Mulberry Wands (25 page)

“Good,” Griff said. “I don’t like the idea of
killing animals for magic.”

Maggie looked thoughtful, then continued.
“Well, I must have de-magicked them cause they turn totally
visible. I’m not killing them though.”

Griff’s eyes were watering from the smoke,
and he really needed to inhale so he just nodded and walked
away.

***

Griff bought some wrapping paper, tissue and
ribbon at the 99 cents store and took the pomegranate home to wrap
it. The partial transmutation had done something to the fruit, and
no matter how gently he handled it, it wept red juice into the
paper.

Darius walked in, holding two apples in his
left hand and eating a third one out of his right hand. “Whatcha
doing?” he asked, around a mouthful of fruit.

“Zoë’s birthday was yesterday. I’m wrapping a
present for her.”

Darius sat on the table, resting one foot on
the chair next to him. “Looks like it’s bleeding.”

Griff turned the box over, and saw that he
was right. Juice had turned the paper pink and soggy. He unwrapped
it again and got a fresh piece.

“Can I see it?”

Since he had to open the box anyway, Griff
handed the pomegranate to Darius.

“You made this? Transmutation?” Darius turned
it over and used a nail to scratch a line in the gold. “I didn’t
think you were a mage.”

“I used a magic wand. I’m a wand-dealer.”

“Why didn’t you just give her a wand then,
and let Zoë make one herself?”

Griff wrapped it in an extra thick stack of
tissue paper and wedged it back into the box. “Zoë doesn’t like
mage-craft. She said it makes her uncomfortable.”

He managed to finish wrapping it just in
time, because a moment later, Zoë walked past them into the
kitchen. Zoë went into the laundry room and came out again with her
cordless drill.

Zoë was wearing her overalls over a skintight
black camisole. She looked sad, somewhere between gloomy and
apathetic, which matched the goth look but didn’t suit her. After
finishing his room, she’d gone back to working on the new floor.
The maple boards had crept slowly across the upstairs like moss
growing in a cool garden. Then she’d taken a break from that and
got Darius to help her empty the furniture out of Susan’s room. The
week earlier, she’d painted Susan’s room a dark blue, with sponging
techniques for texture on two of the walls. Griff had tried to make
a joke about how much effort it took to make the walls look poorly
painted, but Zoë hadn’t laughed or made any comment.

The paint had dried the previous weekend, so
now Zoë was changing the switchplates, hanging curtains, and
designing shelves and drawers for the closet. Griff wondered if it
were some sort of bargaining strategy. He had faint memories of his
mom putting up new wallpaper while Eddie was in the hospital, as
though she could be sure he’d come home if he had someplace nice to
come home to.

“Zoë, wait.” Griff managed to catch her
before she went back upstairs. She set her drill on the counter and
turned back to look at him.

“Um, happy birthday. Sorry it’s late,” Griff
said.

Zoë took the box and silently unwrapped the
present. She still wasn’t smiling. Griff held his breath, wondering
if she’d like it or not.

“What is it?” she asked, pulling the fruit
out of the tissue paper.

“A golden pomegranate. See, there’s this
Greek myth—“

“Paris and Aphrodite,” she said. She put the
fruit back in the box. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“I wanted to.”

She looked at him silently. She still wasn’t
smiling. His present hadn’t done anything to scratch her
depression. “Thank you.” She set the box back on the table, picked
up her Dewalt drill, and went back upstairs.

She walked so quietly that they didn’t hear
she was upstairs until the door closed.

“Nice try,” Darius said, a little smugly.
“But you don’t have a chance with her. Zoë doesn’t date.”

“She seems really sad that Susan’s missing.
Were she and Susan … girlfriends?”

“That would be smoking hot, but no, she’s not
into girls,” Darius said. “Zoë just doesn’t date. Guys hit on her
at work all the time, but she just shuts them down. Me, I know how
she is, so I don’t even try.”

A rattling vibration reverberated from
upstairs, as though she were drilling into a hollow door.

“I bet she’s gonna start working overtime now
to avoid you,” Darius said. “Now that she knows you’re into
her.”

“Shut up, man. I’m not into her.”

Darius rolled his eyes.

“What was that?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Darius said, chuckling to
himself.

Griff had to walk past Susan’s door to get to
his room, and he thought he’d try to chat up Zoë again, but she
shut the door loudly and started drilling into it (hanging a hook,
he thought.) He sighed, grabbed his bag of wands, and headed out
the door.

It was early, on a weeknight, but the bar he
picked still had a fair number of alcoholic college kids taking
advantage of the well-drink specials. The bar was too small to
house any band that had more than one member, which meant that they
didn’t have a cover charge. Even at a fifty percent commission,
he’d rather not have to write off any business expenses. It had a
patio area outside, with cheap metal tables, white plastic chairs
and a couple of propane heaters which were blazing away on high,
making even the December night feel overly warm.

He walked inside, where neon signs and red
plastic candle holders provided just enough light not to shin
yourself. The walls had framed movie posters, grown dull from age,
and even though smoking in public places had been prohibited for
several years, it still had that bowling-alley tinge of stale
cigarettes.

The bar looked like something out of Cheers,
with a glossy wooden top, brass rail, and mirror behind the
bottles. The bartender himself looked like the store mannequin for
a head shop. He had a ripped, black t-shirt with Iron Maiden on it.
His hair was platinum blond and spiky, and his earlobe holes had
been stretched wide enough to pass a cigar through.

“Hey, wizard guy!” the bartender called out
to him. “You got more magic wands?”

Griff raised the Wal-Mart bag in response. At
the bartender’s beckon, he headed to the bar.

The bartender opened a beer and handed it to
him. “On the house. People have been asking about you. They keep
wanting to know when the wand guy’s coming back.”

“I had some trouble with my partner, had to
find a new one.” Griff looked at the bottle. It was an expensive
microbrew, bitter and flavorful and so out of keeping with the
sports-bar-dive ambiance that he wondered if maybe it was the
bartender’s private stash. “You’re okay with me selling them here,
then, I take it?”

“Yeah, totally cool.” The bartender pulled
out his wallet and made a small pile of twenties on the bar. “Give
me a couple before you run out. I told my girlfriend about them and
she’s been harassing me to buy her one.”

Griff picked out two of the straightest,
smoothest ones, even though how they looked had nothing to do with
how powerful they were. “You have to squeeze these extra hard to
get them to work. Dig your nails into the bark. They have more
power than the last ones though.”

“Rockin’,” the bartender said. He slipped the
wands into his back pocket, then looked over Griff’s head at
someone coming inside. “Hey, Tricia! The wizard guy is here.”

“Sweet,” Tricia said.

She and her girlfriend bought two each, and
asked him to go out to the patio. They insisted on using theirs
right away, which meant that Griff didn’t have to waste any charge
on demonstrations. One of the girls just made glowing illusions,
the glittering pink butterflies drifting into the air like soap
bubbles. This drew a crowd.

Griff sold all of his wands within two
hours.

He crumpled the empty bag up and threw it
into the garden. His wallet felt fat in his pants pocket. He walked
up Mill Ave towards his bike, debating whether or not he should
drink some of his money away. The money made him confident, which
made women notice him. Or maybe he was just noticing them more. He
saw a really cute girl who reminded him a little of Zoë, as she was
tiny and blonde. She had an owl on her shoulder, and he tried to
strike up a conversation with her, but she just smiled and walked
away. He saw a few other girls too, and almost went up and talked
to some of them, but he lost his nerve each time. He reached his
bike realizing that having money and no one to spend it with was
almost as bad as not having money. Where had he gone wrong with
Zoë?

Susan became increasingly agitated, waiting
for Tuusit to return from his visit to the judicial council. She
even thought about trying to escape again. Then she remembered
Sphinx, and rubbed her stomach where the scratches had been. She
wasn’t afraid of the cat; she was just concerned about what would
happen to Tuusit’s family if she left. They’d probably forfeit a
bond or something. It wasn’t that she was scared of a kitty.

Tuusit and Reela’s sister Aiine was coming
for a visit, and the whole family was in high spirits. The women
had spent the day cooking, and Reela had kicked the young men out,
telling them not to come back until they’d found feast-food. They
returned an hour later, each carrying oranges balanced on their
shoulders. Reela clicked her tongue and said it was a good start,
in a way that left it clear she expected more.

The men left again, and returned just after
dark, carrying a pigeon. The children were set to plucking it under
one of the shrubs (with the men napping nearby, holding a spear in
case a cat showed up). They made quick work of it, all working
together, and then they played with the pinion feathers, flapping
around with them as if trying to fly. Some of them even got off the
ground.

Viiene came out with lengths of yucca-twine,
and told the children they had to gather the feathers up. The
children whined that their game was cut short, but they obeyed, and
sorted the feathers by size. Susan was going to offer to help, but
Reela pulled her away, explaining that plucking birds was
considered children’s work. The women’s work (eviscerating and
sorting the organs by method of preservation) made her sick to her
stomach. She tried anyway, but she had no idea what she was doing,
and soon made a botch of it.

Viiene handed Susan her baby son and told her
to rock him to keep him from crying. Susan gratefully took the baby
(who wasn’t crying at all) and went inside to keep Reela
company.

Reela was kind and competent. A few years
older than Tuusit, she’d already buried two husbands. The first had
died in the fever that took their baby. The second had given her
two daughters. The previous summer, he’d drowned in the flash flood
caused by a monsoon. The drainage in the city was good, more than
sufficient for the three hundred days a year when it wasn’t
raining, but when the summer thundershowers hit with full force,
the streets rushed with water, occasionally a foot or more deep in
places. A foot of water wasn’t enough to drown a human (at least,
not a sober adult) but as she was learning, life in the suburbs was
more precarious when you were small.

The women cut the pigeon meat up into small
chunks, slicing meat off the bones with shards of obsidian. Since
the meat would spoil quickly, they worked nonstop, well into the
night, using candles to light the kitchen. They chopped meat,
ground up fire-hot peppers, and stuffed the mixture into the
entrails to make sausage. The breast meat (which in a pigeon is
dark) got sliced paper-thin and hung over lines like sheets to dry.
Susan wasn’t very good with a knife, but she helped spread the
peppery masala over everything. It made her hands burn and her eyes
water, but Reela swore it would keep the meat from spoiling. By the
time they’d finished, the children had dropped off, the women were
yawning, and the dusty floor of the kitchen block was muddy with
blood.

Susan staggered to where the children were.
There were so many children sleeping that the unheated cinderblock
had become close and warm from all the people, and they’d kicked
off their blankets. She carefully picked her way to the open spot
on the floor, and fell asleep as soon as she lay down.

In the morning, she awoke ravenous to the
smell of spicy sausages smoking over mesquite fires. From outside
the wall, in one of the cholla-protected gardens, came the sound of
stone against stone as someone ground up mesquite pods to make
sweet flour. The children who had slept too long (and hadn’t run
out to play fast enough to escape their mothers) were using agave
leaves to rake the muddy blood off the kitchen floor. The men took
the piles of mud-blood far away, where the smell wouldn’t attract
cats, they explained to her. Susan thought that was a little
pointless, since the whole cinderblock warren they lived in smelled
like a barbecue cookout. Probably what they cared more about was
not being around while the women were cleaning. Anyone still inside
the cinderblock was likely to have a damp rag thrust into his hands
and be ordered to clean.

By the time they were done, it was noon and
Aiine and her husband and children had arrived. Susan heard the
shouts of joy and excitement, and hoped that Tuusit was among them,
but he hadn’t come back yet.

Susan picked up an orange and helped carry it
to the picnic, hoisting it overhead so she could see where she was
going. It was so large in comparison to her own body that it
reminded her of carrying yoga balls back when she still had a
membership at the fitness center.

The place they’d chosen for the welcome party
was at the far end of the cinderblock warren, and they had to carry
the food and supplies over unexposed ground (translators hated to
be out in the open) but it was the only place large enough to host
everyone. The set up the picnic under the sheltering branches of a
giant prickly pear cactus. Prickly pears tended to sprawl,
especially when they got a little water, and their thorns were just
as nasty as cholla in their own way. Someone had hacked a clear
tunnel through the pads, burning the fibrous spines off wherever a
careless child might accidentally brush against it. Scars showed
where they’d hacked other tunnels before, but prickly pear grew so
well that the joke was that after you stuck a pad in the ground,
you had to stand back.