Wizard of Washington Square (7 page)

“It’s delicious,” said Leilah at her first sip. “What is it?”

“Nectar,” said the Wizard. “The drink of the old gods.”

They finished their nectar in silence, each thinking godlike thoughts.

Finally David said, “Now all we have to do is turn the statue back into a real live dog and—” he was stroking the statue as he spoke and he suddenly stopped. “It’s chipped! The statue is chipped. Here, look. On the back leg. There’s a piece missing.”

“Oh my,” said the Wizard. “So there is.” He shook his fist at the table. “See what you did. You weren’t careful enough. Making eyes at that schoolmarm desk instead of tending to your own business. I ought to turn you into firewood!”

“It’s just a
little
chip,” soothed Leilah. “Will it make a difference?”

“I don’t know,” said the Wizard. “I don’t know. It might spoil the spell. It’s been known to happen. Pieces of things getting stuck in the works and all that. All we can do is go ahead and hope.”

“Okay,” said David. “What do we do?”

“First, I think we should all go out where it all began. With the swinging statues, I mean. I’m sure if anything is going to happen, it will happen there.”

Leilah collected the goblets and put them gently in the large wooden wine vat the Wizard seemed to use as a sink. The Wizard put the golden nectar bottle back on the shelf amid dozens of other colorful bottles. Then David, with the statue in his hands, led the way up the twisting tunnel.

They pushed open the door to the park and the sunlight blinded them momentarily, so they didn’t see the owner of the voice that shouted, “Stop, thieves. Come back with my table and my statue.”

But they didn’t need to see to know who it was—Mr. Joseph Pickwell himself, stepping out of a taxi. He had guessed that the table would return to its original owner, and as soon as the policeman had let him go, he grabbed a taxi and hurried downtown once more.

“What do we do now?” wailed Leilah.

“I don’t know,” said the Wizard.

David started to shut the door.

At that moment Pickwell, umbrella in hand, reached the Arch and pushed open the door.

“Got you,” he cried as he grabbed for the statue in David’s hand.

L
EILAH SCREAMED. DAVID SLAMMED
the door in Pickwell’s face and leaned his back against it. But he was too light to hold the door shut and it began to move open slowly as Pickwell pushed. Leilah and the Wizard rushed to help David.

“How long can you two keep it shut by yourselves?” asked the Wizard.

“Not much more than a minute,” said David.

“Well, give me the statue,” said the Wizard. “I’ll take it back to the warren and see if I can conjure up something. You hold Mr. Pickwell off as long as you can.” He took the statue and scurried away in the darkness as fast as an old mole in its tunnel.

David and Leilah struggled with the door but it kept inching inward. They could hear Pickwell’s heavy breathing on the other side and an occasional murmur. “Thieves. Ingrates. Beatniks.

“Tell you what,” David whispered to Leilah. “When I say three, we’ll jump aside. Maybe he’ll be leaning so hard, he’ll fall on his face. At least that’s what always happens in the movies. Then we’ll run ahead and try to trip him up at the fork. Don’t forget the first time we came how we felt off balance in the tunnel. Well, Pickleface will probably feel that way, too.”

“All right,” Leilah whispered back. “I’m ready when you say so.”

David took a deep breath. “Here goes,” he said. “One… two… three!”

They jumped back and started to run. From the noise and grunts and mutters they heard as they raced away, David had guessed right. Pickwell had been pushing so hard that when the door opened suddenly, he had been caught off guard and had fallen through. Trying to break his fall with his umbrella, Pickwell fell on the handle and broke it instead, knocking himself out of breath. It was just enough time to give David and Leilah a good head start down the tunnel.

They arrived quite quickly at the fork and started down the path toward the warren.

“Wait a minute,” said Leilah. “We’ll lead him right to the statue and the table this way. Let’s switch signs so that he won’t think of going to the warren at all.” And with that, she reached up on tiptoe to try to take the sign down. She was scarcely an inch too short. But she couldn’t reach the sign. Then David tried. But he and Leilah were the same height.

“I’ll give you a boost up,” said David. “But hurry.”

He knelt on all fours, and Leilah clambered up on his back. Teetering slightly, she took down the
WARREN
sign. Then they brought it over to the right-hand branch. David knelt down again and Leilah scrambled up on his back. She exchanged the
DRAGONRY
sign for the
WARREN
sign. Then they hurried back to the place where the warren sign used to be and hung the sign
DRAGONRY
in its place. Just as Leilah was climbing down, they heard Pickwell’s labored breathing coming down the tunnel.

“There,” Leilah whispered to David with satisfaction, “no one in his right mind would go to a dragonry.”

“Well, maybe he’s not in his right mind,” said David. “Or maybe he can’t read.”

“We’ll soon find out,” said Leilah grimly.

The children drew back into the tunnel that led to the warren and hugged the damp, mossy wall. They were well into the shadows and could not be seen.

“If worse comes to worst,” David said, “we can still try to trip him.”

Under the far lantern light they could see Pickwell making his slow way toward them.

“Shh, don’t make a sound,” said David.

“I’m too scared to,” Leilah whispered back.

At last Pickwell came to the fork. He glanced at the signs and dismissed dragonry and irt with quick snorts. He turned down the tunnel marked warren.

“It worked!” Leilah whispered when Pickwell had disappeared. “He’s headed for the dragonry.”

David clapped her on the back. “That was brilliant!”

Just then they heard a small splash followed by a loud yelp. David grabbed Leilah’s hand. “Let’s go and see what’s happening,” he said.

“Happening?” said Leilah, pulling away. “What’s happening is that we’re getting out of here.”

But David had tiptoed down the tunnel. When Leilah got to him, he was standing with his hand over his mouth.

“It was big and white and had teeth,” he said. “I think…I think it was an alligator. It took Old Pickleface by the seat of his pants and crawled into the water. He was waving his umbrella about and sputtering. Pickwell, I mean. Not the alligator.”

Leilah nodded. She had heard about the big white alligators that were supposed to live in the sewers below New York. Once they had been baby alligators sent as presents to the city’s children from grandparents and rich uncles who lived in Florida. But the mothers had flushed them—the alligators, not the rich uncles—down the toilets. And so the alligators grew and flourished in the dark world beneath the streets, growing fat on sewer rats and white in the always-dark world.

“Maybe we should rescue him?” Leilah asked tentatively.

“Are you crazy?” asked David, and for a moment he really believed she was. “Then they’ll get us too. The alligators.”

“But we can’t just let him…die or something,” Leilah protested.

“Why not?” David said bitterly. “Look what he was going to do with D. Dog. And the table. And us.”

“Well, that is hardly cause to let him die,” said Leilah. “I think we’d better go and find out whether the Wizard can help.” It wasn’t a statement. It was a command.

“Nonsense,” said the Wizard after he heard about Mr. Pickwell’s predicament. “The alligators won’t eat him. They may be only alligators, but they
do
have taste.”

And so it was, some two hours later, that Mr. Pickwell climbed out of a manhole cover on Forty-second Street and Broadway. He was soaking wet, scratched, and fuming. His temper was as foul as his clothes, for he had traveled the length and breadth of the New York sewers in the alligator’s mouth. And when a policeman arrested him for, of all things, obstructing traffic, Mr. Pickwell tried to hit the officer with his now broken umbrella. It was another hour before Mr. Pickwell’s papers had dried out enough so that he could prove to the police sergeant at the station house that he was a Very Important Personage. By then, his moustache was completely unwaxed and wilted, and he looked very little like the picture in his wallet. He finally phoned his lawyer, who paid his bond and got him out of jail for the night, though he would still have to return to stand trial for assaulting a police officer. Mr. Joseph Pickwell of VIP Interiors went home in a twit.

“Poor man,” said Leilah, clucking sympathetically, for they had watched it all in the tapestry. But David and the Wizard were chuckling.

“I always thought he was all wet!” said the Wizard happily.

I
T WAS JUST BARELY
nine o’clock when David and Leilah met at the base of the Arch on Monday morning. David had almost beaten the sun up. He had surprised his mother and father at the breakfast table with the announcement that he had found a friend—indeed, several friends (for he counted the table, too)—and would be at the park all day again. His mother wondered whether he oughtn’t bring the friends around so they could see them. But David’s father was so pleased that he shushed David’s mother immediately and gave David two dollars for lunch and a treat for his friends.

The Wizard was ten minutes late and still yawning when he appeared at the door with the statue. It had remained in the warren for safekeeping. No one had worried about Pickwell showing up, but to be sure, they had switched the signs back. The Wizard guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that Pickwell would not come to the Village again. He had had enough.

“Sorry to be late,” the Wizard said. “But I was up past midnight studying some spells that might help us, and I overslept this morning.”

“Did you find anything?” asked Leilah.

“I’m not sure,” said the Wizard. “I wrote them down, though, and put them under my hat.”

“Oh, great,” said David. “We might find them next week sometime.”

“No, no, child,” said the Wizard. “Not that hat. My nightcap.”

“And when does it give back things?” asked David. “On the full moon?”

“The next morning. Always!” said the Wizard as he brought out his nightcap from a pocket in his robe. He reached into the cap and extracted a small scrap of lined paper on which was written a short couplet. “We’ll have to play the game, though. Just like the last time.” He smiled. “At least if this doesn’t work, we’ll have some fun.”

“But what if you change David and me into statues by mistake?” said Leilah.

“There’s that, of course,” said the Wizard.

“Yes,” David pointed out sarcastically. “It’s the touching, you know.”

“That’s true,” said the Wizard, admiration in his voice. “However did you know? That’s a wizard’s secret.”

“You said it often enough,” said David.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have. I couldn’t have. I’m not supposed to. I must have forgotten,” said the Wizard, looking around over his shoulder as though someone might be watching. “But it’s true, you know,” he whispered confidentially. “About the touching, I mean. So I had already decided not to swing you two but to concentrate on the statue.”

They walked over to the grassy area and took their places. David and Leilah pretended that they had just been swung around and made statues. David stood like a sword swallower swallowing the world’s longest sword. Leilah was a snake that had just dined on a pink hippocampus.

The Wizard stood between them and started to swing around, holding the marble statue in one arm and the piece of paper in the other. He squinted at the verse he had written and chanted:

“Swinging here, swinging there,

Swinging statues everywhere,

Sage and parsley, thyme and chive,

Help me bring ’em back alive.”

When he had finished the verse, he threw the statue into the air. It went straight up and started down, turning end over end over end.

“Hey,” shouted David, “wait a minute! You’ll break it! It’s already chipped.” He ran under the falling statue and waited for it to come down. He spread his arms to catch it and missed. David closed his eyes, expecting to hear it shatter on the ground. But what he heard was D. Dog barking and whining, and when he opened his eyes he saw his terrier jumping up and wriggling and doing all the dog things he had been saving to do for a day.

“You did it! You did it!” squealed Leilah. “That was first-class magic, even if you did have to peek at your paper.”

But the Wizard did not hear her. He was still whirling around and around. A curious humming sound was in the air, and under the Wizard a small whirlwind was building up. First it picked up pieces of dust and dirt and old candy wrappers. Then it gathered in half-eaten peanuts and peanut shells, back pages of the
Village Voice
and the jacket of a Grove Press novel. And at last it picked up the Wizard himself. As he began to rise in the air, the wind blew his beard straight up as if pointing the way. His eyes were closed and his face had an ecstatic smile.

“Where are you going?” shouted David above the humming. “Wait—we haven’t thanked you yet. I even have money for a special treat. Wait….”

Just as he cleared the tops of the maples, the Wizard looked down at David and Leilah and at a small crowd of bearded young men and long-haired young women who had gathered there. “Recalled. Recalled,” he shouted down happily. “I’m going home. Recalled.”

“Will you ever come back?” Leilah yelled up as loudly as she could, afraid that he could not hear her in the rush of wind.

“If you need me, I will come. We are bound by the Rule of Need,” came a voice out of the whirlwind. “Recalled….”

Like a gas-filled balloon that has escaped from a child’s fingers, the Wizard rose slowly at first, then faster and faster, a small speck in the sky rising higher and higher until at last he disappeared.

“That sure is some trip,” said one of the bearded young men. They laughed and went on their way with the longhaired women.