Ivory and the Horn (33 page)

There’s no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one’s home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling monologue itemizing a litany of mis-perceived conspiracies and other ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.

Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.

They talk and she listens, or she doesn’t—she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It’s easier just to walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.

I’ve done it myself.

I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn’t get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn’t help.

“Hey, Ellie. How’re you doing?”

Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn toward me, set so far apart it’s as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.

“They should test for aliens,” she tells me. “You know, like in the Olympics.”

“Aliens?”

“I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead’s dead, right?”

“What’s Kennedy got to do with aliens?”

“I don’t even know why they took down the Berlin Wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn’t they have worked on that one first?”

It’s like trying to have a conversation with a game of Trivial Pursuit that specializes in information garnered from supermarket tabloids. After a while, I’d just pack an extra sandwich whenever I was busking in her neighborhood. I’d sit beside her, share my lunch, and let her talk if she Wanted to, but I wouldn’t say all that much myself.

That all changed the day I saw her with the Bone Woman.

I didn’t call her the Bone Woman at first; the adjective that came more immediately to mind was fat. She couldn’t have been much more than five-one, but she had to weigh in at two-fifty, leaving me with the impression that she was wider than she was tall. But she was light on her feet—peculiarly graceful for all her squat bulk.

She had a round face like a full moon, framed by thick black hair that hung in two long braids to her waist. Her eyes were small, almost lost in that expanse of face, and so dark they seemed all pupil. She went barefoot in a shapeless black dress, her only accessory an equally shapeless shoulder bag made of some kind of animal skin and festooned with dangling thongs from which hung various feathers, beads, bottlecaps and other found objects.

I paused at the far end of the street when I saw the two of them together. I had a sandwich for Ellie in my knapsack, but I hesitated in approaching them. They seemed deep in conversation, real conversation, give and take, and Ellie was—knitting? Talking
and
knitting? The pair of them looked like a couple of old gossips, sitting on the back porch of their building. The sight of Ellie acting so normal was something I didn’t want to interrupt.

I sat down on a nearby stoop and watched until Ellie put away her knitting and stood up. She looked down at her companion with an expression in her features that I’d never seen before. It was awareness, I realized. She was completely
here
for a change.

As she came up the street, I stood up and called a greeting to her, but by the time she reached me she wore her usually vacuous expression.

“It’s the newspapers,” she told me. “They use radiation to print them and that’s what makes the news seem so bad.”

Before I could take the sandwich I’d brought her out of my knapsack, she’d shuffled off, around the corner, and was gone. I glanced back down the street to where the fat woman was still sitting, and decided to find Ellie later. Right now I wanted to know what the woman had done to get such a positive reaction out of Ellie.

When I approached, the fat woman was sifting through the refuse where the two of them had been sitting. As I watched, she picked up a good-sized bone. What kind, I don’t know, but it was as long as my forearm and as big around as the neck of my fiddle. Brushing dirt and a sticky candy wrapper from it, she gave it a quick polish on the sleeve of her dress and stuffed it away in her shoulderbag. Then she looked up at me.

My question died stillborn in my throat under the sudden scrutiny of those small dark eyes. She looked right through me—not the drifting, unfocused gaze of so many of the street people, but a cold, far-off seeing that weighed my presence, dismissed it, and gazed further off at something far more important.

I stood back as she rose easily to her feet. That was when I realized how graceful she was. She moved down the sidewalk as daintily as a doe, as though her bulk was filled with helium, rather than flesh, and weighed nothing. I watched her until she reached the far end of the street, turned her own corner and then, just like Ellie, was gone as well.

I ended up giving Ellie’s sandwich to Johnny Rew, an old wino who’s taught me a fiddle tune or two, the odd time I’ve run into him sober.

I started to see the Bone Woman everywhere after that day. I wasn’t sure if she was just new to town, or if it was one of those cases where you suddenly see something or someone you’ve never noticed before and after that you see them all the time. Everybody I talked to about her seemed to know her, but no one was quite sure how long she’d been in the city, or where she lived, or even her name.

I still wasn’t calling her the Bone Woman, though I knew by then that bones were all she collected. Old bones, found bones, rattling around together in her shoulderbag until she went off at the end of the day and showed up the next morning, ready to start filling her bag again.

When she wasn’t hunting bones, she spent her time with the street’s worst cases—people like Ellie that no one else could talk to. She’d get them making things—little pictures or carvings or beadwork, keeping their hands busy. And talking. Someone like Ellie still made no sense to anybody else, but you could tell when she was with the Bone Woman that they were sharing a real dialogue. Which was a good thing, I suppose, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on, something if not exactly sinister, then still strange.

It was the bones, I suppose. There were so many. How could she keep finding them the way she did? And what did she do with them?

My brother Christy collects urban legends, the way the Bone Woman collects her bones, rooting them out where you’d never think they could be. But when I told him about her, he just shrugged.

“Who knows why any of them do anything?” he said.

Christy doesn’t live on the streets, for all that he haunts them. He’s just an observer—always has been, ever since we were kids. To him, the street people can be pretty well evenly divided between the sad cases and the crazies. Their stories are too human for him.

“Some of these are big,” I told him. “The size of a human thighbone.”

“So point her out to the cops.”

“And tell them what?” ^ A smile touched his lips with just enough superiority in it to get under my skin. He’s always been able to do that. Usually, it makes me do something I regret later, which I sometimes think is half his intention. It’s not that he wants to see me hurt. It’s just part and parcel of that air of authority that all older siblings seem to wear. You know, a raised eyebrow, a way of smiling that says “You have so much to learn, little brother.”

“If you really want to know what she does with those bones,” he said, “why don’t you follow her home and find out?”

“Maybe I will.”

It turned out that the Bone Woman had a squat on the roof of an abandoned factory building in the Tombs. She’d built herself some kind of a shed up there—just a leaning, ramshackle affair of castoff lumber and sheet metal, but it kept out the weather and could easily be heated with a wood-stove in the spring and fall. Come winter, she’d need warmer quarters, but the snows were still a month or so away.

I followed her home one afternoon, then came back the next day when she was out to finally put to rest my fear about these bones she was collecting. The thought that had stuck in my mind was that she was taking something away from the street people like Ellie, people who were already at the bottom rung and deserved to be helped, or at least just left alone. I’d gotten this weird idea that the bones were tied up with the last remnants of vitality that someone like Ellie might have, and the Bone Woman was stealing it from them.

What I found was more innocuous, and at the same time creepier, than I’d expected.

The inside of her squat was littered with bones and wire and dog-shaped skeletons that appeared to be made from the two. Bones held in place by wire, half-connected ribs and skulls and limbs. A pack of bone dogs. Some of the figures were almost complete, others were merely suggestions, but everywhere I looked, the half-finished wire-and-bone skeletons sat or stood or hung suspended from the ceiling. There had to be more than a dozen in various states of creation.

I stood in the doorway, not willing to venture any further, and just stared at them all. I don’t know how long I was there, but finally I turned away and made my way back down through the abandoned building and out onto the street.

So now I knew what she did with the bones. But it didn’t tell me how she could find so many of them. Surely that many stray dogs didn’t die, their bones scattered the length and breadth of the city like so much autumn residue?

Amy and I had a gig opening for the Kelledys that night. It didn’t take me long to set up. I just adjusted my microphone, laid out my fiddle and whistles on a small table to one side, and then kicked my heels while Amy fussed with her pipes and the complicated tangle of electronics that she used to amplify them.

I’ve heard it said that all Uillean pipers are a little crazy— that they have to be to play an instrument that looks more like what you’d find in the back of a plumber’s truck than an instrument—but I think of them as perfectionists. Every one I’ve ever met spends more time fiddling with their reeds and adjusting the tuning of their various chanters, drones and regulators than would seem humanly possible.