Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  As you walk and talk real slow, just home from the prairie green, tall and proud as the villains and scoundrels perish, tall and proud like a man ought, tall and proud, with guns blazing, the soft light of home beckoning welcome, welcome home, home at last, home in John Wayne’s dream.

  The Ballad of the Side-Street Wizard

  Introduction by Lucy Snyder

  "The Ballad of the Side-Street Wizard" displays classic Braunbeck styles and themes. A fast read reveals snappy, witty dialogue worthy of classic 1950-era live television. But beneath the story's witty veneer, there's deep melancholy and a sense of profound existential loneliness that would drive any protagonist to madness (as has happened to our hero Myrddin.) Madness, sadness, and magic: in this tale there be monsters, the kind even a brave man cannot slay.

  The Ballad of the Side-Street Wizard

  or

  Those Low-Down, Dirty, Eternally Depressing, and

  Somewhat Shameful Post-Arthurian Dipshit Blues

  "Myrddin," he says to his own image in the mirror over the bathroom sink (wondering if he should pronounce it as Merlin, seeing as how that’s the name he’s remembered by...if, indeed, he is who he thinks he is, damn that pre-Tennyson, -T.H. White, and -Lewis scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth for muddying the psychological waters): "She loves you not, oh, she doesn't, you poor fool."

  He's put the makeup on, packed the bag of tricks—including the rabbit that he calls Artie, and the bird, the attention getter, that he calls Gwenn. He's to do a birthday party for some five-year-old on the other side of the river. A crowd of babies, and the adults waiting around for him to screw up. This is going to be one of those tough ones. He has fortified himself with some generous helpings of Crown Royal, and he feels ready.

  He isn't particularly worried about it.

  But there's a little something else he has to do first.

  Something in the order of the embarrassingly ridiculous: he has to make a delivery. This morning at the local bakery he picked up a big pink wedding cake, with its six tiers and scalloped edges and its miniature bride and groom on top, standing inside a sugar castle. He'd ordered it on his own; he'd taken the initiative, planning to offer it to a young woman he worked with. He managed somehow to set the thing on the back seat of the car, and when he got home he found a note from her announcing, excited and happy, that she's engaged. The man she'd had such difficulty with has had a change of heart; he wants to get married after all. She's going off to Cincinnati to live. She loves her dear old ? with a big kiss and a hug always, and she knows he'll have every happiness. She's so thankful for his friendship. Her magic man. Her sweet sidestreet wizard. She actually drove over here and, finding him gone, left the note for him, folded under the door knocker; her notepaper with the tangle of flowers at the top. She wants him to call her, come by as soon as he can, to help celebrate. Please, she says: I want to give you a big hug.

  He read this and then walked out to stand on the sidewalk and look at the cake in its place on the back seat of the car.

  "Good God," he said.

  Then thought: I’m not supposed to be here, not like this, am I? Wasn’t I the wizard above all wizards once, the magic man against whom all others must compare?

  Sometimes in sleep, other times during waking hours, he has flashes of memories, centuries-old, of a great, mythical kingdom, and of his place there; he remembers glory and enemies and a spell cast upon him, causing him to sleep, and now that he’s awake he’s living...backward somehow. That’s right, isn’t it?

  He’s old, and most times he forgets.

  He remembers the cake in the back of his car.

  He'd thought he would deliver the cake in person, an elaborate proposal to a girl he's never even kissed. He's a little unbalanced, and he knows it. Over the months of their working together at the Lazarus department store, he's built up tremendous feelings of loyalty and yearning towards her. He thought she felt it, too. He interpreted gestures—her hand lingering on his shoulder when he made her laugh; her endearments tinged as they seemed to be with a kind of sadness, as if she were afraid of what the world might do to someone so romantic—as something more than, as it turns out, they actually were.

  In the olden days—providing those weren’t just a fantasy concocted by a failing mind—he’d simply have waved his hands and set the universe right and have her fall hopelessly in love with him.

  She talked to him about her ongoing sorrows, the guy she'd been in love with who kept waffling about getting married. He wanted no commitments. Myrddin, a.k.a. Buster Francis, told her that he hated men who weren't willing to run the risks of love. Why, he personally was the type who'd always believed in marriage and children, lifelong commitments—eternity-long commitments. He had caused difficulties for himself, and life in this part of time was a disappointment so far, but he believed in falling in love and starting a family. She didn't hear him. It all went right through her, like white noise on the radio. For weeks he had come around to visit her, had invited her to watch him perform. She confided in him, and he thought of movies where the friend sticks around and is a good listener, and eventually gets the girl. They fall in love. He put his hope in that. He was optimistic; he'd ordered and bought the cake. Apparently the whole time, all through the listening and being noble with her, she thought of it as nothing more than friendship, accepting it from him because she was accustomed to being offered friendship.

  Now he leans close to the mirror to look at his own eyes through the makeup. They look clear enough. "Loves you absolutely not. You must be crazy. A loon. A threat to society. A potential man-in-tower-with-rifle. Not-quite-right, even. You must be the Great Myrddin."

  Yes.

  With a great oversized cake in the back seat of his car. It's Sunday, a cool April day. He's a little inebriated. That's the word he prefers. It's polite; it suggests something faintly silly. Nothing could be sillier than to be dressed in a pointed wizard’s cap and star-covered robe in broad daylight and to go driving across the bridge into the more upscale section of Cedar Hill to put on a magic show. Nothing could be sillier than to have spent all that money on a completely useless purchase—a cake six tiers high. Maybe fifteen pounds of sugar.

  When he has made his last inspection of the face in the mirror, and checked the bag of tricks and props, he goes to his front door and looks through the screen at the architectural shadow of the cake in the back seat. Inside the car will smell like icing for days. He'll have to keep the windows open even if it rains; he'll go to work smelling like confectionery delights. The whole thing makes him laugh. A wedding cake. He steps out of the house and makes his way in the late afternoon sun down the sidewalk to the car. As if they have been waiting for him, three boys come skating down from the top of the hill. He has the feeling that if he tried to sneak out like this at two in the morning, someone would come by and see him anyway. "Hey, Buster," one boy says. "I mean, Myrddin."

  Myrddin recognizes him. A neighborhood boy, tough. Just the kind to make trouble, just the kind with no sensitivity to the suffering of others. "Leave me alone or I'll turn you into spaghetti," he says.

  "Hey guys, it's Myrddin the You-Could-Do-Worse." The boy's hair is a bright blond color, and you can see through it to his scalp.

  "Scram,” Myrddin says. "Sincerely."

  "Aw, what's your hurry?"

  "I've just set off a nuclear device," Myrddin says with grave seriousness. "It's on a timer. The time for the Great Revolution is nigh. A few more minutes and—Poof."

  "Do a trick for us," the blond one says. "Where's that scurvy rabbit of yours?"

  "I gave it the week off." Someone, last winter, poisoned the first Mordred (which somehow seemed like misdirected justice to him, for reasons he never quite managed to fathom). He keeps the cage indoors now. "I'm in a hurry. No rabbit to help with the driving. Elwood Dowd wouldn’t let me borrow Harvey for the day.”

  “Huh?” says the boy.

  “Your lack of culture depresses me.”

 
; But they're interested in the cake now. "Hey, what's that in your car? Jesus, is that real?"

  "Just stay back." Myrddin gets his cases into the trunk and hurries to the driver's side door. The three boys are peering into the back seat.

  "Hey man, a cake. Can we have a piece of it?"

  "Back off before I zap you all into newts," Myrddin says.

  The blond-haired one says, "Come on, Myrddin."

  "Hey, Myrddin, I saw some guys looking for you, man. They said you owed them money."

  He gets in, ignoring them, and starts the car.

  "Sucker," one of them says.

  "Hey man, who's the cake for?"

  He drives away, thinks of himself leaving them in a cloud of exhaust. Riding through the green shade, he glances in the rear-view mirror and sees the clown face, the painted smile. It makes him want to laugh. He tells himself he's his own cliché—a magic man with a broken heart. Looming behind him is the cake, like a passenger in the back seat. The people in the cake store had offered it to him in a box; he had made them give it to him like this, on a cardboard slab. It looks like it might melt.

  He drives slow, worried that it might sag, or even fall over. He has always believed viscerally that gestures mean everything. When he moves his hands and brings about the effects that amaze little children, he feels larger than life, unforgettable. He learned the magic while in high school, as a way of making friends, and though it didn't really make him any friends, he's been practicing it ever since. It's an extra source of income, and lately income has had a way of disappearing too quickly. He's been in some travail, betting the horses, betting the sports events. He's hung over all the time. There have been several polite warnings at work. He's managed so far to tease everyone out of the serious looks, the cool study of his face. The fact is, people like him in an abstract way, the way they like distant clownish figures: the comedian whose name they can't remember. He can see it in their eyes. Even the rough characters after his loose change have a certain sense of humor about it.

  He's a phenomenon, a subject of conversation.

  There's traffic on the East Main Street Bridge, and he's stuck for a while. It becomes clear that he'll have to go straight to the birthday party. Sitting behind the wheel of the car with his cake behind him, he becomes aware of people in other cars noticing him. In the car to his left, a girl stares, chewing gum. She waves, rolls her window down. Two others are with her, one in the back seat. "Hey," she says. He nods, smiles inside what he knows is the glorious-wizard smile.

  "Where's the party?" she says.

  But the traffic moves again. He concentrates. The snarl is on the other side of the bridge, construction of some kind. He can see the cars in a line, waiting to go up the hill into Morgan Manor Estates and beyond. Time is beginning to be a consideration. In his glove box he has a flask of Crown Royal. More fortification. He reaches over and takes it out, looks around himself. No fuzz anywhere. Just the idling cars and people tuning their radios or arguing or simply staring out as if at some distressing event. The smell of the cake is making him woozy. He takes a swallow of the bourbon, then puts it away. The car with the girls in it goes by in the left lane, and they are not even looking at him. He watches them go on ahead. He's in the wrong lane again; he can't remember a time when his lane was the only one moving. He told her once that he considered himself of the race of people who gravitate to the non-moving lanes of highways, and who cause green lights to turn to yellow merely by approaching them. She took the idea and ran with it, saying she was of the race of people who emit enzymes which instill a sense of impending doom in marriageable young men.

  "No," Myrddin/Buster said. "I'm living proof that isn't so. I have no such fear, and I'm with you."

  "But you're of the race of people who make mine relax all the enzymes.

  "You're not emitting the enzymes now. I see."

  "No," she said. "It's only with marriageable young men."

  "I emit enzymes that prevent people like you from seeing that I'm a marriageable young man."

  "I'm too relaxed to tell," she said, and touched his shoulder. A plain affectionate moment that gave him tossing nights and fever and an embarrassingly protracted stiffy. A virtual political uprising in his pants.

  Because of the traffic, he's late to the birthday party. He gets out of the car and two men come down to greet him. He keeps his face turned away, remembering too late the breath mints in his pocket.

  "Hey," one of the men says, "look at this. Hey, who comes out of the cake? This is a kid's birthday party."

  “The cake stays," Myrddin says.

  "What does he mean, it stays? Is that a trick?"

  They're both looking at him. The one spoken to must be the birthday boy's father—he's wearing a party cap that says DAD. How original—or perhaps he’s like Myrddin, has a tendency to forget who he really is and the cap in simply the family’s way to remind him when they’re not around. Myrddin hopes there are plenty of mirrors in the house if that’s the case or DAD could be in deep sewage. The man has long, dirty-looking strands of brown hair jutting out from the cap, and there are streaks of sweaty grit on the sides of his face. "So you're the Somewhat Impressive Myrddin," he says, extending a meaty red hand. "Isn't it hot in that outfit?"

  "No, sir."

  "We've been playing volleyball."

  "You've exerted yourselves. Perspiration can get in the way of an odor-free show. You all must shower at once, lest I turn you into road-kill."

  They look at him. "What do you do with the cake?" the one in the DAD cap asks.

  "Cake's not part of the show, actually."

  "You just carry it around with you?"

  The other man laughs. He's wearing a T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. "This ought to be some show," he says.

  They all make their way across the lawn, to the porch of the house. It's a big party, activities everywhere and children gathering quickly to see the wizard.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," says the man in the DAD cap. "I give you Myrddin the Not-So-Terrible."

  Myrddin isn't ready yet. He's got his cases open but he needs a table to put everything on. The first trick is where he releases the bird; he'll finish with the best trick, in which the rabbit appears as if from a pan of flames. This always draws a gasp, even from the adults: the fire blooms in the pan, down goes the "lid"—it's the rabbit's tight container—the latch is tripped, and the skin of the lid lifts off. Voila! Rabbit. The fire is put out by the fireproof cage bottom. He's gotten pretty good at making the switch, and if the crowd isn't too attentive—as children often are not—he can perform certain sleight-of-hand tricks with some style. But he needs a table, and he needs time to set up.

  The whole crowd of children is seated in front of their parents, on either side of the doorway into the house. Myrddin is standing on the porch, his back to the stairs, and he's been introduced.

  "Hello, boys and girls," he says, and bows. "Myrddin needs a table."

  "A table," one of the women says, proving that all the family must share the same awesome genetic intelligence. The adults simply regard him. He sees light sweaters, shapely hips, and wild dresses; he sees beer cans in tight fists, heavy jowls, bright ice-blue eyes. A little row of faces, and one elderly face. He feels more inebriated than he likes, and tries to concentrate.

  "Mommy, I want to touch him," one child says.

  "Look at the cake," says another, who gets up and moves to the railing on Myrddin's right and trains a new pair of shiny binoculars on the car. "Do we get some cake?"

  “There's cake," says the man in the DAD cap. "But not that cake. Get down, Ethan."

  "I want that cake."

  "Get down. This is Teddy's birthday."

  "Mommy, I want to touch him."

  "I need a table, folks. I told somebody that over the telephone."

  "He did say he needed a table. I'm sorry," says a woman who is probably the birthday boy's mother. She's quite pretty, leaning in the door frame with a sweater ti
ed to her waist.

  "A table," says still another woman. Is there no end to the brilliant think-tank of people assembled here? Myrddin sees the birthmark on her mouth, which looks like a stain. He thinks of this woman as a child in school, with this difference from other children, and his heart goes out to her.

  "I need a table," he says to her, his voice as gentle as he can make it. She doesn’t notice the little wave-like gesture he makes with his hand. It probably won’t be until much later, when she’s washing her face before bed, that she’ll notice the birthmark is gone and her face is clear-skinned and lovely.

  "What's he going to do, perform an operation?" says DAD.

  DAD is beginning to annoy. Sincerely.

  It amazes Myrddin how easily people fall into talking about him as though he were an inanimate object or something on a television screen. "The Impressive Myrddin can do nothing until he gets a table," he says with as much mysteriousness and drama as he can muster under the circumstances. Then he belches and the children laugh. He tastes Crown Royal in his mouth and wonders once again if there isn’t something he’s missing, some sign to prove he’s really a magic man, a true wizard, out of time and out of place.

  "I want that cake out there," says Ethan, still at the porch railing and pointing at the magic man’s car. The other children start talking about cake and ice cream, and the big cake Ethan has spotted; there's a lot of confusion and restlessness. One of the smaller children, a girl in a blue dress, approaches Myrddin. "What's your name?" she says, swaying slightly, her hands behind her back.

  "Jeffrey Dahmer. And I’ve not had my lunch. Now go sit down. We have to sit down or Myrddin can't do his magic."

  In the doorway, two of the men are struggling with a folding card table. It's one of those rickety ones with the skinny legs, and it probably won't do.

  "That's kind of shaky, isn't it?" says the woman who until recently had the birthmark.

  "I said, Myrddin needs a sturdy table, boys and girls." Mensa could more than fill its membership roster here.