Black and Blue Magic (13 page)

Just across the small clearing there was a huge tree with thick heavy foliage. Harry headed for the tree, and once safely hidden by its leaves he came to a quick stop on a strong branch near the trunk. He just clung there for a minute, holding on to the trunk of the tree and wondering desperately what was going to happen next.

He was afraid to go on flying towards home for fear his wings might drop off at any moment. Mr. Mazzeeck had said that if there was any “public notice” the gift would be taken away. Just what did that mean? He reached back quickly and touched his wings. He almost expected to find them gone; but at least for the moment, they were still there. If they’d been gone, he really would have been in a mess. Imagine being found in the morning stranded in the top of a tall tree, dressed in a pair of old drapes. Harry couldn’t help shuddering at the thought.

But the wings didn’t go away; and after he began to think more calmly, Harry decided Mr. Mazzeeck had probably meant there mustn’t be a big fuss about the wings. Like getting into the papers and television, for instance.

It was just about then that he began to wonder if that man on the bench was the type that liked to get things put in the paper. Suppose he went rushing off to Herb Caen, or one of the other columnists who liked to write interesting things about San Francisco, with the hot tip that there was a boy with wings flying around Golden Gate Park.

Harry lay down on his stomach on the branch and started to squirm out to where he could get another look at the man on the bench. Sometimes you could get a pretty good idea of what a person was likely to do just by looking at him. If the man was still sitting under the street lamp, Harry would be able to take a good look without being seen again himself.

The man was still there when Harry parted the leaves and peeked through. Except for turning a bit towards Harry’s tree, he hadn’t moved at all; and from the expression on his face, he might as well have been struck by lightning. In spite of his worries about losing his wings, Harry couldn’t help grinning a little. The guy looked so absolutely flabbergasted.

All at once the man lurched to his feet and started moving toward the tree. He took only a few steps, and Harry felt more comfortable. He had seen people walk like that before, and most of them had been coming out of Hugo’s Bar and Grill, across the street from Wong’s Grocery. Harry looked closer and noticed a big paper bag sitting on the bench; it wasn’t a bit hard to guess what that was.

The man came a few more unsteady steps toward Harry’s tree and then suddenly stopped and sank down onto his knees. Very slowly his hands came up in front of his face, with the fingers all laced together. He stayed that way for quite a while. Now and then, when he turned his face just a bit so that the light from the street lamp fell on it, Harry could see that his lips were moving.

Harry was beginning to feel pretty uncomfortable—and it wasn’t just from the hard branch under his stomach—when the man finally got back on his feet. He moved slowly back to the bench and picked up the paper bag. Then he just stood there holding the bag straight out in front of him and looking at it. At last he turned and marched with unsteady determination to a trash can a little way down the walk. Harry clearly heard the crash as the bag hit the bottom of the can.

The man turned back towards Harry’s tree for a minute, raised his hand in a funny kind of salute, and then went on down the sidewalk. He was trudging away with a lop-sided sort of firmness, as he disappeared from view behind the next grove of trees.

On the flight home, at a good safe altitude, Harry had two ideas. The first one made him feel good, but the second was a little upsetting.

The first idea was that he didn’t have a thing to worry about as far as getting in the newspapers was concerned. It was obvious what people would think if that man in the park started telling people about seeing a flying boy. The poor guy probably knew what they’d think, too, and it was a safe bet that he’d never tell a living soul.

The other idea was a very strange one. Harry didn’t think of it all at once. He was flying along peacefully, when all of a sudden he began to wonder what the man thought he had seen. A flying boy was odd, sure, but the way the man had acted, it was almost as if he’d seen a flying ghost.

It wasn’t until Harry got back to his room, that he really admitted to himself what had happened. He hung a towel over his lamp to dim the light, and then he stood off across the room and looked at himself in the mirror. It was true all right.

If you were far enough away to miss the crew cut and the green stomach, you really might think you’d seen an angel. An ANGEL! for Pete Squeaks!

T
HE NEXT FEW WEEKS
were full of flying. During the days, Harry did his chores and then hung around waiting for night to come. He was always sleepy because of being up so much at night, so in the afternoons he usually took a nap.

It must have been the naps that first got Mom started worrying. Of course she had no idea how sleepy three or four hours of flying can make you; all she knew was that until that summer Harry hadn’t taken a nap since he was two years old, except when he was sick. So she began asking questions about how he felt and watching him in a worried way.

For a while Mom seemed to think the naps had some connection with the vacation plans fizzling again. Once she suggested to Harry that they might still be able to go. It wasn’t hard for Harry to prove that they really couldn’t afford it. Boarding-house-size water heaters cost a lot of money; and even if Miss Clyde had taken Miss Thurgood’s room, she hadn’t exactly taken her place. One thing about Miss Thurgood, she had always paid her rent on time; Miss Clyde was turning out to be the type who handed out excuses more often than money. After Harry had done his best to convince Mom that he wasn’t feeling bad about missing the trip, she admitted that he was right, that they really didn’t have enough money.

But once a mother starts worrying, it spreads worse than a bad case of poison oak, and it wasn’t long before Mom found something else to worry about. She decided that Harry ought to look up some old friends, or maybe make some new ones. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea, but under the circumstances Harry couldn’t get too enthusiastic. The guys he liked best had all moved to the suburbs or even farther; and none of the ones he liked second-best lived close enough to visit without making a big deal out of it. And what with flying and everything it just seemed like too much of an effort.

Once, just to keep Mom happy, he did spend the afternoon with a kid named Robert, who lived just a few blocks away, but it wasn’t much fun. The only thing Robert liked to do was play Monopoly and cheat; like snitching money out of the bank or slipping an extra house on his property. He had his own special rules about how cheating was fine as long as nobody saw you. Robert said his rules made the game more exciting, but compared to flying it didn’t seem like fun at all.

Except for Mom’s worrying, things at home weren’t too bad. At least, as far as Harry could tell they weren’t getting any worse. Miss Clyde was still monopolizing Mr. Brighton’s time and attention every minute that he was at the boarding house, and Mom was still spending too much time talking to old Konkel. But there didn’t seem to be much progress in the wrong direction. Nobody had reached the whispering and hand-holding stage; at least, not that Harry had seen.

As for flying—that was more terrific all the time. Ever since that night in the park when he had practiced so hard, there hadn’t been so many bumps and bruises. For quite a while there weren’t even any narrow escapes.

Harry had worked out a system for take-offs and landings that was fairly foolproof. Because it was risky to go traipsing through the house with his wings on in the early evening, he soon forced himself to learn how to take off from his window. He would squeeze himself through the small opening and then, balancing on the outside sill, fall forward into a gliding take-off. It worked all right because the drop of the hill made it possible for him to glide over the roofs of the Piper Street houses before he began his climb. But the falling forward part was pretty scary the first few times.

After a few tries, however, he gave up the thought of coming home by way of his window. He never seemed to be able to manage it without a dangerous thud when he lit and then a mad scramble to keep his balance on the narrow sill until he could squeeze himself inside. So he had to go on using the carriage house and Madelaine’s roof as landing places. The carriage house stairs and Madelaine’s fire escape both led quickly to the Marcos’ back yard. Mom kept an extra key hidden on the back porch, so Harry simply let himself in the back door and tiptoed up the back stairs to his room. It was always very late by then so there wasn’t much chance of meeting anyone in the hall or on the stairs.

In fact, there was only one little thing that worried Harry just a bit. That was the flowers on the carriage house roof. He first noticed them quite early in the summer. He came in one night from an especially long flight and landed on the roof, as usual. He was just about to go down the stairs when he noticed something strange. Over in the corner of the roof, against the railing, someone had set up a little table. On it was a small vase full of some sort of sweet-smelling flowers and a candle in a glass holder.

When he saw it, Harry didn’t think it was too important. He just supposed that some neighborhood kids had been using the roof as a playhouse, as he had done himself, and had left some of their stuff behind. But after he got into bed that night, he started to do some second guessing.

For one thing, there weren’t any neighborhood kids left, except for some very little ones who lived on Piper, the next street down. It was just possible that they could have gotten into the Furdells’ yard by the back way, but it didn’t seem very likely. And there was something else that was even harder to explain. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he was pretty darn sure those flowers and things hadn’t been on the roof when he flew over it as he took off. It didn’t seem a bit likely that those little kids from Piper Street had been out there playing house in the middle of the night.

It was all very mysterious, so Harry just stopped landing on the carriage house roof for a while, except on foggy nights. He had to go on using it then because his other landing place, Madelaine’s roof, was too dangerous when you couldn’t see to avoid all the clotheslines, lounge chairs, and T.V. antennas. As time went by, he stopped worrying about the little table; but once when he landed on the roof, he thought the flowers in the vase looked fresh. In the dark and fog, though, he couldn’t be sure.

Sometimes that summer when Harry swooped out and away from his bedroom window, he had a definite destination in mind, but often he only wanted to fly. Then his favorite direction was out towards the middle of the bay. Out there above the open water he could swoop and glide and dive and climb without having to think about anyone looking up and seeing him.

But other nights he felt like going some place in particular. It was wonderful to be able to go any place, in any direction, as long as it wasn’t too far to get back before dawn. Once or twice on particularly foggy nights, he crossed the bay and kept on going until the fog and the Berkeley hills were behind him. On the other side of the hills it was clear and warmer. He drifted on and on, looking down on housing developments and then on farms and pastures, until he was almost to the foothills of Mount Diablo. He lit once or twice to rest on quiet hilltops, and once, without meaning to, he stampeded a herd of horses that happened to be grazing nearby.

Other times he went north, across the Golden Gate to Marin County. Once he found Mr. Brighton’s farm, and circled around it thinking what a great place it was and how much fun it would be to live there. It was a clear bright night, and the moonlight made the big old two-story house and the little barn and corral look like something out of an old-fashioned picture. Harry could just picture himself saddling up a horse out by the barn. It was just too bad that a picture like that hadn’t occurred to Mr. Brighton.

Once in a while, Harry flew around the city, too, but that always seemed more dangerous. For one thing, all the thousands and thousands of lights made a golden haze that penetrated far up into the sky, so that it was impossible to fly very low without taking a big risk. And on foggy nights there was always the danger of running into a tall building or a church spire or something. One night when he was feeling particularly daring, he landed right on the top of the Fairmont Hotel. By peeking over the edge he could watch the glass-walled observation elevator going down the outside of the building, and for a minute he had a terrific urge to fly down and press his face against the glass. Boy, wouldn’t that give those people in the elevator a jolt—seeing a face looking in at them, up there, twenty stories above everything?

But, of course, he didn’t do it. “Public notice” was what Mr. Mazzeeck had said he mustn’t have, and if peeking in the Fairmont elevator didn’t cause public notice, nothing would. Besides, he wouldn’t want to give somebody a heart attack, or anything like that.

I
T WAS EARLY IN
August that Harry decided to explore Alcatraz prison. The deserted old prison on its tiny island had always been a part of Harry’s private view from his third-story window. But now it occurred to him that it might be interesting to see close up.

It had been a clear day; but as Harry began his climb above Kerry Street that night, he noticed the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate. The first wispy fingers were already circling the island of Alcatraz. By the time he arrived above it, the fog was drifting in thin ghostly veils past the high walls of the old prison. As Harry glided in a circle on silent wings, he could hear only a distant lapping of water and now and then the moan of a foghorn or the shrill cry of a gull.

Although he had planned to land and do a bit of exploring, Harry found suddenly that he had changed his mind. He told himself that there was probably a night watchman left on the island; but that wasn’t the only reason. It was more a strange feeling he had that the island wasn’t really deserted at all. The prisoners were all gone, but something had been left behind. It was as if the island were still alive with the misery and loneliness and despair that had lived there for so many years. Harry decided on some practice-flying up over the bay instead.