Jilly didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just held my hand and exuded comfort as only Jilly can.
“You could find her,” she said finally.
“Who? Sam?”
“Who else?”
“She’s probably—“ I stumbled over the word dead and settled for “—not even alive anymore.”
“Maybe not,” Jilly said. “She’d definitely be old. But don’t you think you should find out?”
“I…”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. And if she were alive, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her. What could we say to each other?
“Think about it, anyway,” Jilly said.
That was Jilly; she never took no for an answer.
“I’m off at eight,” she said. “Do you want to meet me then?”
“What’s up?” I asked, half-heartedly.
“I thought maybe you’d help me find Paperjack.”
I might as well, I thought. I was becoming a bit of an expert in tracking people down by this point. Maybe I should get a card printed: Geordie Riddell, Private Investigations and Fiddle Tunes.
“Sure,” I told her.
“Great,” Jilly said.
She bounced up from her seat as a couple of new customers came into the café. I ordered a coffee from her after she’d gotten them seated, then stared out the window at the traffic going by on Battersfield. I tried not to think of Sam—trapped in the past, making a new life for herself there—but I might as well have tried to jump to the moon.
* * *
By the time Jilly came off shift I was feeling almost myself again, but instead of being relieved, I had this great load of guilt hanging over me. It all centered around Sam and the ghost. I’d denied her once. Now I felt as though I was betraying her all over again. Knowing what I knew—the photo accompanying the engagement notice in that old issue of The Newford Star flashed across my mind—the way I was feeling at the moment didn’t seem right. I felt too normal; and so the guilt.
“I don’t get it,” I said to Jilly as we walked down Battersfield toward the Pier. “This afternoon I was falling to pieces, but now I just feel…”
“Calm?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s because you’ve finally stopped fighting yourself and accepted that what you saw—what you remember—really happened. It was denial that was screwing you up.”
She didn’t add, “I told you so,” but she didn’t have to. It echoed in my head anyway, joining the rest of the guilt I was carrying around with me. If I’d only listened to her with an open mind, then…what?
I wouldn’t be going through this all over again?
We crossed Lakeside Drive and made our way through the closed concession and souvenir stands to the beach. When we reached the Pier, I led her westward to where I’d last seen Paperjack, but he wasn’t sitting by the river anymore. A lone duck regarded us hopefully, but neither of us had thought to bring any bread.
“So I track down Sam,” I said, still more caught up in my personal quest than in looking for Paperjack. “If she’s not dead, she’ll be an old lady. If I find her—then what?”
“You’ll complete the circle,” Jilly said. She looked away from the river and faced me, her pixie features serious. “It’s like the Kickaha say: everything is on a wheel. You stepped off the one that represents your relationship with Sam before it came full circle. Until you complete your turn on it, you’ll never have peace of mind.”
“When do you know you’ve come full circle?” I asked.
“You’ll know.”
She turned away before I could go on and started back toward the Pier. By day the place was crowded and full of noise, alive with tourists and people out relaxing, just looking to have a good time; by night, its occupancy was turned over to gangs of kids fooling around on skateboards or simply hanging out, and the homeless: winos, bag ladies, hobos, and the like.
Jilly worked the crowd, asking after Paperjack, while I followed in her wake. Everybody knew him, or had seen him in the past week, but no one knew where he was now, or where he lived. We were about to give up and head over to Fitzhenry Park to start over again there, when we heard the sound of a harmonica. It was playing the blues, a soft, mournful sound that drifted up from the beach.
We made for the nearest stairs and then walked back across the sand to find the Bossman sitting under the boardwalk, hands cupped around his instrument, head bowed, eyes closed. There was no one listening to him except us. The people with money to throw in his old cloth cap were having dinner now in the fancy restaurants across Lakeside Drive or over in the theatre district. He was just playing for himself.
When he was busking he stuck to popular pieces—whatever was playing on the radio mixed with old show tunes, jazz favourites, and that kind of thing. The music that came from his harmonica now was pure magic. It transformed him, making him larger than life. The blues he played held all the world’s sorrow in its long sliding notes and didn’t so much change it, as make it bearable.
My fingers itched to pull out my fiddle and join him, but we hadn’t come to jam. So we waited until he was done. The last note hung in the air for far longer than seemed possible, then he brought his hands away from his mouth and cradled the harmonica on his lap. He looked up at us from under drooping eyelids, the magic disappearing now that he’d stopped playing. He was just an old, homeless black man now, with the faint trace of a smile touching his lips.
“Hey, Jill—Geordie,” he said. “What’s doin’?”
“We’re looking for Paperjack,” Jilly told him.
The Bossman nodded. “Jack’s the man for paperwork, all right.”
“I’ve been worried about him,” Jilly said. “About his health.”
“You a doctor now, Jill?”
She shook her head.
“Anybody got a smoke?”
This time we both shook our heads.
From his pocket he pulled a half-smoked butt that he must have picked up off the boardwalk earlier, then lit it with a wooden match that he struck on the zipper of his jeans. He took a long drag and let it out so that the blue-grey smoke wreathed his head, studying us all the while.
“You care too much, you just get hurt,” he said finally.
Jilly nodded. “I know. But I can’t help it. Do you know where we can find him?
“Well now. Come winter, he lives with a Mex family down in the Barrio.”
“And in the summer?”
The Bossman shrugged. “I heard once he’s got himself a camp up behind the Beaches.”
“Thanks,” Jilly said.
“He might not take to uninvited guests,” the Bossman added. “Body gets himself an out-of-the-way squat like that, I’d think he be lookin’ for privacy.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” Jilly assured him. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
The Bossman nodded. “You’re a stand-up kind of lady, Jill. I’ll trust you to do what’s right. I’ve been thinkin’ old Jack’s lookin’ a little peaked myself. It’s somethin’ in his eyes—like just makin’ do is gettin’ to be a chore. But you take care, goin’ back up in there. Some of the ’bos, they’re not real accommodatin’ to havin’ strangers on their turf.”
“We’ll be careful,” Jilly said.
The Bossman gave us both another long, thoughtful look, then lifted his harmonica and started to play again. Its mournful sound followed us back up to the boardwalk and seemed to trail us all the way to Lakeside Drive where we walked across the bridge to get to the other side of the Kickaha.
I don’t know what Jilly was thinking about, but I was going over what she’d told me earlier. I kept thinking about wheels and how they turned.
* * *
Once past the City Commission’s lawns on the far side of the river, the land starts to climb. It’s just a lot of rough scrub on this side of the hills that make up the Beaches, and every summer some of the hobos and other homeless people camp out in it. The cops roust them from
time to time, but mostly they’re left alone and they keep to themselves.
Going in there I was more nervous than Jilly; I don’t think she’s scared of anything. The sun had gone down behind the hills and while it was twilight in the city, here it was already dark. I know a lot of the street people and get along with them better than most—everyone likes a good fiddle tune—but some of them could look pretty rough, and I kept anticipating that we’d run into some big wild-eyed hillbilly who’d take exception to our being there.
Well, we did run into one, but—like ninety percent of the street people in Newford—he was somebody that Jilly knew. He seemed pleased, if a little surprised to find her here, grinning at us in the fading light. He was a tall, big-shouldered man, dressed in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt, with big hobnailed boots on his feet and a shock of red hair that fell to his neck and stood up on top of his head in matted tangles. His name, appropriately enough, was Red. The smell that emanated from him made me want to shift position until I was standing upwind.
He not only knew where Paperjack’s camp was, but took us there, only Paperjack wasn’t home.
The place had Paperjack stamped all over it. There was a neatly rolled bedroll pushed up against a knapsack, which probably held his changes of clothing. We didn’t check it out because we weren’t there to go through his stuff. Behind the pack was a food cooler with a Coleman stove sitting on top of it, and everywhere small origami stars hung from the tree branches. There must have been over a hundred of them. I felt as if I were standing in the middle of space with stars all around me.
Jilly left a note for Paperjack, then we followed Red back out to Lakeside Drive. He didn’t wait for our thanks. He just drifted away as soon as we reached the mown lawns that bordered the bush.
We split up then. Jilly had work to do—some art for Newford’s entertainment weekly, In the City—and I didn’t feel like tagging along to watch her work at her studio. She took the subway, but I decided to walk. I was bone-tired by then, but the night was one of those perfect ones when the city seems to be smiling. You can’t see the dirt or the grime for the sparkle over everything. After all I’d been through today, I didn’t want to be cooped up inside anywhere. I just wanted to enjoy the outdoors.
I remember thinking about how Sam would’ve loved to be out walking with me on a night like this—the old Sam I’d lost, not necessarily the one she’d become. I didn’t know that Sam at all, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to, even if I could track her down.
When I reached St. Paul’s, I paused by the steps. Even though it was a perfect night to be out walking, something drew me inside. I tried the door and it opened soundlessly at my touch. I paused just inside, one hand resting on the back pew, when I heard a cough.
I froze, ready to take flight. I wasn’t sure how churches worked. Maybe my creeping around here at this time of night was…I don’t know, sacrilegious or something.
I looked up to the front and saw that someone was sitting in the foremost pew. The cough was repeated, and I started down the aisle.
Intuitively, I guess I knew I’d find him here. Why else had I come inside?
Paperjack nodded to me as I sat down beside him on the pew. I laid my fiddle case by my feet and leaned back. I wanted to ask after his health, to tell him how worried Jilly was about him, but my day caught up with me in a rush. Before I knew it, I was nodding off.
I knew I was dreaming when I heard the voice. I had to be dreaming, because there was only Paperjack and I sitting on the pew, and Paperjack was mute. But the voice had the sound that I’d always imagined Paperjack’s would have if he could speak. It was like the movement of his fingers when he was folding origami—quick, but measured and certain. Resonant, like his finished paper sculptures that always seemed to have more substance to them than just their folds and shapes.
“No one in this world views it the same,” the voice said. “I believe that is what amazes me the most about it. Each person has his or her own vision of the world, and whatever lies outside that worldview becomes invisible. The rich ignore the poor. The happy can’t see those who are hurting.”
“Paperjack…?” I asked.
There was only silence in reply.
“I…I thought you couldn’t talk.”
“So a man who has nothing he wishes to articulate is considered mute,” the voice went on as though I hadn’t interrupted. “It makes me weary.”
“Who…who are you?” I asked.
“A mirror into which no one will look. A fortune that remains forever unread. My time here is done.”
The voice fell silent again.
“Paperjack?”
Still silence.
It was just a dream, I told myself. I tried to wake myself from it. I told myself that the pew was made of hard, unyielding wood, and far too uncomfortable to sleep on. And Paperjack needed help. I remembered the cough and Jilly’s worries.
But I couldn’t wake up.
“The giving itself is the gift,” the voice said suddenly. It sounded as though it came from the back of the church, or even farther away. “The longer I remain here, the more I forget.”
Then the voice went away for good. I lost it in a dreamless sleep.
* * *
I woke early, and all my muscles were stiff. My watch said it was ten to six. I had a moment’s disorientation—where the hell was I?—and then I remembered. Paperjack. And the dream.
I sat up straighter in the pew, and something fell from my lap to the floor. A piece of folded paper. I bent stiffly to retrieve it, turning it over and over in my hands, holding it up to the dim grey light that was creeping in through the windows. It was one of Paperjack’s Chinese fortune-tellers.
After a while I fit my fingers into the folds of the paper and looked down at the colours. I chose blue, same as I had the last time, and spelled it out, my fingers moving the paper back and forth so that it looked like a flower speaking soundlessly to me. I picked numbers at random, then unfolded the flap to read what it had to say.
“The question is more important than the answer,” it said.
I frowned, puzzling over it, then looked at what I would have gotten if I’d picked another number, but all the other folds were blank when I turned them over. I stared at it, then folded the whole thing back up and stuck it in my pocket. I was starting to get a serious case of the creeps.
Picking up my fiddle case, I left St. Paul’s and wandered over to Chinatown. I had breakfast in an all-night diner, sharing the place with a bunch of blue-collar workers who were all talking about some baseball game they’d watched the night before. I thought of calling Jilly, but knew that if she’d been working all night on that In the City assignment, she’d be crashed out now and wouldn’t appreciate a phone call.
I dawdled over breakfast, then slowly made my way up to the part of Foxville that’s called the Rosses. That’s where the Irish immigrants all lived in the forties and fifties. The place started changing in the sixties, when a lot of hippies who couldn’t afford the rents in Crowsea moved in, and it changed again with a new wave of immigrants from Vietnam and the Caribbean in the following decades. But the area, for all its changes, was still called the Rosses. My apartment was in the heart of it, right where Kelly Street meets Lee and crosses the Kickaha River. It’s two doors down from The Harp, the only real Irish pub in town, which makes it convenient for me to get to the Irish music sessions on Sunday afternoons.
My phone was ringing when I got home. I was half-expecting it to be Jilly, even though it was only going on eight, but found myself talking to a reporter from The Daily Journal instead. His name was Ian Begley, and it turned out he was a friend of Jilly’s. She’d asked him to run down what information he could on the Dickensons in the paper’s morgue.
“Old man Dickenson was the last real businessman of the family,” Begley told me. “Their fortunes started to decline when his son Tom took over—he’s the one who married the woman that Jilly said you were interested in tracking dow
n. He died in 1976. I don’t have an obit on his widow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s still alive. If she moved out of town, the paper wouldn’t have an obit for her unless the family put one in.”
He told me a lot of other stuff, but I was only half listening. The business with Paperjack last night and the fortune-telling device this morning were still eating away at me. I did take down the address of Sam’s granddaughter when it came up. Begley ran out of steam after another five minutes or so.
“You got enough there?” he asked.
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”
“Say hello to Jilly for me and tell her she owes me one.”
After I hung up, I looked out the window for a long time. I managed to shift gears from Paperjack to thinking about what Begley had told me, about wheels, about Sam. Finally I got up and took a shower and shaved. I put on my cleanest jeans and shirt and shrugged on a sports jacket that had seen better days before I bought it in a vintage clothing shop. I thought about leaving my fiddle behind, but knew I’d feel naked without it—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone anywhere without it. The leather handle felt comforting in my hand as I hefted the case and went out the door.
All the way over to the address Begley had given me I tried to think of what I was going to say when I met Sam’s granddaughter. The truth would make me sound like I was crazy, but I couldn’t seem to concoct a story that would make sense.
I remember wondering—where was my brother when I needed him? Christy was never at a loss for words, no matter what the situation.
It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house that I decided to stick as close to the truth as I could—I was an old friend of her grandmother’s, could she put me in touch with her?—and take it from there. But even my vague plans went out the door when I rang the bell and stood face-to-face with Sam’s granddaughter.
Maybe you saw this coming, but it was the last thing I’d expected. The woman had Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes, Sam’s face…to all intents and purposes it was Sam standing there, looking at me with the vaguely uncertain expression that most of us wear when we open the door to a stranger standing on our steps.
Dreams Underfoot Page 43
