The Very Best of Charles De Lint

by Charles de Lint

  for Joe Strummer, R.I.P.

  Old Man Crow

  Old Man Crow lifted his head from its pillow of moss and pine needles and sniffed the air. Something walked in the pine woods around him, invisible as the wind, and more silent than a spider’s bite. But he was Old Man Crow and he could be as quiet as the movement of that spider’s web in the wind. When he sat up, it was without a whisper of sound. His dark gaze searched the shadows under the trees. He tracked the flight of a blue jay cousin through the upper boughs, then studied the hollows that the granite rib-rocks had made as they pushed their way out of the forest floor, back in the long ago.

  “Little sister, little sister,” he said. “I know you’re there. You can’t fool this old crow with your sneaking about and hiding.”

  “Not so little and not your sister,” a gruff voice said almost in his ear. “So who’s the fool now?”

  When he turned around, his features hid his surprise that someone could get this close to him, that they could move even more quietly than he could.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  The woman sitting cross-legged on the pine needles smiled. She was big—bigger than him and almost as tall. Her skin was white from her widow’s peak to her smallest toe, her hair was the colour of a snowdrift in the sunlight, her eyes the dark of graveyard secrets. Her breath was apple-sweet.

  “And here I was told that Old Man Crow knew everyone,” she said.

  “Then you’ve been talking to the wrong people.”

  She shrugged and her breasts bounced with the movement.

  “Do you mind putting some clothes on?” he said.

  She gave him a puzzled look. “Just what do you see when you look at me?”

  “A big, handsome woman—too damn handsome to be walking around buck-naked.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted.”

  Now it was Old Man Crow’s turn to be puzzled.

  “About what?” he asked.

  “I’m no woman, Joey Creel. I live up by Spirit Lake.”

  Old Man Crow leaned back against the pine tree.

  “Well, now,” he said. “That’s different. What can I do for you, cousin?”

  He wasn’t surprised that she knew his waking name. The spirit bears who lived up the mountain on the glacial shores of Spirit Lake were like that. They were supposed to have a way of knowing things about you without your having to say a word. Much like the cousins could when they walked about in the world of the five-fingered beings.

  “I need you to see something,” she said.

  When she stood up, it was like watching water flow. She reached a hand to him and he let himself be pulled to his feet. She was as strong as she was quick and silent.

  “What kind of some—” he began.

  But then the pine forest dissolved and they stood in the middle of an intersection, with cars stopped all around them as far as the eye could see. Buildings rose, sleek and tall as the first trees must have been in the long ago. They, too, went on forever and ever, it seemed, off into the horizon in each of the four directions.

  Old Man Crow couldn’t hide his surprise over this. He blinked and looked around himself. All the cars were motionless, many with their doors hanging ajar. It took him a long moment to realize that this busy street was utterly still. It was as though he and the spirit bear had stepped into the middle of a photograph. And then, as he slowly settled into accepting their surroundings, he realized something else.

  “Where are all the people?” he asked.

  She shrugged again and he kept his gaze on her face.

  “This is what it would be like,” she said, “if we stepped back into the long ago.”

  “Except for the buildings and cars, and all the other crap.”

  “That’s true.”

  She fell silent. Old Man Crow waited, but she seemed content to simply stand with him on the street, surrounded by the motionless, empty vehicles. If there had been people in those cars, he thought, they’d have all come to a halt anyway when this glorious woman appeared in front of them.

  “So why are you showing me this?” he asked.

  “I thought you might find it interesting.”

  “I liked those pine woods better.”

  “And I thought maybe you could fix it.”

  “Fix what?”

  “Whatever’s going to happen here.”

  * * *

  Joey Creel woke up in his familiar bed, in his familiar apartment, with the familiar sounds of the city coming in through the bedroom window. Traffic, people talking, dustbins clanging, a distant police siren. He sat up, half-expecting the spirit bear to still be with him, but he was alone in the room.

  Getting up, he went into the bathroom and had a long morning pee. Washing his hands, he looked at his reflection. His beard was going so grey it looked almost white against his dark skin. He gave the bristles a rub and pushed his hair back from his face.

  He thought about his dream, about the task the spirit bear had set him, and he shook his head. It was a powerful dream—a power dream—and he didn’t understand a bit of it.

  “I guess we’re finally getting old,” he told his reflection.

  His reflection stared silently back at him until he finally turned away.

  Returning to the bedroom, he got dressed. Dark trousers, cowboy boots, an old white shirt. He took his change from the dresser and dropped it in his pocket. Grabbing his suit jacket from the back of the sofa where he’d left it last night, he went to the diner on the corner for breakfast and a coffee. He didn’t bother to lock the apartment door behind him. There was nothing there to steal—not even that old guitar of his was worth any real money. Anything he had of worth, he carried around in his head.

  “I had the strangest dream last night,” Ruby the waitress said when she came over to his booth.

  She brought a coffee along with a plate of beans, eggs and toast and set them in front of him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually placed an order here. Ruby just gave him whatever she decided he wanted. So long as coffee was a part of the equation, Joey was happy to let her decide.

  “Was there a big naked white woman in it?” Joey asked.

  Ruby laughed. “I guess we’re never too old to dream, are we?”

  “Bad enough I call myself old. Don’t you start doing it, too.”

  Ruby was a cute, curvy young thing—twentysomething and flirty, with tousled blond hair and a tattoo of a magpie on her upper arm. When she reached for something on the top shelf behind the counter, you could just see the tip of that magpie’s long tail poking out from under her sleeve. She gave a look around the diner to make sure nobody needed her attention, then slipped into Joey’s booth.

  “So in this dream,” she said, “Jay-Z’s living in the neighbourhood, and he comes right here into the diner and wants to know if I’ll be in his new video.”

  “I thought he’d retired and was running some record company now.”

  She shakes her head. “How do you know that? You always know the strangest things.”

  “I’ve been around,” Joey said.

  And he had. Not back to the days of the long ago, maybe, when Raven first pulled the world out of that big black pot of his, and not even back when the Indians first came wandering through these lands, but he’d been around for a while. His name wasn’t Joey Creel any more than it was Old Man Crow, though they’d both grown to be a part of his story.

  That would have been a good name for this old corbae: Story Man. He collected stories—or at least what he called stories. He rarely knew how they began or ended because mostly they came to him piecemeal. Something overheard at a bus stop. Something read in a newspaper, or in a magazine at the checkout counter of the grocery store. Something a drunk might tell him in a bar. Something the squirrel cousins gossiped about with the pigeons.

  There were stories everywhere, or at leas
t pieces of them, and corbae had always been collectors. The baubles he hoarded just happened to be made of words rather than gleams and glitters.

  “So what did you say to Jay-Z?” he asked Ruby.

  “I told him I wasn’t that kind of a girl.”

  “And what kind of a girl are you?”

  She smiled. “A good girl with attitude.”

  “Works for me. And I tell you what. Come visit me in my dreams sometime. Look a little older and I’ll look a little younger—who knows what could happen.”

  “In your dreams!”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m still waiting for Kyle to ask me out.”

  “What? Is that boy blind? I need to have a talk with him.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  He grinned, not saying yes, not saying no.

  “So what about you?” she asked. “Did you really dream about a big naked white woman last night?”

  Joey nodded and grew thoughtful.

  “She was actually a spirit bear in human form,” he said. “Funny thing was, she didn’t know she looked human. She came to give me a vision.”

  “A vision?”

  “Yeah, she brought me from the pine woods where I was napping into the city, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And the whole place was empty. There were no people anywhere. No sounds at all. Not even a single bird’s call.”

  “There’s days when I’d find that kind of nice.”

  “This was different,” he said. “There were cars in the middle of the street with their doors hanging open—but no wrecks. It was like people just stopped whatever they were doing and went away.”

  “What did your naked woman have to say about that?”

  “That I was supposed to fix it.”

  Ruby shook her head. “You have the weirdest dreams.”

  He nodded. He could have said, “It’s something that comes to a lot of the corbae cousins—you know, crows like me. We have the gift of portent and prophecy, and mostly we’re the ones that take people out of this world and into the other. Places like the land of dreams.”

  But all he said was, “I suppose I do.”

  A bell rang on the counter behind them to let Ruby know that an order was up. She carried the tray like the pro she was, four breakfast plates, juice and coffee, not spilling a drop. When she’d delivered the meals, she came back to Joey’s booth.

  “Are you free this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Are you asking me on a date?”

  “Yeah, right. No, I just thought maybe you can show me a new song. I’ve pretty much got that last one down now.”

  “Sure, I’d like that,” he told her. “I’ll be home after lunch—unless that spirit bear comes looking for me again.”

  Ruby touched the magpie tattoo on her arm. She often did it when their conversation turned to the cousins. He knew it was an involuntary gesture that she wasn’t even aware of doing.

  “Why do you always say things like that?” she asked.

  “Things like what?”

  “You know. Spirit bears and visions. Yesterday you were trying to tell me something you said a cat had told you.”

  “A bobcat cousin.”

  “Whatever. You know what it can sound like, don’t you?”

  “That I see more in the world than most people do?”

  She laughed. “I guess. Or maybe that you’re not all there.”

  She touched a finger to her temple.

  “I’m never all here,” he told her. “I’ve always got one foot in the otherworld.”

  “But there is no…”

  She let her voice trail off instead of finishing.

  “Well, here’s something you can think of as real,” he said. “When young handsome Kyle comes in for his lunch today, why don’t you ask him out?”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? Where’s that attitude?”

  She opened her mouth, then laughed again.

  Joey grinned. “You can’t think of one good reason, can you?”

  “No,” she said. “I guess I can’t.”

  “You need to remember,” he told her, “that you don’t have another life in the bank. You got to make the most of the one you’re living right now.”

  Ruby McCaulay paused to watch Joey after he left the diner. She’d been wiping off a table in one of the window booths, and leaned on the backrest, one knee on the seat, as she watched him cross the street. He turned left, heading south on Lee.

  When she couldn’t see him anymore, she went back to what she’d been doing. She just liked that old man and couldn’t say why. She might be having the worst day—cranky customers, crappy tips, her back and calves aching—but when he came in, his presence in the diner pushed all of that away. It was like he changed her into someone younger than her twenty-three years, like she was a kid again, full of energy, with the whole world waiting, laid out before her. Not everybody felt that way.

  “God, he just gives me the creeps,” Eileen had said one morning, a couple of weeks ago.

  She had just come on shift when Joey was leaving that day. Ruby’d turned to her, surprised.

  “Dirty old man creeps?” she asked. “Because he’s really harmless.”

  Eileen shook her head. “I don’t think he is. I know that guys from his generation love to flirt, and I know they don’t mean anything by it, but…well, that’s not it.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “He just…he knows too much. It’s like he knows something about everything, it doesn’t matter what the subject is.”

  “He’s smart, that’s all.”

  “And sometimes, when he looks at me, it’s like he’s right inside my head.”

  Ruby gave a slow nod. It was eerie how often he knew exactly what she was thinking without her having to say a word. She’d accused him once of being a mind reader and he’d laughed, telling her he was a people reader. That he just knew things about people from the way they carried themselves, from—and this was a weird thing to say, she’d thought at the time, and still did—how they fit in their skin.

  But she kind of liked that, too—the way he’d always know the right thing to say, or how he’d call her on it when she was sugarcoating something, or trying to B.S.

  “And that bothers you?” she asked when Eileen didn’t go on.

  “God, yes. It doesn’t bother you?”

  Ruby shook her head.

  “No, I guess it wouldn’t,” Eileen said, “considering how you see him outside of work. What do you guys do anyway?”

  “I’ve told you. He teaches me songs. He must know thousands of them.”

  “So when are you going to go out and play some of them?”

  “You mean like get a gig?”

  Eileen nodded.

  “I’m not learning them for that,” Ruby said. “I’m learning them so that when Joey’s gone, someone will still remember them.”

  Eileen shook her head.

  “You’re getting as weird as him,” she said, but she smiled.

  “No,” Ruby said. “I think Joey’s got the weird all sewn up for himself.”

  “Says you.”

  Ruby smiled, remembering. She finished wiping down the table, then went and helped Anna, who was checking that all the condiment holders were filled for the lunch rush.

  It was funny, she thought. If you saw Anna and her together, Anna always came off as the more subdued. She usually wore her brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, had glasses instead of contacts, and never used makeup at work, whereas Ruby had the funky hair and her tattoo, and the only time she made herself up was when she was working at the diner. Or if she had a date.

  But of the two of them, Anna was the freer spirit, ready for anything. This year alone she’d already gone whitewater rafting in the Kickahas, had her first parachute jump, and had applied to teach English in Thailand.

  Ruby was happy just to be at home playing her guitar.


  Anna looked up as she approached.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  Ruby unscrewed the lid of a sugar dispenser and started to fill it.

  “Do you ever ask guys out on a date?” she said.

  Anna laughed. “Of course. How else would I get to go with a guy I want to go out with?” Then she cocked her head and grinned. “Why? Are you going to ask Joey out?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s old enough to be my grandfather.”

  Anna nodded. “And he’s nice like a grandfather.”

  “That, too.”

  “Then who do you—wait, never mind. I already know. It’s that Kyle guy.”

  “I think he’s cute.”

  “You and I’m sure every other girl he meets.”

  “But I don’t think he knows it.”

  “Or it’s a good act,” Anna said.

  “So, you don’t think I should ask him out?”

  Anna laughed. “Are you kidding? Go for it. What’s the worst he can do?”

  “Say no?”

  “See, that’s where we’re different,” Anna said. “You like to hold on to possibilities, while I just like to go out and grab life by the ass.” Like a good comedian, she held the beat for a moment before adding, “Or some cute guy’s.”

  She grinned and played a rim-shot on the tabletop with her hands.

  “Maybe I’ll surprise you,” Ruby said.

  “I totally hope you do,” Anna told her.

  * * *

  Kyle Foster worked at Freewheeling, the bicycle repair shop down the street, and ate lunch at the diner every day. He always made a point to sit in Ruby’s section, and had for the better part of six weeks, which was when he began working at the shop and first started coming in. He was soft-spoken and invariably polite—which Ruby hoped only meant that he was shy, not disinterested.

  When he arrived at around quarter to one, she and Anna were standing behind the counter, waiting on orders. Anna gave her a nudge, but Ruby had already seen him come in.

  “You are so going to rock his world,” Anna told her.

  Ruby nodded—more to indicate she’d heard than that she agreed. She got a glass of ice water, plucked a menu from the holder on the side of the counter, and walked over to his table.