Now I understand all the quivering. Now, when it’s too late. Some merlin I am, I think. Some stupid, Taco-faced merlin I am.
I send out knighties, but they’re about wilted after the fire and I know it won’t do any good. I been away hours, fire-watching — like my prayers could do something about the physics of firecrackers and oily goo. Worst of it is, I understand that bird beak now. And the wood chip.
Huh. Some light bulb I got. Now it comes on. They were never after Hermajesty. They were after Doug. They emptied the Palace, got us to split our knighties between the Wharf and the Presidio, snuck up on our big bare ass and got away clean...with Doug.
I send one of Firescape’s girls to the Presidio with the news, then, just to keep from going shining, I cast runes. This time, the crap just looks like crap. My eyes don’t go wonky no matter what I do. And there are no Whispers. Zip. And to add insult to injury, the damned garbage is back in the can. I start to pick out the pit and the tacks and chuck them again, then think, why bother?
Instead, I just put the stuff back in the can. That’s when I find another slip of paper, which is neatly folded and sticking to the underside of the peach pit. It’s kind of a lavender rice paper, fine quality.
I open it.
There is a strange symbol I don’t know in one corner of the little page and a series of Chinese characters, which I do know, in the middle of it.
He sends the vultures, they say. He sure does.
For one miserable moment, I take this as Lord E’s way of saying "Up yours," then realize he’s already done that with the GOTCHAs. Suddenly, the message don’t figure. I mean, Lord E barely speaks Chinglish, let alone Chinese proper. And a neatly folded note has never been in his repertoire. But if it’s not from Lord E, then who? And why? Was somebody trying to warn me about the tree-napping?
With my cosmic sense of timing, that’d make about perfect sense. I get the warning after the crime.
Disgusted, I pocket the little hunk of driftwood and the note and head for the Wiz. Can’t wait no more. Shoulda gone when I first saw that torn book page. Too late now, but at least I can go to The Fish and study maps.
“Show me the quickest way from here to Lord E Lordy’s palace in Potrero-Taraval.”
“Specify,” says Fish, “which Palace. There are three.” And Fish pops up a map with three bright spots on it.
One of Lord E’s places is in a Conservatory, another one is in the old Trans-bay Terminal — spitting distance; no way he’ll be there. The last one is buried in the Sunset south of the Farm. Far and away from the Border; that’s where I put my money.
“SF State,” I say.
All the spots wink out but one, and Fish draws me a ziggy-zaggy red line all the way from the Wiz to the old University. The line is etched into my pea-brain. I genuflect respectfully, then I am on my way to the Farm — my last stopping-off point before I venture into Potrero-Taraval.
The Farm is beautiful this time of year. The leafy trees are all different colors — yellows, oranges, the purply-red of the little maples. Only the giant conifers are green still. Usually when I walk through them, smelling their sweet pine musk, they remind me of Doug, and I’m happy. Now they remind me of Doug and I want to cry.
I’m not a brave person. It’s all I can do not to cry when I finally see Bags and Kaymart gathering cones under the Giants. They’re surprised to see me. I realize it’s been weeks since I came out to see them.
Guilt is one of the quickest emotions I know — quicker than anger, even.
“Great harvest, Taco!” Bags thanks me. “Number one jade. Biggest squashes we’ve ever had. Thanks a lot.”
Most times I’d be glad to take the praise for my merlinish ministrations. Now...who cares?
“Most welcome,” I say, anyway. “You seen any skulking action down here? Last night, maybe?”
Kaymart frowns, cuddling a monster pine cone. “It’s funny you should ask. I thought the dogs were up to something last night. They sure were raising Cain. Woke me up, oh, about moon-set, I guess.”
Bags scratches in his grizzly beard. “I didn’t hear nothin'.”
“You,” says Kaymart, “sleep like the proverbial log.” She turns back to me. “What’s wrong, Del? Somehow I seriously doubt you’ve just come home for dinner.”
Kaymart talks like the Videoschool Teachers in the Wiz’s AV Shrine. This is because she is (or was, I guess) a Professor of Anthropology before the Getting Out. She didn't leave, she told me, 'cause she saw the Getting Out as surrender and wasn't inclined to do so. Then she met Bags, who was living under the back porch of her walk-up in Cow Hollow, and that was that.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand Kaymart. She got all these quaint aphorisms. Right now, I’m having trouble understanding what my problems have to do with her dogs growing sugar. And they grow beets here, anyway, not cane.
Right about now I realize how wore out I am.
“It’s Doug,” I say. “The Potreros snatched him last night. I think they may be headed for the Palace at SFU.”
Bags and Kaymart are blown about sidewise by this news. They helped me raise Doug practically from a fir cone — they’re like his grandparents — and they take it hard. I feel terrible. Doug is gone and it’s my fault. Bags wants to go with me into Potrero-Taraval. Kaymart wants me to stay with them and rest until nightfall.
“You’re dead tired, Taco. You probably haven’t eaten since God-knows-when. It’ll be dark in about three hours. Stay and rest.”
I start to protest, but she gives me a Mom Look. “You’re not going to do Doug any good in the condition you’re in. Just look at that; you’re hands are shaking.”
She’s right, and I submit. It’s hard to argue with Kaymart when she’s in Mom mode.
For dinner, we eat squashes stuffed with spinach, acorns, and goat cheese and talk about my plans to rescue Doug. I talk Bags out of going with me; he’s pretty old and so much like my own padre, I sure wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.
One thing leads to another and next thing I know we’re reminiscing about Doug’s seed-hood and way back past that to when I first found my way to the Farm.
oOo
It was Hoot that brought me there, really — Hoot with all his questions about the Whisperers. He is, like, fascinated by the idea that there’re these voices in my head that I can’t tune in.
Maybe I got a bad filling, he says. He’s read comics where guys with bad fillings hear voices in their heads. Me, I got no fillings. Hoot is disappointed, but the questions don’t stop.
“So, d’you think it might be a directional thing, anyway, like a radio transmitter? I know all about radio transmitters. That’s what I do — fix radios and things like that when they go fizz. Now with radio signals, you gotta get the antennae oriented so they can pick up the signal clear. Ever thought of that? Are your Whispers clearer some places than others?”
I had not thought of that and did not want to think of that. I was spending most of my time cogitating on a Calling — which, I figure, has nothing to do with radio signals or Whispers or antennae.
“I don’t have antennae,” I say, but Hoot will not leave it alone, even though he has now determined I am not something he can take a screw-driver to.
“Look, Hoot,” I say, finally, “I don’t think this is that type of reception problem. I think it’s more of a spiritual nature, comprendé?”
He looks at me like I’m speaking in tongues. “You think angels are trying to talk to you?”
“Not angels maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s a mechanical thing.”
“Okay. You prayed about it then?”
“On occasion.”
“Yeah, but did you ever just say, ‘Hey, God, could you tune in these Whisperers a little better so I can understand what the hell they’re chewin' on?’ Did you say that?”
“I don’t talk to God that way,” I answer.
Before I know it, we are on a quest. We are taking a walking tour of Embarcadero and local environs to see if there are places where the Whispers are clearer than others. I make a point of stopping at every dios house we pass to go in and offer prayers for the clarity of Whispers.
I am thinking the day is destined to be uneventful by the time we have walked all the way around Embar and have wound up tracing the Slot up toward Potrero-Taraval. I am tired and tending toward grumpiness and am getting ready to grumble about all and sundry when I hear a Whisper that is a real word, Dolores.
I stop in my tracks and turn all around.
“What?” asks Hoot.
“Dolores.”
In answer to my non-answer, he turns and points across the Border between Potrero and Embar. There’s a trench that runs the whole length of the parklands on southside, just below the Farm — used to be a street. Maps show it was dug up to put in electronics for the masstransit, but it never got done, ‘cause right about then everybody was outward bound. On the Embarcadero side there’s a brick wall with gates, where there are Checkpoints with knighties on constant patrol. On the Potrero side is terra incognito, which means the ‘big unknown.’
“There?” asks Hoot, still pointing. “There’s a Mission over there named Dolores.”
Since this is inside enemy territory, I do not think that can be what the Whisperers are talking about.
“No,” I say, “that can’t be it.”
The Whisper in my ear is suddenly more of a little shout: Dolores! Damned insistent all of a sudden, these Whisperers.
“We can’t get there from here,” I say, half to Hoot and half to the Whisperers.
Dolores, insist the Whisperers, and Hoot grins at me, like he can tell what’s going on in my head.
“I can get us across, no problem.”
And he does, at a place where the abandoned masstransit dig lets us disappear on one side of the border and pop up again on the other. Trick is, we have to wait for dark to get across, so in the meantime, Hoot suggests we visit the Farm.
My only real association with the Farm up till now has been dietary. Like anybody else in Embarcadero, I eat stuff that’s been grown there. Most greens eaten here — except for the ones from rooftop gardens — come from the Farm, or from the plot of land set aside at the Presidio. The Farm is almost a mythical place to me, but I never actually been there.
Hoot acts like he owns the place. He acts like that everywhere, and here, he just marches me up to this little log house and onto its big front porch and I meet Bags and Kaymart who will very soon change my sorry life, though I don’t know it yet.
Bags is a crusty old dude with one dead front tooth and a lot of gray and white hair. Grizzled. That’s the word I read in books to describe a guy like Bags. He laughs a lot — sometimes at nothing I can hear or see — and he always looks like he’s got a secret and is thinking of letting you in on it. I can’t tell what color his eyes are. I don’t think they are any color at all, but they twinkle with his secret. I can’t help but wonder what it is.
Kaymart, now she’s a different sort of person altogether. I feel like she’s studying me — not in a bad way, but like I’m something really interesting. She thinks a lot, Kaymart does, and even from the beginning, she thought things about me.
I’m not used to that. People thinking about me, I mean. She asked me all sorts of questions about the Whisperers once Hoot told them what we were doing. I felt pretty dumb, let me tell you.
“Voices?” Kaymart says. “What do they say?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, and Hoot pipes up and says, “Dolores. They said dolores just now.”
“Dolores? As in sad?” asks Kaymart, and Bags says, “I hear voices sometimes. Not as often as I used to, but I hear ‘em.”
“As in the Mission Dolores,” says Hoot and jerks his head in that general direction. “Which is why we’re planning a forage into the land of darkness.”
“I think you mean foray,” Kaymart says and looks at me studyingly. “Is that what you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But it was a damned insistent voice and seemed righteously pushy when I tried to offer another explanation as to its intent.”
“Well, that’s not good,” says Bags. “Damned dangerous territory just over there. Mission’s haunted, you know.”
“Haunted? By what?”
“Whisperers, I should say,” says Kaymart, and gives her old man this look. “Don’t scare the boys now, Mr. Bags. They seem to be on a quest of sorts — a fine thing to be on, in my opinion. Better than a lot of other things boys their age could be on.”
Bags nods. “Be careful, anyway — just in case what the Mission’s haunted with is Potreros.”
Hoot just grins. He likes quests.
I am not in the mood for a quest of any sort by the time we leave the Farm. I would rather, I decide, hang here among the giant trees and the strange, blocky buildings and follow Kaymart around asking dumb questions about vegetables.
I like the way the Farm smells — like spicy perfume. I do not like the smell of Potrero at all, which unless you’ve ever been up along the Border between Potrero and Embar you can’t fully appreciate. Potrero stinks ‘cause Lord E doesn’t give a toot about garbage pickup.
Still, when darkness falls, we are at the trench from which Hoot will lead me, most likely, to my death. We do not go anywhere near the Checkpoints and I find myself wishing some knightie would spy us, stop us, and send us packing.
None does.
On the Potrero side of the Trench there’s another wall made of old junked cars and trucks and trolleys laced together with razorbarb wire. Runs for miles.
Smeagols say there are no running trolleys in Potrero-Taraval. No running anything — water, electricity, you name it. All sorts of stories come out of Potrero-Taraval on the tongues of smeagols. Stories about gangs and burnings and rapes and horrible diseases; people stealing to eat, starving if they can’t steal. Sounds like something out of Mad Max to me. Like I said, we hear this stuff from Deadend and that bunch. Don’t know whether to believe them or not. I’ve never known truth to stand between a smeagol and a good story.
All this haunts me; I realize I’m about to find out for myself if any of it is true. We go down into the trench where, if I stand on tiptoe, I can see over the lip. I move along behind Hoot, popping my head up here and there, while he looks for a place to slip through the machine wall.
It’s a clear, calm night with only a shadowless sliver of moon — almost the kind I’d’ve prayed for if I’d thought of it. But I didn’t, so I thank God for thinking of me without being asked.
About a quarter mile from where we drop into the trench, Hoot spies a chink between an old trolley and a mangled dumpster. About smeagol-sized. We go up over the edge, scat over to the wall of dead machines and squeeze through REAL careful.
Peeking out from the little chink, we see the streets are empty. No. Scratch that. More-than-empty. I see nobody. No knighties, no by-standers, no bikers, no mimes, no street-vendors, nothing.
Not, I s’pose, that I should expect to see ordinary people so close to the fringes, but I’m looking up a long hill and there’s nobody there, either. Besides which it is un-friggin’-believably dark in Potrero-Taraval. No street lamps, no fire-cans, no light bulbs, not even a candle.
Maybe, I think, the knighties are hiding in the buildings. I take a look. But I can see from here that these buildings are also more-than-empty. Fact is, when I look up at the ones crowding the street, I can see right through some of them — and I’m not talking windows here, either.
I shiver. It’s like looking through somebody’s flesh and seeing clear bluesky through their skeletals. Ooga-booga, as Creepy Lou would say.
Hoot nudges me. “Two blocks,” he whispers. “Easy streets — you’ll see.”
I get the sudden feeling Hoot has done this before.
“Just for the record,” I say, “I’m not hearing any Whispers at the moment.”
And just then, as if to make a liar of me, they whisper, Dolores again, and then something I don’t know — tsiaiaruka ka ruk.
I shake my head, wishing they’d go away.
“You were saying?” asks Hoot, somehow knowing.
“Let’s go,” I say.
I am known to exaggerate, but I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it was so dark on the Potrero side of the wall, I started to think the darkness was like fog. Not just any fog, but wu planchar, which is the kind that when you push it, it pushes back.
This was that kind of darkness — pressing in all over. I could feel it kneading my face, weighing down on my shoulders, flattening my hair. I was sure if I ever got back to Embarcadero (Kingdom of welcome light!), I’d find the stuff on the bottom of my shoes.
I can just see Hoot ahead of me in the dark, moving — so, I am moving too. I tug at his jacket.
“Yeah?” he says, and the unexpected sound of his voice just about turns me into an abject coward, as opposed, say, to a merely trepidatious one.
I start to hush him, but he says, “S’okay, Taco Face, just past new moon. The knighties are all up around Lord E’s headquarters, tucked in for the nighty.” He chuckles over his own dumb pun. “They tighten the perimeters when the moon’s new. That’s when the Haunts’re out.”
Now, I’d never heard of these Haunts until Bags mentioned them back at the Farm, and I say as much, which launches Hoot into a description of these ghosts that about curdles my blood.
I am pretending not to believe any of this, but as I am a dude who hears Whispers, and who is on his way to try to locate source of same. I feel I have very little grounds for bluster. But I say it anyway: ”I don’t believe in ghosts.”
And in my head, the Whisperers say, cat-ta-us, which makes no sense, but which somehow makes me feel...okay. I mean, okay as in I am not scared spitless all of a sudden, though I realize my lack of belief in ghosts is possibly uninformed.
“Which way?” I ask.
“Down that way,” he comes back, but as he is wearing his black leather jacket (can’t say I’ve ever seen him not wear his black leather jacket), I don’t see which way "that way" is.
“Straight down two blocks,” he adds a moment later. “And you don’t have to whisper. I’m not jazzin' about the Haunts. They’re really here.” There is a flash of almost white from where I think his mouth might be. “Well, at least the Potreros think so. They don’t come around the Mission at night.”
“How they figure to guard their border if they’re afraid to come down here?”
Hoot giggles, which is a source of amazement to me. Big, cool dudes don’t, as a rule, giggle much. It tends to spoil the effect of being big and cool.
“They think the Haunts are guarding the Mission border for ‘em.”
My feeling of okay-ness slips a little and I pray that the Potreros are dead wrong about this. We plow through the heavy darkness for the longest two blocks I have ever skulked. I can barely see the broken buildings that hover over us, but I can feel them. Without eyes, they are watching.
“Are you sure there’s nobody here?” I ask Hoot and then almost walk up his back when he just stops.
“Here,” he says and I struggle to see where "here" is.
I find an iron fence in front of me — the kind that’s like a row of spears stuck shaft first in the ground. I peer through the bars and am amazed that I can actually see something by the thin curve of moonlight.
It is big and ghost-gray against the smothering darkness. Tatters of wu seda fly like silky banners from the bell tower. I begin to see where this whole Haunt idea came from. The Mission Dolores is not a home of ghosts, it is a ghost, a ghost in a monk’s habit of black wool and silver silk and gauze.
Though the dark seems less heavy here, I still feel something pushing, pressing, pulling at me — reaching all the way to my immortal soul.
Cattaus. My son, say the Whisperers, loud and clear.
Whoa. Now, that part I understand. I just don’t understand what it means.
I been hearing these Whispers for almost a year and this is the first time they come up with a word in any language I get. The possibilities mad-dash through my head — foremostly that I’m the sole survivor of a family of ghosts. So, now what — they’re calling me to the Glorious Place?
“You hearing ‘em?” asks Hoot, and I’m all but knocked sideways because I’ve forgotten he’s there.
“They called me ‘son.’”
“ Zhende?” he says. “No kidding? Huh. Well, c’mon then.”
“Where?”
“Inside. C’mon.”
He moves off and I barely have time to peel my fingers off the cold iron bars and follow him.
“We don’t gotta go inside,” I protest.
“Yeah, we do. This is important. We got us a quest.”
“How do you know that? How do you know it’s important?”
Hoot makes a rude noise. “What — you think this shit happens to everybody?”
I can’t answer that. Or maybe I just don’t want to.
Deeper into Potrero-Taraval we go, about half a block. Then we turn east. I can see a little better now, though I can’t say how. There is still no light to speak of, and now a sly fog has begun to creep about us. It’s a shabu dong — that’s Chinglish for Moving Form of Gauze — and it makes my skin crawl when I pass through it — like walking through a ghost, I think.
Hoot takes me to a large and stiffly-leafed bush that has climbed all over the Mission’s outer wall. I think I’m s’posed to climb and start feeling for a branch to grab when Hoot clamps a hand on my ankle.
I make this noise I had no idea could come out of a human throat and hit the dirt.
“Geez, Chickpea! You wanna bring the whole of Potrero-Terribal down on us? C’mon!”
And he drags me down and stuffs me under the bush.
The next thing I know, I am standing in a strange forest of frozen stone. The shabu dong is here, too, and wraps itself around the strange shapes and around me and around what I think might be trees, but am not sure. Hoot comes up next to me.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask.
“Graveyard,” says Hoot. “How’re the Whispers?”
“Whispering,” I say, and they are — like crazy.
One big voice, a lot of little ones, all saying God-knows-what. It isn’t English or Chinese or Spanish or even Chinglish — which is what most Embarcaderans speak day-to-day — but it sounds vaguely like cross between the last two. In between all the unintelligibles I hear it again, Cattaus — my son.
“Let’s stroll,” says Hoot, and we do.
I’ve gone about a dozen steps before I realize something.
“Graveyard? We’re scopin' ghosts?”
“You don’t believe in ghosts,” Hoot reminds me, and leads on through a garden gone loco. (At least I hope all the light-sucking black stuff among the not-so-black stuff is greenery.) Through the graves we creep, and it occurs to me as we scuttle, to ask Hoot how he comes to know this side of the Border so well.
For a moment, the only answer is the creak of leather as he moves.
“Just a curious guy, I guess ... and kinda stupid.” There is a flash of white as he smiles back at me. “Thrills, y’know? The Potreros, the Haunts. Besides, I like this place, I guess. It’s got something.”
It does. And that something suddenly reaches out and hauls me to a dead stop (you should pardon the term).
Something ahead of us looms like a small mountain. By the sliver of moon and the silver of fog I see it as a jumble of pale stone. The shabu dong curls around and over it like giant see-through cat — gray fluff everywhere.
And the Whisperers aren’t whispering now, they’re talking out loud.
My son! they insist, but this is not mi madre y padre, that much I know for sure.
“Who are you?” I ask, not really expecting an answer, but I get one, and it makes my insides quiver.
Amah.
The word is alien. I don’t know it...but I feel it. It feels old. Older than the walls of this Mission, old as the rocks in this little mountain, old as....
“What is this place?” I ask Hoot.
“Don’t know. Part of the graveyard, I guess. There’s some sort of plaque or something on the other side, but it’s real worn. I can’t read it. You might be able to make it out. Maybe we could make some light.”
“Rather not,” I say, and turn my attention back on the Whisperers. “I wish I understood you guys,” I tell them.
There is no answer, but for no particular reason my hair stands up all over my head. The shabu dong around the pile of rocks is doing something most un-shabu dong-like. It’s all moving toward the same spot, which is about ten feet from the tip of my nose.
It’s a little chilly in the graveyard, but where I’m standing it’s sub-zero. I am aware that my mouth is hanging open, sucking in mist.
Beside me, Hoot says, “Cool. What is it?” Like I should know.
"It" was starting to look less and less like fog and more and more like something else — something sort of person-shaped.
“Huh,” says Hoot. Then he tugs at my sleeve. “We should zhou now.”
I shake my head. I’m scared spitless, but I don’t want to miss this — whatever it is.
“No. I mean it,” Hoot tells me. “Let’s go. Now.”
About the time he says "now," I hear something most un-ghost-like. Like shouting, for example, and the pounding of many non-ghost feet. And about this same time, Hoot just grabs me and shoves me into some overgrown bushes.
“Zhou!” he says — which is to say, "scram most diligently."
I do, momentarily forgetting the not-shabu-dong thing forming by the rock pile.
Hoot and I scramble for yards on our hands and knees — him leading, me praying I don’t lose him in the shrubbery and wondering if he knows where the hell we are going. Suddenly, I realize there are no more bushes and Hoot is hauling me to my feet.
“Zhou!” he says again, as if I need any more encouragement.
We are in the open street now between the Mission and the Border. Behind us is the Mission wall; before us is another wall — a wall of fog. It’s a woolly zhentou — thick and silent and impossible to see through.
We dive in and lose ourselves to Potrero-Taraval. I pray we don’t lose ourselves, period.
We don’t. Oddly, the zhentou stops right at the Border, and it is clear where we drop into the long, deep ditch. Behind us, I can still hear shouting, and the fog lights up with the flicker of torches.
“I thought you said the Potreros never went there,” I say as we come out into the lesser dark of Embarcadero.
Hoot blinks up at me from the trolley car wreck.
“Things change, Taco Face,” he tells me.
They do. They change muy mucho and all at once. The next night Hoot goes back into Potrero-Taraval, pulled by his own Whisperers, I suspect. He does not come back.
As a result of this, I spend the next month or so — every day — at the Wiz, trying to do two things: One is to make sense of the loneliness; two is to figure out my Calling.
I read. I listen. I watch. I VR. I talk to the Keepers of Wisdom and History.
No ideas come to me.
The Whisperers are of no particular help, either. I’m getting more words I can understand, but not make sense of, ‘cause I got no context. Sometimes now, I think I hear Hoot, too — in the alley outside my cozy — but I know that’s only the loneliness talking.
I think a lot about finding another cat.
I also read a lot about the California mission system. This does not inspire me to happy thoughts, but the subject sucks my interest like a vacuum.
I mean the Haunts, ni dong. The Haunts that Hoot took me to meet that night at the Mission Dolores. I didn’t know what they were then, but now I was beginning to get the picture.
Long ago, the Ohlone people lived here. There were many tribes, all of which referred to themselves as The People. This is called ‘ethnocentricity.’ Everybody does it.
The thing that made my blood run deep-freeze was learning that that Mission — Dolores — had about 5,000 Ohlone buried somewhere around it as a more or less direct result of my ancestors' attempting to save their souls.
Hoot and I’d been standing on a burial ground, and that pile of rock where the shabu dong did its little dance was a memorial — a tribute to the dead Ohlone.
I’m not thrilled with this idea. Besides, it’s confusing. I mean, why would 5,000 dead Indians be talking to me? The only answer I can come up with isn’t comforting, considering that my ancestors were responsible for their demise.
Anyway, I am sitting in the Wiz staring at a History book without seeing the words when someone sits down cross-table. It’s the old man Bags, and he’s looking at me like I’m an unreadable subway sign.
“History,” he says. “Good subject. Never figure out where you’re goin' if you don’t know where you been.”
I nod, feeling as if he’s saying more than he’s saying.
He taps his finger on the page I have not been reading. “Mount Diablo,” he says. “Big magic there. Very sacred ground to the Ohlone people. They say that’s where they met the first Spaniards.”
I nod again. “I read about it. The Spaniards met an Ohlone holy man and thought he was their Devil.”
“Yeah, well, I bet that old Indian shaman thought the same thing about the Spaniards.”
His eyes are twinkling at me and, for some reason, I smile.
“Yeah, well, I guess he’d’ve been right.”
“They were powerful, those shamans. And wise. Shamanry is a great calling.”
He nods at his own pronouncement, very solemn, then turns the other books I have collected so he can read the spines. What he sees is another book about the Ohlone and the first of the Books of Kingdom.
“Ah, you study the Classics.”
“Sure,” I say, and don’t add, “Doesn’t everybody?”
Fact is, I’ve probably read all the primary Books of Kingdom more than most folks I know except maybe the reigning monarch. I can almost recite them by heart.
“Who d’you read for?”
“Huh?” seems the only likely thing to say.
“Who d’you read the books for? Arthur? Guinevere? Frodo?”
“Oh. Merlin, I guess. And Gandalf.”
He reads me up and down and I fidget. “You’re about how old — twelve?”
“Thirteen,” I say quickly.
“Two years from choosing your Calling...thinking of going into merlinry, are you?”
His question strikes me both kinds of dumb. Only in the deepest recesses of my little chickpea heart had I ever dreamed of being a merlin, and I had hidden it so well that I didn’t even know it until the old guy spit it out.
“No way,” I answer. “I just like the books.”
“That so? Then what you planning to do?”
I shrug. “Dunno.”
He squints like the sun is in his eye, which it is not, ‘cause the Wiz is usually kept kind of dark except for the little reading lamps at the tables. This is more economical and does not waste resources. Regardless of this general dimness, Bags squints up one eye, then the other, then says, “Your friend Hoot said you got some magic.”
The mention of Hoot pushes me out of mopey into depression. There is now a big fat lump in my throat, and my stomach is wriggling, and my heart feels like someone is scrunching it into a little, tight ball.
“Sorry you lost him. He was a good kid.... So you think he’s right about the magic?”
“Beats me.”
“You still hear them voices?”
“Yeah. I get every third or fourth word. But I don’t get ‘em, y’know?”
“Yup. I know. It was like that with my plants at first. Only caught little itty bits of what they were sayin' to me.”
Now that tickles my Alice bone. “You hear whispers?”
“Surely.” He leans toward me across the table. “Green things, Taco,” he tells me. “Green things speak to the heart of any man — or woman — who’ll listen. You’ve seen Kaymart’s greenhouse. Green things talk to her, too. Of course, you’ll never hear her admit it.”
I recall the overgrown garden of the Mission Dolores.
“D’you think it’s green things talking to me?”
“Could be.”
“What would they be saying? Why would they call me their son?”
“Well, I don’t know that, Taco. Probably don’t mean it literal. Whispers are pretty individual; they say different things to different folks.”
“What do yours say?”
“Oh, they tell me when to plant and when to harvest, and they tell me how much food there’ll be for market and how much to put up for me and Kaymart. They tell me when it’s gonna rain and whether the rain’ll be a gentle shower or a hell-bent-for-wet thunderstorm. They talk to me about cold snaps and hot spells. The maples tell me when the syrup is up and if there’ll be an early fall. The pines tell me how the water table’s doin. They tell me other stuff too. Secret stuff.”
I am impressed. I had no idea plants could be so vocal. I say as much.
Bags cocks his head sidewise in a way that reminds me of Hoot.
“You want to find out more about your Whisperers? You want to find a Calling?” he asks.
“In a big way,” I answer.
“Why don’t you come on out to the Farm? Maybe the answers are out there. I know mine were. Come on, boy,” he adds, when I don’t speak up right away. “Explore the possibilities. What’ve you got to lose?”
Truth is — nothing. I got no Calling in heart or mind other than merlinry — a striving for which I have no suit. I could, I think, be a farmer like Bags. It would be a most useful Calling, after all.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” I say. “I do thank you for the kind invitation.”
“Most welcome.” He gets up and winks at me. “‘Sides, Kaymart’s all set she’s gonna feed you up. Put some meat on your bones. Anyway, son, you’re welcome there any time you care to show up.”
I show up the next morning, early. Suddenly, my cozy doesn’t seem so cozy. Seems damn hard to sleep in. ‘Specially as I have not heard anybody call me ‘son’ lo these many years except for the Whisperers. On the lips of Mr. Bags, it is awesomely sweet.
Another reason I hit the Farm early is to try to do some green listening. I hear wind in the boughs of the pines and firs and sequoias. I hear insects and birds waking to talk amongst themselves.
And that’s nothing compared to what I smell. I smell the green. I swear.
Then, when I’ve almost given up listening for smelling, I hear, in my inner ear, “Tsiaiaruk ka ruk.”
“Huh?” I say.
“I said ‘welcome home,’ son,” says Bags from suddenly in front of me. He has a very large fork in his hand and grass in his hair. “Let me introduce you around.”
Green things did not talk to me that day. In fact, they never talked to me — at least not in the way they talk to Bags. Which is not to say they didn’t communicate stuff. I learned to tell in other ways about harvests and frosts and heat waves.
I’m talking about ordinary, general green things now. There’s green things and there’s Doug, which is entirely different.
I have what Kaymart calls an Affinity for Conifers — which means that trees that make cones and have needles like me. I notice it right away.
Conifers are just different from other trees. They have this smell that just about makes me float away. My bed in my room (my very own room) in the Farm House is a pile of fragrant boughs. I could sit and stroke the shiny needles for hours, and would, if Bags and Kaymart didn’t keep me moving.
It was my special job to collect dropped cones, for which I thank the trees most humbly as Bags taught me.
One day I’m trekking through the Farm dogging Bags’s tracks and picking up cones, incidentally sucking up attar of evergreen and Bags’s lore, when I see Doug for the first time. He’s just a little guy, growing cupped between two roots of this great big sequoia gramma (or maybe grampa — you can never be real sure with trees).
“Bags,” I say, “isn’t it hard for a little guy like that to grow all hunkered on top of those big old roots?”
Bags snorts so loud, a flock of quail takes off twenty yards downhill.
“Hard? S’damn near impossible. Can’t put down his taproot. Won’t last the winter, most likely.”
“Then, why’d God put him here?”
“It's a legit mystery, son.”
I look down at the little tree and feel my guts start to quiver. It was the first time I’d ever felt that. I hear the Whisperers say that familiar word, Cattaus, and the next thing I know my eyes go all wonky and I see that little, tiny seedling in a clay pot, and the clay pot is in my arms.
“What’d happen, Bags,” I ask, “if I dug that little tree up and put it in a nice pot and took care of it all year round?”
Bags’s funny no-color eyes glint at me. “Well, I s’pose it’d stand a whole lot better chance of survival.”
“Can we? Dig it up, I mean?”
Bags makes every last one of his nine hundred ninety-nine thoughtful faces. He knows how bad I want him to say, "yes." And he knows what having to stand there and watch all those nine hundred ninety-nine faces is doing to my twisty guts. No good, that’s what. Finally, he nods.
“Let’s get us a shovel and a pot,” he says.
We do, and dig Doug up and put him in a pot. (I don’t know he’s Doug yet, of course.) I insist I can carry him home on my own.
Bags watches me hug that big old pot in my arms.
“Well, now,” he says, “you still wondering why God let that little tree grow there?”
I’ve always been impressed with how well Bags understands God. Kaymart’s always been impressed, too.
“That’s one of the reasons I married him,” she tells me once. “You could go to the Wiz every day and never come home with even a smidgen of the wisdom in that old bean. I’d trade his savvy for my magna cum laude any day.”
I didn’t know what a magma-come-loud was and asked if it had anything to do with volcanoes, which I was studying in Videoschool at the Wiz. Kaymart just laughed. Much later I find out it has to do with going to a university, which we don’t have any of around here anymore. Unless, of course, you count the Wiz.
It’s as I’m carrying Doug back to the Farm House in his little clay pot that I come to a peculiar understanding: I have sort of just made a Green Thing my son. If Bags is right, may be Green Things are also calling me ‘son.’
I have gone from orphaned to lousy-with-family in short order. I find I like this.
oOo
Forgive me, I have meandered bigtime down memory lane. Wandering back, I am sitting at table with Bags and Kaymart, preparing to make only my second-ever foray into the darkness that is Potrero-Taraval, and my eyes are watering something fierce, for Doug and Hoot both.
“You rescued him afore, f’sure,” Bags reassures me. “You’ll do it again. You’ll see. No doubt about it.”
I shake my head. “Back then he was only being guarded by a giant redwood, and that old redwood wasn’t likely to pull her roots up out of the ground and come chasing after me for tree-napping.”
“Yeah,” Bags concedes, “but back then, you weren’t no merlin either.”
“I’m not sure I’m one now,” I admit. “Sometimes I think I’m just making it all up.”
Kaymart’s having none of this.
“Nonsense, Del,” she tells me, her eyes looking fierce under her frizz of gray hair. “You’re most certainly a merlin. I’ve seen you work. You’ve got some kind of special ability, that much I know. Your only problem is a lack of confidence. You just need to bolster your self-esteem.”
I almost understand what she’s saying before Bags butts in with a loud bray and exclaims, “She means you need to grow some cajones, boy!”
I have cajones, of course. Five seconds in close quarters with Firescape is enough to prove that. But I know what Bags and Kaymart mean. I don’t have a lot of confidence, but sometime between then and nightfall, I gotta get some.