Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “No we’re fine.”

  “Cool.”

  At least her sense of direction was still good, Zeffy thought as the man returned to his book.

  “Why don’t we have a look around?” she said to Nia. “Maybe we’ll see something that’ll make sense of why Bones sent us here.”

  Just don’t think of how he did it, she told herself. Don’t get into the fact that none of this should be possible in the first place.

  “Okay,” Nia said.

  She stood up, dusting the sand from her jeans, and gave Buddy’s leash a little shake.

  “C’mon, boy,” she told him. “We’re going exploring.”

  The dog scrambled to his feet, muzzle raised to give her a quizzical look. Either he really had taken Jilly’s advice to heart or, somewhere in his doggy brain, he’d come to the conclusion that Nia equaled safety, because ever since they’d left the café—and don’t start thinking about how far away it is, Zeffy reminded herself—the dog had become inseparable from Nia.

  Rising, Zeffy brushed the sand from her own clothes. “That looks like the main drag,” she said, indicating the street that joined the parking lot directly across from the end of the pier.

  They stepped over a low stone retaining wall and followed the concrete path that lay between the beach and the tiny walled-in yards of the properties facing it until they reached the parking lot, dodging in-line skaters as they whizzed past. Cutting a zigzagging diagonal path through the parked cars, they made their way to the street and walked down its four-block length of restaurants and galleries, stores specializing in sports gear and souvenir shops. Among the more popular items—they had to be, since almost every store seemed to carry them—were T-shirts with the legend LIFE’S A BEACH and sea-shells that, Zeffy thought cattily, had probably been imported from Hawaii. Grudging space appeared to have been given over to a grocery store for the locals—or perhaps it was a holdover from a time predating the tourist boom.

  The last few blocks after the core of shops were shaded with tall palm trees, the spiky trunks thrusting out of small front yards, their enormous dark green fronds crisscrossing where they met above to cast sharply patterned shadows on the pavement below. The very last house was a Spanish-styled adobe painted a faded pink with a thick hedge of jade plants running along the front of the property. Zeffy took it in with wide eyes and fingered one of the thick shiny leaves.

  “This is so weird,” she said. “I’ve got one of these growing in a tiny pot in my bathroom. But this is huge. I never knew they could grow so big.”

  Beyond the last house, the sidewalk ran out and the street became a narrow highway. There were fields of dried brown grass on either side of it and a sign indicating how far it was to the freeway. In the middle of one of the fields was an old wooden water tower with enough slats missing that they knew it was no longer in working order. Zeffy shaded her eyes, but there wasn’t much more to see. Just the fields and the highway running off into the distance where a dull blue smear on the horizon looked like mountains of some sort. She had to take the existence of the freeway on faith.

  “So,” she said. “Do we try to get a ride to L.A., or do we go back and look around some more?”

  Nia shrugged. “Look around, I guess. There has to be some reason we ended up here.”

  “Beyond a certain individual’s perversity?” Zeffy asked as they started back.

  “Oh, come on,” Nia said. “You two just got off on the wrong foot.”

  “He had a right one?”

  “At the end of his other leg,” Nia said, grinning.

  Zeffy had to smile with her. “Okay. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and check around a little more. But don’t blame me if we don’t find anything.”

  Halfway down the block, Zeffy paused to remove a stone that had got stuck in the tread of her shoe and was making an irritating clicking sound whenever she took a step. Standing again, she looked down the street toward the ocean and arched her back, working the kinks out of it. Santa Feliz was larger than it seemed at first. The town hugged the oceanfront, but when she remembered how far it had stretched along the shore, it was obviously far longer than it was wide.

  Beside her, Nia knelt down to give Buddy a bit of reassurance. She looked up at Zeffy over the dog’s head, her features serious.

  “Are you scared?” she asked.

  Zeffy nodded. “But I’m pretending I’m not. And I’m working really hard at not thinking about how we ended up here in the first place.”

  “What if we can’t get back?”

  “Can’t get back to where?” a voice said.

  Zeffy and Nia stared at each other; then they both looked at Buddy. The voice had appeared to have come from him—a gruff, rumbly sort of a dog’s voice, or at least the kind of voice Zeffy had always imagined a dog would have if it could talk.

  “Did he—” Nia began.

  “I could swear—” Zeffy said at the same time.

  Nia stood up and gave Buddy an uncertain look. Buddy immediately picked up on their nervous surprise and swung his gaze back and forth between them. They waited for him to speak again, holding their breath, but all he did was loll his tongue, his tail banging against Nia’s leg.

  “Pretty good, huh?” the same voice said, but this time it came from the yard they were standing beside.

  They turned to find a bizarre figure sitting on the browned grass, back leaning against the trunk of a palm tree, a goofy grin on his face. He was in his late forties, a white man with a deep tan, his brown hair hennaed in places and hanging in matted dreadlocks down his back. His face was painted— blue lines under his eyes, a jagged red lightning bolt on his right cheek, a yellow circle filled with dots on the other. Or maybe they were tattoos—Zeffy couldn’t tell. His ears were adorned with silver earrings, hoops of all sizes from which hung dozens of small silver milagros—virgins, crosses, saints, various arms and legs.

  His clothes were a combination of rags and sewn-together affairs—plaid sleeves attached to a white T-shirt with a multitude of ribbons and brightly patterned strips of cloth hanging from the shoulders to form a raggedy vest. The baggy pants had once been army-issue green, but they were now so faded as to be almost colorless. Each leg had an extra half-dozen pockets sewn onto it, none of which matched the other. He wore one red hightop and one very scuffed and worn leather workboot. Beside him on the grass was a water container with the blue-skinned genie from Aladdin on the front.

  Eucalyptus trees by the house behind him filled the air with a heady, pungent scent that, for the first time since they’d arrived, took the salty smell of the ocean out of the air. Zeffy decided she liked the ocean smell better. And she wasn’t at all sure she wanted anything to do with the man grinning at them from under the palm. His eyes were the intense pale blue that, perhaps unfairly, always reminded her of psychos.

  “I’ll bet you never even saw my lips move,” he added.

  Now Zeffy understood. Of course Buddy hadn’t spoken; dogs couldn’t speak. The man had thrown his voice.

  “We weren’t even looking at you,” she said.

  “You’re looking at me now,” he said.

  There was only the faintest tremor in his lips, and his voice now seemed to come from Zeffy’s shoes.

  Nia laughed. “He’s good.”

  "So now we’re stuck in the middle of a variety show,” Zeffy said, though she had to agree with Nia. He was good. Crazy and a little scary, but good. And probably harmless. But then she thought of Bones. Look where trusting crazy, probably harmless but still scary guys had got them so far.

  “So where you trying to get back to?” the man asked.

  “Home,” Nia said.

  “Well, that’s simple enough. Just wake up.”

  Zeffy gave him a withering look. “Oh, right. That really helps.”

  She backed up a step as the man lumbered to his feet. He was taller than she thought he’d be—maybe six-five—and towered over them, a swaying, tattered scarecrow figur
e who suddenly seemed to be made of debris more than flesh and bone. His pale gaze studied them carefully, moving from Zeffy’s face to Nia’s, then back again.

  “Well, shit my drawers,” he said. “You’re really here.”

  Zeffy frowned with distaste, mostly because it was all too easy to imagine him doing just that.

  “What a lovely turn of a phrase,” she said.

  “And la-di-da yourself, little missy.”

  “What do you mean we’re really here?” Nia asked.

  “I mean you’re not dreaming yourself here, you really are here.”

  That vague sense of vertigo returned in a rush. Zeffy had been afraid of something like this, of finding out that Bones hadn’t magically transported them to the West Coast—disconcerting enough on its own—but that they really were in some other world.

  “This...this guy on the beach,” she said. “He told us we’re just south of L.A.”

  The man nodded. “Yeah, but it’s this L.A.—not the one we know. You really don’t want to head up there, uh-uh. It’s a dark and dreadful place.”

  “So is it bad—being here like we are?” Nia asked. “I mean, not dreaming, but really being here?”

  He held up his water container. “Starts the water talking. Next thing you know, everybody’s in on it.”

  The confusion that spread over Nia’s features mirrored how Zeffy was feeling herself.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  The man gave her a suspicious look. “You one of those vampires from Jupiter, huh? Walking around with a box of mad?”

  This conversation, Zeffy realized, was rapidly degenerating. She touched Nia’s shoulder, indicating that they should start walking.

  “Nice talking to you,” she said.

  “You don’t think the water’s listening?” Nia’s knapsack seemed to say. “Think it’s too busy, huh?”

  Nia looked over her shoulder. “He’s opening that water bottle of his,” she said.

  “Ignore him,” Zeffy said.

  “Don’t you start rummaging around behind my eyes!”

  Now the voice seemed to come from Buddy again. The dog shook his head, as though trying to dislodge a fly that had landed on his muzzle.

  “How’d you find me anyway, huh? Who told you you could carry my cross? Fucking parasites! You keep your cannibals away from my dick—you hear me? Huh? Huh?”

  He was following along behind them, weaving back and forth on the sidewalk, waving his water container above his head. There was a sudden slap of footsteps against the pavement. Zeffy turned, putting herself between the man and Nia, but he wasn’t attacking them as she’d feared. He was only catching up to them.

  “Had you fooled, huh?” he said.

  “Look, we’re not really interested in anything you’ve got—”

  “The name’s Gregory,” he said, breaking in. “Like the saintly pope they named the chanting after. Course no one’s going to canonize me. Been there, done that, haven’t got an ounce of innocence left in me.”

  He stuck out his hand, but Zeffy studiously ignored it. Her snub didn’t appear to register.

  “See, I act crazy,” he told them, “but it’s all a front—so they can’t get to me.”

  “Who can’t?” Nia asked.

  “You know. Them. The ones that are out to screw us all. I’m as normal as you, except I know they’re out there, waiting for us to let down our guard. Act like a poet or a crazy and they don’t touch you and since I can’t rhyme worth a shit, I put on this act, get it?”

  “Not really.”

  Zeffy started walking again, but Gregory fell in step beside them.

  “Three kinds of people you’ll meet here,” he told them and counted them off on his fingers. “First you’ve got your dreamers—people sleeping, maybe meditated themselves here, whatever. Lots more dream questers now, too—white folks, you know? Not just the indigenous and Buddhist kind. Second there’s the people that aren’t really here. They’re more like backdrop— get too close to them and they kind of fade away. I guess the only reason they’re around is to fill out the picture or something.”

  “And the third?” Zeffy found herself asking.

  “They’re native to this place. Spirit-types. And they’re the ones you’ve got to watch out for because they all want a piece of you. More real you are, the bigger piece they want.”

  “So what’re you trying to tell us?”

  “Get with the program. Start rhyming, or act crazy. Or get your pretty asses out of here, unless you don’t mind going home missing a piece or two of who you are.” He lowered his voice. “If you ever get home at all.”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Zeffy told him.

  She wanted to laugh it off, for Nia’s sake if not her own. Nia was staring wide-eyed at Gregory, a scared look in her eyes. But the trouble was, Zeffy couldn’t. She’d tried hard, from the moment they’d found themselves on the beach, but she was long past the point now of pretending that none of this was unusual. And if it was possible to end up in some parallel world, peopled by crazies and who knew what else, then maybe Gregory’s warnings weren’t implausible either. Even Bones had warned them about the poetry and madness bit. And the spirits. And so had Jilly, she now recalled uncomfortably, before they’d ever tracked down Bones. Jilly had talked about the spirits, too, and warned Zeffy not to let them hear her true name. Or what? They’d get a piece of her the way Gregory claimed?

  “What do you mean by a piece of us?” she asked him.

  But he was no longer paying attention to them. He came to an abrupt halt and stared down at his water container.

  “Now we’re in trouble,” he said. “Deep, bad, dreadful trouble.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  He held up the container and turned it upside down, but that didn’t make anything clearer for Zeffy.

  “The...the genie's gone,” Nia said.

  Zeffy looked again. So it was. There was no longer a blue-skinned Aladdin genie on the side of the water container.

  “Run!” Gregory cried. “Run for your lives!”

  He flung the container onto the street where it bounced on the pavement until it finally rolled up against the curb. But he was long gone before it lay still, dashing off between the houses, a comical scarecrow come to life, dreadlocks and ribbons streaming behind him as he ran. Panic went skittering through Zeffy and she almost bolted herself, but she forced herself to stay calm as she scanned their surroundings. She gave Nia a reassuring smile that didn’t come close to how she was actually feeling, but at least it seemed to help Nia deal with her own panic.

  “It’s okay,” Zeffy said. “Look around. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The street was quiet on their block. Over where the shops began, tourists were going about their aimless business. Across the street a matronly woman with a dark Spanish complexion was watering the plants on her porch. She smiled at them and waved. Nervously, Zeffy lifted a hand in response. But already her panic was ebbing.

  “He was just nuts,” she told Nia. “That’s all. I mean, think of some of the stuff he was saying.”

  “But he said he was only pretending...”

  “Pretending so well it was real, I’d say.” She started walking again. “Come on. Let’s finish having a look around, then we’ll grab something to eat—you like Mexican?”

  “Sure.”

  Zeffy nodded at a restaurant across the street. The sign above the door read CANTINA ROSA.

  “We’ll eat there later,” she went on, “but for now, why don’t we look around a little more.”

  Think calm thoughts, Zeffy was telling herself. Think positive. And it worked, too, at least for a while. They spent the afternoon wandering around the small beach town, ate at the Mexican restaurant, stopped in at an instrument shop on a little backstreet where they found a couple of Trader guitars hanging in amongst the store’s other merchandise.

  “See?” Zeffy said. “I guess that’s what brought us here.”


  Nia nodded. “That and this place. It’s just like the kind of little bohemian towns I’ve always wanted to go to. There’s probably some really cool café around here where people are reciting their poetry against bebop jazz.”

  Once outside the shop, they made their way back to the main street and sat on a wooden bench outside of one of the souvenir shops. Buddy plunked himself comfortably at Nia’s feet and immediately went to sleep.

  “So now we have to figure out how to get back home,” Zeffy said.

  “Or find Max.”

  Zeffy nodded, but she didn’t hold out much hope for that.

  “You notice how people keep looking at us?” Nia said. “It’s been like that all afternoon and it’s starting to give me the creeps.”

  Buddy lifted his head, obviously catching the nervousness in Nia’s voice. “Maybe we’re overdressed or something,” Zeffy said, trying to keep her tone light. “Everybody else is wearing shorts or bathing suits.”

  Nia shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s like what that crazy guy was saying. They know we’re here for real, not dreaming.”

  And they’re all looking to see how they can get a piece of us, Zeffy thought, finishing what Nia left unsaid. She wanted to laugh it off, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Nia had hit too close to home.

  “Makes me wish we could run into Bones,” she said. “Get him to whisk us back home. I’d happily trade him another song.”

  “You haven’t even written the first one yet.”

  “Not true,” Zeffy said. “I’ve already got the—” She smiled. “—bones of it running around in my head. It works like that sometimes,” she added when Nia gave her a curious look. “You start to think about it and then you end up with a melody and some words sticking around like a commercial jingle that won’t go away. Which is good, if you don’t happen to be someplace where you can get it down on tape.”

  “Like here.”

  “Exactly.” Zeffy looked around and sighed. “This place is nothing like what I expected. As things stand, I’d trade Bones a couple more songs just to get back home.”

  Nia nodded. “Me, too. But not home. I want to go to where Max is. I mean that’s the whole reason we—”