Charles Johnson - Sorcerer's Apprentice

“The gun,” said Parrot. “Monkey has it.”

Berkeley’s eyes, still phlegmed by sleep, Wearily panned the counter. The room was swimming, full of smoke from a fire in the storeroom. He was short of wind. And, worse, he’d forgotten about the gun, a Smith and Wesson, that Tilford had bought after pet shop owners in Seattle were struck by thieves who specialized in stealing exotic birds. Monkey had it now. Berkeley’s water ran down his legs. He’d propped the pistol between the cash register and a display of plastic dog collars, and his wide, yellow grin was frighteningly like that of a general Congress has just given the go-ahead to on a scorched-earth policy.

“Get it!” said Parrot. “You promised to protect us, Berkeley!”

For a few fibrous seconds he stood trembling paw-deep in dung, the odor of decay burning his lungs, but he couldn’t come full awake, and still he felt himself to be on the fringe of a dream, his hair moist because dreaming of the French poodle had made him sweat. But the pistol… There was no power balance now. He’d been outplayed. No hope unless he took it away. Circling the counter, head low and growling, or trying to work up a decent growl, Berkeley crept to the cash register, his chest pounding, bunched his legs to leap, then sprang, pretending the black explosion of flame and smoke was like television gunfire, though it ripped skin right off his ribs, sent teeth flying down his throat, and blew him back like an empty pelt against Tortoise’s cage. He lay still. Now he felt nothing in his legs. Purple blood like that deepest in the body cascaded to the floor from his side, rushing out with each heartbeat, and he lay twitching a little, only seeing now that he’d slept too long. Flames licked along the floor. Fish floated belly up in a dark, unplugged fishtank. The females had torn Siamese to pieces. Spackled lizards were busy sucking baby canaries from their eggs. And in the holy ruin of the Pet Shoppe the tarantula roamed free over the corpses of Frog and Iguana. Beneath him, Berkeley heard the ancient Tortoise stir, clearing a rusty throat clogged from disuse. Only he would survive the spreading fire, given his armor. His eyes burning from the smoke, the watchdog tried to explain his dream before the blaze reached them. “We could have endured, we had enough in common — for Christ’s sake, we’re all animals.”

“Indeed,” said Tortoise grimly, his eyes like headlights in a shell that echoed cavernously. “Indeed.”

Evelyn’s problems with her husband, Rudolph, began one evening in early March — a dreary winter evening in Seattle — when he complained after a heavy meal of pig’s feet and mashed potatoes of shortness of breath, an allergy to something she put in his food perhaps, or brought on by the first signs of wild flowers around them. She suggested they get out of the house for the evening, go to a movie. He was fifty-four, a postman for thirty-three years now, with high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet, and, as Evelyn told her friend Shelberdine Lewis, the lingering fear that he had cancer. Getting old, he was also getting hard to live with. He told her never to salt his dinners, to keep their Lincoln Continental at a crawl, and never run her fingers along his inner thigh when they sat in Reverend William Merrill’s church, because anything, even sex, or laughing too loud — Rudolph was serious — might bring on heart failure.

So she chose for their Saturday night outing a peaceful movie, a mildly funny comedy a Seattle Times reviewer said was fit only for titters and nasal snorts, a low-key satire that made Rudolph’s eyelids droop as he shoveled down unbuttered popcorn in the darkened, half-empty theater. Sticky fluids cemented Evelyn’s feet to the floor. A man in the last row laughed at all the wrong places. She kept the popcorn on her lap, though she hated the unsalted stuff and wouldn’t touch it, sighing as Rudolph pawed across her to shove his fingers inside the cup.

She followed the film as best she could, but occasionally her eyes frosted over, flashed white. She went blind like this now and then. The fibers of her eyes were failing; her retinas were tearing like soft tissue. At these times the world was a canvas with whiteout spilling from the far left corner toward the center; it was the sudden shock of an empty frame in a series of slides. Someday, she knew, the snow on her eyes would stay. Winter eternally: her eyes split like her walking stick. She groped along the fractured surface, waiting for her sight to thaw, listening to the film she couldn’t see. Her only comfort was knowing that, despite her infirmity, her Rudolph was in even worse health.

He slid back and forth from sleep during the film (she elbowed him occasionally, or pinched his leg), then came full awake, sitting up suddenly when the movie ended and a “Coming Attractions” trailer began. It was some sort of gladiator movie, Evelyn thought, blinking, and it was pretty trashy stuff at that. The plot’s revenge theme was a poor excuse for Chinese actors or Japanese (she couldn’t tell those people apart) to flail the air with their hands and feet, take on fifty costumed extras at once, and leap twenty feet through the air in perfect defiance of gravity. Rudolph’s mouth hung open.

“Can people really do that?” He did not take his eyes off the screen, but talked at her from the right side of his mouth. “Leap that high?”

“It’s a movie” sighed Evelyn. “A bad movie.”

He nodded, then asked again, “But can they?”

“Oh, Rudolph, for God’s sake!” She stood up to leave, her seat slapping back loudly. “They’re on trampolines ! You can see them in the corner — there! — if you open your eyes!”

He did see them, once Evelyn twisted his head to the lower left corner of the screen, and it seemed to her that her husband looked disappointed — looked, in fact, the way he did the afternoon Dr. Guylee told Rudolph he’d developed an extrasys-tolic reaction, a faint, moaning sound from his heart whenever it relaxed. He said no more and, after the trailer finished, stood — there was chewing gum stuck to his trouser seat — dragged on his heavy coat with her help and followed Evelyn up the long, carpeted aisle, through the exit of the Coronet Theater, and to their car. He said nothing as she chattered on the way home, reminding him that he could not stay up all night puttering in his basement shop because the next evening they were to attend the church’s revival meeting.

Rudolph, however, did not attend the revival. He complained after lunch of a light, dancing pain in his chest, which he had conveniently whenever Mount Zion Baptist Church held revivals, and she went alone, sitting with her friend Shelberdine, a beautician. She was forty-one; Evelyn, fifty-two. That evening Evelyn wore spotless white gloves, tan therapeutic stockings for the swelling in her ankles, and a white dress that brought out nicely the brown color of her skin, the most beautiful cedar brown, Rudolph said when they were courting thirty-five years ago in South Carolina. But then Evelyn had worn a matching checkered skirt and coat to meeting. With her jet black hair pinned behind her neck by a simple wooden comb, she looked as if she might have been Andrew Wyeth’s starkly beautiful model for Day of the Fair . Rudolph, she remembered, wore black business suits, black ties, black wing tips, but he also wore white gloves because he was a senior usher — this was how she first noticed him. He was one of four young men dressed like deacons (or blackbirds), their left hands tucked into the hollow of their backs, their right carrying silver plates for the offering as they marched in almost military fashion down each aisle: Christian soldiers, she’d thought, the cream of black manhood, and to get his attention she placed not her white envelope or coins in Rudolph’s plate but instead a note that said: “You have a beautiful smile.” It was, for all her innocence, a daring thing to do, according to Evelyn’s mother — flirting with a randy young man like Rudolph Lee Jackson, but he did have nice, tigerish teeth. A killer smile, people called it, like all the boys in the Jackson family: a killer smile and good hair that needed no more than one stroke of his palm to bring out Quo Vadis rows pomaded sweetly with the scent of Murray’s.