The Magician

by Sol Stein

  Ed and Lila both recognized him immediately. He saw them about the same time. Since he didn’t know who among the kids was in charge, he threaded through the dancers toward Ed. The rock blast from the corner stereo was deafening. Thomassy said practically into Japhet’s ear, “You’ve got to clear the place out fast.”

  “Why?”

  “Where’s the phonograph?”

  Ed pointed. Thomassy strode over to it, avoiding the dancers. Gently he picked the arm off the record. The dancers gradually stopped, though the colored lights continued to swirl.

  “What’s the matter?” said Ed.

  “Can I have your attention,” said Thomassy into the left-over babble. “There’s very little time. A group of men who are high on beer are overreacting to the letter in the paper today. They’re on the way over here right now, looking for trouble.”

  A red-headed boy clenched his fists.

  “Now, we don’t want any trouble,” said Thomassy.

  “We can take care of ourselves,” said the red-headed boy.

  “I know some of these men,” said Thomassy. “You can tell the police if you want, or you can clear out of here.”

  He noticed that some of the girls were heading for the door. “That’s good,” he said. “There’s been enough trouble in this town.”

  Thomassy took the red-headed kid by the arm, figuring that if he could get him moving, the rest would go too. He whispered something in the kid’s ear.

  “Gasoline?”

  “Maybe.”

  One girl said, “It’s crazy. Why would they do anything?”

  “Shut up,” said her frightened escort. There was a general move toward the back door.

  Thomassy didn’t like the way the Japhet kid was looking at him. He could get into real trouble if Urek and his friends found out who warned the kids.

  “Please,” said Thomassy, “trust me,” not knowing why they should trust him.

  But they did.

  He made sure they locked the front door before they left through the back. He turned the lights off himself, after someone had pointed to the switch box, which was around the corner near the small kitchen. He had to hurry one boy along who was slow about putting his records back into their jackets. When he was sure they were all out, he closed the back door.

  His heart still pounding, Thomassy found his way in the darkness around the side of the rec hall toward the front where he had left his car. He was about to cross the sidewalk to it when the three-car procession came around the corner almost directly at him. He stepped back into the shadows, hoping the men had not seen him.

  Chapter 22

  Behind the bushes, uncomfortable on haunches, Thomassy watched the cortege of cars stop, five doors swing open to let five men out, the distinctive, different slams of the car doors, the momentary huddle at the lead car as they looked at the darkened building, and then Paul Urek motioning them along.

  “What do they do in the dark?” said Scarlatti.

  “It’s usually lit up,” said Eldon.

  Paul Urek knocked on the door.

  It was Feeney, brave in company, who kicked in the small window. The sound of glass was music. The other four laughed, and it took only a second before they were battering the door, and the hinge gave.

  Urek lifted the bolt on the second hinge, and they were in.

  He flipped the light switch, expecting to see a mob of scared kids backing against the walls.

  The fucking place was empty.

  Thomassy, unused to squatting, was glad to stand. He edged around the bush. Something caught his left shoe, and he went forward, breaking his fall on both hands. He brushed away the dirt he could not see and careful not to trip again, found his way to the side window.

  The five faces, frozen in anger, at that moment broke their surprise. The men went into action, ripping down posters, spinning records like thin discuses across the room to split and shatter when the edges hit the far wall. Paint cans opened, they dipped and smeared LOVE AMERICA across the wall. Each streaked obscenities of his own devising, except Paul Urek, who waited till they had exhausted themselves, and wrote, neater than the others, across the wall facing the window through which Thomassy peered: KIDS ARE SHIT.

  As they closed their paint cans and assembled their things near the front door, Thomassy saw Eldon wipe his brush on the floor in the unmistakable shape of a swastika. Scarlatti and Eldon laughed. Then they were gone through the rectangle from which the front door swung.

  Three sets of sealed beams went on, the third car lighting the second, the second the first, and the first the road, as they drove off.

  Inside the building, Thomassy stepped over the torn posters on the floor to study the mess on the walls. He took the white, neatly folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and, knowing it would never be usable again, smeared the still-wet drawing on the floor in the hope of making it indecipherable.

  Chapter 23

  Lila answered the door, a finger to her lips, and motioned Ed toward the living room where the meeting was already under way. He sat down on the floor next to some of the other kids.

  The Motherwells had a hopeless proposition. They wanted to hit every door in town for a donation for redoing the new rec hall. It was dismissed on the grounds that it would take too long and that most people wouldn’t give anyway.

  Morey Ruff, who turned up a minute after Ed, jumped in with an offer of five bucks if ten of the other kids would match it. “We could buy the paint and do it ourselves in a weekend.”

  Frankel protested. Why should some pay and others not, when they all used the rec hall. He suggested a dollar each, but compulsory.

  Liz Crowell asked what about the kids who couldn’t afford it.

  “Everybody can afford a dollar,” said Frankel.

  “It’ll take too long,” said Morey Ruff.

  Ed didn’t know where the idea came from, but it came into his head while the others were talking, and his first instinct was to leave, to just excuse himself, say he wasn’t feeling well or something, and go. He listened some more. He hated committees. Nobody was taking the lead. There were now more proposals than people. The conversation was getting heated, and then Liz said, “Ed, you’re the only one who hasn’t spoken up. Do you have any ideas?”

  He wished Lila wasn’t in the room. “Well, I don’t know if you’ll like my idea.”

  “Can’t tell until you say it,” said Fred Frankel.

  Ed got up. You couldn’t speak sitting on the floor. He had an impulse to pace. He felt nervous, which was ridiculous. He put his hands on the back of Pat Toombs’s chair. “I think we ought to leave the rec hall as it is,” he said.

  There were half a dozen questions all at once, like how do you dance in a wreck like that, rain would come in the broken window, and so on.

  Pat Toombs turned around in her chair and said, “Why?”

  “Look,” said Ed, “I haven’t worked out all the details, but I think we ought to keep it as a museum.”

  They were all looking at him.

  “It’ll help us remember. Listen, they kept some of the Nazi camps as museums, but they cleaned them up first, which was a mistake. Don’t you think they ought to have roped off the grass at Kent State and put four dummies on the grass where the students fell? How else do people remember, unless you leave reminders.”

  He looked at their faces as his idea sank in.

  “I mean,” he said, “you can put a plastic sheet outside where the window’s broken to keep the rain out, but keep the broken glass as it is inside. Leave the torn posters hanging. Keep ‘Kids are shit.’”

  “Where’ll we dance?” asked Pat Toombs, looking up at him from the chair.

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to fix up another place, I guess.”

  There was another silence in which people avoided each other’s eyes, and then Kevin Mooney, who hadn’t spoken before said, “Wow, a museum.”

  “My father won’t like the idea,” said Ed, “but I’ll bet
anything it’ll have an effect on him.”

  Perhaps that was the conclusive argument because in their entire lexicon of teen-age strategies, the most difficult was to come up with something their parents couldn’t argue down.

  “I think it’s looking for trouble,” Lila said.

  “We’ve had the trouble,” said Ed. “This may be a way of avoiding trouble like that in the future.”

  There wasn’t much discussion. Lila voted against the proposal. Everyone else voted in favor.

  Chapter 24

  Ed Japhet knew he could not make the withdrawal without his father, and his father refused to accompany him to the bank. “It’s my money,” said Ed. “All you do is sign the slip.”

  Mr. Japhet couldn’t disagree about that. All the money Ed had saved from his allowance and later, sums he had made from delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, raking grass, and finally from giving magic performances for children’s birthday parties, had gone into the savings account. But the account had prudently been set up as a trust account so that Mr. Japhet would not be taxed on the interest that accrued.

  “A hundred and eighty dollars,” said Mr. Japhet, “is more than half of what you’ve saved in four years.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “You’ve got to learn to be cautious about money.”

  “I’m taking it out for a useful purpose.”

  “I consider karate lessons a dangerous purpose. I’d just as soon let you buy a gun with it.”

  “You can’t go to that school without knowing how to fight back.”

  “Take boxing lessons, then.”

  “Oh, Dad, you can’t box with kids that carry knives. You’re living in a dream world.”

  “You think everything was invented yesterday. We had hoodlums in school when I was a boy.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I stayed clear of trouble.”

  “I mean, when they came after you.”

  “I stayed out of confrontations.”

  “You mean you ran away.”

  Terence Japhet watched Ed leave the first unpleasant conversation they’d had in a long time and go up the stairs to his room. Was his son accusing him of having been a coward? Had he been? Never mind, he was convinced that the karate lessons were not a solution to anything. It was to him like the escalation of an arms race.

  At moments like this he wished that they had had a second child, because when one was being impossible, it was probably nice to be able to turn to another, to have an alternative. He had never been able to bear a quarrel that lasted beyond the speaking point.

  Mr. Japhet was conscious of each step as he drift-walked up to Ed’s room and patted the door with his fingertips. It took Ed a long time to answer. Then he said merely, “Yes?”

  “It’s me. Please open up.”

  Terence Japhet would never have opened the door of his son’s room unasked, any more than he would have walked into a friend’s house if the door were open.

  “Come on in,” said Ed, sighing.

  The walls were covered with a collection of bright posters, some in luminous oranges, yellows, and reds, a few garish and ugly to Mr. Japhet’s eye, and some certainly obscene by the standards of an earlier time. Mr. Japhet did not understand the attraction of posters to almost all of the young. Once a middle-class boy’s room might have had a triangular banner of the college the boy hoped most to go to, a framed photo of a girl, and that was all. Here it seemed that all visible space had been allotted to—what? Hendrix, dead. Joplin, dead. Zappa sitting on a toilet. The idiot boy from Mad magazine, wearing an Uncle Sam uniform and saying, “Who Needs YOU?” And on the facing wall, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on their strangely shaped cycles, smiling easily as they ride toward a gratuitous death. And on the door itself, an election poster which had once said under the candidate’s picture, “Make America Great,” and now, with the last word obliterated, said “Make America.”

  He was staring at the last one when Ed said, “You like that one, don’t you, Dad?”

  The posters had offended at first as they had been intended to. But Mr. Japhet had gotten used to them. Some he had actually liked from the beginning: the one in Miro-like colors that said “To Love Is Enough” and another one, “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” It would be an idea, thought Mr. Japhet, if the delegates at the United Nations made posters instead of speeches.

  “Yes,” he said.

  They sat at opposite ends of the bed, facing the same poster-filled wall and not each other.

  “I don’t want to be unreasonable,” said Mr. Japhet. “I was trying to make my point of view clear.”

  Ed wondered when his father would capitulate. He usually did.

  “Dad, I didn’t mean to imply that you were a sissy or anything. I’d just as soon duck trouble as face it myself.” He closed his eyes. “The trouble is, you just can’t anymore. It’s not just our school, it’s all over.”

  “Couldn’t you just try a lesson or two and see if you really do find it useful? Maybe a couple of lessons’ll give you more physical self-confidence, keep people from picking on you. I mean, why commit a hundred and eighty dollars at once?”

  “If you pay in advance, they give you your karate suit, a white gym suit, free. You need the suit anyway, and if you pay piecemeal, it costs you an additional twenty dollars.”

  “It sounds a little like a racket to use your money before they’ve provided the services. How long is the course?”

  “Four months.”

  “You see!” Terence leaped at the point. “It’s like a bank deducting interest in advance. It actually means you’re paying more than a hundred eighty for the course. And suppose you decide to quit—will they refund?”

  “I suppose they’d have to give you some back pro rata, I didn’t ask. But they’d make you pay for the suit you got free.”

  “It’s not just the money. I don’t like the psychology of prepayment.”

  “It’s an advantage to me, Dad. It’ll make me go.”

  “Why should you take on something that requires forcing?”

  “Because I know it’s something I have to do.”

  The cash withdrawn from the savings account was deposited by Mr. Japhet, who gave Ed a check for a hundred and eighty dollars so they would have a record of the payment. “I don’t trust people who run a school like that,” Mr. Japhet said.

  The owner, Mr. Fumoko, was also the instructor. The ad for the school had billed him as a black-belt holder and a third-generation instructor in the Japanese arts of self-defense. Mr. Fumoko, a fortyish, soft-spoken nisei, was a very short man with a broad flat face and shiny black hair. He registered Ed in the cramped cubicle that passed as a front office, told him he could pick up his suit after three days, when the check had cleared. A new course started each Monday. In the meantime, would the young man mind filling out this questionnaire?

  Ed glanced at the questions. Gently Mr. Fumoko said, “Insurance company wants no trouble. This is educational institution.” He smiled, and Ed filled out the form, which included such questions as, “Have you ever been arrested? If yes, please explain.” And he had to give three adult references, who, Ed soon learned, actually were called by Mr. Fumoko.

  Mr. Fumoko introduced the other new students elaborately, each to the group and then each to each. The Baxe boys were brothers, one Ed’s age, one two years younger. One tall, skinny boy of nineteen had kept himself apart. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple that went up and down when he mumbled a “how-do-you-do” in response to the other people’s “hi” or “hello.” One of the boys Ed’s own age was Japanese, like Mr. Fumoko. And there was an older man, past forty, with a very white face and white legs. Ed hoped he wouldn’t have to pair off with him.

  Perhaps because the nineteen-year-old was shy, Mr. Fumoko picked him as the model to point out the vulnerable parts of the body. In a dispassionate voice, Mr. Fumoko explained how a blow to the bridge of the nose would drive the bone bac
k into the brain, stunning, or paralyzing, or killing the victim, depending on the strength of the blow. He showed how to strike the windpipe and explained the consequences. He dealt with the temple, the ear, under the jaw, the side of the neck, the Adam’s apple, the hollow of the throat, how to grasp the shoulder muscle to cause great pain, the solar-plexus strike, the vulnerability of the side just below the last rib, how to cause pain in the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, how to crack fingers that came within one’s grasp, how to kick the upper and lower thigh, the shin, ankle, and instep, and then, turning the nineteen-year-old around, Mr. Fumoko indicated the vulnerable base of the skull, the center of the back, the seventh vertebra, the back between the shoulderblades, the back of the arm and the back of the elbow, the kidney, the back of the upper leg, the back of the knee, the calf, and the vulnerable tendon called the Achilles’ heel.

  Mr. Fumoko had them pair off, then point to the vulnerable parts of the partner’s body as he called off the places, murmuring, “Very good, very good.” Finally, as the hour drew to an end, he warned them of the dangers inherent in the sport of self-defense and devoted himself to the description of five degrees of force. A moderate blow would cause moderate pain. A sharp blow would cause sharp pain. A hard blow would stun or numb in the head or neck area and would interfere with an opponent’s ability to strike back for anywhere from several seconds to several hours. A really hard blow in several spots would probably cause a temporary paralysis—very useful in self-defense—and he was quick to point out that temporary meant not a few hours always but perhaps only a few minutes, time to get away, or call the police. Then, watching the faces of his pupils with greater attention than some of them were paying to him, using his hand against himself with pretended ferocity, Mr. Fumoko showed how hard and where a blow would cause a severe and possibly permanent injury, or kill. In a whisper he said, “You think of this only if life is in danger.”

  Ed was glad the lesson was over. Perhaps his father’s advice had been right: he would not want to force himself through the entire course; maybe just a few lessons would suffice. As he changed in the back room with the others, a room that had the pungency of a locker room, though there were no lockers and all their clothes were hung on hooks along the wall, he was aware of all of the parts of his body that might be struck, and also of his hands, which might strike, and a memory crossed his mind of seeing a nuclear physicist on television, a famous one—he couldn’t remember who at the moment—explaining the sense of guilt that the developers of the atomic bomb felt, of having tasted the apple in Eden. During the disruptions in school that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Ed had taken the position that owning a gun meant having the means to kill. Now, Ed thought, he was developing those means in his own hands, which Mr. Fumoko had urged them all to harden by hitting against hard objects.