Charles De Lint: Dreams Underfoot

Half the people in the restaurant were probably wondering what the hell she was doing sitting here with a scuzz like him.

Ellen looked up and caught his gaze. A smile touched her lips. “The cook must be in a good mood,”

she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve heard that the worse mood he’s in, the hotter he makes his sauces.”

Reece tried to give her back a smile, but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted a beer, but they wouldn’t serve him here because he was underage. He found himself wishing Ellen wasn’t so much older than him, that he didn’t look like such a freak sitting here with her. For the first time since he’d done his hair, he was embarrassed about the way he looked. He wanted to enjoy just sitting here with her instead of knowing that everyone was looking at him like he was some kind of geek.

“You okay?” Ellen asked.

“Yeah. Sure. Great food.”

He pushed the remainder of his rice around on the plate with his fork. Yeah, he had no problems.

Just no place to go, no place to fit in. Body aching from last night’s beating. Woman sitting there across from him, looking tasty, but she was too old for him and there was something in her eyes that scared him a little. Not to mention a nightmare booger dogging his footsteps. Sure. Things were just rocking, mama.

He stole another glance at her, but she was looking away, out to the darkening street, wine glass raised to her mouth.

“That book your friend wrote,” he said.

Her gaze shifted to his face and she put her glass down.

“It doesn’t have anything like my booger in it,” Reece continued. “I mean it’s got some ugly stuff, but nothing just like the booger.”

“No,” Ellen replied. “But it’s got to work the same way. We can see it because we believe it’s there.”

“So was it always there and we’re just aware of it now? Or does it exist because we believe in it? Is it something that came out of us—out of me?”

“Like Uncle Dobbin’s birds, you mean?”

Reece nodded, unaware of the flutter of dark wings that Ellen felt stir inside her.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

“Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” was the last story in Christy Riddell’s book, the title coming from the name of the pet shop that Timothy James Dobbin owned in Santa Ana. It was a gathering place for every kind of bird, tame as well as wild. There were finches in cages and parrots with the run of the shop, not to mention everything from sparrows to crows and gulls crowding around outside.

In the story, T. J. Dobbin was a retired sailor with an interest in nineteenthcentury poets, an old bearded tar with grizzled red hair and beetling brows who wore baggy blue cotton trousers and a white Tshirt as he worked in his store, cleaning the bird cages, feeding the parakeets, teaching the parrots words. Everybody called him Uncle Dobbin.

He had a sixteenyear-old assistant named Nori Wert who helped out on weekends. She had short blonde hair and a deep tan that she started working on as soon as school was out. To set it off she invariably wore white shorts and a tanktop. The only thing she liked better than the beach was the birds in Uncle Dobbin’s shop, and that was because she knew their secret.

She didn’t find out about them right away. It took a year or so of coming in and hanging around the shop and then another three weekends of working there before she finally approached Uncle Dobbin with what had been bothering her.

“I’ve been wondering,” she said as she sat down on the edge of his cluttered desk at the back of the store. She fingered the world globe beside the blotter and gave it a desultory spin.

Uncle Dobbin raised his brow questioningly and continued to fill his pipe.

“It’s the birds,” she said. “We never sell any—at least not since I’ve started working here. People come in and they look around, but no one asks the price of anything, no one ever buys anything. I guess you could do most of your business during the week, but then why did you hire me?”

Uncle Dobbin looked down into the bowl of his pipe to make sure the tobacco was tamped properly. “Because you like birds,” he said before he lit a match. Smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. A bright green parrot gave a squawk from where it was roosting nearby and turned its back on them.

“But you don’t sell any of them, do you?” Being curious, she’d poked through his file cabinet to look at invoices and sales receipts to find that all he ever bought was birdfood and cages and the like, and he never sold a thing. At least no sales were recorded.

“Can’t sell them.”

“Why not?”

“They’re not mine to sell.”

Nori sighed. “Then whose are they?”

“Better you should ask what are they.”

“Okay,” Nori said, giving him an odd look. “I’ll bite. What are they?”

“Magic.”

Nori studied him for a moment and he returned her gaze steadily, giving no indication that he was teasing her. He puffed on his pipe, a serious look in his eyes, then took the pipe stem from his mouth.

Setting the pipe carefully on the desk so that it wouldn’t tip over, he leaned forward in his chair.

“People have magic,” he said, “but most of them don’t want it, or don’t believe in it, or did once, but then forgot. So I take that magic and make it into birds until they want it back, or someone else can use it.”

“Magic.”

“That’s right.”

“Not birds.”

Uncle Dobbin nodded.

“That’s crazy,” Nori said.

“Is it?”

He got up stiffly from his chair and stood in front of her with his hands outstretched towards her chest. Nori shrank back from him, figuring he’d flaked out and was going to cop a quick feel, but his hands paused just a few inches from her breasts. She felt a sudden pain inside—like a stitch in her side from running too hard, only it was deep in her chest. Right in her lungs. She looked down, eyes widening as a beak appeared poking out of her chest, followed by a parrot’s head, its body and wings.

It was like one of the holograms at the Haunted House in Disneyland, for she could see right through it, then it grew solid once it was fully emerged. The pain stopped as the bird fluttered free, but she felt an empty aching inside. Uncle Dobbin caught the bird, and soothed it with a practiced touch, before letting it fly free. Numbly, Nori watched it wing across the store and settle down near the front window where it began to preen its feathers. The sense of loss inside grew stronger.

“That ... it was in me ... I ...”

Uncle Dobbin made his way back to his chair and sat down, picking up his pipe once more.

“Magic,” he said before he lit it.

“My ... my magic ... ?”

Uncle Dobbin nodded. “But not anymore. You didn’t believe.”

“But I didn’t know!” she wailed.

“You got to earn it back now,” Uncle Dobbin told her. “The side cages need cleaning.”

Nori pressed her hands against her chest, then wrapped her arms around herself in a tight hug as though that would somehow ease the empty feeling inside her.

“Eearn it?” she said in a small voice, her gaze going from his face to the parrot that had come out of her chest and was now sitting by the front window. “By ... by working here?”

Uncle Dobbin shook his head. “You already work here and I pay you for that, don’t I?”

“But then how ... ?”

“You’ve got to earn its trust. You’ve got to learn to believe in it again.”

Ellen shook her head softly. Learn to believe, she thought. I’ve always believed. But maybe never hard enough. She glanced at her companion, then out to the street. It was almost completely dark now.