Trader

by Charles de Lint

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman said, quickly bending down to give her a hand up. “I was so busy looking at my own feet that I never...”

  Her voice trailed off. They recognized each other at the same time and regarded each other for a long moment, Lisa lying in the snow, the woman crouched beside her. Lisa was first to find her voice.

  “Julie?”

  A brief smile touched Julie’s lips as she finished helping Lisa to her feet.

  “Hello, Lisa.” Julie retrieved Lisa’s present for her from a nearby snowdrift and passed it over. “Out delivering presents?”

  “It’s just an office party at The Rusty Lion. Everybody’s supposed to bring something, then they hand them out at random.”

  “Ah.”

  “I...I’ve missed you,” Lisa said. She couldn’t believe how fast her pulse was racing. “I kept wanting to talk to you.”

  “I’ve got a phone.”

  Lisa nodded. “I know. I...I just didn’t have the courage.” And barely had it now, so she quickly plunged on before she lost the little she had. “I wanted to apologize for—for everything. You were right. I was blaming you and it wasn’t fair, because it wasn’t your fault. It was only the stupid way I was looking at things.”

  “And now you’re all better?”

  Neither Julie’s expression or tone of voice gave away what she was thinking. Serious or sarcastic? Lisa couldn’t tell. It was hard to concentrate with the wind and the snow and Julie standing there in front of her looking as beautiful as ever. Maybe more so.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not better at all. But I’m working on it.”

  Julie sighed and seemed to relent. “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “Do you have time for a coffee or something?” Lisa asked.

  “What about your party?”

  “It’s just for...”

  The people in the office and their spouses, she was about to say, and what would that add to the office gossip if she showed up with Julie on her arm? Then she realized she didn’t care what they’d think. If they had a problem with it, let them deal with it.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” she said. “Be my date.”

  Julie’s eyebrows rose. “Just like that?”

  “Please. I’m not asking for a commitment or assuming that you can forgive me or anything. But I’d really like to talk to you. I want to be with you and I don’t care what anybody thinks about it. Except for you.”

  Julie shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said as she took Lisa’s arm and started walking with her.

  Lisa was caught between the delight of being so close to Julie, walking with her like this, and knowing that it probably wouldn’t last. There was no reason on earth for Julie to give her a second chance.

  “I guess I’m kind of hopeless, aren’t I?” she said.

  Julie shot her a sidelong glance. “Hardly. You’re messing up some, that’s all. And you’ve had good reason to feel messed up.”

  Lisa’s spirits lifted, hope fluttering in her chest.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked. “I mean...”

  “I know.” Julie touched her side. “Physically, I’m all better. But I still get bad dreams. They caught the guy, but he’s already out on bail and it doesn’t look like he’s going to do any real time.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Tell me about it. And how about you? Have you heard from Nia?”

  Lisa shook her head.

  “How’re you dealing with it?”

  “Not well,” Lisa admitted. “Anyone who says time heals all wounds is full of it.”

  Julie nodded sympathetically and gave her arm a squeeze.

  “I guess the hardest thing,” Lisa said, “is not knowing what happened to her. Where she is. Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know how you deal with it.”

  Lisa gave her a startled look.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Julie said. “What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t understand your being so worried? If you want to know the truth, I’ve felt like a heel for walking out on you the way I did. I knew what you were going through. I knew it wasn’t your fault you were all messed up.” She sighed. “But it was hard to take all the same.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. Not completely. See, it wasn’t just your fault. My last girlfriend was pretty young, fresh out of college. A sweet little LUG, though I didn’t know it at the time and I guess she didn’t either.”

  “LUG?”

  “Lesbian Until Graduation. You know, bought into the lesbian chic while she was on campus, then changed her mind after being out in the real world for a few months. No harm done, right?—except I got left with the broken heart. I didn’t have another serious relationship until we met.”

  Lisa caught and held the words “serious relationship” close to her chest, hope flaring.

  “And then,” Julie went on, “when you seemed to have second thoughts about the morality of it all, I just got scared. The only thing I could think to do was cut and run. I felt I had to call it off before I got hurt again.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Julie shrugged. “I never told you. But the funny thing is, I got hurt all the same.”

  She paused. Lisa looked up, surprised they were already at The Rusty Lion. The windows of the restaurant were steamed with condensation, but she could make out a few of her coworkers.

  “You sure you want to go through with this?” Julie asked.

  The snow whirled around them. Lisa heard a distant rumble and saw the flashing amber lights of the ploughs far down Lee Street, coming their way. Julie’s face was damp, glistening with melted snow, and she wanted to lick the moisture away. Instead, she leaned forward and gave Julie a quick kiss that turned into one that was far longer and more intimate.

  “I’d rather go back to your place or mine and be alone with you,” Lisa told her when she stepped back and was able to catch her breath. “But, yes. I’m sure.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  14 ZEFFY

  Using the dry riverbed as a road, Joe drove them up into the foothills. It had to give out at some point, Zeffy thought, and then they’d be walking, but the riverbed simply led them deeper and deeper into the forested hills. It was as though Joe had determined they’d find a usable route, so the usable route was there—the same way they acquired food and gas and the spare tire. If that was the case—and really, Zeffy thought, what else could it be?—she put her own will to the task as well, expecting the route to continue as it did.

  The riverbed remained usable, but it wasn’t flat. Half the time she and Nia had to brace themselves, arms stiff against the dashboard. From the creak and rattle of the truck, Zeffy wasn’t sure how long it would hold together. The headlights bounced across the landscape like a pair of flashlight beams held in an unsteady hand. Images flashed out of the darkness—sheer stone cliffs, tangles of vegetation, bone-dry roots that reached out for water that was no longer there. Occasionally the beams caught the eyes of some animal and reflected them back. Joe always slowed down then, allowing it to escape into the underbrush flanking either side of the riverbed, before returning to their previous speed.

  Deer. Raccoons. Fat, waddling porcupines. Once a wolf or coyote, it was hard to tell, the lanky shape was gone so quickly. If it weren’t for the urgency of their journey, Zeffy would have been delighted, but she rode instead with what seemed like a stone in the pit of her stomach, her nerves all stretched taut.

  She kept thinking of Max...Johnny...whoever this guy was she’d met and talked with in the park. Call him Max. Forget the fact that he looked like Johnny. Their parting argument had mostly faded from memory. Instead, she kept circling around this intense attraction she’d felt toward him, the sense of connecting with someone who could really mean something to her. A soul mate.

  “This is nuts,” she said, unaware that she was speaking aloud until Joe shot her a quick look.


  “What is?” Nia asked.

  Zeffy turned to her. “How come I can’t stop thinking about a guy I hardly know? Worse, he looks exactly like the last person in the world I’d want to have a relationship with.”

  “But he’s not Johnny. He’s Max.”

  “I guess...” Zeffy looked out through the windshield again and sighed. “What am I saying? I’ve only talked to him a couple of times. What do I know about him? For all I know, he could be worse than Johnny.”

  “He’s not.”

  Zeffy smiled. “Like you’re in the least bit objective, little miss matchmaker.”

  “You guys’d be great together. Really.”

  “I doubt he even knows I’m alive.”

  “I’d find that hard to imagine,” Joe said.

  Zeffy gave him a surprised look. “I didn’t think you knew Max.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know: You’re not the sort of woman a guy forgets in a hurry.”

  Zeffy was happy it was so dark in the cab of the pickup—no one could see her blush. She cleared her throat.

  “So,” she said, hoping to change the subject. “How much farther do you think we have to go?”

  Joe was silent for a long moment, then relented and followed her lead. “A few miles as the crow flies.”

  “And as the crow drives?”

  He chuckled. “A lot farther. A couple of hours, maybe. The sun’ll be up.”

  “Is Max going to be all right?” Nia asked.

  Joe kept his attention on the road. “I wish I could say yes, but I won’t make any promises I can’t keep. Depending on who’s been called up by whatever he’s done, I can’t even promise that we’ll be all right.”

  “But we’ve got to try,” Zeffy said.

  Joe nodded. “That’s the decision we made.”

  Meaning they could change their minds, Zeffy thought. They could turn around right now and no one would know any different. Except for them.

  “The sooner we get there,” she said, “the sooner we can deal with what’s waiting for us. So let’s just concentrate on arriving in one piece and everything working out.”

  Joe glanced at her. “Just wanting it to work out isn’t necessarily going to be enough. You know that, don’t you?”

  Zeffy did, but she didn’t want to think along those lines. She wanted to think positively, to expect everything to be okay in the same way that they were expecting this riverbed road to take them to where they were going.

  “But I’m choosing to believe it will,” she said.

  Joe smiled. “Good for you.”

  They drove from night into the morning twilight. For a long time the sun remained hidden behind the mountains, but the east side of the riverbank began to grow long shadows and slowly the light changed. The blur of the forest separated into individual trees. Lots of pine. Birch, cedar, aspens. Oak, maple. Zeffy was watching a hawk float high above the riverbed, when Joe killed the engine. The pickup rounded a corner and coasted to a stop.

  Zeffy turned to him. “Are we—”

  He put his fingers to his lips and nodded to the dusty length of the riverbed ahead of them. Zeffy and Nia looked ahead, then studied the banks on either side. There was only the forest and the dry bed of the river cutting through it like a road. Buddy stirred where he was sitting between Nia’s legs. He whined and tried to clamber up on her lap to look out the window.

  “Shhh,” Nia whispered. “There’s nothing to see.”

  Except there was. Two figures stepped out from between the trees on the west side of the riverbank. Zeffy stopped breathing. Never mind that this was the spiritworld and full of magics she’d already experienced, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  One was a woman with a bison’s head upon her shoulders, the other had an African water buffalo’s. The pelt of the bison woman was a startling white, thick and curly on her head, her woman’s body covered with a soft down fuzz. The other woman was a black brown with massive horns that her shoulders seemed too frail to bear. Her skin was hairless, her chest bare, a brightly colored cloth tied around her hips. The legs of both women ended in hooves.

  “What...what are they?” Zeffy asked.

  The animal women pushed through the brush and raspberry bushes that choked the east bank and then disappeared in between the trees. Zeffy stared at the spot where they’d vanished, but couldn’t seem to hold their impossible images in her mind. She turned to Joe, realizing that she’d forgotten the crow’s head that had been sitting on his shoulders when they first met, forgotten the boar-woman and her friends in Santa Feliz. With the memory now fresh in her mind, his face shimmered like a heat mirage and she saw the vague image of a crow’s head superimposed over his more familiar features. “Buffalo women,” he said. “Old spirits. Very old and powerful.”

  Zeffy blinked and the mirage went away. It was Joe sitting there again, the familiar, human Joe. But she remembered exactly what he was now and wondered how she’d ever let herself forget.

  “They were so beautiful,” Nia said, her voice soft.

  Zeffy nodded in agreement.

  “Beautiful,” Joe agreed. “And dangerous.”

  “Are they Native spirits?” Zeffy asked.

  “They’re native to the spiritworld.”

  “No, I meant like the spirits of the Native Americans from my world. You know, White Buffalo Woman and all that.”

  Joe shook his head. “Here in the spiritworld everybody wears the shapes most comfortable to them. The spiritworld doesn’t belong to any one group; it belongs to everybody. You find here what you expect to find; you look the way you expect to look.”

  “How come we don’t look any different?” Nia asked. “I mean, Zeffy and I.”

  “Because that’s how you expect to look.”

  Zeffy gave a slow nod. “Except,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting a beach town—or to meet a guy with a crow’s head.”

  “Sometimes your dreams go deeper than you remember after you’ve woken from them.”

  “But—”

  “We’ve got it all here,” Joe said. “Deserts, mountains, cities, villages. Mosques and churches and temples. Tundra, mesas and cyberspace. Anything you might expect to find, is somewhere around—the good and the bad.”

  “So those buffalo women...”

  “Either got their shapes from some dream-walking shaman, or just happened to pick them on their own.”

  “I see.”

  Though she didn’t. Not really. Not completely. It was more that something deep inside her reacted to what Joe was saying, recognized and accepted the truth, while the rest of her was left floundering.

  “So the gods,” she began. “The way they look. It’s just arbitrary.”

  “Who’s talking about gods? They’re something that belongs to your world. I was talking about the cousins.”

  “But you told us about these vision quests and sacred journeys that people make to come here.”

  “That’s right. But whatever wisdom they happen to pick up, they get from spirits. If they don’t do what they should have done in the first place and asked themselves. Trouble is, people don’t trust themselves, so they come looking.” Before Zeffy could ask another question, he pressed on. “Some of the spirits you find here will help you, some will hurt you. Most won’t pay you any nevermind. There’s no accounting how they’ll react to you, or why they’re one way or another. Maybe they just take a shine to you, maybe not.”

  “Like you did,” Zeffy said.

  “Right,” Joe told her. He smiled. “Took a shine and here we are. You want some free advice?”

  Zeffy nodded.

  “Got this from my granddad and it’s the only piece I ever heard that makes real sense: Look inside yourself for the answers—you’re the only one who knows what’s best for you. Everybody else is only guessing.”

  He started the truck then. As they drove past the spot where the buffalo women had crossed the riverbed, both Zeffy and Nia craned their necks to get ano
ther glimpse of them, but the buffalo women were long gone. Joe rolled a cigarette one-handedly, lit it with a thumbed match. A mile or so on, he stopped again, took his last drag and killed the engine. Butting the cigarette out in the truck’s overcrowded ashtray, he opened his door then and stepped out.

  “We walk from here,” he said.

  Zeffy waited for Nia to open the passenger door and slid out that side. The dirt of the riverbed didn’t feel quite stable underfoot.

  “I’m feeling scared again,” Nia said.

  Buddy was Velcroed to her leg once more, his gaze darting nervously from one riverbank to the other, tail tucked between his legs.

  “Me, too,” Zeffy told her.

  Joe came around from his side of the truck. “We can still turn back,” he said.

  She wondered if he knew how tempting his offer was at this moment. But she couldn’t do it—nor could she explain why. It wasn’t simply that she had this inexplicable attraction to Max—or maybe simply to the man Johnny had become. There was something else afoot, a—what did they call it in the old days? It took her a moment to recall the word. A geas. Like in the Arthurian stories. Something she had to do. A promise, only she couldn’t remember making it, or to whom.

  “How come you’re always offering to take us home?” she asked. “You know why we’re here.”

  Joe shrugged. “Just like to make sure. I feel a little responsibility for you, dragging you all the way out here.”

  “But it’s been our decision to come,” Nia said.

  “Like I said,” Joe told them.

  He led them out of the riverbed. When they pushed through the raspberry bushes choking the riverbank, they found themselves on a narrow game trail that wound off between the trees. The ground rose sharply as soon as they put the river behind them, but the trail followed the contour of the cliffs that rose steadily higher beside them.

  They walked single file: Joe, Nia and Buddy, with Zeffy bringing up the rear. When Joe suddenly stopped, Zeffy almost ran Buddy over. She only just caught her balance by grabbing the branch of a nearby tree.

  “What is it?” Zeffy asked, pressing closer to see what he was looking at.