Trader

by Charles de Lint

“Okay,” he says, through a cloud of grey-blue smoke. “Then I see only one way for you to set your mind at ease. You’ve got to lay on the hands again and find out what’ll happen. I’m saying nothing.”

  So we’re back to courage again. It’s a funny thing, I’d step right in if it was Nia or Zeffy or Buddy that might get hurt, step in and take the hurt. But this, when it’s only me, when I could just as easily walk away...

  “Thing you’ve got to ask yourself,” Joe adds as though he’s reading my mind, “is how badly do you want to know?”

  Part of me wants to turn my back on the body right now and walk away. But I know I’ll get no peace until I find out, one way or the other. I can’t leave without knowing for sure.

  Joe gives me a sympathetic look—I guess he knows how hard this is. I don’t think either Zeffy or Nia quite understand what could happen to me. But Buddy does. He whines when I get up and reluctantly follows me to where the corpse is lying on the stones behind us.

  It seems no more real than it did before. Still no smell, no flies. But I can barely recognize it now. It’s like looking at a stranger, someone I might have gone to school with but haven’t seen in years.

  “Wait a sec now,” Zeffy says. “You can’t—”

  But I do. I have to. I don’t hesitate, but reach out to touch for it because I have to know.

  Zeffy grabs at my hand.

  “Let him do it,” Joe says. “Unless you want him brooding about it for the rest of his life.”

  She looks deep into my eyes and that makes it harder still, because I can see she cares for me—for me, the guy inside, not Devlin. But she slowly lets my hand go. I reach for the corpse’s cheek again, feel the cold waxy skin. I shiver, but I stay rooted in Devlin’s body. When I take my hand away, I realize everybody’s been holding their breath—myself included.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m okay now.”

  We raise a cairn over the body. It’s hot, sweaty work, but it’s got to be done. It completes the story, lets us put it away and get on with our lives. At the end, Nia takes her magic marker out of her pocket and writes on the top stone: JOHN DEVLIN, R.I.P. And it’s done.

  I stand there for a long time, reading the words she’s written. I’m here, reading them, but I’m under those stones, too. There’s a real ache in my chest when I finally turn away, a sense of loss that I’m not sure I’ll ever escape. I remember being a kid and pretending to be somebody else. Now I look like somebody else. I get a little crazy, worrying at it. I guess I always will.

  The spirits are still watching us, but I guess the big guns haven’t shown up yet, or maybe we caught them in a moment of sympathy. Maybe they think we’ve seen enough hardship for the time being and deserve a break. Or maybe, Nia confides in me, it’s Joe being kin to them. But they let us raise the cairn, flitting shapes, part animal, part human, watching us work from the shadows under the trees. And they let us leave.

  We head back to Joe’s truck. He drives along the riverbed for a mile or so until the trail we’re all expecting shows up. Ten minutes later the trail gives out, but there’s only the meadows that front Janossy’s farm to traverse before we’re driving into the farmyard and pulling up in front of the house. I collect the guitar I was working on, a case for it and my knapsack.

  “This is for you,” I tell her, handing her the guitar.

  She shakes her head. “I couldn’t...”

  “I can’t play both and it’d mean a lot to me if you’d take it.”

  She holds it with the respect the instrument deserves, having known the touch of Janossy’s hands, and I feel bad all over again for what happened in the park. I smile as she sits down on the front porch and has to tune it up, try it out right away. She runs through a beautiful old-timey folk tune, finger-picking the melody, thumb picking out the bass line, a sweet high lonesome Appalachian sound. Right then, if I hadn’t been sure before, I know I made the right decision in giving it to her. That instrument’s going to get a lot of love and play.

  “What’s in the knapsack that’s so important?” Nia asks.

  “It’s all I’ve got left of my old life. Pictures of my parents. A journal Janossy left me. Some tools. Stuff I can’t replace.”

  Zeffy looks up from the guitar and shakes her head. “You’ve still got your old life up here,” she says, tapping her temple. “Nobody can take that away. And everything else is waiting for you at your shop.”

  “It’s not my shop anymore.”

  “So have Trader sign it over to you,” Nia says.

  Zeffy nods. “You can be the apprentice that nobody knew he had.”

  “I don’t know. Devlin Guitars?”

  “Keep the old name.”

  It feels good worrying about something so mundane, instead of what I’ve been going through the past few days. I’m looking forward to normal, though I remember my promise to myself and refuse to get complacent about any of it.

  Joe’s ready to send us back now, but Zeffy asks him to hold on.

  “I’ve been trying to decide on a moment to give you,” she says to Joe. She smiles. “You know, one of those stories that’ll make it easier for you to cross over yourself.”

  Joe shakes his head. “Don’t you worry about me crossing over or staying here. I make do. Always have.”

  “You think I’m doing this out of charity,” Zeffy says.

  “No, I’m thinking it doesn’t need to be done.”

  “Maybe I’d just like to know we might see you again.”

  “Look for me hard enough,” Joe says, “and you will. I’m not that hard to find. The thing is, I’m not exactly the safest person to be around. It’s a genetic thing—got too much Coyote in me. Now, you caught me on a good day, first time we met, and I took a shine to you and all. The next time we meet I might mess up your lives. I won’t mean to, but I just don’t think things through the way I should. That kind of thing happens around me.”

  “I don’t care,” Zeffy says. “The thing with friends is, you’ve got to take the good with the bad—treat them with the same openheartedness as how you want them to treat you. Nobody’s perfect.” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “You did mean that about being friends?”

  Joe nods. “Yeah, but mostly I just wanted to see how the story’d turn out.”

  Zeffy gives him a long considering look.

  “Bullshit,” she says.

  I have to smile. I do like the brass of this woman.

  “Anyway,” she goes on. “Like I said, I started thinking and the best moment I could come up with was at my very first gig. It was just a spot at a little folk club, the room held maybe forty people and it was only half full. I was so scared I could barely hang on to my guitar but after I got through my three songs and those twenty or so people applauded—not just politely, but like they’d actually enjoyed my performance—I realized that I could really do this. I could be a singer and write songs and play the guitar and it didn’t matter how long it took, that’s what I was going to do.”

  Joe doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He looks away, across Janossy’s fields. There’s a shiver around his features, a flash of coal-black feathers, the spirit face I hadn’t seen until just this moment; then the man’s back, dark crow eyes looking at her, shiny in the bright sunlight.

  “That’s a powerful piece of medicine,” he says. “You better hang on to it.”

  “But I want you to have it.”

  “You know if you give it to me, you’ll lose it and you won’t get it back?”

  Zeffy nods. He hesitates a moment longer, then he puts a hand on either side of her head. She gives a small gasp, eyes widening slightly, and it’s over. She seems a little unsteady, but recovers quickly.

  “You okay?” Joe asks, worried.

  “I’m fine.”

  Nia gives him a story, too. “I guess I’m a little young to have much in the way of life-changing epiphanies,” she apologizes, but then she lets him take the moment she first heard Miles Davis, sitting in a co
ffee bar while she’s waiting for her mother to get her hair done in a nearby salon, radio behind the bar tuned to a jazz station.

  “I had no idea that kind of music even existed,” she says. “It really spoke to me. It was the first time something like that ever spoke so directly, you know, reached right into me and helped me make sense of things I was feeling. So that was a way special moment for me. People—like my mom and the kids at school—think I’m into it and beat poetry and that kind of stuff just to be different, but it’s not like that.”

  “Maybe you’re an old soul,” Zeffy says.

  I think of how Nia has always loved to hear about Janossy, about his beat days and the poets and musicians he knew, so maybe Zeffy’s right. There’s always a reason we are the way we are and after the experience I’ve been through, I’m not so ready to toss out the concept of reincarnation.

  I’m ready to give him a story, too, the most intense and meaningful moment, the most defining moment, I can call to mind: that feeling I had coming back into Devlin’s body. But I’m looking at Joe and suddenly something twigs. I reach into my pocket and hand over the hickory-handled knife I’ve been carrying around with me—ever since he gave it to me.

  “Thanks for the loan,” I say.

  He looks at the knife, lying there in the palm of his hand, then lifts his gaze to search mine.

  “How’d you know?” he says.

  “It wasn’t any one thing,” I tell him, “just a lot of little pieces that only added up now. Something about the way you carry yourself and talk—it’s different, but not different enough. The way you referred to the animal spirits as cousins, not really including yourself in their number.”

  Zeffy and Nia are both starting to catch on.

  “Crazy Dog,” I say. “Now that seems a name somebody with a bit of Coyote in him might wear—or at least what people might call him. And Jenna— back in Fitzhenry Park—told me how you’re always taking these mysterious trips and coming back with a look in your eyes like you’ve been someplace outside the world. Like here.”

  “Is this true?” Zeffy says.

  Bones nods. Something shifts in his features and for a moment he looks the way he did when I met him in Fitzhenry Park, then he’s back to looking like Joe Crow again.

  “I start with a look when I cross over to here and it’s hard to lose it till I get back,” he explains.

  Zeffy’s seriously not happy about this. “So all this time, you were lying to us.”

  “Lying how?”

  “Well, you...that is...”

  “I came looking for you is all,” Bones says. “Never told you a lie—just didn’t tell you everything.”

  “You said your name was Joe.”

  “That is my name. Joseph Crazy Dog.”

  Nia gets an “ah-ha” look. “That’s what Jilly called him,” she says. “Remember?”

  Zeffy seems reluctant, but she concedes the point.

  “Took me a while to track you down,” Bones goes on, “but then when I did find you, seems you were pretty determined to see things through so I decided I’d better tag along to keep an eye on you, make sure neither of you got hurt.”

  "Why didn’t you just tell us who you were?”

  Bones shrugs. "Because then you’d’ve always been looking to me for the answers instead of thinking for yourselves.” He pauses, then adds, “I meant it about being your friend.”

  “But these stories we gave you...”

  “The draw’s deeper on me, here in the spiritworld. I really do need the stories if I want to spend much time on the other side.”

  “I should be really mad at you,” Zeffy says.

  Nia shakes her head, says, “I’m not,” and Zeffy sighs.

  “No,” she says. “I guess I’m not either. Too much Coyote in you, huh?”

  Bones shakes his head. “He gets a bad rap.”

  “This from the guy who tells us that the next time he meets us he might mess up our lives because that kind of thing tends to happen around him?”

  Bones shrugs. He and I look at each other for a long moment; then I step over to him and give him that story I’ve been holding for him.

  “How’s that mojo now?” Nia asks, grinning.

  “Burning,” Bones says, his voice soft. “Dropped in me like hot coals.” He looks as though he’s going to add something else, but then sets to rolling himself a cigarette instead. “Time I got you folks home,” he said, thumbing a match alight.

  “You’re not coming?” Nia asks.

  “No. I’ve got a bit of unfinished business to attend to first.”

  He stoops to pat Buddy, then starts to shake Zeffy’s hand, but she won’t allow that and hugs him instead. Nia, too. Even me. But I’m thanking Bones, the man that helped me out in Fitzhenry Park, not this guy that Nia and Zeffy traveled across the spiritworld with.

  “Guess maybe now you know why I never settled down,” he says.

  “Guess I do,” I tell him.

  “You’ve been good to us,” Zeffy says. “Thanks for everything.”

  “You’ve been better,” Bones tells her.

  The old vertigo returns as he sends us back, leaving us all clinging to each other, Buddy whining, until we find ourselves in the snow that’s covering the lawns of Fitzhenry Park, where we lose our balance and fall in a tangle of limbs.

  WALKING LARGE AS TREES

  To discover who you are, first learn

  who everybody else is—and you're what's left.

  —attributed to Ashleigh Brilliant

  1 ZEFFY

  Nia scrambled to her feet first, then took the guitar case from Zeffy while Max gave her a hand up. They were alone in the park except for an old man sitting on a nearby bench who appeared to be wearing at least two overcoats and three hats, so bundled up he looked twice his size. He was facing the white lawns that ran down to the tree line and hadn’t seemed to notice their remarkable arrival, didn’t know they were there at all until he heard Buddy. He looked around at them, then returned to his contemplation of the wintered park while Buddy ran in circles around the three of them, barking, throwing up snow. Zeffy smiled at his enthusiasm until the snow and cold registered.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” she said as she took the guitar case back from Nia.

  Nia nodded. “How can it be winter? We were only gone three days.”

  “Four,” Max said.

  “No, definitely three,” Zeffy said. “I kept track.”

  “Me, too. We must have been on different time lines over there—at least until we met this morning.”

  “And a whole different one from here,” Nia said slowly.

  Zeffy knew Nia was worrying about her mother and what she must be thinking. Disappearing as Nia had for a few days was bad enough, but what if years had gone by? Then another thought struck her.

  “How do we know we’re even where we want to be?” she said.

  Nia gave her a nervous look. “What do you mean? This is definitely Fitzhenry Park.”

  “But is it the Fitzhenry Park we know, or one in some other world?” Zeffy rubbed at her temples with her free hand and grimaced. “This is making my head ache.”

  “And it’s cold,” Max said.

  He led the way to where the park opened out onto Palm Street and stopped in front of one of the red metal Newford Star boxes. His face went pale as he read the date on the newspaper.

  “Monday. February twentieth.”

  This was too scary weird, Zeffy thought. Rip Van Winkle scary weird. Maybe she’d gotten a little used to the magical way expectations worked out in the spiritworld, acclimatization and all that, but she hadn’t expected the strangeness to bleed back into this world with them. How much time had they lost?

  “What...what year?” she asked, not sure if she really wanted to know the answer.

  “Nineteen ninety-five.”

  “That’s...my god. We’ve been gone eight months.”

  It could have been worse, a small part of he
r mind tried to reason. It could have been years. A century. They might never have come back. But she wasn’t able to take comfort from any of that—not with a sudden eight-month hole in her life. She’d missed her gig, opening for Glory Mad Dog. She’d have lost her job. Probably her apartment. What would Tanya have done? And all her things. Max’s guitar...

  Beside her Nia began to tremble, as much from shock as the cold. Zeffy wanted to comfort her—she went so far as to put her arm around Nia’s shoulders—but the cold had lodged deep inside her as well and she doubted she had any warmth or solace to spare.

  “We’ve got to get out of this weather,” Max said.

  He stepped to the curb and tried to hail a cab, but none of them would stop. Because of Buddy, Zeffy realized. Didn’t want dog hair and slobber all over their nice clean, warm upholstery.

  “Try it where they can’t see we’ve got Buddy with us,” she said, “and then we’ll just bully our way in.”

  Leaving Nia’s side, she took Buddy by the collar and walked far enough away from the others to make it look as though they weren’t together. Max hailed another cab and this one stopped immediately. While Max got in the front seat and engaged the driver in conversation, Nia held the back door open for Zeffy and Buddy.

  “No dogs,” the cabbie said when he saw Buddy getting in.

  “C’mon,” Max said. “He’ll lie on the floor—what’s he going to hurt?”

  The cabbie shook his head. “Don’t want my cab full of fleas and smelling like a dog.”

  After all they’d been through, this was too much for Zeffy. She leaned forward, the guitar case pressing uncomfortably into her midriff, her face only inches from that of the cabbie, and glared at him.

  “Look,” she said. “We’re cold and we’re tired and if you don’t get this car moving I’m going to tell the dog to sic balls, got it?”

  Both Max and Nia looked at her in surprise, and even a little embarrassment, but Zeffy didn’t care. She locked her gaze onto the cabbie’s, staring him down until he slowly turned and pulled the cab out onto the street.

  “Thank you,” Zeffy said sweetly and settled back into her seat.