let him know it. He felt it as a rebuke to him, some sort of subtle mockery that the tip of his wizard’s hat should be bent at such a rakish angle. He remembered to breathe and took a long draw of air. Meticulously he refolded the robe and cloak and replaced them in the bag, packing them around the tall hat. He was carefully folding the mouth of the bag shut when the flutter of wings jarred him.
“Stupid!” Wizard rebuked him. “I warned you that you weren’t fast enough for her.”
The young homer’s feathers were still ruffled, and two of his pinions were missing. In spite of his rakish appearance, he cocked his head at Wizard, fluffed his throat out and gave a bob and coo.
“I’m coming. Next time, don’t be such a show-off. No, no popcorn until I get to my bench. Go on, now. I’ll see you there.”
The young homer soared off. Wizard watched the flick, flick, glide of his wings silhouetted against the lowering sky.
Despite the chill of the day, he took off his tan overcoat and draped it over his arm, concealing the bag. That done, he headed for the bus stop.
HE STARED UNSEEING out the bus window, trying to still the small moth of excitement that always fluttered inside him when he knew he was going to rendezvous with Cassie. Rasputin’s remarks of a few days ago came into his mind to haunt him.
He pushed the ideas away angrily. As if he would ever endanger his relationship with Cassie that way, let alone the magic she had shown him how to unlock. That he had always had the ability to be a wizard he did not doubt; but without Cassie it would never have developed past the stages of odd hunches and strange turns of fortune. He had not been anxious to develop it either.
The second time Cassie had come to him, he had thought he was having a vision. He tried to remember the exact alley. but all his memories from that time were shadowed, like portrait proofs slowly darkening in his mind. It had been winter. That much was certain.
It had been snowing as it did in Seattle once or thrice a winter, with large wet white flakes that spiraled down from the sky. For the first hour, the flakes had melted as soon as they touched the gray streets or the red bricks that cobbled the alleys.
Then the snow had begun to unite in ridges of gray slush in the streets, and in trackless white strips down the centers of the alleys. Soon even the edges of the streets turned white, and the snow filled in the black footprints of the few pedestrians as quickly as they passed. Tomorrow there would be school closures, and the buses would run on emergency schedules and refuse to stop in the middle of the steep streets. He had wiped a drop of moisture from the tip of his nose and slid his numbed hands back into the small warmth between his cramped thighs.
He had been crouching between the back of a dumpster and“ the brick wall of a building, where only the most persistent of the breezes could find him, and none of the snow. But the cold radiated from the bricks at his back and rose from the cobbled street beneath him. The earth was a cold fickle bitch that had turned her icy back on him. The seams of his old black boots were cracked and the faded denim of his pants was as stiff and rough as sandpaper against his chilled skin. His flannel shirt was not long enough to stay tucked in, and the denim jacket he wore was short, barely touching the top of his hips. The collar was turned up to chafe against his reddened ears whenever he turned his head.
He had been watching the snow as it fell past the glow of a streetlamp, trying to dream. There were two parts to the dream. The first was that if he sat still enough, crouched on his heels behind the dumpster, an envelope of body heat would form around his still body and protect him. Whenever the wind was still, he felt the warmth seeping out of his body and resting against his skin like a benign and transparent spirit. But then the wind would stir and rip his warmth away, and he would shiver again. The shivering made his spine ache and his muscles cramp. Every so often, his legs would give way beneath him and he would find himself sprawled flat on the damp, cold pavement. The bricks sucked greedily at his body heat until he raised himself to crouch on his heels again, his body in a shivering curl over his knees.
The other part of the dream was more frightening. When he stared at the swirl of flakes in front of the streetlamp, his perception of distance and speed changed. The flakes seemed to be originating in the lamp and zooming toward him in a dizzying rush. Stare a little longer, and he would feel teal he was the one in motion, journeying to that far-off tight, and me white bits of matter that rushed past him were (he bright stars of a thousand galaxies. He could feel himself drawn to me light like a moth to the candle flame, could fed the pull as he was lifted from his aching crouch and rushed through a thousand nights. Then his body would fall with a crash, jarring him from both dreams, and he would have to begin again. Each time he felt he was getting closer to the light. He did not know what he would find when he arrived there, but he hoped it would be warm.
Without warning, his dream changed. He frowned to himself in annoyance. What business had this vision in coming between him and the brightness of his light? She floated toward him, white face and dark eyes, dark hair outlined and tipped with silver white, wearing a long dark garment that sparkled and shifted with the wind and whirling flakes- She seemed familiar, and yet he was equally certain he had never met her before.
As she got closer to him, she became darker and darker, until she was a black shape between him and the light, nearly blocking out the glow of the street lamp. He blinked up at her.