Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  Mrs. Polanski turned on a dim porch light, timidly opened first the inside door, then the screen door, and stepped outside to see what misery might be visiting her next. There were soft words Jimmy could not hear from Mrs. George and a moment's pause from Mrs. Polanski and then the two women suddenly embraced strongly. The new widows seemed to be drawing something from each other.

  Jimmy Gill could not hear what they were saying above the roar of an airplane passing overhead and the yelling of Ricky and Lucy and Fred and Ethel. Then the women turned, arm-in-arm, and disappeared together inside the house.

  Five

  The next day Detroit Simmons talked Jimmy Gill into crossing the ditch behind the duplex. He said he had been dying to see what was on the other side. That means they would go. Detroit was persuasive.

  Jimmy had been awake before five, lying there quietly and still so as not to disturb Grandmama. She was surly if anything woke her up before seven. She usually stayed awake each night until the television stations all signed off at ten or ten thirty. Then she rolled out of bed at seven in the morning, just in time for the “Star Spangled Banner” that signified the sign-on and the beginning of The Today Show.

  As much as he wanted to hear more music from the big upright radio, Jimmy knew not to disturb his grandmother before her first cup of coffee, her first lung full of cigarette smoke, and her first conversations with the fluttery images on the television set. But he had lain there awake that morning as long as he could. Carefully, he rolled off the edge of the bed, gave a quick glance and a wave to the Zenith, standing there, its back against the wall, where he had shoved it the night before. Then he picked up his clothes and worn-out sneakers and tip-toed to the kitchen.

  There were a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left in the bottom of a jar. He spread some on bread after pinching the mold off, and then he crept quietly out to the porch to watch the sun rise as he ate.

  It was noticeably cooler and less humid than it had been the last few days, and the first brave rays of morning sun felt good when they broke through the new leaves. It threw warm light on the other people along the street who had joined him in rising early. Most of them were probably headed for the first shift at the mill. Engines roared to life. There were happy "goodbyes" from some while others left half-finished arguments dangling in the early air. A choir of birds was so happy to see the sun after all the rain that they added something extra to their songs.

  Then he saw Detroit Simmons coming through the mist, wheeling his bike around the puddles. The machine was so bent and warped it looked like it was coming down the street sideways. Jimmy laughed at him and again got caught at it, but it did not seem to bother Detroit this time. He waved, rolled across the sidewalk, propped the bike against the steps, bounded up two at a time and sat down beside Jimmy as if he had been saving the spot for him.

  "You sure are up early this mornin’, Jimmy Gill."

  "Couldn't sleep. I wanted to listen to the radio but Grandmama's still sleeping."

  "You got a radio?" he asked, his eyes showing excitement. "I wanna hear it sometime! My grandaddy's got one on the table next to his bed and he goes to sleep listening to ball games out of St. Louis. But he dares anybody else to mess with it."

  Jimmy told Detroit about the songs he had heard Rockin' Randy Mathews play, and tried to describe the feelings that had overwhelmed him as he listened to Elvis and a man called "Fats" and the Platters and Dean Martin. But Detroit did not know any of those people or their songs and did not share Jimmy’s enthusiasm.

  "Let's go exploring, Jimmy!" he suddenly yelled. He jumped up, ready to take off that instant.

  Jimmy sat quietly for a moment. He really preferred to stay home, fire up the Zenith radio again, and listen to the smooth voices and the happy music. He was not sure he wanted to plunge into the dense brush under the orange sky anyway. But the way Detroit pleaded with his big dark eyes left him no choice but to follow his new friend to God-knows-where.

  Jimmy stood and Detroit was gone in a flash, disappearing around the corner of the house, wading through the wet knee-high grass and dodging mud-holes, diving into the undergrowth as if he knew what awaited them there. Jimmy had to hurry and follow him or be left behind.

  It had turned into a glorious morning. All the rain had cleared the air and a cool breeze made the new leaves on the sycamores shiver. The sky was clear and deep blue except for the pastel smudge of smoke hanging in the distance over the mills. That was the direction Detroit seemed to be headed, bouncing along boldly. Blindly, Jimmy followed him into a thick wall of honeysuckle, and they were instantly engulfed in a maze of vine-caverns.

  Jimmy had difficulty keeping up as Detroit scurried through the jungle. When Detroit finally came to a sudden stop, Jimmy almost ran up his back. Detroit simply threw back his head and laughed out loud like a kid possessed.

  "Ain't this great? This place is something else, Jimmy Gill! Look! We can build forts and hide-outs and everything in here and ain't nobody going to find us if we don’t want them to!”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Jimmy was thinking, picturing in his mind their skeletons lying here amid the tangle of the brush until somebody accidentally stumbled over their bones someday.

  Detroit was off again at a trot, and before he could catch his breath, Jimmy was once more following obediently, watching as hard as he could for copperheads and bears and hornet nests in the deep shadows of the woods that had gobbled them up. And he watched the ground, too, for the bones of other kids who may have gone before.

  Suddenly, frighteningly, Detroit stepped through a clump of grapevines and kudzu and disappeared completely with nothing more than a quick yelp. He was gone!

  Jimmy cautiously eased forward, expecting to see a tiger licking his chops after such a delicious meal or a bear taking apart his friend like pulling a wishbone. The ground dropped away into a small creek, part of the same ditch that wound behind his house. And there was Detroit, standing sheepishly, dripping wet, waist deep in a rivulet of copper-colored water. Cans and trash paper floated lazily by him as he stood there like a black buoy. He looked up at Jimmy, not sure whether to cry or laugh or both.

  "You see a water moxican, you sing out, Jimmy Gill," he said as he carefully waded back to the edge of the ditch. Jimmy reached out, grabbed his muddy hand, and helped him up the slippery bank. They wandered downstream a bit to where a huge elm tree had fallen across the ditch. It made an easy bridge to the other side. There the brush looked thinner and the mid-morning sun shone down warmly into a clearing.

  As Detroit lay back on a soft blanket of sage grass and let the sun dry his overalls, Jimmy sat quietly, leaning back against a tree.

  A strange noise caught his attention. At first, he thought it might be Detroit wheezing from all the off-color water he had swallowed. But it seemed to be coming from the other way, toward the far edge of the woods. He stood and took a few curious steps toward where the sun was brighter, his head cocked, homing in on the noise. He stepped out of the shade into the full, dazzling sunlight, using his hand as a visor.

  He saw a low building almost hidden by a row of hedges, and behind it, a towering metal spire that seemed to reach so high it could tickle the God’s belly.

  His eyes were drawn to the back window of the vine-covered block building, surrounded by a hog wire fence at the foot of the tower, and still mostly lost in dark shadows and morning mist. Inside a window, an eerie blue glow pulsated to an unheard beat. And he could now clearly hear the ghost-voices buzzing at the base of the huge steel arrow that pointed upward into the sky, held to earth and kept upright by three sets of cables, shimmering with dew.

  To the left of the blue-flickering window, on a grassy mound of dirt, a moss-covered pond made of stone suddenly erupted into a fountain, spraying water and mist fifteen feet into the air. The breeze-blown vapor from the dancing water produced a brilliant rainbow.

  Jimmy’s mouth popped open and he gasped at the sudden, unexpected beauty of it all. Detroit mus
t have seen the look on his face, maybe heard him gulp, and he scurried to see what had grabbed his attention. He, too, stood silently as the waters danced, the blue light in the window flashed, and the ghosts sang for salvation at the tower's base.

  "What is this place, Jimmy? What do you reckon they do here?”

  "Gee, I don't know." He couldn’t even begin to guess. It was mysterious, like a place where some kind of wizard worked his magic.

  "Well, let's just go over there and take a look and maybe we can figure it out."

  "No!"

  Jimmy did not know what the buildings or the tower were but he suspected, somehow, that they were gazing upon something sacred, a magic place, and he did not want to rush to unravel the mystery and risk spoiling it. No, he would feel better studying it from a distance for a while. Then, when the time was right, he would venture close enough to reach out and grasp it.

  Jimmy Gill knew that he could never explain that to Detroit. He did not understand it himself.

  "Look, Dee, I gotta get on home before my grandmama comes looking for me. I never let her know where I was going," he told him, and it was mostly true. "We can come back sometime later and explore this place. Okay?"

  Detroit was obviously disappointed. Jimmy already knew that it was his friend's nature to be maddeningly curious about everything he came across. But Detroit, of all people, understood the demands of grandmothers who had accepted the task of raising their children’s' children.

  Jimmy was careful to pay attention to landmarks on the way home so he could find his way back to this sacred ground. The bridge across the stream, a big crooked tree here, a patch of goldenrod there.

  The place they had just seen was enchanted, as sure as anything he had seen on Walt Disney Presents or Howdy Doody. Or like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz that time his momma and daddy took him to see it at the big theater in downtown Chattanooga.

  He kept looking back through the trees, hoping to catch a glimpse of the tower or maybe even a wizard showing up for his shift. But he kept walking. He knew there would be a better time for them to come back to this place where the sorcerer made the lights flash blue and the spirits hum.

  He hoped it would be soon.

  Six

  They played soldier up and down Wisteria Street all afternoon until Detroit reluctantly had to return to Ishkooda. Jimmy Gill half-hated to see him go, but he was tired anyway, his legs aching from all the running and playing they had done that day. And besides, he was anxious to get back in front of the mahogany radio.

  Finally, with supper in hand, he stood before the big Zenith, paused for a moment as if saying grace, and then reverently clicked the switch on. Slowly, the radio came to life with its now familiar buzz and a few pops from somewhere inside, as if waking up from a deep sleep. He could smell the tubes as they got warm and once again felt against his cheek a hint of a tickling breeze kicked up by the bass speaker behind the dusty maroon cloth grill. And once more he heard the wonderful rock and roll beat. The hypnotic, glad-sounding songs. The voices that were usually happy even when the singer was moaning about terrible pain and loss.

  Jimmy Gill was again swept up in the continuous flow of sound from the radio. His sandwich went uneaten as he lay back on the cool floor and half dozed, lulled to fuzzy sleep by the gentle, resonant current. He dreamed of captured rainbows and upward-reaching towers, happy singers and awakening radios, buzzing ghosts, floating blonde hair in muddy water and angry cars spinning wickedly through flowered yards.

  Then he would wake up for a while and listen to the music, the voices, even the commercials, tapping his foot to the rhythm or singing along with the songs that were already familiar to him. That is, until a rare slow ballad would send him back to his dreams again.

  Jimmy had never started school since the move, and it was not long until Detroit was out. Summer was there at last. The two boys were able to play their games from first sun until it was too dark to see each other. They went back several more times to the tree bridge and across the stream to the clearing near the enchanted place. Detroit offered to boldly march right up to the tower, to go knock on the back door at the wizard’s house.

  “I ain’t afraid, Jimmy Gill. Nobody’s gonna hurt us. We need to see what kind of place that is over there.”

  But Jimmy was able to convince him that it was not yet the time for venturing away from the lip of the ditch or the cover of the kudzu and wild grapevines. They would lie there safely hidden among the weeds and watch as the fountain erupted about every fifteen minutes or so. Then the spray would suddenly subside, falling back as if commanded by an unseen cue or the wave of the wizard’s wand.

  The steel spire stood tall, sometimes whistling softly in the wind. The supernatural buzzing at its bottom was almost constant, like a swarm of honey bees. But they still did not see any magician or enchanter. They saw nobody at all.

  Finally, Detroit tired of the show and wheedled and begged until Jimmy gave in. They dived into the honeysuckle caverns and made believe they we were hunting dragons, looking for pirates along the "river," wiping out nests of vicious renegade Indians. Trees became enemy soldiers, bushes were stagecoaches, piles of rocks were buried treasure.

  Detroit Simmons was well blessed with imagination. He brought stories from his trips to the movie theater downtown, where he watched the serials and the motion pictures from his seat high in the colored section of the balcony. Jimmy contributed plots and characters from hours of lying at Grandmama's feet as she watched the cowboy shows and space adventures on the television set. They collaborated on scenarios, ran for hours through the dusky darkness of the thick undergrowth, making it all up as they went. The more elaborate and far-fetched, the better. Then they ultimately collapsed near exhaustion, slick-sweaty and almost played-out, lying on their bellies in the pine straw under a grape-vine-wrapped tree to talk.

  "How come you don't have no momma or daddy, Jimmy Gill?" Detroit finally asked him one bright, sunny day. Detroit had learned that the best way to get Jimmy Gill to talk was to spring a question on him and then wait for the answer. Let him first be sure that someone would be listening, hush while letting him carefully consider his answer, prudently plan his words, and then he would fill the dead silence with an answer.

  Jimmy told Detroit about the sawmill and his father’s accident, the severed right arm, the thick red blood in the sawdust and the frustration of the quiet, crying men who had gathered helplessly around his dying dad.

  Then he spoke of the beautiful blonde woman, dressed for another night out, but ending up floating gracefully, a bullet hole behind her ear, her long, wavy, blonde hair tangled with the fishermen's trot lines in the swift, cold Tennessee River’s waters. Jimmy surprised himself, talking matter-of-factly and with little hint of the pain the words caused him. Talked much as he might have if he had only been plotting out one of the made-up cowboy and Indian stories he and Detroit acted out every day along the ditch bank.

  But Jimmy knew a greater truth that Detroit could only suspect. He was speaking the words out loud for the first time, telling another person something that had been like a splinter under his skin for so long it had begun to fester. Keeping in inside was hurting him like a green-apple belly-ache.

  But talking made him feel better. Made the hurt more bearable, as if he was being purged of something vile. Having someone listen to him tell the story made it easier to live with. He only hushed when the lump in his throat grew too big to let the words squeeze past.

  Jimmy hoped that Detroit would be satisfied with the answer and consider the complete. Detroit was quiet, watching the crows dip and dart in the blue sky above them. He must have known. He did not try to push for more. He understood how Jimmy felt, finally saying those words, telling the tragic story.

  "You never talk about your momma or daddy, Detroit," Jimmy eventually croaked, turning away, pretending to watch a squirrel zigzag its way crazily between some trees. But it was actually to hide a surprise tear that
had sneaked up on him.

  "Well, Jimmy Gill, I ain't never seen nor heard from my daddy since he ran off up north to Detroit, Michigan. Momma stays over in North Birmingham with a bootlegger. Least, that’s what I’ve heard my grandmaw and them saying when they don’t know I’m listening."

  That's all he said and Jimmy had sense enough to follow his example, to not probe for more than his friend was willing to reveal. There was hurt, though, in his dark-brown eyes. Jimmy realized something then. This colored boy and he had much more in common than either of them could ever have imagined.

  "Let's see what's going on at the mystery place," Jimmy finally suggested.

  It seemed like the natural thing to free them from the sudden dark mood that had kidnapped them. And, for some reason, just then the time seemed right to return there. Whooping and dancing, Detroit jumped straight up from his bed of straw. He was ready.

  They had dubbed it "the mystery place" because neither of them had been able to figure out exactly what was going on there. But they were sure of one thing. Whatever it was involved magic and some combination of wizards and fairies and ghosts.

  The day was already winding down toward darkness when they shinnied across the tree over the creek. In the dryness of summer the stream had become a trickle of dank water barely covering slimy green-moss rocks and gravel, floating bits of garbage, but it was still the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon to Jimmy and Detroit.

  Out of habit, they hesitated a moment in the clearing, considered how late it had gotten, how near dangerous darkness was. But it was time. Time to take a closer look. They looked at each other in the fading sunlight, grinned, shook their double-secret handshake, and pushed bravely into unexplored territory, across the field of saw briars and sassafras bushes, sage grass and short pine saplings, toward the metal spire in the center of the ten-acre clearing. The way the last rays of sun hit the tower's red and white bands gave it a candy-cane look, and that was not threatening at all to the two brave explorers.