She nods, remembering. “Three for a wedding, four for a birth.”
“That’s it. Five for silver, six for gold . . .”
“. . . seven for a secret never to be told . . .”
“. . . eight for heaven, nine for hell . . .”
“. . . and ten for the devil’s own sel’.” She smiles. “But I thought that was for crows.”
He shrugs. “I’ve heard it used for magpies, too. Guess it’s for any kind of black bird.” He looks up at the trees, empty now. “That music of yours,” he goes on. “It called up an unkindness of ravens this afternoon.”
“An unkindness of ravens,” she repeats, smiling. “A murder of crows. Where do they come up with that kind of thing?”
He shrugs. “Who knows? Same place they found once in a blue moon, I guess.”
“There was a blue moon the night my great-great-grandma got my fiddle,” Staley tells him. “Least that’s how the story goes.”
“That’s what I meant about forgetting,” he says. “Maybe you forget some bad things, but work at it hard enough and you forget a story like that, too.”
They’re finished eating now, the last inch of coffee cooling in their cups.
“You up to playing a little more music?” Jake asks. “See what it calls up?”
“Sure.”
She takes the instrument from its case, tightens the bow, runs her finger across the strings to check the tuning, adjusts a couple of them. Jake likes to watch her fingers move, even doing this, without the music having started yet, tells her that.
“You’re a funny guy,” she says as she brings the fiddle up under her chin.
Jake smiles. “Everybody says that,” he tells her.
But he’s thinking of something else, he’s thinking of how the little pieces of her history that she’s given him add to his own without taking anything away from her. He’s thinking about Malicorne and the stories she takes, how she pulls the hurt out of them by listening. He’s thinking—
But then Staley starts to play and the music takes him away again.
“I was working on a tune this afternoon,” she says as the music moves into three-four time. “Maybe I’ll call it ‘Jake’s Waltz.’ ”
Jake closes his eyes, listening, not just to her music, but for the sound of wings.
7
It’s past sundown. The fires are burning in the oil drums and bottles are being passed around. Cider and apple juice in some, stronger drink in others. Malicorne’s not drinking, never does, least not that I can ever remember seeing. She’s sitting off by herself, leaning against a red brick wall, face a smudge of pale in the shadows, horn invisible. The wall was once the side of a factory, now it’s standing by itself. There’s an owl on top of the wall, three stories up, perched on the bricks, silhouetted by the moon. I saw it land and wonder what owls mean around her. Jake told me about the ravens.
After a while, I walk over to where she’s sitting, offer her some apple juice. She shakes her head. I can see the horn now.
“What’s it with you and Jake?” I ask.
“Old arguments never die,” she says.
“You go back a long time?”
She shakes her head. “But the kind of man he is and I do. Live long enough, William, and you’ll meet every kind of person, hear every kind of story, not once, but a hundred times.”
“I don’t get what you mean,” I say.
“No. But Jake does.”
We hear the music then, Staley’s fiddle, one-two-three, one-two-three, waltz time, and I see them sitting together on the other side of the fires, shadow shapes, long tall Jake with his raven hair and the firefly glow of Staley’s head bent over her instrument. I hear the sound of wings and think of the owl on the wall above us, but when I check, it’s gone. These are black birds, ravens, a flock of them, an unkindness, and I feel something in the air, a prickling across my skin and at the nape of my neck, like a storm’s coming, but the skies are clear. The stars seem so close we could be up in the mountains instead of here, in the middle of the city.
“What are you thinking about?” Malicorne asks.
I turn to her, see the horn catch the firelight. “Endings,” I find myself saying. “Where things go when they don’t fit where they are.”
She smiles. “Are you reading my mind?”
“Never was much inclined for that sort of thing.
“Me, either.”
That catches me by surprise. “But you . . .” You’re magic, I was going to say, but my voice trails off.
“I’ve been here too long,” she says. “Stopped to rest a day or so, and look at me now. Been here all spring and most of the summer.”
“It’s been a good summer.”
She nods. “But Jake’s right, you know. Your stories do nourish me. Not like he thinks, it’s not me feeding on them and you losing something, it’s that they connect me to a place.” She taps a finger against the dirt we’re sitting on. “They connect me to something real. But I also get you to talk because I know talking heals. I like to think I’m doing some good.”
“Everybody likes you,” I tell her. I don’t add, except for Jake.
“But it’s like Scheherazade,” she says. “One day the stories are all told and it’s time to move on.”
I’m shaking my head. “You don’t have to go. When you’re standing at the bottom of the ladder like we are, nobody can tell you what to do anymore. It’s not much, but at least we’ve got that.”
“There’s that innocence of yours again,” she says.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
She smiles. “Don’t be angry.”
“Then don’t treat me like a kid.”
“But isn’t this like Neverneverland?” she asks. “You said it yourself. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore. Nothing has to ever change. You can be like this forever.”
“You think any of us want to be here? You think we chose to live like this?”
“She’s not talking about you, William,” Jake says. “She’s talking about me.”
I never heard the music stop, never heard them approach, Jake and the fiddler, standing near us now. I don’t know how long they’ve been there, how much they’ve heard. Staley lifts her hand to me, says hi. Jake, he’s just looking at Malicorne. I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“So I guess what you need is my story,” he says, “and then you can go.”
Malicorne shakes her head. “My coming or going has nothing to do with you.”
Jake doesn’t believe her. He sits down on the dirt in front of us, got that look in his eye I’ve seen before, not angry, just he won’t be backing down. Staley sits down, too, takes out her fiddle, but doesn’t play it. She holds the instrument on her lap, runs the pad of her thumb along the strings, toys with the wooden curlicues on the head, starts to finger a tune, pressing the strings against the fingerboard, soundlessly. I wish I had something to do with my hands.
“See,” Jake’s saying, “it’s circumstances that put most of these people here, living on the street. They’re not bad people, they’re just weak, maybe, or had some bad luck, some hard times, that’s all. Some of them’ll die here, some of them’ll make a second chance for themselves and your guess is as good as mine, which of them’ll pull through.”
“But you chose to live like this,” Malicorne says.
“You know, don’t you? You already know all about me.”
She shakes her head. “All I know is you’re hiding from something and nobody had to tell me that. I just had to look at you.”
“I killed a man,” Jake says.
“Did he deserve it?”
“I don’t even know anymore. He was stealing from me, sent my business belly-up and just laughed at me when I confronted him with it. Asked me what I was going to do, the money was all spent and what the hell could I prove anyway? He’d fixed the books so it looked like it was all my fault.”
“That’s hard,” I say.
I
’m where I am because I drank too much, drank all the time and damned if I can tell you why. Got nobody to blame but myself. Don’t drink anymore, but it’s too late to go back. My old life went on without me. Wife remarried. Kids think I’m dead.
“It was the laughing I couldn’t take,” Jake says. “He was just standing there, looking so smug and laughing at me. So I hit him. Grabbed the little turd by the throat and started whacking the back of his head against the wall and when I stopped, he was dead. First time I ever saw a dead person. First time I ever hit anybody, except for goofing around with the guys in high school.” He looks at me. “You know, the old push and shove, but it’s nothing serious.”
I give him a nod.
“But this was serious. The thing is, when I think about it now, what he did to me, the money he stole, none of it seems so important anymore.”
“Are you sorry?” Malicorne asks.
“I’m not sorry he’s dead, but I’m sorry I was the one that killed him.”
“So you’ve been on the run ever since.”
Jake nods. “Twelve years now and counting.” He gives her a long, steady look. “So that’s my story.”
“Do you feel any better having told us about it?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would,” she says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve got to want to heal before you can get out of this prison you’ve made for yourself.”
I’m expecting this to set him off, but he looks at the ground instead, shoulders sagging. I’ve seen a lot of broken men on the skids—hell, all I’ve had to do for years is look in a mirror—but I’ve never imagined Jake as one of them. Never knew why he was down here with the rest of us, but always thought he was stronger than the rest of us.
“I don’t know how,” he says.
“Was he your brother?” Staley asks. “This man you killed.”
I’ve been wondering how she was taking this, sitting there so still, listening, not even her fingers moving anymore. It’s hard to see much of anything, here in the shadows. Our faces and hands are pale blurs. The light from the fires in the oil drums catches Malicorne’s horn, Staley’s hair, awakes a shine on her lap where the blue fiddle’s lying.
Jake shakes his head. “He was my best friend. I would’ve given him anything, all he had to do was ask.”
“I’m sorry for you,” Malicorne says, standing up. “I’m sorry for you both, the one dead and the other a long time dying.”
She’s going then, nothing to pack, nothing to carry, leaving us the way she came with her hands empty and her heart full. Over by the oil drums, nobody notices. Frenchy is rolling himself a cigarette from the butts he collected during the day. Casey’s sleeping, an empty bottle of wine lying in the dirt beside his hand. I can’t see the black birds, but I can hear them, feathers rustling in the dark all around us. I guess if you want to believe in that kind of thing, there’s a door standing open nearby.
“Let me come with you,” Jake says.
Malicorne looks at him. “The road I’m traveling goes on forever,” she says.
“I kind of guessed that, what with the horn and all.”
“It’s about remembering, not forgetting.”
He nods. “I know that, too. Maybe I can learn to be good company.”
“Nobody ever said you weren’t,” she tells him. “What you have to ask yourself is, are you trying to escape again or are you really ready to move on?”
“Talking about it—that’s a start, isn’t it?”
Malicorne smiles. “It’s a very good start.”
8
Staley and I, we’re the only ones to see them go. I don’t know if they just walked off into the night, swallowed by the shadows, or if they stepped through a door, but I never see either of them again. We sit there for a while, looking up at the stars. They still seem so big, so near, like they want to be close to whatever enchantment happened here tonight. After a while Staley starts to play her fiddle, that same tune she played earlier, the one in three-four time. I hear wings, in behind the music, but it’s the black birds leaving, not gathering. Far off, I hear hoofbeats and I don’t know what to make of that.
Frenchy gets himself a job a few weeks later, sweeping out a bar over on Grasso Street, near the Men’s Mission. Casey goes back to the coast, says he’s thinking of going back to school. Lots of the others, things start to look up a little for them, too. Not everybody, not all of us, but more than tried to take a chance before Malicorne came into our lives.
Me, I find myself a job as a custodian in a Kelly Street tenement. The job gives me a little room in the basement, but there’s no money in it. I get by with tips from the tenants when I do some work for them, paint a room, fix a leaky faucet, that kind of thing. I’m looking for something better, but times are still hard.
Staley, she hangs around for a few days, then moves on.
I remember thinking there’s a magic about her, too, but now I know it’s in the music she calls up from that blue fiddle of hers, the same kind of magic any good musician can wake from an instrument. It takes you away. Calls something to you maybe, but it’s not necessarily ravens or enchantment.
Before she goes, I ask her about that night, about what brought her down to the Tombs.
“I wanted to see the unicorn,” she says. “I was playing in a pick-up band in a roadhouse up on Highway 14 and overheard somebody talking about her in the parking lot at the end of the night—a couple of ’boes, on their way out of the city. I just kind of got distracted with Jake. He seemed like a nice guy, you know, but he was so lonely.”
“The unicorn . . . ?”
For a minute there I don’t know what she’s talking about, but then Malicorne’s horsy features come to mind, the chestnut dreadlocks, the wide-set eyes. And finally I remember the horn and when I do, I can’t figure out how I forgot.
“You know,” Staley’s saying. “White horse, big spiraling horn coming out of her forehead.”
“But she was a woman,” I begin.
Staley smiles. “And Jake was a man. But when they left I saw a white horse and a black one.”
“I didn’t. But I heard hoofbeats. . . .” I give her a puzzled look. “What happened that night?”
Staley shoulders her knapsack, picks up her fiddlecase. She stands on tip-toes and kisses me lightly on the cheek.
“Magic,” she says. “And wasn’t it something—just that little piece of it?”
I’m nodding when she gives me a little wave of her hand.
“See you, William,” she says. “You take care now.”
I wave back, stand there, watching her go. I hear a croaking cry from the top of the derelict building beside me, but it’s a crow I see, beating its black wings, lifting high above the ragged roofline, not a raven.
Sometimes I find myself humming that waltz she wrote for Jake.
Sometimes I dream about two horses, one black and one white with a horn, the two of them running, running along the crest of these long hills that rise and fall like the waves of the sea, and I wake up smiling.
Crow Girls
I remember what somebody said about nostalgia,
he said it’s okay to look back, as long as
you don’t stare.
—Tom Paxton,
from an interview with Ken Rockburn
People have a funny way of remembering where they’ve been, who they were. Facts fall by the wayside. Depending on their temperament they either remember a golden time when all was better than well, better than it can be again, better than it ever really was: a first love, the endless expanse of a summer vacation, youthful vigor, the sheer novelty of being alive that gets lost when the world starts wearing you down. Or they focus in on the bad, blow little incidents all out of proportion, hold grudges for years, or maybe they really did have some unlucky times, but now they’re reliving them forever in their heads instead of moving on.
But the brain plays tricks o
n us all, doesn’t it? We go by what it tells us, have to I suppose, because what else do we have to use as touchstones? Trouble is we don’t ask for confirmation on what the brain tells us. Things don’t have to be real, we just have to believe they’re real, which pretty much explains politics and religion as much as it does what goes on inside our heads.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not pointing any fingers here. My people aren’t guiltless either. The only difference is our memories go back a lot further than yours do.
* * *
“I don’t get computers,” Heather said.
Jilly laughed. “What’s not to get?”
They were having cappuccinos in the Cyberbean Café, sitting at the long counter with computer terminals spaced along its length the way those little individual jukeboxes used to be in highway diners. Jilly looked as though she’d been using the tips of her dark ringlets as paintbrushes, then cleaned them on the thighs of her jeans—in other words, she’d come straight from the studio without changing first. But however haphazardly messy she might allow herself or her studio to get, Heather knew she’d either cleaned her brushes, or left them soaking in turps before coming down to the café. Jilly might seem terminally easygoing, but some things she didn’t blow off. No matter how the work was going—good, bad or indifferent—she treated her tools with respect.
As usual, Jilly’s casual scruffiness made Heather feel overdressed, for all that she was only wearing cotton pants and a blouse, nothing fancy. But she always felt a little like that around Jilly, ever since she’d first taken a class from her at the Newford School of Art a couple of winters ago. No matter how hard she tried, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she looked so typical: the suburban working mother, the happy wife. The differences since she and Jilly had first met weren’t great. Her blonde hair had been long then while now it was cropped short. She was wearing glasses now instead of her contacts.
And two years ago she hadn’t been carrying an empty wasteland around inside her chest.