Wizard of the Pigeons (14 page)

Slowly he became aware that the church was not empty. There were folk gathered here and there for silent devotions, but what was their puniness to this immense repository of godliness? They paid him no attention, and, encouraged by this, he rose and began to cautiously explore. Each stained glass window was dedicated to someone. The brilliance of the daylight when it reached through the purple or yellow of the glass brought tears to his eyes. ‘In Memory of James and Mary Gorman,' he read, and wondered if they knew their
window still scattered bits of coloured light upon his upturned face.

He paused at the shrine dedicated to St Frances Xavier Cabrini. Facts surged to the surface of his mind from some forgotten reservoir, broke like bubbles upon his thoughts. Mother Cabrini. A saint for Washington. In Seattle she had become a citizen in 1909, and worshipped in this very place. Canonized in 1949, she was the first United States citizen to be so honoured. From his pocket he drew coins and pushed them into the donation slot. The book of paper matches was tucked behind one of the candle holders. He lit a candle in a blue glass and knelt to watch it burn before the image of the homely woman in simple garb. He felt consoled by its light and let himself sink into a dream.

First Communion Day. His stiff collar chafed the back of his neck raw. He approached the altar beside a little girl in a white dress with crackling petticoats. She wore a veil over her shining hair and her eyes glowed as she turned them up to the crucifix. He had knelt beside her at the altar railing, the gold and white fence that separated the priest and the holy place from the commoners. He had put out his tongue and received on it the round Host. It was white and stiff and dry, tasting of sanctity. It stuck to the roof of his mouth as he rose and carefully walked back to his pew with the other First Communicants. He knew it was unseemly to chew it, so he waited patiently until it dissolved into a soggy mass he could swallow whole. And as it went down, an interior Goodness so real that it warmed him flooded his whole body, making a shiver up his back and tears in his eyes. Never had he felt so Chosen. Jesus Christ was in him and his soul burned with a white flame of purity.

He had tried to play it at home, to recapture that elusive feeling for himself. In the game he was the priest, with a roll of Necco Wafers, and two small sisters who would do anything to get them. They knelt before him, wildflower crowned, and responded ‘amen' as he set the candy on their pink outstretched tongues. It was good, but it was not the same. Only in the church did that feeling touch him, and he longed for a white surplice and vestments of green and gold and purple, and people kneeling before him to be nurtured. The mystical chanting of the choir, the high Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, like a joyous bird rising to heaven. He knew that someday he would stand before the altar, elevating the Host high, his sleeves falling back to bare his arms as the masses behind him bowed their heads and murmured, ‘my Lord and my God'.

He had become an altar boy, memorizing the mystical Latin responses with ease. He could still remember the tingle on his skin the first time he slipped the black and white robes of his office over his head. He had poured the water over the priest's fingers from the tiny glass carafe trimmed in gold, had seen him shake the shining drops from his fingertips as he mimicked Pilate's denial. The white cloth for the priest to dry his fingers on was always folded precisely over his arms, waiting to be used. And, at exactly the right moment, he had rung the four golden bells fastened to a single handle, let their metal voices cry out in sweet precision at the elevation of the Host. That moment had always closed his throat and made his eyes sting with tears.

He felt a tap against his foot, heard a woman's murmured ‘Excuse me.' Like a diver rising from deep water, Wizard took a deep breath of air and looked around him with
fogged eyes. The church was filling with people. There were small family groups, easily identified as they filled half a pew, mothers holding small babies, fathers trying to maintain manners among older children. There were old women, their white heads draped in lacy scarves, and older men who sat, eyes lowered and shoulders rounded as they spoke to God. Wizard rose from kneeling at the shrine. The Mass was about to begin.

He left. He looked back as the heavy doors swung closed behind him. The tall pipe organ in the back of the cathedral had begun to sound, and the people rose as one. He watched them sail away from him on a sea of peace, and then the doors closed between them. He pushed through the outer doors into the cold and wind. He stumbled going down the steps and nearly fell. He glanced back once at the golden vines on the front of the cathedral. Once, he had been a branch. Now he was defoliated.

He sniffed as he strode down the street, and then surprised himself by coughing. Once he had begun to cough, he couldn't stop, as if he had loosened some sickness in the bottom of his lungs. He felt his face grow red and hot with the strain of it, and for long moments he couldn't draw in enough air to fill his lungs. He leaned against a building until his chest quit heaving, and then took in short, cautious breaths of the chill air. It had gotten colder while he was in the church. The brief November day was drawing to a close. He was glad of it, glad it was nearly done with. He was tired and suddenly weary. Sleepy was too gentle a word for what he felt. He wished he could just curl up on the sidewalk and sleep. Or in a doorway. There were those who did that, he knew, but he had never been one of them.

Or had he? He coughed again, not as strenuously this time, but a racking cough nonetheless. He had walked in the cold rain yesterday, and then slept damp and chill. It was no wonder he had a cough. The only strange thing was that he hadn't gotten it long before this. He brushed his hair back from his damp forehead, feeling the tenderness of old scar tissue just back of his hairline. He took his hand away from it and shoved it deep into his jacket pocket. He hunched his shoulders against the evening and began the cold trek to a bus stop.

The bus ride did not warm him. When he disembarked in the general area of home, he was still deeply chilled. The city seesawed around him. His feet knew where to take him, but nothing looked familiar. He focused himself on the streets determinedly. He belonged here. He had worked a long time to belong here. He knew this place, knew every damn square foot of it. He knew more about Seattle than people that had lived here fifty years. It couldn't turn its back on him now. He willed it to be alive, in the frightening and invigorating way Cassie had opened him to. But the buildings remained faceless, mere stone and mortar and wood and glass. When his magic had fled, it had taken all magic with it.

He stamped his feet a little harder on the sidewalks, to waken his numbed toes and stir the city beneath him. These sidewalks were hollow. He knew that. How many residents of Seattle knew that the sidewalks were hollow, with enough space beneath them for folk to walk around? Well, it was true. The hollow sidewalks came into being after the fire of 1889, as a very indirect result of it.

After the great fire, when the whole damned downtown area burned in less than seven hours, the city decided to rebuild itself in brick. No more wood buildings to
invite another tragedy like that. And shortly after that, the city decided to raise the streets and suspend the plumbing mains under them. It was all the fault of those new-fangled flush toilets. They had worked fine, on an individual basis. Folks just piped the stuff out into the garden patch or over the property lines. But when there got to be a lot of them, and folks joined up to funnel the stuff into big pipes that went out into the bay, problems cropped up. The system worked just fine, as long as the tide was going out. But when the tide came in, the sea paid back a dividend to all the residents in the lower parts of town. The easy solution was to raise the streets and put the plumbing mains under the new, higher streets. The sewage backup would be solved! But by the time the city got around to raising the streets, a lot of businesses had already constructed new buildings. So you had buildings that had their ground-floor store front windows eight to forty feet below street level. People had to climb up ladders to cross the streets. Horses fell from the streets onto the sidewalks below. In 1891 alone, there were seventeen deaths due to falls from the street to the sidewalks. It was not a good town to get drunk in.

So, of course, the city finally had to raise the sidewalks as well. This changed a lot of ground floor space into cellars. That's how the underground shopping began. For years the people of Seattle strolled along on the original sidewalks, their way lit by bottle-glass skylights set into the sidewalks above. At first, the city had tried skylights made of thick clear glass. But young apprentices soon took to spending their lunch hours gazing up through the skylights at the passing ladies. Some of the more obliging hookers wrote their prices on the bottoms of
their shoes. Morality demanded that the skylights be made opaque.

‘I ain't interested!' The man walking in front of Wizard turned around and growled at him.

Wizard halted on the sidewalk in confusion. He had been wandering, not watching where he was going, and talking out loud about the history of Seattle like a weirdo. He shut his jaws firmly, clenching his teeth shut. They wanted to chatter against each other. He pulled his jacket closer around himself and hurried on, passing the man who had snarled at him. First and Yesler. Home was only a few blocks away.

As he entered Occidental Square, the pigeons rose and swirled over his head. A pang of loss jarred him. He had nothing for the hungry ones. He bowed his head and tried to hurry past them, but they refused to be ignored. Down they came like huge, dirty snowflakes, eddying around him, obscuring his vision with their flicking wings. The snap of pinions stung his face as they fought for the privilege of alighting on him. They settled on his shoulders, a feathered yoke of responsibility. He shook them off, gently at first, then more violently, like a dog trying to shake off water. Their questioning coos became alarmed. One tried to land on his head, missed his perch, and Wizard felt small cold feet and claws scrabble down his cheek.

‘Leave me alone!' he cried out, and as swiftly as the storm had come, it dispersed. He watched them scatter up to black tree limbs and desolation filled his soul.

Ashamed, he fled them, scurrying across the square to the Grand Central Arcade and the gas fireplace. He rattled facts in his head to hold his despair at bay. It
dated from 1889, this ivy clad building, and it had been the Squire Latimer Building. It boasted access to the old underground shopping. He squeezed his lips shut to keep from muttering to himself, but his wayward mind clutched at the distraction, hooking his identity to the city. He was losing his grip on both.

The sudden warmth of the mall made his nose start to drip. He hurried to the men's room for tissue. He plucked a handful of stiff leaves from the dispenser and scoured his nose with them. He stared blearily into the mirror. He looked like hell. Like he had died and someone had reheated the body in a microwave. He smiled mirthlessly at himself, a death's head grin. As he stuffed extra tissues into his pocket, his hand encountered coins. He fished them out and looked at them. A quarter, a dime, and a nickel. Forty cents. Worth virtually nothing in terms of food. Coffee was up to fifty cents a cup, and the ten-cent doughnut was a fragment of the past. But the coins were something to clutch as he strolled through the mall stores, seeking some sort of sustenance.

He made three circuits of the shops. He ventured up the stairs that had once led him to Cassie and safety. They stopped at street level and looked at him blankly. He pushed gently at the bare wall, feeling weak, tired, and sick. It turned him away and he returned to the underground stores.

He found a blacksmith working his forge and selling coathooks. He found greeting cards with cats on them, and crystals for sale, and jewellery, flowers, and an art gallery and rare books. He found nothing edible for forty cents. And he felt no warmer. The chill that swept through him in waves seemed to come from his bones, flowing
from the chill ashes of his magic. It was an exhausting, shivering cold that wearied him into an icy sweat. He stumbled back up the stairs to the street level of the arcade and the gas fireplace. He had no trouble finding a seat near the flames; the shoppers were thinning as the stores began to close for the night.

Numbly he sat, trying to absorb warmth. His eyes fixed on a woman tending a vendor's cart. It was a red popcorn stand, selling salted or caramel popcorn. The woman was scooping up her cooling wares with a shiny metal scoop and packing the popcorn into big plastic bags. Wizard stared at the placard on her cart until the words burned into his senses. Popcorn, eighty cents. Carmel Corn, sixty cents. Small, forty cents. The mis-spelling of caramel vexed him unreasonably. He wanted to demand that they change the sign immediately. Then the final line hit him. Forty cents. Salt beckoned him.

The woman looked up at him in a bored but guarded way as she went on shovelling popcorn. ‘Can I help you?' she asked in a voice that indicated she didn't want to.

‘Popcorn.' Wizard was amazed at his croak. He tried to clear his throat and coughed instead as he brought the change out of his pocket and proffered it to her.

‘It's cold, you know, I'm just cleaning out the machine.'

‘That's okay. It'll be fine.'

‘I already counted out for the night.'

He tried to reply, but a chill hit him. He pulled his jacket closed across his chest. Her eyes narrowed, then relaxed into a guarded pity. Poor junkie. She snapped open a small bag and packed popcorn into it. She pushed it into his hand and dropped his coins in the till without counting them

Wizard took the bag awkwardly. She had stuffed it over full and, as he put his fingers in, a few kernels leaped out onto the floor. A man who had walked up beside him glared down at the popcorn on the floor as he commented loudly, ‘Arcade stores are getting ready to close now.' Wizard nodded without looking at him and headed toward the tall doors.

Outside, a gust of wind carried off the top layer of popcorn. The darkening skies had banished the pigeons. No one would salvage the fluffy white puffs until they were sodden and grey beneath the dawn. He was just as glad there were no birds to greet him. There wasn't enough here for a tenth of his flock. He stuffed a few kernels into his own mouth and immediately lost his appetite for more. A fit of shivering rattled him. He twisted the top of the bag to seal it and stuffed it into his pocket.

‘So here you are,' she said.

He turned, needing Cassie. She smiled up at him and the depth of his misfortune engulfed him. He could only stare at her. Her face was turned up to his and raindrops misted her lashes. He realized belatedly that it was raining. Drops were darkening her blonde hair. She was giving him a strange look, half-smile, half-frown.

‘Don't look so blank, honey. Lynda, remember? I told you to meet me here this morning, for breakfast. But I was late and I guess you gave up on me. So I felt just awful. But I figured, well, maybe he'll be around there when I get off work tonight. So I came by here, and sure enough, there you are coming out of the arcade.'

Her chatter went too fast for him. By the time he absorbed the meaning of one sentence, she was two
sentences away. He groped to reply. ‘I wasn't here this morning.' The words dragged past the rawness of his throat. Lynda didn't appear to hear them. At the sound of his croak, her eyes went wide. She pressed her cold hand to his forehead and then the side of his neck.

‘You're burning up! Let's get you out of this rain. Hey – I know just the place; it's a great little place, lots of really healthy food, you know, fibre and vitamins and stuff that's good for you. Come on, now.'

Her arm was through his and her hand gripped his jacket right above his elbow. She hurried him along with short quick steps that put his long legs off stride. She appeared not to notice as she chattered on about a customer who had left her tip in the bottom of his water glass, and another who had wanted her to go out with him after work. ‘He smelled just awful, like mildewed cheese, you know what I mean.'

Her words pattered and splashed against him like the rain, drowning his thoughts. The streets were shiny, their wet pavement reflecting the streetlights. She hurried him across South Main and into the Union Trust Annex and down some stairs. She paused for breath on the stairs and he murmured, ‘Back into underground Seattle.' Lynda frowned up at his non sequitur. He felt a tiny triumph. ‘Notice the rough brick work of the building fronts down here. These all used to be ground floors, and now they're basements. Did I ever tell you a story of the fire of 1889? A carpenter's apprentice let a pot of hot glue boil over. I learned all about it at the Klondike Gold Rush Memorial National Park. Just down the street.'

‘You don't make any sense,' she told him earnestly. ‘Come on.'

She tugged at him and he followed her into City Picnics. She didn't pause to order at the counter, but took him straight to a table and parked him on a bench with her shopping bag and raincoat. Then she left him. He looked around dully. The tables were inlaid with genuine artificial wood. He didn't like it, but had to admit it was well done. He put his hand against the honest brick of the wall, feeling its integrity.

Someone loomed over the table. He turned to look up at her. But it was a stranger who bent down to put her face close to his as she whispered.

‘You dummy! If you had listened, you would understand. War,' she hissed, her breath vile, ‘is a sin, and it has to be atoned for. Penance. That's the only way out of it.'

That old accusation. Someone had beaten her recently. Her features were swollen and blue, her ragged hair caught back in a ratty old scarf. Her words accused and snagged on old scars. ‘I didn't start the war,' he tried to explain. ‘I didn't want the war.'

‘That doesn't matter,' she snapped. ‘Listen to me. It's not a sin you commit, fool. It's a sin that happens to you. Passed on, like heredity and original sin. Like your mother's dimples or syphilis. It might not have been yours to start with, but once you've got it, it's yours. Are you going to let it infect you and eat up your whole life?'

‘It wasn't my war,' he insisted, begging her to say it was true. But she only smiled evilly.

‘No? Then whose was it? Are you going to tell me it wasn't a hell of a lot of fun, when it wasn't just plain hell? Are you going to tell me that you'll never feel that alive again? Isn't your life all the same now, day after day, beset by problems you're not allowed
to solve? Wasn't it all simpler with a rifle in your hands?'

‘What do you want of me?' he groaned.

‘Get up. Come on. This one is your war, and yours alone. Don't run away from it. You have to fight.'

He stared up at her, shaking, trickles of sweat or rain funnelling down his face. She was so ugly and so close. She kept leaning closer, leering at him with her puffy eyes and squashed mouth. She was making him want to hit her, just so she would go away.

‘Ex-cuse me!'
Lynda's voice was politely venomous. ‘We're together.' She shouldered past the woman with the professional grace and balance of a waitress, to land food on the table before him. A huge sandwich like a torpedo for Wizard, salad for herself, and two foaming mugs, ‘Michelob on tap!' she said with a flourish, and slid on over to him. She plumped down on the bench beside him, squeezing him up against the wall. The old woman wandered off muttering. Lynda glared after her. ‘Jee-sus H. They ought to lock up some of the crazies in this town, you know what I mean? What was she saying to you?'

‘I don't remember.' He stared down at the food in front of him. The smell had flooded his mouth with saliva. He could think of nothing else.

‘So eat!' Lynda laughed, seeing him stare. ‘I got you a Gobbler on sourdough. Hope you like everything in a turkey sandwich, ‘cause that's what you got.'