The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  * * *

  “So, have you asked her out yet?” Jilly wanted to know.

  We were sitting on a park bench, feeding pigeons the leftover crusts from our lunches. Jilly had worked with me at the post office, that Christmas they hired outside staff instead of letting the regular employees work the overtime, and we’d been friends ever since. These days she worked three nights a week as a waitress, while I made what I could busking on the Market with my father’s old Czech fiddle. Jilly was slender, with a thick tangle of brown hair and pale blue eyes, electric as sapphires. She had a penchant for loose clothing and fingerless gloves when she wasn’t waitressing. There were times, when I met her on the streets in the evening, that I mistook her for a baglady: skulking in an alleyway, gaze alternating between the sketchbook held in one hand and the faces of the people on the streets as they walked by. She had more sketches of me playing my fiddle than had any right to exist.

  “She’s never going to know how you feel until you talk to her about it,” Jilly went on when I didn’t answer.

  “I know.”

  I’ll make no bones about it: I was putting the make on Sam Rey and had been ever since she’d started to work at Gypsy Records half a year ago. I never much went in for the blond California beach-girl type, but Sam had a look all her own. She had some indefinable quality that went beyond her basic cheerleader appearance. Right. I can hear you already. Rationalizations of the North American libido. But it was true. I didn’t just want Sam in my bed; I wanted to know we were going to have a future together. I wanted to grow old with her. I wanted to build up a lifetime of shared memories.

  About the most Sam knew about all this was that I hung around and talked to her a lot at the record store.

  “Look,” Jilly said. “Just because she’s pretty, doesn’t mean she’s having a perfect life or anything. Most guys look at someone like her and they won’t even approach her because they’re sure she’s got men coming out of her ears. Well, it doesn’t always work that way. For instance—” she touched her breastbone with a narrow hand and smiled, “—consider yours truly.”

  I looked at her long fingers. Paint had dried under her nails.

  “You’ve started a new canvas,” I said.

  “And you’re changing the subject,” she replied. “Come on, Geordie. What’s the big deal? The most she can say is no.”

  “Well, yeah. But. . ”

  “She intimidates you, doesn’t she?”

  I shook my head. “I talk to her all the time.”

  “Right. And that’s why I’ve got to listen to your constant mooning over her.” She gave me a sudden considering look, then grinned. “I’ll tell you what, Geordie, me lad. Here’s the bottom line: I’ll give you twenty-four hours to ask her out. If you haven’t got it together by then, I’ll talk to her myself.”

  “Don’t even joke about it.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Jilly said firmly. She looked at the chocolate chip cookie in my hand. “Are you eating that?” she added in that certain tone of voice of hers that plainly said, all previous topics of conversation have been dealt with and completed. We are now changing topics.

  So we did. But all the while we talked, I thought about going into the record store and asking Sam out, because if I didn’t, Jilly would do it for me.

  Whatever else she might be, Jilly wasn’t shy. Having her go in to plead my case would be as bad as having my mother do it for me. I’d never be able to show my face in there again.

  * * *

  Gypsy Records is on Williamson Street, one of the city’s main arteries. The street begins as Highway 14 outside the city, lined with a sprawl of fast food outlets, malls and warehouses. On its way downtown, it begins to replace the commercial properties with ever-increasing handfuls of residential blocks until it reaches the downtown core where shops and low-rise apartments mingle in gossiping crowds.

  The store gets its name from John Butler, a short round-bellied man without a smidgen of Romany blood, who began his business out of the back of a hand-drawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years, always keeping just one step ahead of the municipal licensing board’s agents. While it carries the usual bestsellers, the lifeblood of its sales are more obscure titles—imports and albums published by independent record labels. Albums, singles and compact discs of punk, traditional folk, jazz, heavy metal and alternative music line its shelves. Barring Sam, most of those who work there would look just as at home in the fashion pages of the most current British alternative fashion magazines.

  Sam was wearing a blue cotton dress today, embroidered with silver threads. Her blond hair was cut in a short shag on the top, hanging down past her shoulders at the back and sides. She was dealing with a defect when I came in. I don’t know if the record in question worked or not, but the man returning it was definitely defective.

  “It sounds like there’s a radio broadcast right in the middle of the song,” he was saying as he tapped the cover of the Pink Floyd album on the counter between them.

  “It’s supposed to be there,” Sam explained. “It’s part of the song.” The tone of her voice told me that this conversation was going into its twelfth round or so.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” the man told her. “When I buy an album of music, I expect to get just music on it.”

  “You still can’t return it.”

  I worked in a record shop one Christmas—two years before the post office job. The best defect I got was from someone returning an in concert album by Marcel Marceau. Each side had thirty minutes of silence, with applause at the end—I kid you not.

  I browsed through the Celtic records while I waited for Sam to finish with her customer. I couldn’t afford any of them, but I liked to see what was new. Blasting out of the store’s speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though.

  By the time Sam was free I’d located five records I would have bought in

  more flush times. Leaving them in the bin, I drifted over to the front cash just

  as the Beastie Boys’ last cut ended. Sam replaced them with a tape of New Age

  piano music.

  “What’s the new Oyster Band like?” I asked.

  Sam smiled. “It’s terrific. My favourite cut’s ‘The Old Dance.’ It’s sort of an allegory based on Adam and Eve and the serpent that’s got a great hook in the chorus. Telfer’s fiddling just sort of skips ahead, pulling the rest of the song along.”

  That’s what I like about alternative record stores like Gypsy’s—the people working in them actually know something about what they’re selling.

  “Have you got an open copy?” I asked.

  She nodded and turned to the bin of opened records behind her to find it. With her back to me, I couldn’t get lost in those deep blue eyes of hers. I seized my opportunity and plunged ahead.

  “Areyouworkingtonight, wouldyouliketogooutwithmesomewhere?”

  I’d meant to be cool about it, except the words all blurred together as they left my throat. I could feel the flush start up the back of my neck as she turned and looked back at me with those baby blues.

  “Say what?” she asked.

  Before my throat closed up on me completely, I tried again, keeping it short.

  “Do you want to go out with me tonight?”

  Standing there with the Oyster Band album in her hand, I thought she’d never looked better. Especially when she said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I put in a couple of hours of busking that afternoon, down in Crowsea’s Market, the fiddle humming under my chin to the jingling rhythm of the coins that passersby threw into the case lying open in front of me. I came away with twenty-six dollars and change—not the best of days, but enough to buy a halfway decent dinner and a few beers.

  I picked up Sam after she finished work and we ate at The Monkey Woman’s Nest, a Mexican restaurant on
Williamson just a couple of blocks down from Gypsy’s. I still don’t know how the place got its name. Ernestina Verdad, the Mexican woman who owns the place, looks like a showgirl and not one of her waitresses is even vaguely simian in appearance.

  It started to rain as we were finishing our second beer, turning Williamson Street slick with neon reflections. Sam got a funny look on her face as she watched the rain through the window. Then she turned to me.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

  The serious look in her eyes stopped the half-assed joke that two beers brewed in the carbonated swirl of my mind. I never could hold my alcohol. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a buzz on.

  “I don’t think so,” I said carefully. “At least I’ve never seriously stopped to think about it.”

  “Come on,” she said, getting up from the table. “I want to show you something.”

  I let her lead me out into the rain, though I didn’t let her pay anything towards the meal. Tonight was my treat. Next time I’d be happy to let her do the honours.

  “Every time it rains,” she said, “a ghost comes walking down my street. . ”

  She told me the story as we walked down into Crowsea. The rain was light and I was enjoying it, swinging my fiddle case in my right hand, Sam hanging on to my left as though she’d always walked there. I felt like I was on top of the world, listening to her talk, feeling the pressure of her arm, the bump of her hip against mine.

  She had an apartment on the third floor of an old brick and frame building on Stanton Street. It had a front porch that ran the length of the house, dormer windows—two in the front and back, one on each side—and a sloped mansard roof. We stood on the porch, out of the rain which was coming down harder now. An orange and white tom was sleeping on the cushion of a white wicker chair by the door. He twitched a torn ear as we shared his shelter, but didn’t bother to open his eyes. I could smell the mint that was growing up alongside the porch steps, sharp in the wet air.

  Sam pointed down the street to where the yellow glare of a streetlamp glistened on the rain-slicked cobblestone walk that led to the Hamill estate. The Hamill house itself was separated from the street by a low wall and a dark expanse of lawn, bordered by the spreading boughs of huge oak trees.

  “Watch the street,” she said. “Just under the streetlight.”

  I looked, but I didn’t see anything. The wind gusted suddenly, driving the rain in hard sheets along Stanton Street, and for a moment we lost all visibility. When it cleared, he was standing there, Sam’s ghost, just like she’d told me. As he started down the street, Sam gave my arm a tug. I stowed my fiddle case under the tom’s wicker chair, and we followed the ghost down Henratty Lane.

  By the time he returned to the streetlight in front of the Hamill estate, I was ready to argue that Sam was mistaken. There was nothing in the least bit ghostly about the man we were following. When he returned up Henratty Lane, we had to duck into a doorway to let him pass. He never looked at us, but I could see the rain hitting him. I could hear the sound of his shoes on the pavement. He had to have come out of the walk that led up to the estate’s house, at the same time as that sudden gust of wind-driven rain. It had been a simple coincidence, nothing more. But when he returned to the streetlight, he lifted a hand to wipe his face, and then he was gone. He just winked out of existence. There was no wind. No gust of rain. No place he could have gone. A ghost.

  “Jesus,” I said softly as I walked over to the pool of light cast by the streetlamp. There was nothing to see. But there had been a man there. I was sure of that much.

  “We’re soaked,” Sam said. “Come on up to my place and I’ll make us some coffee.”

  The coffee was great and the company was better. Sam had a small clothes drier in her kitchen. I sat in the living room in an oversized housecoat while my clothes tumbled and turned, the machine creating a vibration in the floorboards that I’m sure Sam’s downstairs neighbours must have just loved. Sam had changed into a dark blue sweatsuit—she looked best in blue, I decided—and dried her hair while she was making the coffee. I’d prowled around her living room while she did, admiring her books, her huge record collection, her sound system, and the mantel above a working fireplace that was crammed with knickknacks.

  All her furniture was the kind made for comfort—they crouched like sleeping animals about the room. Fat sofa in front of the fireplace, an old pair of matching easy chairs by the window. The bookcases, record cabinet, side tables and trim were all natural wood, polished to a shine with furniture oil. We talked about a lot of things, sitting on the sofa, drinking our coffees, but mostly we talked about the ghost.

  “Have you ever approached him?” I asked at one point.

  Sam shook her head. “No. I just watch him walk. I’ve never even talked about him to anybody else.” That made me feel good. “You know, I can’t help but feel that he’s waiting for something, or someone. Isn’t that the way it usually works in ghost stories?”

  “This isn’t a ghost story,” I said.

  “But we didn’t imagine it, did we? Not both of us at the same time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But I knew someone who probably did. Jilly. She was into every sort of strange happening, taking all kinds of odd things seriously. I could remember her telling me that Bramley Dapple—one of her professors at Butler U. and a friend of my brother’s—was really a wizard who had a brown-skinned goblin for a valet, but the best thing I remembered about her was her talking about that scene in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs are all howling to send a message across town, one dog sending it out, another picking it up and passing it along, all the way across town and out into the country.

  “That’s how they do it,” she’d said. “Just like that.”

  And if you walked with her at night and a dog started to howl, if no other dog picked it up, then she’d pass it on. She could mimic any dog’s bark or howl so perfectly it was uncanny. It could also be embarrassing, because she didn’t care who was around or what kinds of looks she got. It was the message that had to be passed on that was important.

  When I told Sam about Jilly, she smiled, but there wasn’t any mockery in her smile. Emboldened, I related the ultimatum that Jilly had given me this afternoon.

  Sam laughed aloud. “Jilly sounds like my kind of person,” she said. “I’d like to meet her.”

  When it started to get late, I collected my clothes and changed in the bathroom. I didn’t want to start anything, not yet, not this soon, and I knew that Sam felt the same way, though neither of us had spoken of it. She kissed me at the door, a long warm kiss that had me buzzing again.

  “Come see me tomorrow?” she asked. “At the store?”

  “Just try and keep me away,” I replied.

  I gave the old tom on the porch a pat and whistled all the way home to my own place on the other side of Crowsea.

  * * *

  Jilly’s studio was its usual organized mess. It was an open loft-like affair that occupied half of the second floor of a four-story brown brick building on Yoors Street where Foxville’s low rentals mingle with Crowsea’s shops and older houses. One half of the studio was taken up with a Murphy bed that was never folded back into the wall, a pair of battered sofas, a small kitchenette, storage cabinets and a tiny box-like bathroom obviously designed with dwarves in mind.

  Her easel stood in the other half of the studio, by the window where it could catch the morning sun. All around it were stacks of sketchbooks, newspapers, unused canvases and art books. Finished canvases leaned face front, five to ten deep, against the back wall. Tubes of paint covered the tops of old wooden orange crates—the new ones lying in neat piles like logs by a fireplace, the used ones in a haphazard scatter, closer to hand. Brushes sat waiting to be used in mason jars. Others were in liquid waiting to be cleaned. Still more, their brushes stiff with dried paint, lay here and there on the floor like discarded

  pick-up-sticks.

  The room smelled of
oil paint and turpentine. In the corner furthest from the window was a life-sized fabric maché sculpture of an artist at work that bore an uncanny likeness to Jilly herself, complete with Walkman, one paintbrush in hand, another sticking out of its mouth. When I got there that morning, Jilly was at her new canvas, face scrunched up as she concentrated. There was already paint in her hair. On the windowsill behind her a small ghetto blaster was playing a Bach fugue, the piano notes spilling across the room like a light rain. Jilly looked up as I came in, a frown changing liquidly into a smile as she took in the foolish look on my face.

  “I should have thought of this weeks ago,” she said. “You look like the cat who finally caught the mouse. Did you have a good time?”

  “The best.”

  Leaving my fiddle by the door, I moved around behind her so that I could see what she was working on. Sketched out on the white canvas was a Crowsea street scene. I recognized the corner—McKennitt and Lee. I’d played there from time to time, mostly in the spring. Lately a rockabilly band called the Broken Hearts had taken over the spot.

  “Well?” Jilly prompted.

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to give me all the lovely sordid details?”

  I nodded at the painting. She’d already started to work in the background with oils.

  “Are you putting in the Hearts?” I asked.

  Jilly jabbed at me with her paintbrush, leaving a smudge the colour of a Crowsea red brick tenement on my jean jacket.

  “I’ll thump you if you don’t spill it all, Geordie, me lad. Just watch if I don’t.”

  She was liable to do just that, so I sat down on the ledge behind her and talked while she painted. We shared a pot of her cowboy coffee which was what Jilly called the foul brew she made from used coffee grounds. I took two spoons of sugar to my usual one, just to cut back on the bitter taste it left in my throat. Still beggars couldn’t be choosers. That morning I didn’t even have used coffee grounds at my own place.

  “I like ghost stories,” she said when I was finished telling her about my evening. She’d finished roughing out the buildings by now and bent closer to the canvas to start working on some of the finer details before she lost the last of the morning light.