A Lion Among Men (19 page)

“I’ll come with you,” he told Dorothy and the others.

At this point-the moment when Brrr stepped into the limelight of history-he was perhaps twenty, though of course as a Lion that meant he was middle-aged. Twenty, and he’d conducted his sordid affairs and peccadilloes only in Gillikin and Munchkinland. But he’d spent his life within earshot of Oz’s great capital city, which pulsed with so much power it was almost a nation unto itself-a state on its own. Perhaps what was scandalous elsewhere, in hidebound provincial centers like Shiz, would seem penny-candy stuff in a capital city. Perhaps the EC was large enough, urbane enough, to consider Brrr’s trials and shames not only incidental but unremarkable.

He had little to lose now. If Dorothy’s stamp of approval from Lady Glinda proved genuine, he might be traveling with diplomatic immunity. After all, Dorothy had shown him a writ on a scroll, though he couldn’t read it well enough to parse its curlicued grandiosity.

The Kiss of Lady Glinda, it was called: a passport requiring its bearer safe passage to the Emerald City under penalty of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

It was signed with a flourish and a little scribble of a heart with a smile inside it, which looked to Brrr like a picture of an extracted tooth delighted to be liberated from some foul mouth.

A good deal of what happened next-the Matter of Dorothy-was a story he didn’t choose to dwell upon. How déclassé, to arrive with a crippled human decked out with tin prophylactics and with a Scarecrow, sweet enough but clueless as to his own origins-though who wasn’t? Brrr liked Dorothy, though. One evening he found himself imagining her as Jemmsy in a dress and pigtails, which seemed too weird, if fun, so he steered his attentions elsewhere.

The Emerald City lifted itself onto the horizon, more pomp and glory than Brrr had imagined possible. Emerald overdrive. Even the loo paper was green, which Brrr considered a sort of design error. But The Kiss of Glinda worked its magic, as it were. The magnificent and dreadful Wizard of Oz agreed to meet them, though in separate interviews. Brrr’s was last, and he was expecting a great Head, like the one that had shown itself to Dorothy, but perhaps the wine had been more toxic than he’d realized, for all he could see was light shining from the throne.

Steeling himself, Brrr remembered the Ozmists, and thought: Barter! He would negotiate for some government sinecure in exchange for having escorted this foreign dignitary to the palace. “I have a request of you,” he began, “O great-and-powerful-and-all-knowing Oz.”

“Courage,” said the Wizard.

“No, not courage,” said the Lion. “I mean, well, courage would be nice. But I was thinking of something more in the line of a job.”

“I will give you what you most need,” said the Wizard, “if you bring down the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Bring her down? I had hoped she wouldn’t even come up,” murmured Brrr. The Wizard was better at bartering than he was.

Later, Brrr said to his new companions, “I’m all for engaging in a little cut-and-run action here. Why should we do the Wizard’s dirty work? He has his own military presence. The EC is crawling with soldiers.”

Some of those middle-aged military personnel might once have known Jemmsy. But Brrr let that thought pass.

“Yes,” said Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman. “And any one of those soldiers could take you into custody for refusing the request of the Wizard.”

“He didn’t order us out to the West,” said Brrr. “We’re volunteering. Aren’t we? Aren’t we?”

They looked at him.

“We’re not drafted against our will, surely.”

“De facto, we are,” said the Scarecrow. “It’s only our having a commission from the Throne of Oz that keeps those soldiers from picking you up, anyway. The Animal Adverse laws haven’t been lifted, Pussycat. You don’t see many Animals in the streets of this fair city, do you?”

“Besides,” said Dorothy, “I want to go home. I’m sick of this place. Not of you, dear friends, never of you. But all this rigamarole, all this kowtowing. It’s exhausting. Let’s just consider this little military action something we have to go through. In any event, I’m going, on my own if I have to.”

“You’d kill a witch, just like that, at someone’s suggestion?” asked the Tin Woodman. “How unfeeling. You’re a monster.”

“I didn’t say I was going to kill her,” said Dorothy. “Perhaps we can make a private arrangement with her. Broker a peace deal, a compromise of some sort. Who knows. In any event, my house did sort of smush her sister, and I haven’t had a chance to deal with the trauma of that, what with all the festivities and so on. I mean, I need some closure here.”

The Wizard of Oz, it seemed, had them all by the short hairs. So against his better judgment, Brrr signed on to the mission. Maybe Dorothy’s preternatural innocence would call good luck upon them, and he could be a partial beneficiary. And the Wizard had promised Brrr a suitable reward should the mission succeed.

Now, was it forward to victory? Or was it out of the frying pan into the fire? The stakes were never higher. Whatever happened, it would be impossible to retire anonymously after all this. Perhaps Brrr should have roared that tiny little Toto into an early grave and gotten out while he could.

The trip to the West was taxing in every sense. Eventually the Witch’s Winged Monkeys showed up to give them a lift up the steepest of the slopes of Knobblehead Pike to the Witch’s castle, known as Kiamo Ko. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow were left below, but the Lion and Dorothy and Toto were deposited in the courtyard to meet the Witch and her little entourage: the other monkeys, that lad named Liir, and the old Nanny whom Yackle, it seemed, had met all those years earlier.

Liir was the least of creatures on the scene, a scrambling aide-desorcière as the Lion remembered. Fumbling, earnest: a knockabout kid who looked as if he could fall out a tower window without much surprise. The Lion had paid little attention to him: Who knew that Liir’s whereabouts would come to intrigue the high and mighty in the Emerald City one day?

And of the so-called Witch, what could Brrr now recall? His whole life had seemed to lead up to this fatal event: the instruction to murder the Wicked Witch of the West. So you would think he’d have a better grasp of that Elphaba Thropp.

Yet he had only seen her the once, really, and there she remained, stamped in his mind’s eye in a kind of bas-relief, like a figure on a commemorative medal. If she really was a Witch, beneath all that witchy drag, she was an erratic one. Her body made a zigzaggy shape at the top of those castle steps, like a W fallen on its side. She was all angles, contorted like a cripple, twisted with rage and fear, but not with paralysis. She was anything but paralyzed.

“You!” she’d cried at him. Had she recognized him as the Lion cub in the laboratory back at Shiz? He didn’t know. He hadn’t the temerity to ask for clarification. “You!” she’d cried again, and this time he quailed more deeply, thinking she meant You traitor! How can you, a Lion, come against me, when I have fought for your weal since before you were born!

He wanted to reply, Show me some respect. Some of your detractors have tarred me as your familiar. And he would have said that, and more. If he only had the nerve.

But her gaze had turned to Dorothy, and Elphaba had whipped down those steps like an oversize, bewitched eggbeater whirling on its own. What happened next, the famous dissolution of the Witch, had happened offstage, as the flying monkeys had crowded Brrr and the Witch’s help-boy, Liir, into a larder and locked the door. By the time Brrr had broken the door off its hinges, the damage was done. The Witch was gone. And Brrr’s reputation would be tarnished forever by dint of his presence at the castle.

Guilt by association-or a hero by popular clamor, depending on which political hack was retailing the events.

One way or the other, the Witch was gone.

After a couple of skirmishes with barbaric tribes of the Vinkus, the Lion and Dorothy-together with young Liir, and soon reunited with Nick Chopper and the Scarecrow-made their way overland back to the Emerald City. Their hopes were high but soon daunted. By an accident of the sort one might see on the stage, Dorothy’s little yapper, Toto, took a grip on a closet curtain and gave a tug. Only useful thing the fool animal ever did. The Wizard was revealed as a mere mortal, and a bit of a charlatan at that. As clever with his hands-all those tiktok inventions, those terrifying images he projected-as he was with his diktats and fiats and fatwahs. Oh my.

In the confusion that followed, the Emerald City Irregulars were showered with junk. Tchotchkes you could pick up at a five-and-farthing store.

As the Wizard rummaged through a drawer, he spoke over his shoulder. “My research associates are thorough when they need to prepare the case for honorifics. You, my friend, are known as the Cowardly Lion-oh, don’t be bashful! Your history precedes you! I shall give you just what you deserve: a token of esteem suitable for wearing at Court.” He came up with a tin medal on a sash of green and gold. It wasn’t suitable for wearing to the church rummage sale, unless you intended to dump it in the hand-me-down box. The sash was stained with creepy beige spots (don’t want to know what that was) and the medal said COURAGE! It had been so clumsily produced that the first three letters were afflicted with bloat. The only legible part read RAGE!

“Thank you, your Ozness,” said Brrr, hoping it was a joke, hoping if he played along he’d end up happy. The
WOO
placed the medal around his neck. Had Jemmsy’s medal for courage been as cheaply manufactured, as odious? Brrr lifted the medal to sniff it, to bring back Jemmsy. A pin mounted on the back cut the softer part of the pad of his paw.

“I can’t accept this-” he began to say, but the Wizard had moved on to address Dorothy, and the little girl was beaming in such high hopes of an exit visa from Oz that the Lion didn’t have the nerve to interrupt.

Still, as they were dismissed and ushered away, Brrr continued to imagine that he might somehow parry the dubious honor into a rehabilitation, perhaps even a position in the Wizard’s court. He was mistaken, though. His timing couldn’t have been worse. The Wizard’s long reign had come to an end at last. Oscar Zoroaster Diggs, the great and powerful
WOO
, abdicated the throne and departed the Emerald City by a hot-air balloon, said to be the way he had arrived four decades earlier. Why, why leave now, when his adversary, the Wicked Witch, was finally done for? No one was certain. Perhaps the crafty old geezer could hear that palace knives were being sharpened for a use more sinister than the carving of rump roast.

“Cowardly Lion,” said Dorothy to him, snapping her fingers in his face to get his attention. “With any luck my visit is drawing to a close, and I need to talk to you before I go.”

He roused himself from the lethargy of resentment. Dorothy shut the door to the chamber of the shabby guesthouse in which he was lodged. There was no direct light, given that to the north a government bureau loomed six stories above them. “Sadly in need of redecoration,” said Dorothy, smoothing her skirt over her behind and sitting down on the chenille bedspread, “but nothing compared to what Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are faced with, given that I set out from home bringing the whole house with me.”

“Are you making the rounds, dispensing last little bromides? You can save your breath.”

“Don’t be like that. When the time comes for me to leave, I know you won’t want to make a public fuss over me. So I’ve come to say something in private.”

Brrr hadn’t actually planned to attend Dorothy’s valedictory session. He just nodded at her: Go on.

“I love your pals, you know; the Scarecrow and the Woodman. But I love them for their quaintness, while I love you for the animal in you.”

In most Animal circles referring to one’s animal instinct would be considered a ferocious insult. But Brrr thought it best not to challenge Dorothy to a duel at this stage. He’d probably lose.

“You see, I grew up on a farm. I had a little pet hen once. She followed me around, in and out of the kitchen, into the farmyard. She couldn’t speak, of course. We’re talking Kansas, where free speech in general is not highly prized.”

“Is there a moral to this story?”

“One day she crossed the road. Do you know why the chicken crossed the road?”

“Is this a joke?”

Nothing was a joke to Dorothy. “Because I was on the other side,” she finished. “I was standing on one foot and singing a little song about, oh, I don’t know what. And that brave little hen crossed the dangerous road to be with me.”

“What happened to her?”

“One Saturday night Uncle Henry wrung her neck and Auntie Em made chicken stew. I cried and cried but actually she tasted pretty good.”

Brrr shook his head. “I’m not getting the point of this, Dorothy. I think you’ve been away from your own kind too long.”

“That is exactly my point!” she exclaimed. “You see, I lost my parents, too. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry aren’t even relatives. They wrote away to an orphanage in Independence, Missouri, requesting someone because Auntie Em needed some help around the house, what with her sciatica. I’m who they got.” She chewed her pigtail. “Perhaps they regret it now, or maybe not. Hard to say.”

“Dorothy,” said Brrr, “I was about to take a nap.”

“Sorry. The point is: You and I are more alike than you think. And ornery as Auntie Em could be, and pigheaded as Uncle Henry is, they are my own family now, and I miss them and love them. I would cross the road for them, like my pet hen did for me. You must feel no different about your own family.”

“With all due respect, I have no family, Dorothy.”

She put her arms around him, which was an odd comfort.

“Take care of Liir,” she whispered. “Okay? He has no family either. And he’s a little…well, dim.”

“I don’t have any obligations to that boy.” Brrr was all too aware how he had failed Jemmsy and Cubbins. Better that Liir should get on in his life without being shackled with a big burly Lion for a sidekick.

“For me?” she said. “If the Witch was his mother, my word: it’s my fault he’s an orphan now, too. Like me and you both. I can’t bring him home with me, and I daren’t leave him alone. He needs someone, Brrr, and so do you.”