Trader

by Charles de Lint

  She broke off when a fat woman in polyester shorts and a halter top that could only barely deal with the pull of gravity on her massive chest suddenly stepped up close to her.

  “Hey!” Nia cried as the woman pinched her.

  “Real as real can be,” the woman said, her voice a happy drawl.

  “Leave her alone,” Zeffy said, standing up.

  The woman turned to look at her. “Don’t get your panties all in a twist, honey. I’m just making nice.”

  She reached for Nia again and Zeffy slapped her hand away. Nia stood up, looking as scared as Zeffy felt. Because the woman wasn’t alone. A halfdozen other ordinary-enough-looking people were standing nearby now— tourist types, all of them, except for the hungry look in their eyes. Zeffy felt a strange pressure at the back of her head that moved into her eyes, giving her double vision, and all her hard-won composure dissolved. One moment she was looking at beach-town tourists, the next they had various animal parts and heads superimposed over their own in a nightmare collage. Nia stood closer to her and took her hand. Buddy whined at their feet and sidled in behind them.

  “Oh shit,” Zeffy said.

  Maybe crazy Gregory hadn’t been so crazy after all. The fat woman seemed to have the head of a boar now, all tusks and coarse bristles. Tiny pig eyes regarded them with undisguised spite.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said, sugar-coating her voice. “It won’t hurt.”

  A fox-tailed man nodded in agreement. “We’re not greedy. We only want a taste.”

  Think of a rhyme, Zeffy told herself. Start talking crazy. But she couldn’t think of a thing to say, her throat seemed to have filled with dust, and she was sure it was way too late to pretend to be a poet or crazy anyway.

  5 MAX

  The ghosts are here, but only in my head.

  I can’t face the workshop at all—the memories are too strong. But as I walk down into the farmyard the memories are strong whichever way I turn. I keep expecting Pitter and Hoo to come tearing across the yard from around back of one of the outbuildings, barking shrilly and launching themselves at me in their excitement. Thinking of them reminds me of Buddy and I wish now I hadn’t left him with Nia. He’d love it here. Nothing to be scared of. He could chase rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels to his heart’s content. Play with Janossy’s dogs...

  The happy images trail off.

  Pitter and Hoo are only here in my mind. The same way Janossy is.

  I cross the farmyard to the house, hesitate for a moment on the porch when I see the oil lamp I rescued from the dump hanging where it’s supposed to from the big iron nail by the door, then open the door and step inside. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust. I realize I’m holding my breath, listening. Listening for Janossy. But the house is empty. I can feel its emptiness, the same way I can feel Devlin stumbling through the bush. He’s circling around to where he can watch the farm, but not be seen. Guess he doesn’t feel the connection the way I do, doesn’t know where I am the way I could step back out the door and walk right to where he’s crouched in a stand of cedar at the end of the apple orchard, hiding there in the no-man’s-land of new growth that blurs the distinction between forest and orchard.

  I return my attention to my surroundings. The inside of the farmhouse is exactly the way I remember it. No one’s renovated this place—they can’t have, not and duplicate it so perfectly. I’ve stepped back into time. I can imagine Janossy at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables for a stir fry. Or reading in the rocking chair beside the old cast-iron stove. Sitting at the pine kitchen table in the center of the room, tuning that odd eight-stringed guitar of his. We might have slept in the bedrooms upstairs, but the only room that saw any real use the whole time I lived here with him was the kitchen.

  I can’t seem to walk into the room. All I can do is stand there in the doorway and stare at its familiar confines. I don’t remember seeing powerlines outside, but my hand reaches up and tries the light switch anyway. The overhead comes on, the bare hundred-watt bulb that we always used—not that the overhead was on very often. More often than not we lit our evenings with candles or oil lamps.

  My fingers are still on the switch. I turn the light off and step back out onto the porch, look across the yard to the workshop. I remember my dreams, then, the ones I had of Janossy before my world turned upside down. Janossy working on that unfinished guitar of his, Nia sitting in the corner, watching, listening.

  I have to be dreaming. How else could this place exist the way it does, every detail so faithfully reclaimed from the past? How could there be electricity without powerlines? No highway beyond the lane. This eerie sixth sense in the back of my head that lets me know where Devlin is. None of this fits the world as it should be. It’s the stuff of dreams.

  I have to laugh. But then how do I explain this body I’m walking around in?

  Dreams don’t go on this long, with this much detail.

  I’d like to put it off longer, but I’m through being easy on myself. I cross the farmyard, walk briskly right up to the door of the workshop and open it up, step in. It’s so perfectly the room I remember, it can’t be possible. The past few hours should have prepared me for this, but the unchanged, physical presence of the shop hits me like a punch in the chest. I have to grab the doorjamb to keep from stumbling. For one moment Janossy is there, looking up from the other side of the workbench to see who’s come in. I blink, and he’s gone. But the guitar he was working on is still there. Only the body, no neck. The way it was when he died.

  I back slowly out and shut the door. The click of the latch lets me breathe again.

  Returning to the past—even this ghostly, uninhabited version of it—is proving harder than I thought it would be. I go back to the farmhouse and make myself a cup of tea, no longer marveling that the stove works, the water runs, there’s milk in the fridge. I take the tea out onto the porch and sit on the steps, drinking it while it’s too hot, scalding the back of my throat, but somehow that helps make it all more bearable.

  When I’ve finished the tea, I go back inside, set the empty cup on the counter and go up the back stairs to my room. It’s unchanged as well. I remember the quilt on my bed—my father and I bought it at a church rummage sale a couple of years before I first apprenticed with Janossy. The books on the table by the window are old friends: naturalists’ diaries, travelogues, an antique violin maker’s handbook, a few novels. I still have some of them. My parents’ wedding picture is in a place of prominence on the wall behind my head. Elsewhere hang reproductions of old photos and paintings taken from magazines, a pencil schematic design of Janossy’s for a flat-back bouzouki and a small watercolor by an old girlfriend of mine from my high-school days. Cathy Galloway. I haven’t thought of her in years. I wonder whatever happened to her.

  What holds my gaze longest after the first cursory glance is the guitar in its stand, set up beside a straight-backed chair in the corner of the room. It’s the first steel-string I made entirely on my own. I’ve still got it, back at my shop in the Market, hanging on the wall beside the door that leads into my spray booth—a claustrophobic little room at the back of the shop where the instruments I build have their lacquered finish applied. Janossy had nothing so fancy, just one of the horse stalls in the barn that he’d sealed with sheets of plastic. We’d use an old, if workable, army gas mask to protect us from the fumes while we worked, looking like alien bugs when we emerged from behind the plastic.

  I walk across the room and sit down, pick up the guitar. Every one I’ve made since this has been better built, has a better sound, but as I hold my first guitar on my lap, the warm glow of how I felt when I finally finished it returns to me in a rush. I go to play a C chord, but my fingers feel all wrong and fumble the simple shape. My clumsiness reminds me of a discussion I had with Janossy once about memory—whether what the body remembers is as important as what the mind remembers.

  “They remember differently,” he said. “The mind remembers logistically, the body i
nstinctively. Our präna lives in our flesh and bones, not the place where we calculate equations.”

  Präna. The Hindu term for both breathing and spirit. That was another of those words he took for his own. Like wu-sei and feng shui, they acquired their own resonance in his conversations.

  Devlin’s body doesn’t remember how to shape chords on the guitar. But it didn’t remember simple carving either, back in Fitzhenry Park, and it took to that with alacrity after a first few awkward cuts. Playing the guitar takes more time—either because it requires more complex motor skills, or because the bits of himself Devlin left behind in this body are becoming stronger. Some certainly are. The depression. The anger. The impatience.

  That starts me off on another train of thought. I remember having heard somewhere that, after a certain number of years, every cell in the human body is replaced. So how long will it take before this body is entirely mine, until it no longer remembers anything of Devlin?

  I practice chords and simple scales until the room grows dark and the uncallused tips of my—Devlin’s—fingers get sore. Setting the guitar back into its stand, I stretch and look out the window. The sun’s almost behind the hills, casting ever-lengthening shadows. Bats are out, shadow shapes that dart and swoop across the lawn, chasing moths and mosquitoes. The sound of the frogs from the marsh is suddenly loud. I can still sense Devlin; he’s fallen asleep under those cedars.

  Turning from the window, I make my way back downstairs. I don’t question the leftover vegetable stew I find in the fridge, or the half loaf of bread in the breadbox, any more than I do the electricity or the other incongruities about this place. I help myself to both, wash them down with a bottle of Janossy’s homemade cider and go back up to my room to bed.

  Sleep comes almost instantaneously and without dreams.

  When I wake in the morning, the bird’s chorus is loud outside my window, an oriole’s sweet warbling cutting strongly across the rest. I lie there for a few moments, unwilling to open my eyes, afraid of where I’ll find myself when I wake. I want to be on the farm, to embrace the strange return to the past that it offers, to find safety in being myself, instead of having to deal with the residue Devlin left behind. It’s easier to do that on the farm. I don’t want to be back in Newford. Not just yet.

  I get what I want for a change.

  The fresh air coming in through the window tastes better than I remember it did when I lived here. There’s a thickness to it, a presence, a...vitality. I almost feel as if I could survive on it alone, but my rumbling stomach tells me otherwise.

  I shave and take a shower. My old clothes in the closet fit Devlin’s body better than they’d fit my own. I’ve gained weight over the years. I put on fresh socks and underwear, jeans and a cotton shirt, Devlin’s shoes, and head downstairs to the kitchen to brew some coffee. I search for Devlin as I wait for the coffee to be ready and find him crouched on the far side of the barn, out of sight.

  I think he slept in the barn last night. I’m probably lucky he didn’t feel brave enough to come into the farmhouse while I was sleeping, though what could he do? He’s more afraid of me than I am of him at the moment. I don’t know what my hitting him did to bring us here any more than he does, but I’m not complaining. I feel alive for the first time in far too long.

  I take my coffee out onto the porch along with a toasted cheese-and-honey sandwich. Devlin’s probably hungry, but I don’t much care. Today I’m going to face up to the workshop and I’m more concerned about that. I keep thinking of that unfinished guitar of Janossy’s. I made a new neck for it once, but I was never happy with it. I’ve got some other ideas now, as though the feng shui of this place will allow me to perfect what I couldn’t do on my own.

  I clean up the dishes and set them to dry in the drainer. Starting for the door, I hesitate. Maybe I don’t care for Devlin, but I’m not as hard-hearted as I’d like to pretend. I make up a couple of sandwiches for him and take them and a big mug of coffee out on a tray to where he was hiding in back of the barn. He’s gone now, of course. I can sense him in the tall grass at the edge of the field, but I pretend I don’t know exactly where he is. I leave the tray where he can find it and return to the farmyard.

  The workshop doesn’t rattle me so much today. I can step inside and walk around without dizziness, fingering the various tools and woods. For a long time I sit at the workbench with my hands on the body of Janossy’s unfinished guitar, trying to absorb its essence the way he would, mapping its energy patterns in my mind, breathing in the smell of the wood.

  There’s a bin at the back of the workshop with a stack of various lengths of softer hardwoods, the kind needed for an ideal neck, wood that’s not too heavy and not too dense, strong for its weight and generally stable. Tropical mahogany, local maple, some beautiful bird’s-eye. But none of it’s quite right. After sorting through it all a second time, I make my way to the outbuilding where we stored the rest of our seasoned wood and spend most of the afternoon choosing a piece of curly maple that resonates perfectly with the pattern of the guitar body I’m holding in my mind.

  I wouldn’t normally have chosen it for a steel-string guitar. The metal truss rod and heavy, geared machine heads will already add greatly to the weight of the neck. With the inherent nature of the steel-string wire, there would be good sustain right from the start so there’s no need to enhance it. If I were building a more sensitive classical guitar, I wouldn’t have hesitated with the maple. Here it’s not necessary, but the resonance is right.

  I take it back to the workshop and make a few rough cuts with a handsaw. Although it’s becoming almost old-fashioned, I’m planning to use a dovetail neck joint to attach the neck to the body. I have nothing against the bolt-on neck that Leo Fender first came up with in the sixties—most of the steel-string guitars I build now have them. It’s easier to attach them and I can service them better. The bolt-on was a great idea, but the acoustic guitars Fender was making at the time sounded bad, so the technique got a bad reputation, even though the bolts have little to do with the sound. The only reason I’m going with the dovetail joint is that, as in choosing the wood, it feels right. More of Janossy’s mystic approach. The pattern points that way.

  By the time I’m ready to rough out the neck, my stomach reminds me that I never stopped for lunch. I always shape out my necks by hand—I probably enjoy that aspect of building the guitar more than any other, but it’s a long job and one I’d rather start after I’ve eaten. I put together a pasta dish— tomatoes, black olives, pesto and spiral pasta—making enough for two. Half I eat by myself in the kitchen, the other half I take out behind the barn and leave for Devlin.

  He’s still hanging around, just off the main property at the moment, skulking in the woods. I’ve no idea what he’s up to or how he spent his day— I was too busy to pay much attention to him.

  After dinner, I clean up and put on a pot of tea. I decide to go back to work on the guitar in the morning. When the tea’s ready, I sit down in the straight-backed chair by the window with my guitar and practice, smoothing more of the kinks out of my fingers, getting some of my speed back, until the clock over the sink tells me it’s going on nine. My fingertips are aching. I want to get an early start in the morning—I still have to finish the neck, cut and fit the fretboard, install the frets; it’ll take me most of the day. So I turn in early.

  I don’t know if it’s the good air, or a return to a kind of routine, but I fall asleep immediately again tonight. And don’t dream.

  By late afternoon I’ve got the neck finished, oiled, fretboard attached. I spend the next few hours installing the frets, then glue the neck to the body. Tightbond dries in about thirty minutes, so I won’t have long to wait. All that’s left now is gluing the bridge and saddle that Janossy had already made to the top and doing the final setup—installing the tuning machines, making the nut, that kind of thing.

  I take a break for dinner and work into the evening. By sunset, I’ve got the guitar loosely strung. I ju
st have to wait for bridge glue to dry and I can tune it. I find myself thinking of Zeffy as I’m tidying up the shop. Seeing her with the other version of this instrument in Fitzhenry Park that day made me go crazy. I’m not sure how much I can blame on the bits of Devlin still left floating in me and how much on my simply having been a jerk, but I do know she didn’t deserve my snapping at her the way I did.

  She can’t help disbelieving that Devlin and I’ve switched bodies—who would, outside of a movie? And it certainly wasn’t her fault that Devlin lent her the guitar. I owe her an apology, big-time. I glance at the guitar and smile. Hell, if I can bring this back with me, the way I brought my backpack here, I’ll have two of these guitars. Maybe I’ll just give her one of them. It’s not like I could ever sell either one of them—wouldn’t feel right—and I don’t need two.

  I think the thing I regret the most about this business—beyond the obvious, of course—is that I didn’t get to meet Zeffy under better circumstances. That strong attraction I felt toward her is a very rare occurrence for me. Last time it happened was with Donna and that was more years ago now than I care to remember.

  But any chance of making something good with Zeffy is long gone now. There were a few times when I was talking to her in the park when she seemed interested in me—even though she was still convinced that I was Devlin. But after that incident with the guitar, and the way I lit into her when I left the park, I doubt she’ll even listen long enough for me to apologize, never mind my trying to express anything beyond that.

  I’ve got a bunch of apologies to make. To Nia. To Bones. To Buddy. Maybe I’m turning more into Devlin than I’d like—but at least there’s this difference: I’m willing to admit I’ve made a mistake and I’ll do what I can to straighten things out. I may look like Devlin, I may have pieces of him still floating around inside me, cellular memories and patterns of behavior, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let myself be like him, too.