A Wizard In Dreary

WRITTEN BY RILEY BAXTER

The Wizard was at the pub, for the pub he knew was the place that god went to hide when men were ignoring him. The Wizard went to the pub often, for he sought god often, and as a result, often came up short and incredibly disappointed, when he met with dusty mornings instead.

Two young men, more so boys, of eighteen years had been watching the Wizard since the three o’clock game, for a Wizard was a rare sight in a small town such as Dreary. Heath, the younger of the two, was a bright and handsome young man who was prone to comparisons with Charlie Chaplin (without the moustache). Finn, who was none too much a fool himself, had just placed a multi on the evening’s games, and here was his ticket;

The Panthers to beat the Titans with Tamou to score anytime, the Sharks to have the Storm, and the Roosters to have the Warriors. Easy games perhaps bar the Sharks but Morrison was doing well in the polls at the time and that had to count for something. Besides, for $10 the money could really come or go and it didn’t seem to matter.

The Wizard, the boys noted, seemed to be barracking for the Gold Coast. This became much more obvious when the Titans, subverting all conventions, scored a try in the 10th minute of the game. Assumedly the travelling old lunatic was a naturalised fan of the club, and so, Heath thought very little of his gleeful galavanting, his rudimentary rodomontade and his unholy heel claps in his rude leather dress shoes.

Even so, the fact that the Titans had got in at all was rather controversial and Finn was determined to discover if some foul magic was at play. He approached the kindly old Wizard and asked who he had taken, in each of the three games. The Wizard looked the young man up and down and smiled. ‘Your panthers shall go white, and your Sharks shall all be zapped, and your Roosters will go the way of the Moa,’ the Wizard cackled and raised his glass in cheers.

Well the Titans got up, and so did the Storm – for we must skip the interesting game – and Finn and Heath were still trying to make sense of the Wizard despite their dead bet. ‘We beg of you O’ Wizard please explain how you picked your tips!’ Finn said, offering to buy the man a beer, a sure way to win a Wizard’s trust.

‘I get visions,’ was the reply the Wizard made,

although in truth the man simply tipped the animal or emblem he saw coming out on top in an honest fight. A titan would naturally defeat a panther, a warrior would convincingly best a rooster, and a storm may not kill a shark too often, but certainly you have never seen a shark kill a storm.

It was 15 minutes until the 7:35 kick off, and the party of three were outdoors for some fresh air and a complimentary smoke. ‘How do you get these visions?’ Finn asked softly. The Wizard became very serious. ‘When you close your eyes tight you can see these strange specks of absolutely nothing. The brain can be trained to see what lies between and behind and above and around the specks and so in time it connects them and gives me my visions. It’s just a bit different to how early men looked up at the stars and saw fish and crabs.’ The Wizard replied staring deeply into the smoke trail of his cigarette.

Tonight the moon was full and bright and the stars were just at the point where you could look around at one point in the sky and then to another and then back and there would be several more stars at the original point and you would think that this could seemingly go on forever, until it got so dark that the sky stopped paying you fan service and you would have to be content with those stars already there. It was however, just beginning.

‘Do they mean anything? Anything more than what those people saw when they saw those fish and crabs?’ Heath asked and almost immediately felt guilty for airing the possibility that something so far out could be used for anything more than selling books to old ladies.

‘It’s hard to say isn’t it. Those stars up there are all dead. They’re long dead. Except maybe the sun, but we don’t call that a star. It’s like how we try not to remind old people that they’re old. But it’s a star and one day it will die. Well then, I don’t know how much those stars mean if they’re dead and long dead and that we still see them. I suppose it’s like how someone really dies when people stop saying their name. Maybe if we don’t look at the stars, they don’t mean anything and maybe if we don’t look inside our heads than those specks don’t mean anything either. I suppose the stuff in our head probably does matter though, because as long as we can see it, we aren’t dead and that means something doesn’t it?’ The Wizard replied, although I have presented his thesis here in a much-truncated form from that which would exist had I added in the pauses and haws, the fiddling and riddling, which existed between the full stops.

They stepped inside and the Warriors were up 18-6. The Wizard’s left eye was fixed upon his right foot, as though fearful it would make some sudden movement, while his right eye gazed directly east, with a readiness to leap into the shrub were the sun to rise. The drunk old man smiled at the boys and wished them well, he put back on his trilby hat and walked into the restroom, never to be seen again.