And there Del is, all tied up.
I could get so used to this.
“I think you can put your knife away,” I tell Raylene.
She studies Del for a long moment, then slowly nods. I see her thumb push the release button, and she flicks the blade back into its handle. She stows it in the pocket of her jacket.
“Stop stalling,” she says. “I want to know exactly what the hell’s going on here.”
Joe
She made no sound, but Joe still looked up at her approach. She seemed taller and more regal than he remembered, but maybe that was only because he was sitting cross-legged in the dirt while she was still standing. He started to get up, but she sank gracefully into a position similar to his, facing him, their knees almost touching.
“Now I know for sure I’m dead,” he said as she smoothed out the fringes dangling from the hem of her dress.
“But you don’t have to be,” Anwatan told him. “I can take you back.”
“I like the sound of that. You’re not what I was expecting when I called out to the spirits, but I’m happy to see you all the same—don’t doubt that for a moment.”
She cast her eyes down for a moment and looked—not exactly nervous. Just uncertain.
“But I have to ask you a favour first,” she said.
Joe took out his tobacco pouch and started to roll another cigarette.
“The thing with favours,” he said, not bothering to look at what his fingers were doing, “is that they should be just that, no strings attached. Maybe you don’t know me well enough, but I don’t trade in favours. But if you have a need, if I can help you and no one gets hurt in the process, all you’ve got to do is ask.”
“I didn’t really mean it like that. It’s just . . . really important.”
Joe put the cigarette between his lips, lit it with a match, and took a drag, before offering it to her. She hesitated a moment before taking the cigarette from his fingers and bringing it up to her own lips. Joe stowed his tobacco pouch away, then took the smoke when she handed it back to him.
“It’s all truth between us now, right?” he said.
She nodded.
“So, tell me what you need me to do.”
“I . . . “ She sighed, started again. “I need you to hide a bogan for me.”
Joe’s eyebrows went up.
“A bogan,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“One of the ones that killed you?”
She shook her head. “But he was with them. He was there. I promised him safety, but I know if the crows find him, they’ll tear him apart the way they did the others. And if they don’t, somebody else probably will.”
“Whoa, back up a little there. The crows have been killing bogans?”
“Raven called the crow girls to heal you,” she said, “and they told him that the crows he’d sent out to find the bogans had indeed found them, but then they’d torn them apart.”
“I’m having trouble working up any sympathy.” He held up a hand to stop her. “I know. Every death diminishes us. But there are times you need to bear the weight of the killing so that worse things don’t happen further down the road.”
“That isn’t our way,” she told him.
“Usually isn’t mine, either.”
He offered her the last drag from the cigarette. When she shook her head, he ground it out in the dirt, then pocketed the butt.
“The crow girls couldn’t revive you,” Anwatan went on. “You had to be found and brought back, they said, but they couldn’t do it without being dead themselves. They were willing to do it, too. To die, I mean.”
Joe shook his head. “Today’s just one damn surprise after the other.”
“But then I said I’d do it.”
“You already being dead.”
She nodded.
“Nobody could bring you back?” he asked.
“I didn’t have a body to come back to—not in one piece like yours is.”
“More or less.”
Joe touched the back of his skull, but there was nothing to feel there. No lump. No blood. But then this wasn’t his actual body, was it?
“More or less,” she agreed.
“So, here we are,” Joe said. “You’ve found me. But first we need to hide this bogan of yours.”
“No, you need to be alive to do that.”
Joe nodded. “I’ll do it, but not because you’re helping me. I’ll do it because I can and I want to. Are we clear on that?”
“Yes. Thank you. But . . .”
She hesitated.
“But what?”
“Why is it so important that it not appear that we’re trading favours?”
“Why do you want this bogan kept safe?”
“He’s not evil,” she said. “He didn’t even want to be with them in the first place.”
“He still had a choice.”
“Were you never young and stupid?” she asked.
Joe smiled. “I don’t know that I was ever young, but I’m still pretty good at being stupid. It’s what brought me to this place when I should have been off helping my sister. But I get your point.”
“His name’s Rabedy Collins. He can take the form of a black dog—will that make it easier?”
Joe nodded. “Nice trick for a bogan.”
“Those bogans had a cousin helping them—giving them safe passage through our territories and teaching them how to shapechange. I’m told his name is Odawajameg—Odawa of the salmon clan.”
“I think I heard something about that. Do the others know about him?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I was about to mention it when Minisino . . . attacked you.”
“I’ll make sure the word gets out.” He cocked his head. “Unless you want him to be hidden as well?”
Joe wasn’t sure he could do that—this cousin had already caused too much damage—but he had to ask.
“I don’t know him,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s a good man or bad.”
“Considering he was behind the bogans’ little killing spree, I’d be guessing he’s not someone you have over to your place for a beer and a laugh.”
“I suppose . . .”
“It’s out of your hands now, anyway.”
She nodded. Looking down, she plucked at the fringe of her dress before finally lifting her gaze again.
“You never did answer my question,” she said.
Joe shrugged. “It’s just this theory I have that there’s not enough goodness in the world. And we need more of it.”
“I don’t understand the connection.”
“Well, see,” he told her, “if you do somebody a favour, expecting something in return, it’s not as pure as just doing it with no expectations. Doing it just for the sake of doing it, because it’s the right thing.”
She nodded again, but he got the sense that it was only to tell him that she was hearing him. Not that she understood.
“It’s a funny wheel we’re on these days,” he went on. “Sometimes I feel it wobbling so much I get worried it’s going to go right off track, and then where the hell would we be? The best way I know to keep it running smooth is make sure the acts of kindness outweigh the bad. I can’t do it for the whole world, but I can do it in my own life, and I figure every little bit helps.”
“So if I didn’t bring you back, you would still do me this favour?”
“Depends,” Joe said. “On whether it’s righteous. And whether I could. But if it was clear on both counts, then, yeah. I would.”
Anwatan smiled. “Minisino said you carry a mix of crow and dog blood. Are you sure you don’t have some deer in there, as well? Because I was just telling my bogan much the same.”
“That’s the thing about being a mutt. Go back far enough and who knows what you’ve got in the mix.”
“I like your attitude better than Minisino’s.”
“It’s all in the delivery,” Joe told her.
He stood in one smooth m
otion and offered her a hand up.
“I wish I’d known you when I was alive,” she said.
“All the spirits say that.”
She smiled again. It was a good smile. It took away some of the shadows in her eyes.
He started to let go of her hand, but she held his tighter.
“Hold on,” she told him. “I’m taking you back. And later . . . when you are done with your business with my father and the others, I will show you how to find my bogan.”
And then they were gone from that place.
Jilly
“You know how all this sounds, don’t you?” Raylene says when I’ve given her the Reader’s Digest version of what’s been happening.
We’re sitting on the front porch, leaning against opposite porch pillars at the top of the stairs. The toes of my shoes are close enough that I could tap the toes of her boots. Del’s still safely tied up in the parlour. The humidity’s gone now. I look away from Raylene, across the fields. A soft breeze makes the tall grass and weeds sway like they’re keeping time to an old-fashioned waltz. Above them, the sky is that perfect summer blue with a couple of fat clouds lazing on the horizon.
Positive thinking and all, I think. That’s what makes it this way.
Once upon a time . . .
I turn to look at my sister.
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?” I say.
“I could just be dreaming. In fact, I was just dreaming before I suddenly found myself fully dressed and staring our monster brother in the face. Who’s to say I’m not still dreaming?”
“You know better.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, her gaze locked on mine. Then she slowly nods her head.
“Yeah, I guess I do,” she says.
We both sit and look at the fields for a while longer before she adds, “So, do you think it’s all okay now?”
“What happened to us will never be okay.”
“I meant the way you’ve been carrying Del around in your head. Are you done with that crap now?”
I nod. “They say that the final closure is to forgive. Not to condone or forget, but to forgive, because if you don’t, you end up carrying the cancer of resentment around inside you forever. I heard it described somewhere as taking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.”
Her eyebrows go up. “So, do you forgive him?”
I shake my head. “But I’m okay with that. I don’t feel like there’s a poison inside me. I just feel . . . I feel like I’m finally done with it.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “That’s what happened to me. When I tracked him down in that trailer park—the real Del, I mean, fat and drunk—I was ready to cut him a new asshole in the middle of his face. But once I saw him, I knew I didn’t have to do a damn thing. He was the one with the fucked up life. I realized that mine didn’t have to be that way—but it would be, if I took him down.”
“So, are we bad people because we can’t forgive him?”
Raylene just laughs. “Well, we’re not nuns. Or at least I’m sure not walking around with a rosary saying my Hail Marys. But are we bad people? Who knows? Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“That you forgive him, or that we be good people?”
“That we’re good.”
“You’re good,” she says. She answers immediately, like she doesn’t even have to think about it. “Me, I’m still working on it.”
“I think that makes you a good person.”
She does that thing with her eyebrows again—part question, part ironic comment.
“When you know the difference between right and wrong,” I explain, “and you choose to do the right thing, even when it’s usually harder, that’s the sign of a good person.”
“I guess . . . “ She waits a beat, then adds, “So, are we really inside your head? Because I’ve got to tell you, that kind of freaks me.”
“Me, too.”
“I think maybe we’re not. I think all the crap in your head made some new little pocket world here in the dreamlands and that’s where we are.”
“I guess that’s possible . . .”
“Let’s go with probable.”
I nod. “Okay. I suppose it makes more sense. Like anything makes sense in this place.”
“Everything makes sense,” she says, “if you study it enough. We just don’t know the right physics to explain this place because it’s all different once we cross over. If we could ever find the manual, we’d be laughing, but I think it’s pretty much the kind of thing you have to come up on from behind. You know, catch it by surprise.”
I keep forgetting how smart she is. Unlike me, she’s got a real head for maths and sciences. And she totally gets computers. Me, I know how to turn them on and work the software, but she can get right inside to the mechanics of the circuitry and wires. She used to do it just for fun—because she could—but now she makes her living getting people’s machines up and running, and keeping them that way.
No more stealing and scams and running wild and crazy. Like I told her, she’s a good person now because she knows the difference and chooses to not break the law anymore.
“ ‘Course that’s a problem for me,” she goes on. “This being the dreamlands, I mean. Those wolf boys find out I’ve been back, and they’re going to seriously kick my ass.”
“No, I think it’ll be okay. I brought you here. You didn’t force your way.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think that’ll hold much water with them, Jill. They were pretty damn clear when they told me to get out and stay out.”
She’s got some kind of canid connection, which seems funny to me because we come from the same gene pool and I don’t have cousin blood. At least, it’s never shown up and that’s what everybody tells me. She made her own way into the otherworld, dreaming herself here in the body of a wolf. The trouble came when she started running with a pack of other dreaming wolves, hunting and killing.
She didn’t know better. She thought she was just dreaming. But she knows now, and she would never do it again. But I doubt those friends of Joe’s who gave her her walking papers would take the time to see that. Whiskey Jack and Nanobozo. If it hadn’t been for Joe, they would have killed her then and there and been done with it.
“They’d have to go through me first,” I tell her.
She smiles. “What would you do? Once upon a time them into kinder, gentler canids? Somehow I doubt that’d take. I think it only works here, on the things that you’ve been carrying around in your head.”
“I guess.”
“So, what are you going to do now?” she asks.
I give her a blank look.
“With Del,” she says. “With this place. Are you going to shut it down and make it all go away?”
“I don’t know that I should.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I shake my head. “All of this is a part of who I am. I already tried to cut it out of my memories and hide it away. And you see how well that turned out.”
“So you’re just going to let him run free in here?”
“No. Him I’ll once upon a time into something better. But this place, the memories . . . I’m just going to accept that it all happened. That it wasn’t my fault. And get on with the real business of my life.”
“Living.”
I nod.
“You ever wake up in a cold sweat, thinking you’re back in those days?” she asks.
“That never went away. It probably never will. But if it happens again, I’m not going to pretend it never happened. I’m going to hold it up to the light and tell myself that it happened, but it’s done now.”
“I hope it works.”
“It has to,” I say.
She smiles. “Yeah. And you’re a tough little cookie. If anyone can make it happen, you can.”
“What about you?”
She shrugs. “Like I told you. I’ve been done with it since I saw him in the tra
iler park. Sometimes I still wake up from the bad dream that I’m just a kid again and he’s coming into my room, but I deal.”
“You’re the tough one,” I say. “If you’d been here before I figured out how to stop him, you’d have just shut him down with a look.”
“And a good kick in the balls.”
“That, too.”
She stands up. “We should go. I think we’re done here.”
I nod. “I’ve just got a couple more things I need to clean up before I go.”
“Do you need a hand?”
“No, I’m good.”
She cocks her head. “So, are you really going to hook up with Geordie?”
“I hope so.”
“Well, whenever you talk about him it’s pretty damn obvious you’re head over heels.”
She catches me off guard with that.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
But she just laughs. “Good luck, sis.”
I start toward her, and she shakes her head.
“Don’t go getting all mushy on me,” she says.
Except she lets me hug her. She even puts her arms around me and sort of pats me on the back. But she seems relieved when I let her go.
“Call me when you’re home,” she says.
“I will.”
She just stands there.
“Well?” she says after a moment. “You brought me here—aren’t you going to send me home?”
“Oh. I didn’t think about that.”
“I was dreaming about Johnny Depp, if that helps. We were about to—”
I give her a smile. “I don’t think I need to know the details.”
Once upon a time, I think.
And then she is gone, and I’m alone on the porch.
I stay for a moment longer, looking out over the fields. I watch a hawk slowly circling above, following its flight until it sinks below the far trees. Then I turn back into the house, the boards of the porch creaking under my feet.
Joe
Coming back to the plain where the buffalo had gathered didn’t work the way Joe had expected it would. Instead of Anwatan putting him back in his body, they were a pair of spirits, invisible to all except each other.
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