“Yeah? How can you tell all that?”
“Because it....” I get the point. “The smell. Okay, so smell can tell me stuff about stuff.”
He squints at me in that way he has when he is delivering wisdom. “It can do more than that.” He reaches off to one side and picks up something from the ground and rubs it between his fingers. “Close your eyes and sniff.”
I obey. I smell attar of fir.
“What’s that remind you of?”
“Doug,” I say and can almost see him sitting on the front porch of the Farmhouse, enjoying the sunshine. I smile.
“How’s that make you feel?”
“Real good. Happy.”
It’s true. My heart seems to swell up with Doug feelings.
“Powerful feeling, ain't it?”
I nod.
“And all from a little attar of Doug.”
He’s right, I realize. The smell of fir or pine or cedar or cypress all make me feel fine — I mean, really fine. Almost like I’m floating in a warm, glowing place. And I realize now that there are other smells I been taking for granted all my life that do powerful things to me — the smell of Mrs. Lopez-Alvero’s tortillas, of rain-wet concrete, of salt-fog, of tar-soaked wharves, of the Hau Bau bakery on Market. I remember the clean, cold scent of Bunuelo’s fur when he’d just come in from outdoors. I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in that old cat’s fur, which is funny, considering how I pretended not to like him. Funny, too, as much as he pretended to be above me, he never seemed to mind.
Now that Bags has scored some points about the power of smells, he goes on to teach me more about them. We dig up the mulch we’re after and head back to the house with it. Smoke curls from the chimney and mingles with a light wu gau that floats above, aloof as Bunuelo. Bags stops to look at it.
“Smell that?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I love the smell of wood smoke.
“What’s that smoke say to you, Del?”
“Home.”
It’s true. Wood smoke was home long ago, too, when home meant mi madre y padre. When I’d been out in the cold and wet longer than I should, that smell always said there were people waiting for me who would make me warm and glad to have even a drafty four walls to come home to.
“We all got smells that make us feel alright,” Bags says. “And we got smells that make us feel rotten. But there’s more to it than that. That wood smoke smell, that reminds you of your mom and dad, don’t it?”
I nod.
“Bet you can almost see ‘em, huh?”
I nod again, feeling sad now, and kind of wishing Bags’d get onto something else.
“Smells evoke memories,” he tells me, sounding more like Kaymart than Bags. “They make you call up things you might’ve forgot.” He smiles funny. “Could be a good interrogation tool.”
I snort. “Yeah? And what’m I gonna interrogate — asparagus?”
“Smells can do other stuff, too,” he says, ignoring me. “They can soothe the up-tight breast, calm the jangled nerve, heal the wounded soul.”
“Now you’re jinkin' me.”
He stops at the porch steps and looks at me most somber. “No, Del,” he says in all seriosity. “I wouldn’t do that. Smell is a greatly powerful thing.” He hands me the sprig of evergreen he has crushed in his fingers. “A greatly powerful thing. Now, you get cleaned up and help Kaymart with dinner.”
He shoulders his shovel and heads off for the tool shed, leaving me with the bags of rich-smelling dirt.
It takes me a moment to realize that Kaymart has come out of the Farmhouse and is standing on the top step watching him. When I look up, I see in her eyes that she really loves that old guy like crazy. I pray someday somebody looks at me like that. The prayer is answered only by the strong smell of crushed fir needles.
I shake my head. “He’s a weird old dude. I sure wish I knew what the power of smells has to do with farming.”
“Farming?” Kaymart echoes.
“Yeah. And he’s always doing that. I mean, yesterday he was showing me how to plant corn, when he gets this weird bug in his noodle and starts telling me how a seed has to sacrifice itself to the tree, and how the tree gives everything it’s got to its cones or fruit or whatever it uses to give birth to its seeds.”
Kaymart nods. “And then it starts all over again.”
“That’s what he said,” I note.
“And what’s so odd about that, Del?”
“Well, it just doesn’t sound like farming.”
She laughs at me — just outright laughs. “Is that what you think he’s teaching you?” she asks.
“Yeah, sure. What else? Isn’t that what he’s teaching all the kids?”
She’s stopped laughing, except in her eyes, which are having rare old time. “Well, he may be teaching them farming, but he’s teaching you magic.”
“Magic? What’d he know about that?”
She shrugs. “Ask him. He hasn’t always been a Farmer, you know.” When I twitch to go after the old guy, she adds, “After you’ve helped me fix dinner. I need you to husk some pine nuts.”
I sit on what Kaymart says for over a week. I mean, it seems too weird, you know — Bags, a merlin? I mean, if he’d been a merlin, what the hell was he doing vegetating down on the Farm? I'm afraid if I ask such a jingbing question (“So, Mr. Bags, is it true you were a merlin, once upon a time?”) he’ll laugh at me. And I hate to be the source of guffaw for the old man. When Bags laughs at you, you feel like you’ve done something not just humanly stupid, but cosmically stupid.
Which is not to say that Bags does anything to make you feel cosmically stupid, it just happens. It’s like with colors. Red is red, but it looks really, truly, redly red when you put it next to green, say, or blue.
I gotta admit, too, that in my recollection, Bags doesn’t wax esoteric around the other apprentices. At least, not that I’ve ever heard.
So anyway, I sit on all this for about a week, trying to think of a way to ask THE QUESTION without asking THE QUESTION, and one day I come up with something I think is not too cosmically stupid.
We are sitting on the front porch of the Farmhouse, me shelling acorns, him petting this old rag-eared cat named Zorro — when I say slyly (I think), “That stuff you put on the tomatoes sure got up a good crop.”
“Yeah,” says Bags. “Best ever.”
“Magic, huh?”
He spocks an eyebrow at me. “Science. Been working on that formula for a coupla years. Finally got it right. Gonna have to get some to Felicidad for his plots over at the Presidio.”
Huh. That went nowhere.
I sit and contemplate my options and lean toward forgetting the whole thing when Bags says, “You interested in magic, are you?”
“I like reading about the first Merlin and Gandalf and those guys.” Now, I try to get sly again. “I studied the latter day merlins too, like Joseph Braghorn, merlin to King Levi Menorah, and the amazing Stanley Nemecec, merlin to the illustrious and artful Troubadour.”
I watch him out of the tail of my eye. He’s smiling and I see several toothless holes.
“Joseph Braghorn,” he repeats. “Stanley Nemecec. Those are names I han’t heard for a month of Feast days.”
“You know ‘em?”
“Well, I remember seeing Joseph when I was a boy. He was an old man even then. Great merlin. The best.”
I wax bold. “You know anything about merlinry?”
His eyes sting my face. “You care, do you?”
“Yeah.”
He nods and strokes the cat’s tatty old carcass. “I know a few things.... You wanna be a merlin, do you?”
I laugh out loud — too loud. “Me? I got no merlin stuff. I’d have to be a certifiable ditz to think I got that Calling.”
“Then I s’pose that means I’m a certifiable ditz, too, ‘cause I think you’ve got merlin stuff. Fact is, I wouldn’t have you here if you didn’t have magic in you.”
“But, I’m — I’
m too small,” I babble. “I got no aplomb, no erudition, no sense of importance. Hell, I couldn’t even get a damn cat to look up to me. A merlin’s got to have aplomb and erudition and-and — ”
“A merlin,” he tells me, pointing a crooked finger at my nose, “don’t need none of that. A merlin only needs a channel.”
“A channel?”
“A sort of cell-phone to the Almighty. A cell-phone that picks up all those little whispers in the Universe.”
“What sort of channel?” I ask.
“Well, that depends on the merlin. Me, I had a cat named Pearl. A gray cat. And my Pearl’d whisper all the little secrets she knew — which was lots. But a channel, now, could be anything — anything at all.”
“Anything?” I try to feature God whispering to me through one of the acorns in the palm of my hand.
Bags cocks his head, also looking at the acorns. “Well, any living thing.”
There is this supreme MOMENT of silence in the Universe, after which I say, “Like...like a tree, for instance?”
“A tree would make a righteous good channel. God’s partial to trees.”
There is more silence, mostly from my end of the Universe, as I ponder this. No, "ponder" is the wrong word. There’s no brain action happening here — this is all metaphysical stuff. And at the center of it is a little Doug fir in a clay pot.
Right about the time the silence has waxed lengthy, something tickles my Alice bone most outrageously. I remember that there are questions lying around unanswered. I pick one up and give it a shake.
“So, after Pearl the Cat whispered all this stuff into your ear, whose ear’d you whisper it into?”
He strokes the cat a few times and says, “Troubadour’s for one, and then there was Hismajesty’s daddy for a while.”
“But, Troubadour's merlin was Stanley Nemecec.”
“That’d be me.”
“But then...what’re you doing here?”
“And what’s wrong with here?” he wants to know.
“Well, nothing, it’s just not merlining. S’posing you were — are — the great Stanley Nemecec — why’d you quit?”
“Well, there’s no simple answer to that one. First, there was the death of Hismajesty the First, who was more to me than just a sovereign lord; he was a friend. And then there was Kaymart and the Farm, and the green things tuggin' at my old heart-strings. And there were kids — Kaymart’s apprentices — who needed a full-time father-figure, so she said. I told the young Majesty he oughta find hisself a younger merlin and recommended an apprentice of mine for the job. That’d be Mad Jin Gao. I suspect he’s doin' a fair job of it. Haven't heard any complaints from His M, and His M the Second being the son of His M the First, I reckon I would, if there was a problem. There, that satisfy your Alice bone?”
I'm torn. I don’t know whether to scoff or be very impressed. I decide to be impressed. Bags may seem like a crazy old man, but I’d been with him long enough by now to believe that crazy is just something he does so folks will size him up all wrong.
Needless to say, I am taking notes.
Tenth: Rescued?
It’s nearly dusk when Squint shows up again, bringing food and a bottle of cola. The food isn’t much — some scraggy veggies and undercooked potatoes — but I am truly amazed by the cola. I didn’t think the Potreros had any of the niceties of civilized life left. They’ve always seemed sort of down on technology. I used to think Lord E was just hogging it for himself, but it sure hasn’t seemed that way up till now.
Squint waves the bottle at me. “You rate bigtime, merlin,” he tells me. “This is from the Alcaldé’s private, personal and very secret stock. I don’t even get this stuff unless I done something mega.”
“Take a swig,” I offer, seeing another way to suck up.
He swigs quite adequately before passing me the bottle. Then he watches me while I eat and drink.
“So,” he says after a while of making my skin crawl, “so, you eat regular food.... How come you don’t eat fish emulsion and bone meal like your bro?”
“Appearances,” I fabricate. “I wanna maintain a people shape, I gotta eat people food. Otherwise, weird shit happens. It’s part of the magic.”
Squint is interested. “Weird shit, huh? Like what?”
“Like, you know, my hair goes green and spiky, my skin gets barky, my toes start wriggling around, looking for dirt.”
“Whoa,” says Squint.
“Pretty scary,” I agree.
“So, where’d you learn your stuff? Turning into people, etal.”
“Oh, uh...the Wiz.”
For the first time, he looks like he maybe doesn’t believe me. “How does a tree get into the Wiz? Somebody plant you in there?”
“Sort of. You see, the last merlin of Embarcadero was a normal guy. He had a Tree...me. When he came to the end of his long and illustrious career, he had no apprentices that suited him. So, he created himself an apprentice via transmogrification.”
It’s scary how easy this stuff comes out of me sometimes.
I can tell by Squint’s expression that I’ve lost him, but he doesn’t let on, really, just nods like, uh-huh, sure, I got it. “So,” he says, turning his nod to Doug, “he’s like your apprentice, then, huh? You gonna do the same thing with him, when you start creakin'?”
“Yeah,” I say, and take another swig of cola.
My eyes wander up over Squint’s head to the darkening skylight. A face is peering in at me through the grimy glass — Firescape’s face. I gulp, nearly choke myself, and hand Squint the bottle.
“Here, have some more,” I say, but it’s hard to hear myself over the racket my blood is making pounding around in my head.
While he’s swigging, eyes closed, I glance up again at Firescape. She makes a little sign. Get rid of him.
Yeah. Like I haven’t already considered this myself.
Squint hands me back the bottle — one swallow left. I kill it and give him the empty, though I don’t s’pose they recycle over here.
“Tell Lord E thanks for the special treatment.”
Squint actually grins at me. “You’re a special dude.” He doesn’t leave though. Just keeps grinning and squinting. “So, you get all your schtick from the Wiz, too, huh?”
Jeez. “Everybody gets their schtick from the Wiz...or one of the little Wizlets. Where else?”
“Everybody? Including Hismajesty?”
“Sure,” I say, and try not to sound testy. I can see Firescape hovering up there, waiting. “All the kids go there. They start off in the AV Shrine with Videoschool. Then they do books. When they’re old enough, they find their calling and go with it.”
“Calling?”
I twitch nervously. “You know — where they fit in. What they want to do. The Service, Firebrigade, teacher, butcher, baker, candle-maker, artist, merlin...court jester. Whatever.”
Squint frowns. “Those’re callings? You got people who just do that stuff? I mean, like a kid says, ‘I wanna paint pictures’ or ‘I wanna bake stuff’ and then they just do it?”
“Yeah, well, they get the inside on it from the Wiz and when they’re ready, they do it.”
“Why?”
Why? Duh. “‘Cause they like to do it and it needs to get done. Somebody’s got to do it, right?”
Squint scratches his head. “Hismajesty says, huh?”
“It needs to get done,” I repeat, not getting why this guy is so dense, “or Embarcadero don’t work.” I don’t feel quite so unworthy to call myself a merlin, all of a sudden. “Look, Merlin Squint, I’d love to jaw all night, but I’m really dragged and the TOD wishes to consult with me about some stuff.”
Squint’s left eye pops almost open. “He told you that?”
I nod.
“Just now?”
I nod.
“I didn’t hear nothin'.”
“He only speaks to one man,” I say, and point to my chest.
“I get it. You understand him ‘cause you’
re a tree, too.”
I nod.
“Jeez. Can I watch?”
“No way. Communications between a merlin and his Tree are privileged.”
“Huh?”
“He’s shy.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Well, any guy who eats through his feet.” He shrugs. “S'cuse me.”
At last! I look up as Squint vacates and see Firescape giving me the thumbs up.
“Uh...one more thing, Merlin Taco,” Squint says from the doorway.
I gulp, jerk my head back down. “Uh, yeah?”
“Where’d you get your Tree?”
“The Farm.”
“The Farm. That’s that park across the Border, right? Where the old dude and dudette hang?”
I nod.
“Weird couple of ducks. Always digging around in the dirt — feeding the trees, I guess.” His eyes get real big and he points at Doug, all reverent. “Wow, like that one, huh?”
“Yeah, yeah, like that one.”
“Course, you can’t get the big ones out of the ground, I bet. I mean, they can’t, like, get up and move or nothin'.”
“No,” I agree, about to cry. “Not usually.”
He scratches his beard, nods. Stands there for another minute. I want to scream and Doug is quivering like, well, like a tree, I guess.
Squint squints one last time, then leaves.
By now little sparklies are swarming around inside my eyes. But I hear Firescape above me, tapping on the skylight and I look up. Through the swarm of sparklies she signs me to move back out of the way. I do, and the next thing I hear is the crunch of breaking glass.
In no appreciable time, Firescape is standing in front of me and I’m wondering if I should hug her. She doesn’t wait for me to decide. She takes things into her own hands — or arms, as the case may be.
“Taco Del, you lamebrain!” she murmurs lovingly (I hope). “You gotta screw loose, or what? I couldn’t believe-! When Geranium told me.... You yutz!”
She gives me this big, outrageous kiss, right on the lips. Hard. Then she socks my jaw. Also hard.
“I love you,” I say, which hurts, but who cares?
Her nose wrinkles. “And you tell me I gotta be careful. C’mon. Grab the TOD and let’s scramble.”
Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny Page 9
