MAGIC (7 page)

Corky did his best, tried very hard, and in the end got both legs broken for the effort.

Not that first scrimmage. He just caught punts then, and he didn’t drop any, being careful always to look the ball right into his hands. He caught and he ran but they kept him out of real contact until he knew which way the runbacks went and once he got that straight he did well enough until the second week when he was trying to juke, had his left leg planted in the grass when someone hit him from the side and he could hear something snap and in the pile up it all got very messy, and the other leg got bent the wrong way too, and just before he passed out on the grass, Corky had a moment left to think, and what went through his mind was that he wasn’t ever going to have to do this anymore, so all in all, on balance, it was a very lucky day …

The magic came out of the pain.

He awoke in Normandy Hospital, a cast from the bottom up. It was dark. Mutt sat in a chair. Corky managed to mutter a few things and his father answered back, but it was impossible to tell who was the more subdued. Finally Mutt looked at his watch. “Gotta go give massages,” he said.

Corky nodded.

“Want me to bring anything?”

Corky couldn’t think.

“Whittling stuff?”

Corky shook his head. “Too messy. The shavings.”

“Get some sleep, Pal,” Mutt said.

Corky did as he was told.

He awoke several hours later, feeling better and bored. He asked a nurse for something. She brought him what she called the game box, but it was only a dirty deck of cards, a pair of dice and a lotto board. He asked for something to read. She brought a pile of magazines, left him. Corky thumbed through. Comics. Romance magazines.

And
Classy Classics Volume I
by Merlin, Jr.

Card tricks? Corky studied the faded pamphlet, almost put it down, didn’t. He opened it instead, read page one:

Corky reached into the game box, took out the dirty deck of playing cards. He squeezed them a few times, bent them one way, then the other. They felt okay. But then, he always did have the good hands.

And the good speed didn’t matter anymore.

He wasn’t sure she even knew his name until the after-noon she called out “Corky, can we talk?” He was leaving high school for the day, walking down the front steps; she was at the bottom, surrounded as always by boys. It was early April, only starting to warm, and she was in her plaid skirt and the white sweater plus the oxblood loafers with the dimes.

It wasn’t one of her best days, she looked barely perfect. With the dark blonde hair and the dark blue eyes and the incredible this and the glorious that that could drive you crazy if you thought about it long enough.

Pointless going on. You could not, Corky realized months ago at the start of freshman year, explain the impact of Peggy Ann Snow by talking about specifics.

He used to spend a lot of time figuring how to best impress her. He rescued her from burning buildings and runaway cars. He fought thieves and rapists, not to mention smugglers and spies, though why the spies were after her he never quite worked out, or, for that matter, what it was the smugglers wanted up in the Catskills. But that was the thing about Peggy Ann Snow. She put weird thoughts in your head.

And they didn’t go away.

“Corky, can we talk?”

He stopped where he was on the steps, watched as she left the group of junior boys, hurried over to him. “I guess we’ve never really met, I’m Peggy Snow, you’re Corky.”

Nod.

“Hi.”

He gave a kind of small, casual wave.

“I hear you do …” and she mimed something, probably pulling a rabbit out of a hat “… stuff.”

Nod.

“Listen, I’m facing a real problem and it would mean just the world to me if you’d kind of help out.”

“Depends.”

“See, Lucas—that’s my twerp of a kid brother—Lucas is having an eighth birthday a week from Saturday and Mom said it was time I pulled my weight so she’s cooking but I have to handle keeping them quiet. So if I paid you, would you do a magic show?”

“Never done one.”

“I can spring for two dollars.”

“It’s time for my debut.”

Not much of a line but it made her smile.

Ahhhhhh.

He spent the intervening days working out his routining. Start with the flashy stuff or save those for the end? If you started big, you could lose interest before you were half done. If you started small, you might never
get
half done. Corky did a lot of list-making. Probably eight-year-olds were a tough audience so what he decided to do was
only
flashy stuff, one climax to another, constantly knocking them dead.

Peg introduced him.

Corky stood behind the pinned up sheet in the basement of her house by Lake Melody. He was wearing his top hat and magician’s cape and carrying his wand and he listened to the commotion out front as the dozen kids got seated. And suddenly, it was very hard to breathe. He inhaled a few times, cleared his throat. Ahead of him Peg went,
“Say hello to Corky Withers,”
unpinned the sheet, and he was on.

“Man-zelle,”
he said and bowed to Peggy. He smiled at the children.
“Mes amis.”

“Why is he talking that way?” one of the kids in the middle front said.

“Shut up, Lucas,” Peggy said. “He’s a great French magician.”

“I thought he went to school right here.”

“He happens to now,” Peggy answered, “but he’s spent a
lot
of time in France, so just zip it up, Lucas.”

Corky brought out two billiard balls from his cape and held them high. “ ’ooo would like to play zee beel-yards? Eet is impossible,
non? Parce que
zere are needed three balls for to play zee beel-yards.
Voilà!
” Corky made a big gesture with his left hand and while they followed that, he pushed the billiard ball shell into position with his thumb so that when he held his right hand high, it looked like there were three balls now.

“Terrific,” Peggy said, leading the applause, or doing her best to, because no one else did any clapping.

“I got that trick, it’s a shell,” the one next to Lucas said.

“Mais non,”
Corky got out.

“Then throw us the three balls,” Lucas said.

“Fat lip time is coming up,” Peggy said. “Anybody interested?”

Corky got out the disappearing cigar. “When some-one try to smoke in mah pre-zahnce, I am poo-lite. I ask,
s’il vous plaît
, out wiz zee see-gar. Eef zay say
oui
, I do nozzing. Eef zay say
non
—” and he clapped his hands together, raising the right one higher, the one with the cigar, because that activated the gimmick on his inside sleeve and pulled the cigar up and out of sight. You had to do it just right to give the impression of disappearance with any skill at all, and Corky knew as he made the move that he’d never done it better. Peggy clapped. Corky bowed.

Lucas farted.

Uproar. Shrieks and screams and when Corky tried to begin the mystery of the bottomless milk pitcher there was no way of being heard, and he tried going on until Lucas belched and that set off a chain belch reaction that went on until Peg struck like an avenging
angel, grabbing her brother by the neck, dragging him up to the stage crying, “Get the stuff Corky—
now
,” but Corky didn’t get it and Peg said, “The
French
stuff for God’s sakes, the stuff you demonstrated in science class, the stuff that
freezes your tongue to the roof of your mouth”
and now Corky managed, “The French freezing stuff, right,” and as he started off Lucas was screaming, “Don’t do it—don’t freeze my tongue” but Peg was having none of it, saying, “It only lasts an hour, you’ll love it” and then Lucas was going, “I’ll be so quiet, I will I will, gimme a chance
please!
” Eventually Peg relented.

And the rest of the performance went wonderfully well.

“Sorry it couldn’t be more,” Peg said, when it was over, the basement quiet now, the children upstairs eating. She handed him the two dollars.

Corky shook his head “no.”

“C’mon, a deal’s a deal.”

“Please.”

She looked at him. “Hey you mean it.”

Nod.

“How come you’re so quiet?”

Shrug.

“Boy, you’re just as weird as they say—”

“—who says I’m weird?—”

“Gotcha that time.” She smiled. “Nobody. I was only trying to get a rise out of you.”

“Do people?” he wondered, since it was something he suspected all along to be true.

“You are awful quiet, Corky.”

“Nothing much to say.”

“Okay.” She helped him gather up his tricks and boxes, put them into a shopping bag so they’d fit neatly. Then she walked him to his bicycle. “Bye, Corky, thanks.”

He nodded, started riding off.

“And you’re good,” she shouted after him.

“Gonna be,” he shouted back. “Someday …”

*   *   *

After that they always nodded in the halls, and if there was anything to talk about, spoke. He helped her with her homework sometimes—she spelled atrociously—and tried to make himself, unobtrusively, handy, and there were times when he was almost positive she liked him.

That summer Mutt got him a job chopping lettuce at the G. A thousand guests a night, salads twice a day, it made for a busy summer. He made up his poem at the start of the second week to stop from going mad.

It wasn’t much of a poem really, but then he never fancied himself to be a poet. And regardless of its merits, it was a lot better than others he tried.

P. B. Shelley didn’t have a lot to worry about …

It was natural that, sooner or later, she would take up with Ronnie Wayne and that fall, she did. Corky wasn’t even jealous, that’s how natural it was; Ronnie Wayne had it all. His nickname was “Duke” and he was a senior and he had his own car, a convertible. That was nothing. His father ran the most successful real estate operation in Normandy. Still nothing. Ronnie “the Duke” got decent grades in school without cracking a book, he could shoot pool better than the poor kids, he was more popular than any other senior but best of all, at that time, in the year of our Lord 1959, he looked shockingly like Elvis Presley.

“Withers,” he whispered one autumn day. “Take this to Stuck-up.”

“Who?” They were in the school library, study hall, everyone in their own seat and no moving around, a rule that didn’t apply to Corky, since he worked in the library for extra money and besides, Miss Beckmire, the librarian, liked him, probably because he had a sweet face and was always polite and could read faster than anybody else in Normandy High.

Duke held out the note for Corky. “Snow, for chris-sakes.”

Corky took the folded paper and strolled the length of the enormous room, dropped it on Peggy’s desk. “From the Duke,” he whispered.

Peggy unfolded the note, read it, then got out her pencil and scribbled a reply on a sheet of paper of her own. She stopped in the middle, whispered, “Is conceited i-e or e-i?” He told her, she finished the note, folded it, and he took it back to Duke.

There were three complete exchanges that study period, three again the next day, culminating in Duke taking Peggy out for Cokes after school. Corky stood by his bicycle and watched the parking lot as Duke tore out toward town. The top was down. Peggy’s dark blonde hair was blowing. Corky felt, no question about it, really good about the whole thing.

Peggy’s right, you are weird, he told himself.

And peddled home.

He passed notes between the two of them for all that week and well into the next, and if Miss Beckmire suspected, she didn’t do anything. And the second Wednesday, Peggy invited Corky to come along.

They went to The Hut, which was only the biggest and busiest place in town as far as the high school was concerned, and they had Cokes and Duke ordered a plate of crisp fries and they devoured them so fast Duke had to order another.

Corky sat there, trying to not look impressed. But it was hard. My Corky, why shouldn’t it be, you’re
sitting between the prettiest girl and the most popular boy and
they invited you
.

They did it several more times that October and afterwards, Corky made quick notes when he got home, because probably he had never had better times than those and you never knew how long they’d last.

Mutt got fired before Thanksgiving. He’d been becoming increasingly morose ever since Willie’s crash, and one day he just slugged the head of the gym at Grossinger’s and wised off to a couple of the customers who tried to intervene, and you didn’t do that kind of thing and expect to stick around.

He lucked out though, latched onto an opening at a private club in Chicago near the Loop, and it was amazing, after living all those years in one place, how fast you could leave when there was nothing holding you back.

His last day at school, Corky went to Peg’s house to say good-bye, and give her a wooden heart he’d whittled but it was cheerleading practice afternoon, so he went to the girls’ gym and waited outside. It was after four when he got there and after five when the first girl left.

It wasn’t Peggy.

Corky waited. It was getting cold now. Inside the lit building he could hear the cheers going on over and over, getting perfect so that the Normandy Tigers might somehow beat the Liberty Wildcats in the final grudge game of the season. The darkening afternoon was filled with strident voices: