Black Magic

by Russell James

  She was his mother.

  Chapter Five

  Felix Arroyo yanked the pull cord on the pole saw. It sputtered to life and settled into a lumpy growl. He released the safety and the cutting chain at the end of the nine-foot pole spun up to speed. He swung the blade far up over his head and aimed it at the shattered branch at the top of the orange tree. The chain churned through the branch and it crashed to the ground. Felix flicked off the saw and tossed it into the back of his pickup. If only a broken branch were his sole problem.

  He tipped his battered straw cowboy hat back and wiped the sweat from his dark brow with a rag. He stood in the shade between two rows of navel orange trees in his orchard. His wife, Carlina, came up behind him and slid her arm around his waist.

  “Look at you, scowling at the trees,” she scolded. “Like the tiny fruit is their fault.”

  Felix plucked a sickly green sphere from the orange tree’s branch. At this point in the year it should have been quadruple the size and bright orange.

  “We left the violence and corruption of Mexico to grow our own fruit,” Felix said. “Now frost and rain and citrus chancre conspire against us.”

  “We’ve had tough years before,” Carlina said. She was short and plump as an olive. Even in these dark times she exuded her trademark glass-half-full outlook. “We lived on less in Juarez.”

  “In Juarez it was just the two of us,” Felix said. He pointed a thumb at the peeling white clapboard farmhouse where their two children, Angela and Ricardo, were. “Now it is four.”

  “And God will provide,” Carlina said. “This fruit will bounce back in no time. The Lord can work miracles.”

  That’s what it will take, Felix thought. And he was certain that with the world such as it was, God did not waste miracles on things so small.

  “I’m sure He will,” Felix lied.

  He gave his wife a hug and they went back to the farmhouse.

  The house was just far enough away from CR 12 that the dust passing trucks kicked up settled before it reached the front porch. The house stood on short, concrete-block pillars to let the air flow under the floors and draw off some of the Florida swelter. Two ancient oaks shaded the homestead’s sides. The realtor who sold Felix the property had assumed the new owner would bulldoze the old place and put up something new. But, while a house without air conditioning that still boasted a stained claw-footed bathtub wouldn’t cut it with most people, it was a mansion to a dirt-poor kid from Juarez and his new wife from a Mexico City barrio.

  The two entered through the back door into the kitchen. The omnipresent smell of cayenne pepper and hot chilies filled the air, though the stove sat cold and empty. A ceiling fan fought a slow, lazy battle against the home’s retained heat.

  “Where’s Ricardo?” Felix asked. It was Saturday and the thirteen-year-old should have been out with him in the orchard.

  “He was in his room,” Carlina said. “And it’s ‘Ricky’ now, remember?”

  Felix shook his head. “So Ricardo, my father’s name, isn’t good enough?”

  “Felix,” Carlina cooed. She stroked his shoulder. “He thinks ‘Ricky’ sounds tougher.”

  “He thinks it sounds less Mexican.”

  “You rebelled at his age,” Carlina said, “and in worse ways.”

  Felix went down the hall and pushed his son’s door open. Posters of bands he had never heard of covered the walls. Strange shapes flickered back and forth as the screen saver played on his son’s desktop computer. The boy lay on his bed, eyes closed, earbuds from his smartphone shoved in his ears. Felix was sure the new phones made you stupider, not smarter. Ricky’s shaggy black hair swayed back and forth as his head bobbed to the beat of some unheard tune. He wore a solid black T-shirt and baggy jeans with square holes ripped into the knees.

  Felix banged on the door without acknowledgement. He walked in and gave the bedpost a kick. Ricky opened one eye and looked at his father. He extracted one earbud. A raspy version of a rap song eked out.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  Felix made a gun with his fingers, pointed at the phone and dropped his thumb. Ricky sighed and hit pause.

  “We need to clear brush in the orchard,” he said. “Tomorrow after church.”

  Church services were a reference point only for Ricky. He hadn’t joined his parents at services since the spring, after he’d started hanging out with the Outsiders, as they called themselves. Ricky rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, sure. Mañana.” He reset his earbud and tuned out the world.

  Felix stifled his frustration and walked out. Somehow his values of hard work, God and family had not penetrated his son. As recently as last year, they had worked together in the grove, harvested oranges with smiles and laughter. But now…

  Carlina waited for him in the hallway.

  “It’s a phase,” she said. “He’ll grow out of it. His hormones will calm down and reason will return.”

  “He needs to be quick about it,” Felix said. “If I’d spoken to my father that way when I was thirteen…”

  “You’d have never made it to fourteen,” Carlina said in a sing-song monotone.

  Felix gave her an irked look. She took his hand.

  “But you aren’t your father. Give him time.”

  Felix shook his head and then kissed her cheek.

  “I’ll give him until tomorrow, how’s that?”

  “A start,” she said.

  They walked back out into the grove, hand in hand.

  Chapter Six

  Mañana was mañana as far as Ricky was concerned. He’d worry about working the grove when he needed to worry about it. He had other things to do hoy.

  As soon as his father left his room, he checked the message that had arrived on his phone. Two words from Zach. “Scorpion blasting.” Excellent.

  Ricky slipped out the front door and hopped on his bike. Halfway down the driveway, his little sister Angela darted out in front of him, hand raised like a traffic cop. Ricky hit the brakes and skidded sideways in the sand.

  “Damn, Ange,” he snapped. “You trying to get run over?”

  Angela’s big brown eyes went wide and her mouth opened into a silent, mortified O.

  “D-word!” she said. She was five and had accumulated a list of words the Sunday school had banned. “Very bad. Where are you going?”

  “Zach’s, if it is any of your business, and it isn’t.”

  She threw her long black hair over her shoulders and raised her chin in defiance.

  “Then you have to pay the toll.”

  Ricky knew the going rate in their running game. He pulled out a pack of gum and put one stick in her outstretched palm.

  “And one for the cursing,” she said.

  “Now you are just a robber,” he said. He put another stick in her hand.

  Angela stepped aside and unwrapped the gum. Ricky rolled by her and ruffled her hair.

  “Next time you’ll get run over,” he said.

  “Mommy will be mad,” she mumbled through a mouthful of gum.

  He pedaled out to the highway, away from the decrepit old embarrassment of a house his parents condemned him to inhabit, away from the stupid trees that his father treated better than his children. He rode along the narrow shoulder for a few miles until he got to Poulsen Acres.

  When TV was still broadcast exclusively over the air in black and white, Poulsen Acres had been the place to live, a grid of small concrete-block starter homes with vertical-slat windows that closed with a crank and a carport for your Ford Edsel. Poulsen Construction stopped building tiny homes about the same time Ford canned the Edsel, both items eclipsed by models that kept up with the times. The unfinished neighborhood had degenerated into an assembly of shabby rentals. Zach Vreeland’s house was no exception. The carport was so swaybacked no one dared park a car underneath it anymore.

  The front door was open with just a punctured screen door to fend off the mosquitoes. Ricky walked in without knocking. Parents were never home
before evening at the Vreeland house. Zach Vreeland sprawled on the bumpy living room couch, feet braced against the lip of a coffee table. He wore the unofficial uniform of the group, jeans with missing knees and a dark Tshirt. His advertised a band called Metal Maidens today. His cheeks were covered with acne, the red, lumpy painful kind you couldn’t pop to make go away. He kept his shaggy brown hair long to cover it. A seventh-grade academic retention made him a year older than the rest of the Outsiders.

  Zach’s fingers danced over the game controller in his hands. His eyes were glued to the widescreen HD TV that hung on the wall. The Vreelands might eat mac and cheese for dinner, but they had a killer TV. Animated soldiers ran across the screen and blasted enormous alien scorpions with laser rifles. The TV volume was maxed and each blast of the soldier’s weapons filled the room like overhead thunder.

  Barry Leopold sat next to Zach. The pudgy kid wore the kind of owlish glasses that might have looked cool on Harry Potter, but only served to amplify the boy’s eyes into a permanent look of wonder. His mother cut his dark hair as if an inverted salad bowl had been the guide. The holes in his jeans knees were cut so recently that they had yet to sprout white cotton fuzz around the edges. Barry mashed the controller in his hands, desperate to save his soldier, who was taking serious hits from the scorpions’ stingers.

  “Dudes,” Ricky said as he stood behind the couch.

  On screen, a scorpion impaled Barry’s alter-ego soldier and then slapped him down against the ground a half dozen times. The soldier flashed red and dropped its weapon.

  “Son of a bitch!” Barry said. It was funny to hear him curse, as out of place as the sound of screaming guitars coming out of a 1930s cabinet radio. The effort to sound cool made him seem even less so. “Now look what you did, Ricky. You broke my concentration and I’m dead.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Ricky said. “You were kicking that thing’s ass until just this second, and I screwed it all up.”

  “You’re dead, loser,” Zach said to Barry. He hit the pause button and the action froze on the screen. “Switch out.”

  “But Ricky—”

  Zach picked a BB pistol up off the coffee table, pointed it at Barry’s meaty shoulder with only the vaguest attempt at aiming. He pulled the trigger. The gun popped.

  “Hey, what the hell?” Barry said. He pulled up his sleeve and exposed a tiny red welt.

  “Low pressure, woosie,” Zach said with derision. “You got the padding to take it.”

  Barry dropped the controller in defeat and left the couch. Paco Mason took Barry’s place.

  Paco was a wiry little kid with a nose like a ski slope. The frayed white denim around the holes in his jeans stood up like brush bristles and swayed with each stuttering step. Perpetually ADHD, all his movements had a jitter to them. His eyes lit up as he took the controller.

  “This is the ultimate, dude,” he said. “Let’s waste some aliens.”

  The game restarted and Paco’s fingers flailed across the controller. His soldier looked like a marionette controlled by a meth head. Volume of fire overcame its random nature and he racked up points.

  The four of them had banded together as the Outsiders over the last few months. They all had issues that kept them out of the mainstream. Zach had been at the bottom of the pecking order since he’d been held back. Now kids his age looked at him as if he was retarded and the younger kids in his class thought he was a freak since he was so much further into puberty. Ricky was poor and his Mexican parents farmed. Paco was jittery as hell, and always in trouble for something, usually involving fire.

  But Barry had it the worst. Short, fat and spectacled, he might as well have had a big red bully bull’s-eye tattooed on his forehead. Asthma kept him out of PE and sidelined in the schoolyard. Watching one of Barry’s panicked grasps for his inhaler was practically an invitation to punch him. His horribly overprotective mother was a constant source of humiliation. If he hadn’t fallen in with the Outsiders, even they would have wailed on him after school.

  Barry sat to one side and massaged his left shoulder. He could not hide the anxiety on his face. Ricky sat next to him. Barry moved his hand from his shoulder and straightened up in his chair. Something exploded on the TV screen and the boys on the couch cheered.

  “Don’t sweat Zach,” Ricky said. “He was raised by wolves.”

  “It didn’t hurt,” Barry said, his voice an octave too low.

  “You know you need to shoot the green diamond on their heads,” Ricky offered.

  “Huh?”

  “The aliens. Nail that green diamond and they go down in one shot instead of having to slice them to pieces.”

  Barry’s eyes widened to fill his glasses. “For real?”

  “For real. Try it next time. Take my turn.”

  “Okay,” Barry said with a grateful look in his eyes.

  Ricky propped his feet up on the table. Zach shot the stinger off an alien. All was right with the world.

  Chapter Seven

  Downtown Citrus Glade was dead as road kill the next morning and not just because it was Sunday.

  Back when Apex Sugar had the mill going, it was a different story. The six blocks that centered on Main and Tangelo bustled with activity. Hundreds of workers lived in Citrus Glade. The town provided all they needed, including movie theaters, car dealerships and a thriving downtown square. Fourth of July parades were good for two dozen floats.

  But that Citrus Glade was gone. Like an aging actress with a fizzled career, the town tried to keep up appearances. But just as thicker makeup cannot cover the ravages of time, fresh paint on the town’s central water tower and a politician’s stirring speeches could not mask the town’s internal economic rot. The tax base evaporated like summer rain on blacktop. Services dwindled. Stores closed. Many moved.

  Downtown now was a shell of its former self. All the two-story brick buildings were there, the sidewalks and streetlamps ready to guide customers from shop to shop. But empty storefronts dominated the square. The movie theater marquee had shed all its neon finery and the “Roxy” lettering underneath it had long peeled away. Glade Hardware made a valiant stand at one corner, Gentry’s Drug at another. Harper’s Video rented DVDs and repaired electronics and thus had cornered the market on obsolete business models. A few small businesses populated the rest of downtown, scrapbooking and antique shops that only broke even with free rent.

  That morning, Zach Vreeland pedaled his bike down the empty street, past the parking meters the few visitors roundly ignored. His knees poked through the big square holes in his jeans with each pump of the pedals. The ninth grader had about outgrown the BMX bike, but a new one wasn’t one of his parents’ priorities

  He’d mastered his new Scorpion Assault video game to the point of boredom. He’d texted the rest of the Outsiders that he’d be here. Now he just awaited a four-person flash mob.

  He hopped the curb and did a lazy slalom down the uneven sidewalk. He jerked the bike to a halt in front of what used to be Everyday Shoes. The empty shop sported a repainted black facade with a glossy shine. The old tiles in the recessed doorway glowed like they had when first laid in the 1950s. A CLOSED sign hung in the door. Sunlight shimmered on the polished display window. Black Gothic letters with gold trim crossed the glass in a wide arc. They spelled:

  MAGIC SHOP

  Underneath in smaller print it said:

  ILLUSIONS AND PRESTIDIGITATION

  Zach’s reflection in the glass disappeared as he pulled his long brown hair from his pimply face and leaned in for a closer view. A new wall behind the window blocked the view to the rest of the store. Two old posters flanked the middle. The one on the right had the word Houdini across the top and a painting of the great magician hanging upside down in a straight jacket inside a water-filled box. The poster on the left was a drawing of a man at a table in a bejeweled turban, left hand around a crystal ball like it was an old friend at a dinner party. He stared straight out from the sheet with a mesmerizing gaze.
Lettering at the top read The Amazing Alexander of the East and Futures Foretold.

  Only one item sat in the display area. Three joined silver hoops hung on a black post. They gleamed against a black velvet background.

  Zach thought that was weird. He remembered, when he was a kid and Dad had money to burn, he had a birthday party. Some guy in a clown suit came to perform. Honestly, the guy in the white face paint and big shoes gave him a case of the creeps. His balloon animals all looked like twisted-together hot dogs. But the clown had a set of magic rings. As the birthday boy, Zach got to touch them to prove that they were solid. Then in front of everyone, the clown juggled the silver rings. They flashed in the sun like some Hollywood special effect. Then fast as lightning, he linked and unlinked the rings. At the time Zach thought it was magic.

  On the other side of the door, a hand snaked into view and flipped the door sign over to OPEN.

  It’s ten-twelve a.m., he thought. Who the hell opens a store at ten-twelve? On a Sunday?

  Nothing else was happening out here. He leaned his bike against the front of the store and walked in. A bell tinkled to announce his entrance.

  The shop was empty. The walls were painted black. A layered curtain of beads covered the doorway between the shop and a rear storage room.

  Lyle Miller sat on a vacant display counter. A huge brass cash register took up the other end. Lyle wore a solid red silk button-down shirt. He gave Zach a grin that made Zach think of a spider in a web, though he didn’t know why since spiders don’t smile.

  “C’mon in,” Lyle said. “Lyle Miller’s the name.”

  Zach gave him a quick snap of his head in return. “Zach.”

  “Welcome to the shop,” Lyle said.

  “Dude,” Zach said with a quick glance around, “you got nothing to sell.”

  Lyle slid off the counter and stepped to the front display window.

  “It’s called ‘just-in-time inventory’ in the business world,” Lyle said. “I only carry what I need to sell.”

  He reached in through a door in the back of the window display and pulled out the three rings. He looped one through his arm and it slid down to his elbow. He held the other two, one in each hand.