Ivory and the Horn (5 page)

Tommy looks up when he hears the dogs starting to yap,’ and suddenly I’m inundated with my family, everybody trying to get a piece of hello from me at the same time. But the best thing is seeing that kind of sad expression that Tommy’s wearing too much these days broaden into the sweetest, happiest smile you can imagine. I don’t figure I’ve ever done anything to deserve all this unadulterated love, but I accept it—on credit, I guess. It makes me try harder to be good to them, to be worthy of that love.

I’ve got the trick down pat by now, ruffling the fur of six dogs and giving Tommy a hug without ever letting anybody feel left out. Aunt Hilary’s straightening up from her garden, hands at the small of her back as she stretches the kinks from her muscles. She’s smiling, too.

“We had a visitor,” she tells me when the pandemonium settles down into simple chaos.

Tommy’s leading me over to the big wooden tray on a patch of grass to show me what his paper people have been up to while I was gone this morning, and the dogs sort off mooch along beside us in an undulating wave.

“Anybody I know?” I ask Aunt Hilary.

“I suppose you must,” my landlady says, “but she didn’t leave a name. She just said she wanted to drop by to see how your family was making out—especially your son.”

I blink with surprise at that. “You mean Tommy?”

“Who else?”

Well, I guess he is like my kid, I think.

“What did she look like?” I ask, half-anticipating the answer.

“A bit like a homeless person, if you want to know the truth,” Aunt Hilary says. “She must have been wearing three or four dresses under her overcoat.”

“Was she black?”

“Yes, how did you—”

“Hair in dreadlocks with lots of buttons attached to them?”

Aunt Hilary nods. “And she kept fiddling with something in her pockets that made a rattle-y sort of sound.”

“That’s Shirley,” I say.

“So you do know her.”

“She’s an old friend,”

Aunt Hilary starts to say something else, but I lose the thread of her conversation because all I’m thinking is, I’m not crazy. Other people
can
see her. I was being pretty cool whenever Shirley showed up, but I have to admit to worrying that her presence was just the first stage of a nervous breakdown.

Suddenly I realize that I’m missing everything my landlady’s telling me about Shirley’s visit.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “What did you say?”

Aunt Hilary smiles. She’s used to my spacing out from time to time.

“Your friend didn’t stay long,” she says. “She just told Tommy what a handsome young man he was and patted each of the dogs with utter concentration, as though she wanted to remember them, and then she left. I asked her to stay for some lunch, or at least a cup of tea, because she looked so—well, hungry, I suppose. But she just shook her head and said, That’s very kind of you, but I don’t indulge anymore.’”

Aunt Hilary frowns. “At least I think that’s what she said. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, when you consider it.”

“That’s just Shirley,” I tell her.

I can tell Aunt Hilary wants to talk some more about it, but I turn the conversation to my plan for an outing to the park, inviting her along. She hasn’t got the time, she says— is probably looking forward to a few hours by herself, is what I hear, and I don’t blame her—but she gets right into helping me get a knapsack of goodies organized.

We have a great day. Nothing’s changed. I’ve still got to deal with my malaise, I’ve still got the ghost of a dead friend hanging around, but for a few hours I manage to put it all aside and it’s like old times again.

I haven’t seen Tommy this happy since I can’t remember when, and that makes me feel both glad and depressed.

There’s got to be a better way to live.

7

I decide it’s time to get some expert advice, so the next day I call in sick at work and head off down to Fitzhenry Park instead.

Everybody who spends most of their time on the streets isn’t necessarily a bum. Newford’s got more than its share of genuinely homeless people—the ones who don’t have any choice: winos, losers, the hopeless and the helpless, runaways, and far too many ordinary people who’ve lost their jobs, their homes, their future through no fault of their own. But it’s also got a whole subculture, if you will, of street musicians, performance artists, sidewalk vendors and the like.

Some are like me: They started out as runaways and then evolved into something like when I was making cash from trash. Others have a room in a boarding house or some old hotel and work the streets because that’s where their inclination lies. There’s not a whole lot of ways to make a living playing fiddle tunes or telling fortunes in other outlets, and the overhead is very affordable.

Fitzhenry Park is where a lot of that kind of action lies. It’s close to the Combat Zone, so you get a fair amount of hookers and even less-reputable types drifting down when they’re, let’s say, off-shift. But it’s also close to the Barrio, so the seedy element is balanced out with mothers walking in pairs and pushing strollers, old women gossiping in tight clusters, old men playing dominoes and checkers on the benches. Plus you get the lunch crowds from the downtown core which faces the west side of the park.

The other hot spot is down by the Pier, on the lakefront, but that’s geared more to the tourists, and the cops are tight-assed about permits and the like. If you’re going to get arrested for busking or hawking goods from a sidewalk cart or just plain panhandling, that’s the place it’ll happen.

The kind of person I was looking for now would work the park crowds and I found him without hardly even trying. He was just setting up for the day.

Bones is a Native American—a full-blooded Kickaha with dark coppery skin, broad features and a braid hanging down his back that’s almost as long as Angel’s hair. He got his name from the way he tells fortunes. He’ll toss a handful of tiny bones onto a piece of deerskin and read auguries from the pattern they make. He doesn’t really dress for the part, eschewing buckskins and beads for scuffed old work-boots, faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the arms torn off, but it doesn’t seem to hurt business.

I don’t really hold much with any of this mumbo-jumbo stuff—not Bones’s gig, nor what his girlfriend Cassie does with Tarot cards, nor Paperjack’s Chinese fortune-telling devices. But while I don’t believe that any of them can foretell the future, I still have to admit there’s something different about some of the people who work this schtick.

Take Bones.

The man has crazy eyes. Not crazy, you-better-lock-him-up kind of eyes, but crazy because maybe he sees something we can’t. Like there really is some other world lying draped across ours, and he can see right into it. Maybe he’s even been there. Lots of times, I figure he’s just clowning around, but sometimes that dark gaze of his locks onto you and then you see this seriousness lying behind the laughter and it’s like the Tombs all over again—a piece of the wilderness biding on a city street, a dislocating sensation like not only is anything possible, but it probably already exists.

Besides, who am I to make judgments these days? I’m being haunted by a ghost.

“How do, Maisie?” he says when I wheel my mountain bike up to the edge of the fountain where he’s sitting.

I prop the bike up on its kickstand, hang my helmet from one of the handlebars and sit down beside him. He’s fiddling with his bones, letting them tumble from one hand to the other. They make a sound like Shirley’s buttons, only more muted. I find myself wondering what kind of an animal they came from. Mice? Birds? I look up from his hands and see the clown is sitting in his eyes, laughing. Maybe with me, maybe at me—I can never tell.

“Haven’t seen you around much these days,” he adds.

“I’m going to school,” I tell him.

“Yeah?”

“And I’ve got a job.”

He looks at me for this long heartbeat and I get that glimpse of otherness that puts a weird shifting sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“So are you happy?” he asks.

That’s something no one ever asks when I tell them what I’m doing now. I pick at a piece of lint that’s stuck to the cuff of my shorts.

“Not really,” I tell him.

“Want to see what Nanabozo’s got in store for you?” he asks, holding up his bones.

I don’t know who Nanabozo is, but I get the idea.

“No,” I say. “I want to ask you about ghosts.”

He doesn’t even blink an eye. Just grins.

“What about them?”

“Well, what are they?” I ask.

“Souls that got lost,” he tells me, still smiling, but serious now, too.

I feel weird talking about this. It’s a sunny day, the park’s full of people, joggers, skateboarders, women with baby carriages, a girl on the bench just a few steps away .who probably looks sexy at night under a streetlight, the way she’s all tarted up, but now she just looks used. Nothing out of the ordinary, and here we are, talking about ghosts.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “How do they get lost?”

“There’s a Path of Souls, all laid out for us to follow when we die,” he tells me. “But some spirits can’t see it, so they wander the earth instead. Others can’t accept the fact that they’re dead yet, and they hang around too.”

 “A path.”

He nods.

“Like something you walk along.”

“Inasmuch as a spirit walks,” Bones says.

“My ghost says she missed a bus,” I tell him.

“Maybe it’s different for white people.”

“She’s black.”

He sits there, not looking at me, bones trailing from one hand to the other, making their tiny rattling sound.

“What do you really want to know?” he asks me.

“How do I help her?”

“Why don’t you try asking her?”

“I did, but all she gives me back are riddles.”

“Maybe you’re just not listening properly,” he says.

I think back on the conversations I’ve had with Shirley since I first saw her in the Tombs a few nights ago, but I can’t seem to focus on them. I remember being with her, I remember the feeling of what we talked about, but the actual content is muddy now. It seems to shift away as soon as I try to think about it.

“I’ve really seen her,” I tell Bones. “I was there when she died—almost four years ago—but she’s back. And other people have seen her, too.”

“I know you have,” he says.

I don’t even know why I was trying to convince him—it’s not like he’d be a person that needed convincing—but what he says, stops me.

“What do you mean?” I ask. It’s my question for the day.

“It’s in your eyes,” he says. “The Otherworld has touched you. Think of it as a blessing.”

“I don’t know if I like the idea,” I tell him. “I mean, I miss Shirley, and I actually feel kind of good about her being back, even if she is just a ghost, but it doesn’t seem right somehow.”

“Often,” he says, “what we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.”

There’s that look in his eyes, a feral seriousness, like it’s important, not so much that I understand, or even believe what he’s saying, but
that
he’s saying it.

“What … ?” I start, but then I figure it out. Part of it anyway.

When I first came to the city, I was pretty messed up, but then Shirley was there to help me. I’m messed up again, so–-

“So I’m just projecting her ghost?” I ask. “I need her help, so I’ve made myself a ghost of her?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but—”

“Ghosts have their own agendas,” he tells me. “Maybe you both have something to give to each other.”

We sit for awhile, neither of us speaking. I play with the whistle that hangs from a cord around my neck—all the messengers have them to blow at cars that’re trying to cut us off. Finally, I get up and take my bike off its kickstand. I look at Bones and that feral quality is still lying there in his grin. His eyes seem to be all pupil, dark, dark. I’m about to say thanks, but the words lock up in my throat. Instead I just nod, put on my helmet and go away to think about what he’s told me.

8

Tommy’s got this new story that he tells me after we’ve cleaned up the dinner dishes. We sit together at the kitchen table and he has his little paper people act it out for me. It’s about this Chinese man who falls down the crack in the pavement outside Aunt Hilary’s house and finds himself in this magic land where everybody’s a beautiful model or movie star and they all want to marry the Chinese guy except he misses his family too much, so he just tells them he can’t marry any of them—not even the woman who won the Oscar for her part in
Misery,
who for some reason, Tommy’s really crazy about.

I’ve got the old black lab Chuckie lying on my feet, Rexy snuggled up in my lap. Mutt and Jeff are tangled up in a heap on the sofa so that it’s hard to tell which part of them’s which. They’re a cross between a German Shepherd and who knows what; I found Jeff first and gave the other old, guy his name because the two were immediately inseparable. Jimmie’s part dachshund, part collie—I know, go figure—and his long, furry body is stretched out in front of the door like he’s a dust puppy. Patty’s mostly poodle, but there’s some kind of placid mix in there as well because she’s not at all high-strung. Right now she’s sitting in the bay window, checking the traffic and pretending to be a cat.