“Well, I thought I saw something, but it was patently impossible so ...” Again her voice trailed off.
Reece had sunk back into his chair and was staring off towards the ocean. “What ... what was it?” Ellen asked.
“I call it a booger,” he replied. “I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s been following me ever since I took off from my parents’ place ....”
The stories in Christy’s book weren’t all charming. There was one near the end called “Raw Eggs”
about a man who had a Ghostbusterslike creature living in his fridge that fed on raw eggs. It pierced the shells with a needlefine tooth, then sucked out the contents, leaving rows of empty eggshells behind.
When the man got tired of replacing his eggs, the creature crawled out of the fridge one night, driven forth by hunger, and fed on the eyes of the man’s family.
The man had always had a fear of going blind. He died at the end of the story, and the creature moved on to another household, more hungry than ever ....
Reece laid aside Christy Riddell’s book and went looking for Ellen. He found her sitting on the beach, a big, loose Tshirt covering her bikini, her bare legs tucked under her. She was staring out to sea, past the waves breaking on the shore, past the swimmers, bodysurfers and kids riding their boogieboards, past the oil rigs to the horizon hidden in a haze in the faroff distance. He got a lot of weird stares as he scuffed his way across the sand to finally sit down beside her.
“They’re just stories in that book, right?” he said finally. “You tell me.”
“Look. The booger it’s—Christ, I don’t know what it is. But it can’t be real.”
Ellen shrugged. “I was up getting some milk at John’s earlier,” she said, “and I overheard a couple of kids talking about some friends of theirs. Seems they were having some fun in the parking lot last night with a punker when something came at them from under the pier and tore off part of their bumper.”
“Yeah, but—”
Ellen turned from the distant view to look at him. Her eyes held endless vistas in them and she felt the flutter of wings in her mind.
“I want to know how you did it,” she said. “How you brought it to life.”
“Look, lady. I don’t—”
“It doesn’t have to be a horror,” she said fiercely. “It can be something good, too.” She thought of the gnome that lived under the pier in Christy’s story and her own Balloon Men. “I want to be able to see them again.”
Their gazes locked. Reece saw a darkness behind Ellen’s clear grey eyes, some wildness that reminded him of his booger in its intensity.
“I’d tell you if I knew,” he said finally.
Ellen continued to study him, then slowly turned to look back across the waves. “Will it come to you tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t kn—” Reece began, but Ellen turned to him again. At the look in her eyes, he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said then. “I guess it will.”
“I want to be there when it does,” she said.
Because if it was real, then it could all be real. If she could see the booger, if she could understand what animated it, if she could learn to really see and, as Christy’s wizard had taught Jilly Coppercorn, know what she was looking for herself, then she could bring her own touch of wonder into the world.
Her own magic.
She gripped Reece’s arm. “Promise me you won’t take off until I’ve had a chance to see it.”
She had to be weirdedout, Reece thought. She didn’t have the same kind of screws loose that his parents did, but she was gone all the same. Only, that book she’d had him read ... it made a weird kind of sense. If you were going to accept that kind of shit as being possible, it might just work the way that book said it did. Weird, yeah. But when he thought of the booger itself ...
“Promise me,” she repeated.
He disengaged her fingers from his arm. “Sure,” he said. “I got nowhere to go anyway.”
5
They ate at The Green Pepper that night, a Mexican restaurant on Main Street. Reece studied his companion across the table, reevaluating his earlier impressions of her. Her hair was up in a loose bun now and she wore a silky creamcolored blouse above a slim dark skirt. Mentally she was definitely a bit weird, but not a burnout like his parents. She looked like the kind of customer who shopped in the trendy galleries and boutiques on Melrose Avenue where his old lady worked, back home in West Hollywood.
Half the people in the restaurant were probably wondering what the hell she was doing sitting here with a scuzz like him.
Ellen looked up and caught his gaze. A smile touched her lips. “The cook must be in a good mood,”
she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve heard that the worse mood he’s in, the hotter he makes his sauces.”
Reece tried to give her back a smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted a beer, but they wouldn’t serve him here because he was underage. He found himself wishing Ellen wasn’t so much older than him, that he didn’t look like such a freak sitting here with her. For the first time since he’d done his hair, he was embarrassed about the way he looked. He wanted to enjoy just sitting here with her instead of knowing that everyone was looking at him like he was some kind of geek.
“You okay?” Ellen asked.
“Yeah. Sure. Great food.”
He pushed the remainder of his rice around on the plate with his fork. Yeah, he had no problems.
Just no place to go, no place to fit in. Body aching from last night’s beating. Woman sitting there across from him, looking tasty, but she was too old for him and there was something in her eyes that scared him a little. Not to mention a nightmare booger dogging his footsteps. Sure. Things were just rocking, mama.
He stole another glance at her, but she was looking away, out to the darkening street, wine glass raised to her mouth.
“That book your friend wrote,” he said.
Her gaze shifted to his face and she put her glass down.
“It doesn’t have anything like my booger in it,” Reece continued. “I mean it’s got some ugly stuff, but nothing just like the booger.”
“No,” Ellen replied. “But it’s got to work the same way. We can see it because we believe it’s there.”
“So was it always there and we’re just aware of it now? Or does it exist because we believe in it? Is it something that came out of us—out of me?”
“Like Uncle Dobbin’s birds, you mean?”
Reece nodded, unaware of the flutter of dark wings that Ellen felt stir inside her.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
“Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” was the last story in Christy Riddell’s book, the title coming from the name of the pet shop that Timothy James Dobbin owned in Santa Ana. It was a gathering place for every kind of bird, tame as well as wild. There were finches in cages and parrots with the run of the shop, not to mention everything from sparrows to crows and gulls crowding around outside.
In the story, T. J. Dobbin was a retired sailor with an interest in nineteenthcentury poets, an old bearded tar with grizzled red hair and beetling brows who wore baggy blue cotton trousers and a white Tshirt as he worked in his store, cleaning the bird cages, feeding the parakeets, teaching the parrots words. Everybody called him Uncle Dobbin.
He had a sixteenyear-old assistant named Nori Wert who helped out on weekends. She had short blonde hair and a deep tan that she started working on as soon as school was out. To set it off she invariably wore white shorts and a tanktop. The only thing she liked better than the beach was the birds in Uncle Dobbin’s shop, and that was because she knew their secret.
She didn’t find out about them right away. It took a year or so of coming in and hanging around the shop and then another three weekends of working there before she finally approached Uncle Dobbin with what had been bothering her.
“I’ve been wondering,” she said as she sat down on the edge of his
cluttered desk at the back of the store. She fingered the world globe beside the blotter and gave it a desultory spin.
Uncle Dobbin raised his brow questioningly and continued to fill his pipe.
“It’s the birds,” she said. “We never sell any—at least not since I’ve started working here. People come in and they look around, but no one asks the price of anything, no one ever buys anything. I guess you could do most of your business during the week, but then why did you hire me?”
Uncle Dobbin looked down into the bowl of his pipe to make sure the tobacco was tamped properly. “Because you like birds,” he said before he lit a match. Smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. A bright green parrot gave a squawk from where it was roosting nearby and turned its back on them.
“But you don’t sell any of them, do you?” Being curious, she’d poked through his file cabinet to look at invoices and sales receipts to find that all he ever bought was birdfood and cages and the like, and he never sold a thing. At least no sales were recorded.
“Can’t sell them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re not mine to sell.”
Nori sighed. “Then whose are they?”
“Better you should ask what are they.”
“Okay,” Nori said, giving him an odd look. “I’ll bite. What are they?”
“Magic.”
Nori studied him for a moment and he returned her gaze steadily, giving no indication that he was teasing her. He puffed on his pipe, a serious look in his eyes, then took the pipe stem from his mouth.
Setting the pipe carefully on the desk so that it wouldn’t tip over, he leaned forward in his chair.
“People have magic,” he said, “but most of them don’t want it, or don’t believe in it, or did once, but then forgot. So I take that magic and make it into birds until they want it back, or someone else can use it.”
“Magic.”
“That’s right.”
“Not birds.”
Uncle Dobbin nodded.
“That’s crazy,” Nori said.
“Is it?”
He got up stiffly from his chair and stood in front of her with his hands outstretched towards her chest. Nori shrank back from him, figuring he’d flaked out and was going to cop a quick feel, but his hands paused just a few inches from her breasts. She felt a sudden pain inside—like a stitch in her side from running too hard, only it was deep in her chest. Right in her lungs. She looked down, eyes widening as a beak appeared poking out of her chest, followed by a parrot’s head, its body and wings.
It was like one of the holograms at the Haunted House in Disneyland, for she could see right through it, then it grew solid once it was fully emerged. The pain stopped as the bird fluttered free, but she felt an empty aching inside. Uncle Dobbin caught the bird, and soothed it with a practiced touch, before letting it fly free. Numbly, Nori watched it wing across the store and settle down near the front window where it began to preen its feathers. The sense of loss inside grew stronger.
“That ... it was in me ... I ...”
Uncle Dobbin made his way back to his chair and sat down, picking up his pipe once more.
“Magic,” he said before he lit it.
“My ... my magic ... ?”
Uncle Dobbin nodded. “But not anymore. You didn’t believe.”
“But I didn’t know!” she wailed.
“You got to earn it back now,” Uncle Dobbin told her. “The side cages need cleaning.”
Nori pressed her hands against her chest, then wrapped her arms around herself in a tight hug as though that would somehow ease the empty feeling inside her.
“Eearn it?” she said in a small voice, her gaze going from his face to the parrot that had come out of her chest and was now sitting by the front window. “By ... by working here?”
Uncle Dobbin shook his head. “You already work here and I pay you for that, don’t I?”
“But then how ... ?”
“You’ve got to earn its trust. You’ve got to learn to believe in it again.”
Ellen shook her head softly. Learn to believe, she thought. I’ve always believed. But maybe never hard enough. She glanced at her companion, then out to the street. It was almost completely dark now.
“Let’s go walk on the beach,” she said.
Reece nodded, following her outside after she’d paid the bill. The lemony smell of eucalyptus trees was strong in the air for a moment, then the stronger scent of the ocean winds stole it away.
6
They had the beach to themselves, though the pier was busy with strollers and people fishing. At the beach end of the long wooden structure, kids were hanging out, fooling around with bikes and skateboards. The soft boom of the tide drowned out the music of their ghetto blasters. The wind was cool with a salt tang as it came in from over the waves. In the distance, the oil rigs were lit up like Christmas trees.
Ellen took off her shoes. Carrying them in her tote bag, she walked in the wet sand by the water’s edge. A raised lip of the beach hid the shorefront houses from their view as they walked south to the rocky spit that marked the beginning of the Naval Weapons Station.
“It’s nice out here,” Reece said finally. They hadn’t spoken since leaving the restaurant.
Ellen nodded. “A lot different from L.A.”
“Two different worlds.”
Ellen gave him a considering glance. Ever since this afternoon, the sullen tone had left his voice. She listened now as he spoke of his parents and how he couldn’t find a place for himself either in their world, nor that of his peers.
“You’re pretty down on the sixties,” she said when he was done.
Reece shrugged. He was barefoot now, too, the waves coming up to lick the bottom of his jeans where the two of them stood at the water’s edge.
“They had some good ideas—people like my parents,” he said, “but the way they want things to go
... that only works if everyone agrees to live that way.”
“That doesn’t invalidate the things they believe in.”
“No. But what we’ve got to deal with is the real world and you’ve got to take what you need if you want to survive in it.” Ellen sighed. “I suppose.”
She looked back across the beach, but they were still alone. No one else out for a late walk across the sand. No booger. No Balloon Men. But something fluttered inside her, darkwinged. A longing as plain as what she heard in Reece’s voice, though she was looking for magic and he was just looking for a way to fit in.
Hefting her tote bag, she tossed it onto the sand, out of the waves’ reach. Reece gave her a curious look, then averted his gaze as she stepped out of her skirt.
“It’s okay,” she said, amused at his sudden sense of propriety. “I’m wearing my swimsuit.”
By the time he turned back, her blouse and skirt had joined her tote bag on the beach and she was shaking loose her hair. “Coming in?” she asked.
Reece simply stood and watched the sway of her hips as she headed for the water. Her swimsuit was white. In the poor light it was as though she wasn’t wearing anything—the swimsuit looked like untanned skin. She dove cleanly into a wave, head bobbing up pale in the dark water when she surfaced.
“C’mon!” she called to him. “The water’s fine, once you get in.”
Reece hesitated. He’d wanted to go in this afternoon, but hadn’t had the nerve to bare his white skinny limbs in front of a beach full of serious tanners. Well, there was no one to see him now, he thought as he stripped down to his underwear.
The water hit him like a cold fist when he dove in after her and he came up gasping with shock. His body tingled, every pore stung alert. Ellen drifted further out, riding the waves easily. As he waded out to join her, a swell rose up and tumbled him back to shore in a spill of floundering arms and legs that scraped him against the sand.
“Either go under or over them,” Ellen advised him as he started back out.
He wasn’t much of a swimmer, bu
t the water wasn’t too deep except when a big wave came. He went under the next one and came up spluttering, but pleased with himself for not getting thrown up against the beach again.
“I love swimming at night,” Ellen said as they drifted together.
Reece nodded. The water was surprisingly warm, too, once you were in it. You could lose all sense of time out here, just floating with the swells.
“You do this a lot?” he asked.
Ellen shook her head. “It’s not that good an idea to do this alone. If the undertow got you, it’d pull you right out and no one would know.”
Reece laid his head back in the water and looked up at the sky. Though they were less than an hour by the freeway out of downtown L.A., the sky was completely different here. It didn’t have that glow from Godknows-howmany millions of lights. The stars seemed closer, too, or maybe it was that the sky seemed deeper.
He glanced over at Ellen. Their reason for being out here was forgotten. He wished he had the nerve to just sort of sidle up to her and put his arms around her, hold her close. She’d feel all slippery, but she’d feel good.
He paddled a little bit towards her, riding a swell up and then down again. The wave turned him slightly away from her. When he glanced back, he saw her staring wideeyed at the shore. His gaze followed hers and then that cold he’d felt when he first entered the water returned in a numbing rush.
The booger was here.
It came snuffling over a rise in the beach, a squat dark shadow in the sand, greasy and slick as it beelined for their clothing. When it reached Ellen’s tote bag, it buried its face in her skirt and blouse, then proceeded to rip them to shreds. Ellen’s fingers caught his arm in a frightened grip. A wave came up, lifting his feet from the bottom. He kicked out frantically, afraid he was going to drown with her holding on to him like that, but the wave tossed them both in towards the shore.
The booger looked up, baring its barracuda teeth. The red coals of its eyes burned right into them both, pinning them there on the wet sand where the wave had left them. Leaving the ruin of Ellen’s belongings in torn shreds, it moved slowly towards them.
“ReReece,” Ellen said. She was pressed close to him, shivering.
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