Tapping the Dream Tree (15 page)

“You're scared.”

He nodded.

“That's okay,” Jilly told him. “Big, life-changing things are always scary. But that doesn't mean they're bad.”

“I know.”

“So when did she tell you about this?”

“Last night.”

Jilly poked him in the shoulder with a stiff finger. “And? So what did you say?”

“That I'd let her know.”

“Oh, Geordie.”

“No, it's okay. She understands. I'm calling her tomorrow morning.”

“We won't stop being friends if you move,” Jilly assured him. “We'll just have bigger phone bills.”

I guess I never really expected him to die. Or at least not so soon.

Like most of the street people I ended up talking to, I never knew where he came from—really came from, that is. If I believed his stories … But I didn't. People called him Woody, but he answered to a half-dozen names. Robin Wood. Jack Green. Sammy King. Merle Hode. Some others that I've forgotten now. Woody was the one that stuck.

I was busking the line-ups in the theater district that night, always a good place to make a little money, when Bridie Grey gave me the message that Woody wanted to see me. She always reminded me of a gangly, wingless bird with her large eyes and twig-limbs. A recovered junkie, she still looked like she had a jones. Dark circles around her eyes like smeared kohl, spiky blonde hair with an inch of dark roots showing, hollow cheeks. Heroin chic. Some people never lost that look.

“He's waiting for you in the Tombs,” she said, “up Flood Street, past MacNeil.”

I was doing okay—pulling the popular tunes from the four strings of my fiddle: “St. Anne's Reel,” “Greensleeves,” “Old Joe Clark”—though not as good as when
Riverdance
was in town. Then any even vaguely Irish tune was guaranteed to fill my fiddle case with change.

“I won't be long,” I told her.

“Whatever.”

She took off before I could ask what Woody was doing in that no man's land of abandoned buildings and old factories. The Tombs is a rough part of town, full of bikers, junkies, runaways, just a lot of people with a chip on their shoulder. The older homeless guys didn't usually go too far in once the sun went down, not unless they traveled in a group, and Woody was a loner.

I tried to play another tune, but my concentration was off, so I packed up and left my spot to a waiting guitarist. I took the subway as far as Gracie Street, then walked over to Flood and up into the Tombs. I could feel a prickle between my shoulderblades as I left the lights of Gracie Street behind. I don't like the Tombs in the day; coming here at night feels like walking into an ambush. But I had this going for me: I've been on the street scene for a lot of years. Most people know me and leave me alone. Not because I'm so tough, but because I've come to fit into the scenery. Like background. I hoped that Woody was as lucky. Sometimes people get the idea that it's funny to douse a bum with gasoline and chase him with a match. Or beat him senseless, just because they can.

There's an empty lot at the corner of Flood and MacNeil—one of those places where the demolition started but never got further than knocking a few blocks of tenements down. It's been years now since the wrecking crews left, long enough for the rubble to be half-covered with weeds and scrub, some of which has actually succeeded in the struggle to grow into scraggly trees. I knew Woody didn't like being inside, so I started checking out the lot first, ignoring the abandoned buildings that were still standing on the other three corners. What I found gave me the serious creeps.

In about the middle of the lot, someone had piled up a heap of wood, an unlit bonfire of twigs and branches, scrap wood, old fixtures and other woodwork from some of the surrounding buildings. On top of it all was a bundle of clothes that I recognized as belonging to Woody and what looked for all the world like a human skull, artfully displayed on a pyramid of bones. I knew it couldn't be real, the skull, the bones, but it made my pulse quicken all the same.

“Okay,” I said. “Very funny, Woody.”

Because I remembered what he'd said. There wouldn't be a corpse when he died. Just the bones. I wondered where he'd found them.

Only then I noted the birds.

I don't know why I didn't notice them walking in. The trees were full of them, more pigeons than I'd ever seen together in one place, eight or nine times the huge flock that gathers daily on the steps in front of St. Paul's. They were all quiet, except for the odd restless rustle of their feathers as one or another shifted position. Once you've seen that Hitchcock movie, you can't help but get a little weirded out over big gatherings of birds like this.

The streetlights of Gracie Street seemed a hundred miles away. Like this was another world. It is another world.

I sat down on some brickwork that had been a part of a wall in some other life and laid my fiddle case down by my feet. I was seriously creeped. My night vision was good, so it was hard to ignore the unlit funeral pyre, the birds, the damned skull that seemed to be staring right back at me. I tried not to look at it.

I don't know how long I sat there, staring off into the dark. After a while I heard footsteps, someone scuffling their way across the rubble. In this place it could have been anybody. A junkie, a runaway, some psycho. I was hoping for Woody, to hear him laugh and tell me, “Gotcha.” Instead it was Jilly who came wandering up to me, out of the dark. I had to shake my head.

“How'd you know I was here?”

Jilly shrugged. “I don't know. It's just...”

“This gift you have.”

She gave me a smile. I don't know why I was surprised. Jilly and I seem to have this connection, always running into each other whenever one of us wants to see the other. We don't even have to think about it. It just happens. And she's fearless when it comes to walking around the city at night. It's not like she doesn't care what happens to her. More like she's made some pact with the darkness, the city, the danger. Or maybe the night itself looks out for her, an unexpected random act of kindness pulled out of its shadows like a magician's rabbit.

She sat down beside me on my memory of a wall and we looked at the bones for a while.

“Woody set this up,” I said finally.

She nodded. “Joe told me.”

Joe was Joseph Crazy Dog, a friend of hers who always makes me feel a little uneasy. It isn't anything he says or does, but something in his eyes. Or mostly in his eyes, because he can come out with the damnedest things, weird pronouncements that he lets drop like most people do comments about the weather. On the street everybody knows him as Bones because of this fortune-telling thing he does with a handful of small animal bones.

I sighed. More bones. There used to be an old woman who wandered the streets collecting animal bones that she tied up with wire and made into skeletons. With my luck, she'd be showing up here tonight as well.

Jilly tapped my knee with hers, a companionable bump.

“I didn't know Woody well,” she said, “but I always liked him. It's too bad he had to go.”

I shook my head. “He's not gone anywhere. This is just something he set up to get me going.”

Jilly gave me an odd look.

“Whose bones do you think those are?” she asked.

“No way,” I told her, starting to wonder if she was in on the joke. “If that's Woody, then who put all this together? The pyre, the bones.”

“Geordie, me lad,” she said. “We're talking about an enchanter. A magician. Didn't you listen to his stories?”

“Yeah, but…”

“You didn't believe.”

“Well, no. I mean, Red tells me he's a werewolf. Am I supposed to believe that as well?”

She shrugged. “Depends. What's he like when there's a full moon?”

“Jilly …”

“I'm joking.”

But I wasn't so sure. The things she accepts as matter-of-course would have most people knocking on the front door of the Zeb and asking for a padded room if they started seeing them as well.

“But not about Woody,” she added.

I don't know why, but I believed her. I guess it's that I've known her too long. If this was a joke, she wouldn't be in on it, because it wasn't her style. She'd never go out of her way to make anybody feel bad, and if this really was Woody, bad didn't begin to describe the way it made me feel.

That's hard to explain, too, because we weren't as close as maybe I've made it out. I'd only known him for a few months, but I liked the guy. He had a certain dignity that most of us don't, and genuinely cared about, well, pretty much everything. Still, I only saw him once or twice a week, listened to his stories, bought him a meal or a sandwich when he looked like he needed it, which was all the time.

“Did you ever notice how many storytellers there are living on the streets?” I found myself saying to Jilly. “I wonder why that is.”

“Everybody's got a story they need to tell,” she said. “Stockbrokers, bankers, plumbers, housewives. The thing about street people is that often their stories are
all
they have.”

I nodded, my gaze pulled back to the funeral pyre. I'd come all the way around to believing now, though I was no closer to understanding why there wasn't a corpse, only those bones. I only had Jilly's explanation and that was no explanation at all. But if I didn't know how we'd come to this place—Jilly, me, Woody's bones—I knew why. Woody wanted to get off the streets. He wanted back into that story he stepped out of all those years ago. The trouble was …

“I don't think I can do it,” I said. “This is just too weird.”

“You have to do it,” Jilly said. “You made him a promise.”

Like I promised Tanya things would work out, that I'd stand by her, except there she was and here I was, and it didn't look like we'd ever be together except for when she had a break from work and could get away to come back to visit me. I mean well, I really do, but I'm not so good at following through. It comes from a lack of trust, from having put up walls a long time ago, tall and thick and a lot stronger than the little memory of a brick wall we were sitting on. People didn't get in behind those walls so much as I looked over the stones at them.

Jilly was the only one who got all the way through, but that's because she's got her own walls. Everybody thinks she's this light-hearted piece of sunshine, and that's a part of who she is, no question, but it hides the shadows. Some people deal with their problems, others like Jilly and I, we simply put them away. Jilly uses her good humor and her art; I use my music. We've known each other for so long, been through so much together, that I guess our walls are made of the same stones by now. We're kind of standing there together, on the inside, looking out at the rest of the world.

“You can't break a promise,” Jilly said.

Well, you can. But then you have to live with yourself after.

I felt the weight of her gaze on me and finally had to turn to look at her. She didn't say anything else, but she didn't have to. I nodded. Opening my fiddle case, I took out a pack of matches I keep to light the candles in my apartment. Some nights all I want is a flickering light, something that moves like music.

I was hoping the wood wouldn't take. That it'd be damp, or the pieces too big, or something. So that I would have tried, but not been able to follow through, because I still didn't want to do this thing. But when I stepped closer I saw that there were old newspapers, twisted into the wood. I lit a match and put the flame to one, moving on when the newspaper caught. It took me four matches to walk all the way around the pyre, to start the flames so that they rose up evenly on all sides, rushing up, the smaller wood crackling and popping as the fire reached for the pyramid of bones, the clothes underneath it, the skull on top.

A promise kept, I thought.

Woody seemed very close at that moment. I felt the echo of the heartbeat of the world drumming inside me, slowly, softly, like it did when he was telling me his stories. It was inside my walls. So was Woody. And so was somebody else, though maybe she didn't know it yet. It was long past time that I did more than simply tell her how much she meant to me.

As I watched the flames lick the bones, I knew I had other promises to keep.

Things burn in the Tombs and no one questions what or why. The streets are too choked with rubble and abandoned cars for the fire trucks to get in, and the truth is, nobody really cares. If you took a poll, you'd find most people would like to see the whole eyesore this place is burned to the ground, the buildings leveled, the night people driven out because there's no place for them to hide anymore.

So we wouldn't be disturbed.

We sat there while the fire burned, bones and wood, the smoke trailing up into the sky throughout the night, thin tendrils still visible against the sky as dawn pinked the distant horizon. I felt like I was in a kind of dream state, an effect that was heightened when all those pigeons that had come to see Woody off suddenly took to the air at the same time. Their wings were like thunder as they circled around the fire, once, twice, three times, then went spiraling straight up, following the last trails of smoke as they drifted apart, high in the dawn sky.

I remembered what Jilly had said about pigeons and angels and watched the cloud they made fade into the distance. When I turned around, Jilly was smiling.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Just how wonderful the world is.”

“Of course.”

“No, really. And you know what's the best thing about it? That it doesn't matter if we're here or not. It just goes on being this wonderful place. That's what people forget. It's not here for us. It's just here, and the gift we were given is that we're allowed to experience it.”

“I wish I could see it the way you do, but I guess I'm too much of a cynic.”