Magic Street Page 0,65

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.

Sure enough, there he was in the living room, building a house of cards. Looking like he always looked. Not even bothering to glance up when Mack came in.

"Tread lightly," said Puck.

"Where've you been?"

"Did we have an appointment? Your feet are filthy and you're tracking it all over the carpet."

"Who cares?" said Mack. "As soon as you leave, there won't be a carpet."

"You know how this works, Mack," said Puck.

Mack sighed. "Some woman in the neighborhood's going to have to shampoo this carpet."

"It's nice when you're tidy," said Puck. "I try to have some consideration for the neighbors."

"You got towels and soap and shit in your bathroom?"

"Oh, are you suddenly all hip-hop, boy, saying 'shit' like it was 'the'?"

"Nothing hip-hop about 'shit,' " Mack murmured as he headed for the bathroom. There was soap, but it was a half-used bar with somebody's hair all over it, and the shampoo was some smelly fruity girly stuff that made Mack feel like he was putting candy in his hair. Couldn't Puck steal this stuff from somebody who kept their soap clean? Rubbing somebody else's little curly hairs all over his own body.

He couldn't stand it, and stood there in the shower picking hairs off the soap and then trying to rinse them off his hand. By the time he got the soap clean the water was running tepid, and it was downright cold when he rinsed.

When he stepped out of the shower, Puck was standing there looking at him. Mack yelled.

"What are you doing? Can't a niggah get some privacy here?"

"You picking up that 'niggah' shit at high school? You grew up in Baldwin Hills, not the ghetto."

"What are you, my father? And how come you get to say 'shit'?"

"I invented shit, Mack," said Puck. "I'm older than shit. When I was a boy, nobody shit, they just threw up about an hour after eating. Tasted nasty. Shit is a big improvement."

"I saved your life, asshole, and then you ran off and