Trader

  “He...they...”

  Nia couldn’t get the words out. For all that she’d come to accept that it was possible, if not probable, for people to switch minds with one another, the abrupt disappearance of Max and Johnny simply wouldn’t register as real. Buddy, tugging at the leash a moment ago, now crouched beside her, whining, his head and shoulders stuck to her leg like glue. She turned slowly to see Zeffy staring at the bench with a look on her face that would have been comical in other circumstances.

  “I...I don’t believe it,” Zeffy said.

  She started walking toward the bench, one hand stretched out in front of her as though she were feeling her way through a dark room. Nia followed with a reluctant Buddy in tow, her own nervousness mirroring his. As they drew nearer, she looked around and realized that except for the man who’d been fighting with Max, no one else seemed to be paying any attention to what had happened, no one except for...

  She stepped up her pace and caught Zeffy’s arm. “Over there,” she said, her voice sounding far more composed than she was feeling. “By that tree.”

  Zeffy paused, then looked in the direction Nia was indicating.

  “That’s him,” Nia added needlessly. “The Bones guy.”

  He was sitting cross-legged under the spreading boughs of a tall oak, wearing an old khaki army jacket over a T-shirt and jeans, black hair pulled back into a braid. Zeffy gave the bench a last uncomprehending look, then proceeded in his direction. He watched their approach with interest.

  “I guess you’ve been looking for me,” he said when they drew near.

  “How do you know that?” Zeffy asked.

  He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be able to see me otherwise.” While Nia was still working that out, he jerked a thumb toward the bench and added, “Some show, don’t you think?”

  Buddy stepped away from Nia’s side to push his muzzle toward Bones. Bones smiled and gave the dog a scratch under the chin.

  “Why wouldn’t we be able to see you?” Nia asked.

  “I tend to blend in when I don’t want to be noticed,” he replied. There was something about his eyes that made Nia feel he was both pulling a joke on them and deadly serious. “It’s like being invisible, except it’s just people not paying attention.”

  Zeffy sat down on the grass across from him with Nia happy to follow suit. Nia’s knees had been feeling rubbery and she hadn’t trusted her legs to hold her up much longer. She gave Bones a long studying look. There was something way too surreal about all of this and she couldn’t quite figure out how she felt about it. Not scared, exactly, but not comfortable either.

  “How’d you get this dog to put a damper on his nerves?” Bones asked. “Jilly asked him to be good,” Nia found herself answering. “And he has been.”

  “Ah, Jilly,” Bones said, as if that explained everything.

  “She’s the one who told us to come look for you,” Nia added.

  “Then I guess you’re okay. Never met a woman with as good a bullshit detector as Jilly.”

  “What...” Zeffy paused. She had to clear her throat and try again. “What just happened over there?”

  Bones smiled. “Well, that’s kind of complicated—depending on what you know, it’ll get either more or less complicated.”

  “Those two guys,” Nia said, “that...that disappeared. We know they kind of switched brains or something.”

  Bones looked from Nia to Zeffy. “But you’re not entirely sure it’s true.”

  “Well, I mean, really,” Zeffy said. “It’s just so...so...”

  Her voice trailed off and she glanced back at the bench. An old woman was sitting there now, feeding pigeons birdseed from a brown paper bag she held on her lap. It was such a prosaic scene that Nia started to wonder if what they’d seen had even been real.

  “It was just so weird,” Zeffy said.

  “But it happens all the time,” Bones told them. “Or at least it used to. Where do you think all the stories about the animal people came from? Bears and wolves that can talk like men. Buffalo women and snake girls. Coyote and raven and hare. It’s not always the little manitou talking to us, maybe making mischief. Sometimes it’s people getting mixed up with animal spirits.”

  Zeffy remained silent, but Nia leaned closer. “You mean, like, for real?” Bones nodded, strange lights dancing deep in his dark eyes. “What happens is, they trade spirits and the medicine gets strange. Sometimes they only trade partway; most times they trade for good, one spirit swapped for the other. They get their dreams mixed up and they lose their way back to where they’re supposed to be.

  “Human to human—that’s not so common. Harder to fix, too. You end up with two stubborn human minds and one of them almost always wants to leave things the way they are because they usually had a good reason for wanting to escape whatever kind of mess they’ve made of their own life. It’s easier when one of them’s an animal spirit. Animals always want to get back. The trouble in that kind of situation is getting them together. But once you do, you can usually work it out.”

  Zeffy shook her head. “This is so...”

  “Unfamiliar?”

  She nodded.

  “Doesn’t make it any less true,” Bones said. “Anyway, that’s what happened with your friends. They dreamed too close and now they can’t get back to where they belong. Maybe they don’t even want to get back. You’d have to make them dream together again, for starters, and they’d have to want to get back into their own skins. Both of them.”

  “What if we can’t?” Nia asked.

  Bones shrugged and leaned back against the trunk of the oak. “Too late to worry about that now. The whole thing’s out of our hands anyway.”

  “I don’t understand, “ Zeffy said.

  Neither did Nia. “Where did they go?” she asked.

  Bones took the time to fish a package of cigarette tobacco out of the pocket of his jacket and rolled a cigarette. Nia watched the economic movement of his fingers with interest. When he was done, he offered it to her, but she shook her head.

  “No, thanks,” Zeffy said when he then offered it to her as well.

  He lit the cigarette and blew a wreath of blue-grey smoke up into the droop of the oak’s low-hanging boughs.

  “Here’s where it gets complicated again,” he said finally.

  Beside Nia, Zeffy gave a short humorless laugh. “Maybe a better word would be improbable.”

  “Depends,” Bones told her.

  “On what?”

  “On how married you are to everything being only one way.” He paused and took another drag. “Your way.”

  “Please,” Nia said to Zeffy. “Let’s just hear what he’s got to say.”

  Bones smiled. “They say we get born wise, but we have that wisdom studied and bullied out of us when we’re growing up and it takes us a lifetime to get back to being wise once more.”

  Nia returned his smile uncertainly, not quite sure what he was getting at. “He means the younger you are, the more gullible you are,” Zeffy said.

  “Or the more clearly you can see,” Bones put in. “Take your pick.”

  Zeffy looked like she was about to add something to that, but she glanced at Nia and then said, “Sorry.” She returned her attention to Bones. “You were going to tell us where they went.”

  “The spiritworld.” Bones waited a moment for that to sink in. When neither of them spoke, he went on. “It’s the place where the manitou live. We’re not meant to go there in our bodies, you see.”

  “Why not?” Nia wanted to know.

  “It’s the place where our spirits travel to when we’re looking for knowledge or wisdom or to speak to ghosts and spirits. You might go there to find a totem. Maybe you just stray into it when you’re dreaming and there’s no harm done. Fact is, there’s people go there on a regular basis when they’re dreaming.”

  “Like Sophie,” Zeffy murmured.

  Bones raised his eyebrows.

  “She’s just a friend,” Zeffy explained.
“Of Jilly’s. She’s always talking about how she goes somewhere else when she dreams—lives a life there that’s as real as the one she lives here.”

  Bones nodded. “Lots of people do that.” He smiled. “Most of them just don’t know it.”

  “So why’s it so dangerous to go there in your body?” Nia asked.

  Bones took a last drag from his cigarette and butted it out on the ground. Buddy lifted his muzzle and regarded the butt as though hoping it might be edible, but Bones simply stowed it away in another pocket of his jacket.

  “It changes things,” he said. “In you, in the land, in the spirits that inhabit it. It’s like the stories you Europeans have about fairyland, how people stray into it and come back either crazy or poets.” He grinned, looking so loopy for a moment that Nia decided he had to have been there himself and not come back a poet. “Same place, different name, that’s all. Spirits come to you looking like you expect them to. You want little elves, that’s what you’ll see. Totems? Got them, too. Little green men from Mars in spaceships. Whatever.”

  “But why's it so dangerous?” Nia asked.

  “Don’t know exactly,” Bones said. “That’s just the way it is. Everything’s different there. Time’s different. You can be there for years and maybe a minute’s passed when you get back. Or you can be there for a moment and a hundred years have gone by.”

  Nia and Zeffy turned to each other. It was hard for Nia to figure out exactly how her companion was taking this, but she knew she believed.

  “And that’s where Max and Johnny went?” she asked.

  “Touched skin to skin,” Bones said. “Set up a kind of backlash, I’m guessing, and it sucked them right into the spiritworld, because that’s the first place dreams go.” His dark eyes grew thoughtful. “But a simple thing like that can get messy when the two of them are carrying pieces of each other around the way they were.”

  “Pieces of each other?”

  Bones nodded. “The spirit’s not a plain and simple separate thing. Bits of it are all mixed up with our bodies, tied to various parts.” That loopy smile returned. “Why do you think things like acupuncture work the way they do? But the personality’s mostly by itself and that’s what goes traveling.”

  “So that’s why Max was acting so weird,” Nia said.

  “What were the two of you arguing about?” Zeffy asked Bones.

  “I thought he was going off to kill the other fellow and I didn’t want him to use my knife to do it.”

  “You didn’t try to stop him?”

  Bones shrugged. “Except for the knife, it wasn’t my business.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” Bones said. “Who’s the one person nobody likes? The one giving advice.”

  “But you tell fortunes,” Zeffy said.

  “Only when people come to me. Hell, I’ll give anybody a hand if they ask. But they’ve got to ask.”

  “And what does it cost?”

  Nia nodded, wanting to know the answer as well because hadn’t Jilly warned them to ask?

  “Depends,” Bones said, “on what they’re willing to pay.” He fished out his tobacco again and started rolling another cigarette. “And before you go all sanctimonious on me, remember this: Nobody puts much value on anything anymore unless they have to pay something for it. When you get to the kind of mojo we’re talking about now, believing in it’s a whole part of what makes it work.” He touched a match to the end of his finished cigarette. “People nowadays only believe in what they’ve paid for.”

  “Not everybody’s like that,” Nia said.

  “That’s true,” Bones agreed. “And that’s why there’s a sliding scale. What a person gives me all depends on what they want, and how much it’ll take them to believe that I can deliver the goods.”

  “So what would you charge us?” Nia asked.

  “To do what?”

  Nia glanced at Zeffy before replying. “To show us how to go after Max— into the spiritworld.”

  “Not a good idea,” Bones said.

  “Definitely not a good idea,” Zeffy agreed. “You heard what he said about the place. We’d probably never even be able to find them.”

  “I could,” Nia said. “And Buddy’d help.”

  “Nia, I know you want to—”

  “Max is my friend. Maybe the only one I have. I’m not going to leave him there without trying to help.”

  “But—”

  “Look, this is my business, okay? What do you even care, anyway?”

  “I’m just worried about what might happen to you.”

  “Well, don’t,” Nia said. “We only just met so you don’t have to act like my mother.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You don’t even believe in any of this,” Nia went on. “But I do and I’m going to help Max.” She turned away from Zeffy. “What’ll you charge to show me how to get there?” she asked Bones.

  He gave her a long studying look.

  “You can’t be thinking of helping her,” Zeffy said.

  “Well, now,” Bones said, ignoring Zeffy. “My wife Cassie’s always telling me how she’d love to have a totem painting on a pebble—you know the kind of thing I’m talking about?”

  Nia nodded slowly. How could he know? He must have seen her making them—walking around invisible the way he claimed he could.

  “What kind?” she asked.

  “A crow’d be nice, considering the way she’s always collecting things. Sometimes I think she and some crow got to dreaming too close one night.” Nia reached into her pocket and took out her stones, sorting through them until she found the one she’d done of a crow.

  “How’s this?” she asked, handing it over to him.

  Bones gave her that grin that made his eye go clown-bright. “Beauty.”

  “And me?” Zeffy asked. “What would you charge me?”

  Nia turned in surprise.

  “Well, I’m in this far,” Zeffy said. “You don’t think I’d really back out at this point, do you?”

  “You’re tougher,” Bones said. “Have to get you looking past the end of your nose and really seeing for a change.”

  “Don’t mince words, do you?”

  “No point.”

  Bones finished his cigarette, thinking. When the butt was ground out in the dirt and stowed away in his pocket with the other one, he finally nodded. “I’m going to need a song from you,” he said.

  “What? You want me to sing you a song?”

  “No. Write me one.”

  “I don’t know if we have that kind of time.”

  “Not now,” Bones said. “When you get back.”

  When, Nia thought, holding on to the word. Not if, but when. Maybe everything he’d been saying was just to scare them, make them cautious. “What about the dangers?” Zeffy said. “What if I come back crazy?”

  She was bringing that up, Nia decided, in a last-ditch hope to dissuade Nia from seeing this through, but it wasn’t going to work. Nia had already made up her mind.

  “Then I guess I won’t get my song,” Bones said. “Or if I do, it won’t make much sense.”

  Zeffy sighed. She put a hand on Nia’s knee.

  “You’re sure about this?” she asked.

  Nia nodded. “What do we have to do?” she asked Bones.

  “Nothing. Just think hard about your friend and sit there. I’ll do the work.”

  He reached into another pocket of his jacket and pulled out what looked like a packet of grass, tightly wound with string, or maybe jute. One end looked as if it had been burned. It took Nia a moment to recognize if for what it was. A smudge-stick. She’d seen them at a powwow up on the Kickaha reservation that her mother had taken her to last summer.

  “What can I call you?” he asked.

  Not what were their names, Nia noted. She looked around a little nervously. Maybe there really were spirits hanging around, watching, like Jilly had said there’d be. Then she had to laugh at herself. She was worried about that whe
n she was planning to head off into the place they came from?

  “Nia,” she said, thinking that’d be safe enough since it wasn’t her whole name, just a part of it.

  “Zeffy.”

  “Nia and Zeffy,” Bones repeated, his voice low, chanting their names more than speaking them. “Oh-na, oh-nya-n …” he went on. “Hey-canta, no-wa-canta...”

  He lit the smudge-stick and the smoke that rose up from it seemed far out of proportion to what should come from such a small source.

  “Oh-na, hey, oh-nya-na...”

  The smoke was sweet, billowing rapidly around them making it impossible to see much farther than a few feet in any direction. Buddy stirred uneasily by Nia’s leg and she stroked his fur to comfort him. Her ears popped and the quiet murmur of Bones’s voice began to fade.

  “Hey-canta...”

  She kept one hand on Buddy’s back, tangling her fingers under his collar so that they wouldn’t be separated. Along her knee, she felt Zeffy’s hand, searching, and she reached for it with her free hand, holding Zeffy’s fingers in a tight grip. She thought she heard her name being called—it was her mother’s voice, rising above the almost inaudible sound of Bones’ chanting.

  That’s so weird, she thought as the billowing smoke from the smudge-stick finally stole away her ability to see anything. For a moment it was as though she was sitting on nothing, floating, a part of the smoke, then there was something soft and gritty under her, loose sand of some sort, and she felt so light-headed, she thought she might faint.

  Think of Max, she told herself. Concentrate on him or who knew where they’d end up.

  But then another thought rose, unbidden and worrying.

  They’d never asked Bones how they’d get back.

  2 MAX

  I’m literally dumbfounded when I crawl back out of whatever black space swallowed me up. I sit up slowly, feeling the whole time as though I’m moving through a lucid dream, lucid only because I know I’m dreaming, have to be, the whole simple procedure of sitting up taking forever, nothing making sense, not any sense at all, because I can’t be where my eyes are telling me I am.