Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “I feel less thirsty,” Nia said, wishing Zeffy wouldn’t be quite so antagonistic.

  Joe laughed. “I just thought maybe, what with the way you’re thinking and all, you’d feel like it was making you smaller or bigger. Or maybe turning you into something.”

  “What kind of something?” Zeffy asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A crow?”

  Zeffy finally cracked a smile. “Okay. I guess I deserved that. It’s just—” The rear wheel on the driver’s side chose that moment to blow. Before Nia could register what the loud bang meant, the bed of the truck dropped and the whole vehicle slewed off course in a cloud of dust. She braced herself against the dashboard with her hands, and wrapped her legs around Buddy, everything going in slow motion as Joe fought the wheel. It seemed to take forever as they spun 360 degrees and then finally skidded to a halt.

  “Shit!” Joe said. He thumped his fist against the steering wheel, then turned to look at his passengers. “Everybody okay?”

  “I guess,” Zeffy said slowly.

  Nia gave him a numb nod.

  “Okay. Good.”

  He opened his door and unfolded his lanky frame through the gap. Nia wanted out as well, but because of the angle of the truck, her door was too heavy for her to get open. She had to wait for Zeffy to follow Joe before she could slide across the seat herself.

  “C’mon, Buddy,” she said.

  She had to work at convincing the dog it was safe. By the time she had coaxed him through the door, Joe and Zeffy were already standing by the back of the truck, surveying the damage.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “It’s not so bad. We blew a tire, that’s all.” He shaded his eyes and looked to the west. “Getting on to nightfall anyway, so we might as well make camp here.”

  “Your face,” Zeffy said when he turned back to them.

  “What about it?”

  “You’ve got one.”

  She was right, Nia realized. There was still a birdlike quality to the features under that flat-brimmed hat—beaklike nose, wide-set eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil, the sharp plane of the cheekbones—but it was a human face now, tanned and weathered. Long black hair hung in a braid down his back.

  Joe smiled. “I was wondering when it would kick in.”

  This was too weird, Nia thought.

  “When what would kick in?” Zeffy asked.

  “This,” Joe said, lifted a hand to touch his cheek. “Means we’re doing okay.” Zeffy looked as confused as Nia felt.

  “Look,” Joe explained. “You get a place with too many dreamers like Santa Feliz—you know, all that energy floating around, dreams banging into each other and stuff—and sometimes it’s hard to hang on to a look. It’s the same reason it’s easier for the spirits to get a handle on you there—they’re drawn by all the traffic. But out here, the medicine’s strong. A spirit could spend the rest of its life looking for you and never track you down.”

  Zeffy cleared her throat. “I’d think it’d be the other way around. That we’d stand out here.”

  Joe shook his head. “No. The mojo’s so thick here, the only tracking you can do is by the eye and ear and nose. It’s like we’re in the middle of a slow soup, all the flavors kind of casually mixing into each other, so you can’t tell where one begins and the other lets off.”

  “So we’re going to camp here?” Nia asked.

  “Don’t sound so dubious. You two go look for some fuel—the wooden bones of some of the cacti bums well—and I’ll set up camp. Oh, and ladies. Mind the critters—some are pretty nasty.”

  Zeffy gave him a look. “What kind of critters?”

  “You know. Scorpions, spiders—that kind of thing. Just watch where you’re putting your hands.”

  Nia couldn’t help the “Yuck” that came out before she could stop it.

  Joe laughed. “Don’t worry. Most of them’ll be more scared of you than you are of them. I just want you to be careful.”

  “What about the truck?” Zeffy asked. “Do you have a spare?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how much we believe we’ve got one.”

  Nia and Zeffy exchanged worried looks. They were out in the middle of nowhere, Nia thought, with a broken truck and a man who sometimes had the head of a bird on his shoulders. And now he was telling them that fixing the truck depended on how much they believed there was a spare tire?

  “Is this some kind of Zen thing?” she asked.

  Joe grinned. “More along the lines of quantum physics. You know, like Schrodinger’s cat, working out the probabilities and possibilities?”

  Nia shook her head, but Zeffy picked up on what he was talking about. “He means,” she explained, “that until we actually look in the back of the truck for a tire, the possibility exists that it’s either there or not there. It’s a potential tire. Only the act of looking can force a resolution of the possibilities.”

  “Exactly,” Joe said. “Except there’s a little faith involved, too.”

  “That part I don’t remember from physics classes,” Zeffy said.

  “It’s like the bottle of water we shared earlier,” Joe said. “I had to believe it was there first.”

  Nia got it now. “So if we haven’t got enough faith...”

  “We’re walking from here on,” Joe said.

  Nia started for the side of the truck, meaning to look over the side, but Joe caught her arm.

  “First we’ll set up camp,” he said. “We’ll let the idea sink in a little, maybe sleep on it. Then we’ll look.”

  “But...”

  Nia looked to Zeffy for help, but all Zeffy could do was give her a helpless shrug.

  “Let’s get the wood,” Zeffy said.

  She had to give Joe this, Nia thought later. He made a seriously excellent cup of coffee. The flat bread and chili he’d cooked for them earlier had been good as well.

  Now they sat around a small campfire, huddling close for warmth, hands cupped around tin coffee mugs filled to the brim with a rich, dark brew. The mesquite wood, mixed in with the cacti ribs and other wood they’d found, gave off a sweet, aromatic smell. Buddy, calmed down now, was sprawled along Nia’s thigh, fast asleep. His body warmth helped—as did the tatty old blanket Joe had pulled from behind the seat of the cab that she was sharing with Zeffy. They needed all the warmth they could get. As soon as the sun had gone down, the temperature seemed to have immediately dropped into the low sixties.

  “So what brought you guys here, anyway?” Joe asked.

  Nia let Zeffy explain. She listened to the crackle of the fire and the desert night instead, all the rustling and murmurings in the scrub around them, the wind that made the canvas sides of the shelter Joe had set up earlier flap against its poles. She’d heard coyotes while they were eating, but the far distance only held silence now.

  She started paying attention again when Zeffy got to the part where the boar-woman had shown up. It was hard to tell because of the poor light, but she got the impression from what she could see of his face in the campfire flicker that Joe wasn’t much surprised by their story. Well, why should he be? she thought. What was amazing to them was probably an everyday kind of thing over here.

  “Focus is the big thing,” Joe said when Zeffy was done. “Your friend should’ve told you that.”

  “He did. We just...” Zeffy shrugged. “We weren’t very good at it, I guess.”

  He nodded and started to roll himself a cigarette. “So are you about ready to head back home now?”

  “Not without Max,” Nia said before Zeffy could reply.

  Joe nodded again, as though he’d been expecting that. He thumbed a match and lit his cigarette, tossed the spent match into the fire.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess we can work around that. Do you have something that belongs to the people you’re looking for?”

  “Like what?” Zeffy asked.

  “Something to connect you to them.”

  “There
’s Buddy,” Nia said. “He’s Max’s dog.”

  Joe gave the sleeping dog a look. “Maybe I could learn to hear him. Let me think on it for a while.”

  Nia waited, but Zeffy didn’t come out with the “You can’t be serious?” she’d been expecting.

  “You can teach him how to talk?” she asked.

  “Everything already talks,” Joe told her. “Plants, animals...even that old truck of mine. The trick is figuring out their language, learning to hear what they’re saying so that it makes sense.”

  “Is it hard?”

  Joe’s grin flashed in the firelight. “Depends what you mean by hard. Takes focus, so for you two, yeah, I guess it’d be hard.”

  “Ha-ha,” Zeffy said.

  “No offense meant,” Joe assured them.

  He looked less human once more, features flickering confusingly from man to bird to other animals in the light of the fire. Nia remembered how when she’d heard the coyotes earlier, he’d seemed to have a kind of lupine cast to his features, just for a moment, a flicker of fur and muzzle, ears sticking up through the flat brim of his hat; then it was gone again.

  “Are you real?” she asked.

  The question popped out before Nia was even aware she was asking it and she immediately wanted to take it back.

  “Define real,” Joe said.

  “I...”

  She started to look to Zeffy for help, but Joe took pity on her.

  “Looking like this, no,” he said. “At least not in the sense you’d use the word. But here I’m about as real as it gets—pretty much native to the place by now.”

  “But you’d be a spirit in our world?” Zeffy asked.

  Joe shrugged. “Not exactly. But most of us, we need to borrow a body to get by on your side. Sometimes we can make our own, make do with leaves and cast-offs and stuff, put together a pretty good semblance, you look at us in the right kind of light.”

  “But here...”

  “This is the place the spirits come from,” he said. “And no, it’s not like this everywhere, and it’s not necessarily like Santa Feliz or L.A. or Mabon or any other place that cross-world dreamers have brought into being. The spiritworld’s like a jewel that goes on forever, with as many facets as everyone put together, spirits and dreamers, can imagine. Or expect to find.”

  “And you’re a guide?” Zeffy asked.

  “When somebody needs one and I’m in the mood.”

  “It seems so different from the way you hear about it,” she went on. “You know, dream quests and all that sort of thing.”

  Joe smiled. “It’s all those facets. Everything depends on what you expect to find.”

  “But we didn’t expect to find you.”

  Nia nodded in agreement.

  “Well, I can't say the same,” Joe said. “When I got the smell of you in the air, it brought me right to you. Saw your trouble and I knew I had to help. Some of us, we’ve got bigger hearts than others.”

  Nia had to smile. He had such a good opinion of himself. Normally, that kind of attitude really irritated her, but with him it was sort of simple and charming.

  “More coffee?” he asked suddenly, holding up the pot.

  “No thanks,” Zeffy said. “I’ll be up all night. And since I haven’t convinced myself there’s a washroom nearby, I don’t feel like leaving myself a target for a snake or a scorpion or something when I’m making do with the great outdoors.”

  Joe smiled. “They won’t bother you. Just make sure you shake out your shoes before you put them on in the morning.”

  Hearing that, Nia was determined to sleep with her shoes on.

  “Why don’t you two turn in,” Joe said. “Me and Buddy here, we’ll take a walk in the desert, see if we can’t find ourselves some common ground.” Understanding their nervousness, he put a couple more pieces of wood on the fire, then called to Buddy and walked out into the darkness. Buddy lifted his head, but turned first to Nia.

  “You can go,” she said.

  He scrambled to his feet then, bumped his head affectionately against her shoulder and padded off into the desert after Joe.

  “Is he getting smarter or something?” Nia asked.

  Zeffy shrugged. “I’ll believe anything in this place. Are you sleepy?”

  Nia shook her head. But she followed Zeffy into the shelter anyway and lay down beside her, sharing the blanket.

  “Do you think we’ll ever get home?” she asked after they’d been lying there for a while.

  Zeffy’s voice came back to her from the darkness. It seemed to be right in her ear and impossibly distant at the same time.

  “I’d like to be reassuring,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I know. I just keep hoping I’ll wake up and this will all be a dream.”

  “I bet that’s what Max’s been thinking all along,” Nia said.

  There was a long silence before Zeffy finally replied. “I guess I owe him an apology, big time.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Though he owes me one, too.”

  “I suppose. But imagine what it must have been like for him. I mean, this is weird, but at least we’re still ourselves.”

  “Are we?”

  Nia shivered. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Zeffy said. She put an arm around Nia’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean to spook you. It’s just, going through something like this...how can anything ever be the same for us again?”

  Nia remembered what the crazy man back in Santa Feliz had told them, about having to be poets or crazy like him to get by. Bones had said something along the same lines. But she didn’t think Zeffy meant that. It was more like how, after all of this, it’d be hard to trust anything again. To know what was real and wasn’t. What could be and what couldn’t.

  She wanted to talk about it more, but Zeffy had been quiet for so long that Nia thought she’d fallen asleep.

  “You know what I think about the most?” Zeffy said suddenly. “What if when we do get back, all we can think about is this place? All we’re going to want is to find our way back?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “But think of all the fairy tales, all those people straying into Fairyland, trying to get home, but when they do, nothing seems as vibrant or alive anymore. If the stories are real, maybe that part of them’s real, too.”

  “I guess,” Nia said. “But it won’t happen to me. I already miss my mom too much. When I get back, I don’t care who she wants to sleep with, I’m just going to tell her how sorry I am that I ran away and I won’t ever do it again.”

  Zeffy’s arm tightened around her shoulders. “You’ll get your chance,” she said. “I don’t know how we’ll work it, but I promise you that much.”

  Nia knew there was no way Zeffy could promise that, but she didn’t care. It was what she needed to hear.

  “We should try to get some sleep,” Zeffy said. “God knows what this guy’s going to have us doing tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  Nia didn’t think she’d be able to sleep. The ground was so hard, it felt so alien lying out here in the desert, and even with Zeffy pressed up against her on one side, it was so cold. Besides, she thought, if this was the place dreamers went, how could you fall asleep here? So she lay there, listening to the desert again. When that just made her feel more awake, she started thinking about how long it had been since she’d heard some good music. She closed her eyes and called up one of the solos from Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” letting the music reduce the rough jangle of her nerves with its soulful calm. It was an album she knew front to back, she’d played it so often, but tonight the solos went in different directions from how she remembered them. They played against the desert, echoing through the scrub and cacti.

  Lying there, listening to the soundscape in her mind of Coltrane’s tenor sax, music he’d never played but so indisputably his, she finally fell asleep. All night long she heard that music in the distance and dreamed of Buddy running through the desert. Sometime
s there was a crow flying in the air above him, sometimes a lean coyote ran at his side.

  Okay, ladies. Rise and shine.”

  Nia groaned at the sound of Joe’s cheerful voice. She pressed her face more tightly against her knapsack, which was serving as a pillow, but it was no good. The light was far too bright and the heat was already creeping in under the shelter where she and Zeffy lay. She rolled over onto her back, eyes still closed, then yelped and sat up when Buddy licked her face.

  Joe laughed. “Coffee’s on and there’s water in the basin for you to wash up in.”

  The coffee smelled wonderful, especially with the aroma of frying bacon added to it. Nia’s stomach rumbled. Where did he get the food? Don’t ask, she told herself. Just appreciate.

  “So do we have a spare tire?” she asked later when they were eating and she was more awake.

  “Well, I’d say Zeffy’s the one to check.”

  Zeffy looked up and smiled. “Of course we have a spare, because there’s no way I’m walking anywhere in this heat.” She got up from where she was sitting and wandered over to the back of the pickup. “See?” she said. “There it is. Complete with a jack and a tire iron.”

  Buddy had already eaten twice as much as any of them, but he lay near Nia now, studiously watching the last few bites that went into her mouth. She gave him a piece of toast.

  “I dreamed about Buddy last night,” she told Joe. “So what does that mean? Was I seeing him somewhere else in the spiritworld, or does this place have its spiritworld?”

  “Good question,” Joe said.

  Zeffy returned to finish her coffee. “Which means he doesn’t know,” she translated.

  “I was considering the question,” Joe said. “That’s all.”

  Zeffy gave Nia a smile. “Doesn’t matter where you go, does it? Guys never want to admit it when they don’t know something.” She turned back to Joe. “Okay, you’re off the hook, because the big question we do want an answer to is this: What happens today?”

  “Do you want to go home, or find your friends?”

  Nia’s pulse quickened. She could feel herself grinning.

  “You know where Max is?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. But Buddy’s given me a good line on him and I think I can find him.”