Ragged Company

by Richard Wagamese

  “So they’re not ghosts?” Margo asked.

  “No. Not really,” I said. “I think when some great sad thing happens in some place with some people, we leave a part of ourselves there, a part that wanted or needed things to come out different, a part that got separated from itself, a shadow of ourselves. If we never get right with it and we’re asked to move to the Spirit World, that shadow stays here, revisiting those places and those people, hoping maybe that it can reclaim the part that got lost.”

  “Can it?” James asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Margo asked.

  “By watching us,” I said. “By watching the living ones. By watching us learn to deal with our hurt, our losses, and reach out to life again. It tells them that we’re okay. That they don’t need to patrol, revisit, or haunt those places anymore. That they can take their place in the Spirit World and prepare for the other part of the journey.”

  “What other part?” Granite asked.

  “Returning.”

  “Returning? Coming back?”

  “Yes. Returning.”

  “You mean we all come back here? We all get a chance to live again?”

  “No,” I said softly. “That’s not the returning I’m speaking of.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “The other part of the journey is a returning to yourself. Reconnecting. Getting whole again. That’s what the Spirit World is for. Getting whole again and preparing to continue the journey.”

  “There’s more?” Dick asked. “After? There’s more?”

  “Always,” I said.

  “Geez,” he said and looked into the fire. “Do you think Timber’s gettin’ whole?”

  None of us had anything to say.

  Digger

  GOT KNIFED one time. Knifed pretty good in the friggin’ leg. Hurt like a son of a bitch and I knew going to the hospital was only gonna bring me heat. They’d wanna know who shivved me and there was no way I wanted any friggin’ interference on me handling the outcome. So I laid up. Got me a few crocks, some rubbing alcohol, some bandages, and a lay-up away from my usual and waited until the leg was good enough to walk on again. Days. I spent days there waiting to heal. But I still had to make a move or two. Still had to hobble down for a fresh crock, score some smokes, or grab a bite to eat somewhere. Had to. Had to because it wasn’t about the dying, it was about the getting it together one more time. I could only hope Timber was getting it together. I didn’t want to think about the other possibility.

  If he was using the money to hole up somewhere different I was fucked. Man, I had no idea how a guy’d use all that cash to put himself away from people. But he was still a friggin’ rounder and I depended on that when I sent the boys out to look for him. Cost me a few bucks over the next three days, but I figured it was worth it.

  Nothing. No sight of him. No word. No hint of where he might be. When the cops had nothing to say to us, I had to kinda let go a little. I guess if the friggin’ bulls can’t figure out where the hell you went there was no one gonna know. I only hoped they wouldn’t bring a body back. That was my big fear. That he’d bought it. That the movie touched something in him that wasn’t supposed to be touched again and he took the desperate route. But I still drove around and around and a-friggin’-round. I saw more of them streets than I wanted to over those three days. Saw more of the way people lived, how they stumbled, lurched, fell, puked, and hunted for the next whatever that’d make their blood move again. Saw them lined up for the handout food. Saw them laid out in parks or leaning out the windows of welfare digs, looking out over the street like they’re waiting for something to move along it that’ll change everything. There ain’t nothing that big. I coulda told them that. Nothing that big that’d change everything. Even money. All the loot we had still couldn’t make it any easier to live. Not for Timber. Not for the ones with woe. The shadowed ones. Haunting the world while they’re still in it. What a fucking bummer.

  One For The Dead

  I SAW THEM from the living room. I watched them talk. Watched them move closer together as they spoke, leaning inward, hoarding each sound like a private treasure. I watched them watch each other and I watched them kiss. They held it. Held it like a cup to parched lips, and I smiled. I remembered. Remembered my Ben’s kisses in the soft orange glow of neon so long ago and how they soothed me, how they made me feel alive on the inside of my skin, how they lifted me up and made me more, how they filled me. I was happy to see it. Happy that Granite had found a light beyond the movies, found a story that was real, found a heartbeat to echo against his own. I didn’t let them know that I was there. I crossed to the other side of the room and sat in my favourite chair to drink tea and send my thoughts to Timber, alone in his pain.

  The telephone rang. I stared at it, didn’t want to answer. All I could do was stand up and stare at it. Granite and Margo hurried into the room followed by Digger and Dick, who ran down the stairs from watching a movie in Dick’s room. No one moved to the phone. It rang and rang before Margo finally reached over and picked it up.

  “It’s James,” she said.

  We waited while she listened. We could hear his voice from where we stood: excited, fast, hurried. Margo pursed her lips into a tight line while she listened, nodding her head and tapping at her belt with the fingers of her free hand. “Okay,” she said finally, “I’ll tell everyone. Is that it? There’s no more?”

  There was a final burst of reply.

  “Okay. We’ll wait here for you.”

  She hung up the telephone and plopped down into an armchair. We all moved a little closer.

  “What?” Digger said. “Fer fuck sakes, what?”

  “They’ve been able to track his movements through his bank card withdrawals,” she said. “They have a rough idea of where he’s been but nothing concrete. For the first three days, he withdrew a few hundred from bank machines in different parts of the city.”

  “Walking,” I said.

  “Yes. It appears so. The bank machines are pretty far apart and it doesn’t appear he was taking a particular direction. He was just walking, apparently. Because it’s cash, they don’t know where he spent the money, only that he got it.”

  Margo looked at us with tears building in her eyes. “Two days ago it stopped. No more withdrawals. Just one big one for eight hundred and no more. That was early in the morning two days ago.”

  “Jesus,” Digger said.

  “The police are looking for him but I think we all know that if he really wants to disappear in the city, there’s places where no one could find him.”

  “Yes,” I said, quietly. “There are places like that.”

  “James has contacted the media. I’m sorry, but he had to. He had to put Jonas’s picture out on the off chance that someone somewhere has seen him. Maybe they sold him something, maybe they rented him a room—anything that might lead us to where he is.”

  “God,” Granite said. “Here we go again.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, they’ll make a big thing of it. Homeless lottery winner disappears. Millionaire street person vanishes. All of that. And they’ll be after all of you, too.”

  “We don’t gotta say nothing, though, right?” Digger asked.

  “No. James and I and Margo can handle the dodge for you. But there’ll be cameras and reporters outside the door, you can bet on that.”

  “Will it help get Timber back?” Dick asked.

  “Yes. Well, it might,” Granite said. “More people knowing his face. You never know. Someone might see him or have seen him already.”

  “Should we put up a reward?” I asked.

  “No,” Margo said. “Not right away. Let the media machine do its work. People generally want to help, and if someone’s seen him they’ll let us know because they’ve seen it on television. James will be here shortly to fill us in on exactly what to do when reporters arrive.”

  “What do we do until then? Until something happens?” I asked
her.

  She came and stood beside me, put an arm around my shoulder and bent her forehead to mine. “Pray, I suppose,” she said. “That seems like a good thing to do.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a good thing.”

  They all came then, my boys, and stood around us, arms encircling us, heads bent close together, eyes closed, and joined in silent prayer for a lost one.

  Double Dick

  WE NEVER WENT to the movie store for a coupla days an’ there wasn’t nothin’ new for me to watch. So I started lookin’ through my collection for somethin’ kinda happy on accounta I needed that right then. Granite an’ Miss Margo had got me all kinds of movies they said I’d like an’ I never got all the way through them. There was a pile on my table waitin’ for me to watch. I thought about Back to the Future and The Color Purple on accounta they sounded nice, but the one I decided to watch was one called E.T. There was a picture of a boy on a bicycle ridin’ across the front of the moon way up high in the air an’ I figured that would be good on accounta I remembered always wantin’ to fly when I was a kid. So I put it in an’ started to watch.

  At first I was scared on accounta this little guy gets left behind by a spaceship an’ has to find a place to hide. But then he gets helped out by a buncha kids an’ everythin’ was kinda happy for a while. Then some bad men come an’ try an’ take him away, so he’s gotta run away an’ that’s when he flies the boy on the bike across the front of the moon.

  Then, it got to me. They sent a message into space an’ the spaceship came back for the little guy. But he was friends now with one boy an’ they was both sad on accounta nobody likes to lose a friend. I was thinkin’ of Timber right then an’ it kinda made me cry. Then the little guy points his finger at the boy’s heart an’ says, “I’ll be right here.”

  Well, I set right to bawling on accounta I missed my friend. I cried hard. It scared me to cry so hard, so I had to have another coupla drinks to settle down. The movie was over, so I went over an’ sat on my windowsill an’ looked up at the moon that was full that night too.

  E.T. went home an’ left his friend behind. He had to on accounta that’s where he lived. That’s where he belonged. And that’s when I knew. That’s when it come to me. That’s when I knew how come we couldn’t find Timber, an’ I ran down the hall to tell everyone.

  Timber

  I WATCHED CLOUDS. That’s all I did that first night on the bus. I sat in my seat, leaned my head against the glass and watched clouds sail by. There’s a funny thing that happens when you do that. When you look at something long enough and hard enough when you’re moving, it gets to looking like whatever you’re looking at is sailing alongside you. That’s how those clouds looked after a while. Like they were sailing beside the bus. It’s called parallax or the Doppler effect or some such thing she put in my head a long time ago. She called it ordinary magic. She said that kind of magic was everywhere all the time, and that we only ever have to open our eyes to see it. She said it was our minds, our brains, our rigid thinking that discounted it, made it a kid’s trick, a conversation starter and not the magic that it was. Relative motion. That’s what made it work. You both needed to be in relative motion to each other in order for clouds to chase a bus down the highway. In order for the magic to happen. I thought about that. Thought about how it works that way with people, too, how it works that way with lives, with histories. You can’t get away from ordinary magic. It’s always there. Waiting. Waiting for you to believe again, to open your eyes and look for it. That scared me. Being on this bus, crossing the country to get back to a city, a history, a life, a person I’d abandoned so many years ago, was the first time in all those years that I allowed myself to look for it, to open my eyes, to believe.

  I never labelled anything that happened to us since we started going to the movies as magic. I couldn’t. I couldn’t open up hope like that. To me, it was all distraction, something to take us away from the lives we were living—entertainment, escape, disarray almost. Even the money. That wasn’t magic. It was a fluke, a jest, a cosmic joke. I always told myself that it hadn’t happened to me. It had happened to Digger. The magic was that he had shared it. To ascribe it to magic was to ascribe it to hope, and hope was something I had walked away from too. I had left a lot of things in that city by the sea and I had left hope in a chair beside a hospital bed. You can only carry so much with you when you’re a rounder on the street and hope is a weight you can’t afford.

  It wasn’t an easy choice to get on that bus. Walking around the city for three days, I wanted to die. I couldn’t drink enough, it seemed, and when I holed up in some shitty-assed hotel each of those nights, I hoped I wouldn’t wake up. But I did. And the thought came to me that death wasn’t going to come along and claim me. No, I was going to have to do something to force its arrival. I just couldn’t make that choice even though I felt like it. I walked. Walked and walked and walked and looked around for an appropriate height to jump from, an appropriate depth to dive into, or a sharp enough point to slip against. I didn’t find it. All I found was Sylvan. All I found was guilt. All I found was a jettisoned life I hadn’t had the courage to see through. Courage. That was the word. It wasn’t hope I’d abandoned in that chair at all. It was courage.

  She told me once that courage was a French word originally. It came from coeur—the heart. Coeur-age then meant from the heart. To live with courage was to live from the heart, that involuntary muscle that drives a life, that beats in the darkness despite itself and propels us onward to become ourselves. Her words, not mine.

  I loved Sylvan Parrish. My heart was filled with love, then and now, and if I was to have courage then I needed to return, to go back to that sad chair in that sad room and look into those eyes again and reclaim my heart. It was courage I needed to return to, and if hope came along for the ride, so much the better.

  Digger

  MOST TIMES a loogan’s a loogan. But when Dick come running downstairs to tell us E.T told him that Timber wasn’t in the city no more, well, it made sense. I’ll be frigged if I could figure out where he went in this town. Merton was there by then and he got right on the blower to the bulls. He was telling them to start running Timber’s picture to the airlines to see if any clerks recognized him. I stopped him.

  “He ain’t on no friggin’ plane,” I go. “He got here by bus and that’s the way he’ll go back.”

  You wanna find a rounder, you gotta think like a rounder. Sure enough, a clerk at the bus station recognized Timber right away. Way Merton figured it, it took four days to get to the west coast. The two days he wasn’t taking no cash from the machine meant he’d been on the bus them two days and he’d be arriving there in another couple days.

  “There’s really nothing we can do, legally,” he goes. “He can go anywhere he wants. He doesn’t need to tell anyone where he’s going. Not even us.”

  “He’s not missin’ no more?” Dick goes.

  “Technically, no,” Merton goes. “I’m still worried about his state of mind, though.”

  “Aw fuck, Jimbo,” I go. “If he was gonna do himself he’da done it by now.”

  “Maybe so,” he goes. “But what about what happens when he gets back there? What about if he manages to find her and it’s the same situation that he left originally? What if she still doesn’t recognize him?”

  “That’s not why he’s going back,” the old lady goes.

  “Pardon me?” Merton goes.

  “He’s going back to sit in the chair again.”

  “You lost me, Amelia.”

  “The chair beside the bed. That’s where his life turned. When he got up from that chair and walked away from her, he left himself behind. He’s gotta go back and sit in it again. No matter what.”

  “You’re saying he’s got no expectation? That he doesn’t carry the hope that she’ll look at him and all the years will vanish in a heartbeat and she’ll be his one true love again? He’s not going back for that?”

  “Are you ask
ing me if he’s crazy?”

  “No. Well, yes. I mean, I guess so. It sounds crazy to me.”

  “It’s not crazy. Even if he is hoping that. It’s love, and I don’t think love is crazy.”

  “Me neither,” Margo goes.

  “But he’s setting himself up for some major hurt,” Merton goes. “Just walking back into that situation after all this time, he’s setting himself up for pain. What will he do then?”

  “James is right,” Rock goes. “I couldn’t imagine it, myself.”

  “That’s why I’m going to the fucking coast,” I go.

  “What?” Merton goes.

  “I’m going out there. What do you expect me to do? Let my winger walk into a set-up? I don’t fucking think so, pal.”

  “I’m goin’ too, then,” Dick goes.

  “Me too,” Amelia goes.

  “Not without me, you’re not,” Margo goes.

  “Or me,” Rock goes. “He’s my friend. I can’t see him setting himself up for pain. Or at least, not alone.”

  “Well, I guess we’re all going then,” Merton goes. “I have some contacts out there who can do the legwork before we get there, and maybe we can shorten the time he’s alone with it.”

  “It’s perfect,” the old lady goes.

  “Perfect?” I go. “How you figure?”

  “Well,” she goes, “in the old stories I was told as a girl there would come a time of great trouble for the People. All kinds of things happened to the People then. Just like now. Most times, a hero would come forward and make things happen. But other times, times when great strength was needed, it took the People themselves. Everyone would make a journey, a trek.”

  “Why?” Rock goes.

  “When great strength is needed, great strength is gained.”

  “Say what?” I go.

  “Sometimes it takes a whole community to save itself, and when people come together in strength, on a mission, what they get in the end is what they spent in the struggle.”