“You should try pulling your own weight for once,” Doc said. “Don’t think we’re going to carry you forever.”
“Oh, but we love you, Grumpy,” Happy said. He put his hand on Grumpy’s shoulder. “You’re the bomb,” Happy said, using an expression he’d picked up from Sneezy.
“Get your paw off me,” Grumpy said. “Freak.”
“Look who’s talking.” Happy had an edge in his voice now. The one thing Happy didn’t love was being a dwarf. At four foot ten, Happy was the closest to normal-sized, and Doc often wondered if Happy stayed not only because of his dedication to the Book but because this was the only place he got to be bigger than everyone else.
“I don’t need you freaks,” Grumpy said, giving Happy a shove. They were sitting on the floor, and the shove sent Happy into the coffee table. He banged his head on the corner.
“Look what you did,” Happy said, holding his temple. “I’m bleeding.”
“He’s bleeding,” everyone concurred, in unison. All except Grumpy, who glared defiantly at the circle of dwarves, his arms crossed in front of him.
“Violence can’t be tolerated,” Doc said sternly.
“Oh, yeah? What are you gonna do about it?” Grumpy said. “You and your stupid Book. Nobody believes in that shit but you. They’re all just humoring you, man.”
“You’re lying,” Doc said. He looked around at the others. “He’s lying, right?”
“Yeah, right,” Sneezy said. “We believe.”
“We believe,” the others said. But it sounded wrong. Doc could hear the doubt in their voices, could see it in the way they shifted their eyes to the floor, hunching their shoulders. Bashful picked up his Big Mac in both hands and chewed, his head down.
“I absolutely, positively, believe,” Sneezy said.
But Sneezy was a kid, Doc thought, who believed in dryads and unicorns, wizards and fairies, in Spiderman and Wolverine and other bullshit superheroes. Sneezy sat rapt in front of the Saturday morning cartoons, saying “Rad” and “Awesome.” Sneezy’s belief was not hard-won.
“Whatever gets you through,” Dopey said, surprising everyone. Dopey never talked at house meetings. “It’s cool,” Dopey said. “She’ll come, dudes.” He lay back against the armrest of the couch and closed his eyes.
“ It’s just—” Bashful said.
“Just what,” Doc said, his voice flat.
“We’re kind of in a rut, I think. Maybe. Or something.” Bashful stared at the hamburger in his hands. A little dribble of pink sauce was falling right onto the table Doc had cleaned.
“You have doubts,” Doc said. “That’s okay, that’s perfectly natural.”
But didn’t Doc have his doubts, too? Didn’t he lie awake at night, listening to the snores of the others, wondering if maybe she wasn’t coming after all; didn’t he try to bury those thoughts, to tell himself to be patient, to withstand the test of these long years? Some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, he would get up and take the Book from the wooden lectern Bashful had built for it, and he would go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet lid and read it again. Once upon a time. She ate the apple, she fell. The dwarves were there, in the story — they took care of her. The Book was a mess of half-pages, missing pages, the story erratic, interrupted. But some things were clear. A few powerful words shone forth, in large letters. There were faded illustrations that had once been bright: a man with an ax. A hand holding a huge, shining red apple. The stepmother and her mirror. But the page that might reveal her, that page was only a scrap, and all it showed was a short puffy white sleeve, and an inch of a pale arm, against which lay a heartbreaking curl of long, blue-black hair. So many mysteries, so many things they might never know. But in the end, on the very last page of the Book, the promise, the words that had given him such hope the first time he read them: They lived happily ever after. She and the dwarves, Doc thought, all of them together. She would come, and see that he had made things ready. She would take the pain that had always been with him, the great ache of loneliness at the center of his life, into her hands, like a trembling bird; she would sing to it, and caress it, and then with one gesture fling it into the sky. A flutter of wings and it would rise away from him forever.
“They don’t buy any of your religious mumbo-jumbo,” Grumpy said. “They’re just too chickenshit to tell you. Well, I’m done, buddy boy. Basta.” He lifted his chin and scratched his stubble, glaring at Doc.
“Grumpy,” Sleepy said. “Don’t go.”
“And my name isn’t Grumpy,” Grumpy said. “It’ s Carlos. I’m a Puerto Rican—” he paused “—little person,” he said. “I’m sick of all of you with your fake names and voodoo loser fantasies about some chick who ain’t coming. She ain’t coming, man. Get it through your fat heads.”
No one looked at him. Grumpy stood up.
“All right then,” he said. He went to the corner where he kept his sleeping bag, and picked it up. “Adios, you chumps. See you around.”
Doc listened to his boots on the stairs. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It doesn’t matter. She’ll still come.
“A dwarf by any other name—” Happy said.
“Would still be an asshole,” Sleepy said.
“My name used to be Steven,” Sneezy said, and Sleepy told him to shut his fucking piehole.
It was a Friday afternoon in November, full of wind and rain, and everyone who came into Oz shook out their umbrellas and dripped water onto the yellow brick tiles in the foyer, and asked for one of the tables close to the big stone fireplace.
Doc was short-staffed. A waiter was out with the flu, and Bashful had left town on Tuesday to attend an aunt’s funeral. On Thursday, he had called to say he might not be coming back, except to pick up a few of his things.
“Of course you’re coming back,” Doc had said.
“She left me some money,” Bashful said. “Nobody thought she had any, she lived in this crummy little studio apartment and never bought a thing. Turns out she had stocks from my grandfather, and she left it all to me and her cat. I’m the trustee for the cat.”
“You can’t just take off.”
“I want to live here for a while. See how things go. I’m sorry, Doc. This just seems like the right thing for me now.”
A couple of men came into the restaurant, dressed in matching red parkas, their arms around each other. The first man’s hair was blond and combed back off a perfectly proportioned face; the other man had a square jaw, outlined by a thin black beard, and when he shucked his parka Doc saw his chest and biceps outlined in a tight thermal shirt.
“Nasty weather out there,” Doc said. He stepped down from his stool behind the podium to lead them to a table near the fireplace. He heard one man whisper something to the other, and the second’s “Shh, he’ll hear you.” He was used to comments. On the street, teenagers yelled to him from passing cars. People stared, or else tried not to, averting their eyes and then casting furtive glances in his direction. Children walked right up to him, fascinated that he was their size, but different. He’d learned to block it out. But when the men were seated he walked away from them, feeling a sudden, overwhelming rage.
Things were falling apart at home. At night he would sit on the couch, the Book on his lap, and read a few sentences aloud. In the old days, everyone would gather around, relaxing with cigarettes and beers, and maybe some dessert they’d brought back from the restaurant. But now they drifted away. To the kitchen, or up to the loft to turn on the TV and watch some inane show he could hear as he tried to focus on the words in the Book, the all- important words that were going to change their lives. That had changed Doc’s life, given him hope. But now that hope was being drained away. One by one they were going to leave him. And she would never come, not to a lone dwarf. An old, balding dwarf whose feet and back hurt him every night so that he had to soak in a hot bath for some relief. She wouldn’t take his gnarled, aching feet in her hands and massage them. In the black nights when he lay awake and empty, she wouldn’t lay her long white body, smelling of apples, on top of his.
As the evening went on he forced himself to greet customers pleasantly, not to yell at Sleepy when he dropped a bus tray, or at Happy when he mixed up orders — Happy was usually a dishwasher, but he was filling in tonight for the absent waiter. Doc focused on keeping everything running smoothly, not letting it get chaotic. He let
