Wizard of the Pigeons

by Megan Lindholm

  He shuddered. He picked up his own bag of popcorn and reached deep into it for a large handful. He flung it with a snap of his wrist that sent the seeds and popped corn scattering far beyond Lynda’s tossed food. His flock swooped to it, feeding well outside her perimeter. Lynda dropped plump kernels right at her feet and sat perfectly still. He felt a sweat break out on the back of his neck as the birds ventured closer. He took another handful and threw it, deliberately pelting the birds that were daringly close to her. They started back, raising reproving eyes to him. He kept his face stony. Back, he thought at them. Back, you fools!

  “You’re doing that on purpose‘” Lynda accused him, but she laughed as she said it. She was very pretty when she laughed, all her sulkiness fuming to softness. Like a different woman. She smiled at him looking at her, and gave her head a toss that sent her hair dancing. “Look. I give up, okay? You win. If you won’t let me feed your birds, how about you? Why don’t you let me buy you some breakfast?”

  “No. Thank you. I’m not that type of person.”

  She didn’t understand him and laughed at what she thought a joke. “Yeah, me neither. Let’s just go grab a sandwich and some coffee or something. I was so upset this morning, I hardly ate a thing myself. I hate to eat alone. Look, we can go right inside to the Bakery. Ever been there? Right inside the doors? Good coffee.” She tilted her head toward the tall glass and metal doors. Her eyes had brightened, and in her red jacket she looked like a bright bird perched on the end of the bench.

  “I’ve been there,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “You are such a stone-face. It wasn’t so hard to get you to eat yesterday. Look, don’t feel awkward about it. It’s just the way I am with people. I like you. I don’t even know why I say that, but it’s true. Even not knowing you much, I can tell we could be friends. Guess I knew it when I came to sit down over here. Rats!” She threw a handful of popcorn. “That’s the last of mine. Share with me, okay?”

  She tweaked the bag of popcorn from his grip and put her small hand into it. His heart tried to burst from his chest. She pulled out a fistful of fragments and threw them on the ground.

  “Hey, look, yours was all gone, too.” She shook the little bag upside down over the cobblestones. An errant wind carried away a few fragments of popcorn from it. Wizard stared with uncomprehending eyes. He reached numbly to take the empty bag from her fingers, but she wadded it up nimbly and stuffed it into her own empty bag. She thrust both into her pocket.

  “So, that’s that! No more popcorn, so no more birds. Really, you might as well come and eat with me.”

  He stared at her pocket. His throat was closed tight, too tight for any words to pass.

  “Oh, come on,” she begged impatiently. “Don’t be so shy. Look, I know about guys like you. I’m not a kid. You don’t stink like a drunk, but you don’t shake like a junkie. I think you’re just temporarily down. Lady dumped you, maybe, or your job ran out. I mean, look at how you’re dressed. You’re not really a bum. All you need is to get thinking straight again and get back on the tracks. Just have a cup of coffee and keep me company while I eat; it’s no big deal. What do you say?”

  He dragged his eyes away from her pocket and up to her face. Her front teeth nibbled appealingly at her lower lip, but he scarcely noticed. He mustn’t stare at her pocket. If he agreed and went with her, he might have a chance to get his bag back.

  He could offer to take her coat, to hang it on a chair or something. A quick stab of his hand into her pocket and… No. He didn’t want to feel it for himself, didn’t want to stick his hand into an empty bag with a wrinkled paper bottom. Most of all he didn’t want to pull his hand out with nothing in it for the flock. He agonized again over how it could have happened.

  But it was gone, his gift taken as abruptly as it had been bestowed. He had never known how he could feed the pigeons, and now he would never understand how he could not.

  “Lunch, then?” Her cool fingers touched his wrist, numbing it. She snatched them back with a cry of dismay and gripped her own wrist. “Oh, look at the time. I hate it when I’m on afternoon shift. Just about the time I start to enjoy the day, I have to rush off to work. Look, I’m sorry. I have to go now if I’m going to be on time, so I can’t take you to lunch.”

  He stared up at her miserably as she rose. She looked deep into his eyes and misread them. “Hey, look. It’s not that way! I wasn’t teasing you. Look, take this,” she dug in a bottomless purse and came up with a folded green bill. “Take this, I mean it, and get a bite to eat. You really look like you need it. And meet me here, tomorrow, early, and we’ll talk and have breakfast. You can tell me all about yourself. Now, don’t shake your head at me. You take this.” Boldly she tucked it into the chest pocket of his jacket. Wizard felt strangely powerless before her insistence. “You eat something, you’ll feel better, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t look so surprised. That’s how I am. I can never turn away from someone who really needs help. And I can tell a lot about people Just by looking at them, maybe cause I been waiting tables for so long. Now you get something to eat. I mean it, now. See you later.”

  She left him buried in the avalanche of her words. She looked back once as she hurried away to give him a friendly little wave and an admonishing shake of her finger that cautioned him to obey. It was all he could do to stare after her, totally unmanned.

  When he looked away from her diminishing figure, the square looked unfamiliar. The light seemed dimmed, and his eyes would not focus as sharply as he wanted them to. Like waking from a nap you hadn’t known you’d taken. He blinked and felt the wetness of his lashes. Rain. It was raining very tiny drops, millions of them. like a determined mist condensing on him. Wizard sat in it for a long time, feeling the money in his breast pocket where she had jabbed it in, feeling the emptiness in his coat pocket where the popcorn bag had been. His birds were gone, abandoning him to seek shelter in treetops and on window ledges. He was alone in the gray rain, caught between numbness and a creeping cold. Just like bleeding to death, he thought to himself; once the shock takes away the pain, you just get colder and sleepier and dimmer. He turned his eyes down. His coat and slacks were dark and wet, but this time it was only rain. Only rain.

  He dragged himself to his feet, forced himself to move. The square boasted a concrete monstrosity that passed for a rain shelter and benches. It was very big and stark, with the roof so high that the rain blew in under it. Even in summer, its shade was too cool. The cleverly designed brass drinking fountain beside it squirted everyone in the face. The designer who had envisioned mothers and small children relaxing there was mistaken. Only street people did. Different cliques claimed different benches, sprawling or hunching on them as decreed by the weather. Hostile stares greeted intruders. Wizard walked past it. On one of the unsheltered benches a lone boy sat, trying to make fifteen years look like twenty. His black hair had been greased into spikes that were wilting in the rain. He reminded Wizard of a forlorn Statue of Liberty. He had scratched lightning strikes into his cheeks and etched fear behind his eyes.

  He sat very still as Wizard walked up behind him. When he leaned over the back of his bench, the boy neither moved nor spoke.

  “Go home, kid.” Wizard lifted the money from his pocket with the tips of his fingers and dropped it in the boy’s lap. “Your mom threw out that guy that hurt you. She doesn’t show it by day, but at night she cries, and she lets your cat sleep on the pillow by her head. She keeps the porch light on, and there’s a box of chocolate mints in the freezer compartment of the fridge for you. She’s not such a bad old broad; besides, she loves you. Bus can take you as far as Auburn. You can hike the rest of the way. Go for it, kid.”

  Wizard stepped away. The boy never looked at him. He just nodded, as if to himself, and picked up the money in his lap. He rose a second later and headed for the bus stop. Wizard nodded after him, relieved. At least he had managed to get rid of the money. He tucked his bag more firmly under his arm.

  He
walked, through streets and weather too wet for walking, ignoring the buses. He walked away from his home and his territory, out past the King Dome, walked right out of the Ride Free Area and into the uncharted lands beyond. Restless and rootless, he drifted, turning aimlessly down any street that presented itself, wandering through areas of warehouses, offices, and old residential sections, wandering much farther than he would have imagined he could.

  He stopped in a Thriftway grocery to ask if his wife had forgotten her spare keys there, on a keychain with a green-dyed rabbit’s foot on it. She hadn’t, but while they looked, he had a free sample of Brim Decaffeinated Coffee and a heated Jeno’s Pizza Roll served by a smiling lady from a tin-foil-lined tray. There was a dime on the floor of a phone booth outside a convenience store. In the drugstore, they didn’t have his daughter’s asthma prescription on file, but they let him use the bathroom while they checked. He looked at the man in their mirror. The rain had helped, actually. He did look like a harassed father sent on a wild goose chase on a rainy day. Darn kid had left her prescription in her gym locker and someone had stolen it. Probably thought they could get high on it; you know kids these days. Well, he’d have to get the nurse to track the doctor down and phone it in again. Thanks, anyway, and back into the rain. Outside the Langendorf Bakery thrift store, a man with a farm pickup full of rotten produce and brown lettuce dropped two packets of tiger-tails as he was loading in three boxes of outdated baked goods. After he drove away, Wizard salvaged them and ate them as he walked. They were squished and stale; their sweetness made him long for rich black coffee, hot enough to bum their cloying taste away. He thought longingly of Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice, down on Virginia across from the market. Or better still, the Elliott Bay Cafe just under the book store; there was something about the old books on their shelves gazing down benignly on him as he sipped from a steaming mug. He wanted coffee and he needed home. He circled the block and turned his steps back.

  The day was cooling and the rain had finally managed to soak through his clothes. He shivered. Walking was no longer enough to warm him, not even fast walking. The paper sack under his arm had started softening. Now he wished he had folded up the plastic shopping bag and stuffed it in his pocket.

  He didn’t know what he would do if the tired seams of the bag gave way and the wizard things dropped out on the wet sidewalk. He snuggled it protectively against him and walked a little faster. Streetlamps began to come on, blossoming overhead against the gathering darkness.

  He almost made it safely home. As the darkness and rain intensified, he broke into a wolf-trot, trusting to the night to keep him anonymous. His feet ate up the blocks, carrying him up Alaskan Way under the length of the viaduct. The highway and traffic overhead could not keep the rain off him, nor could their noise keep the thoughts from pelting down on his mind.

  There was a hypnotic effect to the regular beat of his feet against the ground, the whoosh of traffic overhead and beside him, and the totally miserable weather. He could move himself doggedly along and keep his consciousness away from how acutely miserable he was. But he could not keep his thoughts from chewing at the edges of his mind, shredding his calm with a threat of gray Mir out there somewhere in the night, stabbing his soul with the loss of his popcorn bag. It was almost a relief when his quick ears picked up the sounds of a scuffle and a single, sharp cry.

  Under the viaduct it was dark, making a jest of the lights that lined Alaskan Way. This time of night, it should have been deserted. The noises were coming from the shadows behind a dumpster. Wizard felt the familiar unwelcome surge and was running the zigzag path before he was aware of it, his bag tucked tightly to him. As he passed the corner of the dumpster, he gave the bag a toss that carried it safely under it. His feet made no sound as he approached the struggle, and he gave no cry of warning.

  He hit the tangled knot like a striking eagle. The boy dropped and skidded on the pavement, but the narrow man snaked away into the darkness. The old man on the ground gave another cry and tried to crawl away. Wizard ignored him. Damn, but he wished that the adult one had not escaped. Now he would have to worry about him coming from behind. But for now…

  “Let me go, please, mister!” the boy wailed suddenly as the dead-faced man towered over him. He tried to scrabble away, but he was on his back, and his arms and legs refused to work properly when glowing blue eyes stared down at him.

  Three kicks. To throat and belly and armpit, and then he could pursue the other black-clad man melting into the night.

  Or he could push his fingers down fast as a snap against the soft hollow of the boy’s throat, to crush the tiny fishlike bones within and flood blood all through the secret caverns of his flesh. Wizard smelled the pungent odor of urine as the scrabbling boy wet himself. Snatches of gray fog were drifting in off Elliott Bay and floating through the night. There was no solution so simple and beautiful as death. He could put him out and be done with him, never have to worry about this particular one again. No one would ever see what was going to happen here. The boy was like a cake waiting to be cut. “ god o god o god,” he was praying, sobbing and sniffling already, before Wizard had ever touched him. But now he touched and the boy squealed long. Wizard looked at the rag of shirt in his hand, marveling at how easily the cloth had torn. A tendril of fog passed between the boy and himself, drifting like blood in water. The gray fog stank in his nostrils, worse than the urine, and he shook it from his nose.

  For the first time he heard the old man’s repeated words.

  “I’m all right. Let him go and help me. Please.” Wizard stared down at the boy. His eyes were squeezed shut and water from them was leaking down his cheeks. He felt suddenly and intensely sick.

  “Get out of here, kid. Go!”

  Wizard stood up, but the boy was gone even before he stepped back. He stared after his vanishing prey.

  “Please. Please help me.”

  The gray sheaf of hair that was supposed to be combed to cover the old man’s bald spot had draggled down one side of his head. His old brown sweater was muddied at the elbow and one knee of his gray pants was torn. Wizard raised him gently, smelling the unmistakable odor of fried chicken and fish clinging to him. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. God be thanked, I’m not hurt. Boys today. Only a boy that was, did you see? I told them I didn’t have any money. But they said they had watched me carrying a bag home every night, and they wanted the deposit. Deposit! Leftover chicken and fish from the restaurant for my cat. For that they put a knife to my throat.”

  “So why did you tell me to let him go?” Wizard spoke softly, his voice a deeper nimble than the traffic overhead.

  “So maybe it’s not that different, if he kills me over leftover chicken, or you kill him. Or maybe it’s the delicate ecological balance I was worrying about.” A quavery laugh shook the old man’s voice. “Look at it this way. I’ve just had the rare opportunity of seeing a fullgrown Mugger in its natural surroundings as it taught its young to stalk and attack its natural prey. Think of what might have happened if you had killed it. Why, there might be a mother Mugger, and a whole line of little baby Muggers at home in the den, waiting for those two to bring home their kill. Oh, God!”

  The old man started shaking suddenly. Wizard helped him to the dumpster and he leaned against it until the belated adrenalin shudders had passed. He tried for another laugh, but it failed. “Or think what it could have done to you, if you had killed him. Or to me.”

  “Would it be worse than what’s been done to you?” Wizard asked. He didn’t want to be speaking to him like this, especially not in this chilly soulless voice, but the words were swelling out of him like blood from a wound.

  “I’m not hurt. Well, not much. It would be nothing to a man your age. Oh, I’ve bruises that won’t heal for a week, and a scrape that’s going to keep me awake all night. But if it hadn’t been for you. I might be headed for the hospital. Or the morgue. But you came along and stopped it. I’ll be fine.”

  �
��Will you? And will you walk home with your kitchen scraps tomorrow night?”

  For a moment the only sound other than the roar of traffic overhead was the labored pumping of the old man’s lungs.

  “No. I guess I won’t be doing that anymore,” he admitted slowly. “I guess I’ll call a cab, or get the cook to drop me off on his way. No, I don’t suppose I’ll be walking home after work anymore.”

  “Then that’s what they took from you tonight, old man. Not your money nor your life, not even your cold chicken. They took your private walk home of an evening, through the streets that should belong to you. You’ve been robbed and you don’t even know it.”

  With a trembling hand the old man flipped his hair back into place and patted it down. He was over the worst of his fright now, and dignity was coming back to his voice.

  “I know it, young man. I knew it before they had even knocked me down. But do you think it would be different if you had killed that boy? Then on the walk home at night I could look at this dumpster and say to myself, ‘That’s where that young bastard died for trying to rob me.’ I saw you. You weren’t going to rough him up or hold him for the cops. You were on the killing edge. Do you think I’d be thinking of punks and muggers as I walked up this street alone at night? No. I’d be thinking of you. Good evening.”

  There was strength in the old man. Rebuked, Wizard stepped back to let him pass. He didn’t even look back at Wizard as he continued his interrupted walk home. Shame, weariness, and cold flooded up through Wizard, rising like a cold tide from the pavement. He wished no one had seen him tonight.

  He stooped to retrieve his bag from under the dumpster. From there his nose led him to the crumpled sack of cold chicken and fish fillets. The muggers had tossed it aside, untouched. He claimed it and took a cold fillet to nibble as be walked.