Magic City

by Paula Guran

  “Hi, Mama.” She picked up the phone, gathering the pages with the other hand. “Still working on it. Won’t finish before bedtime, no that’s fine, I’ll still be up when you call.” Mama would still call anyway, even if she said she’d be asleep. “Too bad Lori called in sick. Maybe you could make Dragon Lady empty a few for a change? Sorry, Mom.” Mari June rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean to be rude about Ms. Bellamy . . . I was kidding. Yeah. ’Night, Mom.” And she hung up thinking that if she had to work for Ms. Bellamy, Dragon Lady, she’d starve first. And Dragon Lady wasn’t what she’d call her, either.

  She put her books in her back pack for the morning, mussed up her bed and left the toothbrush, wet, beside the soap dish in the bathroom and dampened the towel, just in case she had to race Mom into the house. (Had happened). Mom noticed those kinds of details.

  Safeguards in place, she went out.

  The moon floated overhead in the darkening sky, almost full, a pale, lopsided sphere like an orange fallen out of Mr. Schwartz’s wire shopping cart when he bumped it up and over the curb. School had started four weeks ago. New friendships had been forged, boundaries freshly drawn between the gangs, teachers tried and tested. Everyone knew what was what. Summer was a nostalgic memory, routines as familiar now as the cicadas’ end-of-summery monotony.

  But tonight a hint of fall edged the air, a tiny tweak of chill, a promise of red leaves, pumpkins, Halloween, a gorge of candy, never mind Mama’s threats every year to drag her off to the Halloween Party at Saint Sebastian’s where you had to wear costumes of the Virgin Mary or Cinderella (who should have sold the stupid carriage for a good price and caught a plane to one of those white sandy islands you saw in the magazines), and only got lame treats like stale oatmeal cookies with bright orange icing and plastic-wrapped popcorn balls that stuck to your teeth and pulled out fillings.

  Halloween, that chill breath promised. The real thing, with good candy, and scary things in the dark that want to suck your breath. Then Christmas, then Easter eggs, and pretty soon it will be summer again. The night-air tickled her and she giggled, pausing on the sidewalk in the streetlight’s yellow pool to check the watch Mama gave her for First Communion. Six twenty. Plenty of time. She stepped off the white sidewalk, out of the nice safe pool of streetlight yellow and into . . . the night.

  By day the street was safe, boring, a sunny reality defined and bounded by the iron rules of the known—stop signs, neatly painted siding, mowed lawns, and the mail man. A good neighborhood, Mama always said when she whined about the bills. It’s worth whatever it costs so you can grow up in a good neighborhood. And she would level a hard, accusing stare at Mari June. Even if I have to go without new clothes or those cute shoes I saw at Kaufmann’s, it’s worth it to give you a good place to grow up. You listenin’, girl?

  Yes, ma’am. Why adults seemed to equate good with boring, Mari June had never been able to figure out.

  But by night . . .

  By night, Elm Street was another world, with different rules.

  By night, Mr. Kingston, who yelled at you if you stepped off the sidewalk onto his perfect lawn, wore a red ball gown and a blond wig and sometimes spit champagne at his image in the full length mirrors that lined one wall of his downstairs rec room. Mrs. Silvano, who swept her sidewalk every day and always asked you if you had said your rosary sang to her dead husband at her big black piano that took up her living room. He sat right next to her on the piano bench with his hand on her butt. In between numbers she told him about her day, laughing, answering him, and tossing her head, really young and sexy, not all shriveled up and old.

  Ms. Johnson, who was really a vampire, waited for the young men who arrived every night, parking their cars around the corner on Maple Street, across from the empty lot where the boys rode their bikes. She would greet them at the door all dressed in black and usher them inside, pausing to peer past the screen door, eyes searching the night street like laser beams before closing the door. Once or twice, up early with the sun, Mari June had seen them stumble out again, white as the grubs you find under the bark on dead trees, or maybe something that lives in a cave. Then there was Miz Willows who walked her invisible dogs, chirping at them, babytalking to them, commanding them to get off that lawn right now, don’t you pee on that nice lily plant you big lunks. Her yard was all beaten dust and scraggly old rhododendrons with burnt up drooping leaves and straggling weeds that struggled and sometimes bloomed along the rusty chain link fence that bordered the sidewalk. Muddy brown rawhide bones and old sun-bleached rubber toys lay here and there. No dogs. Some of the boys threw stones into her yard and pretended to hit the nonexistent dogs. Then Miz Willows would come out the front door, yelling and waving a broom, threatening to call the cops, threatening to let her dogs loose to chew on their butts, her gray hair standing up all over her head, her Hawaii-print dress as faded as the rubber toys in the dusty yard and about ten sizes too large. The boys would run away laughing and she would babytalk to the dogs, hushing their inaudible barking, telling them it was okay, not to kill the boys ’cause they were just babies, before retreating to the house again.

  Mari June liked Miz Willows. Mom wouldn’t let her have a dog and so she pretended—something she wouldn’t admit to if they tore her tongue out, like Sister Martha described when she read to them in Sunday School from the really cool, gross book about all the things people did to the saints. She’d created Shep when she was little, scared of the dark, and Mom wouldn’t let her have a nightlight because everybody knew that they were a fire danger. Shep was a big German shepherd that slept on the foot of her bed and would tear out the throat of anybody who tried to hurt her. So she felt a certain kinship with Miz Willows, even though her hair was pretty awful. But she was old anyway, so it didn’t matter.

  And besides, Miz Willows was the only one on the street who was the same in the daytime as she was at night. Mari June slipped across the street in the narrow crevice of shadow between the streetlights in the middle of the block. If Mrs. Silvano or Ms. Johnson saw her, they’d tell Mama, and then she’d send Mari June to stay nights with Aunt Susanna over in Lents who had ten kids and lived in a house with three bedrooms. So she slipped across the narrow crack of shadow like a ghost and onto the sidewalk in front of Mr. Kingston’s house. Sure enough, there he was, down in his rec room, back arched, head tilted like the old pictures of Marilyn Monroe in the history books, right down to the blond wig and the black spot (that was supposed to be pretty but just looked just like a black spot to Mari June) by his mouth. His breasts were about the same size as the movie star’s, too, which really made her curious. She hoped to run into him on the sidewalk one day . . . literally . . . see if they were padding or if they might be real.

  He had a thick green champagne bottle as usual, and he tossed his head back, tilted the bottle to his lips, then faced the mirror. Liquid sprayed out, spattering the glass, running down in long streaks. Fascinated, Mari June crouched by the blooming rose of Sharon, peering raptly between the branches. Maybe he filled the bottles with ginger ale, she thought. Mom said champagne cost a lot. But he sold cars. Mrs. Silvano had said something about that once, how that was why he always drove a shiny new car, that’s why he parked it in the back yard, inside the tall board fence with the big padlock on the gate. Because it didn’t really belong to him. He was just putting on airs, she had said and sniffed.

  She watched him for a little while, but that hint of fall breathed on the back of her neck and filled her with a winey, cidery tingle of excitement. Mr. Kingston with his jowly, Marilyn Monroe face and stained dress was . . . old. Mari June drifted across the limp fall grass, letting the beams from the squashed-orange moon push her along, restless as the first fall leaves skittering along the sidewalk. Mrs. Silvano’s high, shrill soprano seeped through her cracked-open windows. Beautiful dreamer, dream of my heeaartt . . . Ms. Johnson leaned against the front door of her house, watching for her next victim, her eyes reflecting the red glow of her cigarette.

/>   All old tonight. All boring. Mari June crossed the street, cut through the vacant lot with the bags of garbage and lawn clippings burst and spilling on the rough clay like cut open stomachs she thought, like scenes from the book on the saints Sister Martha read. The yard on the far side didn’t have a fence and Mari June crossed it, navigating around flowerbeds, the grass a weird washed out gray in the squashed-orange moonlight. Across the street, barricaded by a fence of nose-to-tail beater cars loomed . . . The Park.

  Mari June always thought of it in capitals, the way her mother spoke of it. Don’t you set a foot in The Park, girl. You-know-who hangs out there! You know what They’ll do to you! And when Mari June had once said that no, she didn’t know, and asked for clarification, Mama had delivered a stinging slap and a sharp admonition to watch your mouth, girl, don’t you get smart with me. Adult speak for “I don’t know.”

  But she paused at the sidewalk, eyeing the dark bulk of the cars, an occasional bit of chrome reflecting the moonlight like animal eyes. Waiting. She imagined them snapping their hoods like cartoon alligator jaws as she squeezed between them, lunging at her with sharp chrome teeth and glaring headlight eyes. Enough time? She checked her watch and hesitated.

  The moon laughed at her and fall tweaked her hair, teasing her, daring her.

  Mari June lifted her chin and marched across the empty street, I’m not scared of you, you’re just empty metal like old oil drums and that’s all. She stared at the wide dark snouts of the cars, teeth hidden behind painted bumper lips. They stared back at her, eyes dull and smug. We choose to let you pass, they whispered in the hiss and skitter of the dry leaves on the blank black asphalt. This time we choose to let you passss.

  She walked between them, head still high, the skin on her thighs quivering, hairs erect, wary of movement, aware of the soft scrape of jeans against metal, faint heat leaking from the car-snout like dragon breath.

  They let her pass and she didn’t run as she stepped up onto the curb, didn’t change the rhythm of her walk one beat as she stepped into the grass on the far side, hairs prickling on the backs of her legs, tiny antennae trained on the sleeping cars . . .

  Maybe next time . . . they whispered behind her.

  The air changed as she stepped off the sidewalk, as if she had passed through an invisible door. The chill in the air intensified, breathing down her neck, making her nipples hurt. She crossed her arms on her chest, squeezing those swollen not-quite-part-of-her breasts against her rib cage until they ached. Leaves swirled around her feet like puppies and she hesitated, back to the streetlight glow, facing darkness beneath the trees. A deeper darkness than the darkness in her back yard, it pooled like a brooding creature between the trees. Ordinary maples by day, in the dark their branches stretched out, gathering the darkness to them, whispering together beneath that squashed moon.

  For just a moment, Mari June hesitated. Behind her, the cars tittered. Then she put her arms down at her sides and walked resolutely into the pooled darkness. It swallowed her and then parted like a curtain. Ahead she saw the swing set and jungle gym, bright with graffiti like Christmas lights in glowing red, green, blue, empty and strange in the moonlight, like the ruins of a civilization that had flourished and died right here in the city and nobody ever noticed. Beyond it lurked the benches, not the benches that old men sat on by day, drowsing and staring at the squirrels, or hard tired-eyed women yelling at kids on the swing set not to pull Jamie’s hair, or stop throwing sand. Nobody had ever sat on these benches and Mari June edged around them, sheltered by the thick darkness, not willing to step into the empty space beneath the moon’s stare. A bird called, a hollow questioning sound and the trees answered, whispering their answer in a rustle of leaves.

  Time to go home, she told herself. Got to be there for sure when Mama called, let the empty-oil-drum-cars giggle and laugh! But as she turned, she heard them. Loud voices hard and bruising, not-caring. The darkness thickened and retreated, leaving behind the kind of darkness you saw at the edges of the streetlights, tame darkness, submissive. Yah, you wish, dude. Boobie’s asking a dime, the slut. And then she did me and . . .

  Mari June shrank back into the darkness of the night maples, wanting to pull it around her, hide in it. But instead, she felt the darkness pulled from around her the way someone might pull the blanket off you in the middle of the night, leaving you cold and naked. Visible. They drifted into the orange-moonlight, tall and gray, dodging, pushing each other, laughing. One of them leaped to catch the top arch of the jungle gym, swinging out, feet arcing down to a perfect landing, spinning to punch another’s shoulder.

  She wanted to run, but her body had frozen, stiff as one of the mannequins in the Nordstrom’s windows downtown, shoulders, ribs, hips, legs all hard plastic, her shirt hanging on its hard ridges and curves, jeans slack around her plastic legs. Not thinking. Frozen.

  They danced closer, walking weird, legs almost stiff, every pelvis thrust out, going first. Leading. She tried to swallow but her throat was dry and they heard it . . . the rasping of it. All looked.

  “Hey.” Tallest one moved forward, bending a little at the knees now, his eyes on her like the headlight glare of the tittering cars. “What have we here?” The others were moving now, spreading out, making a fence between her and the cars, street, home. The playground wall crowded her back. Strange yards beyond it with fences to stop her, clotheslines to catch her.

  “It’s a chick.”

  “Whatcha doin’ out here, little girl?”

  “I got what you need, honey.”

  They moved closer, lithe, sinuous shadows, their faces blurred by orange moonlight, hair black as night, clothes baggy, gang uniform. She’d know them, if it was morning. If they were lounging here, laughing and spitting, hassling the younger boys, hitting them up for their lunch money, their iPods—yeah she’d know them. Put a name to them, a street, a family. Littl Big, his dad’s in jail for dealing crack, mom’s a hooker, that’s Brushy, been kicked out twice, this time’s his last chance, Spell Boy, he was maybe the one who let the oil out of Principal’s car, wrecked the engine . . .

  Not tonight. Tonight they had no names.

  They were staring at her. Like the boys at school.

  Only . . . hungry. Like the kids who got free lunch at school. Staring at the gray meat loaf and drooling.

  She backed up one step, two. They moved with her, faces sharp and feral in the orangey moon glow. Their eyes gleamed like cats in the dark, and the thing in her belly moved, like a cat waking up, full of hunger. She hated them for waking it.

  Hated it for waking for them.

  Hard cold bumped her back. The wall, the brick wall layered with graffiti and white paint like some kind of urban lasagna. The thing in her belly writhed, and heat and cold buzzed in her ears.

  “Hey, baby,” one of them said. “Don’t be scared, baby.”

  The others laughed, the sounds sawing at her brain. They moved closer, faces identical, shark-grinning, feral eyes speaking to the thing in her belly, calling it by name.

  “Now don’t you go peein’ on those bushes, you hear? You mind your manners, you dogs.” The voice cut through the orange moon glow and they all looked, faces turning in perfect unison.

  Miz Willows stepped out from nowhere, wearing the darkness like a hem of black cats, prowling feral around her feet as she stepped into the orange moonlight, walking straight up to Mari June as if they weren’t there at all, as if it was just the two of them in the park. They didn’t really move aside for her. But somehow she walked through them. “You’re out late, Mari June.” She smiled, her face as clear as if it was noon, like a private spotlight shone down to illuminate it. “You go out late, don’t you leave Shep home. You bring him with you.”

  “Hey, old woman. Get the hell out of here.”

  “Not your bizness, bitch.”

  The tallest one reached for her, grabbed for her arm, like you’d reach for a left-behind newspaper on the daytime benches, toss it on the ground bef
ore you sat down. Mari June cringed.

  Miz Willows turned around, a look of mild surprise on her face. She didn’t say anything, but the hem of darkness like black, feral cats, grew, rising up like ebony fog, taking shape—legs and wide chests, thick necks, blunt, wide muzzles. White teeth gleamed and the growl seemed to come from the ground, the trees, the thick, feral darkness itself. A cloud slid across the squashed moon like someone covering their eyes with both hands.

  “Hey.” Tallest one stepped back. “What the hell . . . ”

  Black as the dark, they edged forward, heads low, white gleam of teeth like exposed bone. Mari June tried to count them, but when she looked straight at them, she saw nothing but darkness and the shape of benches, trees, the colorless poles of the play structure. They took a step back, but not all together, not in unison, not any more. “Bitch,” the tallest one hissed, but behind him, one of them broke. Ran.

  The dark surged forward, razored with teeth, and the night growled.

  They all ran, not yelling, silent as the torrent of shadow surging at their heels, toward the street, toward the cars, toward the safety of the yellow street-lamp glow beyond.

  A metallic banging like car hoods and trunks slamming echoed through the night. A car alarm went off, shrill shrieking and beeping, splitting the night like an axe blade.

  It stopped.

  The cloud slid timidly way and the squashed orange moon peeked out. Miz Willow smiled at Mari June, her hair tufted, dry and ugly, her eyes bright, brighter than the orange moon’s feeble glow. The breeze frisked around her and Mari June rubbed her arms, goosebumps speckling her skin. The shadows were slinking back, sliding silently across the moon-washed grass, glints of white light like splinters of razor blades here and there. Grinning. Licking shadow chops.