Megan Lindholm - Wizard of the Pigeons

He stared at her pocket. His throat was closed tight, too tight for any words to pass.

‘’Oh, come on,“ she begged impatiently. ”Don’t be so shy.

Look, I know about guys like you. I’m not a kid. You don’t stink like a drunk, but you don’t shake like a junkie. I think you’re just temporarily down. Lady dumped you, maybe, or your job ran out. I mean, look at how you’re dressed. You’re not really a bum. All you need is to get thinking straight again and get back on the tracks. Just have a cup of coffee and keep me company while I eat; it’s no big deal. What do you say?“

He dragged his eyes away from her pocket and up to her face. Her front teeth nibbled appealingly at her lower lip, but he scarcely noticed. He mustn’t stare at her pocket. If he agreed and went with her, he might have a chance to get his bag back.

He could offer to take her coat, to hang it on a chair or something. A quick stab of his hand into her pocket and… No. He didn’t want to feel it for himself, didn’t want to stick his hand into an empty bag with a wrinkled paper bottom. Most of all he didn’t want to pull his hand out with nothing in it for the flock. He agonized again over how it could have happened.

But it was gone, his gift taken as abruptly as it had been bestowed. He had never known how he could feed the pigeons, and now he would never understand“ how he could not.

“Lunch, then?” Her cool fingers touched his wrist, numbing it. She snatched them back with a cry of dismay and gripped her own wrist. “Oh, look at the time‘ I hate it when I’m on afternoon shift. Just about the time I start to enjoy the day, I have to rush off to work. Look, I’m sony. I have to go now if I’m going to be on time, so I can’t take you to lunch.”

He stared up at her miserably as she rose. She looked deep into his eyes and misread them. “Hey, look. It’s not that way!

I wasn’t teasing you. Look, take this,“ she dug in a bottomless purse and came up with a folded green bill. ‘Take this, I mean it, and get a bite to eat. You really look like you need it. And meet me here, tomorrow, early, and we’ll talk and have breakfast. You can tell me all about yourself. Now, don’t shake your head at me. You take this.” Boldly she tucked it into the chest pocket of his jacket. Wizard felt strangely powerless before her insistence. “You eat something, you’ll feel better, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t look so surprised. That’s how I am.

I can never turn away from someone who really needs help.

And I can tell a lot about people Just by looking at them, maybe cause I been waiting tables for so long. Now you get something to eat. I mean it, now. See you later.“

She left him buried in the avalanche of her words. She looked back once as she hurried away to give him a friendly little wave and an admonishing shake of her finger that cautioned him to obey. It was all he could do to stare after her, totally unmanned.

When he looked away from her diminishing figure, the square looked unfamiliar. The light seemed dimmed, and his eyes would not focus as sharply as he wanted them to. Like waking from a nap you hadn’t known you’d taken. He blinked and felt the wetness of his lashes. Rain. It was raining very tiny drops, millions of them. like a determined mist condensing on him. Wizard sat in it for a long time, feeling the money in his breast pocket where she had jabbed it in, feeling the emptiness in his coat pocket where the popcorn bag had been. His birds were gone, abandoning him to seek shelter in treetops and on window ledges. He was alone in the gray rain, caught between numbness and a creeping cold. Just like bleeding to death, he thought to himself; once the shock takes away the pain, you just get colder and sleepier and dimmer. He turned his eyes down. His coat and slacks were dark and wet, but this time it was only rain. Only rain.

He dragged himself to his feet, forced himself to move. The square boasted a concrete monstrosity that passed for a rain shelter and benches. It was very big and stark, with the roof so high that the rain Mew in under it. Even in summer, its shade was too cool. The cleverly designed brass drinking fountain beside it squirted everyone in the face. The designer who had envisioned mothers and small children relaxing there was mistaken. Only street people did. Different cliches claimed different benches, sprawling or hunching on them as decreed by the weather. Hostile stares greeted intruders. Wizard walked past it. On one of the unsheltered benches a lone boy sat, trying to make fifteen years look like twenty. His black hair had been greased into spikes that were wilting in the rain. He reminded Wizard of a forlorn Statue of Liberty. He had scratched lightning strikes into his cheeks and etched fear behind his eyes.

He sat very still as Wizard walked up behind him. When he leaned over the back of his bench, the boy neither moved nor spoke.

“Go home, kid.” Wizard lifted the money from his pocket with the tips of his fingers and dropped it in the boy’s lap.

“Your mom threw out that guy that hurt you. She doesn’t show it by day, but at night she cries, and she lets your cat sleep on the pillow by her head. She keeps the porch light on, and there’s a box of chocolate mints in the freezer compartment of the fridge for you. She’s not such a bad old broad; besides, she loves you. Bus can take you as far as Auburn. You can hike the rest of the way. Go for it, kid.”

Wizard stepped away. The boy never looked at him. He just nodded, as if to himself, and picked up the money in his lap.

He rose a second later and headed for the bus stop. Wizard nodded after him, relieved. At least he had managed to get rid of the money. He tucked his bag more firmly under his arm.

He walked, through streets and weather too wet for walking, ignoring the buses. He walked away from his home and his territory, out past the King Dome, walked right out of the Ride Free Area and into the uncharted lands beyond. Restless and rootless, he drifted, turning aimlessly down any street that presented itself, wandering through areas of warehouses, offices, and old residential sections, wandering much farther than he would have imagined he could.

He stopped in a Thriftway grocery to ask if his wife had forgotten her spare keys there, on a keychain with a greendyed rabbit’s foot on it. She hadn’t, but while they looked, he had a free sample of Brim Decaffeinated Coffee and a heated Jeno’s Pizza Roll served by a smiling lady from a tin-foil-lined tray. There was a dime on the floor of a phone booth outside a convenience store. In the drugstore, they didn’t have his daughter’s asthma prescription on file, but they let him use the bathroom while they checked. He looked at the man in their mirror. The rain had helped, actually. He did look like a harassed father sent on a wild goose chase on a rainy day. Darn kid had left her prescription in her gym locker and someone had stolen it. Probably thought they could get high on it; you know kids these days. Well, he’d have to get the nurse to track the doctor down and phone it in again. Thanks, anyway, and back into the rain. Outside the Langendorf Bakery thrift store, a man with a farm pickup full of rotten produce and brown lettuce dropped two packets of tiger-tails as he was loading in three boxes of outdated baked goods. After he drove away, Wizard salvaged them and ate them as he walked. They were squished and stale; their sweetness made him long for rich black coffee, hot enough to bum their cloying taste away. He thought longingly of Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice, down on Virginia across from the market. Or better still, the Elliott Bay Cafe just under the book store; there was something about the old books on their shelves gazing down benignly on him as he sipped from a steaming mug. He wanted coffee and he needed home. He circled the block and turned his steps back.