Black and Blue Magic (9 page)

Wing feather, bat leather, hollow bone,

Gift of Icarus and Oberon,

Dream of the earthbound—Spin and Flow

Fledge and Flutter and Fan and GO
!

As Harry said the last word he was instantly shaken by a violent and frightening sensation. There was no pain, but something seemed to press and pull and wrench deep inside his back. He couldn’t seem to open his eyes, and a whirling dizziness made him stagger forward.

For a time—a strange amount of time that seemed to have very little to do with ordinary minutes or hours—the dark dizzy cloud whirled in his head and then, suddenly, it spun itself clear and drifted away. Harry found himself holding on to the bedpost with both hands. The violence was completely gone and he felt quite normal again, except for a heaviness across his shoulders as if a pack was strapped to them. He looked behind him—and almost yelled out loud.

Arching up behind him, higher than the top of his head was a huge—he looked the other way and there was another one—running to the mirror over his dresser, he turned sideways and there they were! Wings! Two great enormous wings sprang up from his shoulders, arched behind his head and swept down to his ankles in a long smooth line.

Harry’s first gasp of surprise turned into a great ballooning rush of happiness. It was an absolutely fantastic feeling, as if his oldest dream or most impossible wish had just come true. Actually, he couldn’t remember ever having wished for wings, at least, not in so many words. Not in the way that he’d wished that Mom didn’t have to work so hard, that they could move to a ranch, or that he could get over being so clumsy. But now, all of a sudden, it was quite clear that wings were something he’d always wanted. Having wings was a dream that he seemed to know all about—not with his mind, but in a way that was older and more important than just remembering.

Along with that first rush of happiness came a strange kind of pride. Not nose-in-the-air human pride, but a joyous sort of proudness—like a peacock rejoicing over his beautiful tail. The wings were terrific to look at, covered closely and smoothly with soft shiny feathers, not white exactly, but more like the color of a cloud when the moon is behind it. Near the arched tops, the feathers were very small and curved to fit the line of bone and muscle. But farther down they got larger and larger until, at the tips, they looked bigger and stronger than any feathers Harry had ever seen.

Turning backward and forward, Harry looked and looked and looked. Then he reached back and touched one of the wings with his fingers. It felt warm and alive, and to his surprise he realized that the wing could feel. That is, not only were his fingers feeling the soft feathers over firm muscle, but his wings were feeling the touch of his fingers.

As Harry stretched and turned to get a better look, the left wing suddenly lifted and unfolded. It took a second to realize that he’d moved it himself. Without quite knowing how he’d done it, he’d somehow brought the wing tip forward where he could see it better. He tried it again, and there was a funny feeling like the pull of new muscles, or at least muscles moving in some new way, across his back and chest. He turned around and after a moment, he could make the other wing lift and spread itself, too.

Next he faced the mirror and concentrated on lifting both wings at once. There was a whoosh of air, a rustle of feathers, and his wings jumped out behind him into a huge tent of feathers that reached almost across the little room. Harry was so startled at the size of his wingspread that he relaxed quickly, and they dropped smoothly down to their narrow folded shape.

After a moment he tried it again, and this time, when the wings were up and spread, he decided to try bringing them down a little bit harder. They came down with a rush of wind, and for a moment Harry felt his feet lifted right off the floor.

It was all Harry could do to keep from shouting “Whoopee!” right out loud. He could fly! He, Harry Houdini Marco, could fly like a bird! In a burst of enthusiasm he spread his wings and fanned them HARD! The rush of air blew the lamp off the table, sent the curtains fluttering out the window, and Harry’s head went CRACK against the ceiling.

The next thing he knew he was sitting on the side of the bed rubbing the top of his head. It hurt like everything, and he could already feel a bump beginning to rise. Something else was hurting, but for a confused moment he couldn’t figure out just what it was. Then he realized he was sitting on the end of one of his wings. He straightened it out behind him and the pain went away. At least that one did. But his head still hurt and his enthusiasm for flying seemed to be permanently damaged.

The longer he sat there and thought about it, the more discouraged he became. It really looked as if poor old Mr. Mazzeeck had goofed again. Of all the crazy things to give him. Him! Humpty Dumpty Harry, the guy who went around black and blue from one end to the other with nothing but feet and a bicycle to fall off of. And now he was going to fly. That was a good one! Way up in the sky, he’d be going maybe a hundred miles an hour, or more. Great! Just GREAT! And how was he going to look after he’d smashed into the Coit Tower, for instance, on some foggy night? Or gotten tangled up in some high tension electric wires?

And there was no use kidding himself. He was just the boy who could do it.

H
ARRY’S COMPLETE DISCOURAGEMENT WITH
flying didn’t last very long. As a matter of fact, it really only lasted until the pain had faded from the bump on the top of his head. It left behind, though, a very vivid reminder of what Mr. Mazzeeck had said about proceeding with caution, and of his own promise to be careful.

After his head began to feel better, he got up and went to his window. He leaned out and looked into the foggy night. Below, fading away down the hill, were street lights and the lights of houses, blurred and pale through the drifting fog. To climb out on his window sill and take off into the blinding mist would be stupid, to say the least. He’d have to think of a safer place to learn.

Just then, he noticed the roof of the Furdells’ carriage house and he knew right away where it was going to be. He got out his flashlight, the extra big one that Mr. Brighton had given him for his birthday, and cautiously opened the door of his room. Marco’s Boarding House slumbered in an after-midnight kind of quietness. On the stairs, Harry kept close to the wall, where the old boards were less likely to squeak. When he reached the ground floor hall, he headed for the kitchen and the back door; and made a short dash through the foggy yard to the carriage house.

Once inside, Harry stopped to catch his breath and turn on his flashlight. There were overhead lights, but it would be a risk to turn them on. One of the windows faced the house and too much light might bring someone to investigate. At night, the carriage house had always seemed a spooky place to Harry. Even with the lights on, the immensely high ceiling where the hayloft used to be was full of shadows. But tonight, Harry wasn’t a bit frightened. Somehow, having wings made a difference.

Except for Lee Furdell’s beat-up old Oldsmobile, the carriage house was empty, so there was plenty of floor space. Harry walked to one end of the building, grasped his flashlight firmly in both hands and spread his wings.

At first he didn’t try to go very far or very high. He fanned his wings hard, took off, and tried stopping right away. He soon learned that a quick run forward helped him to get under way, and that in order to stop, all he needed to do was make huge cups of his wings to catch the air. The cupped wings slowed him up and at the same time acted as kind of parachutes to bring him down easily. Once or twice he didn’t come down quite easily enough to keep himself from collecting a couple of new reminders to “proceed with caution.” One time it was a skinned knee, and another a bruised heel.

When he finally felt ready to try it from one end of the barn to the other he made a marvelous discovery. He found that once he was really under way his body leveled out into a kind of swimming position with his toes trailing along behind. When that happened, the flying became much easier. Balancing, which had been a problem before, was suddenly almost automatic, and he no longer had to beat the air frantically to stay up. Once his body leveled out, it took only long gentle strokes to keep him gliding smoothly through the air.

From one end of the barn to the other he went, over and over again, getting more confident with every flight. He kept at it until it was perfect. Two or three fast hard beats to get air-borne and leveled out, and then a swooping, breath-taking glide to the far wall. Once there, he simply cupped his wings, back pedaled, and came down gently, feet first. Finally, he got so confident that he tried a quick pin-point landing on the roof of the Oldsmobile. He came down perfectly, feather-light, and right in the middle of the roof. And that made him so confident, that he decided to fly straight up and land on the huge crossbeam, high up under the roof of the barn.

That was nearly a mistake. In the first place, there were spiders’ webs up there, which wasn’t very pleasant. Harry brushed the sticky clinging webs off his face and chest, and shook them off his wings and got ready to leave in a hurry. That was when the dumb thing happened. As he looked down his flashlight beam, down, down, through the shadows, he suddenly froze. It wasn’t too surprising. After all, Harry had only had wings for maybe an hour or an hour and a half, and for almost twelve years he’d had a lot of painfully bad luck with high places. Spiders’ webs, or no spiders’ webs, he sat down quickly on the crossbeam and grabbed hold with both hands.

There he sat for several minutes, shaking like crazy, with his wings trailing helplessly down on each side of the crossbeam. He tried to tell himself that he knew how to fly, and jumping off wasn’t any different from taking off from the ground; but it wasn’t any use. Not until he got to thinking what it would be like to have everybody come in the morning and find him up there, did he get up nerve enough to try again. He stood up, unfolded his wings, shut his eyes and jumped. And the moment he was in the air again, he wasn’t afraid at all. He came down in a wonderful gliding spiral. It was better than anything he’d tried yet.

After that, he practiced a few more spirals until he got the knack of slanting his wings into a turn, and knew just how much to slant to sharpen a turn, or smooth it out. Then he felt ready to go outdoors.

In the tiny back yard Harry looked around him and up into the sky. There was certainly no room for a running take-off and he would have to climb very steeply. He would be fanning his wings very hard—if he could make it at all—just as he was going past the windows of the boarding house. The motion or the rustle of feathers might bring someone to the window.

It was just about then that he thought of the perfect take-off spot—the flat roof of the carriage house. He could take off away from the buildings on Kerry Street and over the roof of the houses on the street below.

He ducked back into the Furdells’ yard and climbed the outside stairway to the roof. Once there he stopped for a minute to look and listen. All the windows in the boarding house were dark; and in the Furdells’ house, only one small light was on somewhere on the second floor. There was no sound but the far-away honking of car horns, and no movement except the slow drift of the fog. At last, Harry took a deep breath, spread his wings, and took off into the blinding fog.

Up and up he went, in a wide circle, his heart pounding with a crazy excitement that was more than half fright. The wind was wet against his face and his ears were full of the breathy whirr of feathers. It was a pretty frantic and frightening few minutes until at last he broke out above the fog into the clear open starlit sky.

Coming up so suddenly out of damp gray blindness, Harry was amazed to see how bright it was, and how clearly he could see. As he climbed higher into the starlit brightness the fog became only a rolling gray river beneath him. It poured in through the Golden Gate in great gray billows, spread out over the water of the bay, and spilled up onto the surrounding land. To the south, the tops of some of the tallest buildings looked like the last remains of a sunken city. As Harry turned in his circling flight, he caught a glimpse of the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, barely showing above the foggy flood. Farther north, small patches of the hills of Marin could be seen through the fog breakers that dashed over their tops and almost seemed to splash down to the bay below.

As Harry went on climbing up and up he suddenly noticed a wonderful feeling of warmth. The air above the fog blanket was a whole lot warmer than it had been further down. It was the good feel of sudden warmth that made Harry realize how cold he’d been for a long time. All that time in the carriage house he must have been freezing, but he’d been too excited to notice. He decided right then that flying around San Francisco without a shirt wasn’t a good idea.

The warm air above the fog blanket was so comfortable, and the fog-flooded world beneath him was so fascinating that Harry stopped being even the least bit afraid. In fact, for a few minutes he came close to forgetting where he was and what was keeping him up there. Without intending to, he had been flying slower and slower. It all came back as quick as anything, though, when he suddenly started to fall.

Right then Harry learned two things in a hurry. If you fly too slowly you begin to sideslip—and you only make things worse by panicking and trying to climb too steeply. His feet dropped down and he began to slide backwards and downwards toward the water of the bay. It wasn’t until he had spun through a heart-stopping tail spin, and several hundred feet of air, that he managed to get his balance back and catch the wind under his wings. With a huge gulp of relief, he started back up to the warm upper air. After that he kept his mind strictly on his flying.

Not that he didn’t have any more trouble, because he did. Once when he tried to turn too quickly, and again when he first tried to soar, he lost his balance and started to fall. But he wasn’t quite as frightened as he’d been the first time so it was easier to relax and let his body level out. Once he did that, his wings just naturally did the rest.