The Book of Magic Read online

“Sold it to the vintage store,” he said brusquely and then said, “What do you have for me?”

  There are times when you can help someone and times when there’s nothing you can do. I tilted my head toward the paper bag on the table. “It’s in there. A doll I’m pretty sure was hated and feared. If you can find a way to get her to eat it, it may undo her.”

  “Yeah. Like an opposite thing.” His wet sneakers left tracks on my clean floor as he walked back into the utility room. He picked up the bag without looking inside. He glanced at me and then away. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” I wiped my hands down the front of my jeans, but guilt doesn’t come off even when you do that. I wanted to offer him food, money, coffee, but didn’t. He left, bag in hand, and as I let him out the door, the pelting rain on the brown paper sack made a hollow drumming.

  So. That was that. I locked up again, doused all my lights except for my custom-made neon in the window, and headed up the worn steps. I paused on the landing and even found the key on my ring, but decided tonight was not a night for me to look at my treasures and think warm thoughts of the past. Instead I went to my apartment, microwaved a chicken pot pie, and ate it on the couch with all my tenants attentively watching me. When I went to bed, Cooper came and purred on the pillow by my head. I closed my eyes and wondered how Farky would deliver the toxic doll to the toy-eater. I wondered if he’d show up to drive her, or if he’d tumble back into using. I wondered if he’d go to jail and what would happen to him there. I pretended that none of it was my concern.

  At six-thirty a.m., I let myself stop pretending to sleep and got up. In my pajamas, I went down to my shuttered shop. My clientele followed me down the stairs and grudgingly got back into their pens. I don’t know how Cooper conveys to them what they’re to do. I just know that since he was abandoned with me, my life is a lot easier. I dished out the morning chow and water, made sure their cuddle blankets were clean and fresh. I went back upstairs, got dressed, and came down and opened my shop.

  It wasn’t raining. Business was slow. I fed, I scooped poop, I surfed the Internet. I sold a leash. I took in a recently adopted black kitten. Blackie would stay with me for a month. Why would anyone adopt a kitten right before going on vacation for a month? I will never understand people.

  I put my hand on the junk drawer. Barely humming. I went upstairs and scoured my desk for clutter. I came back down and fed the drawer a rubber band, an AA battery, a bent paper clip, a business card from a cleaning service, a refrigerator magnet, and three loose coins. The junk drawer doesn’t really care about the value of what’s dropped in there; it’s the idea of being given things.

  At noon, I hung up my “Back Soon” sign and headed down to Expensive Coffee. Selma was behind the counter. I ordered a vanilla latte. “What name you want on that?” she asked me.

  “Selma, it’s me. Celtsie.”

  She looked up from her register, and our eyes met. She gave me a tired smile. “Of course it is. Sorry.” She took my money and gave me my change.

  I sat down at a table near the window. When they called for Kelsey, I went and got my drink. Yes. That was what she’d written on the cup. As I took it, one of the other clerks bumped into the counter and spilled a slop of milk on to the floor. Selma turned on her. “Clean it up. And pay attention. Are you stoned, or just stupid?”

  The girl looked at Selma with wide brown eyes. I saw her pinch her lips tight shut, mutter a “sorry,” and stoop to clean up the spill. I left. No. That wasn’t the Selma I’d known. I wondered if killing the toy-eater would bring her back.

  At my shop, I checked the pickup dates and times for my clientele. I left a message on Farky’s cellphone. Then I flipped the sign to “Back Soon,” leashed up the dachshund, gathered my poop sacks, and headed out for a walk in Wrongs Park.

  Wrongs Park isn’t that far from my shop. On the other side of the tall hedge, Wright’s Park has a playground and a fountain, a botanical greenhouse, and tree specimens from all over the world. In Wrongs Park, other things are remembered about Tacoma. There’s a statue of a man with a cast on his leg, asking a woman to help him carry his briefcase. There’s another of a man target-practicing on a stump. The most wrenching one for me depicts the Expulsion of the Chinese from Tacoma. It’s not something we enjoy remembering, but even more, it has to be something we don’t forget.

  I was doing a slow circle of the statues of the people being forced onto the train when Farky found me. “Hey,” he said. His greeting was flat. No joy, no anticipation, no anger. Just flat. His sneakers and the cuffs of his jeans were soaked. His green hoodie was sucking up the rain.

  “Did it work?” I asked him.

  He sat down on a wet park bench like he didn’t care. I perched on the edge of it with my raincoat trapped under me. Slowly he took out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one out. I waited while he lit it with the Zippo, inhaled, and then pushed out a column of smoke. “Not like we wanted it to,” he said. He gave me a sideways mournful look. “Maybe that’s just as well. I thought about that afterwards. What if she ate it, and it killed her and I’m sitting there in the driver’s seat with my fingerprints all over the car?”

  “I see your point,” I said. We hadn’t thought about that angle. When he said nothing, I prodded, “So what did happen?”

  Another long drag in and out. He shrugged. “I was wondering how to get it to her. I had it in the paper sack in my backpack. I got to her place as usual. I had my backpack in the front seat. She did her butt-first get in the car, and then, without saying anything, she lunged for the front seat. Celtsie, she tore my backpack open. Not unzipped it, tore the canvas open, and ate that doll like I’d wolf a Big Mac. Then she sat in the back seat, breathing loud through her nose. I’d never guessed how strong she was. I was sitting there, afraid to let her see me looking at her in the mirror, afraid to turn around. Then she said, ‘Let me out. That’s all I need today.’

  “So I got out, and I opened the door, and she got out. She was young and strong, but in an ugly way. That’s all I can say about it. And she moved up too close to me, chest to chest, but not like a woman. Like, well, I stepped back. She looked at me and said, ‘You’d better bring me more. You know what I need now. Get it for me.’ Then she just looked at me. And that was a threat so bad…I can’t even imagine what the threat was.” He sniffed and took another drag from his smoke. He gave me another jolt from his sad dog eyes. “So I think I’m in even worse than I was before.”

  We were silent. The dachshund whined and stood up to put muddy paws on Farky’s knee. He put his hand gently on the nape of the dog’s neck and scratched him. I reflected that Farky was probably right. Pimping meals for a toy-eater was not a good career move.

  “What now?” he asked me sullenly. Sullenly because he knew what I would say.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should ask?”

  I folded my lips for a short time, angry that he had even suggested it. “I don’t like to ask,” I said primly.

  Another long draw on his cigarette. He dropped it, stood up slowly, and ground it out as he exhaled. “So. I guess I’m just fucked, then.” He turned and walked away from me. I watched him go. There was nothing I could do. None of it was my fault. He wasn’t really my friend, not anymore. I didn’t owe him anything. I’d already done more than he had any right to expect. I stood up and walked back to my shop, stopping once to pick up dachshund poop.

  The bad part about a set routine is that you can follow it and think at the same time. I counted up all the times Farky had screwed me over. Then I added the times when he’d failed me as a friend. I closed up and cleaned up and refused to think of him sitting at my red table, blood in red rivulets down the side of his face, my dad holding a bag of ice to his brow. So we’d helped him then. What did that have to do with now?

  I sighed. I put my hand on the front of the junk drawer. Barely a hum. This w
ould waste even that. I jerked it open and looked inside. A bookmark. Oh, great. I took it out. It was one of those cheap school reward things. It had Arthur and Buster Baxter on the front. On the back, it said, “Good job, Selma! Great book report.” I shut the drawer.

  It could have been in there for years, trapped somehow above the drawer to fall down at exactly this time. But I knew it hadn’t, and I knew what it meant. I shut off the lights and trudged upstairs.

  When I was a kid, I had to do a science report. My grandpa helped me saw a D battery in half, and then my dad lifted the hood on our car and showed me about how the car battery worked. Acid in there, and unlike metals, and he explained the flow of electrons from one plate to another.

  But it was years before I understood how it worked for books. That Dewey fellow was one brilliant man. He figured it out, and so few people know enough to give him credit for making libraries safe. Librarians don’t talk about it, and some bookstore people, the way they shelve books, you’d think they were just hoping for a mishap. The one time I had a long talk about it with Duane, he theorized that was what happened in the library of Alexandria. A careless juxtaposition of books and scrolls might have set off a powerful flow between unlike volumes, and the resulting surge of power might have been enough to start a fire.

  My library is small but it’s potent. Mostly hardbacks. Illustrated hardbacks. Some vintage paperbacks. Nonfiction can act as insulators separating the more powerful novelists, but even then, one has to be careful. I once shelved Future Shock next to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I’ll never make that mistake again. Nor will I ever put more than three volumes of poetry on the same shelf. Every comic goes in a protective plastic envelope. Even so, messing with it is a dangerous business. My hands were sweating before I even turned the lights on in the room.

  I looked at all the spines for a long time. Pull out the wrong insulator, and I could be told something that no one needed to know. What did I want to know? I wanted to help Farky. Did I want to let Tom Sawyer butt up against The Mouse and his Child? No, I needed to be more specific than that. I needed to know how to slay a toy-eater. The Velveteen Rabbit was next to Simon and Schuster’s Guide to Trees. And just past the tree book was The Age of Fable. Lots of monster slaying in there.

  That just might work.

  I said a little prayer and pulled the Guide to Trees. The Velveteen Rabbit leaned over against The Age of Fable. I carried the tree guide out to my kitchen, softly closing the door behind me. I sat down at the table. I knew I had to give it time, but not too much. I vividly recalled when Caesar’s Gaul shot across the room and hit the wall so hard it cracked its spine. I got up. Can’t pace. Can’t wait. Magic doesn’t like it when people wait on it. I made a BLT and put a scoop of cottage cheese next to it. I set it on the table and made a nice pot of Red Rose tea. I set out a cup and saucer like I didn’t have a care in the world, and I sat down to eat. Cooper came in and asked for a piece of bacon. I gave him some, and he sat on the table and kept me company while I ate, until I heard what I’d been waiting for. The soft thud of a falling hardback.

  I crept back into the library, swiftly shelved the Guide to Trees, and stood over the fallen book. Bartlett’s Quotations. This could be tricky. I knelt down beside it without looking at it and then let my eyes snap to the open page.

  “The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.” Elie Wiesel.

  Oh.

  I put Selma’s old bookmark in as a thank-you and carefully reshelved Bartlett’s.

  Well. That certainly cleared that up. Now I just needed a toy that had left the owner indifferent to it. Indifferent, I decided—not in the way of “not my thing, I don’t play with Barbies,” but deliberately indifferent. And I knew right away what that was.

  My mother had an older half sister. They were estranged. Her name was Theresa. Perhaps she thought two estranged equaled a bond, because twice she tried to insert herself into my life. When I was about eight, several years after my mother had gone, she called my father and grandfather to say she would be in Tacoma and wanted to see me. That was the first time I’d even known she existed. She made an uncomfortable visit to our home where she ate none of the dinner we’d prepared for her, but offered to help my father and grandfather “when the time comes for her to be taught about womanly things.”

  Then she vanished again. But for the next two years, she sent me birthday gifts that came the month after my birthday. The first was a package of Beanie Babies. But they were the ones that came free with McDonald’s Happy Meals, not the ones that were theoretically “collectible.” The second was a Nancy Drew book. I’d traded the book at the secondhand book store for several old Doc Savages. But the Beanie Babies…I frowned. Would I have kept them? Perhaps. Perhaps in what my father had called the “emergency gift box.” It was where we tossed things that were new and valued by other people, but totally unnecessary to our lives. White elephants, my grandfather called them. A French press for coffee. A cheap dock for an iPod I’d never had. Christmas knee-high socks. The sorts of gifts that well-meaning friends gave us over the years. And that we re-gifted as needed.

  The box for “emergency gifts” was in the back of the deep closet in the second bedroom. With other boxes, it helped to conceal the hatch to the secret room. I dragged it out into the light and dug through it. Here was a boxed set of socks with dogs and cats on them. Beneath it, a curling iron still in its package. I abruptly decided that the entire box of crap was all going to the Goodwill tomorrow. But as I dug down, there in the corner in a zip-lock bag were the Beanie Babies. One was a pink hippo. I took it out and looked at it. The Ty label was still affixed to it. I knew it was a hippo only because someone had once told me that was what this pink blob represented. I considered it carefully a moment longer. Did I hate it? Love it? Did it waken regret in me, or resentment? No. None of the above. I was as indifferent to it as my aunt had been to me.

  I set the box of other people’s treasures in the hall to carry downstairs later. The Beanie Baby wasn’t large, only as big as my fist. Was that much indifference enough to kill a toy-eater? There was only one way to find out. But now I had to confront the second part of the ruse. Delivery. How was I going to get her to eat it?

  As if in answer to that thought, my phone rang. Not my wall phone, but my cell. The wall phone was for business. The cellphone meant whoever was calling was either a friend or a telemarketer. I didn’t recognize the number and didn’t answer. But they left a message, and I did dial in and listen to that. Then I called Farky back.

  “Tonight. She told me I got to bring her something tonight. Or she calls the cops and tells them she saw me do a deal outside Fred Meyer.”

  “Did she?”

  Silence. Then. “Celtsie. Please. She threatened the deal thing, but I…I just know she could do more. Darker.” He caught his breath. “She has my Nirvana T-shirt.”

  There’s a time to think and a time to just do, my father always said. Of course, that’s how he took a bullet in the leg for some teenager he didn’t even know, and how he gained a limp the rest of his life. But I’d never heard him say he regretted it.

  “My place. Fifteen minutes.”

  I hung up. There was already a coldness running through me. I knew what I was going to do, and I knew I couldn’t think about it too much. The very hardest things you can’t think about too much or you lose your resolution. Especially when you know what you are going to do is wrong or bad. But you have to do it anyway.

  I set the pink hippo on my table and went back to my bedroom. I took down the old boot box. I reached in blindly, knowing it would be impossible to decide. I’d take whichever I touched first. The moment my fingers brushed the worn fabric, I knew it was Terry. I took him out and put Boomer, all alone now, back in the top of my closet.

  I hugged Terry hard as I carried him to the kitchen. I didn’t wonder what it would do to me when she ate him. I found
I hoped that he wouldn’t feel it, and that Boomer wouldn’t be lonely. Once he had had bright little black button eyes. I looked at the two circles of faded felt backers, at the residue of old glue that had once held them firmly in place. Then I hugged him and kissed him goodbye. I set him on his back on the kitchen table.

  I could do this. I had to do this.

  I took down the sewing box from its shelf. It wasn’t just Farky he’d be saving. I told myself that as I took scissors and cut open his belly. It was people like Selma, and whoever had owned that shoebox full of plastic soldiers. How many people had she deadened over her life span? How old was she, and how long could she live? I parted the multicolored stuffing in Terry’s abdomen. I tucked in the hippo that had never mattered. I drew a layer of stuffing over him. I selected a spool of gray thread and threaded the needle. I sewed Terry up, plumper than he’d been in many a year.

  And I felt it. He wasn’t Terry anymore, not in the way he had been. I wondered, if I cut him open again and took out the hippo, would he be Terry? But I didn’t. I found a brown paper sack folded under the sink. I slid him into it. But still, for a long moment, I cupped his worn head and his floppy ears between my two hands. “Goodbye,” I told him, and my voice broke, and the tears ran.

  The doorbell buzzed.

  I closed the bag and carried it down the stairs. Farky was waiting outside in the autumn evening. I unlocked the glass door and then unlocked the outer grille and slid it up. The rain had stopped. The streets were shining and the last of the water was gurgling down the gutters. “Here,” I said. Then I reached back and took my windbreaker off the coat rack by the door.

  “You’re coming with me?”

  I nodded. We walked around to the little courtyard behind my building. I got into the Celebrity and leaned across to unlock the passenger door for Farky. “It’s been years,” he said as he got in. He glanced back. “You, me, and Selma in the ‘way back’ seat. The one that faced backward. Coming home from Norwescon.”