Chapter 12
MOTORCYCLE
So it was that, full of curiosity and dread, Mack Street passed the next four years, living as if it were always summer, passing back and forth between the world of concrete, asphalt, and well-tended gardens in Los Angeles, and the wild, rainy tangle of the forests of Fairyland.
In the one world, he went to high school and learned to solve for n, the causes of the Civil War, how to write a paragraph, the inner structure of dead frogs, and how and why to use a condom. He dropped in on neighbors and ate with them and knew everybody. He took Tamika Brown out in her wheelchair and walked her around to see stuff and learned to understand her when she tried to talk.
He broke up fights between neighborhood kids and carried things for old ladies and watched over things, in his way.
In the other world, he wandered farther and farther, climbing higher into the hills, using the tools he brought with him to shape wood and stone. For days at a time he stayed, and then weeks. He built an outrigger canoe and took it out into the ocean, thinking to sail to Catalina, but the currents were swift and treacherous and he used up all his drinking water before he was able to work his way back to shore, south of the barking seals and cruising sharks and killer whales of the rocks around Palos Verdes.
He climbed mountains and wrote notes on the terrain and marked on topographical maps of Southern California. He drew sketches of the creatures that he saw. He traced leaves. He drank from clear streams and looked up to face a sabertooth tiger that merely looked at him incuriously and padded away. He learned that the fauna of Fairyland was impossible. Creatures that could not coexist passed each other on the forest paths or fought each other over carcasses or slept ten yards from each other in the dark of night. Yet whenever he needed to sleep, he lay down in a likely spot and was undisturbed through the night. He was always a visitor here, and even the animals knew it.
His outrigger, which he abandoned on a rock-strewn beach where crabs as big around as basketballs were so thick underfoot that he could hardly find a place to walk, became a drug-runner's speedboat that inexplicably drifted to shore, filled with cocaine but with not a hint as to what happened to the crew.
The canvas-roofed shelter he built for himself against the frequent downpours became a roofed bus stop shelter on La Brea where there had been no bus stop.
The melon and bean seeds he planted in a clearing did not grow in Fairyland, but in Koreatown they became a maddening series of ONE WAY and DO NOT ENTER and NO OUTLET signs that made traffic snarl continuously.
His cache of hand tools turned into a huge banyan tree that lifted and jumbled the sidewalk and street at the corner of Coliseum and Cochrane, along with protest signs demanding that the city let this
"beloved and historic tree" remain standing. When he took the hand tools out of Fairyland again, the tree remained, but soon died and was cut down and dug out without protest. And when he took the tools back to the same place, instead of a tree, this time there was a seepage of water from a natural spring that caused sewer workers to dig and patch and redig and repatch through Mack's whole junior year in high school.
The one time he tried to carry fire into Fairyland was entirely by accident. Miz Smitcher had taken him to dinner at Pizza Hut and on a whim he picked up a matchbook. He forgot it was in his pocket until he stepped off the brick onto the soft mossy ground of the path in Fairyland, and all at once he felt his leg grow warm, then hot. He tugged at his pants, thinking maybe he'd been bitten by some insect, a spider or fire ant that got into his pants. Then he felt the square of cardboard through the denim and tried to dig the matchbook out of his pocket. It burned his hands. Only then did he realize he had to leave, take the matches back out of the place, back to the patio, where he tossed them on the ground.
He ran back out of Skinny House to the street and then ran around the block to make sure the matches hadn't caused a fire in the real world. He watched the Murchison house for a while, just to make sure. No smoke, no flame. But that would have been too logical. The next day, the story spread through Baldwin Hills about how the Murchisons came home and found that their dog Vacuum, chained up in the back yard, was now missing a leg. Only the vet told them that the dog had obviously never had a right hind leg, since there was no bone, no scar, and... the Murchisons quickly realized that the vet thought they were insane and they stopped arguing. At first nobody argued with them about how normal their dog had been the day before, but within a few days it seemed like nobody but Mack remembered that Vacuum had had four legs his whole life until some idiot accidentally carried fire into Fairyland.
Unpredictable. Uncertain. No rules. Mack feared the uncertainty but loved the profusion of life, and wished that he could share it with someone. Ceese did not want to go back there, though. And besides, what kind of companion would he be, towering sixteen or twenty feet in the air? Or taller, for all they knew—maybe Ceese would never stop growing the farther he got from Skinny House, until at the Santa Monica shore he would be so tall he could see over the mountains to the north and look at the Central Valley, or turn eastward and see the Colorado, no longer a thread of silver through a desert, but now a wide stream like the Mississippi.
As he got older, he also got taller, so each stride took him farther. He grew so tall so fast that for a while he wondered if maybe he was becoming a giant like Ceese was in Fairyland, only slower, and on both sides of Skinny House. It wasn't like he knew of any blood relatives who could show him how tall he was likely to grow. But eventually it slowed down, and while he was tall enough that his loping stride carried him far and fast, nobody would mistake him for an NBA star. Well, maybe a point guard.
His feet were callused so they felt like the skin of the soles didn't even belong to him, they were like hooves. He hated putting shoes on at school—it felt to him like he was in prison, wearing them.
And in Fairyland they were more trouble than they were worth, the laces always snagging on something, the soft soles cushioning his feet so that he couldn't feel the earth and learn what it was telling him about the land he was passing through. One pair of shoes was sucked off his feet in the swamp and became a suitcase full of nearly perfect counterfeit hundreds found by a couple of skateboarders in Venice. The newspapers speculated that the bills were part of a terrorist plot to destabilize the economy. No sane person would ever believe that they began as a pair of Reeboks that were sucked off his feet in a mudhole.
And from time to time Mack climbed down into the ravine and up the other side and walked to the clearing where it was always night, and the two globes sparkled with the only lights Mack saw in Fairyland that weren't in the sky. He sat and contemplated the globes, not knowing which was the captured fairy queen, not knowing if she went by Titania or Mab or some other unguessable name.
Sometimes he thought of her as Tinkerbell from the Peter Pan movie—a scamp too dangerous to let out into the world. But sometimes she was a tragic figure, a great lady kidnapped and imprisoned for no other crime than being in somebody's way. Titania had saved a changeling from Oberon's clutches. Titania had saved a boy like Mack. So she had to be punished, at least in Midsummer Night's Dream. Was it possible that her imprisonment now had something to do with Mack?
"Do I owe you something?" he asked.
But when he spoke aloud, the panther always grew alert and stopped its prowling. If he kept talking, even if it was to the panther and not to the captured fairies, the panther began to stalk him, creeping closer, its muscles coiled to spring at him. So he learned to be silent.
The corpse of the ass-headed man was a collapsed skeleton now, and grass grew over it, and leaves had scattered across it, and before long the ground would swallow it up or rain would carry it away. That's me, thought Mack. Dead and gone, while the fairies live forever. No wonder they don't care about us. We're like cars that whip past you going the other way on the freeway. Don't even see them long enough to wonder who they are or where they going.