The Radio Magician and Other Stories by James van Pelt Read Free Book Online Page A

briefcase out the door.
    Latasha and I faced each other, then dashed into the hallway. At the end toward the main office, a crowd of kids and the assistant principal stood. Mr. Herbert and the two policemen were gone.
    Much later, after we’d been interviewed and debriefed, after our parents came to pick us up, after we stayed up to watch the evening news, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. My heart had long since settled into a calm rhythm, and my hands had quit shaking, but every time I closed my eyes I could see Mr. Herbert’s face six inches from my own, breathing his antiseptic breath in my face.
    My phone buzzed beside my head on the nightstand. I picked it up, opened to the screen. The text message from Latasha glowed in the dark. “Whch 1 R U?”
    I closed the phone. My counselor at school told me once that most kids change their minds four times about what they are going to be while in college, and very few students end up as they imagined themselves. I pictured a young Adolf Hitler lying in his bed at night, his future stretching out before him like a canvas. Did he know, deep down? Could he sense his destiny?
    I thought about how I would text it. How would I send the message? It would be a question I’d send to myself, “Whch 1 M I?”
    But I didn’t know the answer.

LIGHT OF A THOUSAND SUNS

    Without beginning, middle or end, of infinite power,
    of infinite arms, whose eyes are the moon and sun,
    I see thee, whose face is flaming fire,
    Burning this whole universe with Thy radiance.
    -from the Bhagavad Gita

    T rellis noticed the trailer parked at the edge of the Lynwood Mall’s parking lot, but he didn’t think much about it. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Troublesome dreams he couldn’t recall. In fact, the idea that maybe the trailer had been there for a couple of days tickled the back of his mind until he dismissed it in the morning’s hassles. Penney’s had started their big ½ off sale, making traffic in the lot heavy and crowd control a nightmare, so Trellis didn’t spend much time watching the monitors. First, a tiny woman who must have been at least ninety-five tried to muscle a thirty-two inch Radio Shack plasma screen television into her minivan and sprained her neck. Waiting for the paramedics to get there, he held her hand. “I’m not really hurt, dears,” she kept insisting as they strapped her to a backboard.
    Then he spent a half hour helping two high school boys change a flat. After that, a woman so overweight the backs of her arms shifted from side to side when she walked stuffed four hundred dollars worth of stretch slacks and extra-extra large blouses into a baby carriage before strolling out of Foley’s. He knew she was a shoplifter the second she came into view of the south exit camera. The bad ones kept their heads down and tried not to look like they were in a hurry. He sprinted to the exit and confronted her before she left the sidewalk. Of course, she swore she knew nothing about the clothes until he started pulling out one item after another.
    “They’re for my baby girl,” she mumbled over and over when Trellis sat beside her as the policeman processed her for arrest. Trellis felt sad. “This isn’t the end of the world. You’ll grow from this.” Catching shoplifters bothered him. He liked it better when he could give tokens to a forlorn five-year-old wandering in the arcade where his mom put him while she shopped. He liked to jiggle the tokens in his pocket when he walked, knowing he would give them away later. Trellis liked watching people buy gifts, and he liked families smiling as they talked to each other, packages in hand.
    Trellis didn’t look at the trailer again until night had fallen and the mall closed. An old Airstream, a beat up silver bar of soap on wheels, sat at the parking lot’s edge, hitched to an even older red pickup with busted running boards. A lone figure walked into the streetlight’s illumination, knocked on the door, then