Moonlight & Vines (30 page)

It was to honor the bone prison that holds her breathing for this turn of the wheel. It was to honor the gift of the world underfoot. It was to celebrate what's always changing: the stories. The dance of our lives. The wheel of the world and the sky spinning above it and our place in it.

The bones of her prison weren't there to keep her from getting out. They were there to keep her together.

I'm holding the cartridge now, but there's no need for me to speak. The story's done. Somewhere up above us, the skies over the Tombs are still full of smoke, the Devil's Night fires are still burning. Here in the hollow of this stone room, we've got a fire of our own.

Alberta looks across the circle at me.

“I remember,” she says.

“That was the first time we met,” Jolene says. “I remember, too. Not the end, but the beginning. I was there at the beginning and then later, too. For the dancing.”

Bear nods. He takes the cartridge from my fingers and puts it back into his pocket. Out of another pocket he takes packets of color, ground pigments. Red and yellow and blue. Black and white. He puts them on the floor, takes a pinch of color out of one of the packets and lays it in the palm of his hand. Spits into his palm. Dips a finger in. He gets up, that
Old Man of the Mountain, and he crosses over to one of the walls. Starts to painting. Starts to leave a message for the ones to follow.

Those colors, they're like dancing. Once someone starts, you can't help but twitch and turn and fidget until you're doing it, too. Next thing you know, we're all spitting into our palms, we're all dancing the color across the walls.

Remembering.

Because that's what the stories are for.

Even for old spirits like us.

We lock ourselves up in bone prisons same as everybody else. Forget who we are, why we are, where we're going. Till one day we come across a story we left for ourselves and remember why we're wearing these skins. Remember why we're dancing.

What is unseen is not necessarily unknown.

—Wendelessen

When I was twelve years old, it was a different world.

I suppose most people think that, turning their gazes inward to old times, the long trail of their memories leading them back into territory made unfamiliar with the dust of years. The dust lies so thick in places it changes the shape of what it covers, half-remembered people, places and events, all mixed together so that you get confused trying to sort them out, don't even recognize some, probably glad you can't make out others. But then there are places, the wind blows harder across their shapes, or maybe we visit them more often so the dust doesn't lie so thick, and the memories sit there waiting for us, no different now than the day they happened, good and bad, momentous occasions and those so trivial you can't figure out why you remember them.

But I know this is true: When I was twelve years old, kids my age didn't know as much as they do today. We believed things you couldn't get by most eight year olds now. We were ready to believe almost anything. All we required was that it be true—maybe not so much by the rules of the world around us, but at least by the rules of some intuitive inner logic. It wasn't ever anything that got talked out. We just believed. In
luck. In wishes. In how a thing will happen, if you stick to the right parade of circumstances.

We were willing to believe in magic.

Here's what you do, Jerry says. You get one of those little pipe tobacco tins and you put stuff in it. Important stuff. A fingernail. Some hair. A scab. Some dirt from a special place. You spit on it and mix it up like a mud pie. Prick your finger and add a drop of blood. Then you wrap it all up in a picture of the thing you like the best.

What if you don't have a picture of the thing you like the best? I ask.

Doesn't have to be a real picture, he says. You can just make a drawing of it. Might be even better that way because then it really belongs to you.

So what do you do with it? Rebecca asks.

I can see her so clearly, the red hairs coming loose from her braids, picking at her knee where she scraped it falling off her bike.

You stick it in that tin, Jerry says, and close it up tight. Dig a hole under your porch and bury it deep.

He leans closer to us, eyes serious, has that look he always gets when he's telling us something we might not believe is true, but he wants us to know that it is.

This means something, he says. You do it right and you'll always have that thing you like the best. Nothing will ever take it away.

I don't know where he heard about it. Read it in a book, or maybe his grandmother told him. She always had the best stories. It doesn't matter. We knew it was a true magic and that night each of us snuck out of our house and did it. Buried those tins deep. Made a secret of it to make the magic stronger is how Jerry put it.

I didn't need the magic to be any stronger. I just needed it to be true. We were best friends, the three of us, and I didn't want that to ever change. I really believed in magic, and the idea of the tin seemed to be about the best magic kids like us could make.

Rebecca moved away when we were in ninth grade. Jerry died the last year of high school, hit by a drunk driver.

Years later, this all came back to me. I'd returned to have a look at the old neighborhood, but our houses were gone by then. Those acre lots we grew up on had been subdivided, the roads all turned around on themselves and changed until there was nothing left of the neighborhood's old
patterns. They're identical, these new houses, poured out of the same mold, one after the other, row upon row, street after street.

I got out of the car that day and stood where I thought my house used to be, feeling lost, cut off, no longer connected to my own past. I thought of those tins then and wondered whatever had happened to them. I remembered the drawing I made to put in mine. It was so poorly drawn I'd had to write our names under our faces to make sure the magic knew who I meant.

The weird thing is I never felt betrayed by the magic when Rebecca moved away, or when Jerry died. I just . . . lost it. Forgot about it. It went away, or maybe I did. Even that day, standing there in a neighborhood now occupied by strangers, the memory of those tins was only bittersweet. I smiled, remembering what we'd done, sneaking out so late that night, how we'd believed. The tightness in my chest grew from good moments recalled, mixed up with the sadness of remembering friends I'd lost. Of course those tins couldn't have kept us together. Life goes on. People move, relationships alter, people die. That's how the world turns.

There isn't room for magic in it, though you'd never convince Ted of that.

Ted and I go back a long way. We met during my first year in college, almost twenty years ago, and we still see each other every second day or so. I don't know why we get along so well unless that old axiom's true and opposites do attract. Ted's about the most outgoing person you could meet; opinionated, I'll be the first to admit, but he also knows how to listen. He's the sort of person other people naturally gravitate to at a party, collecting odd facts and odder rumors the way a magpie does shiny baubles, then jump-starting conversations with them at a later date as though they were hors d'oeuvre.

I'm not nearly so social an animal. If you pressed me, I'd say I like to pick and choose my friends carefully; the truth is, I usually have no idea what to say to people—especially when I first meet them.

Tonight it's only the two of us, holding court in The Half Kaffe. I'm drinking espresso, Ted's got one of those decaf lattés made with skim milk that always has me wonder, what's the point? If you want to drink coffee that weak, you can find it down the street at Bruno's Diner for a
quarter of the price. But Ted's gone health-conscious recently. It's all talk about decaf and jogging and macrobiotic this and holistic that, then he lights up a cigarette. Go figure.

“Who's that woman?” I ask when he runs out of things to say about this
T'ai Chi
course he's just started taking. “The one at the other end of the counter with the long straight hair and the sad eyes?”

I haven't been able to stop looking at her since we got here. I find her attractive, but not in a way I can easily explain. It's more the sum of the parts, because individually things are a little askew. She's tall and angular, eyes almost too wide-set, chin pointed like a cat's, a Picasso nose, very straight and angled down. She has the sort of features that look gorgeous one moment, then almost homely the next. Her posture's not great, but then, considering my own, I don't think I should be making that kind of judgment. Maybe she thinks like I do, that if you slouch a bit, people won't notice you. Doesn't usually work.

I suspect she's waiting for someone since all she's been doing is sitting there, looking out the window. Hasn't ordered anything yet. Or maybe it's because Jonathan's too caught up with the most recent issue of the
Utne Reader
to notice her.

I look away from her when I realize that Ted hasn't answered. I find him giving me a strange look.

“So what've you got in that cup besides coffee?” he asks.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

He laughs. “I'm not sure. All I know is I don't see anyone sitting at this counter, male or female. I see you and me and Jonathan.”

I'm sure he's putting me on. “No, seriously. Who is she?”

And he, I realize, thinks I'm putting him on. He makes an exaggerated show of having a look, taking off non-existent glasses, cleaning them, putting them back on, looks some more, but his attention isn't even on the right stool.

“Okay,” he says. “I see her now. I think . . . yes, she's a princess. Lost a shoe, or a half-dozen feet of hair, or a bag of beans or something. Or maybe turned the wrong key in the wrong lock and got turned out of her bearded husband's apartment and now she's here killing time between periods of sleep just like the rest of us.”

“Enough,” I tell him. “I get the picture.”

He doesn't see her. And it's beginning to be obvious to me that Jonathan doesn't see her or he'd have taken her order by now. The group
at the table behind us, all black jeans and intense conversation, they probably don't either.

“So what's this all about?” Ted asks.

He looks half amused, half intrigued, still unsure if it's a joke or something more intriguing, a piece of normal that's slid off to one side. He has a nose for that sort of thing, from Elvis sightings to nuns impregnated by aliens, and I can almost see it twitching. He doesn't read the tabloids in line at the supermarket, he buys them. Need I say more?

So when he asks me what it's all about, he seems the perfect candidate for me to tell because it's very confusing and way out of my line of experience. I've never been prone to hallucinations before and besides, I always thought they'd be more . . . well, surreal, I suppose. Dadaistic. Over the top. This is so ordinary. Just a woman, sitting in a coffee bar, that no one seems to be able to see. Except for me.

“Hello, Andrew,” Ted says, holding the first syllable of my name and drawing it out. “You still with us?”

I nod and give him a smile.

“So are you going to fill me in or what?”

“It's nothing,” I say. “I was just seeing if you were paying attention.”

“Um-hmm.”

He doesn't believe me for a moment. All I've managed to do is pique his curiosity more.

“No, really,” I tell him.

The woman stands up from the counter, distracting me. I wonder why she came in here in the first place since she can't seem to place an order, but then I think maybe even invisible people need to get out, enjoy a little nightlife, if only vicariously.

Or maybe she's a ghost.

“Did anybody ever die in here?” I ask Ted.

Ted gives me yet another strange look. He leans across the table.

“You're getting seriously weird on me,” he says. “What do you want to know that for?”

The woman's on her way to the door now. Portishead is playing on the café's sound system. “Sour Times.” Lalo Schifrin and Smokey Brooks samples on a bed of scratchy vinyl sounds and a smoldering, low-key Eurobeat. Beth Gibbons singing about how nobody loves her. At one time we both worked at Gypsy Records and we're still serious music junkies.
It's one of the reasons we like The Half Kaffe so much; Jonathan has impeccable taste.

I pull a ten from my pocket and drop it on the table.

“I'll tell you later,” I say as I get up from my stool.

“Andrew,” Ted says. “You can't just leave me hanging like this.”

“Later.”

She's out the door, turning left. Through the café's window, I watch her do a little shuffle to one side as a couple almost walk right into her. They can't see her either. “Sour Times” dissolves into an instrumental, mostly keyboards and a lonesome electric guitar. Ted calls after me. He's starting to get up, too, but I wave him back. Then I'm out the door, jogging after the woman. “Excuse me!” I call after her. “Excuse me, miss!”

I can't believe I'm doing this. I have no idea what I'll say to her if she stops. But she doesn't turn. Gives no indication she's heard me. I catch up to her and touch her lightly on the elbow. I know a moment of surprise when I can feel the fabric of her sleeve instead of some cool mist. I half expected my fingers to go right through her.

“Excuse me,” I say again.

She stops then and looks at me. Up close, her face, those sad eyes . . . they make my pulse quicken until my heartbeat sounds like a deep bass drum playing a march at double-time in my chest.

“Yes?”

“I . . .”

There's no surprise in her features. She doesn't ask how come I can see her and nobody else can. What I do see is a hint of fear in her eyes which shouldn't surprise me. A woman alone on the streets always has to be on her guard. I take a step back to ease the fear, feeling guilty and depressed for having put it there.