Ivory and the Horn (3 page)

“It’s like a riddle,” she says. “Remember our treasure hunts?”

I nod my head. How can I forget? That’s where I first learned about the freebies you can find in behind the bookstores, where I was initiated into what Shirley liked to call the rehab biz.

“If you cherish something enough,” she told me, “it doesn’t matter how old, or worn, or useless it’s become; your caring for it immediately raises its value in somebody else’s eyes. It’s just like rehab—a body’s got to believe in their own worth before anybody can start fixing them, but most people need someone to believe in them before they can start believing in themselves.

“You know, I’ve seen people pay five hundred dollars for something I took out of their trash just the week before—
only
because they saw it sitting on the shelf of some fancy antique shop. They don’t even remember that it once was theirs.

” ‘Course the dealer only paid me fifty bucks for it, but who’s complaining? Two hours before I came knocking on his back door, it was sitting at the end of the curb in a garbage can.”

Garbage days we went on our treasure hunts. Shirley probably knew more about collection days than the city crews did themselves: when each borough had its pickup, what the best areas were depending on the time of year, when you had to make your rounds in certain areas to beat the flea market dealers on their own night runs. We had dozens of routes, from Foxville down into Crowsea, across the river to Ferryside and the Beaches, from Chinatown over to the East End.

We’d head out with our shopping carts, sensei baglady and her apprentice, on a kind of Grail quest. But what we found was never as important as the zen of our being out there in the first place. Each other’s company. The conversation. The night’s journey as we zigzagged from one block to another, checking out this alleyway, that bin, those Dumpsters.

We were like urban coyotes prowling the city’s streets. At that time of night, nobody bothered us, not the cops, not muggers, not street toughs. We became invisible knights tilting against the remnants of other people’s lives.

After Shirley died, it took me over a month to go out on my own and it was never quite the same again. Not bad, just not the same.

“I remember,” I tell her.

“Well, it’s something like that,” she says, “only it’s not entirely happenstance.”

I shake my head, confused. “What are you trying to tell me, Shirley?”

“Nothing you don’t already know.”

Back of me, something knocks a bottle off a heap of trash—I don’t know what it is. A cat, maybe. A dog. A rat. I can’t help myself. I have to have a look. When I turn back to Shirley—you probably saw this coming—she’s gone.

2

Pride goes before a fall, I read somewhere, and I guess whoever thought up that little homily had her finger on the pulse of how it all works.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have had far to fall; by most people’s standards, at seventeen, I was already on the bottom rung of the ladder, and all the rungs going up were broken as far as I’d ever be able to reach. I lived in a squat. I made my living picking garbage and selling the better stuff off to junk shops and the fancy antique places—only through the back door, if you would, yes it’s a lovely piece but terribly worn, sorry that’s my best offer, many thanks and do come again. I had a family that consisted of a bunch of old dogs so worn out that nobody wanted them, not to mention Tommy who’s—what’s the current euphemism? I lose track. Mentally handicapped, I guess you’d call him. I just call him Tommy and it doesn’t matter how dim the bulb is burning in behind his eyes; like the dogs, he became family when I took him in and I love him.

I never thought much about pride back in those days, though I guess I had my share. Maybe I was just white trash to whoever passed me on the street, but I kept myself cleaner than a lot of those paying taxes and what I had then sure beat the hell hole I grew up in.

I hit the road when I was twelve and never looked back because up until then family was just another word for pain. Physical pain, and worse, the kind that just leaves your heart feeling like some dead thing is caught inside your chest. You know what pigeons look like once the traffic’s been running over them for a couple of weeks and there’s not much left except for a fiat bundle of dried feathers that hasn’t even got flies buzzing around it anymore?

That’s like what I had in my chest until I ran away.

I was one of the lucky ones. I survived. I didn’t get done in by drugs or selling my body. Shirley took me in under her wing before the lean men with the flashy suits and too much jewelry could get their hands on me. Don’t know why she helped me—maybe when she saw me she was remembering the day she was just a kid stepping off a bus in some big city herself. Maybe, just looking at me, she could tell I’d make a good apprentice.

And then, after five years, I got luckier still—with a little help from the Grasso Street Angel and my own determination.

And that pride.

I was so proud of myself for doing the right thing: I got the family off the street. I was straightening out my life. I rejoined society—not that society seemed to care all that much, but I wasn’t doing it for them anyway. I was doing it for Tommy and the dogs, for myself, and so that one day maybe I could be in a position to help somebody else, the way that Angel does out of her little storefront office on Grasso, the way that Shirley helped me.

I should’ve known better.

We’ve got a real place to live in—a tenement on Flood Street just before it heads on into the Tombs, instead of a squat. I had a job as a messenger for the QMS—the Quicksilver Messenger Service, run by a bunch of old hippies who got the job done, but lived in a tie-dyed past. Evenings, four times a week, I was going to night school to get my high school diploma.

But I just didn’t see it as being better than what we’d had before. Paying for rent and utilities, food and for someone to come in to look after Tommy, sucked away every cent I made. Maybe I could’ve handled that, but all my time was gone too. I never really saw Tommy anymore, except on the weekends and even then I’d have to be studying half the time. I had it a little easier than a lot of the other people in my class because I always read a lot. It was my way of escaping—even before I came here to live on the streets.

Before I ran away I was a regular at the local library—it was both a source of books and refuge from what was happening at home. Once I got here, Shirley told me about how the bookstores’d strip the covers off paperbacks and just throw the rest of the book away, so I always made sure I stopped by the alleys in back of their stores on garbage days.

I hadn’t read a book in months. The dogs were pining— little Rexy taking it the worst. He’s just a cat-sized wiry-haired mutt with a major insecurity problem. I think someone used to beat on him, which made me feel close to him, because I knew what that was all about. Used to be Rexy was like my shadow; nervous, sure, but so long as I was around, he was okay. These days, he’s just a wreck, because he can’t come on my bike when I’m working and they won’t let me bring him into the school.

The way things stand, Tommy’s depressed, the other dogs are depressed, Rexy’s almost suicidal, and I’m not in any great shape myself. Always tired, impatient, unhappy.

So I really needed to meet a ghost in the Tombs right about now. It’s doing wonders for my sense of sanity—or rather lack thereof, because I know I wasn’t dreaming that night, or at least I wasn’t asleep.

3

Everybody’s worried about me when I finally get home— Rexy, the other dogs, Tommy, my landlady, Aunt Hilary, who looks after Tommy—and I appreciate it, but I don’t talk about where I’ve been or what I’ve seen. What’s the point? I’m kind of embarrassed about anybody knowing that I’m feeling nostalgic for the old squat and I’m not quite sure I believe who I saw there anyway, so what’s to tell?

I make nice with Aunt Hilary, calm down the dogs, put Tommy to bed, then I’ve got homework to do for tomorrow night’s class and work in the morning, so by the time I finally get to bed myself, Shirley’s maybe-ghost is pretty well out of my mind. I’m so tired that I’m out like a light as soon as my head hits the pillow.

Where do they get these expressions we all use, anyway? Why out like a light and not on like one? Why do we hit the pillow when we go to sleep? Logs don’t have a waking/sleeping cycle, so how can we sleep like one?

Sometimes I think about what this stuff must sound like when it gets literally translated into some other language. Yeah, I know. It’s not exactly Advanced Philosophy 101 or anything, but it sure beats thinking about ghosts, which is what I’m trying not to think about as I walk home from the subway that night after my classes. I’m doing a pretty good job, too, until I get to my landlady’s front steps.

Aunt Hilary is like the classic tenement landlady. She’s a widow, a small but robust grey-haired woman with more energy than half the messengers at QMS. She’s got lace hanging in her windows, potted geraniums on the steps going down to the pavement, an old black-and-white tabby named Frank that she walks on a leash. Rexy and Tommy are the only ones in my family that Frank’ll tolerate.

Anyway, I come walking down the street, literally dragging my feet I’m so tired, and there’s Frank sitting by one of the geranium pots giving me the evil eye—which is not so unusual—while sitting one step up is Shirley—which up until last night I would have thought was damned, well impossible. Tonight I don’t even question her presence.

“How’s it going, Shirl?” I say as I collapse beside her on the steps.

Frank arches his back when I go by him, but deigns to give my shoulder bag a sniff before he realizes it’s only got my school books in it. The look he gives me as he settles down again is less than respectful.

Shirley’s leaning back against a higher step. She’s got her hands in her pockets,
clickety-clickety-click,
her hat pushed back from her forehead. Her rosehip-and-licorice scent has to work a little harder against the cloying odor of the geraniums, but it’s still there.

“Ever wonder why there’s a moon?” she asks me, her voice all dreamy and distant.

I follow her gaze to where the fat round globe is ballooning in the sky above the buildings on the opposite side of the street. It looks different here than it did in the Tombs— safer, maybe—but then everything does. It’s the second night that it’s full, and I find myself wondering if ghosts are like werewolves, called up by the moon’s light, only nobody’s quite clued to it yet. Or at least Hollywood and the authors of cheap horror novels haven’t.

I decide not to share this with Shirley. I knew her pretty well, but who knows what’s going to offend a ghost? She doesn’t wait for me to answer anyway.

“It’s to remind us of Mystery,” she says, “and that makes it both a Gift and a Curse.”

She’s talking like Pooh in the Milne books, her inflection setting capital letters at the beginning of certain words. I’ve never been able to figure out how she does that. I’ve never been able to figure out how she knows so much about books, because I never even saw her read a newspaper all the time we were together.

“How so?” I ask.

“Grab an eyeful,” she says. “Did you ever see anything so mysteriously beautiful? Just looking at it, really Considering it, has got to fill the most jaded spirit with awe.”

I think about how ghosts have that trick down pretty good, too, but all I say is, “And what about the curse?”

“We all know it’s just an over-sized rock hanging there in the sky. We’ve sent men to walk around on it, left trash on its surface, photographed it and mapped it. We know what it weighs, its size, its gravitational influence. We’ve sucked all the Mystery out of it, but it still maintains its hold on our imaginations.

“No matter how much we try to deny it, that’s where poetry and madness were born.”

I still don’t get the curse part of it, but Shirley’s already turned away from this line of thought. I can almost see her ghostly mind unfolding a chart inside her head and plotting a new course for our conversation. She looks at me.

“What’s more important?” she asks. “To be happy or to bring happiness to others?”

“I kind of like to think they go hand in hand,” I tell her. “That you can’t really have one without the other.”

“Then what have you forgotten?”

This is another side of Shirley I remember well. She gets into this one-hand-clapping mode, asking you simple stuff that gets more and more complicated the longer you think about it, but if you keep worrying at it, the way Rexy’ll take on an old slipper, it gets back to being simple again. To get there, though, you have to work through a forest of words and images that can be far too zen-deep and confusing— especially when you’re tired and your brain’s in neutral the way mine is tonight.

“Is this part of the riddle you were talking about last night?” I ask.

She sort of smiles—lines crinkle around her eyes, fingers work the pocketed buttons,
clickety-clickety-click.
There’s a feeling in the air like there was last night just before she vanished, but this time I’m not looking away. I hear a car turn onto this block, its headbeams washing briefly over us, bright lights flicker, then it’s dark again, with one solid flash of real deep dark just before my eyes adjust to the change in illumination.

Of course she’s gone once I can see properly again and there’s only me and Frank sitting on the steps. I forget for a moment about where our relationship stands and reach out to give him a pat. I’m just trying to touch base with reality, I realize as I’m doing it, but that doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t quite hiss as he gets up and jumps down to the sidewalk.

I watch him swagger off down the street, watch the empty pavement for a while longer, then finally I get up myself and go inside.

4

There’s a wariness in Angel’s features when I step into her Grasso Street office. It’s a familiar look. I asked her about it once, and she was both precise and polite with her explanation: “Well, Maisie. Things just seem to get complicated whenever you’re around.”