The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog (5 page)

The Dog wagged his tail. “Let's just say I've got a feeling about you. And it helps that you're a kid. All good magicians learn when they're young. After a certain age, inflexibility starts to settle in.”

“All right,” said Peter. He still felt dubious—he was a good enough student, but he had never thought of himself as particularly adept at using his brain—but it seemed worth trying. “So what do I do?”

“Bend down,” said The Dog.

“What?”

“Bend down,” The Dog growled.

Peter bent down.

The Dog's face was suddenly close to Peter's. His damp nose nuzzled through Peter's hair, and Peter couldn't help envisioning himself minus an ear. “Here,” said The Dog, tapping his nose against Peter's scalp. The spot was about two inches behind Peter's right temple. “This is the part of your brain you have to use to do magic. Just think about what you want, but think with that part.”

“How do you think with a particular part of your brain? Don't people just, well, think?”

The Dog snorted, his warm, stinky breath ruffling Peter's hair. “Are we going to do this or not?”

“We're going to do this,” said Peter.

“Well, then, I'm telling you—think about what you want, but with that part of your brain!”

Peter didn't say anything for a moment.

“What are you waiting for now?” asked The Dog.

“It's just . . . what do you mean, what I want?”

The Dog sighed. “If you're going to do magic, Peter, you have to want something. To be rich. To be invisible. To be able to fly.” He stared at Peter, really stared at him, hard. “You must know what you want, right? That's why you asked me to teach you.”

As the breeze whispered through the orange trees surrounding them, Peter thought about The Dog's question. It wasn't something anyone normally asked him. But here it was, his birthday, and he was being granted a wish.
Flying
, he thought. Once, when Peter was eight, his father had borrowed a friend's Cessna and taken Peter for what he'd called a spin. Peter had loved diving through the sky as the clouds parted in wisps before them, his father next to him. Imagine how it would feel without the plane! Now Peter tried to think about flying with that particular spot on his head. He tried and tried. Nothing happened.

“Try again,” ordered The Dog.

“Maybe it would help if you showed me,” said Peter. “I wasn't really watching when you did it before.”

Staring downward, The Dog gritted his teeth, and
Peter thought he was going to refuse. Instead, one moment there was a twig on the ground, and the next the twig was gone and in its place was a bone. A bone that The Dog immediately began to gnaw.

“Wow,” said Peter. “That's so cool. Does it taste like a real . . . ?”

The Dog put the bone down on the green. “Your turn. If you think you've had enough show-and-tell, I mean.” He cocked his head. “Or maybe you're too scared to learn it after all.”

In general, Peter was a pretty easygoing kid. He knew, for instance, that Celia was embarrassed by him: by his shyness, by his love of computers and space and books, by his outcast status in the seventh grade. Celia was, well, Celia: after only two months at their new school, she was already the girl everyone wanted to sit next to at lunch. Merely by existing, Peter disappointed Celia, and he couldn't blame her for not letting him forget it. If Celia made fun of him, so be it. But The Dog was another story. Peter hadn't chosen to be with The Dog; The Dog had, in fact, forced himself upon Peter. And now The Dog was insulting him.

It made Peter mad. Mad enough that, staring at The Dog's snarky face, he made up his mind that he was going to do magic, if only to show The Dog: not only was he going to do magic, he would do magic
to
The Dog.

So Peter thought. He thought as hard as he could with that particular spot on his head that The Dog had showed him.

When he looked down, The Dog was gone. On the ground in front of Peter was the bone, looking particularly
savage against the civilized green of the golf course's grass. And sure enough, when he knelt next to the bone, there, growing in that perfect grass, was a small gray mushroom. Elongated so that it looked just a bit like a dog, with a hint of a plumy tail. Triumph flooded through Peter. He had done it! Done magic! All he had to do was think with that one spot and anything was possible: wasn't that the sort of power every kid dreamed of? Magic even had a taste, he realized; it was a little like chocolate, a little like cherries, and a little like something rich and old that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Maybe, he thought, power tasted like a sort of mushroom.

Ha ha.

So now he knew how to do magic: what next? He was eager to try it again. Something simple, he thought. The Dog had turned a twig into a bone. What if Peter turned a leaf into a cheeseburger? He picked up a leaf from the ground, held it in his hand, and thought with that particular part of his brain.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

Nothing happened.

He felt the first cold edge of panic but pushed the feeling down. He would just have to turn The Dog back so that The Dog could show him what he was doing wrong. He had been planning to turn The Dog back, anyway; he shouldn't have lost his temper.

And that was when the panic turned into a sinking feeling that started someplace in his throat and ended
in his stomach. If he couldn't turn a leaf into a cheeseburger, would he be able to turn the mushroom back into The Dog? He had turned The Dog into a plant. No, worse than a plant: a fungus. And he might not be able to change him back.

“Umm, Dog? Are you . . . are you in there?”

If The Dog was in there, he chose not to answer.
Of course
, Peter reminded himself,
mushrooms don't have mouths
.

“I'm sorry,” Peter said, a little bit lamely, just in case The Dog could hear him. “I'll turn you back in just a minute. Really. I just need to . . .” What he needed to do was figure out what he had done so he could undo it. But how? There was no room for screwing up now. If Peter didn't figure out how to fix this, he would end up, in effect, having taken a life, because there was no doubt in his mind that come tomorrow morning, this little mushroom growing on the putting green would be efficiently removed by whoever was in charge of mowing, trimming, and beautifying the base's golf course.

Above Peter, the sky sparkled with stars, but now that he was alone, the golf course seemed dark and strangely silent. In the distance, he could still hear the occasional sounds of cars, but they felt as far away from him now as yesterday seemed from today—yesterday, when he was eleven, before he had known about magicians or talking dogs or that special part of his brain. That spot. Peter tried to remember the feeling of The Dog's muzzle against his head. There. No, there. Pressing his finger to his scalp, he squinted down at the mushroom.
Turn into
a dog
, he thought as fiercely as he could. That wasn't quite right.
Turn into The Dog. Turn into The Dog. Turn into The Dog!

Please turn into The Dog?

But it was no good. The mushroom was nothing but a mushroom.

Peter moved his finger a little to the left and tried again. And again. And again.

Peter didn't wear a watch, so he had no idea how long he had been crouching on the golf course when he finally gave up. All he knew was that he'd poked himself in the head so many times his scalp felt like a pincushion. He was exhausted, and everything was blurring. A cold breeze blew in from the desert. Goose bumps climbed his arms.

It was then that a solution came to him. It wasn't, admittedly, a perfect plan. Too many things could go wrong. On the other hand, it offered at least some hope that when the sun rose, Peter wouldn't be standing in exactly this spot, waiting for the golf course's keepers to throw him out.

Biting his lower lip, Peter walked to the nearby grove of orange trees and, in the darkness, searched the grass beneath them. When he couldn't find what he needed, he reached up and broke a small branch from the shortest of the trees. Then he hurried back to the mushroom, its location made obvious by the bone.

Using the branch as a shovel, Peter began to dig.

He didn't know how long a mushroom's roots were, so he dug a circle perhaps eight inches in diameter and
another five inches deep. The hardest part was digging under the mushroom. If he'd had a spade, Peter could have just slipped it beneath the roots and pushed the ball of dirt from the ground. Since all he had was a stick, he had to slide it back and forth and back again, cutting through dirt clods and grass roots and who knew what else. He tried not to think about worms wriggling helplessly as he sliced them in half.

When the ground finally seemed loose enough, he stuck both his hands down into the earth, spread his fingers wide, and pulled. At first the dirt resisted him. But just as he was about to ease out his hands and pick up his stick once again, something in the ground released. Just like that, the mushroom was in his grasp, unbelievably still intact, and in the middle of the once-perfect green was a raggedy hole.

He took off his shirt and wrapped the mess of dirt and roots and grass and mushroom in it. As an afterthought, he added the bone. Then he started for home.

Peter woke to Izzy's small face, inches from his own. Her gaze was panicked. “Peter! Peter!” she said. “Oh, please wake up, Peter!”

“What is it?” he asked, but he already knew.

“The Dog is gone!”

“What do you mean?”

“I've looked all over,” she said. “I can't find him anywhere!”

Peter glanced at his clock. It was 5:17, which meant he'd been asleep for only two hours. Then he checked the mattress next to him and breathed a sigh of relief. Last night, when he had crept back in through his window, he'd almost yelped at the sight of himself and The Dog sleeping peacefully in his bed—in the hours he'd spent on the golf course, he'd forgotten about The Dog's illusion. Not knowing what else to do, he'd hidden the mushroom in a shoe box in his closet, then pushed the pillows aside and climbed right onto the image of his sleeping self, which thankfully had no more substance than the flickering light from a movie projector. If the
illusion was still there in the morning, he'd thought, he'd deal with it then.

But perhaps moving the pillows had disrupted The Dog's magic, or perhaps the illusion had just disappeared as The Dog had warned: either way, the image was now gone.

“Do you know where he is?” asked Izzy. “Should I wake up Mommy and Celia?”

“He was in the room when I went to sleep,” said Peter. (This was true, strictly speaking, if you counted being in the closet as being in the room.)

Izzy brightened. “He must be hiding, then. You and I can look for him!”

“Umm . . . I guess . . .”

“Let's start with the living room!”

Peter and Izzy spent the next thirty minutes searching the house, Peter feeling guiltier with every passing moment. They peered behind furniture, inside cabinets, beneath rugs—Peter agreed to anything Izzy suggested, no matter how unlikely. All the while, he was thinking furiously, replaying the events of the previous evening. In his head, he kept hearing The Dog's voice asking what he wanted. Last night, he had thought that what he wanted most was to fly. But now, as he and Izzy tiptoed around their house, he realized that wasn't what he really wanted. What he really wanted was to bring his father home.

Today was Sunday. On Sunday mornings, Peter's father always made pancakes—daddycakes, Izzy called them. The smell of hot oil and warm maple syrup would fill the house as Peter and his sisters stood around the
stove, calling out suggestions. A rose with a long stem. A stick-figure girl in a dress. A space shuttle about to take flight. Whatever the request, Peter's father would carefully ladle batter into the pan as though it were paint being brushed onto a canvas. Then Peter, Celia, and Izzy would giggle as his delicate lines ballooned in the skillet, the girl's head growing puffy and enormous, the rose transformed into a blob of oversized petals.

“Vat has happened to my art?” Peter's father exclaimed, in an accent that sometimes sounded Russian and sometimes French. “That ees not the way I drew it!”

They were none of them whole without his father: not Peter, not his mother, not his sisters. Their lives might look the same from the outside, but they themselves weren't the same; and the differences were made worse because they all knew that their father's absence might not be temporary; that he could come back hurt, or not come back at all. They had lived on air force bases all their lives. Even Izzy realized what could happen to parents who went to war.

And then The Dog had come. What The Dog had offered, Peter realized, was a way to ensure his father's safety. And how had Peter responded? By losing his temper and turning The Dog into a mushroom.