by Billy Wright
Eddie had been quiescent for a few minutes, watching Stewart work. Finally, he said, “So what’s this ‘Damascus’ stuff you say you’re working on?”
“Damascus steel,” Stewart said between hammer blows. He would pull the billet from the forge, beat on it until it grew too cold to shape, then return it to the heat. He had drawn it out sufficiently now it was almost time to fold it again. “It’s layered, like a sandwich. Every time you fold it, it doubles the number of layers.”
“Like a samurai sword?” Eddie said.
“Sort of, except that I’m using nickel foil for the in-between layers.” When it was finished and polished—again, if all went well—the layers would give the steel an almost wood-grain appearance. “Back in medieval times, it was the best steel in the Western world. The layers made it flexible and sharp. It holds an edge better, too. How it compares to the Japanese swords is up for debate.”
“Sounds really cool. Someday I’ll have to have you make one for me.”
Stewart shrugged. “I sure could do it. This one is for Hunter. I hope I have enough gas left to finish it.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“This. Nobody needs this anymore. Factories make perfectly good knives. Swords, too.”
“None of those factory swords are made to be used. They’re just decoration. The steel is all wrong and they’re not sharpened.”
“But we’re not running around out in muddy fields trying to stab each other with swords anymore. What’s the point?”
Stewart closed the door on the forge again and wiped his brow. “Don’t you feel like there’s stuff we’re losing? There’s no soul in a factory, where CNC machines just stamp out thousands of blades at a time. Not much point in a sword as decoration. Like making a gun that doesn’t shoot.”
“Never bring a knife to a gunfight.”
Stewart rummaged around among the half-finished projects and experiments atop his workbench. He found a mostly finished blade, a little longer than his hand, a blade lacking only a final grind and a handle. He flipped his grip between blade and tang several times, enjoying the balance of it.
Then he threw it.
It stuck point first in the ground between Eddie’s feet.
Eddie yelped and jumped out of his chair, sloshing beer everywhere.
Stewart chuckled.
“Not funny!”
“A little funny,” Stewart said. “I didn’t hear a gunshot, did you?”
Eddie pulled the knife out of the ground. “Point taken. Where did you learn to do that?”
“My childhood in the circus.”
“What? I didn’t know you were in the circus!”
Stewart chuckled. “Sorry, just pulling your leg.”
“You don’t talk about your past. Every time I ask, you deflect.”
Stewart nodded. It was so hard to answer questions about his past. “Let’s just say when I was a kid, I went through a really bad patch.” His whole childhood was a bad patch. Then there was the worse patch, where he had to think about killing one of his foster fathers to defend himself, to survive. He still had scars on his legs and back from the wire coat hanger.
“Whereas I am an open book,” Eddie said. “You hear enough dirt and drama on my family to fill the National Enquirer for a month.”
That was also true. “I don’t like to think about my past. I’m happy it’s over. It needs to stay that way.”
“I’ve heard some stuff, but I have a hard time believing it.”
“I was an angry kid.” With good reason. Shooting out streetlights with a slingshot was a favorite pastime.
“I get that. Bouncing around foster homes will do that to a person.”
“I never knew my dad. When I was three, my mom and the baby died in childbirth.” The truth was, Stewart only barely remembered her, just fleeting flashes of love and comfort, usually lost in a sea of fear and sadness. What would it have been like, to have a real sibling? “After she died, I bounced from foster home to foster home, some of them worse than hell.”
“Harsh.”
“Like I said, I don’t like to think about it.”
“So, you want to go egg Richards’ car?”
Stewart laughed. “As satisfying as that would be, I think he would suspect.”
“But he wouldn’t suspect me,” Eddie said with a dark grin.
“Nah, I think I’m content to let him wallow in his bad-person-ness. I’ve never met such a negative person before. Why do you keep working there?”
Eddie shrugged. “Not many jobs in Mesa Roja for someone with my incredible educational background.” He shrugged again. “It’s something to do.”
“What do you dream of doing?” It seemed like such a personal question, too intimate.
Eddie laughed, a sharp bark. “Dude, I am not one of those people.”
“One of what people? Dreamers?”
“I honestly haven’t had a dream in years.”
“You mean at night, or greater aspirations?”
“Both. I go to bed, I’m out, like I’m dead. As for aspirations...” He shrugged again.
Stewart frowned. “Don’t you ever dream of things outside Mesa Roja? Doing something with your life bigger than counting key blanks for Richards?”
“Sure, but I’m smart enough to know they’ll never happen, so why beat myself up about it?”
Stewart stood and stared at him for a long moment. “Do you believe in magic, Eddie?”
“You mean like rabbits in hats?”
“No, I mean real magic, that there’s more to the world than this place, paycheck to paycheck. Things we can’t see.”
“Not much point, is there?” He shrugged yet again. “I’m stuck here. My mom is here. My family’s here. They’re not going anywhere.” Eddie was frowning now, too, as if Stewart’s questions had cracked something loose. “Life is life. Keep your expectations low, and you’ll never be disappointed.”
***
Snuggled in their blankets, Hunter and Cassie lay in their bunk beds with the windows open to admit the cool night air, listening to the sounds of night.
Hunter could tell that Dad’s bad news had really shaken his sister, as she was innately incapable of hiding anything she was thinking. Neither of them had ever seen their father looking so worried.
In the quiet, they could hear him hammering hot metal, talking to Eddie. Late at night, after Hunter and Cassie went to bed, was when Dad did most of his work. To Hunter, the sound of tink-tonk-tink-tonk was like a lullaby. It let him know that his dad was near, watching over them all, protecting them from the things that made little noises outside when they thought no one could hear, all the little scrapings and whisperings.
He tried to go to sleep, but Cassie’s tossing and turning made the bed squeak. He would get close to nodding off and then she would rumple around and wake him up, and he would sigh.
“Go to sleep!” he said.
But she would only toss and turn some more.
At some point, his awareness rose from the quiet grayness between sleep and waking, the land of shadows, and he realized the hammering had gone silent and the voices disappeared.
Cassie had gone still and silent above him.
At least he thought so, until he heard her voice outside.
He climbed out of the bed and peeked over the mattress above. Only her plush unicorn occupied her bed. She was talking to someone outside. But who?
He went to the window and listened through the screen.
“…knew you were here somewhere!” came Cassie’s voice.
And then another voice answered her. A voice small and high-pitched, as if a rabbit could talk, but it was too faint to make out the reply.
He took a deep breath and became a ninja, a shadow that moved, warrior of silent deadliness. Well, except for the deadliness. And probably the silence, too, because the floor creaked as he crept toward the door. He would have to practice his stealth skills more. Taekwondo was f
un, but the ability to break boards was not exactly a deadly skill.
The back door was only a few feet across the hallway from their bedroom door. It hung open half an inch, unlatched. He pushed it open and stole outside barefoot. At least at this time of night, there were no scorpions around, and Dad kept the yard clear of cactus.
Cassie’s voice came from around the corner of the house. “…know what I can offer you…”
More tiny whispers.
His feet were as silent as a native tracker’s on the earth of the back yard. He reached the corner of the house and peered around.
There was Cassie, hunched near a pile of mesquite wood Dad used to grill steaks. Dad wasn’t much of a cook for most things, but he knew how to grill meat fit for a king. But it had been a long time since they’d had steaks. Cassie squatted beside the woodpile in her Harry Potter nightshirt. Beyond her, Hunter caught sight of a little glow.
“My daddy really needs help,” Cassie said. “Can you help him find a job?”
Whisperwhisperwhisper.
“Gee, thanks!” Cassie said.
Whisperwhisper.
Hunter edged farther out, trying to see who or what she was talking to.
“Do you want to be friends?” Cassie said.
Hunter would have sworn he heard a tiny yes, like the tinkling of a bell.
Cassie clapped her hands in delight. “Sweet!”
Hunter edged out farther, and that’s when he saw the tiny woman sitting cross-legged on a small log. She was about the size of one of his Star Wars figures and… He rubbed his eyes, once. Nope, still glowing. He rubbed them again. Her skin glowed with an inner light like a firefly’s, slowly pulsing with brightness.
“No way!” he said.
In an instant, Cassie turned and gasped.
The tiny woman disappeared like a firefly going out.
“Hunter!” Cassie whispered. “You scared her away!”
“Uh, sorry!” Hunter said. “What was I supposed to do when I saw you talking to a faerie?”
Cassie sniffed. “She’s not a faerie.”
“She looked like one.”
“She doesn’t have wings. And faeries aren’t real.” Then she whispered out over the woodpile. “Hey, come back!”
They waited several moments for a response.
Finally, she sighed and gave him an expression of profound annoyance. “You scared her away.”
“Uh, sorry.”
Cassie whispered out over the woodpile again. “If you’re still out there, you can come back anytime!”
“Let’s go inside before Mom and Dad hear us. We’ll get in trouble.”
“No, we won’t. They would think it was cool.”
“Not being awake this time of night, they wouldn’t.”
“Okay fine, but it’s your fault.”
“Okay, it’s my fault. Can we go back in now?” Was that tiny woman one of the things he had heard moving outside the house? So many questions, a flash flood of them wanting to bubble out, but he had to get his sister back to bed.
Tomorrow on the school bus there would be time for questions.
Chapter Five
Stewart was up bright and early, groggy from having slept little. What sleep had come was filled with dreams of uncertainty and endless trouble, an unceasing cavalcade of misfortunes that prevented him from accomplishing the most basic tasks. The arrival of dawn was an exhausted relief.
A tingle of foreboding drew him outside into the grayness to the area where he had imagined the huge, ugly creature the previous morning. He stood out there, hands on his hips, looking around, silently daring whatever was out there to show itself again.
Nothing happened. He went back inside, a bit saddened by the lack of activity.
He made breakfast for Liz and the kids before they went off to school and work, and only burned the eggs a little.
At the breakfast table, Hunter and Cassie kept exchanging meaningful looks.
“What, you don’t like eggs?” Stewart said to them.
Hunter replied, “Oh, the eggs are fine, Dad.”
Stewart gave both of them long looks, but they both innocently—too innocently—went back to eating their breakfast. Cassie surreptitiously gave her brother a Shut UP! glare.
After the kids had hurried off to meet the school bus, Liz gave him a long kiss before she departed for work herself. “Everything is going to be okay, baby,” she said. “Go get ’em!” Her beaming smile warmed him in spite of himself.
He hugged her again, grateful that she had chosen to be in his life. His stomach twisted half a turn at her departure, but he certainly loved to watch her walk away.
The first order of business was dragging the old phone book out of a kitchen drawer, a holdover from when people still used landline phones. Then he went through the Yellow Pages and made phone calls to the handful of other locksmith operations in town. All of them already knew him, at least by reputation. None of them were hiring. He tried nearby towns as well, even as far away as Page. No luck.
The second order of business was to call all the hardware stores, which often employed locksmiths for their key-making counters. None of them were hiring. Then the department stores. Same story.
And so it went. By noon, the discouragement left him staring at the surface of the kitchen table.
With a heavy sigh, he went out to the truck. It was time to return his little girl’s birthday present. As he twisted the key in the ignition, his stomach twisted with it. He drove away thoughts of what her face would look like when she saw the dolls. Meals on the table and gas in the truck were more important.
Or were they?
Was a life devoid of joy, a life bereft of magic, worth living at all?
It was so easy to forget what life was worth living for in the face of its daily onslaught of immediate needs.
No, he couldn’t think about that now. Cassie would never know what she had almost gotten. Food and shelter came first.
One of the dolls looked up at him from inside the golden bag, its eyes—her eyes—a perfect cerulean blue. He could almost hear her whisper Loser...
He sighed again, but got the truck moving. On the way to the Cabinet of Curiosities, he turned up the radio loud to try to drown out his thoughts, but the songs grated across his nerves.
It was a day like any other in Mesa Roja. Hot, sunny, and quiet. The world had neither idea nor care that his life was in ruins. It churned along, oblivious to his plight.
He found himself at a stop sign at the end of the street where the shop lay, then chided himself for being so deep in his head that he missed the place. He made a U-turn and headed back toward the shop, this time keeping a sharp eye out for it. But then he started seeing buildings that he knew were on the other side of the Cabinet of Curiosities, buildings that he remembered clearly from the day before. How could he have missed it again? He drove another couple of blocks to be sure, but then snorted with frustration and made another U-turn.
Where was it?
He paused to consider clearly, to rack his brain and recall which buildings and businesses had been on either side of the shop. An art gallery with a lot of Southwest and cowboy paintings and sculpture. And a lawyer’s office.
It took him less than two minutes to find the lawyer’s office and the art gallery.
They were side by side. No Cabinet of Curiosities between them.
And the storefront wasn’t just empty. It wasn’t there at all. The lawyer’s office and the art gallery abutted each other as if there hadn’t been another whole building between them the day before.
Stewart’s head spun.
He got out of the truck and walked up and down the street, looking for the shop, grasping the back of his head with one hand.
Was he going crazy?
Or.
Was it magic?
The thought slammed into him.
Like a balloon swelling inside him, the sensation that he had just ventured into the uncanny for the second time
in two days filled his stomach, pressing on his heart and lungs.
Was this real?
Could it be real?
He leaned against the hot grill of his truck, the scalding heat instantly seeping through his clothes, as if to remind himself of what was real.
Magic was real. He believed in it. So why couldn’t it happen to him? Why was he unworthy of experiencing it? His childhood memories were full of moments of miracle and mystery. But it was not a religious belief, like one of his foster families had tried to drill into him. This was not “faith,” it was knowledge. It was a certainty that went all the way to his bones.
The question was: What was he supposed to do with this knowledge?
This new mystery did clear up one thing: he couldn’t take the dolls back, and he found himself happy about that.
When he was Cassie’s age—eight years old tomorrow—his foster father had locked him in a closet for twenty-four hours because he had stolen a donut from a box on the counter. It was chocolate glazed, the most heavenly thing he had ever eaten. The taste of it was still in his mouth as the man screamed at him, “Thou shalt not steal!” In that twenty-four hours of confinement, Stewart had both wet and soiled himself, and when they let him out, they beat him for it and made him scrub the closet with a toothbrush, and then use the toothbrush.
But in that dark closet, in the dead of night, listening to his foster parents snore, lying on the hard floor, Stewart saw something.
A tiny beetle, slightly larger than a ladybug. He would never have seen it in the dark, except that it glowed like a firefly. But he had seen fireflies before. Only their butts lit up. This bug’s entire body glowed, and it trundled along like a dung beetle. Where it had come from, he didn’t know, because there were no holes in the walls. An empty closet didn’t seem like the place for a dung beetle, especially one that glowed like a lightbulb.
At one point in its path, it stopped, as if looking at him, waving its feathery antennae.
“Hang in there, Stewie,” the beetle said in a voice so small he couldn’t be sure he heard it. Its tiny shell coruscated with brilliant colors.
He sat bolt upright on the floor. “What?”
But it didn’t speak again. It disappeared under the door.