Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Straightening up from the paperwork scattered across the counter, Hunter winced at the sudden pain in his side. There’d been no blood in his urine this morning, but he knew his kidney was swollen from the way it pressed up against his ribs. The whole area was bruised and sore, his back stiff. Every breath hurt unless it was shallow. He closed his eyes for a moment and the hard man’s features leapt into his mind. The smell of him—tobacco smoke and something feral, a wild dog scent. The cold eyes. The flat voice.

You don’t want to fuck with us, you little shite.

What had that been all about anyway?

The Dar Williams EP came to an end and for a long moment he let the silence hang. The store was empty. He’d only had three customers this morning and one had been returning a defective CD. Between the other two, they hadn’t even put thirty dollars in the till. It made him wonder, and not for the first time, why he even bothered opening on Sundays, though of course he had to. Even if the customers weren’t coming in, he had to be as available for business as the big chain stores were. Hunter didn’t really mind being in the store on a Sunday—especially not now, when his only other option was an empty apartment—but today it just made him feel depressed all over again. One of his staff had to go. There was just no way around it. That salary was just taking too big a chunk of his working capital.

This week he’d been cut off by one of his main distributors because he was late paying his bills. He knew he’d have it covered in a couple of weeks—hell, they knew it, too—but in the meantime, they’d cut him off and he could forget carrying any of their back catalog for a while. New releases he could get from Contact Distributors, a rack-jobber who serviced most of the smaller accounts in town, but that meant at least another dollar cost per unit. And since he couldn’t raise his selling price and stay competitive, he’d be losing a dollar on every CD of theirs he sold. Which didn’t help the money crunch he was feeling now.

This was the part of owning your own business that he’d dreaded the most. But someone had to go, and they’d all have to work longer hours, if he was going to keep his doors open. The question was who. It couldn’t be Titus. With his lack of social skills and graces, how would he ever survive? Adam wasn’t much better. Miki had seniority—next to him, she’d been working here the longest.

That left Fiona.

Sighing, he turned to take the EP out of the CD player, moving carefully when pain shot up from his side. A few moments later Dar Williams’s sweet soprano was replaced by the high lonesome sound of Gillian Welch. Though Welch had grown up in California, you’d swear she’d just come down from the Appalachian Mountains by way of the Stanley Brothers to make this recording. He loved the raw, emotional narrative of the songs and her unadorned delivery. By the third cut he was in a bit of a better mood, the store’s poor business and the pain in his side notwithstanding, and returned to finish up the last of his paperwork. It was only when the CD ended and he was back thinking about how he was going to tell Fiona that she was being laid off that his melancholy returned.

He considered his figures again, wondering if he could make it just a temporary thing. A few weeks, no more than a couple of months. Only until business started to pick up again with the warmer weather. He was still worrying at it when Miki came in a little later, wrinkling her nose at the Dan Bern CD he had playing on the store’s sound system.

“Okay,” she said as she offered Hunter one of the coffees she’d brought with her. “I realize that someone up there has decided that every generation needs its Bob Dylan, but really. Doesn’t this guy sound like an exact clone to you?”

Hunter shook his head. “It’s just a style of songwriting. You know, talking blues. Anecdotal.”

“And it doesn’t bother you, the way he’s got Dylan down so well it might as well be Dylan? I mean, hello tribute city. Look at me, I’m pathetic.”

“I don’t hear it that way.”

Miki raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Besides,” Hunter went on. “I hear he’s really into Coltrane.”

“Really?”

Hunter nodded, having no idea what Dan Bern’s tastes in music really were. What he did know was Miki’s inclination to forgive a great deal if your taste was what she considered to be good. Classic sax players were right up there at the top of the list.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “ Trane. Bird. Wayne Shorter. Lester Young.”

“You’re making this up.”

“No, I’m sure I read it an interview somewhere.”

Miki cocked her head, giving the CD another listen.

“Well, maybe he’s not so bad,” she said. “There is a kind of improvisa-tional flavor to what he’s doing, isn’t there?”

Hunter managed to keep a straight face until she went to hang up her coat in the back room, only just wiping the grin from his face before she stepped back out into the store. Miki made her way slowly back to the front counter, straightening CD cases in their bins as she came.

“You’re looking rather well,” she said when she was standing on the other side of the counter. “Considering the state you were in last night.”

“The—oh, right.”

She leaned over the counter for a closer look. “You’re not hungover at all, are you?”

“Quick recovery.”

“Umhmm. Very quick. Now I’m wondering if you were even drunk in the first place.”

“Very. Could barely stand up on my own.”

“Which brings us to the question, why would you be pretending to be drunk?”

“Could barely see straight. Sick as a dog. Trust me on this one.”

But Miki wasn’t buying it. “You weren’t just trying to avoid me, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t lie now. That’d hurt my feelings worse than if I thought you didn’t fancy me.”

“I’m not…” Hunter began, but he couldn’t do it. This was Miki, after all. “It’s just that Donal…” He broke off again.

“Oh, Christ. What did he tell you this time?”

“It’s just…”

There didn’t seem to be an out—not and be honest at the same time. So he told her all of it. Miki was quiet for a long moment when he was done. She regarded him thoughtfully from under long lashes.

“You and Ellie, eh?” she said finally. “I could see it.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Not yet.”

Hunter sighed, then gave her a slow nod. “Not yet,” he conceded. “Maybe not at all. Who knows?”

“You’re thinking I’m mad at you,” she said.

Hunter shrugged.

“Don’t be. I won’t deny I was wondering a bit if things could go somewhere with us, but it was only wondering.” She smiled. “Idle conjecture. The fleeting stuff of dreams.”

“You are mad.”

“Only at Donal. What was he thinking? First this business of trying to set us up in the pub the other night, and now this. You know he and Ellie used to be an item?”

Hunter nodded.

“He was quite desperate for her, but she didn’t feel the same, which is why they broke up.”

“So what are you saying? That all of this was planned?”

“Well, not the business at the pub. How could he even know you’d be meeting Ellie last night?”

Hunter laid a hand gingerly against his kidney. “And the hard man—”

Miki cut him off. “Donal’s moody, and a tease, but he’s not that mean. He’d never put someone up to that. But what’s he driving at with this business of not telling Ellie?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“And what would the hard men be wanting with Ellie?”

“He didn’t tell me that either,” Hunter said.