Dark eyes, she’s got, like there’s no pupils, watching him and not blinking, and Joe watches her back. He’s got one eye that’s blue and one eye that’s brown, and the gaze of the two of them just about swallows her whole.
But Joe doesn’t lose the music, doesn’t hesitate a moment; his sax wails, coming in right when it should, only he’s watching the woman now, Johnny’s forgotten, and the music changes, turns slinky, like an old tomcat on the prowl. The woman smiles and lifts her glass to him.
She comes home with him that night, just moves in like she’s always been there. She doesn’t talk, she doesn’t ever say a word, but things must be working out between them because she’s there, isn’t she, sharing that tiny room Joe’s had in the Walker Hotel for sixteen years. Live together in a small space like that, and you soon find out if you can get along or not.
After a while, Joe starts calling her Mona because that’s the name of the tune they were playing when he first saw her in the Rhatigan and, musicians being the way they are, nobody thinks it strange that she doesn’t talk, that she’s got no ID, that she answers to that name. It’s like she’s always been there, always been called Mona, always lived with Saxophone Joe and been his woman.
But if he doesn’t talk to anyone else about it, Joe’s still! thinking about her, always thinking about her, if he’s on stage or walking down a street or back in their room, who she is and where she came from, and he finds himself trying out names on her, to see which one she might’ve worn before he called her Mona, which one her momma and poppa called her by when she was just a little girl.
Then one day he gets it right, and the next morning she’s gone, walked out of his life like the straying cat in the story the grannies tell, once someone’s called her by her true, secret name. What was her name, this woman Joe started out calling Mona? I never learned. But Joe knows the story, too, cats and names, and he gets to thinking some more, he can’t stop thinking about Mona and cats, and then he gets this crazy idea that maybe she really was a cat, that she could change, cat to woman, woman to cat, slipped into his life during her straying years, and now she’s gone.
And then he gets an even crazier idea: The only way to get her back is if he gets himself his own cat skin.
So he goes to see the priest—not the man with the white collar, but the hoodoo man—except Papa Joel’s dead, got himself mixed up with some kind of juju that even he couldn’t handle, so when Joe goes knocking soft on Papa Joel’s door, it’s the gris-gris woman Ti Beau that answers and lets him in.
Friday night, Joe’s back in the club, and he’s playing a dark music now, the tone of his sax’s got an undercurrent in it, like skinheaded drums played with the palm of your hand and a tap-tap of a drumstick on a bar of iron, like midnight at a crossroads and the mist’s coming in from the swamp, like seven-day candles burning in the wind, but those candles don’t flicker because the gateways are open and les invisibles are there, holding the flames still.
Saturday night, he’s back again, and he’s still playing music like no one’s heard before—not displeasing, just unfamiliar. Tommy and Rex, they’re having trouble keeping the rhythm, but Johnny’s following, note for note. After the last set that Saturday night, he walks up to where Joe’s putting his sax away in its case.
“You been to see the mambo?” Johnny asks, “playing music like that?”
Joe doesn’t answer except to put his sax case in Johnny’s hands.
“Hold on to this for me, would you?” he asks.
When he leaves the club that night, it’s the last time anybody sees him. Sees the man. But Heber Brown, he’s been working at the Walker Hotel for thirty years. When he’s cleaning out Joe’s room because the rent’s two months due and nobody’s seen him for most of that time, Heber sees an old tomcat on the fire escape, scratching at the window, trying to get in. Heber says this cat’s so dark a brown it’s almost black, like midnight settled in the corner of an alley- J way, and it’s got one blue eye, so you tell me.
You think Ti Beau’s got the kind of gris-gris potion to turn a man into a cat, or maybe just an old cat skin lying about that’ll work the same magic, someone says the right j words over it? Or was it maybe that Joe just up and left town, nursing a broken heart?
Somebody taped that last set Joe played at the Rhatigan, and 111 tell you, when Johnny plays it for me, I hear hurting in it, but I hear something else, too, something that doesn’t quite belong to this world, or maybe belonged here first but we kind of eased it out of the way once we got ourselves civilized enough. It’s like one of the loa stepped into Joe that night, maybe freed him up, loosened his skin enough so that he could make the change, but first that spirit talked to us through Joe’s sax, reminding us that we weren’t here first, and maybe we won’t be here the last either.
It’s all part and parcel of the mystery that sits there, right under all the things we know for sure. And the thing I like about that mystery is that it doesn’t show us more than a little piece at a time; but you touch it and you’ve just got to pass it on. So if Joe’s not with Mona now, you can bet he’s slipped into someone else’s life and he’s making them think. Sitting there on a windowsill, maybe looking lazy, but maybe looking like he knows something we don’t, something important, and that person he’s with, who took him in, well she stops the tumbling rush of her life for a moment to take the time to think about what lies under the stories that make up this city.
Things may be getting worse in some ways, but you can’t deny that they’re interesting, too, if you just stop to look at them a little closer.
Like that old man playing the clarinet in the subway station that you pass by every day. He’s bent and old and his clothes are shabby and you can’t figure out how he makes a living from the few coins that get tossed into the hat sitting on the pavement in front of him. So maybe he’s just an old man, down on his luck, making do. Or maybe he’s got a piece of magic he wants to pass on with that music he’s playing.
Next time you go by, stop and give him a listen. But don’t go looking for a tag to put on what you hear or, like that cat that runs off when you name her, it’ll all just go away.
THE BONE WOMAN
No one really stops to think of Ellie Spink, and why should they?
She’s no one.
She has nothing.
Homely as a child, all that the passing of years did was add to her unattractiveness. Face like a horse, jaw long and square, forehead broad; limpid eyes set bird-wide on either side of a gargantuan nose; hair a nondescript brown, greasy and matted, stuffed up under a woolen toque lined with a patchwork of metal foil scavenged from discarded cigarette packages. The angularity of her slight frame doesn’t get its volume from her meager diet, but from the multiple layers of clothing she wears.
Raised in foster homes, she’s been used, but she’s never experienced a kiss. Institutionalized for most of her adult life, she’s been medicated, but never treated. Pass her on the street and your gaze slides right on by, never pausing to register the difference between the old woman huddled in the doorway and a bag of garbage.
Old woman? Though she doesn’t know it, Monday, two weeks past, was her thirty-seventh birthday. She looks twice her age.
There’s no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one’s home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling monologue itemizing a litany of mis-perceived conspiracies and other ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.
Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.
They talk and she listens, or she doesn’t—she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It’s easier ju
st to walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.
I’ve done it myself.
I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn’t get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn’t help.
“Hey, Ellie. How’re you doing?”
Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn toward me, set so far apart it’s as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.
“They should test for aliens,” she tells me. “You know, like in the Olympics.”
“Aliens?”
“I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead’s dead, right?”
“What’s Kennedy got to do with aliens?”
“I don’t even know why they took down the Berlin Wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn’t they have worked on that one first?”
It’s like trying to have a conversation with a game of Trivial Pursuit that specializes in information garnered from supermarket tabloids. After a while, I’d just pack an extra sandwich whenever I was busking in her neighborhood. I’d sit beside her, share my lunch, and let her talk if she Wanted to, but I wouldn’t say all that much myself.
That all changed the day I saw her with the Bone Woman.
I didn’t call her the Bone Woman at first; the adjective that came more immediately to mind was fat. She couldn’t have been much more than five-one, but she had to weigh in at two-fifty, leaving me with the impression that she was wider than she was tall. But she was light on her feet—peculiarly graceful for all her squat bulk.
She had a round face like a full moon, framed by thick black hair that hung in two long braids to her waist. Her eyes were small, almost lost in that expanse of face, and so dark they seemed all pupil. She went barefoot in a shapeless black dress, her only accessory an equally shapeless shoulder bag made of some kind of animal skin and festooned with dangling thongs from which hung various feathers, beads, bottlecaps and other found objects.
I paused at the far end of the street when I saw the two of them together. I had a sandwich for Ellie in my knapsack, but I hesitated in approaching them. They seemed deep in conversation, real conversation, give and take, and Ellie was—knitting? Talking and knitting? The pair of them looked like a couple of old gossips, sitting on the back porch of their building. The sight of Ellie acting so normal was something I didn’t want to interrupt.
I sat down on a nearby stoop and watched until Ellie put away her knitting and stood up. She looked down at her companion with an expression in her features that I’d never seen before. It was awareness, I realized. She was completely here for a change.
As she came up the street, I stood up and called a greeting to her, but by the time she reached me she wore her usually vacuous expression.
“It’s the newspapers,” she told me. “They use radiation to print them and that’s what makes the news seem so bad.”
Before I could take the sandwich I’d brought her out of my knapsack, she’d shuffled off, around the corner, and was gone. I glanced back down the street to where the fat woman was still sitting, and decided to find Ellie later. Right now I wanted to know what the woman had done to get such a positive reaction out of Ellie.
When I approached, the fat woman was sifting through the refuse where the two of them had been sitting. As I watched, she picked up a good-sized bone. What kind, I don’t know, but it was as long as my forearm and as big around as the neck of my fiddle. Brushing dirt and a sticky candy wrapper from it, she gave it a quick polish on the sleeve of her dress and stuffed it away in her shoulderbag. Then she looked up at me.
My question died stillborn in my throat under the sudden scrutiny of those small dark eyes. She looked right through me—not the drifting, unfocused gaze of so many of the street people, but a cold, far-off seeing that weighed my presence, dismissed it, and gazed further off at something far more important.
I stood back as she rose easily to her feet. That was when I realized how graceful she was. She moved down the sidewalk as daintily as a doe, as though her bulk was filled with helium, rather than flesh, and weighed nothing. I watched her until she reached the far end of the street, turned her own corner and then, just like Ellie, was gone as well.
I ended up giving Ellie’s sandwich to Johnny Rew, an old wino who’s taught me a fiddle tune or two, the odd time I’ve run into him sober.
I started to see the Bone Woman everywhere after that day. I wasn’t sure if she was just new to town, or if it was one of those cases where you suddenly see something or someone you’ve never noticed before and after that you see them all the time. Everybody I talked to about her seemed to know her, but no one was quite sure how long she’d been in the city, or where she lived, or even her name.
I still wasn’t calling her the Bone Woman, though I knew by then that bones were all she collected. Old bones, found bones, rattling around together in her shoulderbag until she went off at the end of the day and showed up the next morning, ready to start filling her bag again.
When she wasn’t hunting bones, she spent her time with the street’s worst cases—people like Ellie that no one else could talk to. She’d get them making things—little pictures or carvings or beadwork, keeping their hands busy. And talking. Someone like Ellie still made no sense to anybody else, but you could tell when she was with the Bone Woman that they were sharing a real dialogue. Which was a good thing, I suppose, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more going on, something if not exactly sinister, then still strange.
It was the bones, I suppose. There were so many. How could she keep finding them the way she did? And what did she do with them?
My brother Christy collects urban legends, the way the Bone Woman collects her bones, rooting them out where you’d never think they could be. But when I told him about her, he just shrugged.
“Who knows why any of them do anything?” he said.
Christy doesn’t live on the streets, for all that he haunts them. He’s just an observer—always has been, ever since we were kids. To him, the street people can be pretty well evenly divided between the sad cases and the crazies. Their stories are too human for him.
“Some of these are big,” I told him. “The size of a human thighbone.”
“So point her out to the cops.”
“And tell them what?” ^ A smile touched his lips with just enough superiority in it to get under my skin. He’s always been able to do that. Usually, it makes me do something I regret later, which I sometimes think is half his intention. It’s not that he wants to see me hurt. It’s just part and parcel of that air of authority that all older siblings seem to wear. You know, a raised eyebrow, a way of smiling that says “You have so much to learn, little brother.”
“If you really want to know what she does with those bones,” he said, “why don’t you follow her home and find out?”
“Maybe I will.”
It turned out that the Bone Woman had a squat on the roof of an abandoned factory building in the Tombs. She’d built herself some kind of a shed up there—just a leaning, ramshackle affair of castoff lumber and sheet metal, but it kept out the weather and could easily be heated with a wood-stove in the spring and fall. Come winter, she’d need warmer quarters, but the snows were still a month or so away.
I followed her home one afternoon, then came back the next day when she was out to finally put to rest my fear about these bones she was collecting. The thought that had stuck in my mind was that she was taking something away from the street people like Ellie, people who were already at the bottom rung and deserved to be helped, or at least just left alone. I’d gotten this weird idea that the bones were tied up with the last remnants of vitality that someone like Ellie might have, and the Bone Woman was stealing it from them.
What I found was more innocuous, and at the same time creepier, than I’d expected.
The inside of her squat was littered with bones and
wire and dog-shaped skeletons that appeared to be made from the two. Bones held in place by wire, half-connected ribs and skulls and limbs. A pack of bone dogs. Some of the figures were almost complete, others were merely suggestions, but everywhere I looked, the half-finished wire-and-bone skeletons sat or stood or hung suspended from the ceiling. There had to be more than a dozen in various states of creation.
I stood in the doorway, not willing to venture any further, and just stared at them all. I don’t know how long I was there, but finally I turned away and made my way back down through the abandoned building and out onto the street.
So now I knew what she did with the bones. But it didn’t tell me how she could find so many of them. Surely that many stray dogs didn’t die, their bones scattered the length and breadth of the city like so much autumn residue?
Amy and I had a gig opening for the Kelledys that night. It didn’t take me long to set up. I just adjusted my microphone, laid out my fiddle and whistles on a small table to one side, and then kicked my heels while Amy fussed with her pipes and the complicated tangle of electronics that she used to amplify them.
I’ve heard it said that all Uillean pipers are a little crazy— that they have to be to play an instrument that looks more like what you’d find in the back of a plumber’s truck than an instrument—but I think of them as perfectionists. Every one I’ve ever met spends more time fiddling with their reeds and adjusting the tuning of their various chanters, drones and regulators than would seem humanly possible.
Amy’s no exception. After a while I left her there on the stage, with her red hair falling in her face as she poked and prodded at a new reed she’d made for one of her drones, and wandered into the back where the Kelledys were making their own preparations for the show, which consisted of drinking tea and looking beatific. At least that’s the way I always think of the two of them. I don’t think I’ve ever met calmer people.
The Ivory and the Horn Page 23