"Thirteen and two months," said Mack. "Since the day I was found, anyway, and Miz Smitcher says I couldn't have been born very long before that."
"Then that man came to our house thirteen years and two months ago," said Word.
Mack thought about that for a minute. And added into his calculations the way Ceese was glaring at Word.
"So he had something to do with me, too, is that what you're saying?" asked Mack.
"Let's just say that when he came to our house, he had all kinds of empty grocery bags on his belt and in his pockets. But when he left, there was a baby in one of them."
Mack felt a rush of feeling, like his blood was trying to move to different parts of his body all at once. He was a little faint, even.
"And you didn't say anything?" said Ceese softly.
"Nobody would have believed me," said Word.
"Why not?" said Ceese.
"Because my mother wasn't pregnant an hour before," said Word. "But I caught a glimpse of her through the door and her belly was swollen up and... who's going to believe that? Especially when she didn't remember it even happened, half an hour later? She swelled up, had the baby, and forgot all about it in about two hours. You don't believe it even now."
"Yeah," said Ceese. "We do."
"Because of him," said Word. "Because of Bag Man."
"Mr. Christmas," said Ceese.
Puck, thought Mack. "So am I your..."
"I don't know," said Word. "You might be my brother. Or my half brother. But considering that things like that are impossible in the real world, I'm not altogether sure that you exist." He laughed again, that harsh laugh that said he really didn't think it was funny. "And if you do, what put you in my mother's uterus? Who could I tell? Who could I ask? All I could do was watch. I saw Ceese find you. And soon I heard that Miz Smitcher had taken you in. So you were okay."
"And what if I hadn't found him?" said Ceese. "Or what if Raymo..."
"I knew Raymo," said Word. "I wouldn't have let anything happen."
"So you just watched," said Mack. "Like Miriam watching Moses in the bulrushes."
"So you're a Bible reader," said Word.
"I listened in Sunday school," said Mack.
"Exodus. Moses was in danger of being murdered by Pharaoh's men, so they put him a basket and floated him down the river. I suppose today it would be a grocery bag, and he'd be set down in a field by a drainpipe."
"I'm not Moses," said Mack. "And nobody was trying to kill me."
Both Ceese and Word laughed grimly at that, then glanced at each other. Both of them probably wondering what danger the other one had known about.
"Do you read Shakespeare?" asked Mack.
Word shrugged. "My father almost named me William Shakespeare Williams. Instead of William Wordsworth Williams. So I might have been called Shake instead of Word."
"Or Speare," said Ceese helpfully.
"That would have guaranteed I never got a date in high school," said Word, and this time his laugh was a little more real.
"What can you tell me about Puck and the queen of the fairies?" asked Mack.
"Puck? Why?"
"Why? You think that Bag Man's an overgrown fairy or something?"
"Just asking," said Mack. "But if you don't know, I guess I'll have to read about it."
"Good luck on Shakespeare," said Word. "It's written in a foreign language. I heard a black linguist from Berkeley once say that English-speaking people are the only ones who never get to read Shakespeare in their native language. Instead we have to suffer through reading his stuff in the kind of English they were speaking back in 1600."
"I got through Shakespeare okay," said Ceese. "Romeo and Juliet. King Lear."
"High school's one thing. They spoonfeed it to you."
"In college I mean," said Ceese.
"Okay, well, fine," said Word.
"All I want to know is about the Queen of the Fairies," said Mack.
"Titania," said Word. "And her husband is Oberon. They fight all the time. Puck is Oberon's servant, and he plays terrible tricks on people. He takes this guy who's lost in the woods and magically makes him have the head of a donkey, and then Puck gives Titania a love potion and she falls in love with this half-assed guy."
"So Puck is a bad guy," said Mack.
"No, he's a trickster. Like Loki in Norse mythology. He just... plays pranks on people. But they're mean tricks. He has no conscience."
They rode in silence for a while.
Then Word glanced back and asked Mack, "So you think this guy is Puck?"
Ceese said, "He's just talking."
"I have a word of advice for you," said Word.
Ceese snorted. "You have a word."
"I know it's a pun on my own name. Don't you think I hear enough of that crap?"
"Your advice?" said Ceese.
"Leave it. Forget about it. My father broods about it. It still poisons him. He watches you from the window. He watches you whenever he passes you in his car. Because he knows. Baby found in a grocery bag, not an hour after Bag Man carried you out of the house. Dad hates that guy. But what good does it do?"
Then Word spoke again. "In the play—in Midsummer Night's Dream, that's the play that has Puck in it—what they're fighting about—the queen and the king of the fairies, Titania and Oberon—is a changeling."
"What's a changeling?" asked Mack.
"A little boy. That's all they say. I think there's an old legend that fairies sometimes come and steal away human children and leave fake children in their place. I suppose it's the kind of legend that was invented to explain autistic children. The changeling looks like a perfectly normal child, but he just doesn't respond right."
"Is that what I am?" asked Mack.
"You're not autistic," said Ceese. "Weird, but not autistic."
"How could you be a changeling?" said Word. "There wasn't a baby to swap you for. I don't know what you are. Maybe you're just... my magical brother."
"I don't see how you're any kind of brother to him," Ceese said irritably.
"Cecil," said Word, "you're his brother. His real one. Or his father or some combination.
Everybody knows that. Everybody in Baldwin Hills knows you gave up half your own childhood to look after Mack. They love you for it. I'm not making any claim that I mean anything in Mack's life."
"Less than nothing," said Ceese quietly.
"If I had told this story back then, would it have changed anything?"
Silence again, until Ceese finally answered, "They would have locked you up in the loony house."
"He had you in his life. And that was good. What if I had 'found' Mack in that grocery bag? I thought of it. But I couldn't have brought him home. If I had come in that door with that particular baby, I think my dad would have lost it. Might have killed the baby or run out of the house and never come back or... I don't know. Dad was crazy. You finding him, that was a good thing, Ceese."
That was the last thing Mack heard for a little while, because right at that moment, he slipped into a cold dream. Didn't even fall asleep first. Just felt himself walking into a hospital room that he had never seen before and firing eight rounds from a handgun right into Bag Man's bandaged-up head.
Only the bandages were nothing like the real ones, and the room was nothing like the draped-off area where Mack actually saw Bag Man, and suddenly Mack understood what he was seeing. It wasn't coming out of Mack's memory of the hospital, it was coming out of someone else's imagination. What Professor Williams wanted more than anything else in the world right now, far more than he wanted to be a great poet, was to murder Bag Man.
Mack had never thought of Puck as "Bag Man," but in the cold dream that's absolutely who the man was, what his name was.
Until he awoke shivering, with Ceese pinching the skin on his arm.
"Ow," said Mack.
"You fainted," said Ceese. "You were shivering like you were having some kind of fit."
"I was cold," said Mack angrily. "You don't have to punish me for it by pinching like a girl!"
"Just trying to bring you back."
And that's what Mack wanted him to do.