Firebirds Soaring (41 page)

“Ohhhh,” sighed Clarisse, and plunked down on her bottom.

“Now for the first event in this matinee theatrical,” he said grandly, and gave a bow.

Maudie and I sat cross-legged by Clarisse and waited. I hadn’t seen one of his shows in a long time, probably two years or more—once I babysat for Dr. Doddleman on the day his oldest son had a birthday. It was a terrific magic show for a kid magician, and I was expecting more of the same.

“Don’t speak, no matter what happens. This may take a few minutes,” he said, tossing the cape artfully over one shoulder and closing his eyes.

The cicadas were droning in the weeds, and a big star of sun on chrome burst from the other side of the meadow. I hadn’t really noticed the yellow jackets until Erl Jack was went so quiet and still, but a gang of thirty or forty zoomed by in the direction of the Chevy while we waited.

“Bikers,” I whispered.

Nothing was happening. It was the most boring magic show on the face of the earth. I was about to say so when Maudie lay down and swept her fingers across the grass. Erl Jack Falchion’s feet had lifted into the air, ever so slightly. She grabbed a stick, poking it between his bare soles and the ground.

It was a trick, but I couldn’t conceive how.

Slowly his feet returned to the ground, and his eyelids fluttered. He looked about dreamily, as though he wasn’t quite sure of his surroundings. In another minute, he seemed entirely himself again.

“One of the guys at the lumber mill taught me how to do that,” he said, “a man from Brazil.”

“That was definitely cool,” I said, forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to be sweet to Erl Jack.

“That was really, really awesome.” Maudie nodded with such vigor that her sweaty ringlets danced.

“He’s a wizard,” Clarisse whispered, clutching her dolly.

“Thank you, my friends,” he said, bowing. “Now, prepare yourselves for my second act.” With a snap of his fingers, he untied and dropped the cape. Lightning-fast, he stripped off my grandpa’s shirt, and it floated away like gossamer, landing on a bunch of Queen Anne’s lace.

“That’s quite an act,” I said. Dryly, let me add—about as dry as dry ice. I didn’t put it past Erl Jack to flaunt himself and call it magic. My eyes crept over his torso, hard and tight from manhandling lumber, and rested on his face. And if you think that sounds as if my eyes were bugging out on stalks, well, they probably were.

“India,” he said, looking annoyed.

“Don’t cheat.”

“If I had on clothes, you’d say I cheated worse,” he complained. “Hush.”

He held out his palm to prove that it was empty. He closed the hand and lifted it to his cheek. Holding it out again, he revealed a blue petal. He let it fall and displayed the palm again. Fourteen times he did this, each time letting a petal flutter to the ground, where Maudie and Clarisse pounced on it.

Afterward he asked them for the petals, made some hokey-looking mystic passes, and produced a rose.

With another flourish, he presented it to me.

“There’s no such thing as a blue rose.” Bemused, I stared at the holy grail of horticulture. The petals looked just as rich and velvety as those of the pink climber by Gran’s porch steps. A pair of yellow jackets landed and began to explore, so Erl Jack flicked the stem until they flew away. When he blew across the top of the flower, I smelled perfume. The girls danced in a sweet, sudden chill and called for more. Later on, when I told Gran that the air had gone cool, she didn’t believe me. “Erl Jack could make a hog dream about being a lady’s silk purse with a golden clasp and taffeta lining,” she declared.

Clarisse had let out a cry of pure mourning on seeing that the petals were gone, so now he plucked a pair of rabbits out of the air. They were no bigger than my pinky fingernail but made both girls absurdly pleased. For them, the toys overshadowed the rose.

“Just some of my party supplies,” Erl Jack said modestly.

“Was that magic?”

He drew the flower from my fingers and tucked it carefully behind my ear.

“How could it not be, dear India?” He glanced at the little girls and lowered his voice. “The bargain was power and magic, wasn’t it? That was magic. Next is power. With witnesses.”

He snapped his fingers to get the attention of Maudie and Clarisse.

“Now for the last and most risky part of the show. Follow me.” He picked up the brazier and waded through the wildflowers, toward the car.

Clarisse hung back.

“Come on,” he called. “You don’t have to go too close.”

I felt the same reluctance she did. When guiding visitors to the car, I always parked myself on the end of the path and waited for them to gawk their fill. I’d never been close. I trailed after Erl Jack, stepping where he had mashed down the wildflowers because I despise ticks. They’re nasty little acrobats, slinging themselves from a rocking stem onto bare legs. Halfway through the field, I could make out gray, spittle-worked paper pressed against the windows. The nest hummed along with the endless sawing of the cicadas. Where the glass was broken, gray bulged out—the whole thing suggesting a car and speakers from some weird, abandoned movie drive-in.

“A barn near the mill is packed with nest,” Erl Jack said. “They’re going to torch it this winter.”

He flattened the weeds in a two-yard radius and told us to stand there to watch.

“It seems like the end of the world,” I murmured. I had a strong sensation of horror mixed with fascination.

Clarisse was whimpering and dragging on my hand, but I didn’t brush her off.

Maudie, however, was staring with interest at a squad of incoming yellow jackets.

Erl Jack Falchion waded closer to the car, carrying the hibachi. “They say that there are ten or eleven queens in each of these things,” he called, “and that there may be one hundred thousand insects inside, or more. But people do strange things for love.” He sounded quite cheerful as he set down the hibachi; afterward, he still had something in his hand.

It was a jar of honey. He began anointing his body from the waist up with driblets of the stuff.

“Erl Jack, no!”

He just smiled at me.

With that many yellow jackets sailing in and out of the windows, it didn’t take long for them to find Erl Jack. He threw a handful of powder that made the fire shoot up black cumulus, and he kept moving to stay in its path. The yellow jackets settled a breast plate on his chest, shielded his belly, stuck epaulets on his shoulders. Within three minutes, he was a tigerish, seething mass. His eyes were open, staring.

Clarisse howled, swaying back and forth in an ecstasy of fright.

“Maudie,” I whispered, “take her home. Very slowly, before she attracts their attention.”

I wanted to go with them.

My legs had gone wiggly, and I dropped to my knees, letting out a moan that blotted out the noise of the yellow jackets and cicadas. Big stinging tears were pushing out of my eyes as the pelt of black and gold rippled across his heart. My throat felt jammed with grief and death.

Erl Jack was a goner.

He must’ve been a bit panicked, because he dropped the sack of powder onto the grill. The coals gnawed through the bag by degrees, consuming more powder and setting off fresh bursts of gray and black.

Erl Jack’s shape writhed in the billowing cloud, wheeling slowly. When the wind blew, I glimpsed yellow jackets pelting his bare feet. He stepped gingerly out of the smoke with only a few dozen insects still clinging on, and these he whisked away with his fingers. For yards around, yellow jackets toppled and reeled like drunks.

“Your hair,” I croaked, and he scattered a few more with his fingers.

He broad jumped out of the yellow pool, landing beside me.

“India.” His voice was shaky, and I took him by the hand and led him through the wildflowers. My legs still trembled. I looked back once to make sure the yellow jackets weren’t coming after us. They were flying up from the ground, bumbling in the air. The mammoth nest reared up behind them, a dozen insect kingdoms ruled by pitiless queens.

When we got to the trail, I started to cry, and in earnest. I used to sob like that when my mother was carted off to the hospital—until I got hardened and didn’t care because she didn’t care, not about me or anything except getting seriously high.

“Hush, hush, India,” Erl Jack said, and he didn’t sound as cocky as before. He put his arms around me, and I hit him on the chest two or three times, though I’d never struck anybody in my life.

“Don’t you ever, ever, ever do anything so stupid, ever again.” I head butted him, my face slick with tears, and when I looked up, his eyes were wet.

After a while I stopped, and he retrieved the cloak and shirt, along with a rag and a bottle of insect repellent. He doused himself liberally, scrubbing at the honey until his skin glowed. I felt as empty as a dried-out nest of a castle, abandoned by queen and workers.

The cicadas’ song was unbearably loud in the wood. We didn’t talk until I’d quit sniffing and wiped my tears away with Grandpa’s worn-out shirt.

“Power and magic, India,” Erl Jack teased, his usual air of nonchalance coming back.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, stopping. “Now, when my face is streaked with snot, and I’m madder at you than I’ve ever been in my whole life?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “I want it whenever I can get it.”

I touched a swelling on his shoulder and slipped my arms around his neck.

“But don’t you dare ask me for another, you hear me? Wait until I ask you, even if you have to wait until hell is a major block of ice.”

He nodded meekly—put on, of course.

So I paid him. I’m a girl of my word, and that was magic and power, even if the latter was weirder and just plain more than I ever care to see again.

Gran has an old, old refrigerator. It has a seal on it that won’t quit. Once that baby’s shut, it’s shut good. My first thought was that Erl Jack Falchion kissed like that refrigerator. He was going to make sure that if it was only one kiss, it was no chicken peck on the lips but one that would last him a while. I giggled, though I was mad at him, and I got serious and kissed him as tenderly as I knew how because he had, after all, delivered on magic and power and, in the end, deserved it. Just for an instant, I thought that our feet floated up from the path. The honey and molasses in me melted entirely away, and my veins lit up like a big silver tree with its branches flying and leaves going like mad.

“Now that was magic,” Erl Jack said, once he caught his breath.

When we got back to the mimosa tree, Clarisse dropped her doll and stared at Erl Jack. Her sister trotted right over.

“How many stings you got?”

“Three, maybe four,” he said, kneeling to show her. “You got a credit card, Maudie? That’s the best thing for sliding the stingers out.” He hadn’t put my grandpa’s shirt on because I wouldn’t give it back, not after I’d blown my nose on it.

She choked with laughter. “I’m not old enough for a credit card!”

“No? I knew for sure that India didn’t have a card, but I thought you and Clarisse might.”

“You are one crazy boy,” Maudie said admiringly.

“That’s what they said about the last guy to win a Darwin Award,” I told her.

“What’s Darwin?”

“I can’t get into that right now,” I said. “Ask the rocket scientist. She’s bound to know.”

“It’s the prettiest flower I ever saw.” Clarisse hugged her doll and looked with intense longing at my blue rose.

“A rose of magic and power.” I slipped the flower from my hair. The petals still had a faint perfume, but I was astonished to see that they were no longer genuine but silk, though the dusting of gold seemed to be pollen.

“I thought you might like to keep it as a souvenir,” Erl Jack said.

For once, I looked at his face and had nothing to say. That was a feat in itself—shutting up India—though I should’ve needled him for assuming that a kiss from Erl Jack required a memento.

“I need another bath,” he went on. “And you’re a mess. Want a lift to the café in about forty minutes?”

We drifted away from the girls, toward the truck.

“All right,” I said, stopping him to peel a wing from his arm. My mind kept roving from the kiss to the car-shaped mound of spittle-paper, from the blue rose to the soles of Erl Jack’s feet, floating on air.

“It ended happily,” he said, sliding his hand along my cheek.

“You got the kiss.”

Gran came out on the porch with a trowel, and we both waved at her. She just can’t quit gardening. She’s got every inch of the yard covered with zinnias and coleus and a hundred other plants.

I stuck the rose in my hair and took Erl Jack’s hand.

“I really love only two people in this world,” I told him, “but don’t take advantage, you hear me? I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and not even you and Gran could ever stop me.”

“We’re probably the only ones who wouldn’t try,” Erl Jack said, squeezing my fingers.

For a moment my heart felt packed with fluttering insect wings. I was bound to leave for the wide world, despite the pink mimosa flowers and the cicadas’ song and the laughter of Erl Jack and Gran that was in me like honey and molasses in girl-growing weather on a summer’s day.

“Yeah,” I said, a little bitterly.

But it was okay: two was a lot for somebody with no parents, who grew up smart but downwind from the dump in a house like a mossy growth on the slope of a hill.

MARLY YOUMANS
is the author of
Ingledove
and
The Curse of the Raven Mocker
, two very southern fantasy books that braid together Celtic and Cherokee culture (both are available in Firebird editions). In addition, she is the author of a collection of poetry,
Claire
, and the novels
The Wolf Pit
(winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction),
Catherwood
, and
Little Jordan.