Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

“First tell me what you were talking about.”

Ellie sighed. Did she really want to get into this? She still remembered Tommy’s parting shot this morning.

My family lives in another world from this one.

Meaning, he’d explained, the world of spirits. And Tommy was right. It wasn’t something she’d ever felt comfortable talking about with any seriousness. There were enough wonderful and strange things in the real world to capture her attention without needing to venture into some New Age fairyland. As if.

But wasn’t that what she’d seen from the window of Kellygnow? Bettina had given it some Spanish name, but it translated into the same thing. The spiritworld. And those men in their broadcloth suits and bare feet had been spirits, she’d said. The reason she could see them and Chantal couldn’t was because she had some kind of magic in her.

Feeling stupid, even though she knew he wouldn’t make fun of her, Ellie related her morning to Tommy—how it turned out that Bettina was supposed to be a witch or something; describing the odd men in the garden, why it was supposed to be that she could see them.

“What kind of thing would wake up magic in a person?” she asked. “I mean, here I’ve gone through my whole life, perfectly normal—”

Tommy snorted.

“Okay. Non-supernaturally inclined. So how come this is happening to me? Why now?”

Tommy shook his head. “How would I know?”

“I thought Native beliefs included that kind of thing.”

“Right,” Tommy said, smiling. “Like Indians are all one universal tribe. It’s not like being Catholic, or a Buddhist, you know. There are hundreds of different tribes on this continent, each with their own language and culture and beliefs. What’s sacred to one group, might be a joke to another.”

“But at that powwow you took me to—”

“Powwows are a culture unto themselves,” Tommy told her. “They’re a mishmash of everything Indian. The name’s borrowed from the Chickasaw. And what do you get at them? Mohawks doing Sioux sun dances. Crees weaving Navajo blankets. Kickaha frying up buffalo burgers. You can’t go to a powwow without smelling sweetgrass, seeing Haida, salmon and raven imagery, grass dancing, Hopi beadwork—doesn’t matter what part of the country it’s in. Remember Chief Morningstar in his big feathered headdress?”

Ellie nodded.

“Not a part of Kickaha culture. But it sure looks cool, right? And how about those dream-catchers? They’re a good-luck charm of the Lakota, but they’re like the symbol of Indian spirituality now, aren’t they? Everybody’s making and selling them. The damn things drive me crazy.”

“You’ve got one hanging from the mirror in your truck.”

“You bet,” Tommy said. “It’s better than the Club. Indian kids aren’t going to boost my pickup because the dream-catcher tells them I’m a blood, too.”

“I thought you liked powwows,” Ellie said.

“I do. But I like going because it’s fun and I get to see a lot of old friends that I wouldn’t see otherwise. Not because it’s some kind of pan-Indian evangelical meeting hall.”

He broke off as they rounded a corner to see some hydro workers removing a tree limb that was dragging down an already overextended power line. Pulling over, he and Ellie got out of the van to hand out a round of coffees and sandwiches to the grateful men. Returning to the van, Tommy took his turn at scraping down the windshield and then they continued on to Angel’s Grasso Street office.

“See,” Tommy said, taking up where the conversation had left off, “for most Indians there’s no mystical mumbo jumbo in our spiritualism, and that’s probably our strongest common ground. What our teachings instruct us to do is to live our lives with truth and honesty and respect. Or as the Aunts say, ‘Our job is to be an awake people, utterly conscious, to attend to the world.’ That lies at the heart of the teachings of most tribes. It’s in the details that we differ, but those differences are what give each tribe its individual identity.”

“Protestant, Catholic, Baptist.”

“Exactly.” He smiled. “If they were tribes.”

“But you and your aunts,” Ellie said. “You all believe in more than that, don’t you?”

“More how?”

“That… these spirits. The spiritworld. That it’s real.”

Tommy nodded. “Oh, it’s real, all right. But we don’t have a particular claim on it. I think it’s like Jilly says. The spirits are out there, but how they appear to us depends on what we bring to them. A shaman might see Old Man Coyote, a priest might see an angel. You might see one of those junkyard faeries that Jilly puts in her paintings.”

“Except,” Ellie said, “Bettina described those men in the garden exactly the way I was seeing them.”

“Hey, I’m no expert. I keep telling you that.”

He fell silent and pulled over so that Ellie could scrape down the windshield once more.

“If you want to know about magic,” he said when she climbed back in, “you should talk to one of my aunts.”

“Well, Sunday seemed nice…”

Tommy laughed. “Meaning she wasn’t this weird old woman who looked like she was going to turn you into a moth or a toad.”

Ellie punched his shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t damage the merchandise.”

“I know, I know,” Ellie said. “Hearts would break everywhere in the world of the supermodels where you are king.”

“I’m like a drug dealer,” Tommy told her. “They just can’t resist what I have to offer.”

“Bountiful humility, for one.”

Tommy shook his head. “No. I sneak them pork chops.”

Eilie went to punch him again, but then out of the corner of her eye she caught movement on the street.

“Look out!” she cried at the same time as Tommy eased on the brakes.

A man had burst out onto the street from between a couple of parked cars, the whites of his eyes reflecting weirdly in the van’s headlights. Ellie had long enough to see he was wearing a handkerchief tied across his face like a bandit’s mask and bright yellow rubber kitchen gloves, before he slipped on the icy street and went down right in front of the van.

“Oh shit,” Tommy muttered.

He braked and the van’s rear end began to fishtail, sliding on the ice before it came to a stop that left it standing broadside in the middle of the street.

“Did we hit him?” Ellie asked as she fumbled with her seatbelt. “I didn’t feel us hit him.”

But Tommy was already out the driver’s door and didn’t answer.

Hunter was about four blocks from Miki’s apartment and breathing hard when he realized he was being followed. The first he knew of it was a pinprick sensation in the nape of his neck, an animal-level warning that resonated up through the levels of his consciousness until it finally registered in the reasoning part of his mind. He turned, sliding on the wet ice underfoot until he was brought up short by a parked car. He caught hold of the car as best he could, rubber gloves finding a grip on the ice sheath that covered the vehicle. He used the hood of the car to support his weight and looked back the way he’d come.

Nothing.

But he knew something was out there. The wet hairs at the back of his neck were still raised like hackles.

He pushed away from the car and continued down the sidewalk, shuffling along rather than lifting his feet since it was easier to keep his balance that way. The freezing rain continued to fall, but it didn’t make that much difference anymore. He was already soaked through and through by the sleet and doubted he could get much wetter. He’d been out in it too long, taken too many falls in icy puddles since he’d fled the apartment.