Magic Street (16 page)

They all thought Shakespeare was taming the fairies, making stuff up that would make them seem cute instead of dangerous.

Mack knew that when a fairy was in our world, like Mr. Christmas, he was the size of a man.

But in Fairyland, he was small. Not so small that he could fit into a hazelnut shell, though. Unless he really was that small when he got even deeper into Fairyland. He had already made his way to a point on the path within sight of Skinny House. If he hadn't, if he had still been as tiny as Queen Mab, then Mack would never have found him.

Shakespeare got it right. Shakespeare knew something about how Fairyland worked. Changing sizes. The way fairies mess with humans for fun, but don't actually hate us because they don't care about us.

And if Shakespeare got that part right, then why shouldn't he know about an ongoing rivalry between the king and queen of the fairies? In his day, it was a matter of pranks, arguments over a changeling, love potions. Silly things. But what if it got uglier and uglier as the years passed? What if Oberon somehow managed to imprison Titania in a globe-shaped lantern hovering in a clearing on the far side of a ravine, guarded by a panther?

There were two lanterns there with a fairylight inside. Was the other one Oberon himself? Or maybe some boyfriend fairy that Titania was cheating on Oberon with.

If only Shakespeare had written more.

He was known as the greatest writer in the world. Even people who didn't speak English thought so, just from reading translations of his plays. There was a guy who actually wrote a book that claimed that Shakespeare somehow invented human beings, or something wacko like that.

Was it possible that Shakespeare's brilliant writing had been his wish? That he hungered to be the greatest writer in the world the way Tamika had hungered for water to swim in forever. What was it Shakespeare might have asked for? Undying fame. A name that would live forever.

"Shakespeare" indeed. Some prankster fairy—was it Puck himself?—had decided to let Shakespeare's life act out his name. If the pen was his weapon, his spear, then at the end of his career his spear shook so badly that he was unable to keep writing. He hadn't wished for a long career, had he? Nor for happiness in love. He ended up marrying a woman who was years older than he was because he got her pregnant—or somebody did. And then his career was cut off short by his shaking hands—but then, his wish had already been granted, hadn't it? He was already going to be famous forever, so why should he be allowed to keep writing or even keep living long enough to enjoy his fame?

Ha ha, Puck. Very funny.

What fools these mortals be my ass. I heard your teeny weeny little voice, Puck, and dragged you out of Fairyland and took you to the hospital and then you somehow sucked healing out of me then what? Any thanks? Any favors? No, you just disappeared.

Though now that Mack thought about it, maybe not getting a favor from Puck was the best favor he could think of. Because fairy favors always took away more than they gave.

"Mack, this thing you've got with Shakespeare," said Miz Smitcher one morning, "I'm delighted, I'm happy for you, you're smart as I always thought you were. But you got to sleep at night, baby.

Look at you, hardly keeping your eyes open. It's a miracle you don't put your Rice Krispies in some other hole."

And because he was tired, Mack answered almost honestly. "I got to find out about him," he said. "He's like me. In a lot of ways."

Miz Smitcher touched his forehead. "Oh, I know, baby. He was white, you black. He had long hair like a white girl, you got hair so nappy your head could rub the paint off a Cadillac. He was English, you American. He was a brilliant writer, you can't spell. He made up plays, you wander around the neighborhood like a stray dog eating at anybody's back door who'll feed you. Who could miss the resemblance?"

Mack sat up straighter and finished his Krispies and didn't talk about being like Shakespeare again.

"I can spell okay," he mumbled.

"I know. But you don't spell like Shakespeare."

"Nobody spells like Shakespeare anymore, Miz Smitcher. He couldn't spell worth... spit."

That was an old game between them, and Mack took it up. "Tastes so bad I got to lick up the puke just so I can have something to puke out again."

"Now you going to make me puke," said Miz Smitcher. She got up from the table and started rinsing off her dish to put it in the dishwasher.

So the game was over before it began. Or maybe it never was a game. Maybe she really was mad at him. But why? He didn't actually say "shit." So she was probably really mad about something else.

About Shakespeare. About Mack reading all the time and staying up late looking stuff up on the web.

Don't you see, Miz Smitcher? This stuff is about me. I'm a changeling myself, and Shakespeare wrote about fairies and changelings because he met them, he must have, he knew the answers. Only he's dead and I can't ask him. So I got to find the truth in his plays.

Ariel, for instance, in The Tempest. He was a fullsize fairy or spirit because he had been rescued by Prospero and so he was bound to serve him for a certain period of time and...

And I rescued Puck. There in the woods, I rescued him, and he's bound to serve me.

That's why he's never there at Skinny House. That's why I never see him on the street. He's hiding from me, so I won't realize that he's my slave.

Not that I want a slave.

But if I'm his master, then I can ask him questions and he's got to answer.

But as long as he can't hear me giving him any kind of command, he doesn't have to obey.

Cheater.

That afternoon Mack slipped into Skinny House and out the back door and went to the ruins on the hill above Olympic Boulevard and with spray paint wrote in big letters, one letter per column, PUCK YOU CHEATING FAIRY GET BACK HOME!

Two days later there was a story in the paper that he heard Mrs. Tucker read aloud to Miz Smitcher. "Can you imagine such bigotry in this day and age? Right there in huge letters across the face of the Olympic overpass."

"At least it said 'fairy' instead of 'nigger,' " said Miz Smitcher. "Maybe that's progress, maybe it ain't. The way it used to be for us in this country, I don't wish that on anybody."

Mack heard this and he called Ceese and pretty soon the two of them were parked at Ralph's just down from the overpass, looking at the big letters that said PUCK YOU CHEATING FAIRY

GET BACK HOME!

"I wrote it but not here. I wrote it in Fairyland. I was sending a message to that lying cheater Puck."

"Puck?" asked Ceese.

"Mr. Christmas. Bag Man."

"You're saying he is Puck?"

"I asked the house what his real name was, and It made a hockey puck appear."

"It doesn't look like it says Puck, actually."

"That's what it says."

"That P looks more like an F. See how it's not really a loop there?"

"It says Puck, dammit!" said Mack.

"Don't get excited. But you can see how it got folks talking. They aren't going to think somebody's writing a message to a real fairy named Puck. They're just going to think it's a message from a bigot so dumb he can't make an F right."

"Don't you get it, though, Ceese? I wrote that at a ruined circle of stone columns in Fairyland, and it appeared on the overpass here."

"On both sides, too," said Ceese. "You only wrote it once?"

"Only once."

"So what you do in that place changes things here," said Ceese.

"I've peed and pooped all over Fairyland," said Mack. "You think that stuff pops up in our world, too?"

"Now that's a pretty thought. Right in the middle of somebody's kitchen table."

"Right in the office of some studio bigshot."

"A pool of piss."

"A steaming pile of—"

"You're going to make me puke."

"I puked once there, too."

"You a regular shitstorm, boy. Somebody got to get you under control. I got to find out if there's a serial burglar who breaks into people's houses, takes a dump, and leaves without stealing nothing."

"I'd like to see you prove it."

"We could do DNA testing."

"Shit don't have no DNA," said Mack.

"Did somebody here ask Mr. Science?"

"I wrote that sign in Fairyland," Mack said, returning to the subject. "And come to think of it, stuff that happens here changes the world there, too. I mean, the terrain is pretty much the same. So when we have an earthquake, maybe they have an earthquake, too. Maybe they get mountains because we get mountains."

"That's God's business," said Ceese. "Not mine. I'm a cop, not a geologist."

"You not a cop yet."

"Am too. Been a cop for two weeks now."

"And you didn't tell me?"

"I'm still a trainee. Probationary, kind of. I don't want to make some big announcement yet because I still might wash out. But I got a badge and I'm going out on calls."

"You a cop. I can't believe that."

"Now you can't mess with me anymore," said Ceese.

"I never messed with you before," said Mack. "Now I got to start."

"I'll arrest your black ass and give you such a Rodney."

"It takes six cops to give somebody a Rodney."

"It takes six white cops," said Ceese. "Takes only one black cop."

"Who the bigot now?"

"Just stating the obvious," said Ceese. "I been practicing Eddie Murphy's speech from Beverly Hills Cop. His 'nigger with a badge' speech."

"Only cop I ever saw was Baldwin Hills."

"That's one long movie."

"The name of the movie is... stop messing with me, Mack. I come clear over here cause you want to check out the graffiti they wrote about in the paper, and now you telling me you wrote it in Mr. Christmas's back yard."

"It's a big back yard, Ceese."

"Well, I got to give you credit. It's the first graffiti I seen in years that I could actually read. But you can't make a P worth shit."

On the way home Ceese took him to the Carl's Jr. on La Cienega so it turned into a feast, but the whole time, they both knew that something strange and important and maybe terrible was bound to happen one of these days, and they wished they had some idea of what.

MOTORCYCLE

So it was that, full of curiosity and dread, Mack Street passed the next four years, living as if it were always summer, passing back and forth between the world of concrete, asphalt, and well-tended gardens in Los Angeles, and the wild, rainy tangle of the forests of Fairyland.

In the one world, he went to high school and learned to solve for n, the causes of the Civil War, how to write a paragraph, the inner structure of dead frogs, and how and why to use a condom. He dropped in on neighbors and ate with them and knew everybody. He took Tamika Brown out in her wheelchair and walked her around to see stuff and learned to understand her when she tried to talk.

He broke up fights between neighborhood kids and carried things for old ladies and watched over things, in his way.

In the other world, he wandered farther and farther, climbing higher into the hills, using the tools he brought with him to shape wood and stone. For days at a time he stayed, and then weeks. He built an outrigger canoe and took it out into the ocean, thinking to sail to Catalina, but the currents were swift and treacherous and he used up all his drinking water before he was able to work his way back to shore, south of the barking seals and cruising sharks and killer whales of the rocks around Palos Verdes.

He climbed mountains and wrote notes on the terrain and marked on topographical maps of Southern California. He drew sketches of the creatures that he saw. He traced leaves. He drank from clear streams and looked up to face a sabertooth tiger that merely looked at him incuriously and padded away. He learned that the fauna of Fairyland was impossible. Creatures that could not coexist passed each other on the forest paths or fought each other over carcasses or slept ten yards from each other in the dark of night. Yet whenever he needed to sleep, he lay down in a likely spot and was undisturbed through the night. He was always a visitor here, and even the animals knew it.

His outrigger, which he abandoned on a rock-strewn beach where crabs as big around as basketballs were so thick underfoot that he could hardly find a place to walk, became a drug-runner's speedboat that inexplicably drifted to shore, filled with cocaine but with not a hint as to what happened to the crew.

The canvas-roofed shelter he built for himself against the frequent downpours became a roofed bus stop shelter on La Brea where there had been no bus stop.

The melon and bean seeds he planted in a clearing did not grow in Fairyland, but in Koreatown they became a maddening series of ONE WAY and DO NOT ENTER and NO OUTLET signs that made traffic snarl continuously.

His cache of hand tools turned into a huge banyan tree that lifted and jumbled the sidewalk and street at the corner of Coliseum and Cochrane, along with protest signs demanding that the city let this

"beloved and historic tree" remain standing. When he took the hand tools out of Fairyland again, the tree remained, but soon died and was cut down and dug out without protest. And when he took the tools back to the same place, instead of a tree, this time there was a seepage of water from a natural spring that caused sewer workers to dig and patch and redig and repatch through Mack's whole junior year in high school.

The one time he tried to carry fire into Fairyland was entirely by accident. Miz Smitcher had taken him to dinner at Pizza Hut and on a whim he picked up a matchbook. He forgot it was in his pocket until he stepped off the brick onto the soft mossy ground of the path in Fairyland, and all at once he felt his leg grow warm, then hot. He tugged at his pants, thinking maybe he'd been bitten by some insect, a spider or fire ant that got into his pants. Then he felt the square of cardboard through the denim and tried to dig the matchbook out of his pocket. It burned his hands. Only then did he realize he had to leave, take the matches back out of the place, back to the patio, where he tossed them on the ground.

He ran back out of Skinny House to the street and then ran around the block to make sure the matches hadn't caused a fire in the real world. He watched the Murchison house for a while, just to make sure. No smoke, no flame. But that would have been too logical. The next day, the story spread through Baldwin Hills about how the Murchisons came home and found that their dog Vacuum, chained up in the back yard, was now missing a leg. Only the vet told them that the dog had obviously never had a right hind leg, since there was no bone, no scar, and... the Murchisons quickly realized that the vet thought they were insane and they stopped arguing. At first nobody argued with them about how normal their dog had been the day before, but within a few days it seemed like nobody but Mack remembered that Vacuum had had four legs his whole life until some idiot accidentally carried fire into Fairyland.

Unpredictable. Uncertain. No rules. Mack feared the uncertainty but loved the profusion of life, and wished that he could share it with someone. Ceese did not want to go back there, though. And besides, what kind of companion would he be, towering sixteen or twenty feet in the air? Or taller, for all they knew—maybe Ceese would never stop growing the farther he got from Skinny House, until at the Santa Monica shore he would be so tall he could see over the mountains to the north and look at the Central Valley, or turn eastward and see the Colorado, no longer a thread of silver through a desert, but now a wide stream like the Mississippi.

As he got older, he also got taller, so each stride took him farther. He grew so tall so fast that for a while he wondered if maybe he was becoming a giant like Ceese was in Fairyland, only slower, and on both sides of Skinny House. It wasn't like he knew of any blood relatives who could show him how tall he was likely to grow. But eventually it slowed down, and while he was tall enough that his loping stride carried him far and fast, nobody would mistake him for an NBA star. Well, maybe a point guard.

His feet were callused so they felt like the skin of the soles didn't even belong to him, they were like hooves. He hated putting shoes on at school—it felt to him like he was in prison, wearing them.

And in Fairyland they were more trouble than they were worth, the laces always snagging on something, the soft soles cushioning his feet so that he couldn't feel the earth and learn what it was telling him about the land he was passing through. One pair of shoes was sucked off his feet in the swamp and became a suitcase full of nearly perfect counterfeit hundreds found by a couple of skateboarders in Venice. The newspapers speculated that the bills were part of a terrorist plot to destabilize the economy. No sane person would ever believe that they began as a pair of Reeboks that were sucked off his feet in a mudhole.

And from time to time Mack climbed down into the ravine and up the other side and walked to the clearing where it was always night, and the two globes sparkled with the only lights Mack saw in Fairyland that weren't in the sky. He sat and contemplated the globes, not knowing which was the captured fairy queen, not knowing if she went by Titania or Mab or some other unguessable name.

Sometimes he thought of her as Tinkerbell from the Peter Pan movie—a scamp too dangerous to let out into the world. But sometimes she was a tragic figure, a great lady kidnapped and imprisoned for no other crime than being in somebody's way. Titania had saved a changeling from Oberon's clutches. Titania had saved a boy like Mack. So she had to be punished, at least in Midsummer Night's Dream. Was it possible that her imprisonment now had something to do with Mack?

"Do I owe you something?" he asked.

But when he spoke aloud, the panther always grew alert and stopped its prowling. If he kept talking, even if it was to the panther and not to the captured fairies, the panther began to stalk him, creeping closer, its muscles coiled to spring at him. So he learned to be silent.

The corpse of the ass-headed man was a collapsed skeleton now, and grass grew over it, and leaves had scattered across it, and before long the ground would swallow it up or rain would carry it away. That's me, thought Mack. Dead and gone, while the fairies live forever. No wonder they don't care about us. We're like cars that whip past you going the other way on the freeway. Don't even see them long enough to wonder who they are or where they going.

Sure enough, there he was in the living room, building a house of cards. Looking like he always looked. Not even bothering to glance up when Mack came in.

"Tread lightly," said Puck.

"Where've you been?"

"Did we have an appointment? Your feet are filthy and you're tracking it all over the carpet."

"Who cares?" said Mack. "As soon as you leave, there won't be a carpet."

"You know how this works, Mack," said Puck.

Mack sighed. "Some woman in the neighborhood's going to have to shampoo this carpet."

"It's nice when you're tidy," said Puck. "I try to have some consideration for the neighbors."

"You got towels and soap and shit in your bathroom?"

"Oh, are you suddenly all hip-hop, boy, saying 'shit' like it was 'the'?"

"Nothing hip-hop about 'shit,' " Mack murmured as he headed for the bathroom. There was soap, but it was a half-used bar with somebody's hair all over it, and the shampoo was some smelly fruity girly stuff that made Mack feel like he was putting candy in his hair. Couldn't Puck steal this stuff from somebody who kept their soap clean? Rubbing somebody else's little curly hairs all over his own body.

He couldn't stand it, and stood there in the shower picking hairs off the soap and then trying to rinse them off his hand. By the time he got the soap clean the water was running tepid, and it was downright cold when he rinsed.

When he stepped out of the shower, Puck was standing there looking at him. Mack yelled.

"What are you doing? Can't a niggah get some privacy here?"

"You picking up that 'niggah' shit at high school? You grew up in Baldwin Hills, not the ghetto."

"What are you, my father? And how come you get to say 'shit'?"

"I invented shit, Mack," said Puck. "I'm older than shit. When I was a boy, nobody shit, they just threw up about an hour after eating. Tasted nasty. Shit is a big improvement."

"I saved your life, asshole, and then you ran off and hid for four years."

"Statute of limitations run out so I'm back," said Puck.

"There's no statute of limitations on owing somebody for saving your life."

"Ain't no lawyers in Fairyland," said Puck. "That's one of its best features."

"We aren't in Fairyland," said Mack.

"Well, your mortal cops and courts sure as hell got no jurisdiction here," said Puck. "But tell me what you want me to do for you, and I'll see if I want to do it."

"I want to know about the queen of the fairies."

Puck shook his head and clicked his tongue three times. "Ain't you got no young girls in high school? Why you got to go looking into a woman older than the San Andreas Fault, and a lot more troublesome?"

"So she causes even more trouble than you do?" asked Mack.

"Some people think so," said Puck. "Though maybe it's a tossup."

Mack wasn't going to let the fairy distract him. "Is she named Titania or Mab?"

"I thought we settled that years ago. I don't tell names."

"Then I'll ask the house."

"She ain't here," said Puck. "Won't work."

"I think you're lying," said Mack.

"I'm gone four years, and you call me a liar first thing. You got no manners, boy."

Mack leaned his head back and talked to the ceiling. "What's the name of the queen of the fairies?"

Nothing happened. Mack went back to drying off with the towel.

"Told you so," said Puck.

"Maybe the house just trying to figure out how to show me her name. Her name isn't a word, like yours is."

"Easy," said Puck. "Show you a tit with a tan—plenty of those in Brentwood—then a knee, then some dumb kid standing there saying, 'Uh.' "

"So her name is Titania."

Puck made a big show of looking aghast. "Oh, no! I let it slip!"

"So her name isn't Titania?"

"Come on, Mack. I'm not going to tell you because it ain't mine to tell."

"All right then, tell me this. Why don't I ever see any fairies in Fairyland?"

"Because this part of Fairyland is a hellhole where nobody goes on purpose. Why else would he exile her here?"

"A hellhole?" said Mack. "It's beautiful. I love it here."

"That's because you got protection," said Puck. "In case you forgot, I almost got my ass chewed off in there."

"I saved your chewed-off ass, remember?"

"How can I forget, with you always bringing it up like that?"

"I haven't mentioned it in four years!"

"Oh, yeah, congratulations on being a senior. Got AP English this year, too. Not bad for a boy can't figure out how to tie his shoes."

"Are you going to get out of the doorway so I can go out and put on my clothes?"

Puck stepped aside. Mack went into the bedroom and pulled on his jeans.

"Oh, you go commando," said Puck. "No underwear."

"What's the point?" said Mack.

"You ready for anything," said Puck. "Except your pants fall down in the mall."

"I wear underwear when I remember to wash it."

"Good thing you buy tight jeans instead of letting it hang off your butt like those other kids at high school."

"I don't care about being cool."

"Which means you even cooler."

Mack shrugged. "Whatever."

"You want to know why I'm back?" asked Puck.

"I want to know about the queen of the fairies," said Mack.

"I'm back because he is about to make his move."

"What do I care?"

Puck laughed. "Oh, you'll care."

"So tell me his name, then."

Puck was silent.

"No guessing games?" said Mack.

"Don't even think about his name," said Puck.

"I can't. I don't know what it is."

"Don't think about thinking about it. You might as well have flashing lights and a siren."

"What, he doesn't already know where I am?"

"But you don't want him to notice you in particular."