She walked around the circle then, kissing each of them firmly but brusquely on the lips.
Mack watched from the brow of the hill, and as she made the circle he said to Ceese, "You see it? You see how each one she kissed, they got a little spark of light above their heads?"
"No, I don't," said Ceese.
"Well, it's there."
"What I been thinking," said Ceese, "is how to get the LAPD to back off long enough for this fairy circle to do its job."
"Think of anything?"
"It's coming to me," said Ceese.
"You as scared as I am?" asked Mack.
"If I had brains enough to get scared, would I be a cop?"
"I don't want Miz Smitcher to get hurt. Or your mom. Or any of them."
"You didn't bring danger to this neighborhood," said Ceese. "You part of the solution, man, not the cause of the problem."
"I feel them inside me," Mack said. "All their dreams. All so... wistful. And hungry. Or angry.
And filled with love. So mixed up."
"When all this is done," said Ceese, "maybe they'll all have their own dreams back again, and you'll be free of them. Free to be just Mack Street again."
"Whoever the hell that is," said Mack.
Chapter 22
BREAKING GLASS
They left Grand Harrison and Miz Smitcher in charge of the fairy circle with a plan that sounded so crazy to Ceese that it would be a miracle if anything worked.
Only a few watchers would wander onto the bridge, waiting for Mack's signal. And this was the weirdest part: They had no idea what it would be. "The one time I wrote something," said Mack, "the words came through, but about ten times as big and along the sides of the overpass. All the other stuff I left, it sort of got transformed. All I can tell you is, look for a change. It might even be a natural change. But there are seventeen pillars, so look for seventeen... things."
And then what?
"Then form a circle. Seventeen of you right on top of the markers, the others arrange yourselves in between. And the rest I don't know."
Yolanda knew. "You'll feel it," she said. "You'll know when I'm in the circle."
"But you won't be in the circle," Ophelia objected, sensibly.
"I will, but on the other side. You'll see. Or... not see, but feel. And when that happens, you start moving. Counterclockwise. Which means, if you're facing into the circle, to your right."
"We all know what counterclockwise means," said Moses Jones.
"Except for those that don't and are too embarrassed to ask," said Yolanda with a toothy smile.
"But we don't know the dance," said Miz Smitcher.
"In a fairy circle," said Yolanda, "the dance dances you."
The other part of the plan was Ceese's own contribution. "Six dozen black people, even nicely dressed black people, if you start blocking the road, LAPD will be called and you will be dispersed.
But if you're carrying signs, then you're black activists. Protestors. Got to treat you differently. Find out your grievances. A couple of you carry video cameras—prominently. The LAPD has great respect for video cameras."
"Signs saying what?" asked Grand Harrison.
That was farther than Ceese had planned. "Something that would make sense to demonstrate about in Century City."
" 'Down with Fox'?" somebody suggested.
"Don't forget that there's a big MGM building there now, too."
" 'Not enough black actors in movies.' "
"Yeah," said Miz Smitcher dryly. "How about the stereotype of blacks with signs, having a demonstration."
"Can we sing 'We Shall Overcome'?" asked Ebby DeVries. "I always wanted to march and sing that."
"No," said Sondra Brown. "That song is sacred. You don't sing it for some... act."
"You sing it to change the world, sistah, and that what we doing," said Cooky Peabody, sounding as ebonic as she knew how. A dialect she pretty much learned from television.
To Ceese it didn't matter. He left it up to Grand and Miz Smitcher and—why not?—democracy to make the decision, while he would drive his patrol car down to the gateway between worlds. First, though, he watched Mack get on the motorcycle behind... his wife. Man, that stuck in Ceese's craw, even to think it. Wife. Mack marries a hoochie mama on a bike before he's eighteen and Ceese doesn't even have a steady girl at thirty.
All right, she wasn't a hoochie mama. She was queen of the fairies and Mack was supposedly some excrescence from the king of the fairies. To Ceese he was still a kid who had no business being that free and familiar with such a voluptuous body.
Ceese stood beside his patrol car watching them ride off on the bike. That's when Miz Smitcher came up to him. "Didn't so much as invite us to the wedding," she said.
"I don't think it really counts as a wedding. Near as I can tell, it was reconnaissance."
"Now that's a word for it I've never heard before. 'Hey, baby, how about a little reconnaissance.' "
Ceese chuckled.
She leaned close to him. "Ceese, give me your weapon," she said softly.
"Are you crazy?" he said. "A cop doesn't give his gun to anybody."
"You can't take it in there with you, right? Into Fairyland? I just got a feeling, Ceese. You know I'm not crazy. I got a feeling that gun's going to be needed somewhere other than locked in the trunk of your patrol car here in Baldwin Hills. You dig?"
"I can't believe I heard you say 'you dig.' "
"I been listening to Ray Charles," she said.
"He used to say that?"
"I don't know. I just know that back when I started listening to Ray, we were all saying 'you dig.' "
"I used to look young, anyway," she said. "Give me the gun."
"If you shoot that thing, and somebody does ballistics on the bullet, they'll know it was my gun which got fired in a place where I wasn't."
"That happens, I stole it from you."
She looked determined.
"Ceese," she said. "I trusted you with my baby. Now you trust me with your gun. I won't ruin your life or kill anybody doesn't need killing."
He had her get inside the car and then took out the weapon, showed her how to work the safety, and then gave her extra ammo.
"Won't be much good against fairies," said Ceese. "Especially if they're really tiny."
"Just have a feeling," said Miz Smitcher. She put it all in her purse.
A few minutes later, Ceese was down near the bottom of Cloverdale, parking the patrol car between Snipes' and Chandresses'. Yolanda and Mack were already waiting for him. "What kept you? Stop to take a leak?" asked Mack. "We got a whole woods back there."
"Yeah," said Ceese, "but like you said, stuff you leave there might be anything on this side. I'd hate to leave a bag of marshmallows or a baby stroller in the middle of some road, just because I had to pee."
"Am I going to have to listen to two little boys making peepee jokes the whole way?" asked Yolanda.
Mack took both their hands and led them through the gateway into the house.
Puck was waiting inside with two plastic 35mm film canisters.
"Planning on taking pictures?" Ceese asked him.
"They're empty," said Puck. "And look—air holes."
"Air holes?"
"We're going to get real small once we get into Fairyland. Being without our souls the way we are," said Puck. "And every creature Oberon can assemble is going to come and try to kill us. If you're holding us in your hands, you can't slap them away. Or else you're going to get excited and crush us. So you let us go inside these film tubes and then put us in your pockets. Your safest pockets that we can't fall out of."
"And something else," said Puck. "When we're small, we can't hear big deep sounds. Talk really high, Ceese, or we won't understand you. And every now and then, shut up so you can hear if we're yelling something at you."