The Illusionist (2 page)

Brian stood squarely above him.

“I got something good,” said Dean.

“Yeah,” Brian said. “What?”

“Come with me. You'll find out.”

“I don't go anywhere unless I know where,” Brian said.

Dean leaned back in his chair, hands on the table in front of him, looked meaningfully around the room. Then, “I got the best Humboldt you ever had. None of that Jersey swamp weed. Beautiful, big bud. Nice purple hairs on it. Guaranteed best you ever had.”

“Better be,” Brian said. I saw him hesitate, look at Jimmy, who never said anything. Jimmy nodded.

“Not here,” Dean said.

“Down by the river?” I suggested.

“You coming?” he said to Brian. Brian nodded.

So we left, the three of us, me and Brian and Jimmy, following Dean.

Outside in the parking lot, the wind swirled around us, sweeping the dead leaves across the asphalt. A big wooden sign stood at the edge of the road, lit by a spotlight, with a picture of an Indian in a headdress painted on it, one of the Taponacs who used to live here hundreds of years go.

There was the sound of cars pulling in and out of the lot, doors slamming, and of voices among the pine and spruce trees. The sounds still had the flighty, echoey lilt of summer.

“Let's take my truck,” Dean said. “You can guide me, Chrissie.”

Brian said, “We'll follow.” He was challenging Dean to offer something good. He climbed into his blue Camaro with Jimmy.

Dean had an old red customized Dodge Ram with a cap on the back. There were white swirly decals running along the rusting sides, and a bumper sticker on the rear fender: In Order to Get to Hell You Have to Step Over Jesus.

Inside, the truck was filled with garbage, empty cans of Mountain Dew and Skittles bags. An old rug remnant was laid out in the back, with a sleeping bag on it, as if he slept there.

“Which way?” Dean asked.

“Make a left.” We pulled out of the lot, onto Old 27, then made a left down the river road, Brian and Jimmy following behind us in the blue Camaro.

The river road was narrow, and led down through a steep
ravine. On either side of us were tall pines, hanging over the road, pines left over from when the settlers grew them for their whaling ships.

Through the dark trees as you drove, you could glimpse, now and then, an old mansion, where the lords of the manor who owned Palatine County and the land around it had once lived. The big houses belonged mostly to weekenders now.

As we rode, there was a tension in the air between us, like a charge, an unasked question hanging there. “So, where're you living?” I asked Dean.

He shot a grin at me, then nodded over his shoulder. “In back of the truck. . . . You from around here?”

“Yeah. All my life. You working?” I asked Dean.

“At the Laundercenter. Making change and selling soap,” he said.

“I'm an aide up at the Nightingale Home.”

We had come to the end of the road, and we were at the river. We stopped the cars. There was an inlet, with a little gray-shingled hut covered in scraggly vines, the roof caving in. It was an old ice house, it belonged to one of the estates hidden up in the trees.

Beyond the inlet, a steep embankment rose, and then sloped down again to the railroad tracks, which ran along the edge of the river. On the heights on the other side of the river, you could make out the winking lights of Manorville.

It was completely deserted here. There was the sound of the river lapping at the shore, and out on the water, the waves were shivery and silvery, tipped with moonlight. From somewhere came a faint wind, rustling through the dry leaves.

You couldn't swim in the river here because the bed was all mud, and as soon as you stepped into the water, you sank right down. Anyway, the river was poisoned, full of PCB's.

Out in the middle was what appeared to be a small island covered in scrub. In summer, there were water lilies there, but if you rowed over in a boat, you discovered the island was not solid
ground at all, just mud and marsh, and there was nowhere really to land.

We got out of our cars, and Brian led the way through the long, dry grass to the ice house.

Inside, there were gaps in the floor slats, the black river water moving beneath, and a big round hole where they must have cut the ice in winter.

The floor of the hut was littered with beer cans, and tiny, brightly colored crack vials. An empty Dewar's bottle lay on the ground and an old hairbrush, and a sweatshirt sodden with mud. The ice house was where we always came when we were doing anything other than drinking.

Dean reached into the inside pocket of his deerskin jacket, and took out a little tin and a little wooden pipe, coffin-shaped, with a hinged lid.

“Humboldt,” he said.

They didn't say anything, but kept their eyes on it. He opened up his little tin. Inside lay a roundish bud. He picked it up, held it out for them to see. “Beautiful,” he said.

He broke off a piece and packed it into the pipe.

Brian watched carefully, missing nothing. That little smile, that fake calm. And suddenly, I pictured Brian dancing fiendishly in the flames of his apartment, laughing and screaming. Brian was like a deer tick, I thought, the only way you could kill him was to burn him.

Dean handed the unlit pipe to Brian together with his Bic. “You first,” he said, focusing all the attention on Brian.

Brian fired it up, drew a long breath on it. Then he passed the pipe on to me.

I drew in on the pipe, and it was a taste like none I'd ever experienced, deep and rich, like burning leaves, damp and thick in the autumn, and a faint sweetness in it, as if the leaves had sugar in them.

I'd heard of Humboldt, but if truth be told, I'd never had any.
And neither, probably, had Brian. Cost way too much. Out of our reach.

We passed the pipe around, and soon the little hut was filled with the smell. I felt the dope spread through my body like a kind of liquid solvent, melting away all the soreness and tension.

“Okay,” Brian said. He had to give Dean that.

Jimmy took some and I could tell even lumbering Jimmy appreciated it. Here in the hut, close to Jimmy, I could smell the mildew on his big body. He had opaque, greenish eyes, and thick, porous skin. He hadn't spoken a word since we'd gotten out of the cars.

“Huh, Brian? Good?” I prompted, wanting Brian, for no reason I understood, to like what Dean had given him, to like Dean.

Brian closed his eyes a moment, savoring, then nodded.

“You don't need to roll this shit, too expensive,” Dean said. Talking like an expert, like he knew the streets. But we
were
the streets in Sparta.

Brian looked at Dean and his eyes narrowed. “So what
are
you anyway?” Brian asked Dean, his voice suddenly thick.

“Whaddya mean?” Dean said.

“I mean—what are you? Queer or something?” The dope had loosened Brian's tongue.

Brian had asked the question I wanted to ask, but was afraid to. Dean was like this blurred image, an image I had pondered, but hadn't let come into focus yet. I saw Dean's high, red cheeks, his liquid green eyes, the full beautiful lips. The cowboy hat was parked rakishly on the back of his head. He wore loose jeans over his small frame.

“What're you talking about?” Dean asked Brian.

“I'm talking about what you are,” Brian answered, not taking his eyes off Dean.

Outside the hut, the wind breathed; dry leaves scuttled across the grass, and underneath our feet, we could hear the sound of the river water lapping at the pilings of the ice house.

Brian watched Dean. “You look like a girl,” Brian said.

“I'm a guy,” Dean said, relaxed, as if he wasn't bothered by the question. “Of course.”

Most guys would get excited now, puff up their chests, and raise their fists. But Dean's eyes were on his pipe as he took a deep breath in.

Yet I thought I could feel, in the air of the ice house, Dean's fear.

“Yep,” Brian said. He cocked his head back in a gesture of fake disbelief, a goofy look, ridden with the dope. “Could've fooled me. Don't you think so?” Brian said to Jimmy. “Don't you think it's a fag?”

Jimmy gaped at Dean. “Looks that way to me,” he said finally in his deep, phlegmy voice.

“That's your problem,” Dean said, still avoiding looking at them.

“Yeah?” said Brian.

I interrupted. “I'm cold. Let's go.”

But Brian wouldn't be stopped. “You're like a—pervert?” Brian asked Dean, his eyes wide with fake innocence.

“Shut up,” said Dean. He emptied the ashes from the pipe. I could see Dean's lips trembling as he poked at it. Then he tucked the pipe in his jacket.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

Next to me, Brian giggled. A stupid dope kind of giggle, loose and freaky, something that could easily go out of control. I shivered.

“Fag is what I think,” said Brian, with a little giggle. “What about you, Jimmy?”

“I think fag too,” Jimmy said.

I grabbed Dean's sleeve, pulled him away through the long grass. “He's an asshole,” I said.

We moved off, and I looked back and Brian and Jimmy were following us and in the darkness I could hear Brian's laughter, silly and pointless, with no real object, it seemed, anymore.

We hurried back through the long grass, and got in our cars. And Dean and I drove back to Wooden Nickel in his truck. As we drove, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his large eyes shining, thin fingers on the steering wheel. I was too shy to ask him again what
they
had asked him. Because if I pressed him, he might run. And I knew I wanted him to stay.

As we pulled into the parking lot of the Wooden Nickel again, he said, without looking at me, “Getting cold out. You know someplace I could crash? Just for the night?”

“You can stay at my place, I guess, for the night,” I answered. I knew he wasn't asking for sex or anything, really did need a place to go in the cold. I sensed I would be safe, even though he was the stranger. It was he who needed protecting. “Don't mind Brian,” I said. “He's just an asshole.”

So he came back with me that night to Washington Street. He slept in his sleeping bag on the futon in the living room, while I slept in the bed in the bedroom.

I had lived in this apartment a year, after I'd had to move out of my mom's house because I couldn't take it with Mason, my stepfather, anymore. Mason was acting like he was my real father, and even after I got the job at the Nightingale Home, he wanted to know where I was all the time, when I was coming home at night, everything about me. I hated Mason's thin, beige-gray face, his blunt beige hair, the way his clothes smelled of cigarette smoke even after they were laundered. Mason was a manager at City Shop. And my mom just went along with whatever Mason did, she let him scream at me because Mason was younger than she was, and she was so afraid he'd leave her. And she couldn't bear Mason to leave her like my dad did for Liz.

My dad and Liz didn't have room for me because Liz had her own two boys, the brats Fletcher and Timmy. Liz and Dad never told me I couldn't live with them, but it was obvious, when I looked around, there was no room for me in Liz's house.

This realization, that I had nowhere that was my real home, gave me an inner sadness. Because, though I was grown up now, maybe I was still a kid and I wanted to know there was a place I could still call home if I really needed it, if I lost my job or something.

During the day I worked at the Home, and at night I took courses at Sparta Community toward my associate's degree. Most evenings after class, or after work, I drove to the Wooden Nickel, which was about five miles out of town. The Wooden Nickel was where we had all hung out ever since high school. I would sit at the end of the bar, reading my book, doing my homework. Carl left me alone. He didn't care. Carl was like a father to us. He didn't card kids too closely. He knew all the troopers and the sheriff. But if a kid was drunk, Carl would find someone to drive him home. He watched over us. Carl wasn't married, had no kids of his own. We were his family, except we had to pay for drinks.

*  *  *

Washington Street, where my apartment was, was the main street in Sparta. It was paved in cobblestone, lined with false-fronted buildings of red brick and frame. Like everything else in Sparta, the street sloped steeply down to the river. Indeed, sometimes it seemed as if the whole place was slowly sliding down into the river, and that one day the entire town would just disappear into the water.

Long ago, Sparta was a thriving place, a whaling port, one of the most prosperous cities in the state, they said. The square riggers would sail upriver from New Amsterdam, their decks loaded with barrels of whale oil and bone. And when the ships reached the docks of Sparta, all the inhabitants of the town would gather to greet them, and the air would be filled with the boom of cannon fire. My dad said that the Pecks were an old Sparta family. There was even a Peck Street in town, named after us, he said, though it was only a little side street. But long ago, he said, we were probably rich people, though my dad worked at Sparta Utility now.

Then, suddenly, all the whaling ceased, and Sparta went into a decline. And then, after the Civil War, the city came to life again for a generation or so, with manufacturing. But slowly, that industry died down too, until there were only the husks of old factory buildings down by the river, covered in ivy and bindweed.

Over the years, the town fathers had tried periodically to revive the fortunes of the city. These days, Washington Street was mostly antique stores, run by gay people who'd moved up from New York City. The city government had gotten federal loans, put up fake gas lamps to attract tourists, but it seemed that every day another store closed. A group of weekenders, including the famous poet who lived on Courthouse Square, were trying to raise funds to restore the old Sparta Opera House, with its gargoyles representing comedy and tragedy above the entrance, which had been boarded up for years now, and turn it into a cultural center.