Trader

by Charles de Lint

  Joe moved aside a little so that she and Nia could see. There was a clearing ahead of them, created by the rocks and debris that fell from the sheer cliff face behind it. It took Zeffy a moment to see the two bodies lying on the stones in front of the cliff, one lying on top of the other.

  “Is...” Zeffy cleared her throat. “Is that them?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Why are they just lying there like that?” Nia asked.

  She started forward, but Joe caught her arm.

  “Hang on,” he said. He looked almost wolfish as he lifted his head, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring as though he was testing the wind. “Okay. I think we’re the first to get here.”

  He was talking about his cousins, Zeffy realized and shivered.

  “Those buffalo women we saw earlier,” she said. “Are they on their way here?”

  Joe shrugged. “Could be. C’mon.”

  He started out leading the way, but Buddy bolted ahead and ran toward the figures, paws scrabbling for purchase on the loose stones as he hurried. Zeffy watched him reach the bodies. He stopped and walked stiff-legged around them. By the time he dropped down to his belly and began whimpering, she was close enough to see for herself.

  Beside her, a small gasp escaped from between Nia’s lips. “Th-that’s Max,” she said. “Max’s body...”

  With Johnny Devlin lying on top of him.

  They hurried across the stones, letting Joe bring up the rear now. Nia started crying when they reached the bodies and threw her arms around Buddy. A deep chasm seemed to open inside Zeffy as she looked down. Max Trader lay with his neck and limbs twisted at impossible angles, as though...Her gaze went up the side of the cliff. As though he’d fallen...

  “Oh no,” she said in a small voice.

  She knelt down and with Joe’s help pulled Johnny’s body to one side. He seemed unhurt, but he was a dead weight, arms and legs limp. Joe rolled back one of Johnny’s lids, but only the white of the eye showed. He put two fingers along the neck, checking for a pulse that wasn’t there.

  “Shit,” Joe said, sitting back on his heels, studying the bodies. “Looks like one of them went over the cliff in Max’s body, then the other got sucked into the corpse when he came over to check things out.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s hard.”

  “D-do...something,” Nia said through her tears.

  “Nothing I can do,” Joe said. “You can’t call back the dead.”

  Zeffy refused to accept that. “There’s got to be something.” She looked at Joe. “This is the spiritworld, isn’t it? So where’s the magic when we need it? Why can’t we just...just expect them to be alive again?"

  Joe made no reply. He wouldn’t even look at her.

  Zeffy turned back to the bodies, her vision blurring with tears. She cursed every time they’d stopped to eat or sleep. They should have gotten here sooner. They should have...should have...

  They should have saved the day. Hadn’t that been what they were expecting? This was all wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong.

  She leaned over Max Trader’s body. Swallowing thickly, she reached out and closed his unseeing eyes.

  15 MAX

  I hear the sound of the engine stop. There’s silence for a long time; then I hear something scrambling across the stones toward me. It sounds like an animal—big, fast. Something’s found itself a meal, I think, and I’m glad that I can’t feel anything. But then I hear whatever it is begin to whimper. A dog.

  Buddy?

  It’s the first thought that comes to mind, but I know it can’t be. He’s safe in Newford with Nia. But then I hear her, too. And...Zeffy? I can’t figure out what’s going on. There’s a third voice—a man’s. Unfamiliar. But I hear where he’s coming from.

  You can't call back the dead.

  Tell me about it.

  Zeffy starts talking about spiritworlds and magic and how things are supposed to happen because you expect them to, but none of it makes any more sense than what they’re doing here. They’re crying now, both of them, Buddy whimpering. The man’s silent. I feel like crying, too. Can’t move, have no sensory perception at all except for my hearing. But I can feel. Emotions, nothing tactile.

  And all the time, ghost impressions of the body’s other occupants range through me, shadowy and vague. The bird, all confusion and panic, mirroring my own. Devlin. He’s a little stronger. I get mostly anger from him, a lit-tie regret, but not for what he’s done, only that things aren’t working out his way.

  I get the sense that someone’s leaning over me. Zeffy. Don’t know what makes me think that. I can’t feel the weight of her hands, but I know she’s touching me. All the fear and panic comes roaring up inside me and I start to reach for her, for her body, trying to slide into it the way Devlin slid into mine. I catch myself at the last moment, horrified at what I’m doing, and force myself back into my own skin, push myself away, deep and deeper, down inside myself, away from the temptation.

  I’m gone so far, I lose my hearing now, too. I’m in my own body, but this is unfamiliar territory, the shadowland where autists go when they shut themselves away from the outside world. My panic’s ebbing, even my fear. They’re replaced by resignation and sorrow. I float in the darkness, thinking this must be what it’s like in a sensory-deprivation tank. I wonder if I’ll get the chance to go on—heaven, hell, be reincarnated. Whatever happens. Is it something you do on your own, the directions genetically set in you when you’re born, or does someone come to show you the way? Or maybe this is it—you’re stuck in your body until it rots away.

  It’s funny how quickly time loses meaning when you’ve no way to measure it. I might have been floating there for minutes or days, I have no way of knowing, when I sense I’m no longer alone. It’s nothing definite. Like the passing of time, I can’t measure it, but there’s something here with me. I pray for an angel, some spirit presence come to lead me into the next world, but find only a ragged remnant of myself—the pieces that got left behind when Devlin evicted me, the ones that must have worked on him the way his impatience and tendency toward depression worked on me.

  I gather them to me and find in them a memory of Janossy, a time when we were building a set of twin mandolins for a bluegrass band and got to talking about the state of the world. He was the first person I heard voice the concept “think globally, act locally.”

  “The way I see it,” he said, “is the problems that face the world are the same problems that face an individual. If you’re at peace, if you’re happy, if you have a desire to help others, then the problems of the world disappear.”

  “I don’t buy that,” I told him. “You can feel as altruistic as you want, but that’s not going to stop the war in Vietnam, or feed starving people in Third World countries.”

  Janossy sighed. “I’m not saying there’s an immediate cause and effect. But the world changes any time one person changes. What we have to do is clean our own house and then—by example, through discussion, whatever works—help others clean theirs. Until we have our own peace, an understanding of ourselves and the strength to stick to our convictions, how can we expect others to meet our expectations?”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “The most important things are simple,” Janossy said. “We’re the ones who make them complicated.”

  “So we have to know ourselves...” My voice trailed off at his smile. “Okay, what then?”

  “It’s not enough to know yourself. Think of who you want to be and then strive to attain that ideal.”

  That last phrase goes echoing through me, kickstarted by that sliver of memory until it looms enormous and unavoidable.

  Think of who you want to be.

  Who do I want to be? Not dead, for starters. Not trapped in this helpless, broken body that would make a quadriplegic’s life seem like one of infinite freedom. But not who I was before Devlin came into my life, either. I did some good, but not enough of it—or not enough of it deliberately. I lived too much of a
mole’s existence, so wrapped up in the insularity of my own concerns that the world passed me by.

  I had no enemies, but no real friends either. No great sorrows, but no great joys. I wasn’t at peace, I was drifting. I wasn’t content, I was simply making do. I had convictions, but what was the point of them if they made no impact on the world beyond the walls of my shop and my apartment? Tching over the newspaper or the six-o’clock news, but never once making an effort to do something about what I felt was wrong.

  I wasn’t a bad person. I coasted through a limited existence not much different from most people’s—only the details varied. But it wasn’t living.

  Who do I want to be?

  A man who lives his life. To be a man who takes nothing for granted, who not only accepts the challenges of every day, but looks forward to them. A man whose enemies would be complacency and ennui. And if I can’t be that man in my own body, then I’ll be it in Devlin’s. I’ll reclaim his skin guiltlessly. He chose to trade, not I. I gave him his chance to make things right, but he refused it. Whatever his fate now, he brought it down on himself.

  I want to rise up out of the shadows, back into the light that falls on my broken body, but I can’t. I can’t find the way back. It’s all the same. Up, down. Left, right. Front, back. I need a guide. I need someone who cares for me the way I am, borrowed body and all. Someone who trusts me implicitly.

  And then I hear it. A howl that comes shivering down through the darkness and pulls me up and out. It’s not a sound so much as an emotion. A need, a reaching out. And I reach back. Physical hearing returns, ears popping, and the howl’s for real now, Buddy’s sorrow filling the world with despair. But hope, too. For me, it’s a sound of hope.

  I see Devlin’s body as a flare of light and reach for it with all the desperate need of a man long denied his own, finally coming home. I know living in Devlin’s skin won’t make me perfect. I know the intensity with which I’ve promised myself to live won’t be something I’ll be able to maintain every day. No one’s perfect. But at least I’ll try.

  I start to flow from the broken body into Devlin’s, the skin familiar, a perfect fit this time. I sit up, marveling at the breeze that touches my skin, at the glory of sight, the taste in my mouth. I barely have time to register my successful return when Buddy’s all over me, almost knocking me down, licking my face. Then Nia’s hugging me, still crying, and I’m crying, too.

  Through the blur of my tears I can see Zeffy, studying me. There’s a look I take for hope in her eyes, but there’s also a stepping back, like she’s confronting a zombie from some late-show monster movie, an undead thing that’s just risen from its grave. And I know what she’s thinking: Who’s inside that skin?

  l6 ZEFFY

  The telling point for Zeffy were the tears in the eyes of the man in Johnny’s body. That was when she was sure it was Max who had come back, not Johnny. Johnny wouldn’t cry for anybody.

  The way the body had sat up, hard on the heels of Buddy’s desperate howling, had given her a bad scare—maybe the worst since she’d found herself mixed up in all of this. But now that she was sure, she was suddenly shy and found herself hanging back from the joyful trio Max, Nia and Buddy made. She noted Joe was hanging back, too. Sitting on a boulder now, rolling himself a cigarette, calm as you please, a look on his face like he’d known all along this was going to happen—like he’d maybe had a hand in it. The old faker, she thought affectionately.

  Max finally more or less disengaged himself from Nia and Buddy. He sat with his arm around Nia’s shoulders, free hand resting on Buddy’s neck, fingers kneading the dog’s wiry fur.

  “How’d you all get here?” he asked.

  “We were looking for you,” Nia replied.

  “Really?”

  His gaze was on her, so Zeffy nodded. He looked embarrassed.

  “Listen,” he said. “I owe you an apology big time for the way I lit in to you back in the park. You, too,” he added, turning to Nia. “I can’t believe how badly I treated the both of you.”

  Definitely not Johnny, Zeffy thought. Johnny never apologized for anything—at least not with such sincerity. She could read it in Max’s eyes. There was a real pain for whatever hurt he’d caused them.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I guess I know now you didn’t mean it.”

  Joe had gotten his cigarette lit. He stood up, his gaze on the forest that edged the clearing. When Zeffy looked to see what interested him so much about the trees, she thought she saw figures flitting through the undergrowth. Nothing definite. More the idea of something being there.

  “Joe,” she said. “What are those things?”

  “Kind of a sign that you folks should be heading back home,” he replied. “The cousins aren’t exactly here yet, but I can feel them getting close. Got a few little manitou watching us right now. Curious, mostly. But the others’ll come.”

  “The buffalo women?” Zeffy asked.

  “Them. Maybe some others just as powerful.”

  “I can’t go,” Max said. “Not right away.”

  Zeffy wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “Say what? The whole point of our coming here was to bring you back.”

  “I know. But I left a couple of things at Janossy’s farm that I need to get. And then there’s that.”

  Zeffy had still been trying to work out what he meant by Janossy’s farm when Max nodded with his chin toward the corpse. Nia wouldn’t look at all and Zeffy didn’t blame her. She returned her attention to Max and saw the bleak look in his eyes. He might be alive, she realized, but now he knows it’ll never be the same again. He’ll never get his own body back. She couldn’t imagine what he must be going through, how it must feel.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “We’ll bury the body. Pile enough rocks on it so that the scavengers’ll never get a piece.”

  “That’s not it. It’s...” Max sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.” There was a long silence that Zeffy finally broke.

  “Try,” she said, her voice gentle.

  17 MAX

  I really don't know where to begin. Anything I say is going to make me sound like a whiner. I’m so tired of feeling sorry for myself, and I’m doing such a good job of it that I really don’t need anybody else to join in.

  “We want to help,” Zeffy says.

  “Yeah, Max,” Nia adds. “We’re your friends.”

  “I could use a walk,” the man Zeffy called Joe says. “I’ll go pick up whatever you left at that farm.”

  I shake my head. “No. It’s okay.”

  I take my arm from around Nia’s shoulders and shift over to one of the larger boulders and sit so I’m looking out at the forest and can’t see the body. My body. Except I’m not dead. I’m sitting over here in Devlin. Buddy shifts over with me, collapses by my feet, tongue lolling. At least someone’s happy, I think as I wait for the others to join me.

  “You brought me back,” I tell him, holding his head between my hands and looking down at him. “Saved my life even when I broke my promise to you.”

  “What did you promise him?” Nia wants to know.

  “That I’d never desert him.”

  There’s not much to add to that. I find myself wondering what Zeffy’s thinking. If I break a promise to a dog, how good are any other promises I might make? I don’t even know why I’m thinking about her along those lines except she is here, came looking for me, and there’s something in the way she looks at me that makes me think maybe there’s a chance we could get to know each other better. Except we’ve got something else lying between us.

  “The thing is,” I say, “I don’t know what’ll happen to me if I go back.”

  Zeffy and Nia are looking blank, but Joe nods his head.

  “I get it,” he says. “You’re worried about the guy who originally owned that skin you’re walking around in, that he’s going to reclaim it and then where will you be?”

  I don’t even ask how he knows that.

  “That’s partly
it,” I say, “but it’s more complicated than that.”

  I fill them all in on what happened last night—that connection I had with Devlin, how it brought me up to the ridge, the bird talking to me, the two of them going over the edge of the cliff.

  “That’s hard,” Joe says when no one else speaks, “but none of it’s your fault. Let me tell you straight, you’ve got no worries about carrying on in that skin. Any karma comes down, it’ll fall on the other guy.”

  “But what’s to stop him from taking his body back?”

  “Live intensely,” Joe tells me. “Live big. The cousins have a saying: ‘Walk large as trees, with the blood quick in you and swift-running.’ In other words, don’t let there be holes in your life where somebody else can creep into your head again. You get what I’m saying?”

  I nod slowly. “That’s what left me susceptible the first time. I was just drifting through my life instead of living.”

  “Not that drifting is a crime,” Joe says. “But now you don’t drift, you do.”

  “But...” I glance over at the corpse. “It doesn’t seem right.”

  “What Devlin did wasn’t right,” Zeffy says.

  “I know, but two wrongs don’t...”

  Joe puts up a hand, palm out. “Stop hanging on to the guilt. Devlin’s dead, carrying all the bones and burden of his wrongs along with him into the next world. And if he’s not dead, then he’s stuck here, same as all the cousins. They can’t steal somebody’s skin without it costing them. Borrow it, maybe, with their permission—you know, make a deal—or just take it, if they’re too weak. But that’s serious karma and it weighs as heavy on them as it does on you or me. Get enough baggage like that dragging you down and you’re not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t think Johnny Devlin thinks anything through that carefully,” I say.

  “If he even knows about it,” Zeffy adds.

  Joe nods. He takes the time to roll yet one more cigarette, twists it into shape, lights it.