Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

“Grumpy means I’d be snapping at everyone. Depressed means I just want to go slit my wrists or something.”

“Cool. Am I in your will?”

Hunter shook his head.

“Then I’d think this whole thing through a little more carefully before you do anything that drastic.”

“You’re so sweet.”

Miki nodded. “Many people say that.”

She joined him behind the cash and stuffed her jacket under the counter. The black T-shirt she wore was missing its sleeves and sported a DIY slogan, carelessly applied with white paint: “Ani DiFranco Rules!” Surrounding the words were splatters of the same white paint, as though she’d flicked a loaded paintbrush at the shirt after scrawling her message. She perched on the stool Hunter wasn’t using, popped open the lid on her coffee and took a sip. Hunter returned his gaze to the snowy view outside.

“I know it’s hard,” Miki said after a moment. “I mean, Ria leaving you and all. But you can’t let it take over your life.”

He turned to find her studying him, her bright green eyes thoughtful.

“What life?” he said.

“This life. You know, where you’re a living, breathing human being in charge of your own destiny.”

“How old are you, Miki?”

“Twenty-two, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

Hunter could only sigh.

“Oh, please,” Miki said. “Don’t go all ancient on me.”

“It’s not. It’s just you’re…”

“What? Too young to fully appreciate the bummers of life? As if. I know all about heartbreak. Been there, done that.” She plucked the fabric of her T-shirt. “Brought back the merchandise.”

“I thought you liked DiFranco.”

“I do,” Miki said. “Stop being so literal.”

“You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

“But I know what you’re going through,” she went on. “When the bad times come rolling in, it doesn’t seem like anyone else could possibly understand. Or that they’ll ever go away.”

Hunter nodded. “That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”

“See? And I’m only twenty-two.”

Hunter had to smile. It was hard not to be cheered up by one of Miki’s pep talks. As her brother Donal had said to him once, she could make a stone laugh. But there was too much wearing him down these days and he couldn’t hold onto that smile for more than a moment.

“It’s not just Ria,” he said, “though that’s a big part of it.”

“C’mon,” Miki told him, immediately figuring out what else was bothering him. “It’s still early in the year. Sales never start to pick up until the turis-tas hit town.” She waved her hand around the store. “Besides, what’s to buy? New product’s not exactly flying in the door these days.”

“And it wasn’t exactly flying out over Christmas either, and those are the bills I’m still trying to pay.”

“This is true. But everybody was down.”

“Not this down,” Hunter told her.

That gave her pause.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

Hunter shrugged. “I won’t know till the end of the month. But I’m going to have to cut some hours.”

“Is this your way of saying, maybe I should be considering a secondary career?”

“Not your hours,” he told her. “It’s just… nothing seems to be going right lately. Between Ria, the store, the weather…”

They both looked up as the front door opened and Titus Mealy came in, stamping the snow from his boots. A dour, mousy-haired man with the body shape of a stork, he was the store’s shipper/receiver, an occupation that suited him well since it allowed him to spend the greater proportion of his time in the back room, packing and unboxing shipments, instead of out on the floor where he’d have to deal with customers. It wasn’t that he was deliberately unfriendly—he could be quite charming on occasion—but for him to open up to you, first you had to pass some indecipherable Titus Mealy respect-meter test.

Most people didn’t. But he had a regular contingent of pale-faced and soft-bodied misfits that came in to see him, usually buying up to a half-dozen CDs per visit, and he was a hard worker, so Hunter tended to leave him to his own devices.

“Now that’s what I call perfect timing,” Miki said.

Titus looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We were just talking about things that bum us out.”

“Ha, ha.” He turned his attention to Hunter. “Any new shipments?”

Hunter shook his head.

“Then I guess I’ll keep working on the returns.”

He headed off towards the back room with the awkward gait of someone not entirely comfortable in his own body.

“See,” Miki said. “Now that’s grumpy. And probably depressed, too, though with him I’d say it was clinical.”

“Are you ever going to stop ragging on him?” Hunter asked.

“I don’t know. Do you think he’ll ever learn any social graces?”

The phone rang before Hunter could reply. He picked up the receiver. “Hello. Gypsy Records.”

“Do you have any Who bootlegs?” a high, nasally voice asked.

Hunter sighed and hung up the phone without replying.

“Who-boy?” Miki asked.

He nodded.

There were two daily occurrences they’d come to count on—if not look forward to. One was that the anonymous caller with what had to be a put-on voice would phone asking for Who bootlegs. He called at least once a day and had been doing it for years—not only to Gypsy Records, but to record stores all over town. The first time Who-boy phoned after the store got call display, they’d all crowded around the telephone to finally see who he was, or at least where he was calling from, but the liquid display had only read “Caller unknown.”

The second thing was Donnie Dobson, a large, pink version of the Pills-bury dough boy in a polyester suit who came in and/or called the store on a daily basis looking for new country and easy-listening releases by female artists. But he at least bought music. Like Who-boy, Gypsy Records wasn’t the only recipient of Donnie’s interest, but since they went out of their way to bring in whatever album he was desperately looking for that particular week, he tended to give them most of his business.

For the longest time Hunter had no idea what Donnie did with everything he purchased—he couldn’t possibly listen to it all, there was simply too much of it. Donnie had been doing this for years—long before Hunter got into the business, and Hunter had been working in music stores for almost twenty years now. But then one day Titus made an offhand remark about having been over to Bonnie’s house and how weird it was that he was still living with his mother. It was Titus who explained that Bonnie listened to each new purchase once, then carefully put it away in one of the boxes that literally filled his mother’s basement.

“But what were you doing over there?” Miki had wanted to know.

“I was looking for a Brenda Lee cut for this tape I was making,” Titus had replied in a tone of voice that left one with the sense that it explained everything.

In a way, it did. He and Adam Snipe, Hunter’s other full-time employee, were forever making compilation tapes, arranging and rearranging the order of the cuts with a single-minded focus that went far beyond obsession. They often seemed willing to go to almost any length to get exactly the right version of a song. “See,” one of them would explain in the middle of yet another obscure song search, “I need something to put before this cut by Roger Miller and I figure it’s got to be by Stealers Wheel because Gerry Rafferty went on to produce that version of ‘Letter from America’ by the Proclaimers and they covered ‘King of the Road.’ You see how it all connects?”