Black and Blue Magic (11 page)

Gift of Icarus and Oberon,

Dream of the earthbound—Spin and Flow

Fledge and Flutter and Fan and GO!

Again, there was the tingling, the violent sensation in his back and shoulders, and the whirling dizziness; except that this time it wasn’t quite so frightening. And then, there were the wings, just as huge and beautiful and terrific as he remembered them. And with the wings there came again the tremendous surge of pride, and a happiness as if a million dreams had come true, all at one time and place.

It was a while before Harry was able to get his eyes and mind off the wings themselves, and back onto the problem at hand—a good flying suit. The next step, once he got his mind back on it, was to figure out how he could use the drapes he’d found in the attic. They were a little dingy now, but they had once been white and they were made of a very thick material. They were all lined with something nice and soft, and at the ends there were fringes of stuff that looked like little tassels.

Harry tried several different ways of draping himself before he hit on the one that seemed to work the best. He finally hung one drape over his left shoulder, passed it behind, under his right wing, and across his chest in front. Then he pinned it several times down his right side. He draped the other one over his right shoulder and fixed it in the same way on the other side. The white rope-like belt from his bathrobe, tied around his waist, pulled it all together in the middle. When he was all through, the drapes made a neat criss-cross on his chest and back, and the fringy stuff hung down almost to his ankles. It looked okay in an old-fashioned way—like an ancient Roman, maybe, or somebody out of the Bible.

Of course, it wasn’t much like what Harry had had in mind when he first started thinking about a flying costume. He’d had a picture, in his mind’s eye, that was more like—well, like a cross between an astronaut’s gear and a skin diver’s wet suit. But the drapes were warm at least, and since no one was going to see him anyway, it really didn’t matter much what he looked like.

When Harry was all dressed and ready to go, he sat in the window of his room and thought about his plans for the evening. He watched lights come on across the bridge, and the water of the bay turn from dark blue to black. A few wisps of fog drifted in from the Golden Gate but most of the sky was clear and starry. It was going to be a great night for flying.

When the last twilight glow was gone, Harry tiptoed down the back stairs. He had thought about taking off from the window of his room, but he’d decided against it. Flying through a three-foot-wide window is a bit tricky when your wing span is around ten feet. Of course, you could just jump out with your wings folded, and hope you remembered how to get them working before you hit the ground. But after some consideration Harry had decided to stick with the carriage house roof as a take-off site. At least until he’d had a little more experience.

On the roof of the Furdells’ carriage house there was room for him to fan his wings, slowly at first and then harder. It wasn’t until then that he began to be sure he remembered what he had learned about flying the night before. He became more confident with each strong sweep of his wings; but before he took off, he stopped long enough to remind himself firmly to concentrate and to keep his mind on his flying. That was a lesson he wasn’t going to forget again. Then he spread his wings, leaped up and out, and he was off, into a clear starry sky.

H
ARRY STARTED HIS SECOND
flight in a mood of efficiency and confidence. Right away he accomplished something very important. It had occurred to him while he was sitting in his window waiting for the darkness to be complete, that he should take advantage of the clear sky and map out a landing route for foggy nights.

So when he took off from the carriage house roof that night, he climbed upward only until he felt he was out of sight from below. Then he leveled out and drifted in a large circle above Kerry Street, and made mental notes of everything he could see. He located the roof of Furdells’ carriage house, and hovering directly above it, he picked out everything around that he might be able to see, above or through a deep fog.

It isn’t easy to memorize angles and distances, but Harry gave it his full attention until he was sure he could zero in on the roof no matter how foggy it might be. On the next foggy night, he wasn’t going to have to trust to guesses or dumb luck. When he finally took off on the next part of his flight plan, he was feeling proud of himself for thinking so far ahead.

Earlier in the day when Harry was making plans for the evening, he had decided on a visit to the zoo. Fleishhacker Zoo had always been one of his favorite places, and it occurred to him that it would be fun to find out what it was like at night. He’d have the whole place to himself, with no crowds in front of his favorite animals; and all the nocturnal animals that were usually asleep when you saw them, would be up and prowling around. It ought to be great.

Harry was feeling fine and flying strongly as he headed southwest towards Twin Peaks. Once he passed the peaks he ought to be able to see all the way to the beach and Fleishhacker Zoo. The wind was clean and sharp against his face, but his drapery robe was thick and warm. He liked the sound the drape fringe made whipping madly against the legs of his Levis. It was a keen high-speed sound, something like a playing card makes on the spokes of a bike wheel. The beat of his wings was strong and sure against the lifting wind, and up here in the open sky flying seemed to have become almost automatic.

As he approached Twin Peaks, he had to climb again in order to clear their tops; and the view from that height was so tremendous that he decided to go even higher to find out just how much he could see, all at one time. He began to spiral up and up until he was almost out of breath. At last he leveled out and drifted in a great circle high above Twin Peaks. Below him the whole bay area lay spread out in patterns of golden haze, midnight blue, and velvety black. Glittering streams of light bordered the darker patches, or laced in and out among them, like velvet embroidered with diamonds. To the west, the Pacific Ocean framed the white beach with an even whiter border of surf.

As Harry’s slowly circling flight turned his face eastward, he could see the entire bay, stretching its dark arms far to the north and south, crossed only by the bridges in three thin bracelets of light. Directly across the bay, crowds of tiny lights climbed the lower slopes of the Berkeley hills, whose dark crests made a black border for the eastern sky.

It was just about the most beautiful sight Harry had ever seen. Below him lay San Francisco, the city that people said was the most beautiful place in the world, spread out like a gigantic living map. As he circled slowly he kept picking out familiar places. Some of them he recognized immediately, even though he generally saw them from a very different angle. Others were puzzling at first, and didn’t seem to be quite where they belonged.

The Embarcadero with its fringe of piers was unmistakable, and so was the Ferry Building, Market Street and the huge glowing dome of City Hall. But Coit Tower seemed a lot nearer the bay than he would have expected, and the Golden Gate Bridge seemed farther to the west.

If he hadn’t already made other plans, Harry could have stayed up there for hours. But the zoo ought to be great, too, so he finally turned toward the south and west and slanted into a long downward glide. As he passed over the dark treetops of Stern Grove, he was flying fairly low again, and it was only a few minutes later that he skimmed silently above the empty parking strip and the high fence that surrounded the zoo.

It had been quite a long flight for a beginner, and his wings were feeling a little tired. He was just thinking about finding a nice safe landing spot—it wouldn’t do to land in the lions’ grotto, for instance—when, just ahead of him, he saw a familiar sight. Monkey Island.

Monkey Island had always been one of Harry’s favorite places at Fleishhacker Zoo. There are no bars at all around the island, only a small moat. There is a big hill of artificial boulders, with a waterfall coming down one side, and lots of nooks and crannies for sleeping and shelter. At one end of the island there is a good sandy beach where the monkey families sit around and sun themselves on nice days and the little babies play tag and scoot around on their stomachs in the sand, just like real kids. Near the beach, at the edge of the moat, there is a dead tree. It isn’t much more than a slender trunk going straight up like a telephone pole; but the monkeys like to play on it.

Anyway, the island was one of the places that Harry liked most, and that was probably the reason he did what he did. If there had been time to stop and think it over, he might have had better sense, but there wasn’t any time at all. He was on the island almost before he knew what was happening.

It was one of his best landings. His scooping wings caught the ocean breeze, and he came down beautifully, feet first, right on top of the little hill. There he was, standing right at the top of Monkey Island’s hill, with the little waterfall trickling down from just below his feet. Everything was very quiet and peaceful, and although it was darker than up in the open sky, there was plenty of light for him to see his way around. Harry was just thinking that the monkeys were probably asleep in the little caves and crannies and wondering if he’d get to see them at all when, suddenly, the little hill erupted like a monkey volcano.

In a split second the whole island was jumping with shrieking monkeys, and more seemed to be oozing out of every crack in the hill. The screeching and chattering was so unnerving that Harry couldn’t think what to do. It seems like anybody would know that there’s not much point in arguing with a bunch of hysterical monkeys, but for a minute all Harry could think to do was say, “Shhh! Be quiet! I’m not going to hurt anything. Hush up, won’t you? Oh, for Pete Squeaks shut up!”

It was just about then that a particularly loud noise from right behind him made Harry look back over his shoulder. A great big monkey was dashing up the hill yelling like crazy, in an especially nasty tone of voice. He was heading right for Harry’s ankles. Instantly Harry decided not to wait to see if a monkey could bite clear through Levis, gym socks and drapery fringe. He took off straight ahead, without even fanning his wings first to warm up.

Everything might have been fine if Harry’s mind had been on his flying, but it’s pretty hard to concentrate with a screaming monkey hanging on to the tail of your drapery. And that’s exactly what the monkey was doing. The crazy monkey had gotten himself so worked up over being a hero for all the lady monkeys, by chasing off the intruder, that when Harry took off, the monkey jumped after him and grabbed him by the robe. He was still hanging there and yelling when Harry ran into the dead tree.

In the excitement and semi-darkness, Harry didn’t even see the tree until he was almost on it. He just had time to throw out his hands to ward off a head-on collision. As his hands grabbed hold of the narrow trunk, worn smooth by many monkey hands, his momentum carried the rest of him on around the tree, like—well, like a monkey on a string. Only, in this case, it was more like two monkeys—Harry and the real one, who was still hanging on to the other end of Harry.

Whatever happened next was so quick and confused that Harry never did remember it very clearly. He did recall a couple of jarring thumps, and a sudden coldness, and the next thing he knew he was sitting in the middle of the moat and a wet monkey was sitting right beside him.

The monkey wasn’t yelling any more. The cold water must have shocked all the hero business right out of him, because he scrambled for the island side of the moat almost as fast as Harry scrambled for the other. Harry was just trailing his wet wing-tips over the railing, when through the yelling of the monkeys, he heard something else. It was the sound of running feet and a human voice shouting something. Harry glanced around frantically and scurried for the nearest bushes. There wasn’t time to take off and even if there had been, he was sure he couldn’t get two feet off the ground, with his wings all wet and his drapes heavy with water.

He had barely crouched down under the bushes, when a man appeared, running down the walk with a flashlight in his hand. When the watchman reached the moat, he stood at the railing for a long time, shining his light around on the island, where the monkeys were beginning to quiet down. Meanwhile Harry crouched under the bushes, dripping and shivering. He had just about decided that he really was going to freeze clear to death, when he saw something that scared him so much he forgot all about the cold.

The watchman had started to walk slowly around the island shining his flashlight from side to side as he went. And it was just at that moment that Harry noticed the trail of water that led from the edge of the moat directly to his hiding place. As a matter of fact, there were three trails, a big wide one in the middle and a little narrow one on each side where the water had run off the tips of his wings. In just a minute, the watchman would reach those trails, and when that happened, Harry knew he had better be somewhere else.

As quickly and quietly as he could, he began to move away from his hiding place. By making use of a tree, a trash can, and a bench, he had scurried and ducked part way around the island by the time the watchman came to the place where the trail of water left the moat.

Peeking out from behind the bench, Harry saw the watchman stop as his flashlight beam hit the trail of dribbled water, and saw him follow the trail backward to the edge of the moat. Near the railing he stopped and seemed to be picking something up off the ground. As the watchman held his find under the beam of the flashlight to examine it, Harry was able to see it, too. He wasn’t positive, but it looked a lot like a feather, a great big white feather.

The watchman turned and followed the trail of water to the bushes, where Harry had just been hiding. He tramped around in the underbrush for a moment, and then came out carrying another feather. For a while, he just stood there, looking at the feathers, and then he began to shine his light up into the branches of the nearby trees.