Ivory and the Horn (4 page)

It’s nothing I plan.

Her office is a one-room walk-in storefront off Grasso Street, shabby in a genteel sort of way. She has a rack of filing cabinets along one wall, an old beat-up sofa with a matching chair by the bay window, a government surplus desk—one of those massive oak affairs with about ten million scratches and dents—a swivel chair behind the desk and a couple of matching oak straightbacks sitting to one side. I remember thinking they looked like a pair I’d sold a few years ago to old man Kemps down the street, and it turns out that’s where she picked them up.

A little table beside the filing cabinets holds a hot plate, a kettle, a bunch of mismatched mugs, a teapot and the various makings for coffee, hot chocolate and tea. The walls have cheerful posters—one from a travel agency that shows this wild New Orleans street scene where there’s a carnival going on, one from a Jilly Coppercorn  show—cutesy little flower fairies fluttering around in a junkyard.

I like the one of Bart Simpson best. I’ve never seen the show, but I don’t think you have to to know what he’s all about.

The nicest thing about the office is the front porch and steps that go down from it to the pavement. It’s a great place from which to watch the traffic go by, vehicular and pedestrian, or just to hang out. No, that’s not true. The nicest thing is Angel herself.

Her real name’s Angelina Marceau, but everyone calls her Angel, partly on account of her name, I guess, but mostly because of the salvage work she does with street kids. The thing is, she looks like an angel. She tries to hide it with baggy pants and plain T-shirts and about as little makeup as you can get away with wearing and still not be considered a Baptist, but she’s gorgeous. Heart-shaped face, hair to kill for—a long, dark waterfall that just seems to go forever down her back—and soft warm eyes that let you know straight-away that here’s someone who genuinely cares about you. Not as a statistic to add to her list of rescued souls, but as an individual. A real person.

Unless she’s giving you the suspicious once-over she’s giving me as I come in. It’s a look you have to earn, because normally she’ll bend over backwards to give you the benefit of the doubt.

I have to admit, there was a time when I’d push her, just to test the limits of her patience. It’s not something I was particularly prone to, but we used to have a history of her trying to help me and me insisting I didn’t need any help. We worked through all of that, eventually, but I keep finding myself in circumstances that make her feel as though I’m still testing the limits.

Like the time I punched out the booking agent at the Harbour Ritz my first day on the job that Angel had gotten for me at QMS.

I’m not the heartstopper that Angel is, but I do okay in the looks department. My best feature, I figure, is my hair. It’s not as long as Angel’s, but it’s as thick. Jackie, the dispatch girl at QMS, says it reminds her of the way they all wore their hair in the sixties—did I mention that these folks are living in a time warp? I’ve never bothered to tell them that the sixties have been and gone, it’s only the styles that are making yet another comeback.

Anyway, my hair’s a nice shade of light golden brown and hangs halfway down my back. I do okay in the figure department, too, though I lean more towards Winona Ryder, say, than Kim Basinger. Still, I’ve had guys hit on me occasionally, especially these days, since I don’t put out the impression that I’m some assistant baglady-in-training anymore.

The Harbour Ritz booking agent doesn’t know any of this. He just sees a messenger girl delivering some documents and figures he’ll give me a thrill. I guess he’s either hard up, or figures anyone without his equipment between their legs is just dying to have him paw them, because that’s what he does to me when I try to get him to sign for his envelope. He ushers me into his office and then closes the door, leans back against it and pulls me toward him.

What was I supposed to do? I just cocked back a fist and broke his nose.

Needless to say, he raised a stink, it’s his word against mine, etcetera, etcetera. Except the folks at QMS turn out to be real supportive and Angel comes down on this guy like he’s some used condom she’s found stuck to the bottom of her shoe when she’s walking through the Combat Zone. I keep my job, and don’t get arrested for assault like the guy’s threatening, but it’s a messy situation, right?

The look Angel’s wearing says, “I hope this isn’t more of the same, but just seeing you kicks in this bad feeling….”

It’s not more of the same, I want to tell her, but that’s about as far as my reasoning can take it. What’s bothering me isn’t exactly something I can just put my finger on. Do I tell her about Shirley, do I tell her about the malaise I’ve got eating away at me, or what?

I’d been tempted to bring the whole family with me—I spend so little time with them as it is—but settled on Rexy, mostly because he’s easier to control. It’s hard to think when you’re trying to keep your eye on six of them and Tommy, too.

Today I could be alone in a padded cell and I’d still find it hard to think.

I take a seat on the sofa and after a moment Angel comes around from behind her desk and settles on the other end. Rexy’s being real good. He licks her hand when she reaches out to pet him, then curls up on my lap and pretends to go to sleep. I know he’s faking it because his ears twitch in a way they don’t when he’s really conked out.

Angel and I do some prelims—small talk which is always relaxed and easy around her, but eventually we get to the nitty-gritty of why I’m here.

“I’ve got this problem,” I say, thinking of Shirley, but I know it’s not her. I kind of like having her around again, dead or not.

“At work?” Angel tries when I’m not more forthcoming.

“Not exactly.”

Angel’s looking a little puzzled, but curious, too.

“Your grades are good,” she says.

“It’s not got anything to do with grades,” I tell her. Well, it does, but only because the high school diploma’s part and parcel of the whole problem.

“Then what
does
it have to do with?” Angel wants to know.

It’s a reasonable request—more so because I’m the one who’s come to her, taking up her time. I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to phrase it.

My new life’s like a dress I might have wished after in a store window, saved for, finally bought, only to find out that while it’s the right size, it still doesn’t quite fit properly. It’s the wrong color. The sleeves are too long, or maybe too short. The skirt’s too tight.

It’s not something Angel would understand. Intellectually, maybe, but not how I feel about it. Angel’s one of those people that sees everyone having a purpose in life, you’ve just got to figure out what it is. I don’t even know where to begin figuring out that kind of stuff.

“Nothing really,” I say after a few moments.

I get up suddenly, startling Rexy who jumps to the floor and then gives me this put-upon expression of his—he should take out a patent on it.

“I’ve got to go,” I tell Angel.

“Maisie,” she starts, rising herself, but I’m already heading for the door.

I pretend I don’t hear her. I pretend she’s not following me to the street and calling after me as I head down the block at a quick walk that you might as well call running.

I’m not in good shape, I realize. Angel’s the only person I know that I could have talked with about something like this, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even start.

All I felt like doing was crying, and that really would have freaked her, because I never cry.

Not where people can see.

5

“So what are you really doing here?” I ask.

We’re sitting on a bench in the subway station at Williamson and Stanton, Shirley and I, with little Rexy sleeping on the toes of my running shoes. We’re at the far end of the platform. It’s maybe ten o’clock and there’s hardly anybody else down here with us. I see a couple of yuppies, probably coming back from an early show. A black guy in a three-piece checking out papers in his briefcase. Two kids slouched against a wall, watching a companion do tricks with her skateboard that bring her perilously close to the edge of the platform. My heart’s in my throat watching her, but her friends just look bored.

I wonder what they see when they look down this way. A baglady and me, with my dog dozing on my feet, or just me and Rexy on our own?

Shirley’s gaze is on the subway system grid that’s on the opposite side of the tracks, but I doubt she’s really seeing it. She always needed glasses but never got herself a pair, even when she could afford them.

“When I first got to the city,” she says, “I always thought that one day I’d go back home and show everybody what an important person I had become. I wanted to prove that just because everyone from my parents to my teachers treated me like I was no good, didn’t mean I really was no good.

“But I never went back.”

Ghosts always want to set something right, I remember from countless books and stories. Revenge, mistakes, that kind of thing. Sometimes just to say goodbye. They’re here because of unfinished business.

This is the first time I ever realized that Shirley’d had any.

I mean, I wasn’t stupid, even when I was twelve and she first took me in under her wing. Even then I knew that normal people didn’t live on the streets wearing their entire wardrobe on their backs. But I never really thought about why she was there. She always seemed like a part of the street, so full of smarts and a special kind of wisdom, that it simply never occurred to me that she’d been running away from something, too. That she’d had dreams and aspirations once, but all they came to was a homeless wandering to which the only end was a mishap like falling down the stairs in some run-down squat and breaking your neck.

That’s what your life’ll be like, I tell myself, if you don’t follow through on what Angel’s trying to do for you.

Maybe. But I’d respected Shirley, for all her quirks, for all that I knew she wasn’t what anybody else would call a winner. I’d just always thought that whatever she lacked, she had inner peace to make up for it.

I slouch lower on the bench, legs crossed at the ankles, the back of my head leaning against the top of the bench. I’m wearing my fedora and the movement pushes it forward so that the brim hangs low over my eyes.

“Is that why you’re back?” I ask Shirley. “Because you still had things left to do here?”

She shrugs, an eloquent Shirley-like gesture, for all the layers of clothes she’s wearing.

“I don’t really feel I ever went anywhere or came back,” she says.

“But you died,” I say.

“I guess so.”

I try a different tack. “So what’s it like?”

She smiles. “I don’t really know. When I’m here, I don’t feel any different from before I died. When I’m not here, I’m… I don’t know where I am. A kind of limbo, I suppose. A place where nothing moves, nothing changes, months are minutes.”

I don’t say anything.

“I guess it’s like the bus I never took back home,” she adds after a moment. “I missed out on wherever it was I was supposed to go, and I don’t know how to go on, where to catch the next bus, or if they’re even running anymore. For me at least. They don’t leave a schedule lying around for people like me who arrive too late.

“Story of my life, I guess.”

I start to feel so bad for her that I almost wish she’d go back to throwing cryptic little riddles at me the way she’d done the first couple of times we’d met.

“Is there anything I can do?” I say, but the subway roars into the station at the same time as I speak, swallowing my words with its thunder.

I’m about to repeat what I said but when I turn to look at Shirley, she’s not there anymore. I only just make it through the doors of the car, Rexy under my arm, before they hiss closed behind me and the train goes roaring off again into the darkness.

The story of her life, I think. I wonder, what’s the story of mine?

6

I should tell you about Tommy.

He’s a big guy, maybe six feet tall and running close to a hundred and eighty pounds. And he’s strong. He’s got brown hair, a dirtier shade than mine, though I try to keep it looking clean, and guileless eyes. He couldn’t keep a secret if he knew one.

The thing is, he’s simple. A ten-year-old in an adult’s body. I’m not sure how old he is, but the last time I took him in for a checkup at the clinic, the doctor told me he was in his early thirties, which makes him older than me.

When I say simple, I don’t mean stupid, though I’ll admit Tommy’s not all that bright by the way society reckons intelligence. I like to think of him as more basic than the rest of us. He’s open with his feelings, likes to smile, likes to laugh. He’s the happiest person I know, which is half the reason I love him the way I do. He may be mentally impaired, but sometimes I figure the world would be a better place if we all maintained some of that sweet innocence that makes him so endearing.

I inherited Tommy the same way I did the rest of my family: I found him on the streets, abandoned. I worried some at first about keeping him with me, but when I started asking around about institutions, I realized he’d have something with me and the dogs that he couldn’t get anywhere else: a family. All a guy like Tommy needs is someone willing to put the time into loving him. You don’t get that in places like the Zeb, which is where he lived until they discharged him so that someone with more pressing problems, read money, could have his bed.

One of the things I hate about the way my life’s going now is that I hardly ever see him anymore. Our landlady knows him better than I do these days and that’s depressing.

The day after I talk to Shirley in the subway, I get off early from work. There’s a million things I should be doing—like the week’s grocery shopping and research for a history essay at the library—but I decide the hell with it. It’s a beautiful day, so I’m going to pack up a picnic lunch and take the family to the park.

I find Tommy and Aunt Hilary in the backyard. She’s working on her garden, which for a postage-sized tenement lot is a work of art, a miniature farm and English garden all rolled into about a twenty by twenty foot yard of sunflowers, rosebushes, corn, peas, every kind of squash, tomatoes and flowerbeds aflame with color and scent. Tom’s playing with the paper people that I cut out of magazines and then stick onto cardboard backings for him. The dogs are sprawled all over the place, except for Rexy, who’s dogging Aunt Hilary’s heels. You don’t understand how apt an expression like that is until you see Rexy do his I-always-have-to-be-two-inches-away-from-you thing.