“Ethical wizards get their ass kicked,” he tells Salvador, pulling chicken feathers. But he thinks a chicken will do.
Range might suffer, but this is a fuck-all mighty spell.
He bakes the chicken.
Salvador remembers the smell of roast fowl, wiggles his hips the whole time.
He used to get the gizzards.
Evening.
Andrew takes the walking stick down from over the fireplace.
Oak with an iron tip and an ovoid iron knob on the end, a knob that fits smoothly into the hand, but which is obviously a perfect shape for thumping. A silver collar sits under the knob, inscribed with Gaelic words reading, Think while your skull is sound. Drink while your mouth is whole. Shake this man’s hand while he offers it.
He rubs it with walnut oil.
Kisses it.
Takes it out back to the fire pit, puts the iron tip into the embers, says words in Gaelic that make it glow red-hot. Walks it over to the turtle shell he found—it was no easy thing finding a dead turtle with a whole shell by the side of the road—and punches the cane’s tip through, loading the trigger word.
Buckler.
Andrew goes to the thrift store.
Buys a set of six yellow glass tumblers.
Not enough.
Drives to the Pier 1 just north of Syracuse.
Buys a dozen yellow wineglasses.
Makes a whole vase full of fireglass stones.
Puts it in the attic.
Fishes a trumpet out of an attic tub.
The next one’s his favorite.
His mentor invented it.
He rubs six pennies with magical oil, puts them heads up on a tree stump, arranged like a tiny audience.
Plays the trumpet loudly (and poorly) down at the sextet of Abe Lincolns for better than an hour.
Puts the pennies in a leather pouch he hangs around his neck.
80
Nadia courses under the water, following the Jaybird Sally. She has been tailing the boat since it left the Oswego Marina around noon, partly because she likes the boat’s name, partly because one of the two men who periodically fishes from the stern is handsome in a craggy way; his short beard covers the kind of chin one mostly finds on soldiers and athletes.
She’s very good at going unseen; dull people will see her as driftwood or a fish unless she wants their attention. For the sake of sharper ones, she knows how to stay in a boat’s shadow, she knows how to use chop and murk and to anticipate a glance in her direction, how to submerge before it comes.
When the boat stops, she catches pieces of the conversation between the two men as she floats, her ear overlapped by waves.
“Going to Rochester tomorrow… that three-bedroom house we got at auction. I’ll be… flip it the week after, put some new carpet… stripped copper… else it needs.”
“It burns my ass that… things like that… plumbing and mark up… out of spite because… get their shit together. No class.”
“None.”
The men talk business and switch to women and Nadia begins to regret eavesdropping; it was better when she didn’t know how ordinary the handsome one was, when she could pretend he was a cavalry officer with a bright saber and a wool coat, not a house-flipper with a motel mistress and an unobservant wife. She’s about to swim off in a state of helpless ennui when the men reel in their lines and the motor starts up. Another race! But it isn’t much of a race. She follows the boat, easily keeping up with its drowsy chug, swimming serpentine beneath it.
Then it happens.
A glass bottle hits the water, bobs there.
She doesn’t know if anybody on the boat sees her white hand reach up and pluck the bottle under, but she doesn’t care.
She’s pissed.
She didn’t spend all morning breaking those disgusting zebra mussels off her shipwreck just to let these inconsiderate swindlers pollute her lake. So bourgeois. She knows that’s a Bolshevik word and she hates Bolsheviks, but bourgeois, with its suggestion of new money and bad manners, best describes the specimens on the Jaybird Sally.
“Sam Adams,” she says, looking at the little brown-vested colonial on the blue label, air escaping from her mouth in a wash of small bubbles. Stale air. She uses her lungs only to smoke and to speak.
When the Jaybird Sally stops again, she sees the hooked bait-fish plop into the water, watches a gorgeous chinook salmon swim toward it. She waves it off, still holding the beer bottle.
No fish for you, bourgeois!
But that’s not enough.
She bangs the bottom of the boat with her fist, hard.
Not hard enough.
She gets some distance, swims into the hull.
Likes the way that feels.
Attacks several more times, battering the Jaybird Sally with her shoulders and head; two of the blows open gashes below the waterline.
Especially the last head butt.
That hole is serious.
About the size of three strips of bacon laid end-to-end.
The lake starts pouring in.
She peeks through the hole, sees the startled captain see her.
He takes the Lord’s name in vain.
The alarm sounds ringing as the first float switch is tripped and the pump starts.
She puts her lips to the hole now and says, “Don’t litter,” swims off.
Realizes she was so mad she said it in Russian, swims back and says it in English now, adding, “Bourgeois assholes” for good measure.
The handsome one, still on deck, gripping the rail in anticipation of another collision, sees the rusalka’s pale, slender arm throw the bottle, watches it spin, watches it land amidships with a clunk.
He’ll forget he saw this by the time the others come up and the captain starts barking “Mayday” on VHF 16.
By the time the deck of the Jaybird Sally starts to tilt, he’ll put on his life vest, text wife and girlfriend, put his cell phone in a baggie.
“Don’t worry,” the captain says. “We’re not going in the drink.”
He points.
They would have already heard the helicopter but for the alarm.
The helicopter from Canada is coming with a P250 that will flush a thousand gallons a minute out of the ship.
Of course the rusalka could put her fingers in the gash and yank it so large that even the Canadians’ pump won’t help.
Or she could roll the boat; this would be hard, but not impossible.
No.
Not for one bottle.
But if so much as a cigarette butt hits the water.
When the Jaybird Sally finds suitable, safe mooring, she will put in for repairs. The diver will pull several long, coarse red hairs from the gash in the hull.
The boat will not be lost today.
The man who flips houses will fish again.
But, without remembering exactly why, he will never again toss litter overboard.
Skinning below the water like the dangerous thing she is, Nadia passes the Coast Guard ship coming to escort the listing Sally in.
Salutes it.
Later.
Nadia snatches down a placid seagull who stopped to float on the lake, so smoothly its fellows don’t even fly away.
She feeds violently at first, blood and feathers everywhere, then delicately, picking meat from bones like a girl on a picnic. She means to swim back to the wreck, and police it one more time before heading in to grow her legs back and spend the night protecting her magus.