Magic Street

by Orson Scott Card

  He sat on the bench between the elevators for the rest of the shift. When Miz Smitcher came to him and woke him, the baby was still in his arms, and still alive. And sure enough, even though a different desk lady had lots of things to sign at the desk when they got there, none of them gave Miz Smitcher permission to turn the baby over to the hospital. She had to take the baby home.

  "All right then," said Miz Smitcher, "if I'm going to be his foster mother, I'm going to name him."

  "Might as well," said the new desk lady. "Got to call him something."

  "Mack," she said.

  "First name or last?" asked the desk lady, poised to write something on a form.

  "Short for something?"

  "That's the whole name. The whole first name."

  "Last name Smitcher?" asked the desk lady.

  "No way in hell," said Miz Smitcher. "Bad enough I'm stuck with Willie Joe's name, I'm not going to impose it on a poor little baby who with any luck will never meet him. Last name Street, that was my name when I was growing up. My daddy's and mama's name."

  "Mack Street," said the desk lady.

  "Just like that?" asked Miz Smitcher. "Don't need permission?"

  "There's countries where you can't give a baby a name without the government's okay, but here, you just pick a name."

  "What if this baby already had a name?"

  "The person named him went and left him in a field somewhere," said the desk lady. "I'm betting there's no birth certificate. He still had amniotic fluid on him, the doctor said. He was born and laid in that grass and that was it. So this is the first name he ever had, count on it."

  Miz Smitcher turned to Ceese. "What do you think? Mack Street okay?"

  "Mack's an okay name," said Ceese. "Better than LeRoy or Raymo," he said.

  "I agree with you there."

  "Way better than Cecil."

  "Cecil's a good name," said Miz Smitcher. "Every Cecil I knew was a fine man."

  Not all. Not if you knew the sick crap that was going through my head this afternoon.

  "But we got a Cecil in the neighborhood," said Miz Smitcher. "Near as I can tell, we got no other Mack."

  "Mack Street is a good name," said Ceese.

  And then it was done. Papers signed. And in a few minutes, Ceese was sitting in the car beside Miz Smitcher, holding little Mack Street in his arms.

  They went home by way of a Kmart, where Miz Smitcher bought a baby seat and some cans of formula and some baby bottles and baby clothes and disposable diapers. "Stupid waste of money when the baby's going to live with somebody else in a couple of days," she said.

  "What you say?"

  "Nothing," said Ceese.

  "I know what you said."

  "Then why did you ask?"

  "Wanted to see if you had the balls to say it twice."

  "Keep him," said Ceese. "You know you want to."

  "Just because you want to doesn't mean everybody else does. He's an ugly little baby anyway, don't you think?"

  Ceese just stood there watching while she finished belting the car seat into place. By the time she was done, she was dripping with sweat. "Give him to me now," she said.

  Ceese handed the baby in to her.

  "More trouble than you're worth, that's what you are," she cooed to the baby. "Use up all my savings just to put food in one end and out the other."

  Ceese looked out across the parking lot toward the street. Under the bright streetlights there was a homeless man standing on the curb, watching him, or at least looking toward Kmart.

  Ceese heard again the thing that must have made him turn and look: the sound of a motorcycle engine revving.

  A black-clad woman bent over the handlebars of a black motorcycle that rode along the street.

  She wasn't looking where she was going, she had her head turned toward Kmart, and even though there was no way to see her eyes, Ceese knew exactly who she was and what she was looking at.

  The homeless man stepped into the street in front of her.

  She screeched to a stop, the front wheel of her bike between the homeless man's legs.

  The homeless man flipped her off.

  She flipped him back.

  He didn't move.

  She walked her bike backward a couple of steps, then revved up and drove around him, flipping him off again.

  He double-flipped her back, then strode back to the sidewalk.

  "Home with you," said Ceese.

  "Then get in the car."

  He did. By the time they got to the street, neither the motorcycle nor the homeless man were anywhere to be seen.

  At home, Mother was strangely nice about his being away all afternoon and half the evening, and when Dad got back late from work, he didn't say much, either. "Well, it's nice that Miz Smitcher will have a child to look after," Dad said.

  "She didn't sound too happy about it," said Ceese. "I'm going to be helping her by tending him during the day."

  "That'll keep you out of trouble," said Dad, laughing a little. And then it was on to other topics with Mom, as if finding a baby happened every day in their neighborhood.

  It was all sort of anticlimactic. There was nobody to tell about the motorcycle woman or the homeless man. Nobody who even wanted to hear more about finding the baby. It was all just... done.

  Over with. It'll just be Miz Smitcher's little boy growing up next door, and everybody will forget that I found him and diapered his little butt and fed him and didn't throw him down the stairs.

  He ate a late supper and went to bed and lay awake for a long while. The last thing he thought was: I wonder if Miz Smitcher is going to smother little Mack in his sleep.

  Chapter 6

  SWIMMER

  Mack Street grew up knowing the story of how Ceese found him in a grocery bag and Miz Smitcher took him in. How could he avoid it, with neighborhood kids calling him by nicknames like

  "Bag Boy" and "Safeway" and "Plasticman."

  Miz Smitcher wouldn't talk to him about it, even when he asked her direct questions like, Why don't you let me call you Mama? and, Was I born or did you buy me at the store? So he got the straight story from Ceese, who came over every afternoon at four-thirty to take care of him while Miz Smitcher went to work at the hospital.

  Mack would ask Ceese questions all the time, especially when Ceese was trying to do his homework, so Ceese made a rule: "You get one question a day, at bedtime."

  Mack would store up his questions all day trying to decide which one would be tonight's bedtime question. A lot of times he had one that he knew was great, the most important question ever, but by the time bedtime came around he had forgotten it.

  "You don't got to answer it now," said Mack. "Just write it down so I don't forget."

  "Write it down yourself."

  "I can't," said Mack. "I'm only four."

  "If you can't remember it and you can't write it down, that's not my fault," said Ceese. "Now let me do my homework."

  So that night, Mack's question was, "Will you teach me to read?"

  "That's not a question," said Ceese.

  Mack thought for a minute. What was a question, anyway? "I don't know the answer and you do."

  "That's a request."

  "If that one doesn't count, then I get to ask you another."

  "Hit me."

  Mack hit him.

  "Ow!" said Ceese. "When somebody say 'Hit me' it means 'Go ahead.' "

  "What would you say if you wanted somebody to hit you?"

  "Nobody wants somebody to hit them. And that's your question, and that's my answer, go to sleep."

  "You're mean!" called out Mack as Ceese went back into the living room to watch TV till he fell asleep on the couch, which is where he spent every night that he tended Mack.

  "I'm the meanest!" called back Ceese. "Miz Smitcher specially picked me to tend you cause I'm the most wicked boy in Baldwin Hills!"

  That was why Mack Street started teaching himself how to read when he was four years old, by c
opying out letters, not knowing what they said, and then asking Miz Smitcher to tell him what the letters spelled. She could always answer when he copied them down in the same order as on the page, but when he changed the order she'd say, "It doesn't say anything, baby." Finally she gave up and taught him the sounds of the letters, and pretty soon he was sounding out words for himself.

  But by that time he had already asked Ceese the most important and worrisome questions.

  How come they sometimes call me Ralph's? "Cause it's the name of a grocery store. Like Safeway."

  Well, why do they call me grocery-store names? "That's a second question so you better save it till tomorrow."

  Next night, he remembered and got the answer. "Cause when you was found, Mack, you was a naked little baby in a plastic grocery bag, covered with ants and lying in a field."

  The next night: Who found me? "Me and Raymo, only Raymo wanted to kill you like a cat and I wanted to save you alive."

  Bit by bit Mack got the story from Ceese. He wasn't sure he believed it, so one of his questions was, "Is that all true? Cause if it ain't, when I'm bigger I'll beat the shit out of you."

  "Who taught you to say shit?" demanded Ceese.

  "Is that your question for tonight?" said Mack.

  "My answer to your question, before you said a nasty word that Miz Smitcher going to wash out your mouth with soap, my answer is Yes."

  But thinking about what Miz Smitcher might do drove out what he'd asked. "What was my question?"

  "That's another question, which I don't have to answer, nasty-mouth baby."

  "Shit shit shit shit shit."

  "I'm going to get the stapler and fasten your tongue to your nose and see if you want to say any more nasty words."

  "If you do I'll bleed on your shirt!"

  "You bleed on my shirt, I'll pee on your toys."

  Mack loved Ceese more than any other human on earth.

  In good weather, which was most afternoons, Ceese took Mack out to play in the neighborhood before dinner. Ceese was way older than any of the children Mack played with, so he always brought along a book so he could read, but then most of the time Ceese would get involved in the kid games they played, sometimes cause there was a fight and Ceese had to break it up, but mostly cause kid games were more fun than the books Ceese had to read for school.

  "Mack, if you happen to live to be my age and somebody tells you you going to have to read The Scarlet Letter I recommend you just kill yourself right off and get it over with."

  "Ask me at bedtime."

  Mack didn't know he was having a great childhood. Ceese tried to tell him one time. About how rich kids grew up in big empty mansions and never saw anybody except servants and nannies. And poor kids grew up in the ghetto where people were always shooting bullets into their house so they never slept at night and they got beat up every day and stabbed if they went out of their house. And kids from in-between families lived in apartments and never had anybody to play with but mean ugly kids at day care.

  "But you, Mack, you got a whole neighborhood full of kids who know who you are. You're famous, Mack, just for being alive."

  Mack didn't know what famous was. So what if everybody knew who he was? He knew them right back. Was everybody famous?

  Okay, so everybody thought he was special or weird because he was found instead of being born or adopted. But that wasn't what made Mack different, he knew.

  It was the cold dreams.

  He tried to talk about it to Ceese one time. "I had a really bad cold dream last night."

  "A what?"

  "A cold dream."

  "What's that?"

  "Where you dream and it's really real and you want it so bad, and when you wake up from it you're shivering so hard you think it's going to break your teeth."

  "I never had a dream like that," said Ceese.

  "You didn't? I have them sometimes when I'm not even asleep."

  "That's just crazy. You can't have a dream when you're not asleep."

  "It comes in front of my eyes and I just stop and watch and when it's done I'm shivering so hard I can't even stand up."

  "You crazy, Mack Street."

  Ceese must have told Miz Smitcher because the next day she took him to a doctor at the hospital who stuck things all over his head and then a bunch of metal rods made squiggly lines on a moving paper and the doctor just smiled and smiled at him but he looked all serious when he talked to Miz Smitcher and then they glanced at him and closed the door and kept talking where he couldn't hear.

  But the cold dreams scared him. They were so intense. And strange. His regular dreams, even his nightmares, they were about things in his life. His friends. Miz Smitcher. Ceese. Grocery bags and ants. But the cold dreams would be about grownups most of the time, and more than once it happened that he'd see a grownup for the first time in his life, and it would be somebody from a cold dream.

  "Miz Smitcher," said Mack, "I know that man."

  "You never met him before in your life."

  "He all the time sees this woman naked."

  She was furious. "Don't you say such things! He's a deacon at church and he does not see women naked and how would you know, any way?"

  "It just came into my head," said Mack, which was true.

  "You're too young to understand what you're saying, which is why I don't beat you till your butt turns into hamburger."

  "Better than my butt turning into a chocolate milkshake."

  "How about beating your butt into french fries?"

  "That doesn't even make sense," said Mack.

  "Don't go talking about men seeing women naked," said Miz Smitcher.

  "I was just saying that I know that man."

  "You don't know him. I know him and he's a good man."

  But then came a day when Miz Smitcher sent him out of the room when Ceese's mama came over and the two of them talked all serious and after Ceese's mama left Miz Smitcher came in to Mack's room and sat down on the floor and looked him in the eye.

  "You tell me, Mack Street, how you happened to know about Deacon Landry and Juanettia Post."

  "Who are they?"

  "You met Deacon Landry and you told me you saw him looking at a naked woman."

  From the look in her eye, Mack knew that this was something really bad, and he wasn't about to admit to anything. "I don't remember," he said.

  "I don't know, Miz Smitcher," said Mack. "I don't know nothing about naked women. That's nasty stuff."

  She searched his eyes but whatever she was looking for, she didn't find it. "Never mind," said Miz Smitcher. "You shouldn't be thinking about naked women anyway, I'm sorry I brought it up."

  But she paused in the door of his room and looked at him like he was something strange, and he decided right then that he'd never tell anybody about those cold dreams, not ever again.

  And he probably would have kept that promise if it wasn't for Tamika Brown.

  Tamika was older than him and he only knew her because of her little brother Quon who was Mack's age, and they played together all the time cause the Browns only lived a few doors down.

  Mack even went into their house sometimes because Quon's mama wasn't one of those women who wouldn't have a grocery-bag baby in their house. But he didn't see Tamika except when she was just going out the door or running around getting ready to go out the door. And she was always wearing a bright red swimming suit because that's what Tamika did—she was a swimmer.

  Quon said she was in competitions all the time, and she outswam and outdived girls two years older than her and people said she was a mermaid or a fish, she was so natural and quick in the water. "She just lives to swim."

  And one time Miz Brown told a story about when Tamika was a baby. "My husband Curtis and I had her in the pool, with those bubble things on her arms, and she wasn't even two years old yet, so we were both holding on to her. But she was kicking so strong, like a frog, that I thought, I'm just holding her back, and Curtis must have thought the same thin
g at that very moment because we both just let go, and she takes off like a motorboat through the water and we knew right then that she was born to swim. Didn't have to teach her none of the strokes, she just knew them. Curtis says there's a scientist who thinks humans evolved from sea apes, and the way Tamika took to the water, I could believe it, she was born to swim."

  So when Tamika showed up in one of Mack's dreams, he would have thought it was just a regular dream about people he knew. Except that he woke up shivering so bad he could hardly climb out of bed and go to the toilet without falling over from the shaking.

  In the dream she was Tamika, but she was also a fish, and she swam through the water faster than any of the other fish. They swam around her when she was holding still, but then she'd give a flick with her back and just like that, they'd be far behind her. She swam to the surface and flipped herself out and flew through the air and then dived back in and the water felt delicious to her, and she didn't ever, ever have to come up because she was a fish, not a girl. She didn't have legs, she had big flippers, and in the water there was nothing to slow her down or hold her back.

  "Why would a girl want to be a fish?" Mack asked Ceese one day.

  "I know a lot of girls like to eat a fish," said Ceese. "Maybe some want to meet a fish. And if they cooking they got to heat a fish."

  "Playing cards they might want to cheat a fish," said Ceese.

  But Mack was done with the game. "I'm not joking."

  "Whazz wet?—that's how you greet a fish."

  "Tamika Brown, she really wants to be a fish."

  "She likes to swim," said Ceese. "That doesn't mean she's crazy."

  "She wants to get down in the water and never have to come up."

  "Or maybe you crazy," said Ceese. "Give it gummy worms, that's how you treat a fish."

  "I dreamed about her," said Mack "No arms and legs, just fins and a tail, living in the water."

  "You way too young to be having that kind of dream," said Ceese, and now he was laughing so hard he could hardly talk.

  "I'm not joking."