Magic Street Page 0,41

while he emptied his bowels. It had been a long time since he'd done it outdoors, but his body was so healthy and worked so naturally that his turd came out dry and he didn't even need to wipe himself, though he scooped up some old leaves and made a pass at his butt just to be sure.

Then he stood up and took a step and then snatched back at the sapling, because his foot didn't find the ground, it hung out in the air, and he realized that the trees and saplings here leaned out over the ravine or grew up from inside it. He had slept on the edge of a cliff last night, the cat between him and death, and the turd he laid had fallen down into nothing.

It knocked the breath out of him, but not the sense - he knew as he slid down toward the water that he had to stop himself or he'd be caught up in the current and battered to death against the banks and stony bottom of the stream, if he didn't drown first.

He caught a tough root growing right at the water's edge, as his legs went into the water. It was so cold, right up to his waist, that it knocked the breath out of him all over again - not that he'd had even a moment to catch it after the fall - and the shock was so great he almost lost his grip.

But he held on, and even though the water tore at him and held him out almost horizontal in the water, he was able to get a leg up into the roots of another tree and then climb up out of the water.

He sat on the bank, still without his trousers, trembling with the cold of the water and the pain and bruises of the fall and the fear of having come so near death.

Far above him, he knew, were his pants. And his shoes? He couldn't remember if he had been barefoot yesterday when he went to take a look at the strange spot between Chandresses' and Snipes'. He wore shoes more and more these days, and he might have been wearing them, but he couldn't remember taking them off last night when he went to sleep. Main thing was, he was naked from the waist down, and somehow he had to get home, only a block or so but that was a long way when your butt was naked and the neighbors all knew where you lived and how to call and tell Miz Smitcher.

Should he climb back up and get those pants?

The ravine was a lot less steep on the other side. And Mr. Christmas - or Puck, if that was really his name, and why would the house lie to him? - might have something he could wear. At least a towel he could wrap around himself as if he was coming back from somebody's swimming pool.

So he rested a little more, then jumped the stream and climbed up the other side. Then he just walked, trusting that he'd run across the path and know it when he saw it. And sure enough, he did.

It was still that faint light of earliest morning when he saw the back of the Skinny House. Mr.

Christmas was no longer standing at the door, of course, as Mack lightly ran along the mossy path until his feet touched brick. And in a few steps the house was itself again, and the patio was concrete with the rusty barbecue and the umbrella clothesline stand and the old screen door that stood just the tiniest bit ajar.

Mack opened it, and turned the knob and the door into the kitchen opened, and there was Mr.

Christmas, looking like himself again - or not like himself, depending on which version was really him.

The dirty dreads, anyway, and the clothes he was wearing, and he sat at the kitchen table sipping something that wasn't coffee but Mack didn't know what.

"Forget something out there?" asked Mr. Christmas.

"Somebody steal your pants or you give them to a beggar? Or have you decided to go au naturel today?"

So he wasn't going to answer, and Mack wasn't interested enough to keep pushing. "I need something to wear."

"As I was saying."

"Got anything that would fit me?" asked Mack. He looked at Puck's thickish body and said, "Or something that won't fit me unless I tighten a belt really tight and roll up the pantlegs?"

"I got