James Van Pelt - The Radio Magician and Other Stories

Confused, he’d looked at himself again. Although he hadn’t been thinking about it at the time, he’d always considered his eyebrows his best mark, in a lupine sort of way, and the shadow between them a distinguishing feature. Dad plucked his?

Of course, he was his father’s son—she wouldn’t be surprised to see him naked in the moonlight either. Still, he worried she might come in. The other part, though, saw himself leaping through the window. He thought, I must go to the forest. Already the trees quivered, waiting for him. And in the trees they would expect him, the entire panoply: elves, fairies, goblins and giants. The other creatures lost in mythical, evolutionary time.

But there would be trolls there too, and dragons. All the old maps said so: in the unexplored areas, here there be dragons.

From the moon-tinted hills beyond town, a thin howl rose in the light. Very lonely. Very far away.

Romulus tried a howl back, a tentative utterance that couldn’t have made it past their front gate.

He did it again, louder. It hurt tearing through his throat that wasn’t quite shaped for it, but it felt good too. Once more. A door popped open across the street, and a neighbor stuck his head out. Romulus buried his head in a pillow. No way Dad heard that, he thought, but he didn’t try it again; and when the moon rose high enough so the light was not so obvious, he curled on the floor to fall asleep.

The day passed miserably until Mythology, where he hoped he could figure a way to warn Fay, but no matter how he thought to phrase it, his message sounded unbelievable. In the classroom’s afternoon mugginess he doodled at the bottom of his notes. Fay split her attention between Campbell, who moved meticulously through the history of the Knights of the Round Table, and the troll, who smiled slyly at her when she turned toward him.

“Many retellings of Arthur’s legend say that after the boy king took the throne at fifteen, and under Merlin’s tutelage, he rid his country of monsters and giants,” said Campbell.

Romulus sketched a sword rising from a lake. If he had Excalibur, he thought, he would rid this classroom of a monster himself.

When the bell rang, Fay continued writing her notes. The troll stood beside her, put his hand on her shoulder, then spoke softly in her ear. Romulus scrunched his toes in his shoes to keep himself from springing from the desk.

That evening Romulus finished dinner, told Mom and Dad he needed to take a walk, and went out the back door, but not before he caught a knowing glance between them.

Chaney Park was a six mile hike up a gravel road that rose too steeply the last three miles to bicycle, and Romulus figured he could be where kids parked by 8:30 or so. There was no question about using the car. He shuddered to think of himself behind the wheel, driving a two thousand pound vehicle, and the moon pouring through the windshield like a million biting ants.

The houses on his street were new brick and crisply-painted bi-levels, but a block over was an older neighborhood, where the roofs rose to steep peaks, and every house sported a single attic window, a lone eye watching him trudge toward the edge of town. Behind him the sunset flared orange and yellow, but before him only the bluffs’ tops caught the last pale sliver of daylight, and they didn’t hold that long. The woods below already swam in shadows. He crossed the railroad tracks; the blacktop changed to dirt, and soon, thin-trunked trees rustling with spring growth lined the path on both sides. He trudged up a long hill. At the crest he looked back, the town spread out behind him, stretched along the river, a tiny fiefdom at this distance. Streetlights could just as well be campfires, the baseball stadium glowing on the other side of town, a castle. He turned and walked into the dale beyond, losing the town and the day’s final glow at the same time. A few stars twinkled in the sable blanket.

Romulus took deep breaths. He hadn’t walked at night out here before. He felt keen, sharp. Another breath. Oak. Old oak that had started growing before the town existed. There were other smells he recognized too: fox, a shy one who must have crossed this path only seconds before he came into sight; and squirrel, and damp ferns dripping into moldy leaves, some so deep in shadow that winter’s frost was only inches below.

In the distance, wheels crunched through gravel, and engine noise rose above the murmuring forest. Romulus loped off the road and into the brush, around a great ball of roots from a fallen tree. He gripped two gnarled, woody wrists and peered out. A moment later a car roared by, radio blaring a steady rap thump. A snatch of laughter and a beer can clattered against a rock. Then dust.

He waited until the air cleared before stepping from behind the tangled dead fall. In the hills above, the car’s rowdy passage rose and fell. Hands jammed deep into his pocket, he continued his walk, thoughtful, now that the car had gone. What if Fay wanted to be with the troll? There would be nothing to warn her about. This trek to Chaney Park could be seen as little more than stalking her. There wasn’t much he could do anyway. Still, he pushed onward, leaning into the road’s steepness, taking each hairpin turn with measured deliberateness. His legs buzzed pleasantly, and he felt as if he could go forever if he had to. With his eyes closed, he imagined trotting along through the forest, tireless, behind deer maybe, waiting for one to drop from exhaustion. He smiled at the image. Several more times he leapt into the covering woods as more cars drove by. He didn’t see the troll’s car.

Finally the road leveled, but the trees surrounded him thicker than ever, leaning over the road and blocking the stars. It wasn’t until he reached a clearing and the forest opened before him that he realized he’d made the top. The moon sat on the horizon, a bloat egg, rich and ivory and huge again, as it had been on Sunday in his room, but now there was no window between him and it.

A full moon in the height of its glory. Romulus had never felt its light so intensely. A breeze swept through the tree tops and the oaks creaked. He looked around for a high place, then saw one, a jumbled pile of boulders that made a miniature mountain to his left. He ran to its base, his wavy, gray shadow flowing over grass and brush and branch. Up he clambered, hands down, like feet, fingernails clicking, leaping from rock to rock until he gained the summit. No forest blocking the moon now. He howled. Not self consciously, but a full-throated paean to the night sky. “Oh,” he said afterwards, and he crouched so his hands took part of his weight. Was this the way it was for Dad? thought Romulus, or am I even closer to the past than he is? Could I actually change ?

He felt the animal shape beneath his human one moving about. Then the sky darkened as a cloud crossed the moon’s face. Romulus shook his head to clear it, and he looked about him for the first time. To the east there was no sign of the town, but he knew if he walked a little bit farther along the road, he’d be at Chaney Park, where the bluff offered a view of the entire valley.

A car’s headlights cut through the trees below, and in a few seconds, the car itself passed, turned toward the park, and vanished into the forest, its taillights glimmering long after he’d stopped hearing it. The moon was a hand’s-width above the horizon. How long had he been on the promontory? Moaning, he ran down the boulders, careless of injury, hit the road at top speed, and raced toward Chaney Park.

Three cars and a van rested on the picnic area’s lined asphalt, noses pointed toward town, but none of them were the troll’s convertible. Romulus crossed the back of the narrow lot in the tree’s shadows. From one car a muffled conversation mixed with the wind. A sticker on the van’s bumper proclaimed, “If we’re rockin’, don’t come knockin’.”