The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  “It’s the feeling that he puts into his voice that’s important,” Jilly said. “But this is an instrumental. He’s not even—”

  “Supposed to be singing. I know. Only—”

  “If you’d just—”

  The jangling of the phone sliced through their discussion. Because she was closer—and knew that Jilly would claim some old war wound or any excuse not to get up, now that she was lying down—Sue answered it. She listened for a long moment, an odd expression on her face, then slowly cradled the receiver.

  “Wrong number?”

  Sue shook her head. “No. It was someone named…uh, Zinc? He said that he’s been captured by two Elvis Presleys disguised as police officers and would you please come and explain to them that he wasn’t stealing bikes, he was just setting them free. Then he just hung up.”

  “Oh, shit!” Jilly stuffed her sketchbook into her shoulderbag and got up.

  “This makes sense to you?”

  “He’s one of the street kids.”

  Sue rolled her eyes, but she got up as well. “Want me to bring my chequebook?”

  “What for?

  “Bail. It’s what you have to put up to spring somebody from jail. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

  Jilly shook her head. “What? And let the aliens monitor my brainwaves?”

  “What scares me,” Sue muttered as they left the loft and started down the stairs, “is that sometimes I don’t think you’re kidding.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” Jilly said.

  Sue shook her head. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  * * *

  Jilly knew people from all over the city, in all walks of life. Socialites and bagladies. Street kids and university profs. Nobody was too poor, or, conversely, too rich for her to strike up a conversation with, no matter where they happened to meet, or under what circumstances. She’d once told Sue that she met Detective Lou Fucceri of the Crowsea Precinct’s General Investigations squad when he was still a patrolman, walking the Stanton Street Combat Zone beat. Jilly was there, taking reference photos for a painting she was planning. When she had asked Lou to pose for a couple of shots, he tried to run her in on a soliciting charge.

  “Is it true?” Sue wanted to know as soon as the desk sergeant showed them into Lou’s office. “The way you guys met?”

  “You mean UFO-spotting in Butler U. Park?” he replied.

  Sue sighed. “I should’ve known. I must be the only person who’s maintained her sanity after meeting Jilly.”

  She sat down on one of the two wooden chairs that faced Lou’s desk in the small cubicle that passed for his office. There was room for a bookcase behind him, crowded with law books and file folders, and a brass coat rack from which hung a lightweight sportsjacket. Lou sat at the desk, white shirt sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows, collar open, black tie hanging loose.

  His Italian heritage was very much present in the Mediterranean cast to his complexion, his dark brooding eyes and darker hair. As Jilly sat down in the chair Sue had left for her, he shook a cigarette free from a crumpled pack that he dug out from under the litter of files on his desk. He offered them around, tossing the pack back down on the desk and lighting his own when there were no takers. Jilly pulled her chair closer to the desk. “What did he do, Lou? Sue took the call, but I don’t know if she got the message right.”

  “I can take a message,” Sue began, but Jilly waved a hand in her direction.

  She wasn’t in the mood for banter just now.

  Lou blew a stream of blue-grey smoke towards the ceiling. “We’ve been having a lot of trouble with a bicycle theft ring operating in the city,” he said. “They’ve hit the Beaches, which was bad enough, though with all the Mercedes and BMWs out there, I doubt they’re going to miss their bikes a lot. But rich people like to complain, and now the gang’s moved their operations into Crowsea.”

  Jilly nodded. “Where for a lot of people, a bicycle’s the only way they can get around.”

  “You got it.”

  “So what does that have to do with Zinc?”

  “The patrol car that picked him up found him standing in the middle of the street with a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters in his hand. The street’d been cleaned right out, Jilly. There wasn’t a bike left on the block—just the cut locks and chains left behind.”

  “So where are the bikes?”

  Lou shrugged. “Who knows. Probably in a Foxville chopshop having their serial numbers changed. Jilly, you’ve got to get Zinc to tell us who he was working with. Christ, they took off, leaving him to hold the bag. He doesn’t owe them a thing now.”

  Jilly shook her head slowly. “This doesn’t make any sense. Zinc’s not the criminal kind.”

  “I’ll tell you what doesn’t make any sense,” Lou said. “The kid himself.

  He’s heading straight for the loonie bin with all his talk about Elvis clones and Venusian thought machines and feral-fuc—” He glanced at Sue and covered up the profanity with a cough. “Feral bicycles leading the domesticated ones away.”

  “He said that?”

  Lou nodded. “That’s why he was clipping the locks—to set the bikes free so that they could follow their, and I quote, ‘spiritual leader, home to the place of mystery.’”

  “That’s a new one,” Jilly said.

  “You’re having me on—right?” Lou said. “That’s all you can say? It’s a new one? The Elvis clones are old hat now? Christ on a comet. Would you give me a break? Just get the kid to roll over and I’ll make sure things go easy for him.”

  “Christ on a comet?” Sue repeated softly.

  “C’mon, Lou,” Jilly said. “How can I make Zinc tell you something he doesn’t know? Maybe he found those wire cutters on the street—just before the patrol car came. For all we know he could—”

  “He said he cut the locks.”

  The air went out of Jilly. “Right,” she said. She slouched in her chair. “I forgot you’d said that.”

  “Maybe the bikes really did just go off on their own,” Sue said.

  Lou gave her a weary look, but Jilly sat up straighter. “I wonder,” she began.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Sue said. “I was only joking.”

  “I know you were,” Jilly said. “But I’ve seen enough odd things in this world that I won’t say anything’s impossible anymore.”

  “The police department doesn’t see things quite the same way,” Lou told

  Jilly. The dryness of his tone wasn’t lost on her.

  “I know.”

  “I want these bike thieves, Jilly.”

  “Are you arresting Zinc?”

  Lou shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hold him on except for circumstantial evidence.”

  “I thought you said he admitted to cutting the locks,” Sue said.

  Jilly shot her a quick fierce look that plainly said, don’t make waves when he’s giving us what we came for.

  Lou nodded. “Yeah. He admitted to that. He also admitted to knowing a hobo who was really a spy from Pluto. Asked why the patrolmen had traded in their white Vegas suits for uniforms and wanted to hear them sing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. For next of kin he put down Bigfoot.”

  “Gigantopithecus blacki,” Jilly said.

  Lou looked at her. “What?”

  “Some guy at Washington State University’s given Bigfoot a Latin name now. Giganto—”

  Lou cut her off. “That’s what I thought you said.” He turned back to Sue. “So you see, his admitting to cutting the locks isn’t really going to amount to much. Not when a lawyer with half a brain can get him off without even having to work up a sweat.”

  “Does that mean he’s free to go then?” Jilly asked.

  Lou nodded. “Yeah. He can go. But keep him out of trouble, Jilly. He’s in here again, and I’m sending him straight to the Zeb for psychiatric testing. And try to convince him to come clean on this—okay? It’s not just for me, it’s for him too. We break this case and find out h
e’s involved, nobody’s going to go easy on him. We don’t give out rainchecks.”

  “Not even for dinner?” Jilly asked brightly, happy now that she knew Zinc was getting out.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jilly grabbed a pencil and paper from his desk and scrawled “Jilly Coppercorn owes Hotshot Lou one dinner, restaurant of her choice,” and passed it over to him.

  “I think they call this a bribe,” he said.

  “I call it keeping in touch with your friends,” Jilly replied and gave him a big grin.

  Lou glanced at Sue and rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m the sane one here.”

  “You wish,” Jilly told her.

  Lou heaved himself to his feet with exaggerated weariness. “C’mon, let’s get your friend out of here before he decides to sue us because we don’t have our coffee flown in from the Twilight Zone,” he said as he led the way down to the holding cells.

  * * *

  Zinc had the look of a street kid about two days away from a good meal. His jeans, T-shirt, and cotton jacket were ragged, but clean; his hair had the look of a badly-mown lawn, with tufts standing up here and there like exclamation points. The pupils of his dark brown eyes seemed too large for someone who never did drugs. He was seventeen, but acted half his age.

  The only home he had was a squat in Upper Foxville that he shared with a couple of performance artists, so that was where Jilly and Sue took him in Sue’s Mazda. The living space he shared with the artists was on the upper story of a deserted tenement where someone had put together a makeshift loft by the simple method of removing all the walls, leaving a large empty area cluttered only by support pillars and the squatters’ belongings.

  Lucia and Ursula were there when they arrived, practicing one of their pieces to the accompaniment of a ghetto blaster pumping out a mixture of electronic music and the sound of breaking glass at a barely-audible volume. Lucia was wrapped in plastic and lying on the floor, her black hair spread out in an arc around her head. Every few moments one of her limbs would twitch, the plastic wrap stretching tight against her skin with the movement. Ursula crouched beside the blaster, chanting a poem that consisted only of the line, “There are no patterns.” She’d shaved her head since the last time Jilly had seen her.

  “What am I doing here?” Sue asked softly. She made no effort to keep the look of astonishment from her features.

  “Seeing how the other half lives,” Jilly said as she led the way across the loft to where Zinc’s junkyard of belongings took up a good third of the available space.

  “But just look at this stuff,” Sue said. “And how did he get that in here?”

  She pointed to a Volkswagen bug that was sitting up on blocks, missing only its wheels and front hood. Scattered all around it was a hodgepodge of metal scraps, old furniture, boxes filled with wiring and God only knew what.

  “Piece by piece,” Jilly told her.

  “And then he assembled it here?”

  Jilly nodded.

  “Okay. I’ll bite. Why?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Jilly grinned as Sue quickly shook her head. The entire trip from the precinct station, Zinc had carefully explained his theory of the world to her, how the planet earth was actually an asylum for insane aliens, and that was why nothing made sense.

  Zinc followed the pair of them across the room, stopping only long enough to greet his squat-mates. “Hi, Luce. Hi, Urse.”

  Lucia never looked at him.

  “There are no patterns,” Ursula said.

  Zinc nodded thoughtfully.

  “Maybe there’s a pattern in that,” Sue offered.

  “Don’t start,” Jilly said. She turned to Zinc. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “You should’ve seen them go, Jill,” Zinc said. “All shiny and wet, just whizzing down the street, heading for the hills.”

  “I’m sure it was really something, but you’ve got to promise me to stay off the streets for a while. Will you do that, Zinc? At least until they catch this gang of bike thieves?”

  “But there weren’t any thieves. It’s like I told Elvis Two, they left on their own.”

  Sue gave him an odd look. “Elvis too?”

  “Don’t ask,” Jilly said. She touched Zinc’s arm. “Just stay in for a while—okay? Let the bikes take off on their own.”

  “But I like to watch them go.”

  “Do it as a favour to me, would you?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Jilly gave him a quick smile. “Thanks. Is there anything you need? Do you need money for some food?”

  Zinc shook his head. Jilly gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and tousled the exclamation point hair tufts sticking up from his head.

  “I’ll drop by to see you tomorrow, then—okay?” At his nod, Jilly started back across the room. “C’mon, Sue,” she said when her companion paused beside the tape machine where Ursula was still chanting.

  “So what about this stock market stuff?” she asked the poet.

  “There are no patterns,” Ursula said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Sue said, but then Jilly was tugging her arm.

  “Couldn’t resist, could you?” Jilly said.

  Sue just grinned.

  * * *

  “Why do you humour him?” Sue asked when she pulled up in front of Jilly’s loft.

  “What makes you think I am?”

  “I’m being serious, Jilly.”

  “So am I. He believes in what he’s talking about. That’s good enough for me.”

  “But all this stuff he goes on about…Elvis clones and insane aliens—”

  “Don’t forget animated bicycles.”

  Sue gave Jilly a pained look. “I’m not. That’s just what I mean—it’s all so crazy.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  Sue shook her head. “I can’t buy it.”

  “It’s not hurting anybody.” Jilly leaned over and gave Sue a quick kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run. Thanks for everything.”

  “Maybe it’s hurting him,” Sue said as Jilly opened the door to get out. “Maybe it’s closing the door on any chance he has of living a normal life. You know—opportunity comes knocking, but there’s nobody home? He’s not just eccentric, Jilly. He’s crazy.”

  Jilly sighed. “His mother was a hooker, Sue. The reason he’s a little flaky is her pimp threw him down two flights of stairs when he was six years old—not because Zinc did anything, or because his mother didn’t trick enough johns that night, but just because the creep felt like doing it. That’s what normal was for Zinc. He’s happy now—a lot happier than when Social Services tried to put him in a foster home where they only wanted him for the support cheque they got once a month for taking him in. And a lot happier than he’d be in the Zeb, all doped up or sitting around in a padded cell whenever he tried to tell people about the things he sees.

  “He’s got his own life now. It’s not much—not by your standards, maybe not even by mine, but it’s his and I don’t want anybody to take it away from him.”

  “But—”

  “I know you mean well,” Jilly said, “but things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to. Nobody’s got time for a kid like Zinc in Social Services. There he’s just a statistic that they shuffle around with all the rest of their files and red tape. Out here on the street, we’ve got a system that works. We take care of our own. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Cat Lady, sleeping in an alleyway with a half-dozen mangy toms, or Rude Ruthie, haranguing the commuters on the subway, we take care of each other.”

  “Utopia,” Sue said.

  A corner of Jilly’s mouth twitched with the shadow of a humourless smile. “Yeah. I know. We’ve got a high asshole quotient, but what can you do? You try to get by—that’s all. You just try to get by.”

  “I wish I could understand it better,” Sue said.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’r
e good people, but this just isn’t your world. You can visit, but you wouldn’t want to live in it, Sue.”

  “I guess.”

  Jilly started to add something more, but then just smiled encouragingly and got out of the car.

  “See you Friday?” she asked, leaning in the door.

  Sue nodded.

  Jilly stood on the pavement and watched the Mazda until it turned the corner and its rear lights were lost from view, then she went upstairs to her apartment. The big room seemed too quiet and she felt too wound up to sleep, so she put a cassette in the tape player—Lynn Harrell playing a Schumann concerto—and started to prepare a new canvas to work on in the morning when the light would be better.

  2

  It was raining again, a soft drizzle that put a glistening sheen on the streets and lampposts, on porch handrails and street signs. Zinc stood in the shadows that had gathered in the mouth of an alleyway, his new pair of wire cutters a comfortable weight in his hand. His eyes sparked with reflected lights. His hair was damp against his scalp. He licked his lips, tasting mountain heights and distant forests within the drizzle’s slightly metallic tang.

  Jilly knew a lot about things that were, he thought, and things that might be, and she always meant well, but there was one thing she just couldn’t get right. You didn’t make art by capturing an image on paper, or canvas, or in stone. You didn’t make it by writing down stories and poems. Music and dance came closest to what real art was—but only so long as you didn’t try to record or film it. Musical notation was only so much dead ink on paper. Choreography was planning, not art.

  You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.

  Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.

  That’s what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn’t neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?