Magic Street Read online

"You called out to me, man. That's the only way I found you."

  "Did not," said Puck. "That would be pathetic."

  "You called my name and I heard your voice come from the bushes and that's how I found you."

  A smile crossed his face. "Well, isn't that sweet."

  "What's sweet?"

  The smile left his face. "It wasn't me who called you."

  "Who, then?"

  "Must have been the Queen."

  "The one in that floating mason jar?"

  "She's the only Queen," said Puck. "All others are sloppy imitations, not worthy of the name."

  "Titania. Mab."

  "Only fools and mortals would try to contain her in a name," said Puck. "She is my lady."

  "Not according to Shakespeare," said Mack. "You were Oberon's buddy and you put that potion in her eyes so she fell in love with the ass-faced guy."

  "Ass-faced." Puck got a real kick out of that. In the midst of a great heaving laugh, he broke again. This time the balls bounced all over and every single one of them came to rest flush against one of the sides, so the middle of the table was completely clear.

  Puck proceeded to hit the balls in numerical order, putting each one into a pocket without touching any of the other balls.

  "Wasn't Shakespeare right?" asked Mack.

  "Shakespeare knew about me and making mortals fall in love," said Puck. "Had nothing to do with a potion, but he never forgave me for getting him married to Anne Hathaway. She was seven years older than him and her eyes were cocked. And for three years I had him so silly with love for her that he thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. She was pregnant when he married her, but what nobody knows is that he had to beg her to marry him."

  "She didn't want him?"

  "She thought he was making fun of her."

  "So what happened when the potion wore off in three years?" asked Mack.

  "It wasn't a potion, I told you. And it didn't wear off. I got tired of it. It wasn't amusing anymore.

  So I set him free."

  "He woke up one morning and—"

  "It wasn't morning. He had just come home from a day's work at his father's glove shop and she was putting the twins to bed and he swept her up in a fond embrace and kissed her all over her face, and right in the middle of that I gave him back to himself." Puck sighed. "He didn't get the joke. I don't like assholes who got no sense of humor."

  "You're such a bastard," said Mack.

  "You'd know."

  "I'm an abandoned child," said Mack. "But I didn't mean that kind of bastard anyway."

  Puck smiled maliciously. "I amuse myself by watching a perpetual TV series called 'Messing with the Mortals.' I'm the host."

  "What did he do?"

  "To me? What could he do? And as for Anne Hathaway, Will was such a nice boy. He couldn't stand to be with her—she repulsed him physically, and he was filled with loathing for how he had been used. Very resentful. But there was no getting out of the marriage—in those days you just had to hope for a dose of smallpox or a bad childbirth to get you out of an unpleasant coupling—and besides, he knew it wasn't her fault, so why should he punish her for loving the only man who had ever wooed her?"

  "You so understanding."

  "Freud and Jung and you, masters of the mind."

  "So Will Shakestaffe got himself taken on as a substitute in a traveling company that had a lead actor die suddenly, so they had to reshuffle all the roles. He showed them some of the sonnets he had written for his beloved wife and they mocked him for being such a bad writer—and it's true, nobody does their best poems when the love is artificial. The only one he ever allowed to be published was the one that punned on Anne's last name—'hate away' for 'Hathaway.' So he had to show them he was a good writer by rewriting some speeches and adding lines to his own bit parts. It really pissed off the big boys in the company, because he was getting laughs and tears for tiny parts, but the audience loved his rewrites and the partners weren't stupid. They had him rewrite the leading actors'

  speeches, too, until they had some plays that were more Shakespeare than the original writers' work.

  And they nicknamed him Shake-scene."

  "So they accepted him."

  "He hated the nickname," said Puck. "And they wouldn't even look at his first complete script.

  That was why he quit and joined a company that would treat him with respect and put on his plays.

  So you see, I did him a favor. I started him on his great career by making him fall in love with an unlovable woman."

  "And broke her heart when he left her," said Mack.

  "She had three good years of a husband who was completely devoted to her," said Puck.

  "That's two years and fifty weeks more than most wives get."

  "He wouldn't have been an actor without your little prank?"

  "Oh, he would have been," said Puck. "He was part-timing with a company when he met Anne."

  He really couldn't see that he had caused any harm. "So you postponed his career."

  "I postponed his acting career," said Puck. "It was loving Anne Hathaway that made a bad poet of him. And the ridicule he got for those poems that made him a great playwright."

  And now Mack understood something. "You're the one who twists the dreams."

  "Twists? What are you talking about?"

  "Tamika dreams of swimming and you put her inside a waterbed."

  "I woke her father up, didn't I? Not my fault if he took so long figuring out where she was and getting her out."

  "And what about Deacon Landry and Juanettia Post? It was his wish, not hers, and why did you have to make them get found on the floor right in the middle of the sanctuary?" next. And you have to admit it was funny."

  "They both had to move away, and it broke up his marriage."

  "I didn't make up the wish."

  "You made them get caught."

  "Man has no business wishing for a woman ain't his wife," said Puck.

  "Oh, now you're Mr. Morality."

  "He was a deacon," said Puck. "He judged other people. I thought it was fair."

  "But in the real world, without this magic, he wouldn't have done anything about it."

  "So I showed who he really was."

  "Having a wish in your heart, a man can't help that," said Mack. "He's only a bad man if he acts on it."

  "Well, there you are. This beautiful woman suddenly offered him what he had no right to have.

  Nobody made him take it."

  "So it was all his fault."

  "I set them up. They knock themselves down."

  "So you're the judge."

  "They judge themselves."

  "You make me sick."

  "You're so sanctimonious," said Puck. "Come on, admit it, you think it's funny, too. You're only making yourself angry cause you think you ought to."

  "These people are my friends," said Mack.

  "You were a little boy then, Mack," said Puck.

  "I mean the people in this place. My neighborhood. All of them."

  "You think so?" said Puck. "There are no friends. There is no love. Just hunger and illusion. You hunger till you get the illusion of being fed, but you feel empty again in a moment and then all your love and desire go somewhere else, to someone else. You don't love these people, you just need to belong and these are the people who happened to be close by."

  "You told me to tell you the truth," said Puck.

  "You love things to be ugly."

  "I like things to be entertaining," said Puck. "You have no idea how boring it gets, living forever."

  "So if this furniture and this pool table didn't appear until I showed up, how were you entertaining yourself before I got here?"

  "I was planning my shots," said Puck.

  "You never tell the truth about anything."

  "I never lie," said Puck.

  "That was a lie," said Mack.

  "Believe what you want," said Puck. "Mortals always do."

  "What a
re you doing here?" demanded Mack. "Why are you hanging around in my neighborhood? Why don't you go and have your fun at somebody else's expense?"

  Puck shook his head. "You think I picked this place?"

  "Who did, then?"

  "He did," said Puck.

  "Doesn't mean you have to stay."

  Puck stood upright and threw the pool cue at Mack. It hovered in the air, the tip right against Mack's chest, as if it were a spear aimed at his heart. "I'm his slave, you fool, not his buddy. And now not even that. Not even his slave. His prisoner."

  "This is a jail?"

  Puck shook his head. "Go away. I'm tired of pool, anyway. Like you said, it's no challenge."

  "No wonder Professor Williams wanted to kill you."

  "Oh, do you want to, too? Get in line," said Puck. "You got to give Will Shakespeare credit for this: He didn't hate me. He understood."

  "Yeah, right, you got no choice."

  It was clear the conversation was over. Mack left.

  Chapter 15

  YO YO

  Ceese Tucker heard about it from his mother, who got it from Ura Lee Smitcher, who was about out of her mind she was so angry and worried about that motorcycle mama giving rides to her boy Mack. "Corrupting a minor is still a crime in this state," said Ceese's mama as he ate his supper.

  "That's what I told Ura Lee and that's what I'm telling you. Now you go arrest that woman."

  "Mama," said Ceese, "I'm eating."

  "Oh, so you intend to be one of those fat cops with your belly hanging down over your belt.

  One of those cops that watches criminals do whatever they want but he too fat and lazy to do anything."

  "Mama, giving a ride to a seventeen-year-old boy who's late for school is not going to get that woman convicted of anything in any court, and if I arrested her it would make me look like an idiot and I'm still on probation, so all that would happen is I might get dropped from the LAPD and your motorcycle mama would still be at large."

  "Ain't that just like the law. Never does a thing to help black people."

  "Just think about it for a minute, Mama."

  "You saying I don't think less you tell me to?"

  "Mama, if a white cop came and arrested a black woman for giving a ride to a high school boy, you'd be first in line to call that racial profiling or harassment or some such thing."

  "You ain't a white cop," said Mama.

  "The law's the law," said Ceese. "And my job is one I want to keep."

  "I remember my daddy telling me," said Mama, "that back in the South, somebody got out of line, he come home and find his house on fire or burned right down to the ground. That generally worked to give him the idea his neighbors wanted him to move out."

  "Now that is a crime, Mama, and a serious one. Burning somebody's house down. I hope I never hear you or anybody else in this neighborhood talking like that. Because now if something did happen to her house, I'd be obstructing justice not to tell them what you said."

  "It didn't turn me white, it turned me into a cop. I'm a good cop, Mama, and that means I don't just go arresting somebody because their neighbors don't like her. And it also means that when a real crime is committed, I will see to it that the perpetrators are arrested and tried."

  "So having you here makes that hoochie mama safe to prey on the young boys of our neighborhood and makes it unsafe for us to do a single thing about it."

  "That's right, Mama. Now you got somebody to blame—me. Feel better?"

  "I'm just sorry I fixed you supper. Breakfast tomorrow I ought to make you eat cold cornflakes.

  Ought to make you sit on the back porch to eat them."

  "Mama, I love you, but you worry me sometimes."

  Ceese was worried about more than Mama threatening not to fix him a good breakfast. No shortage of fast-food places with good egg-and-biscuit breakfasts before he had to eat cornflakes.

  And come to think of it, cornflakes weren't bad, either.

  What worried him was a woman on a motorcycle taking special note of Mack Street. The memories came flooding back, of that woman in black leather and a motorcycle helmet who stood there on the landing of the stairs in the hospital and urged him—no, made him want—to throw baby Mack down and end his life on the concrete at the bottom.

  She wanted him dead, and now she's giving him rides on a very dangerous machine. Without a helmet.

  If it's the same woman.

  How could it be? That was seventeen years ago. Nobody would call her a young woman now, the way they were all talking about Yolanda White.

  Lots of people ride motorcycles. Lots of women, for that matter.

  That other woman, though, she knew Mr. Christmas or Bag Man or Puck or whatever his name is. Which means she's probably just like him. A fairy. An immortal. In which case she could look as young as ever, even after seventeen years. Could be the same woman. Might not be, but could be.

  Which is why Ceese got up from the supper table, rinsed his dishes, put them in the dishwasher, added the soap, started it up, then strapped on his gun and headed out the door to walk up the street.

  It occurred to him that this might be more convincing if he arrived in a patrol car.

  Then it occurred to him that if this was an ordinary woman who just moved into a neighborhood that didn't appreciate her, there really wasn't much point to the visit. And if this Yolanda was actually a fairy like Puck, he was in serious danger of getting turned upside down or inside out or something without her lifting a finger.

  Maybe she wasn't as powerful as he feared.

  Still, he couldn't help but wish that this confrontation was happening in Fairyland, where he was very, very large, and fairies were very, very little.

  Ceese walked up the hill, remembering seventeen years before when he walked up this same street with Raymo, carrying a skateboard under his arm and fake weed in his pocket. He had seen enough weed since then to know that they'd been scammed. Finding the baby probably saved him from smoking something poisonous or at least sickening. And it occurred to him right then: Did Raymo know it was fake? Was he setting Ceese up to be humiliated? Look what I got Ceese to smoke!

  Well, it didn't work. Ceese was a cop now. And Raymo was... somewhere. Doing something.

  His family moved out before he got out of high school. Moved north somewhere. Central Valley.

  Raymo was probably the biggest hood in a small town. Well, that was all right. In LA, Raymo would have had plenty of really evil guys to imitate; in a more innocent town, he'd be limited by the evil he was able to think up for himself.

  Trouble was, Raymo was kind of a creative guy.

  And what if he didn't stay in Fresno or Milpitas or wherever the hell he was? After high school, why would he stay? What if he came back to LA and found himself a spot in South Central or Compton? Would there come a day when Ceese came face to face with Raymo again, only this time he's a cop with a gun and the law on his side, and Raymo is...

  Not the same dumb malicious kid he was, that's for sure. Something more. Something worse.

  If my life was touched by whatever power brought Mack and these fairies into our life, why wasn't Raymo touched? Or was he?

  Ceese was standing in front of the Phelps house. Where Yolanda White lived. There were some lights on, but what did that mean? Garage door was closed so he couldn't tell if the bike was there or not.

  Why was he afraid? He was a cop, but he was also a neighbor. He wished he hadn't strapped on his gun.

  He passed through the low gate and walked to the front door and rang the doorbell. Still had the chimes that Mrs. Phelps liked so much. Longest door chiming in Baldwin Hills. And she'd never answer the door till they finished chiming.

  Yolanda White apparently had no such qualms. The door was open less than halfway through the complicated melody. "Oh, good heavens," she said—not exactly the expletive he expected her to use. "A policeman at my door. What is it, the noise of the motorcycle or a charge that I was speeding? Or are you just here on
a neighborly visit?"

  "Miz Yolanda? Am I that old and still single?" She held the door wider so he could come in.

  "Miz White, then," he said as he entered.

  She asked him to sit, and when he did, on a big white furry polar bear of a couch, she sat down across from him on an ebony cube. "So," she said. "Let me guess. My bike is noisy, I drive too fast, I dress too sexy, and the Welcome Wagon wears a gun."

  "Just got off work," said Ceese. "Cecil Tucker's my name. Everybody calls me Ceese."

  "As in 'cease and desist'? You should have grown up to be a lawyer, not a cop. You got a brother named Nolo Contendere? What about Sic Transit Gloria Mundi?"

  "I don't speak Spanish," said Ceese. "And I don't know any Gloria."

  "So you're the one they chose to come tell me what they been hinting about since I got here."

  "No, ma'am," said Ceese. "I suppose I chose myself."

  "So what are you? Neighborhood watch? LAPD? Or you wanting to take me dancing?"

  "I wanted to meet you is all. No dancing."

  "Got something against dancing?"

  "I don't dance."

  "Two left feet? Got no rhythm? Or just never found anybody who'd dance with you?"

  "I see I'm out of my league here," said Ceese. "I just can't think as fast as you talk."

  "My problem, Officer Cease and Desist, is that I never once found a man who could."

  "You're a fast talker."

  "There was one, a long time ago. With him, when we were together I didn't want him thinking and he didn't want me talking."

  "I'm glad to know you have happy erotic memories," said Ceese.

  "Wo, now, that was a fine speech. They teach you that in cop school?"

  "The word 'erotic' comes up now and then."

  The challenge in her voice, her words, her posture, woke a memory in him. Was that how the woman in the black helmet and black leather had stood, looking up at him from the landing on the hospital stairs? Was that how she stood when she was talking to Bag Man on the street?

  At that moment the doorbell rang, startling Ceese and making Yolanda laugh. "Now here's the guest I was looking for."

  She strode to the door, flung it open, and there stood Mack Street.

  Mack looked from Yolanda to Ceese and back to Yolanda.