Shaman (45 page)

He's a Douglas Fir. I know this 'cause of the Wiz. I also know that Trees have sexes just like people and animals. It just so happens that Doug is a boy, which is good, 'cause the name fits better.

“O Tree of Destiny,” I say. Normally, I call him Doug, but this is ritual stuff. “O Tree of Destiny, we have a problem. Lord E Lordy has spies upon us. His head smeagol's been seen in Embar. All the little smeagols've been seen too. So says Kaymart, Bags and Deadend. O Tree of Destiny, we fear the kingdom of Embarcadero is jeopardized by these skulkings. Scrawl says Lord E wants Hermajesty. I need to know is this so and how he means to get her.”

I bend my face to the little Tree. The boughs brush my cheek. I close my eyes and breathe in the firry smell. It reminds me of the Farm that now is all that divides southwestern Embarcadero from Potrero-Taraval, and where I spent many child-days.

Nothing happens, except I can almost see the Farm with its giant Trees and flowers and strange buildings. Which lack of something makes me wonder — like I always wonder — how I got to be a merlin. I know it's 'cause I got the Tree. I say a thanks prayer that Doug chose me and not somebody else (like Scrawl, for instance).

When I open my eyes again, I see something odd. I see a knightie looking up at me from the plaza outside. This is not unusual except that she is half-hiding behind an old trolleycar and she is not wearing Firescape's colors. She is wearing the yellow and black of the Virgin Guard, the knighties who patrol the Richmond near the Farm.

She sees me just as I see her and disappears behind the trolleycar. A chill goes down my spine. I pick up Doug — pot and all — and head back to the Throneroom. The Majesties are surprised to see me lugging the TOD out of the Great Crystal Elevator.

“What the hell?” says His M and salutes the Tree. Hermajesty throws him a kiss.

I ask Firescape if she knows any reason one of Sweetie's Virgin Guard would be wharfside instead of on her normal beat around the Richmond Virgin. She can't think of any, and when I tell her the Tree inspired me to know there was a yellow knightie in the courtyard, skulking, she and her sidekick, Cinderblock, unsafety their magic AKs and head for the street.

“Well, merlin?” Hismajesty is looking kingly at me. “Well? What has the Tree of Destiny revealed?”

“The Tree says,” I say, though I am clueless, “there are smeagols all about us.”

I set Doug's pot down and dust off my hands, catching a whiff of his nice firry smell and trying to think of something more to say. I do.

“The Farm must be watched night and day. This knightie the Tree saw is ersatz. Which means that, most likely, one of Sweetie's gang is deadjim. Maybe more than one. First, smeagols around the Farm, now smeagols in disguise, at the heart of it all. Think of it, sire. If you wanted something close to Lord E, what better way than to disguise yourself as someone who could get
real
close?”

His M is nodding. “Yeah. Like a knightie. But why a Yellow Knightie from the Virgin Guard? Lord E's gotta know the Palace is guarded by Red Knighties.”

I shrug. “She had to get past all kinds of eyes, Majesty. I suspect she cacked the first knightie she came across.”

His M is still nodding. “But is she after my queen?”

I don't know the answer to this, but I'm not about to say that. Scrawl saves me from having to open my mouth. She comes in wailing like a house on fire. “Oi!” she's saying. “Oi! They've left signs! Th'arrogance of 'em!”

They left signs, alright. LORD E RULES! was the sign. Plastered all over the side of the old trolleycar. I didn't have to guess who did it. Only question is, why so bold?

Hismajesty doesn't ask me again if Lord E is after Hermajesty. He has Firescape set a guard on her and puts all the knighties in Embarcadero on alert.

Rumbles start flying. All kinds of scuttlebutt. I hear all of it, of course, 'cause I'm listening. A good merlin has “ears' all over the place. A better merlin is pro-active. I go down to the Gee Gah to hang around the steamy stalls and shops that smell of fish and herbs and incense. That's where I hear that Lord E's shopping queens. According to the rumble along the Du Pon Gai, he's lost another lady-lord to the
dolores
. Childbirth, says the rumble.

The old ladies and gents in their shops and stalls chatter like pigeons, blaming it on the water, the food, the air in Potrero.

On the outside, I think they're right. It could be any of those things. Potrero got its problems, that's a surely, foremost of which is a King who don't give a fig about what he can't stick in his treasure house. And there's a lot of sicklies, too. But I know there's always something inside the outside — something that makes the outside work bad. In the case of Potrero-Taraval, that thing is the
dolores
.

A long time ago, see, way before the Getting Out — hell, before there was even a city here — this whole place belonged to a people called Ohlone. They named it Awaa-te and lived close to the water. One day, they woke up to find aliens — my own ancestors — staring at them from inside these silly tin hats.

My ancestors put them all into a
dios
house called Dolores, which means “sad.” In this
dios
house, the Ohlone caught the alien's diseases and died. There are thousands of them buried around the Dolores
dios
house. I learned this from the Wiz.

By the time the folks who called themselves Americans sent a government agent to check up on the Ohlone, there was only one left — an old man named Pedro Alcantara. Pedro told the agent that he had lost his son and asked if the agent couldn't help to find him. And then he said, “I am all that is left of my people — I am alone.”

The Dolores
dios
house lies smack inside the boundaries of the northern-most Potreran
barrio
. You can see the top of it from Embar. That, I thought, was why Potrero was so sickly and so sad — those spirits were still there — the Ohlone
dolores
.

I am pondering this when I bump into my good buddy, Creepy Lou.

“Thay!” he says to me. “Thay Taco!” (Which is 'cause he's missing a few teeth.) “Thay, Taco! You be scopin' the rumble? Lord E lost hithelf another lordette.”

“I be hearing that,” I say. “Third one.”

He nods, looking sad. “Third one. Young, too.... Thecond trimethter.”

This pokes my Alice bone. “Where'd you hear that?”

Creepy Lou scratches around in his scraggy hair, making dust and leaves rain onto his shoulders. “Shmeagols.”

Interesting. “Deadend?”

“Naw, little shmeagol,” he says, and jerks his head three times to the right. “One of his hangabouts. Shmeagol says, uh, Lord E thinks we got some kinda magic. 'cause Hermatchsty has three babies, already, no hitches, no glitches.”

The last word comes out in a shower of saliva. I blink and shake my head.

“No, really. Th'
Alcaldé
thinks our women are magic.” His face lights up; big holey grin, a little wicked. He pumps his left knee up and down and jerks his head three times to the right. “I think tho too.”

Makes sense, I s'pose. Odd sense. Lord E didn't have such good family luck. He hadn't produced an heir yet. His M has three — two girls and a boy. So, Lord E might think if he has the right queen — a magic queen — he can have heirs too. And slit Hismajesty's throat to the bargain.

I shake my head, this time meaning it. “Our women aren't magic,” I say, “just healthy.”

Lou nods, stamps his right foot, and grabs at something I can't see. “It's the water. Damn bad water in Potrero.”

“Damn bad attitude,” I answer, knowing it's the
Dolores
.

Cicerone
. That's what the other kids called me. Means ‘chickpea.' You got any idea how small a chickpea is? Pretty damned small. Got called ‘Peanut' a lot, too. And some other stuff not as complimentary.

Mi madre
said there was a chance I'd get bigger as I got older, but it never happened. Didn't really expect it to. It's got a lot to do with diet and that
mi madre
didn't eat too well when I was a babe. There was food and all, but they were new here and didn't know the what-how. You get the best veggies in the Sang Yee Gah, but we lived at the other end of the kingdom. I think I saw my first broccoli when I was five. Thought somebody'd shrunk up a shrubbery.

You don't notice stuff when you're little 'cause you think life just goes on and on, and that whatever life's like, it'll always be just like that. My kid life was pretty
bueno
, you know?
Mi padre
got a job at a beanery in the neighborhood and
mi madre
learned how to grow green stuff in a garden on the roof. They got integrated, I guess you'd call it. Which was more than they'd done all the other places they'd been.

It might've been a foggy old dead city to the folks from Outside, but to
mi madre
y padre
it was the Gam Saan — the Golden Mountain — which I guess to them, was sort of like Eldorado.

It was the Economy that killed the cities, Kaymart says. What with one thing and another (like the fact that some Economic Centers were an earthquake, volcano, or hurricane away from Complete Ruin) people just started Getting Out. They went to Rural Places — Planned Communities, Kaymart calls them, where there were no dumpsters or indigents, no rats the size of hub caps, no syringes in the gutters, and where nobody planted their backside on your front porch and called it homesteading.

According to History, folks just sort of drained out of The Cities like corn meal through a slit bag — first trickle-trickle, and then a steady pour and then let's-get-the-hell-out-o-here. It took a while, but finally everybody who could Got Out. What Kaymart calls the Economic Base went with them.

That left people like
mi madre
y padre
, who did a lot of wandering before they found a place that wanted them. And people like Creepy Lou, who isn't much wanted either, 'cause no one likes to be around a dude that makes them twitch. And people like Firescape's
madre
who just got born in the wrong
barrio
. And people like Lord E who saw the Getting Out as a Golden Opportunity. (Oh, I'm not saying Lord E is that old, 'cause he isn't. But there's always been guys just like him, even before the Getting Out, according to Kaymart.)

Anyway,
mi madre
y padre
fit in here, so I just sort of fit in with them and I thought fitting in was something you just did and that just was.

I remember Cinco de Mayo festivals that'd go on early into the next spring morning; the streets all clogged up with folks and torches; the air so stuffed with music and laughter I didn't see how anybody could move.

After I was s'posed to be in bed, I'd lean out over the fire escape and listen and watch and think that maybe I could just float right out the window, and that all that noise and heat and life would let me down to the alley as light as a feather.

I was ten when
mi madre
y padre
were killed.

We lived real close to the Border between Potrero and Embarcadero — just north of the Mission Dolores, I found out later on. Lord E's daddy was especially expansive that summer so the strip right along the Border wasn't the safest place to be. I don't think
mi madre
y padre
knew this, or that it wasn't the best place to go treasure hunting. But there they were, poking through the empty buildings when the Alcaldé's knighties put in an appearance.

Mi madre
had wanted some little bit of furniture to festive up the room we ate in and stayed warm in when the temp dropped — that's why they were there. A stick of furniture seems like such an oddball thing to die for.

I still don't know how it happened really. Just that I was playing in the alley with Fredo and Pigeon when all of a sudden Mrs. Lopez-Alvero, whose husband called her Acorn, was standing in front of me with all her big self trembling and her eyes wetting her rust-colored cheeks. She put her arms around me, too, I remember. And I remember thinking, that here I was, two years short of my Coming of Age Rite, and now there would be no one to do it with me.

There was more than that inside me, but I couldn't let it out just then — only later on Mrs. Lopez-Alvero's big, soft shoulder.

I think that was the first time I heard the Whispers — while I was grieving all over Mrs. Lopez-Alvero. I thought it was Mrs. Lopez-Alvero at first, saying
Ave Marias
in my ear. But it wasn't her; her mouth had closed up shop and gone all grim and sad.

The Whispers didn't mean anything to me 'cause I didn't understand what they were saying, but I heard them as if they were air being sucked through the Lopez-Alvero's actually working window fan. But the window fan wasn't on that day 'cause of the fog and fog doesn't whisper. I thought it might be rain and that the sky was crying for
mi madre
y padre
— but there wasn't any rain, either. Just fog — a
wu pesado
so thick and still no sound could move in it.

So, I lay in Mrs. Lopez-Alvero's overly padded lap and listened to Whispers I didn't understand or even really hear all that well. I decided to believe it was
mi madre y padre
whispering to me from the Abhá Kingdom, and that somehow made me feel a little put back together.

Well, there was someone to do my Coming of Age rite with me, after all; there was Mrs. Lopez-Alvero, who sat with me at the table when I had turned twelve, and gave me my first coffee in a hand-thrown cup, and spoke to me about the Grown Up Things — choosing mates and raising families and finding Something To Do in the world.

I had my coffee with cream and no sugar. And then I packed my stuff and moved north, away from the neighborhood and away from anyplace where I could look up and perhaps see the sad old building where
mi madre
y padre
had died for a stick of furniture.