Dreams Underfoot n-1

by Charles de Lint

  I showed her the picture I had of Sam. There was a street number on the porch’s support pillar to the right of the steps and enough of the house in the picture that I’d be able to match it up to the real thing. If I could find out what street it was on. If the house still existed.

  “This could take forever,” Amy said as she laid the photo down on the desk.

  “I’ve got the time.”

  Amy laughed. “I suppose you do. I don’t know how you do it, Geordie. Everyone else in the world has to bust their buns to make a living, but you just cruise on through.”

  “The trick’s having a low overhead,” I said.

  Amy just rolled her eyes. She’d been to my apartment, and there wasn’t much to see: a spare fiddle hanging on the wall with a couple of Dilly’s paintings; some tune books with tattered covers and some changes of clothing; one of those oldfashioned record players that had the turntable and speakers all in one unit and a few albums leaning against the side of the apple crate it sat on; a couple of bows that desperately needed rehairing; the handful of used paperbacks I’d picked up for the week’s reading from Duffy’s Used Books over on Walker Street; and a little beatup old cassette machine with a handful of tapes.

  And that was it. I got by.

  I waited at the desk while Amy got the books we needed. She came back with an armload. Most had Newford in the title, but a few also covered that period of time when the city was still called Yoors, after the Dutchman Diederick van Yoors, who first settled the area in the early 1800s. It got changed to Newford back around the turn of the century, so all that’s left now to remind the city of its original founding father is a street name.

  Setting the books down before me on the desk, Amy went off into the stacks to look for some more obscure titles. I didn’t wait for her to get back, but went ahead and started flipping through the first book on the pile, looking carefully at the pictures.

  I started off having a good time. There’s a certain magic in old photos, especially when they’re of the place where you grew up. They cast a spell over you. Dirt roads where now there was pavement, sided by office complexes. The old Brewster Theatre in its heyday—I remembered it as the place where I first saw Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and later allnight movie festivals, but the Williamson Street Mall stood there now. Boating parties on the river. Old City Hall—it was a youth hostel these days.

  But my enthusiasm waned with the afternoon. By the time the library closed, I was no closer to getting a street name for the house in Sam’s photo than I had been when I came in. Amy gave me a sympathetic “I told you so” look when we separated on the front steps of the library. I just told her I’d see her tomorrow.

  I had something to eat at Kathryn’s Cafe. I’d gone there hoping to see Jilly, only I’d forgotten it was her night off. I tried calling her when I’d finished eating, but she was out. So I took my fiddle over to the theatre district and worked the crowds waiting in line there for an a hour or so before I headed off for home, my pockets heavy with change.

  That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt like a hole sort of opened in the air above my bed. Lying there, I found myself touring New—

  ford—just floating through its streets. Though the time was the present, there was no color.

  Everything appeared in the same sepia tones as in my photo of Sam.

  I don’t remember when I finally did fall asleep.

  The next morning I was at the library right when it opened, carrying two cups of takeout coffee in a paper bag, one of which I offered to Amy when I got to her desk. Amy muttered something like, “when owls prowl the day, they shouldn’t look so bloody cheerful about it,” but she accepted the coffee and cleared a corner of her desk so that I could get back to the books.

  In the photo I had of Sam there was just the edge of a bay window visible beside the porch, with fairly unique rounded gingerbread trim running offfrom either side ofits keystone. I’d thought it would be the clue to tracking down the place. It looked almost familiar, but I was no longer sure ifthat was because I’d actually seen the house at some time, or it was just from looking at the photo so much.

  Unfortunately, those details weren’t helping at all.

  “You know, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find a picture of the house you’re looking for in those books,” Amy said around midmorning when she was taking her coffee break. “They didn’t exactly go around taking pictures of everything.”

  I was at the last page of Walks Through Old Crowsea. Closing the book, I set it on the finished pile beside my chair and then leaned back, lacing my fingers behind my head. My shoulders were stiff from sitting hunched over a desk all morning.

  “I know. I’m going to give Jack a call when I’m done here to see if I can borrow his bike this afternoon.”

  “You’re going to pedal all around town looking for this house?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “There’s always the archives at the main library.”

  I nodded, feeling depressed. It had seemed like such a good idea yesterday. It was still a good idea.

  I just hadn’t realized how long it would take.

  “Or you could go someplace like the Market and show the photo around to some of the older folks.

  Maybe one of them will remember the place.”

  “I suppose.”

  I picked up the next book, The Architectural Heritage of Old Yoors, and went back to work.

  And there it was, on page thirtyeight. The house. There were three buildings in a row in the photo; the one I’d been looking for was the middle one. I checked the caption: “Grasso Street, circa 1920.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Amy said. I must have made some kind of a noise, because she was looking up at me from her own work. “You found it, didn’t you?” she added.

  “I think so. Have you got a magnifying glass?”

  She passed it over, and I checked out the street number of the middle house. Oneforty-two. The same as in my photo.

  Amy took over then. She phoned a friend who worked in the land registry office. He called back a half hour later and gave us the name of the owner in 1912, when my photo had been taken: Edward Dickenson. The house had changed hands a number of times since the Dickensons had sold it in the forties.

  We checked the phone book, but there were over a hundred Dickensons listed, twelve with just an initial “E” and one Ed. None of the addresses were on Grasso Street.

  “Which makes sense,” Amy said, “since they sold the place fifty years ago.”

  I wanted to run by that block on Grasso where the house was—I’d passed it I don’t know how many times, and never paid much attention to it or any of its neighbors—but I needed more background on the Dickensons first. Amy showed me how to run the microfiche, and soon I was going through back issues of The Newford Star and The Daily Journal, concentrating on the local news sections and the gossip columns.

  The first photo of Edward Dickenson that came up was in The Daily Journal, the June 21st, 1913, issue. He was standing with the Dean of Butler University at some opening ceremony. I compared him to the people with Sam in my photo and found him standing behind her to her left.

  Now that I was on the right track, I began to work in a kind of frenzy. I whipped through the microfiche, making notes of every mention of the Dickensons. Edward turned out to have been a stockbroker, one of the few who didn’t lose his shirt in subsequent market crashes. Back then the money lived in Lower Crowsea, mostly on McKennitt, Grasso, and Stanton Streets. Edward made the papers about once a month—business deals, society galas, fundraising events, political dinners, and the like. It wasn’t until I hit the October 29, 1915, issue of The Newford Star that I had the wind knocked out of my sails.

  It was the picture that got to me: Sam and a man who was no stranger. I’d seen him before. He was the ghost that had stepped out of the past and stolen her away. Under the photo was a caption announcing the engagement of Thomas Edward Dickenson, son of the
wellknown local businessman, to Samantha Rey.

  In the picture of Sam that I had, Dickenson wasn’t there with the rest of the people—he’d probably taken it. But here he was. Real. With Sam. I couldn’t ignore it.

  Back then they didn’t have the technology to make a photograph lie.

  There was a weird buzzing in my ears as that picture burned its imprint onto my retinas. It was hard to breathe, and my Tshirt suddenly seemed too tight.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but I knew it wasn’t this. I suppose I thought I’d track down the people in the picture and find out that the woman who looked like Sam was actually named Gertrude somethingor-other, and she’d lived her whole life with that family. I didn’t expect to find Sam. I didn’t expect the ghost to have been real.

  I was in a daze as I put away the microfiche and shut down the machine.

  “Geordie?” Amy asked as I walked by her desk. “Are you okay?”

  I remember nodding and muttering something about needing a break. I picked up my fiddle and headed for the front door. The next thing I remember is standing in front of the address on Grasso Street and looking at the Dickensons’ house.

  I had no idea who owned it now; I hadn’t been paying much attention to Amy after she told me that the Dickensons had sold it. Someone had renovated it fairly recently, so it didn’t look at all the same as in the photos, but under its trendy additions, I could see the lines of the old house.

  I sat down on the curb with my fiddlecase across my knees and just stared at the building. The buzzing was back in my head. My shirt still felt too tight.

  I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I just sat there, trying to make sense out of what couldn’t be reasoned away. I no longer had any doubt that Sam had been real, or that a ghost had stolen her away.

  The feeling of loss came back all over again, as if it had happened just now, not three years ago. And what scared me was, if she and the ghost were real, then what else might be?

  I closed my eyes, and headlines of supermarket tabloids flashed across my eyes, a strobing flicker of bizarre images and words. That was the world Jilly lived in—one in which anything was possible. I didn’t know if I could handle living in that kind of world. I needed rules and boundaries. Patterns.

  It was a long time before I got up and headed for Kathryn’s Cafe.

  The first thing Jilly asked when I got in the door was, “Have you seen Paperjack?”

  It took me a few moments to push back the clamor of my own thoughts to register what she’d asked.

  Finally I just shook my head.

  “He wasn’t at St. Paul’s today,” Ply went on, “and he’s always there, rain or shine, winter or summer. I didn’t think he was looking well yesterday, and now ...”

  I tuned her out and took a seat at an empty table before I could fall down. That feeling of dislocation that had started up in me when I first saw Sam’s photo in the microfiche kept coming and going in waves.

  It was cresting right now, and I found it hard to just sit in the chair, let alone listen to what Jilly was saying. I tuned her back in when the spaciness finally started to recede.

  .. heart attack, who would he call? He can’t speak.”

  “I saw him yesterday,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm. “Around midafternoon. He seemed fine.”

  “He did?”

  I nodded. “He was down by the Pier, sitting on the riverbank, feeding the ducks. He read my fortune.”

  “He did?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a broken record, Jilly.”

  For some reason, I was starting to feel better. That sense of being on the verge of a panic attack faded and then disappeared completely. Jilly pulled up a chair and leaned across the table, elbows propped up, chin cupped in her hands.

  “So tell me,” she said. “What made you do it? What was your fortune?”

  I told her everything that had happened since I had seen Paperjack. That sense of dislocation came and went again a few times while I talked, but mostly I was holding firm.

  “Holy shit!” Jilly said when I was done.

  She put her hand to her mouth and looked quickly around, but none of the customers seemed to have noticed. She reached a hand across the table and caught one of mine.

  “So now you believe?” she asked.

  “I don’t have a whole lot of choice, do I?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I shrugged. “What’s to do? I found out what I needed to know—now I’ve got to learn to live with it and all the other baggage that comes with it.”

  Jilly didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just held my hand and exuded comfort as only Jilly can.

  “You could find her,” she said finally.

  “Who? Sam?”

  “Who else?”

  “She’s probably—” I stumbled over the word dead and settled for—not even alive anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” Jilly said. “She’d definitely be old. But don’t you think you should find out?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. And if she were alive, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her. What could we say to each other? “Think about it, anyway,” Jilly said.

  That was Jilly; she never took no for an answer.

  “I’m off at eight,” she said. “Do you want to meet me then?”

  “What’s up?” I asked, halfheartedly.

  “I thought maybe you’d help me find Paperjack.”

  I might as well, I thought. I was becoming a bit of an expert in tracking people down by this point.

  Maybe I should get a card printed: Geordie Riddell, Private Investigations and Fiddle Tunes.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  “Great,” Jilly said.

  She bounced up from her seat as a couple of new customers came into the cafe. I ordered a coffee from her after she’d gotten them seated, then stared out the window at the traffic going by on Battersfield. I tried not to think of Sam—trapped in the past, making a new life for herself there—but I might as well have tried to jump to the moon.

  By the time filly came off shift I was feeling almost myself again, but instead of being relieved, I had this great load of guilt hanging over me. It all centered around Sam and the ghost. I’d denied her once.

  Now I felt as though I was betraying her all over again. Knowing what I knew—the photo accompanying the engagement notice in that old issue of The Newford Star flashed across my mind—the way I was feeling at the moment didn’t seem right. I felt too normal; and so the guilt.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Jilly as we walked down Battersfield towards the Pier. “This afternoon I was falling to pieces, but now I just feel ...”

  “Calm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s because you’ve finally stopped fighting yourself and accepted that what you saw—what you remember—really happened. It was denial that was screwing you up.”

  She didn’t add, “I told you so,” but she didn’t have to. It echoed in my head anyway, joining the rest of the guilt I was carrying around with me. If I’d only listened to her with an open mind, then ... what?

  I wouldn’t be going through this all over again?

  We crossed Lakeside Drive and made our way through the closed concession and souvenir stands to the beach. When we reached the Pier, I led her westward to where I’d last seen Paperjack, but he wasn’t sitting by the river anymore. A lone duck regarded us hopefully, but neither of us had thought to bring any bread.

  “So I track down Sam,” I said, still more caught up in my personal quest than in looking for Paperjack. “If she’s not dead, she’ll be an old lady. If I find her—then what?”

  “You’ll complete the circle,” Jilly said. She looked away from the river and faced me, her pixie features serious. “It’s like the Kickaha say: everything is on a wheel. You stepped off the one that represents your relationship with Sam before it came full circle. Until you complete your turn on it, you’ll n
ever have peace of mind.”

  “When do you know you’ve come full circle?” I asked.

  “You’ll know.”

  She turned away before I could go on and started back towards the Pier. By day the place was crowded and full of noise, alive with tourists and people out relaxing, just looking to have a good time; by night, its occupancy was turned over to gangs of kids, fooling around on skateboards or simply hanging out, and the homeless: winos, bag ladies, hoboes, and the like.

  Jilly worked the crowd, asking after Paperjack, while I followed in her wake. Everybody knew him, or had seen him in the past week, but no one knew where he was now, or where he lived. We were about to give up and head over to Fitzhenry Park to start over again with the people hanging out there, when we heard the sound of a harmonica. It was playing the blues, a soft, mournful sound that drifted up from the beach.

  We made for the nearest stairs and then walked back across the sand to find the Bossman sitting under the boardwalk, hands cupped around his instrument, head bowed down, eyes closed. There was no one listening to him except us. The people with money to throw in his old cloth cap were having dinner now in the fancy restaurants across Lakeside Drive or over in the theatre district. He was just playing for himself.

  When he was busking, he stuck to popular pieces—whatever was playing on the radio mixed with old show tunes, jazz favorites, and that kind of thing. The music that came from his harmonica now was pure magic. It transformed him, making him larger than life. The blues he played held all the world’s sorrows in its long sliding notes and didn’t so much change it, as make it bearable.

  My fingers itched to pull out my fiddle and join him, but we hadn’t come to jam. So we waited until he was done. The last note hung in the air for far longer than seemed possible, then he brought his hands away from his mouth and cradled the harmonica on his lap. He looked up at us from under drooping eyelids, the magic disap—

  pearing now that he’d stopped playing. He was just an old, homeless black man now, with the faint trace of a smile touching his lips. “Hey, Jill—Geordie,” he said. “What’s doin’?”

  “We’re looking for Paperjack,” Jilly told him.