1
THERE ARE TWO WAYS to tell a wizard. One is by the blue light that plays around his tires when he is heading north on wet pavement under the northern lights, his headlights pointed toward the top of the world that so many talk about but so few have actually seen.
The other is by his singing.
Talking Man was a wizard who had a small junkyard on the side of a hill on the Kentucky Tennessee line. He sold parts and cars, swapped guns and cars, fixed farm machinery and cars, dug ginseng and mayapple in season, and had an 1,100-pound allotment of burley tobacco which he let his daughter raise. He kept no chickens, no hogs and no dogs.
Talking Man wore a gray felt hat that was black at the front where he used the brim for a handle, and an old sport coat that had started out charcoal with salmon stitching but was now just gray, with darker gray around the pockets, which sagged with wrenches, spark plugs, vise-grips and sometimes a little gun. Talking Man walked bent over, as if he were always about to get into a car that might arrive at any moment.
Perhaps because it was hard, even impossible, to see his eyes under his hat, he was good at swapping things.
He was good at fixing things. Talking Man could persuade a redbelly Ford tractor to start on a bone-cold February morning just by shaking a two-by-four at it, as if it were a smart mule. He could take the knock out of a poured-bearing Chevrolet with a set of 3/8
-inch sockets and a wood file in an afternoon; he could free a stuck valve by pouring pond water through a carburetor, set points with cigarette papers, and sharpen a chainsaw without a file by passing the bar through a green-persimmon fire and singing a certain unhearable, to most people, song. Once, in Russellville, he jump-started a Negro preacher’s car from his pickup without cables by jamming the bumpers together for a ground and then connecting the positive poles of the two batteries with his hands. His wife, Laurel Ann, sat in the truck frowning, angry because magic made her scared, and being scared made her angry; meanwhile their six-year-old, Crystal, held her ears against the singing not even her mother could hear.
That was ten years ago, before Laurel Ann was killed in a car wreck and Talking Man didn’t get a scratch.
Talking Man was considered a fair welder, which meant he got exactly the same amount of work as a good welder would get. He knew the three ways to weld a gas tank so it wouldn’t blow up (fill it with gas, fill it with water, fill it with exhaust fumes).
He was old.
He looked anywhere between forty-five and sixty, but he was older than that. He was older than the hills. He was older than the words people used or the things they talked about with them, older than the ground he hunkered down on when he was making a trade, older than older than stone. Talking Man was so old that, watching the buzzards float overhead, he could remember not only before there were buzzards, but before there were birds, before there were plants between the stones on the shore. Since time, like the world, is round, he could remember forward as well as backward: He could remember after the birds were gone, even their memories gone, their white bones piled up in drifts like snow, the air too weak for flying anymore.
Talking Man was a wizard from the end of time.
There, where the world ends in one endless moment, in a seamless black tower called Elennor, on the gravel shore of a gravel sea, in the light of the rings that once were the moon, Talking Man dreams the dream that is the world. He is dreaming it today. Beside him stands the white-gowned Dgene: She is his lover, his sister, his other, for it is nothing if not lonely at the end of time, and he dreamed her to dream him, for each without the other is only a dreamer and not a dream.
On the ledge in front of them is the owl that separates things and dreams. Look at it and it is two. Pick it up and it is one. But do not turn it, do not turn it, for the world turns with it.
At one end of time is the tower, Elennor, and at the other is the city Edminidine. Between them is everything that is ever dreamed; and around them, nothing. Nothing is as cold as the cold between the stars. Nothing is the stuff that dreams are dreamed to undo. Nothing is undreamed, until Dgene dreamed it; unfelt, until she felt it; unbeen, until she turned to it and held it to her heart; a substance slick like water and sticky like fire and as cold as the cold between the stars.
She called into being the unbeen, and once it is dreamed the stars themselves are in danger.
It would have thrilled her to the bottom of her soul if Talking Man had dreamed of dreaming her a soul.
To turn around at the end of time takes a thousand thousand years, and when she turned around Talking Man was gone.
To turn around at the end of time takes a thousand thousand years, and when she turned around the unbeen was gone.
To turn around at the end of time takes a thousand thousand years, and
when she turned around the owl was gone.
Talking Man knew what had happened when he took her hand and her fingernails were gone; under the folds of her white, white gown, the tips of her breasts were smooth without nipples; her eyes were as deep and storyless as the sea.
Talking Man knew that what she had touched was the unbeen he had been dreamed to dream away. Since the beginning of things, which begin in the city Edminidine, he had guarded against this day. He had been warned, for he was not the first of his kind, only the last. He had even found a jar to hide it in. So he tore it from her and fled. He also took the owl, for without it Dgene couldn’t follow him.
And it almost worked. Except that he fell in love with the world he dreamed, and he gave himself away. Perhaps he had dreamed too well …
Still, it took Dgene a million years to find him and another million to bring him back.
She found him living in a house trailer on the side of a hill with his daughter, Crystal, sixteen.
2
ON SATURDAY MORNING, CRYSTAL was disking the tobacco ground on the far side of the hill from the house trailer and the shop when she heard shots. It was the middle of May and May is hot on the Kentucky Tennessee line. In the bottoms below, Six Mile Creek had overflowed its banks and was shining silvery through the trees like a fallen section of sky. Meanwhile, the sky above was as blue as Crystal had always imagined the sea might be.
The first two shots were pops, like a .22, and she didn’t pay much attention to them since Talking Man was always fooling around with guns. He was probably just knocking a can off a fence post, an important part of a swap. Besides, Crystal had her hands full with the tractor, an old hand-clutch John Deere “A” that made even a daydreamer’s job like disking complicated.
Crystal was not a small girl, but her legs still weren’t long enough to reach the brakes. At the end of each row, she had to jump down from the seat onto the gearbox, then stand up on the right brake to make the giant tractor turn; close the throttle down; pull back out of the way while the steering wheel spun and the front end skated across the ground; then jump off the brake before the tractor ran over its own disk; crack the throttle wide open again; and jump back up into the heaving, jolting, hard green metal seat. There is no meaner, stronger, heavier machine than the “A.” All green and all cast iron, it is like a cross between a grasshopper and a locomotive, and Crystal loved its big two-cylinder boom chunk boom chunk boom chunk boom. Like any normal person, she hated farming, but she loved the spring smells of gasoline and plowed ground.
Of course, she wasn’t a farmer. Tobacco was all she grew.
The next shot was a crack as loud as thunder. There were two more pops, then another thundering crack.
Crystal looked up, then down. She bit her lip. She pulled back on the lever to disengage the clutch, and the big John Deere heaved to a stop in the soft dirt in the middle of the field. She closed the throttle, pushing the lever on the steering column forward, so that the engine slowed to a quieter boom chunk chunk chunk boom chunk chunk.
There was another loud shot. Then a long silence. Then another shot.
Reaching behind her, Crystal found the grass rope that was tied to the back of the seat and yanked on it, pulling the pin that connected the
disk to the tractor. She jammed the gearbox into fifth, the “A’s” high road gear. She pulled back on the throttle and jammed the clutch forward and the John Deere reared like a horse, then set its front end down and started gaining speed diagonally across the plowed field, the two giant bucket-size cylinders booming, the arm-long crank-throws pulling, faster and faster: boom chunk boom boom chunk boom boom boom chunk boom boom boom.
Crystal left the plowed ground and followed the fencerow around the hill. She stood on the gearbox and held onto the wheel for dear life. She knew she was going too fast for the high, narrow machine known throughout the Upper Mid South as the Widowmaker, but she was scared. Something told her this wasn’t just Talking Man fooling around with guns. The big noise had sounded like a .357 or a shotgun.
The fencerow met the dirt road that angled up the hill, and Crystal slowed to cross the shallow ditch—first dropping her narrow front wheels into the ditch, then nosing them up the other side onto the road. As her back wheels settled into the ditch, first one and then the other, she heard a rushing sound from up the hill, like wind. She looked up but she couldn’t see the trailer, hidden behind the trees.
Just then a car hurtled down the road out of the trees straight for the tractor, which was broadside across the road. Crystal could hear the wild howl of a carburetor sucking air. She stood up on the left brake and cracked the throttle open. The John Deere reared back and swung its long nose into the air and out of the way, like a buck sniffing the wind, just as the car sped past, missing it by inches. In the dust, Crystal couldn’t see how close it had been, but she felt the wind on her bare ankles and on the back of her neck.
It was a white car, a hardtop, she couldn’t tell what kind—driven by a woman wearing a white scarf over snow-white hair and holding a gun in one hand.
Crystal heard a whooosh like birds taking off and another boom like thunder, and then the car disappeared down the hill. She sat down in the green metal seat. She felt scared, then angry, then amazed. She’d just been shot at for the first time in her life.
The John Deere accelerated slowly but steadily up the hill in fifth, and by the time Crystal got to the flat part of the road near the trailer it was running wide open, about 20 miles per hour. The screen door was open, but Crystal drove past and pulled up in
front of Talking Man’s shop, twenty yards on the other side of the trailer.
The tractor was a flywheel cranker that only Talking Man could start, so Crystal left it idling and ran inside.
She stopped in the darkness just inside the open door. The shop was a pole shed large enough for three cars, with a dirt floor and barky walls of cull lumber. The only light came from the door and from a trouble light underneath a pickup that was jacked up. The only sound came from Talking Man’s ’48 Chevy radio nailed to the wall in the back. Dickie Lee was singing “Nine Million, Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Thousand, Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine Tears to Go.” There was the smell of gunpowder and electricity in the air.
The pickup was Cleve Townsend’s ’61 GMC, which was unusual for a truck that old because it had an automatic transmission, put in after he lost his left foot in a hay baler, and no left door: Townsend had had Talking Man take it off last summer, since he only used the truck around the farm, ...
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