Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

I tuned her out and took a seat at an empty table before I could fall down. That feeling of dislocation that had started up in me when I first saw Sam’s photo in the microfiche kept coming and going in waves.

It was cresting right now, and I found it hard to just sit in the chair, let alone listen to what Jilly was saying. I tuned her back in when the spaciness finally started to recede.

.. heart attack, who would he call? He can’t speak.”

“I saw him yesterday,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm. “Around midafternoon. He seemed fine.”

“He did?”

I nodded. “He was down by the Pier, sitting on the riverbank, feeding the ducks. He read my fortune.”

“He did?”

“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record, Jilly.”

For some reason, I was starting to feel better. That sense of being on the verge of a panic attack faded and then disappeared completely. Jilly pulled up a chair and leaned across the table, elbows propped up, chin cupped in her hands.

“So tell me,” she said. “What made you do it? What was your fortune?”

I told her everything that had happened since I had seen Paperjack. That sense of dislocation came and went again a few times while I talked, but mostly I was holding firm.

“Holy shit!” Jilly said when I was done.

She put her hand to her mouth and looked quickly around, but none of the customers seemed to have noticed. She reached a hand across the table and caught one of mine.

“So now you believe?” she asked.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice, do I?”

“What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. “What’s to do? I found out what I needed to know—now I’ve got to learn to live with it and all the other baggage that comes with it.”

Jilly didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just held my hand and exuded comfort as only Jilly can.

“You could find her,” she said finally.

“Who? Sam?”

“Who else?”

“She’s probably—” I stumbled over the word dead and settled for—not even alive anymore.”

“Maybe not,” Jilly said. “She’d definitely be old. But don’t you think you should find out?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. And if she were alive, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her. What could we say to each other? “Think about it, anyway,” Jilly said.

That was Jilly; she never took no for an answer.

“I’m off at eight,” she said. “Do you want to meet me then?”

“What’s up?” I asked, halfheartedly.

“I thought maybe you’d help me find Paperjack.”

I might as well, I thought. I was becoming a bit of an expert in tracking people down by this point.

Maybe I should get a card printed: Geordie Riddell, Private Investigations and Fiddle Tunes.

“Sure,” I told her.

“Great,” Jilly said.

She bounced up from her seat as a couple of new customers came into the cafe. I ordered a coffee from her after she’d gotten them seated, then stared out the window at the traffic going by on Battersfield. I tried not to think of Sam—trapped in the past, making a new life for herself there—but I might as well have tried to jump to the moon.

By the time filly came off shift I was feeling almost myself again, but instead of being relieved, I had this great load of guilt hanging over me. It all centered around Sam and the ghost. I’d denied her once.

Now I felt as though I was betraying her all over again. Knowing what I knew—the photo accompanying the engagement notice in that old issue of The Newford Star flashed across my mind—the way I was feeling at the moment didn’t seem right. I felt too normal; and so the guilt.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Jilly as we walked down Battersfield towards the Pier. “This afternoon I was falling to pieces, but now I just feel ...”

“Calm?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because you’ve finally stopped fighting yourself and accepted that what you saw—what you remember—really happened. It was denial that was screwing you up.”

She didn’t add, “I told you so,” but she didn’t have to. It echoed in my head anyway, joining the rest of the guilt I was carrying around with me. If I’d only listened to her with an open mind, then ... what?

I wouldn’t be going through this all over again?

We crossed Lakeside Drive and made our way through the closed concession and souvenir stands to the beach. When we reached the Pier, I led her westward to where I’d last seen Paperjack, but he wasn’t sitting by the river anymore. A lone duck regarded us hopefully, but neither of us had thought to bring any bread.

“So I track down Sam,” I said, still more caught up in my personal quest than in looking for Paperjack. “If she’s not dead, she’ll be an old lady. If I find her—then what?”

“You’ll complete the circle,” Jilly said. She looked away from the river and faced me, her pixie features serious. “It’s like the Kickaha say: everything is on a wheel. You stepped off the one that represents your relationship with Sam before it came full circle. Until you complete your turn on it, you’ll never have peace of mind.”

“When do you know you’ve come full circle?” I asked.

“You’ll know.”

She turned away before I could go on and started back towards the Pier. By day the place was crowded and full of noise, alive with tourists and people out relaxing, just looking to have a good time; by night, its occupancy was turned over to gangs of kids, fooling around on skateboards or simply hanging out, and the homeless: winos, bag ladies, hoboes, and the like.

Jilly worked the crowd, asking after Paperjack, while I followed in her wake. Everybody knew him, or had seen him in the past week, but no one knew where he was now, or where he lived. We were about to give up and head over to Fitzhenry Park to start over again with the people hanging out there, when we heard the sound of a harmonica. It was playing the blues, a soft, mournful sound that drifted up from the beach.

We made for the nearest stairs and then walked back across the sand to find the Bossman sitting under the boardwalk, hands cupped around his instrument, head bowed down, eyes closed. There was no one listening to him except us. The people with money to throw in his old cloth cap were having dinner now in the fancy restaurants across Lakeside Drive or over in the theatre district. He was just playing for himself.

When he was busking, he stuck to popular pieces—whatever was playing on the radio mixed with old show tunes, jazz favorites, and that kind of thing. The music that came from his harmonica now was pure magic. It transformed him, making him larger than life. The blues he played held all the world’s sorrows in its long sliding notes and didn’t so much change it, as make it bearable.

My fingers itched to pull out my fiddle and join him, but we hadn’t come to jam. So we waited until he was done. The last note hung in the air for far longer than seemed possible, then he brought his hands away from his mouth and cradled the harmonica on his lap. He looked up at us from under drooping eyelids, the magic disap—

pearing now that he’d stopped playing. He was just an old, homeless black man now, with the faint trace of a smile touching his lips. “Hey, Jill—Geordie,” he said. “What’s doin’?”

“We’re looking for Paperjack,” Jilly told him.

The Bossman nodded. “Jack’s the man for paperwork, all right.”

“I’ve been worried about him,” Jilly said. “About his health.”

“You a doctor now, Jill?”

She shook her head.

“Anybody got a smoke?”

This time we both shook our heads.

From his pocket he pulled a halfsmoked butt that he must have picked up off the boardwalk earlier, then lit it with a wooden match that he struck on the zipper of his jeans. He took a long drag and let it out so that the bluegrey smoke wreathed his head, studying us all the while.