Mulberry Wands (3 page)

Griff was not impressed. Just as he was about
to say so, Alex took one of the twigs out of the box and pointed it
at Griff’s nose, like a weapon.

Griff waited.

Alex shook the wand and threw it on the
ground. “I think these are all used up. Come by tomorrow and I’ll
show you with one that’s new.”

***

Griff’s parents lived in Hayden’s Ferry, near
the canal which marked the border between Hayden’s Ferry and
Brighamville. When he was younger, his parents had separated for a
while, during which time his Dad got an apartment in Phoenix. His
parents found out they hated being apart more than they hated being
together, so after a few months of separation, Dad moved back in
where he didn’t have to commute twenty minutes to have an
argument.

The house hadn’t changed at all since he was
a kid. The yard still had small hills of pinkish gravel, accented
with beds of purplish lava rock and half a wagon-wheel imbedded in
the ground. Except for two palm trees and a barrel cactus behind
the wagon-wheel, the yard was kept free of plants. Mom was spraying
tufts of Bermuda grass with herbicide when he pulled up to the
curb. She wore denim shorts and a loose t-shirt that she’d painted
turkeys and autumn leaves on at one of her crafting classes. Her
hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She’d worn the same ponytail,
though slightly grayer these days, for as long as Griff could
remember. He’d never seen her without a ponytail. As far as he
knew, she even wore her hair like that in the shower.

“Hey, Mom,” Griff said. “Dad here?”

“He’s out working.”

Griff nodded. That suited him just fine. Dad
would get suspicious when Griff said he wanted to get his bike out
of the shed. Dad always got suspicious. He walked around the house,
through the gate to the walled backyard. The backyard also had palm
trees, but in the front they were skinned to the top, whereas in
the backyard they hadn’t been trimmed at all, and dropped pieces of
fronds almost as often as they dropped pigeon guano. Knee-high
grass clustered near the neighbor’s wall, where it got a little
water from their sprinkler, but except for that it was nothing but
dirt. He walked under the porch to the rusty shed, where an
unlatched padlock held the door shut on its clasp. He’d parked the
bike there when Dad and Uncle Dan got him the truck. They said that
he looked more professional if he drove a truck, so they’d found
him his Toyota and slapped a ‘Harrower Bros.’ logo on the side of
it. It was officially the company truck, and they gave him hell if
he put too many miles on it, but he usually didn’t, since he didn’t
go anywhere except to job sites and sometimes to his friends’
houses. Dad said there was no sense keeping two vehicles, so when
the battery died on his bike, Dad tried to convince him to sell
it.

Griff wheeled it out. The tires were
underinflated, but still good, so with a new battery and maybe some
new spark plugs it should run fine. The helmet’s vinyl had cracked
from being out in the heat, and the registration had expired, but
he decided to drive it with expired tags until he could afford to
get that taken care of.

He used a piece of scrap lumber to make a
ramp up to the bed of his truck. He’d wheeled it in, slammed the
tailgate shut, and would have made a clean getaway, except that Mom
put down her sprayer and asked him if he could do a little favor
for her.

Griff tried not to sigh. He’d done her
“little favors” before. “Sure, Mom.”

Mom went on, even though he’d agreed, as
though she’d been rehearsing her guilt speech all day and didn’t
want to let the practice go to waste. “I can’t do it, you know,
because my health is so bad, and I just can’t bend down that way
anymore, and your father works very hard all the time. I don’t
think it’s unfair for me to ask you to help us out once in a while,
considering all we’ve done for you.”

“What is it you’d like me to do?”

“The grout in the guest bathroom is really
grungy. It could do with a good scrubbing. I think it’s been years
since anyone tackled those hard water stains. I want it looking
nice.”

Although the last thing he wanted to do on
his day off was unpaid menial labor, Griff took the bleach and the
scrubbie and got to work on the tile, which looked as though the
best thing for it would be to rip it all out and start over from
the drywall up.

Mom hovered over him as he worked, but at
least she stopped the guilt trip. “What’s going on in your life? I
tried calling you, but it seems you’re never at home,” Mom said.
She sat next to him on the edge of the bathtub, using a towel to
protect her bottom from the metal shower door frame. “Do you have a
girlfriend? Is that why you’re out all the time?”

“No, I just want to give my roommates some
space,” Griff said. “I’m thinking about looking for another place,
as soon as I can get another job.”

“Why don’t you move back—”

“No. I’m looking for another job, and when I
have more money coming in, I’m going to get a better place.”

“Another job? Have you talked to Dad about
this?” Mom asked. “He and Uncle Dan really rely on you. They say
you’re a good worker.”

Dad and Uncle Dan ran Harrower Bros. Handyman
Service, which always seemed to have just enough work for
two-and-a-half full time employees. Griff always got stuck with the
half.

Griff leaned over to get the mold out from
under the soap dish, and didn’t reply. The way she said it made
Griff think of when he was a kid and Dad and Uncle Dan had built
the addition onto the house. Griff had insisted that he was going
to help. At nine, he felt he was capable of a man’s work. Mom had
gotten him a useless child-sized shovel. Dad and Uncle Dan had
laughed and taken a photo, and Mom had gone on about what a good
worker he was. Even now they kept that photo framed in the living
room, next to the other photos of him on a tricycle, him in Jr.
Football, him naked in the bath, and of course the shrine of photos
of his brother, taken before the accident. (He didn’t look at
pictures of Eddie.) His eye was always drawn to the one of himself
as a child trying to dig a foundation with a tiny plastic shovel,
and his dad and Uncle Dan laughing at him. What a good worker he
is.

Mom left the room, and a few minutes later,
Dad came back in. “Mom said you’re thinking of quitting,” he
said.

“I need more money, Dad.” Griff scrubbed
harder so he wouldn’t have to look at his Dad while they had this
conversation. “I’m twenty-three years old. I ought to be able to
afford my own apartment.”

“You kids today are always on about money.
You don’t know how easy you got it. Life takes work. You can’t
expect to have everything handed to you.”

“I don’t mind working, Dad, I just want to
work full time, that’s all. I can’t pay the bills on twenty-five
hours a week.”

Dad was silent at that, but Griff didn’t turn
around. Griff had done the “I’m quitting” ploy several times
before. Every other time, it had resulted in a lecture about how
much Dad and Uncle Dan needed him, followed by another week or so
of more consistent, better paying jobs. He wasn’t sure if Dad was
going to fall for it this time. What if Dad called his bluff? He
could probably get a new job for real, though he wasn’t sure what
he was qualified for that would pay as well. Construction, he
supposed. He didn’t like it, hated getting up at four am and hated
having to work with guys who never had anything to talk about but
sports and imaginary sexual escapades, but he’d done it before and
could do it again if he had to.

Griff’s strenuous scrubbing didn’t seem to be
doing anything other than leaving bits of green fiber on the grout.
He sat back. Fuck this. It wasn’t his house. They hardly ever used
this bathroom anyway. He washed his hands in the bath spout and
wiped them on the towel hanging from the shower door

“You’re not gonna leave the job half done,
are you?” Dad asked. “Shows poor workmanship, son.”

Griff looked at his watch. “I got an
interview.” If he were going to lie, he might as well go whole
hog.

Dad didn’t say anything as Griff walked out
to the truck and drove off.

When he pulled up in front of Jake’s house,
it was only ten thirty, cloudless except for the permanent brown
haze on the horizon, and with a cool, sunny sky. Alex came out of
the house blinking and stumbling, as though Griff’s knock had
awoken him from deep sleep.

“Good morning,” Griff said.

“Yeah. So, I got a list of potential
customers for you to talk to. Personal contact only,” he said,
shuffling to his car. “These people won’t trust someone selling
wands over the phone.”

“Sure,” Griff said. “I’ve sold stuff
before.”

He’d had several jobs while he was studying
at the University of Arizona, including the Resident Advisor
position that gave him free rent in the dorm. He’d been in the top
of his class in high school, so his tuition was waived. That meant
that all the part-time work he’d had went towards his food, books,
and saving up for his own place when he graduated. He liked to
remind himself of the four years spent studying in Tucson, because
since he came back home again it seemed as though he had never
left.

Alex coughed a few times, then sniffed and
wiped his nose on his sleeve. He opened the car and shuffled trash
around in the back seat for several minutes, like a dog rummaging
through garbage, until he came out with a handful of wands and a
scribbled-on envelope.

Griff took one look at the addresses and
decided that he had been right to get his motorcycle from his
parents’ house. He couldn’t afford the gas to drive to all those
places, and his dad would give him crap about the extra mileage if
he did this too often.

“Here.” Alex handed him the wands in an empty
Jack-in-the-Box bag.

“Are you going to show me how to use one? So
I can demonstrate?”

Alex blinked slowly, then shook himself.
“Yeah. Right. So, it’s easy. All you have to do is think of what
you want to have happen, then squeeze the wand. If what you want is
simple enough, and there’s enough charge, and you’re pinching, it
happens. Illusions are cheap. You can move stuff too, but that kind
of wastes the batteries. I can’t recharge them, I gotta make them
from scratch, so try not to do it too often.”

“Illusions and moving stuff? Is there
anything else you can do?”

“Yeah, I’ll show you, but just once. Hang
on.”

Alex walked over to the gravel yard. He
picked up a piece of gravel, then dropped it and plucked the dried
seedpod off a yucca plant instead. He set it on the sidewalk,
pulled a wand out of the bag, and pointed it.

One moment it was an unremarkable cluster of
three seedpods on a thin brown stem, and the next the whole thing
was shimmering metal.

Griff picked it up. It was heavy, and
alternately shiny and dull according to the texture of the seedpod.
Except for the weight, he would have thought it was plated. “You
transmuted it. Is this silver? Why silver? Why not gold?”

“It’s platinum. Worth more.” Alex took it
from him and tossed it into the car. “Can’t do it too much though
or the pawn shops get suspicious.”

“Wait, you’re going to melt it down?” Griff
lunged and snatched it off the pile of clothes and McDonald’s
wrappers. He brought it out into the sunlight again, marveling at
the incredible beauty. The seeds in the closed pod rattled with a
tinny sound. He turned it over to pour them into his palm. They
too, were perfectly cast.

Alex took the platinum seedpod back. “I need
the money. Sell me ten wands, and I’ll let you keep one. You can
make your own.”

Transmutation. This was real magic. Real
magic that anyone could own, not with years and years of study, but
with a stick and less money then they’d spend on a Playstation.
Adrenaline and excitement roared within him, the warm promise of
sucess. Real magic. They were gonna be millionaires. “Forty bucks
is cheap.”

Alex nodded. “Anything more than that, you
keep.”

“I can sell all these today,” Griff said,
holding up the bag.

“Yeah, do that. I’m going back to bed.” Alex
slammed the door of his car, then shuffled back to the house.

Griff was tempted to try the handle, just to
see if it really was locked. He reached towards the car, but a
feeling of unease came over him, and he decided against it.

“Whispering Shadows Apartments had been made
for a niche market. Originally all of the apartments were decorated
very goth,” Carlos explained as he jangled his keys and led Paul
into the manager’s office. Carlos had enough lines around his eyes
and mouth that he’d never be asked for ID again. He still had the
same thick black hair, but now he had a thick middle to match it.
He wore a tailored dress shirt in a material so dense it shined. He
had expensive-looking dress shoes, and even a tie. The tie seemed
unfashionably narrow, but the rest of his outfit spoke of money and
power. The manager’s office had been carpeted and wallpapered in
dark red, with taxidermied animals for décor. “Two thirds of the
apartments were painted either black, burgundy, or dark grey. You’d
be surprised how popular that is. There’s even an underground
swimming pool, and an underground parking garage so the residents
don’t have to see the sun if they don’t want to. I’m gonna get the
keys.”

“That works for me.” Paul stuffed his hands
in his pockets and followed Carlos.

Paul was average height for a human male, as
tall as three great horned owls perched on each other’s heads. He
was lean, with not an ounce of fat on him, and he had the kind of
muscles that come from work rather than the gym. He was as brown as
a nut on his forearms and face, but pale in the places where his
clothing covered his skin. His shoulders and upper arms bore
crosshatched parallel lines of white scar tissue. He had taut
features, high cheekbones and facial muscles that seemed to
enhance, rather than conceal, his skull. His eyes had a Slavic tilt
to their corners, and his chin was rather sharp and cleft, which is
why he wore a narrow beard. He was hunching his shoulders, and
tried to straighten up. Carlos had said he’d help him. Nothing to
be ashamed of. Everyone needed a little help sometimes.