Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (38 page)

And Dizzy—you can see these awful red stumps where his wings used to be, but otherwise he just looks like a Monkey—Dizzy leans close and whispers about two rounds in, “Funny thing about old Joe today.”

So we all toast the memory of Joe, and we talk about how his widow is doing, and his three kids, but that’s all just
make-talk, I’ve already told you what’s going to happen to them.

Then Hops—who’s so dim we ought to call him Dim—says right out loud, “What’s so funny about Joe?” Because he don’t see anything funny about it at all.

“Not funny, ha-ha,” Dizzy says. “Funny strange.”

And it
was
funny strange. The supervisors don’t give a shit, I’ll grant you that, but the winch men are working stiffs like us—Winkies and Munchkins mainly, but mainly Winkies—and they
do
care because we’re all in this together. So every morning before you go over the wall, the winch men, they check over your equipment real good, and then, because it’s your life on the line, you double-check it twice as good. Are the boards of your platform level and solid? Are they secured tightly to your ropes, and are your ropes unfrayed? Are your pulleys secure, solid, and untangled? Is your safety harness tight, safe, and in good condition? And let me be clear: your safety harness is always in good condition or you don’t go over the wall to polish the emerald. Period. So your equipment is checked and double-checked before you ever go over the wall.

“What do you mean?” Hops says, again too loud, and right now I’m wishing I’d gone straight home to Calixta. But what’s a man to do when he loses his best friend, right? You want a drink and you want to commiserate with men—or Munchkins and Monkeys, more accurately—who know the job the way you do, with all its attendant dangers. What you don’t want to do is get into some unsavory details that might send
you
plunging over the wall, and sooner rather than later.

But Hops is too dim ever to unpack all that luggage. So he says it again, even louder this time, “What’s funny about old Joe? It was just an accident, wasn’t it?”

Dizzy shushes him, and once again, whispering even lower, “Funny strange, is all I’m saying.”

And Hops, in a stage whisper you can hear all over the bar, “Funny strange, how?”

And me, I’m wishing the old Witches were still alive. Don’t believe any of that shit about them being wicked, that’s just propaganda—only Glinda had any drawbacks, and even she was all right before she became the Wizard’s main squeeze. But I was saying: right then I’m wishing the old Witches were still alive and one of them would conjure me right out of Frankie’s and into my pile of straw with Calixta warm beside me.

I drop some change on the table and stand. “Well, that’s all for me, boys. Have a good night.”

But Dizzy’s hand closes around my forearm and yanks me back into my seat. “Sit down,” he says, and I do, slowly, trying not to make a scene. Monkeys—even crippled monkeys—are strong as shit.

“Look here,” he whispers. “Joe didn’t die in no accident, and you know it.”

“Accident,” Hops says. “’Course it was an accident.”

And this time, Dizzy hauls off and lays him one right across the smacker.

Hops collapses back into his seat, his eyes stinging with tears. You can already see the bruise coming up on his cheek. “What was that for?”

“For not shutting the fuck up and listening. Okay?” And then, leveling one hairy finger at me, he says, “It wasn’t no accident, and you know it.”

“Me?”

“You. For instance, you got four lines on a platform, right?”

“Yeah,” I said all innocent, but I knew where he was going all right.

“So you ever see two lines fail at once?”

“Well…”

“Hey, what are you saying?” Hops says. He was slow on the uptake, but he wasn’t that slow.

“What I’m saying is that Joe’s accident wasn’t no accident,” the Monkey says. “You follow?”

“And then the safety harness failed, too.” I’d already worked all this out in my head, of course, but Dizzy had drawn me in. And looking back on it, I think he
was
dizzy, dizzy-stupid for bringing it up, double dizzy-stupid for bringing it up in front of Hops, who had reached the conclusion in his dim, fumbling way that maybe he ought to be a little quieter, too. And the whole thing would have consequences for all of us, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

“But why?” Hops whispered.

“He was talking about organizing,” Dizzy said. “He talked to you, didn’t he?”

I sat there unmoving, like one of those statues of the Wizard he’s put up of himself all over the City. I could have been made of marble. I wish I had been. Maybe things would have turned out different then. But probably not. Probably they’d had their eye on Joe from the start. He was too smart for his own good, and I’d bet they already had a pretty good idea of who he’d been talking too, as well: the monkey, and me, and Hops among them, Hops being an example of Joe being too smart for his own good, if you take my meaning. Who in the hell would confide something like that to Hops in the first place, even if he is muscled like a Monkey and might be useful come crunch time? And I was a little surprised that Dizzy—who was smarter even than Joe, even if he was just a Monkey—had brought it up in front of him, too. But Dizzy wasn’t done yet, and it turns out I
hadn’t sussed out where he was going after all. But now he got there. “Well?” he says.

“He might have mentioned something,” I allowed. “But that was just Joe. He was always a bullshitter, old Joe.”

And just saying the words, just saying his name like that, I got all teary-eyed, and I had to swipe at them with the back of one hand. “Stinks in here,” I said, and it did—it reeked of cheap beer and cheaper gin and the even cheaper tapers Frankie used to light the place. I swear the things smoked more than the coal mines up north, where most of the Munchkins had been shipped. We’re little folk, you know, and I’d been luckier than some—Hops and I both—in getting assigned to polish the walls instead. Something had to fuel what the Wizard had taken to calling the Industrial Revolution, after all, and somebody had to mine the coal. So I’m swiping at my eyes like I’m about to burst into tears, and nobody’s fooled.

Even Hops looks away, embarrassed.

“He say something to you?” Dizzy asked Hops. He’s still clutching my forearm so hard that I’ll have the bruises for days. I’m not going anywhere.

And Hops gets this sly look in his stupid little eyes, and I wonder why I ever made friends with him in the first place. Probably just glad to see another Munchkin among all the Winkies, but still, a man has to draw the line somewhere, and I could see now that I’d drawn it in the wrong place.

“Organizing is sedition,” Hops says, and I find myself wondering if he even knows what the words mean. But one thing is sure, he’s heard the phrase a thousand times—there are dozens of them, and we’ve
all
heard them a thousand times, these memorable little nuggets that are designed to keep all the people in Oz—who had once been free—thoroughly in line. Though I guess we’re still free,
technically. There’s nothing to keep us from walking away from our jobs. It’s just there’s nowhere else to go. But I’m getting sidetracked again.

What happens is that sly look comes into Hops’ squinchy little eyes, and he says, “Organization is sedition.”

“Exactly,” Dizzy says, and now he releases me. “So we gotta keep quiet about this unless we want to have an accident, too.”

I’m rubbing my forearm as he says this last bit, and I’m thinking he’s right and how wrong that is—how wrong it is that we should be trapped like this, scattered from our native lands, “employed,” and worked down to the bone. I’ll even say the real truth here between you and me—enslaved. How wrong it is that we should be enslaved like this, while the real people—that’s the words the Wizard uses for the humans, “real people”—walk around free in the City above the City and farm our lands and scare off all the talking animals into the Haunted Forest (a place you
do not
want to go)—the ones they didn’t beat into submission and silence, that is. You see them sometimes, the intelligent animals, beaten like brutes, the knowing and the bitterness shining in their bright eyes.

That girl from another place you hear about, the one who dropped a house on the Good Witch of the East, supposedly exposed the Great and Powerful Oz as a fraud. But he’s no fraud. He
is
great and powerful, and he’s used guns and bombs—he turned some of the Winged Monkeys to his cause early on, even if they aren’t all bad, like old Dizzy here—to conquer Oz, to claim its name as his own, and bit by bit drive out all the magic in the land. But they say something else about her as well: that she really believes he
is
a powerless old man, that she’s just a child, a perfect innocent, a rube. And that’s important here. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

For now, back in the bar, me rubbing my forearm like the damn Monkey had about half torn it off, Dizzy goes, “We gotta forget it ever happened. You understand me. You understand me, Hops? Not a word, okay. Not a word to anyone.”

And Hops nodded his stupid nod, like he was down with that. But that sly look was still shining in his eyes, and I thought that Dizzy, too, was too smart for his own good, and that he might come to regret that smack across the face he’d given the Munchkin. Hops’s cheek was turning a deep purplish blue, and I remember thinking,
These damn Monkeys don’t know their own strength and sometimes it comes back to bite them
.

I was still thinking that when I headed home, and that night when Calixta and I blew out the last of the tapers and the kids had fallen asleep, I told her the whole thing: about Joe’s fall and Dizzy’s sermon in the bar and the way he smacked Hops, turning his face all blue and purple as a storm hoving up on the far horizon. She cried a little, and I held her close until the tears stopped, and then we had slow sex in the darkness, and when I cried out and broke inside her, it was a sweet and sensuous thing.

After that, nothing much happened for a while, except they moved Dizzy next to me in the polishing line, and we hung down the wall side by side. We didn’t razz each other or even talk much. It was like that day in Frankie’s had marked the end of our friendship, or at least its outward expression. Like it was too dangerous to be seen being chummy. The few times we did talk it was in hurried asides, just to wonder aloud—and barely aloud—why we’d been put on the wall side by side like that, and was someone watching us or listening.

We didn’t see much of Hops. They’d moved him way down the line, and when I did run into him, he didn’t have much to say either. He still had that bruise—it took a month to fade, from black to blue to a yellowish sallow color—and
he still had that sly secret look in his eyes, like he knew something I didn’t, and more than ever I regretted going to the bar with him that day, or even being friends with him in the first place, but a man—a Munchkin—has to have someone to confide in and like calls out to like, as they say. I’d never really hit it off with any Winkies besides Joe. My remaining friends were misfits, living oxymorons (and in Hops’ case, just a moron), a Winged Monkey without his wings and a brute of a Munchkin.

And then I had no friends at all, except that I continued to nurse a place in my heart for Dizzy, even if he was too smart for his own good, because what’s a Winged Monkey without his wings? Calixta always said I had a soft spot for losers and ne’er-do-wells and that someday it would do me in, but you know how it is with wives, they talk and talk and talk and you don’t listen and you don’t listen and you don’t listen, and by the time you figure out they were right all along it’s too late. After all, I was consorting with a known criminal—a Monkey who’d lost his wings—and an idiot, what did I expect? But like I said, like calls out to like, so maybe I’m a misfit myself, or even a criminal. But that’s getting ahead of the story again.

What happened next is they made an example of Dizzy. Like cutting off his wings hadn’t been enough. They hung a sign around his neck—
ORGANIZATION IS SEDITION
, it read—and hung old Dizzy himself from the top of the wall, where we could see him while we worked. They didn’t hang him the good way either, where they break your neck with the drop. No, they let him strangle slowly, his hands grasping and pulling at the rope for a single extra breath, and when his strength finally ran out, they let him hang some more, till the birds pecked out his eyes and stripped the flesh from his bones.

Meanwhile, Hops’ bruise slowly faded, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the humiliation of it had never faded from his heart, for that sly knowing look hadn’t faded from his eyes, and now that Dizzy was gone, I felt it turn ever more certainly on me. And this time Calixta talked and talked and talked, and this time, because every day I got to see old Dizzy hanging there from the wall, I listened.

It was time to get out.

I’m smart too, you see, but I’m not too smart for my own good. That’s what I like to think anyway. So I made a plan, and part of the plan is what I’ve written here. Tonight me and Calixta and the kids, we’re vacating this shithole forever. We’re going to cross the fields of poppy and take our chances in the Haunted Forest. We don’t care that the talking animals are angry and capable of just about anything, and we don’t care what they say about the trees. We’re going to make a home there, close by the road of yellow brick. They say this girl, this Dorothy, comes back to Oz upon occasion and takes the road of yellow brick up to the Emerald City. And what I’m going to do is, I’m going to give her this letter—and hope, because if the rumors and legends are right, she managed to kill the Good Witch of the East and the Good Witch of the West all on her own. She must be a sorceress of great power to have done the deeds that are attributed to her. And I’m hoping something else as well: that she really
was
an innocent, a rube, and that when she realizes what she’s done, she’ll set things to right.

“Dorothy,” I will say, “the Emerald City is built upon the backs of millions.”

“Dorothy,” I will say, “the Munchkins no longer have a song in their hearts.”