Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (4 page)

“You on journey going,” said the old woman, though whether this was an observation, a prophecy, or a swift good-bye, Dorothy couldn’t tel.

Distastefuly Dorothy fingered the little cage. The locusts of Kansas had made her dubious about crickets. Stil, the little twiglet was alive, for it bounced against its straw-colored bars. It didn’t sing. “I don’t believe animals should be in cages,” she said to Uncle Henry.

“People neither,” he answered, almost by rote. His one-note message. “Don’t cage yourself in your fantasticals, girl. Before it’s too late, get your mind out of Oz, or you’l be sorry.”

“I take your point, Uncle Henry. I’ve taken it for some time now.”

“You’re welcome.” He put his hand on his rib and breathed through the pain for a moment.

They walked down the street in silence, under a magnificently carved and painted gateway that spanned the street. Electrification had come to San Francisco and the granite of the buildings glittered as if crystals of snow were salted into the stone. It seemed a nonsense-day and a half-night at the same time.

Maybe Uncle Henry was right. Maybe there was enough in this world to make her forget Oz. But was that the right motivation for marrying a Kansas farmer, assuming she could land one?

Only, she supposed, if he was the right farmer.

At the hotel she begged Uncle Henry that they ride the lift up to their floor. “Your Auntie Em wouldn’t approve, fretting for our safety,” he replied. “Whether she’s around to notice or not, I never behave as she’d disagree with, in honor of her.”

What a set of stairs to walk up, she thought.

But when they reached the fifth floor, he winked at her and kept going. Three, four more flights. She folowed wordlessly. At the top level they found a door. It opened easily enough to reveal to them a glowing cityscape. The canyons between buildings were running with light and sound. On the electric blue darkness, al around Dorothy and Uncle Henry, hung the iluminated windows of people in rooms. A museum of their living lives. Golden squares and rectangles. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “no fibbing—it’s better than the Emerald City! But where is the ocean? We’re so high. Can we see it?” They worked out which direction to look. This late at night there was nothing except for darkness. “That empty place without lights,” said Uncle Henry. “It must be there, though you can’t see it.”

“Some say that about … other places,” she replied, but not harshly. “Beyond the ocean, what’s there?”

“The land of the Japanee and the Chinee. A whole society of them, al talking in that singy-song way they got.”

“And the ocean.” She could hardly bear it. “What’s it like?”

“I never seen it yet, but tomorrow we can come back up here.”

She was lost that night, when she finaly managed to sleep, in the raspy claws of dreams that wouldn’t declare themselves fuly. The cricket chirped on one side of her and Uncle Henry wheezed in concert.

As the first light weakened the blackness of sky, but long before dawn, Toto began to whine. “Hush, Auntie Em is feeling poorly after our long trip,” whispered Dorothy, but Toto needed to go outside. Dorothy hunched herself into her clothes and grabbed the cricket cage, and let herself out of the room, leaving the door open a crack so she could return without disturbing her worthy relatives.

It didn’t take long to find Toto a scrap of junk ground in which to do his business. Dorothy turned her head. Many of the lights were lowered now but there was a strange apprehensiveness to the street, like the setting of a stage in which a play was about to begin. The charcoal of the night decayed into a smokier shade, stil dark but somehow more transparent. “Come on, we’l be in six kinds of trouble if they find us out on the street alone,” said Dorothy. “Let’s go up.”

In the lobby she saw the elevator man asleep in a lounge chair, his head to one side and his little cap askew. In that funny high-waisted jacket he looked like a flying monkey she’d once known. How were they ever affording this, poor dear Henry and Em, late of the Kansas prairie? So frightened of her. So eager for an acceptable future. She
would
make it worth their while.

She stepped into the cage and puled the door shut. The door was fretted, like sets of linked scissors, like the threads of an old apron if you scrub it too hard with lye. Connected to itself, but airy. There was a single control, as far as she could see. She gripped the brass handle and revolved it a ful half turn, and the floor began to lift, with Dorothy and Toto and the cricket inside. She almost squealed, but she knew the merest sound might wake the elevator attendant, and she probably risked being put in jail for ambushing a lift and taking it on a joy ride.

The perforated room sailed up past the fifth floor, al the way to the ninth, which led to the roof. She remembered. She tiptoed from the elevator cabin and shouldered her way through the door, into the chil of dawn above the ocean.

In the few moments she’d been rising in the lift, the sky had lightened that much more. The effect was not so smoky, more pearlescent. The buildings at this hour seemed less defined by light. They looked like stone formations left behind after some unimaginable geologic event.

She could make out a tongue of sea beyond the buildings to the west. But no sound from this far away. No apparent motion. Only a lapidary expanse dimming and shading into the sky. No horizon line: just endlessness. Sea and sky inseparable.

Toto began to whimper and to jump around as if he wanted to leap from the ninth floor. “It’s not frightening, it
isn’t
,” she said, though she didn’t know whether she was trying to convince herself or the dog.

“It’s just the ocean, and another world on the other side. You know al about that. You’re the best-traveled mutt in history, Toto. Stop your fussing! What
are
you fussing about?” The dog appeared to be going mad, running in circles around her and yipping in some sort of distress.

Dorothy set the cricket cage upon the stone barrier that kept people from faling off the flat roof. “You can come out,” she said to the cricket. “I make my own luck, you make yours. Nobody should live in a cage. Never surrender to
that
.”

The cricket emerged and rubbed some scratchy parts of itself together. Whether it leaped or whether the wind took it, Dorothy couldn’t say. The cricket guest was there one moment and gone the next.

“Safe landing,” she caled lightly after it. “Oh, al right, Toto, stop that infernal fussing. The wind isn’t going to take you, too. Once in your life was enough.” She picked up the dog and went back into the building. The elevator was where she had left it, quivering at this height. She would ride it down to the fifth floor, and go in and rest next to her uncle and aunt. She had spied something of the ocean, some little hem of it. The globe was round. She could see there was another world beyond this one. That would have to do. Meanwhile, some corn-blind farmer, waled on four sides of his life by Superior Alfalfa, was waiting for her.

She began her descent. She passed the eighth floor and the seventh. About quarter past five on the morning of April 18, 1906, the buildings of San Francisco started to shake.

To Call Winter upon Water

I.

One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tel, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green.

Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part.

The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn’t see over horizons of any sort. At a smal clearing where (she later realized) a farmer’s cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass.

The mouse pelt was stil soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and al, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk.

She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away.

It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret.

She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.

2.

Please,” said Miss Murth. “He won’t take no for an answer. It’s been an hour and a half.” She laid her palm on her bosom as if, thought Glinda, it were in danger of being noticed. Her fingers fluttered. Murth’s fingers were notched and rickety, like her teeth.

“There is no need to be afraid of men, Miss Murth.”

“It’s an imposition for you to be expected to receive visitors when you are not ‘at home,’ but these are trying times, Lady Glinda. You must hurry. And I can tel by the bars and braids upon his dress uniform that he is a commanding officer.”

“How commanding? Don’t answer that. At least he carries dress uniform into the field.” She worked with a brush and then plunged an ivory comb into her hair, buttressing a heap of it at the nape of her neck.

Ah, hair. “This whole thing
is
vexing. When I was young and at school, Miss Murth—”

“You’re stil young, Lady Glinda—”

“Compared to some. Don’t interrupt. How times have changed!—that a woman of position can be importuned almost at the doors of her boudoir. And without so much as a letter of introduction.”

“I know. Can I help you in any way…?”

Glinda picked up a smal looking glass with a handle of rather fine design. She peeked at her face, her eyes, her lips—oh, the start of vertical pleats below the join of chin to neck; before long she would look like a concertina. But what could she do? Under the circumstances. A little more powder above the eyebrows, perhaps. At least she was younger than Miss Murth, who was hugging senility. “You may give me your appraisal, Miss Murth.”

“Quite acceptable, Lady Glinda. There aren’t many who could wear a sprigged foxile with such confidence … under these circumstances.”

“Considering we’re walowing in a civil war, you mean? Don’t answer that. Show the unwelcome visitor to the pergola. I shal be down presently.”

“In any weather, you do us proud, Lady Glinda.”

Glinda said nothing more for the moment, just waved her hand. Miss Murth disappeared. Glinda continued to daly at her dressing table in order to buy time to think. Strategy had never been her strong suit.

So far the time spent over her toilet had bought her precious little except for a manicure. Wel, she could admire her cuticles after the chains were slapped on, if that was where this was heading.

She was affixing an earring when the door burst open and Miss Murth entered the room backward. “Sir, I protest, I do protest—Madame, I have protested—Sir, I insist!” He pushed her into a chair so hard that three top buttons of her respectable blouse popped and spun onto the floor. Several inches of Miss Murth’s private neck were exposed. She grabbed a pilow to conceal herself.