Black and Blue Magic Read online

  This time Harry rode very carefully and missed all the bumps, and the medicine was still all right when he came in the back door and put it on the kitchen table. Mom was working at the sink. They’d just started a very interesting discussion about how soon Mom was going to get around to writing letters to the guest ranch places, when Miss Thurgood’s screechy voice called from upstairs.

  “Oh dear,” Mom said. “You’d better run up and take her medicine to her. She seems to be in a big hurry for it. She’s called down three times to see if you were back from the drugstore.”

  Miss Thurgood was standing at the head of the stairs looking very impatient. When she saw Harry she said, “At last!” and shut her mouth firmly. When she felt like it, Miss Thurgood could close her mouth in a way that always made Harry expect to hear a clanking noise. Besides that, she could make her eyebrows come down almost to her nose. Harry never could understand how she could do that when her hair was pulled back so tight into the bun on the back of her head. Miss Thurgood’s hairdo was one of the things Mr. Brighton had a saying about. He said with a hairdo like that one, you’d have to stand on your tiptoes to spit.

  But Miss Thurgood was a good reliable boarder, and they were hard to come by, so it was important to keep her happy. Harry decided to run up the stairs to make it look as if he’d really been hurrying. It would have been a good idea, too, if anybody else had had it. Anybody except Humpty Harry—the World’s Clumsiest Kid.

  He was almost to the top of the stairs when all of a sudden one of his feet didn’t get out of the way of the other one, and the next thing he knew his elbow hit the top stair with a crash that knocked the bottle of medicine right out of his hand. The next few minutes were almost too painful to talk about, in more ways than one.

  Dinner time that night was pretty grim, too. Miss Thurgood kept having coughing spells behind a lace-trimmed handkerchief, and then explaining, in a gasping sort of voice, how hard it was for her to keep going without her wonderful medicine.

  Mr. Konkel looked concerned, and every time Miss Thurgood disappeared behind her handkerchief for another coughing spell, he would gaze at Harry accusingly. Mrs. Pusey and Mr. Brighton seemed to take it pretty calmly, though.

  Mrs. Pusey was a quiet grandmotherly lady, with gray hair and sad eyes. She didn’t talk very much, and it was hard to tell what she was thinking. You wouldn’t know she was even interested in kids, except that once in a while she brought Harry a doughnut from the bakery shop where she worked.

  On the other hand, Mr. Konkel was very interested in kids—too interested. Mr. Konkel was the kind of person who seemed to feel that it was up to him personally to keep every kid he met from going to absolute rack and ruin. He had a million little lectures about what you should and shouldn’t do, and he was always talking about juvenile delinquents and looking at Harry pointedly. He loved to tell little stories about what he did when he was a boy. Some people who do that are pretty interesting, but Mr. Konkel must have been just about the most boring kid who ever lived.

  Anyway, Mr. Konkel listened very seriously to Miss Thurgood’s story about how Harry had charged up the stairs and hurled the medicine bottle at her left ankle. According to Miss Thurgood it was only because she stepped aside so quickly, that the bottle missed her and smashed on the wall instead. Mr. Konkel kept looking at Harry and nodding his head as if it was just what he’d been expecting all along.

  Mom was out in the kitchen when Miss Thurgood told the other boarders her version of the story. So it was up to Harry to set them all straight. But every time he got started Miss Thurgood drowned him out with another coughing fit. So, finally, he just gave up.

  He was feeling pretty miserable until he glanced at Mr. Brighton. As soon as he caught Harry’s eye, Mr. Brighton gave a wink and a grin that said he thought the whole thing was a big joke. And if you thought it over, it really was funny, except Miss Thurgood might move out; and if she did—there went her room-and-board money. And without Miss Thurgood’s room-and-board money—there went the vacation trip.

  Mike Wong

  The next morning Harry was on his way to Wong’s Grocery to get two loaves of bread for Mom when he noticed the sunshine on the porch swing. The early morning sun was slanting onto the veranda making an inviting glow across the padded seat. Two days in a row of early morning sunshine right at the beginning of the vacation. It occurred to Harry right away that such an unusual circumstance ought not to be wasted.

  He arranged himself on the warm pillows, being careful not to bump his sore elbow on the back of the swing. The elbow was pretty tender. After he was comfortably settled, and the swing had slowed to a gentle swaying, he twisted the arm around to get a better look. Sure enough, there was an ugly-looking purplish-red spot as big as a silver dollar. Harry examined it with a certain satisfaction. He was an authority on bruises, and this was going to be an impressive one. He thought briefly of showing it to Miss Thurgood to prove he really hadn’t thrown the medicine at her on purpose, but on second thought he decided not to bother. He had a feeling that if Miss Thurgood wanted to believe something, there wasn’t any use showing her evidence to the contrary.

  In a mood of scientific curiosity, Harry decided to test his diagnosis. Lifting his right foot, he pulled up the leg of his jeans. Just as he expected, the bruise on his shin, although larger, didn’t have nearly the color and quality of the elbow one. It hadn’t hurt as much, either, although it had been just about as embarrassing. It had happened on the Sutter Street bus when he was hurrying to get off. He’d tripped over something—or maybe, over nothing, just as like as not. He’d staggered forward, grabbed a hand hold, spun around and wound up sort of sitting in a fat lady’s lap. Afterwards, his shin had begun to hurt, although he couldn’t remember bumping it on anything. He had a hunch, though, that the fat lady had kicked him. She’d looked as if she wanted to, anyway.

  Examining your wounds is a good way to start feeling sorry for yourself, and it wasn’t long before Harry had worked himself up into a very melancholy frame of mind. When you stopped to think it over, what did he have to be happy about? Here he was, probably the clumsiest kid in ten states, practically an orphan—at least, halfway one—living on a crummy old street where there was nothing but shops and stores and grownups. It was enough to give anybody the blues.

  When Harry was really in the mood to feel sorry for himself he usually thought about his father. It wasn’t just that his father was dead, either. It was sad, of course, that his father had died when Harry was only six years old, but that had been long ago, and time had dimmed the memory. Nowadays, Harry could feel even more miserable by thinking about what a disappointment he would be to Dad if he were still alive.

  Harry could still remember just how Dad had looked; tall, and dark and slender—just right for a magician. There was a swift certainty about everything he did, and his hands could move so fast it made you dizzy trying to keep track of them. But most clearly of all, he could remember how Dad had planned and counted on Harry’s becoming a great magician, too. Even when Harry was a little tiny kid, Dad used to try to teach him things: like how to handle cards and do tricks with handkerchiefs. Dad always said that Harry’s clumsiness was only because he was so young, but Harry could tell he was disappointed.

  And then, there had been the time that Dad took him to see the Great Swami. Harry grinned thinking about his crazy dream the day before in the attic. He had to admit he’d been a little scared there for a minute, but not nearly as scared as he’d been the time when he really met the Swami.

  By the time Harry was born, the Great Swami was such an old man that he didn’t do a stage act any more. But he’d once been famous for mind-reading and foretelling and Dad wanted the old Swami to tell Harry’s future. Partly, Harry had been scared because the old man looked like a shriveled up old lizard in a turban, but mostly he’d been afraid of what the Swami might say. He just didn’t know how Dad would take it if the Great Swami said that magic was always going to be a problem for
Harry.

  But strangely enough it had turned out all right. The old man had stared at Harry a long time and then in a slow, splintery voice he’d said, “The boy has a rare gift, and his magic will be of a very special kind.” Harry never had been sure what that meant, but it seemed to make Dad happy. He talked about it a lot and he always called it “The Prophecy.” After that he made Harry work even harder with the cards and handkerchiefs.

  It really makes a guy feel miserable to think about messing up a prophecy and being a disgrace to a name like Harry Houdini Marco. So, because he was in that sort of a mood, Harry thought about it some more, until he had worked himself into a really colossal case of the blues. He was just doing a quick rerun of his list of troubles to see if he’d forgotten anything, when a familiar voice said, “Hey!”

  Harry’s carefully constructed castle of gloom exploded as he lurched to his feet with a force that sent the swing thudding back against the wall. “Hey Mike!” he yelled.

  Mike Wong had been one of Harry’s best friends for years—but only during vacations. That was because Mike really lived in Berkeley. It was only when school was out that he came to spend a few days with his grandparents, who lived in an apartment over their store on the corner of Kerry Street.

  Mike was almost exactly Harry’s age and just about the same size. But that’s where the likeness ended. The difference was that Mike Wong was just about the best athlete that Harry had ever known. Mike could run the fifty yard dash in six and a half seconds, he had a terrific batting eye, and he could pitch a ball that was almost impossible to hit—and right over the plate, too. And in kick ball, he kicked a low hard fly that whistled over fielders’ heads like a bullet. He could do it time after time without one goof, and without asking for “bouncies” either.

  Mike was standing on the veranda stairs, grinning up at Harry. There was a bat over his shoulder with a mitt stuck on the end of it, and he had a ball in his hand. “Want to go to the park and knock a ball around?” he said.

  “Sure,” Harry said. “Just a minute till I ask Mom.” He was halfway through the door when he remembered about the loaves of bread. “Oops,” he said. “Hey, I better run down to your store first. I was supposed to get some bread a long time ago and I sort of forgot about it. I think I’d better get it before I ask about the park, if you know what I mean.”

  Mike grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said.

  Mike’s grandfather, Mr. Williamson Wong, waited on Harry at the store. Mr. and Mrs. Wong were quiet gentle people who gave suckers to little kids and let customers who were having a bad time wait and wait to pay their bills. They’d helped Mom out more than once when the boarding house wasn’t doing too well. Except, maybe, for Lee Furdell, they were just about Harry’s favorite people on the block.

  When Harry and Mike clattered into the kitchen with the bread, Mom was so glad to see Mike again that she didn’t say much about how long it had taken Harry to get back. She said it was all right about the park and she even made them some sandwiches to take along.

  The bus ride to the park was just about long enough to catch up on all the gossip since Easter, when they’d last seen each other. Harry knew a lot of good places in Golden Gate Park where there was room to bat a ball around, particularly on a weekday when it wasn’t so crowded. They found a nice deserted stretch of lawn and had a good time practicing batting and pitching and catching. Harry did a little better than usual and it really made him feel encouraged.

  Actually, it wasn’t that Harry was so awful at sports; at times he did pretty well. It was more that he was so unreliable. Just when he’d been doing fine, he was sure to fall on his face—or flat on his back, like the time he’d stepped on a ball he was trying to kick. But he always tried, at least.

  Once, a long time ago, Mike had said, “The thing about you, Harry, is you’ve got guts. You never chicken out, no matter how much you goof up.”

  That was one of the nicest things anybody had ever said about Harry. But that was the way Mike was. Even though he was so great at everything, he never gloated, like some hot-shot types. And he always said some little thing to make you feel better. Even if it was just, “Nice try,” or “Tough luck.”

  That day at the park started out to be terrific. Late in the afternoon a bunch of big guys, about fourteen years old, let Harry and Mike join their game and it was great to watch their eyes bug out when they saw what Mike could do. And Harry wasn’t so bad himself. He hit a couple of Mike’s pitches and caught a sizzling line drive without even spraining a finger. It would have been a neat day except for one thing.

  They were resting under a tree before starting off for home, when something happened that spoiled everything. They’d been talking about how great it was that summer vacation had started and Harry said, “Hey, why don’t you see if you can spend a lot of time at your grandparents’ this summer? Maybe a whole month or two. We could have a lot of fun. We could go to the zoo and Playland and come here to the park.” He broke off noticing the funny expression on Mike’s face.

  “It sounds great,” Mike said, “but I guess I can’t. My dad’s got a summer coaching job at this old camp up in the Sierras. Mom and I are going with him, and we’ll be gone almost till school starts.”

  So there went one of Harry’s best plans for the summer. Poof! Just like that—the way his Dad used to make a fish bowl disappear in a puff of smoke.

  Harry to the Rescue

  On the way home from Golden Gate Park in the bus, Mike kept bringing up good things to talk about; like how the Giants were doing; and this spooky TV show, about a huge bloodshot eye that came down from Mars and crawled around like a spider. But Harry had a hard time keeping his mind on the conversation. He was feeling too disappointed—and jealous.

  He kept thinking that some people sure were lucky. Mike’s father was a high school coach in Oakland; so, no wonder Mike was so terrific at sports. And if that wasn’t lucky enough, now Mike was going to get to spend a whole summer in the Sierras. Mike had tried to make it sound as if it weren’t anything great so Harry wouldn’t feel bad, but that didn’t fool Harry. There’d probably be swimming and all sorts of other sports, and maybe even horseback riding every single day. Harry sighed.

  Mike went on chattering away and Harry mostly just sat there staring straight ahead. They were in their favorite seat, at the very back of the bus, and there wasn’t anyone else in the whole back part except one funny

  little man. Harry noticed the man because he had a dusty out-of-date look about him and his hair stuck out in a funny way around the brim of his hat. He kept fidgeting all the time and looking at a big old pocket watch. He’d hold up the watch and then glance out of the window, and then he’d look under the seat where there was a great big suitcase that stuck out into the aisle.

  Harry was just thinking, rather bitterly, that he’d be sure to fall over that suitcase if it was still there when they got to Kerry Street, when, suddenly the little man leaped to his feet. The bus had pulled to a stop and some people were getting on at the front door. The man grabbed frantically at his suitcase and started to leave, but it was jammed under the seat so tightly that it didn’t come loose. Then when it finally did come loose, it came so suddenly that the little man staggered backward. By the time he got going forward again the door was starting to close. The little guy lurched through and made it to the sidewalk, but the suitcase wasn’t so lucky. In the rush, it hadn’t gotten turned around endways so, of course, it got stuck in the door. When the suitcase stopped coming, the little man’s feet flew up and he sat down quickly on the sidewalk. The bus doors finished shutting and as the bus moved slowly forward, the suitcase just slid down into the step well and stayed there.

  Afterwards, Harry couldn’t imagine what had gotten into him. It really wasn’t any of his business. Maybe it was because he knew what it felt like. Having fallen out of and into so many things himself, he knew too darn well what it felt like. Anyway, he didn’t wait to explain it to Mike, who ha
dn’t seen the whole thing, or to tell the driver, who apparently hadn’t noticed it at all. Instead he just leaped to his feet, pulled the stop cord, and started tugging the suitcase up out of the step well. It was jammed so tight that he didn’t get it loose until the bus had almost reached the next stop.

  As he started out the door Mike yelled, “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I’m taking this suitcase back to the man who lost it,” Harry called back. “Want to come along?”

  Mike started to jump up, but then he sat back down again. “I can’t,” he said. “I haven’t any more bus money.”

  As the bus pulled away, Harry shouted through the window, “So long. See you later—at the store!”

  It wasn’t until Harry had started back down the sidewalk, staggering a bit under the weight of the suitcase, that it occurred to him that he didn’t have any more money for the bus fare either. As he struggled along, setting the suitcase down now and then to rest and change hands, he began to realize that he’d done a pretty stupid thing—as usual. What if the man had hailed a taxi, or caught another bus? It would be impossible to find him. Harry couldn’t just go off and leave the suitcase and, just as certainly, he couldn’t walk all the way home carrying it. And how would it sound if he tried to explain it to a policeman? “Oh-er, Mr. Policeman. Have you seen a little man in a funny hat? You see, I jumped off a bus with his suitcase and . . .” No, Harry decided, it would be better not to try to explain it to anyone, except as a last resort.

  But the suitcase was unbelievably heavy, and Harry had just about decided that he’d reached the last-resort stage, when he saw the little man. He was sitting on a bus bench with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, looking terribly tired and dejected. His face, which Harry really hadn’t seen before, was as round and pink as the Gerber Baby, only with wrinkles. But there was no mistaking the old-fashioned hat, or the hair that stuck out in funny little tufts over his ears. He looked so mournful, sitting there staring at the ground, that you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.