Peter Beagle - The Line Between

The next day being pickup day, Mrs. Luke had handed him two big green plastic bags of trash for the rolling bins down the driveway. Marvyn had made enough of a fuss about the task that Angie stayed by the open front window to make sure that he didn't simply drop the bags in the grass, and vanish into one of his mysterious hideouts. Mrs. Luke was back in the living room with the news on, but Angie was still at the window when Marvyn looked around quickly, mumbled a few words she couldn't catch, and then did a thing with his left hand, so fast she saw no more than a blurry twitch. And the two garbage bags went dancing.

Angie's buckling knees dropped her to the couch under the window, though she

never noticed it. Marvyn let go of the bags altogether, and they rocked alongside him — backwards, forwards, sideways, in perfect timing, with perfect steps, turning with him as though he were the star and they his backup singers. To Angie's astonishment, he was snapping his fingers and moonwalking, as she had never imagined he could do — and the bags were pushing out green arms and legs as the three of them danced down the driveway. When they reached the cans, Marvyn's partners promptly went limp and were nothing but plastic garbage bags again. Marvyn plopped them in, dusted his hands, and turned to walk back to the house.

When he saw Angie watching, neither of them spoke. Angie beckoned. They met at the door and stared at each other. Angie said only, «My room.»

Marvyn dragged in behind her, looking everywhere and nowhere at once, and definitely not at his sister. Angie sat down on the bed and studied him: chubby and messy–looking, with an unmanageable sprawl of rusty–brown hair and an eyepatch meant to tame a wandering left eye. She said, «Talk to me.»

«About what?» Marvyn had a deep, foggy voice for eight and a half — Mr. Luke always insisted that it had changed before Marvyn was born. «I didn't break your CD case.»

«Yes, you did," Angie said. «But forget that. Let's talk about garbage bags. Let's talk about Monopoly.»

Marvyn was utterly businesslike about lies: in a crisis he always told the truth, until he thought of something better. He said, «I'm warning you right now, you won't believe me.»

«I never do. Make it a good one.» «Okay," Marvyn said. «I'm a witch.»

When Angie could speak, she said the first thing that came into her head, which embarrassed her forever after. «You can't be a witch. You're a wizard, or a warlock or something.» Like we're having a sane conversation, she thought.

Marvyn shook his head so hard that his eyepatch almost came loose. «Uh–uh! That's all books and movies and stuff. You're a man witch or you're a woman witch, that's it. I'm a man witch.»

«You'll be a dead witch if you don't quit shitting me," Angie told him. But her brother knew he had her, and he grinned like a pirate (at home he often tied a bandanna around his head, and he was constantly after Mrs. Luke to buy him a parrot). He said, «You can ask Lidia. She was the one who knew.»

Lidia del Carmen de Madero y Gomez had been the Lukes' house–keeper since well before Angie's birth. She was from Ciego de Avila in Cuba, and claimed to have changed Fidel Castro's diapers as a girl working for his family. For all her years — no one seemed to know her age; certainly not the Lukes — Lidia's eyes

remained as clear as a child's, and Angie had on occasion nearly wept with envy of her beautiful wrinkled deep–dark skin. For her part, Lidia got on well with Angie, spoke Spanish with her mother, and was teaching Mr. Luke to cook Cuban food. But Marvyn had been hers since his infancy, beyond question or interference. They went to Spanish–language movies on Saturdays, and shopped together in the Bowen Street barrio.

«The one who knew," Angie said. «Knew what? Is Lidia a witch too?»

Marvyn's look suggested that he was wondering where their parents had actually found their daughter. «No, of course she's not a witch. She's a santera.»

Angie stared. She knew as much about Santeria as anyone growing up in a big city with a growing population of Africans and South Americans — which wasn't much. Newspaper articles and television specials had informed her that santeros sacrificed chickens and goats and did … things with the blood. She tried to imagine Marvyn with a chicken, doing things, and couldn't. Not even Marvyn.

«So Lidia got you into it?» she finally asked. «Now you're a santero too?»

«Nah, I'm a witch, I told you.» Marvyn's disgusted impatience was approaching critical mass.

Angie said, «Wicca? You're into the Goddess thing? There's a girl in my home room, Devlin Margulies, and she's a Wiccan, and that's all she talks about. Sabbats and esbats, and drawing down the moon, and the rest of it. She's got skin like a cheese–grater.»

Marvyn blinked at her. «What's a Wiccan?» He sprawled suddenly on her bed, grabbing Milady as she hobbled in and pooting loudly on her furry stomach. «I already knew I could sort of mess with things — you remember the rubber duck, and that time at the baseball game?» Angie remembered. Especially the rubber duck. «Anyway, Lidia took me to meet this real old lady, in the farmers' market, she's even older than her, her name's Yemaya, something like that, she smokes this funny little pipe all the time. Anyway, she took hold of me, my face, and she looked in my eyes, and then she closed her eyes, and she just sat like that for so long!» He giggled. «I thought she'd fallen asleep, and I started to pull away, but Lidia wouldn't let me. So she sat like that, and she sat, and then she opened her eyes and she told me I was a witch, a brujo. And Lidia bought me a two–scoop ice–cream cone. Coffee and chocolate, with M&Ms.»

«You won't have a tooth in your head by the time you're fifteen.» Angie didn't know what to say, what questions to ask. «So that's it? The old lady, she gives you witch lessons or something?»

«Nah — I told you, she's a big santera, that's different. I only saw her that one time. She kept telling Lidia that I had el regalo —I think that means the gift, she said that a lot — and I should keep practicing. Like you with the clarinet.»

Angie winced. Her hands were small and stubby–fingered, and music slipped through them like rain. Her parents, sympathizing, had offered to cancel the clarinet lessons, but Angie refused. As she confessed to her friend Melissa, she had no skill at accepting defeat.

Now she asked, «So how do you practice? Boogieing with garbage bags?»

Marvyn shook his head. «That's getting old — so's playing board games with Milady. I was thinking maybe I could make the dishes wash themselves, like in Beauty and the Beast. I bet I could do that.»

«You could enchant my homework," Angie suggested. «My algebra, for starters.»

Her brother snorted. «Hey, I'm just a kid, I've got my limits! I mean, your homework?»

«Right," Angie said. «Right. Look, what about laying a major spell on Tim Hubley, the next time he's over here with Melissa? Like making his feet go flat so he can't play basketball — that's the only reason she likes him, anyway. Or — " her voice became slower and more hesitant — «what about getting Jake Petrakis to fall madly, wildly, totally in love with me? That'd be … funny.»

Marvyn was occupied with Milady. «Girl stuff, who cares about all that? I want to be so good at soccer everybody'll want to be on my team — I want fat Josh Wilson to have patches over both eyes, so he'll leave me alone. I want Mom to order thin–crust pepperoni pizza every night, and I want Dad to — "

«No spells on Mom and Dad, not ever!» Angie was on her feet, leaning menacingly over him. «You got that, Ex–Lax? You mess with them even once, believe me, you'd better be one hella witch to keep me from strangling you. Understood?»