Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “Who cares? You do a few lines, you get high. Better rush than coke and it lasts, so where’s the problem?”

  All Nia could do was shake her head.

  “Yo, Miss I-Know-Better. Cat’s cool. Get yourself a little ephedrine and anybody can make it. Cuts out the middle man, you know what I’m saying? Puts the power back in our hands instead of the bankers’.”

  “I don’t do drugs,” Nia said.

  He looked at her in disbelief. “Like not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “I don’t like the idea of being messed up like that.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t throw up, you don’t get high. Yo, what the hell do you do for fun?”

  “I like jazz.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Ever heard of The Rhatigan?” Only one of the best jazz clubs in town, a seedy little dive on Palm Street, by all accounts she’d heard, but their house band was supposed to be fabulous and all the best players dropped by to sit in when they were in town.

  “Of course,” she said. “But I’m underage. I’d never be able to get in.”

  “I could get you in—dude behind the bar owes me a favor.” He shot her a suspicious look. “You do drink beer, right?”

  So rarely she might as well say she didn’t, Nia thought, but she found herself nodding. And then wished she hadn’t because it suddenly occurred to her to wonder why she even cared what this guy thought about her and the answer troubled her. TAMP was a jerk. The kind of guy she wouldn’t look at twice if she passed him on the street. But having been on her own for over twenty-four hours now, with no one to talk to, she was grabbing on to his company because she needed someone and there was no one else. Her mom and Max had been stolen from her and she didn’t have any real friends. There wasn’t anyone else she could turn to, no one at all, which was way more pathetic than she wanted to admit. She was reduced to putting up with the company of a foulmouthed, petty criminal and self-proclaimed drug addict, just for the sake of human contact. He stood for everything she hated about her generation and now she was actually considering going to some bar with him just because there’d be good music and he could get her in?

  What had happened to her sense of ethics? The realization that she could put them aside so easily made her feel ashamed of herself.

  “Look, I appreciate the offer,” she said, “but I’ve got to go. I...I’m supposed to be meeting somebody.”

  The shades went up and the gaze of those disconcerting blue eyes settled on her, read the lie, then looked away, sunglasses back in place, dismissing her.

  Yeah, you too, Nia thought, but she couldn’t seem to muster much conviction to the sentiment.

  “’Scool,” TAMP said, not bothering to look at her. “Lady’s got an appointment.”

  “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

  “I’m sure.”

  As she started to get up, he turned around. He picked up his spray can from where it lay on its side by his knee, offered it to her.

  “Here,” he said. “Throw up your tag beside mine. Let people know who owns this spot.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s such a—”

  “Yo, you’re too shy, no problem.”

  He gave the can a shake, but before he could start to spray, Nia had crouched down beside him. She grabbed at the can, aiming its nozzle away from the rock. TAMP gave a little shake of his wrist, easily dislodging her grip.

  “You don’t want to be doing that,” he told her.

  A shiver of fear went through Nia at the coldness in his voice, but she refused to let herself back down. She couldn’t. If only to herself, she had to make up for being such a little wimp earlier. She had to stand up for things she believed in. If she didn’t, or couldn’t, then she might as well go back home and let the aliens have her brain, too.

  “Look around you,” she said. “What do you see?”

  His expression was unreadable behind his sunglasses. “What do you think? Trees. The park. A lot of green crap. You making a point here?”

  “Yeah. All of this...it’s beautiful. What do you want to ruin it for? What makes this special is that you can’t own it—or that you shouldn’t try to. If you want to spray your name onto stuff, do it on buildings, but not here.”

  “You telling me?”

  Nia hesitated at the suggestion of menace in his voice. She cleared her throat.

  “No,” she said. “I’m asking you.”

  He stared at her for a long moment before he finally nodded. “You’re one weird chick, but you’ve got cojones, and I like that.” He held the spray can up between them, then made a show of putting it away in his knapsack. “Yo. The paint’s all gone and everybody’s happy, right?”

  Nia nodded. “I guess.”

  She stood up, half-expecting him to stop her, but he lounged back down on the stone.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “No surprise there.”

  “So, I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Whatever.”

  She turned and headed for the back of the stone. Before she could push through the cedars, his voice stopped her.

  “If you change your mind about The Rhatigan,” he said, “I’ll be there later on tonight.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  She made a hole for herself in the trees, spreading the boughs with her hands, then let them close behind her like a curtain. To her great relief, TAMP didn’t try to follow. When she got down to the path he was still stretched out on the stone above, lying on his back now, arms behind his head, sunglasses pointed up to the sky. Nia hesitated for a moment. She almost called up to him, but realized she didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to start up another conversation with him anyway.

  Settling her backpack more comfortably against her shoulder blades, she set off down the path at a brisk pace. A sense of relief settled over her that lasted only as long as it took her to realize that she still had no place to go, no one to talk to, no one to ask for help.

  Her stomach rumbled.

  She could get something to eat, she decided, but that was only a stop-measure. It solved nothing. Once her appetite was satisfied, the whole sorry state of the rest of her life would remain.

  Deal with one thing at a time, she told herself. She sighed, hearing in that phrase the echo of her mother’s way of handling problems, but minding it less than she’d usually own up to. Things were different now. All the problems she and her mother had been having were forgotten, swallowed by events beyond the control of either of them. At this moment she’d have given anything to be with her mother—her real mother—and wouldn’t have cared how much alike they might seem.

  9 MAX

  I’m so bemused from my latest encounter with Zeffy that I don’t notice Bones until he flows into a cross-legged position on the grass beside me. I have to smile at this cat-like ability he has to imply permanence and cool importance to every action, no matter how mundane or fleeting. Sitting there, regarding me with that unreadable gaze of his, it’s as though he’s been with me all afternoon. Buddy doesn’t even stir at his arrival, except to open one lazy eye that soon droops closed again.

  “Nice-looking woman,” Bones says, nodding in the direction Zeffy took. If I squint, I can still see the bounce of her red hair receding in the crowd. Bones is watching me, smiles. “Has a lot of heart, too.”

  I nod in agreement. I know what he means, though I don’t know how he knows it. Maybe his bones told him.

  “I’d say I was in love with her,” I find myself saying, “but I don’t know her well enough to tell.”

  “Uh-huh. She someone you were trying to leave behind, or’s she just coming into your life?”

  I shrug. “A little of both, I suppose.”

  “Damn,” Bones says. There’s a birdlike cock to his head now, dark eyes studying me, amused, raven glitter in the pupils. “I knew this’d happen someday. Hand out those cryptic fortunes for long
enough and sooner or later everything begins to sound like a riddle.”

  I smile at his confusion, but I don’t bother to explain. I don’t take his confusion seriously either. I get the feeling there’s little he misses. Instead I ask him about his choice of oracular device, those bones that gave him his name. I saw him working earlier, when Buddy and I got back from our scavenge in the woods, the way he’d toss this handful of bird or mouse bones onto the deerskin spread out on the pavement in front of him, reading something in the pattern the bones made that neither his client nor I could see. But I guess if people could, nobody would be going to him, would they? “You mean, where do they fit into the Kickaha tradition?” Bones asks.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well,” he says. “You get medicine men who read dreams, but otherwise there’s not a whole lot of interest in fortune-telling on the rez.” He smiles. “’Cept some of the old aunts like to check out the tabloids, read the predictions, cluck over the astrology column. But I guess I shouldn’t laugh. You know somebody in one of those tabloids predicted the ’92 quake in California?”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. Mind you, same woman predicted about a hundred other things that didn’t happen. Guess you’ve got to get lucky once in a while.”

  I can’t tell if I’m supposed to read something more into what he’s saying, or smile along, take it at face value.

  “So where did reading the bones come from, if not from the Kickaha tradition?”

  Bones grins, he’s got that crazy look in his eyes again. “I made them up.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Cheating?”

  The man’s treated me fair and I don’t want to alienate him, but I find myself nodding.

  “I guess it all depends on how you look at it,” Bones says. “Now me, I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know but can’t quite grab on to. It works the same as a ritual does in a church—you get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn’t much matter what the device is. It’s just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn’t stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read—same difference. They’ve both got to be paying attention.

  “What you get’s not the future so much as what’s inside a person, which,” he adds, “is pretty much the real reason they come to you. They’re trying to sort through all this conversation that’s running through their heads, but they get distracted. Me, what I’m doing with my hands, with the bones, it forces them to pay strict attention to me. The noise in their heads quiets down a little and they can hear themselves for a change. It’s my voice, but they’re doing the talking.”

  “So will you read my fortune?” I ask.

  Bones looks regretful, but shakes his head.

  “Why not? Let me tell you, I could use someone to make a little sense out of what’s going through my head.”

  “You don’t believe.”

  “But you just told me that it’s just a matter of paying attention. I can do that.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  I’m getting a little frustrated. “You’re telling me all these people you’re doing it for believe?”

  “Enough to give me their money.”

  “Oh, Come on,” I say. “For most of them it’s just a lark, something to do to pass their lunch hour.”

  Bones nods. “But you’re different, right?”

  “No,” I tell him. “What I’m saying is I don’t get the difference.”

  “Can’t really help you there. That’s something you’ve got to work out on your own.”

  I search those dark eyes of his, looking for a smile, but the gaze he returns is serious.

  “Okay,” I say. “The bones are something you made up and they work because the people coming to you for readings believe in them.”

  Bones gives Buddy a look. “The man’s got it in a nutshell.”

  “So what do you believe?”

  The dark gaze returns to consider me. “That anything is possible.”

  I almost come back with some smart ass remark, but his eyes make me think about what I’m about to say. They won’t let me joke. They have me looking at my carvings, remembering Janossy and his ley lines that work their feng shui mystery on the wood, remembering how I used them in my own instrument building and repair, used it today in each and every one of these carvings I made. More to the point, those dark eyes make me think about what’s happened between me and Devlin.

  “Just like that?” I ask.

  Bones looks away, across the park, head cocked like a raven again. I get the uncomfortable sensation that he’s seeing a whole different world from the one I see. Buddy stirs nervously at my side, sensing the change in the air. There’s a static interrupting the normal flow of how things should be. It’s like the electric charge that sits in the air before a storm but it’s centered in Bones. I look at him and I can almost hear a distant thunder.

  “Just like that,” Bones says. I think he’s answering my question, but then realize he’s only repeating what I said. His gaze comes back to me. “Depends on the weight you want to give those words—that make any sense to you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Let’s take the word just,” Bones said. “Okay. Say, you see a man dancing. If you tell someone he’s just dancing, do you mean ‘only,’ or do you mean he’s doing something that he spent a lifetime learning and he’s making it seem effortless?”

  “I think I’m starting to get the picture.”

  “Are you? Maybe he’s doing a lawful dance.”

  “I think you’re being deliberately oblique,” I tell him.

  Bones laughs. “Maybe I am. Or maybe there’s some things you can only approach from the side. Look at them straight on and there’s nothing there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like look at yourself. Made a few bucks today, did you?”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  Bones holds up a hand, stops me cold, good humor gone.

  “I look at you now,” he says, “and already the man I met this morning is gone. He was beat, almost broken. Man I see now is thinking, maybe it doesn’t have to be so bad, this new life I’m in. Maybe I can make do.”

  I don’t say anything. I know he’s right. I’d made enough to get Buddy and myself something decent to eat, with some left over that I can stretch into our breakfast. It’s not like my problems are all suddenly solved, but I’m not feeling so helpless. I’m thinking maybe we can get by.

  “You’re getting comfortable in this new skin,” Bones says. “Too comfortable. But let me tell you, it’s easier to slip into than out of again.”

  I give him a sharp look. He knows what’s happened to me, I think. What Devlin did. How can he know? But we’re not talking about the same thing, I realize when he goes on.

  “But what’re you going to do when winter comes?” he asks. “Head south? Look for that job you could get now, but you won’t get then? You listen to me, Max, because this is the last time I’ll tell you: You’ve got to get off the street now. Longer you take, harder it gets. Wait long enough and you’ll never get off.”

  “You’re doing okay,” I say.

  Bones laughs. “Sure, I’m doing okay.” He waves a hand expansively. The gesture could be taking in the park, it could be taking in the whole world. “This is what I am. I’m living in the forest because I’ve always lived in the forest. Only difference is, the trees are made of stone here. And maybe this is your life, too. I don’t know. I’ve got me a squat in the Tombs, share it with a decent lady. We don’t own much, but we don’t want much. We move when we have to. When the police decide to roust our building, we go on to the next. But we’re nomads and we chose this life. You’ve got to ask yourself, is this what you want now? Or do you want that old life of yours back?”

  He shakes his head. “Ten years from now, you’re still living hand-to-mouth, what are you goin
g to be thinking? That you made the right choice? Or are you going to be drowning your hurts in a bottle like the rest of the ones that can’t make their lives any better?”

  “You make it sound so hard.”

  “It is hard,” Bones says. “You see these people, playing music, telling fortunes, selling crafts. They’re not street people the way you’re street people. They’ve got places to go when they leave here, they’ve got lives. They’re here because they want to be, or because it’s on the way to where they want to be.”

  “And you?”

  “Don’t look at me all wide-eyed and romantic. Yeah, I chose to live this way, and sure, it’s hard. But the operative word here is chose. You told me you were a luthier.” He points at the little carvings I made. “Is this something you want to do forever?”

  “No. But it works for now. And later...” My voice trails off.

  “Yeah,” Bones says. “Later. How do you plan to buy the wood you’ll need? The tools you’ll need to work that wood? You’re not here because you want to be and the longer you stay, the more it’s going to eat at you.”

  “Somebody stole my life,” I say, the words just coming out of my mouth. I lay a hand on Buddy’s back, work at a knot in his wiry fur to stop from shaking.

  Bones doesn’t ask what I mean. He looks at me, eyes hard.

  “So take it back,” he says.

  He rises with the same fluid motion he used to sit beside me, legs straightening effortlessly, doesn’t use his hands. One moment he’s sitting there cross-legged, the next he’s standing over me.

  “Why me?” I ask him. “What made you choose me to help?”

  Bones shakes his head. “First day I see somebody new on the street...” He smiles. “Everybody gets my lecture, Max. You choose what you do with it. Whatever you choose, that’s who you’ll be and you won’t hear any more about it from me. The only thing I’ll ask of you is, don’t come talking to me about what-might-have-beens. I don’t want to know about how you got done wrong, how the doors are all closing in your face, none of that. We’ll talk about whatever you want, but I don’t want to know from hard times.”

  “Because you think they could have been avoided,” I say.