The Ivory and the Horn n-6

by Charles de Lint

  Why hadn't Sandy Egan call him last night? He'd told her to phone him, instead of just putting Ronnie outside again. He'd promised her, no questions. He wouldn't use the incident as pressure to take the boy away from her. Ronnie was the first priority, plain and simple.

  But she hadn't called. She hadn't trusted him, hadn't wanted to chance losing the extra money Social Services gave her to raise the boy. And now he was dead.

  Halfway through his fourth beer, Dennison started ordering shots of whiskey on the side. By the time the dinner hour rolled around, he was too drunk to know where he was anymore. He'd started out in a run-down bar somewhere on Palm Street; he could be anywhere now.

  The smoky interior of the bar looked like every other place he'd been in this afternoon. Dirty wooden floors, their polish scratched and worn beyond all redemption. Tables in little better condition, chairs with loose legs that wobbled when you sat on them, leaving you unsure if it was all the booze you'd been putting away that made your seat feel so precarious, or the rickety furniture that the owner was too cheap to replace until it actually fell apart under someone. A TV set up in a corner of the bar where game shows and soap operas took turns until they finally gave way to the six o'clock news.

  And then there was the clientele.

  The thin afternoon crowd was invariably composed of far too many lost and hopeless faces. He recognized them from his job. Today, as he staggered away from the urinal to blink at the reflection looking back at him from the mirror, he realized that he looked about the same. He couldn't tell himself apart from them if he tried, except that maybe they could hold their drink better.

  Because he felt sick. Unable to face the squalor of one of the cubicles, he stumbled out of the bar, hoping to clear his head. The street didn't look familiar, and the air didn't help. It was filled with exhaust fumes and the tail end of rush-hour noise. His stomach roiled and he made his slow way along the pavement in front of the bar, one hand on the wall to keep his balance.

  When he reached the alleyway, it was all he could do to take a few floundering steps inside before he fell to his hands and knees and threw up. Vomiting brought no relief. He still felt the world doing a slow spin and the stink just made his nausea worse.

  Pushing himself away from the noxious puddle, the most he could manage was to fall back against the brick wall on this side of the alley. He brought his knees slowly up, wrapped his arms around them and leaned his head on top. He must have inadvertently turned his pager back on at some point in the afternoon, because it suddenly went off, its insistent beep piercing his aching head. He unclipped it from his belt and threw it against the far wall. The sound of it smashing was only slightly more satisfying than the blessed relief from its shrill beeping.

  "You don't look so good."

  He lifted his head at the familiar voice, half-expecting that one of his clients had found him in this condition, or worse, one of his coworkers. Instead he met the grey-green gaze of the woman he'd briefly run into by the lakefront earlier in the day.

  "Jesus," he said. "You... you're like a bad penny."

  He lowered his head back onto his knees again and just hoped she'd go away. He could feel her standing there, looking down at him for a long time before she finally went down on one knee beside him and gave his arm a tug.

  "C'mon," she said. "You can't stay here."

  "Lemme alone."

  "I don't just care about trees, either," she said.

  "Who gives a fuck."

  But it was easier to let her drag him to his feet than to fight her offer of help. She slung his arm over her shoulder and walked him back to the street where she flagged down a cab. He heard her give his address to the cabbie and wondered how she knew it, but soon gave up that train of thought as he concentrated on not getting sick in the back of the cab.

  He retained the rest of the night in brief flashes. At some point they were in the stairwell of his building, what felt like a month later he was propped up beside the door to his apartment while she worked the key in the lock. Then he was lying on his bed while she removed his shoes.

  "Who... who are you?" he remembered asking her.

  "Debra Eisenstadt."

  The name meant nothing to him. The bed seemed to move under him. I don't have a water bed, he remembered thinking, and then he threw up again. Debra caught it in his wastepaper basket.

  A little later still, he came to again to find her sitting in one of his kitchen chairs that she'd brought into the bedroom and placed by the head of the bed. He remembered thinking that this was an awful lot to go through just for a donation to some rainforest fund.

  He started to sit up, but the room spun dangerously, so he just let his head fall back against the pillow. She wiped his brow with a cool, damp washcloth.

  "What do you want from me?" he managed to ask.

  "I just wanted to see what you were like when you were my age," she said.

  That made so little sense that he passed out again trying to work it out.

  ***

  She was still there when he woke up the next morning. If anything, he thought he actually felt worse than he had the night before. Debra came into the room when he stirred and gave him a glass of Eno that helped settle his stomach. A couple of Tylenol started to work on the pounding behind his eyes.

  "Someone from your office called and I told her you were sick," she said. "I hope that was okay."

  "You stayed all night?"

  She nodded, but Dennison didn't think she had the look of someone who'd been up all night. She had a fresh-scrubbed glow to her complexion and her head seemed to catch the sun, spinning it off into strands of light that mingled with the natural highlights already present in her light-brown hair. Her hair looked damp.

  "I used your shower," she said. "I hope you don't mind."

  "No, no. Help yourself."

  He started to get up, but she put a palm against his chest to keep him lying down.

  "Give the pills a chance to work," she said "Meanwhile, I'll get you some coffee. Do you feel up to some breakfast?"

  The very thought of eating made his stomach churn.

  "Never mind," she said, taking in the look on his face. "I'll just bring the coffee."

  Dennison watched her leave, then straightened his head and stared at the ceiling. After meeting her, he thought maybe he believed in angels for the first time since Sunday school.

  ***

  It was past ten before he finally dragged himself out of bed and into the shower. The sting of hot water helped to clear his head; being clean and putting on fresh clothes helped some more. He regarded himself in the bathroom mirror. His features were still puffy from alcohol poisoning and his cheeks looked dirty with twenty-four hours worth of dark stubble. His hands were unsteady, but he shaved all the same. Neither mouthwash nor brushing his teeth could quite get rid of the sour taste in his mouth.

  Debra had toast and more coffee waiting for him in the kitchen.

  "I don't get it," he said as he slid into a chair across the table from her. "I could be anyone— some maniac for all you know. Why're you being so nice to me?"

  She just shrugged.

  "C'mon. It's not like I could have been a pretty sight when you found me in the alley, so it can't be that you were attracted to me."

  "Were you serious about what you said last night?" she asked by way of response. "About quitting your job?"

  Dennison paused before answering to consider what she'd asked. He couldn't remember telling her that, but then there was a lot about yesterday he couldn't remember. The day was mostly a blur except for one thing. Ronnie Egan's features swam up in his mind until he squeezed his eyes shut and forced the image away.

  Serious about quitting his job? "Yeah," he said with a slow nod. "I guess I was. I 'm mean, I am. I don't think I can even face going into the office. I'll just send them my letter of resignation and have somebody pick up my stuff from my desk."

  "You do make a difference," she said. "It might not se
em so at a time like this, but you've got to concentrate on all the people you have helped. That's got to count for something, doesn't it?"

  "How would you know?" Dennison asked her. No sooner did the question leave his mouth, than it was followed by a flood of others. "Where did you come from? What are you doing here? It's got to be more than trying to convince me to keep my job so that I can afford to donate some money to your cause."

  "You don't believe in good Samaritans?"

  Dennison shook his head. "Nor Santa Claus."

  But maybe angels, he added to himself. She was so fresh and pretty— light years different from the people who came into his office, their worn and desperate features eventually all bleeding one into the other.

  "I appreciate your looking after me the way you did." he said. "Really I do. And I don't mean to sound ungrateful. But it just doesn't make a lot of sense."

  "You help people all the time."

  "That's my job—was my job." He looked away from her steady gaze. "Christ, I don't know anymore."

  "And that's all it was?" she asked.

  "No. It's just... I'm tired, I guess. Tired of seeing it all turn to shit on me. This little kid who died yesterday... I could've tried harder. If I'd tried harder, maybe he'd still be alive."

  "That's the way I feel about the environment, sometimes," she said. "There are times when it just feels so hopeless, I can't go on."

  "So why do you?"

  "Because the bottom line is I believe I can make a difference. Not a big one. What I do is just a small ripple, but I know it helps. And if enough little people like me make our little differences, one day we're going to wake up to find that we really did manage to change the world."

  "There's a big distinction between some trees getting cut down and a kid dying," Dennison said.

  "From our perspective, sure," she agreed. "But maybe not from a global view. We have to remember that everything's connected. The real world's not something that can be divided into convenient little compartments, like we'll label this, 'the child abuse problem,' this'll go under 'depletion of the ozone layer.' If you help some homeless child on these city streets, it has repercussions that touch every part of the world."

  "I don't get it."

  "It's like a vibe," she said. "If enough people think positively, take positive action, then it snowballs all of its own accord and the world can't help but get a little better."

  Dennison couldn't stop from voicing the cynical retort that immediately came into his mind.

  "How retro," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It sounds so sixties. All this talk about vibes and positive mumbo-jumbo."

  "Positive thinking brought down the Berlin Wall," she said.

  "Yeah, and I'm sure some fortune teller predicted it in the pages of a supermarket tabloid, although she probably got the decade wrong. Look, I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If the world really worked on 'vibes,' I think it'd be in even worse shape than it already is."

  "Maybe that's what is wrong with it: too much negative energy. So we've got to counteract it with positive energy."

  "Oh, please."

  She got a sad look on her face. "I believe it," she said. "I learned that from a man that I came to love very much. I didn't believe him when he told me, either, but now I know it's true."

  "How can you know it's true?"

  Debra sighed. She put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a piece of paper.

  "Talk to these people," she said. "They can explain it a whole lot better than I can."

  Dennison looked at the scrap of paper she'd handed him. "Elders' Council" was written in ballpoint. The address given was City Hall's.

  "Who are they?"

  "Elders from the Kickaha Reservation."

  "They've got an office at City Hall?"

  Debra nodded. "It's part of a program to integrate alternative methods of dealing with problems with the ones we would traditionally use."

  "What? People go to these old guys and ask them for advice?"

  "They're not just men," she said. "In fact, among the Kickaha— as with many native peoples— there are more women than men sitting on an elders' council. They're the grandmothers of the tribe who hold and remember all the wisdoms. The Kickaha call them 'the Aunts.' "

  Dennison started to shake his head. "I know you mean well, Debra, but—"

  "Just go talk to them— please? Before you make your decision."

  "But nothing they say is going to—"

  "Promise me you will. You asked me why I helped you last night, well, let's say this is what I want in return: for you just to talk to them."

  "I..."

  The last thing Dennison wanted was to involve himself with some nut-case situation like this, but he liked the woman, despite her flaky beliefs, and he did owe her something. He remembered throwing up last night and her catching the vomit in his garbage can. How many people would do that for a stranger?

  "Okay," he said. "I promise."

  The smile that she gave him seemed to make her whole face glow.

  "Good," she said. "Make sure you bring a present. A package of tobacco would be good."

  "Tobacco."

  She nodded. "I've got to go now," she added. She stood up and shook his hand. "I'm really glad I got the chance to meet you."

  "Wait a minute," Dennison said as she left the kitchen.

  He followed her into the living room where she was putting on her jacket.

  "Am I going to see you again?" he asked.

  "I hope so."

  "What's your number?"

  "Do you have a pen?"

  He went back into the kitchen and returned with a pencil and the scrap of paper she'd given him. She took it from him and quickly scribbled a phone number and address on it. She handed it back to him, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then she was out the door and gone.

  Dennison stood staring at the door after it had closed behind her. The apartment had never seemed so empty before.

  Definitely flaky, he thought as he returned to the kitchen. But he thought maybe he'd fallen in love with her, if that was something you were allowed to do with angels.

  He finished his coffee and cleaned up the dishes, dawdling over the job. He didn't know anything about the Kickaha except for those that he saw in his office, applying for welfare, and what he'd seen on the news a couple of years ago when the more militant braves from the reservation had blockaded Highway 14 to protest logging on their land. So he had only two images of them: down and out, or dressed in khaki, carrying an assault rifle. Wait, make that three. There were also the pictures in the history books of them standing around in ceremonial garb.

  He didn't want to go to this Elders' Council. Nothing they could tell him was going to make him look at the world any differently, so why bother? But finally he put on a lightweight sportsjacket and went out to flag a cab to take him to City Hall, because whatever else he believed or didn't believe, the one thing he'd never done yet was break a promise.

  He wasn't about to start now— especially with a promise made to an angel.

  ***

  Dennison left the elevator and walked down a carpeted hallway on the third floor of City Hall. He stopped at the door with the neatly lettered sign that read ELDERS' COUNCIL. He felt surreal, as though he'd taken a misstep somewhere along the way yesterday and had ended up in a Fellini film. Being here was odd enough, in and of itself. But if he was going to meet a native elder, he felt it should be under pine trees with the smell of wood smoke in the air, not cloistered away in City Hall, surrounded by miles of concrete and steel.

  Really, he shouldn't be here at all. What he should be doing was getting his affairs in order. Resigning from his job, getting in touch with his cousin Pete, who asked Dennison at least every three or four months if he wanted to go into business with him. Pete worked for a small shipping firm, but he wanted to start his own company. "I've got the know-how and the money," he'd tell Dennison, "
but frankly, when it comes to dealing with people, I stink. That's where you'd come in."

  Dennison hesitated for long moment, staring at the door and the sign affixed to its plain wooden surface. He knew what he should be doing, but he'd made that promise, so he knocked on the door. An old native woman answered as he was about to lift his hand to rap a second time.

  Her face was wrinkled, her complexion dark; her braided hair almost grey. She wore a long brown skirt, flat-soled shoes and a plain white blouse that was decorated with a tracing of brightly coloured beadwork on its collar points and buttoned placket. The gaze that looked up to meet his was friendly, the eyes such a dark brown that it was hard to differentiate between pupil and iris.

  "Hello," she said and ushered him in.

  It was strange inside. He found him self standing in a conference room overlooking the parking garage behind City Hall. The walls were unadorned and there was no table, just thick wall-to-wall on the floor and a ring of chairs set in a wide circle, close to the walls. At the far side of the room, he spied a closed door that might lead into another room or a storage closet.

  "Huh..."

  Suddenly at a loss for words, he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out the package of cigarette tobacco that he'd bought on the way over and handed it to her.

  "Thank you," the woman said. She steered him to a chair, then sat down beside him. "My name is Dorothy. How can I help you?"

  "Dorothy?" Dennison replied, unable to hide his surprise.

  The woman nodded. "Dorothy Born. You were expecting something more exotic such as Woman-Who-Speaks-With-One-Hand-Rising?"

  "I didn't know what to expect."

  "That was my mother's name actually— in the old language. She was called that because she'd raise her hand as she spoke, ready to slap the head of those braves who wouldn't listen to her advice."

  "Oh."

  She smiled. "That's a joke. My mother's name was Ruth."

  "Uh..."

  What a great conversationalist he was proving to be today. Good thing Pete couldn't hear him at this moment. But he just didn't know where to begin.