Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (20 page)

I had taken Jesus Christ as my personal savior when I was seven years old, shortly before we left Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and had, at the time, assumed I had done everything necessary to earn an Express ticket to Heaven, bypassing the Pearly Gates as I was ushered through the celebrity VIP entrance. I had, after all, allowed the pastor to shove me underwater during a Sunday morning service, no small sacrifice given that baptism completely wrecked my hair.

But it seemed clear now that God was not at my side. Maybe he had never been with me at all.

“Who among us,” Pastor Thompson boomed, “has not endured the pain of a loved one’s death? Many have walked through that dark valley.”

Mr. Clarkson snored at the other end of the pew. I used my hymnal as a fan as I hung, for one of the first times ever, on the pastor’s every word.

“But Christ’s resurrection,” he bellowed, “conquers all. Though death follows us closely in this life, it will be banished in the next.”

Did this apply to rabbits? I wondered. Was that little gray rabbit bounding around in Heaven with Mrs. Edwards and, hopefully, those people from the bus accident? Did a rabbit have to get “right with God”?

As the Sunday morning service ended and Mother and Dad chatted with friends, I stole up to the front of the church.

“Pastor Thompson?” I called from a few feet away, standing off to one side.

He excused himself from the couple he was chatting with and crossed over to me. Although he reminded me of Dad, his tall stature, gray hair and solemn preaching style gave him a sterner edge and made me frequently envision him standing at the Pearly Gates with a clipboard, advising congregants that—for reasons they knew all too well—their names were not on the guest list.

“Hello, Eric,” he said in his most magisterial tone. “What can I do for you today?”

I leaned in, as if to shush him. “Can I ask you a question?” I whispered.

“Sure,” he whispered back, a note of bemusement in his voice.

“Do animals go to Heaven?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you just lose a pet?”

“Sort of,” I replied uncomfortably. I didn’t want to get into specifics, since he’d probably think I was crazy. It was just a wild rabbit.

“We don’t know for sure,” he said kindly. “There’s no real proof that pets have souls.”

“But people do, right?”

“Well, of course.”

“So animals just die and that’s it?”

“Well, they provide lots of love to us human beings and we do the same for them, so their lives are not in vain.”

“But what if they die before their time? Do they get another shot?”

“Eric,” he said kindly, “there’s no such thing as reincarnation. Animals are a gift to the world, but you can’t worry about their journey. Everything will be explained when we get to Heaven.”

Boy, I thought to myself, when I arrive in Paradise, God’s sure got a lot of splainin’ to do. Pastor Thompson gazed at me to see if his words had had their intended effect. I smiled wanly and thanked him as he patted my shoulder and walked off.

 

 

“ H E SOUNDS LIKE A PSYCHO,” Darren said that night, when I told him of Albert’s brutal killing of the rabbit. “I’d stay away from that creep, or you might be next.”

He pulled a slightly crumpled cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “But I’ll come visit your grave if he kills you. I’ll sit on your tombstone and smoke.”

“Isn’t it wrong to just kill things for fun?” I asked as we paced the darkened hallway of the church.

“Well, I wouldn’t kill a
person
. You could go to the slammer for that.”

“But it’s okay to kill an animal?”

“You can’t sweat the small stuff.”

“But that’s not small! That rabbit probably had a family and maybe some friends, and—”

“I figure,” Darren replied with authority, “if it ain’t hurting another
person
—you know, like a human being—it’s small stuff. I mean, I cheat in school all the time. That’s not hurting anybody.”

“Hmmm,” I said, politely brushing aside my curiosity at how it was possible for him to cheat all the time and still be flunking eighth grade. “But don’t you ever worry,” I said hesitantly, “that God’ll get you in the end?”

“Nah,” he said. “I’m not sure if I believe in all this God stuff.”

This was the first time I had ever heard someone say this aloud. The only atheist I had ever seen was that woman Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was on the news because she sued to end prayer in schools, and Mother and Dad had assured me that she was a sad and lonely woman who would one day be rotating on a spit in Hell.

It was blasphemous to think such a thing. Wasn’t it?

As we strode up and down the darkened hallway in silence, I slowly began to replay the “magical” moments of my past.

What if Dad had not returned to the family after his fight with Mother years ago through any mystical ministrations of mine? I wondered. What if he had returned merely from a sense of duty, or obligation?

What if I had not magically won the friendship of Stacy, my armless fourth-grade classmate? What if, since we were both outcasts, it was simply convenient, or inevitable?

What if Mother’s confrontation with Grandma Dorothy had not been created as a moment of understanding for me, but was simply a long-brewing dispute destined to explode?

And what if the events with a bus, a Royal Ambassador, cancer and now Albert were the natural outcomes of a world where God, if he even exists, has better things to do?

These moments of “magic,” events that I thought had given me both a mystical connection to God and some measure of control over my world, suddenly seemed like nothing more than twists of fate. And as we drove home from church that night, and I sat silently in the backseat staring out the window at the stars, the truth slowly began to settle down upon me like a thick, suffocating blanket.

Magic doesn’t exist.

We’re all on our own.

 

 

I HAD PUT the rabbit in a Kinney shoe box and hidden it behind the shrubs on the side of the house, waiting for the appropriate moment when no one was home to give him a proper burial. I knew that Dad would have helped me, but in case I got choked up, I didn’t want him to see me cry.

It was Monday afternoon, and Mother and Dad were at work. Val was in her bedroom with the door closed, whispering into the telephone like an informant for the mob.

The box was starting to smell funny. A weird, sickly sweet odor permeated the bushes as I pulled it out, and I nearly vomited up the box of Ding Dongs I had just eaten (having found them inside the basement ceiling, one of the secret locations where Mother hid snacks so we wouldn’t gorge on them all at once).

I couldn’t bear to open the box. I solemnly carried it to a spot just outside the perimeter of our lawn, shaded somewhat by one of the fruit trees that bordered the yard. I glanced right and left to be sure that no one was watching, and, with a hand shovel, began to dig into the matted brown grass of the common ground.

“I bless you,” I said silently to this forsaken little animal, trying not to blow chunks as the malodorous stench hung in the lifeless air. “I bless you.”

When enough earth had been displaced, I carefully set the shoe box into the hole. I covered the box with dirt, taking care to pack it tightly and pat the top layer of soil smooth so that no one would be the wiser. I briefly considered crafting a small grave marker to memorialize this Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but thought better of this, since Albert might see it and exhume him so he could fry him up.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” I whispered. “I’m not the witch I thought I was.”

 

 

THE NEXT EVENING, as Mother was eliminating clutter by assembling a bag of donations for the Disabled Veterans (a charity she generously supported by giving away anything that wasn’t nailed down), I slipped down to the basement and pulled out my old bedspread.

The cloth was usually a bit musty, crammed as it always was behind the chair. But tonight, I noticed that it seemed to be lint-free and smelled of fabric softener. That’s odd, I thought. If Mother had come across it, she wouldn’t have returned it to this hiding place—would she? I sniffed it again. It must just be my imagination.

I fingered the worn white fabric. Those days of childish belief in magic seemed as distant as my friendship with an armless girl. It was time, I thought, to let go of a past that was nothing more than a fantasy.

I carried the bedspread upstairs and, when Mother was out of the room, began to remove the top layer of clothing from the donation bag in order to slip the blanket underneath. I wanted no questions about from whence this item had come. As I gently placed it in the bag, I began to recall the hundreds of afternoons that this worn, pilled piece of material had been my comfort, my confidant, my connection to a mystical realm.

Then I reached to snatch it back from the pile. It wasn’t as if I still believed that throwing a bedspread over my shoulders could change my life. But it had been an important part of my history, and it seemed disrespectful, somehow, to simply send it off to some guy with no hands.

But I stopped myself. Because I knew in my heart the truth: it was time to move on.

 

 

“CAN I get a BB gun?”

Dad and I were lying in the family room watching a
Land of the Giants
rerun. For some time I had been saving my allowance for a fringed suede jacket, but suddenly, thanks to Albert, the idea of gun ownership now seemed more appealing.

Dad had always patiently attempted to interest me in traditional male pursuits like vegetable gardening and home improvements, hobbies of his that I found tolerable only as long as he let me recap
Here’s Lucy
episodes throughout. And fortunately, he had never forced me to take up sports. Yet he was strangely delighted at my interest in shooting.

“Sure, you can get one. But you have to be very careful with it. You can blow off a guy’s grape nuts with a gun like that.”

Val was now working part-time at Kmart, and several days later she furtively called Dad from the store.

“Red Ryder Blue Light,” she whispered into the phone, in code. “Hurry.”

Dad and I hightailed it up to Kmart in time to purchase the popular Daisy Red Ryder BB gun at the Blue Light Special price of just $12.99. Screaming kids surrounded the whirling blue light, pulling the guns out of their boxes and aiming them at frightened passersby as the manager rushed up and informed the crowd that “anyone who shoots a customer will be arrested!”—conveniently leaving the employees out of the equation as several kids attempted to blast automotive clerks in the ass.

When we returned home, Dad walked to the backyard and began to tape a paper target sheet onto the branch of one of the fruit trees.

“Hey, can we do this inside?” I asked nervously, wanting to keep this purchase a secret from prying eyes.

“It’s a lot safer out here,” Dad said. “You don’t want BBs ricocheting off the walls.”

“It’s hot,” I whined. “And I could catch Lyme disease from a mosquito, or get stung by a bee and discover that I’m allergic and swallow my tongue and choke to death!”

“Where,” Dad said with a sigh as he yanked the target down, “did you learn to be so dramatic?”

We marched down to the basement, where he stuck a target onto the dartboard. Having grown up in a small Kansas town, he seemed to easily fall back into the rhythm of holding a firearm, and he taught me how to properly aim the gun.

My first several shots—not even in the vicinity of the target, but roughly on the same wall—stuck in the paneling and Dad was forced to dig them out with a penknife, whereupon he moved the dartboard to the more cramped but unpaneled laundry room, explaining that this was for my own good “so that your Mother doesn’t kill you in your sleep.”

As the afternoon wore on, I began to improve. I had no idea I possessed such marksman talent, landing shots within the largest target circle almost every time. By the time Mother returned from the beauty salon, Dad was no longer having to dodge BBs, although he refused to remove the towels he had placed over the washer and dryer to protect them, since any nick in the ceramic veneer would result in the summoning of the Lord Jesus to the rathskeller.

“So, what made you want to learn to shoot?” he asked.

“I want to kill one of the neighbors,” I replied.

Dad chuckled. “Never can get a straight answer out of you.”

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I kept practicing, focusing the obsessive behavior I typically applied to the trumpet on hitting that target. I will, I thought, avenge that little rabbit’s death. Whether there was a God or not, he obviously wasn’t protecting his creations. Somebody had to.

Finally, when I was able to hit eight bull’s-eyes out of ten shots, I decided it was time.