Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (56 page)

“So what brings you in so early?” he asked when he turned back to her.

“I can’t get those envelopes out of my head.”

“The…oh, yeah. They’re a bit of a puzzle all right. But I can’t let you look at them.”

“I’m not asking. But when you were giving me mine, I saw the date on the one on the top of the stack.”

“Today’s date,” Alphonse guessed.

She nodded. “Do you mind if I hang around and wait?”

“Not at all. But it could be a long haul.”

“’sokay. I’ve got the time.”

She sat chatting with Alphonse for a while, then retired to one of the booths near the stage with her second cup of coffee. Pulling out her journal, she did some sketches of the bar, the empty stage, Alphonse at work. The sketches were in pictures and words. At some point they might find a melody and swell into a song. Or they might not. It didn’t matter to her. Doodling in her journal was just something she always did—a way to occupy time on the road and provide touchstones for her memory.

Jonathan Block didn’t show up until that evening, after she’d had a surprisingly-good Cajun stew and the band was starting to set up. He looked nothing like what she’d expected—not that she’d had any specific visual in mind. It was just that he looked like a street person. Medium height, gaunt features, a few days worth of stubble and greasy hair, shabby clothes. She’d expected someone more…successful.

She waited until he’d collected his envelope and had a chance to read it before approaching him.

“I guess your replay didn’t turn out,” she said.

He gave her a look that was half wary, half confused.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She pulled out her own envelope, creased and wrinkled from living in her pocket for over a month, and showed it to him.

“Do you feel like talking?” she asked. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure. I’ll have a ginger ale.”

She got one for him from Alphonse, then led Jonathan back to her booth.

“What did you want to talk about?” he asked.

“You have to ask? I mean, this, all of this. . ” She laid her envelope on the Formica tabletop between them. “It’s just so strange.”

He gave a slow nod and laid his own down beside his drink.

“But it’s real, isn’t it?” he said. “The letters prove that.”

“What happened to you? Why didn’t it work out?”

“What makes you think it didn’t?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just…the way you…you know. . ”

“No, I should be the one apologizing. It was a fair question.” He looked past her for a moment, then returned his gaze to hers. “It worked for me and it didn’t. I just didn’t think it through carefully enough. I should have focused on a point in time
before
I got drunk—before I even had a problem with drinking. But I didn’t. So when I went back the three years, suddenly I’m in the car again, pissed out of my mind, and I know that the other car’s going to come around the corner, and I know I’m going to hit it, and I know it’s too late to just pull over.”

He wasn’t telling her much, but Sarah was able to fill in the details for herself.

“Oh, how horrible,” she said.

“Yeah, it wasn’t very bright on my part. But hey, who’d have ever thought that a thing like that would even work? When he kissed me on my forehead I thought he was just some freaky guy getting some weird little thrill. I was going to take a swing at him, but then I was there. Back in the car. On that night.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the good thing was, even drunk as I was, I knew what was coming and whatever else I might have been, I wasn’t a bad guy. Thoughtless as shit, oh yeah, but not bad. So instead of letting myself hit the car, I just drove into a lamppost in the couple of moments I had left. The twelve-year-old girl who would have died—who
did
die the first time around—was spared.”

“And you?”

“Serious injuries. I didn’t have any medical, so I lost everything paying for the bills. Lost my job. Got charged with drunk driving, and it wasn’t the first time, but since I hadn’t hurt anybody, they just took away my license. But after that it was pretty much the same slide downhill that it was the first time.”

“You don’t sound. . ” Sarah wasn’t sure how to put it.

“Much broke up about it?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s like I told you,” he said. “This time the little girl lived. I wasn’t any less stupid, but this time no one else had to pay for my stupidity. I’ve still got a chance to put my life back together. I’ve been sober since that night. I just need a break, a chance to get cleaned up and back on my feet. I know I can do it.”

Sarah nodded. Then she asked the question that troubled her most.

“Did you ever try to change anything else?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Some disaster where a little forewarning could save a lot of lives.”

“You mean like 9/11?”

“Yeah. Or the bombing in Oklahoma.”

He shook his head. “It’s a funny thing. As soon as I heard about them, it all came back, that I’d been around when they happened the first time and I
remembered
. But the memory just wasn’t there until it actually happened.”

“Like all we’re changing is our own lives.”

“Pretty much. And even that’s walking blind, the further you get from familiar territory.”

Sarah knew exactly what he meant. It had been easy to change things at first, but once she was in a life that was so different from how it had gone the first time, there were no more touchstones and you had to do like everybody did: do what you could and hope for the best.

“I was afraid there was something wrong with me,” she said. “That I was so self-centered that I just couldn’t be bothered with anything that didn’t personally touch my life.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“How would you know?”

“Well, c’mon. You’re Sarah Blue. You’re like a poster child for causes.”

“I never told you my name.”

He smiled and shook his head. “What? Suddenly you’re anonymous? Maybe the charts got taken over by all these kids with their bare midriffs, but there was a time not so long ago when you were always on the cover of some magazine or other.”

She shrugged, not knowing what to say.

“I don’t know what your life was like the first time around,” he went on, “but you’ve been making a difference this time out. So don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I guess.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Sarah looked around the bar and saw that the clientele had changed. The afternoon boozehounds had given way to a younger, hipper crowd, though she could still spot a few grey heads in the crowd. These were the people who’d come for the music, she realized.

“Will you do like it says in the letter?” she asked, turning back to her companion.

“You mean pass it on?”

She nodded.

“First chance I get.”

“Me, too,” she said. “And I think my go at it should be to help you.”

“You haven’t passed it on yet?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know if you get a third try,” he said.

She shrugged. “If it doesn’t work out, I can always front you some money, give you a chance to get back on your feet, and use the whatever-the-hell-it-is on someone else.”

“You’d do that for me—just like that?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

He gave a slow nod. “Not before. But now, yeah. In a heartbeat.” He looked at her for a long moment. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

“I saw your name and the date on your envelope when I was collecting my own. I just…needed to talk to someone about it and Eddie doesn’t seem to be available.”

“Eddie,” he said. “What do you think he is?”

“An angel.”

“So you believe in God?”

“I…I’m not sure. But I believe in good and evil. I guess I just naturally think of somebody working on the side of good as being an angel.”

He nodded. “It’s as good a description as any.”

“So let’s give this a shot,” she said. “Only this time—”

“Concentrate on a point in time where I can make the decision not to drink before it’s too late.”

She nodded.

She gave him a moment, turning her attention back to the bandstand. Looks like tonight they had a keyboard player, a guitarist, a bass player, a drummer, and a guy on saxophones. They were still tuning, adjusting the drum kit, soaking the reeds for the saxes.

She turned back to Jonathan.

“Have you got it?” she asked.

“Yeah. I think I do.”

“I’m not going to try to tell you how to live your life, but I think it helps to have something bigger than yourself to believe in.”

“Like God?”

She shrugged.

“Or like a cause?” he added.

She smiled. “Like a whatever. Are you ready?”

“Do it,” he said. “And thanks.”

She leaned over the table, put her hands on his temples and kissed him where Eddie had kissed her, on—what had he called it? Her third eye. She kept her lips pressed against his forehead for a couple of moments, then sat back in her seat.

“Don’t forget to come back here on the same day,” she said.

But Jonathan only gave her a puzzled look. Without speaking, he got up and left the booth. Sarah tracked him as he made his way through the growing crowd, but he never once looked back.

Weird. How was she even supposed to know if it had worked? But she guessed that in this world, she wouldn’t.

Her gaze went to Jonathan’s half-drunk ginger ale and she noticed that he’d left his letter behind. There was another puzzle. How did they go from world to world, future to future?

Maybe it had something to do with the Rhatigan itself. Maybe there was something about the bar that made it a crossroads for all these futures.

She thought of asking Alphonse, but got the sense that he didn’t know. Or if he knew, he wouldn’t be telling. But maybe if she could track down Eddie. .

He appeared beside her table as though her thoughts had summoned him.

“Never thought about third chances,” he said.

He slid a trumpet case onto the booth seat, then sat down beside it, smiling at her from the other side of the table.

“Is—was that against the rules?” she asked.

He shrugged. “What rules? The only thing that’s important is for you to come back and get the message to pass it on.”

“But what
is
it that we’re passing on? Where did this thing come from?”

“Sometimes it’s better to just accept that something is, instead of trying to take it apart.”

“But—”

“Because when you take it apart, it might not work anymore. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Sarah?”

“No. Of course not. But I’ve got so many questions. . ”

He made a motion with his hands like he was breaking something, then he held out his palms looking down at them with a sad expression.

“Okay, I get the point already,” she said. “But you’ve got to understand my curiosity.”

“Sure, I do. And all I’m doing is asking you to let it go.”

“But…can you at least tell me who you are?”

“Eddie Ramone.”

“And he’s…?”

“Just a guy who’s learned how to give a few people the tools to fix a mistake they might have made. Doesn’t work on everybody, and not everybody gets it right when they do go back. But I give them another shot. Think of me as a messenger of hope.”

Sarah felt as though she was going to burst with the questions that were swelling inside her.

“So’d you bring a guitar?” Eddie asked.

She blinked, then shook her head. “No. But I don’t play jazz.”

“Take a cue from Norah Jones. Anything can swing, even a song by Hank Williams…or Sarah Blue.”

She shook her head. “These people didn’t come to hear me.”

“No, they came to hear music. They don’t give a rat’s ass who’s playing it, just so long as it’s real.”

“Okay. Maybe.” But then she had a thought. “Just answer this one thing for me.”

He smiled, waiting.

“In your letter you said that this is a different time line from the one I first met you in.”

“That’s right, it is.”

“So how come you’re here and you know me in this one?”

“Something’s got to be the connection,” he told her.

“But—”

He opened his case and took out his trumpet. Getting up, he reached for her hand.

“C’mon. Jackie’ll lend you his guitar for a couple of numbers. All you’ve got to do is tell us the key.”

She gave up and let him lead her to where the other musicians were standing at the side of the stage.

“Oh, and don’t forget,” Eddie said as they were almost there. “Before you leave the bar, you need to write your own letter to Jonathan.”

“I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“‘Crazy,’” Eddie said. “Willie Nelson. That’d make a nice start—you know, something everybody knows.”

Sarah wanted to bring the conversation back to where she felt she needed it to go, but a look into his eyes gave her a sudden glimpse of a hundred thousand different futures, all banging up against each other in a complex, twisting pattern that gave her a touch of vertigo. So she took a breath instead, shook her head and just let him introduce her to the other musicians.

Jackie’s Gibson semi-hollow body was a lot like one of her own guitars—it just had a different pick-up. She took a seat on the center-stage stool and adjusted the height of the microphone, then started playing the opening chords of “Tony Adams.” It took her a moment to find the groove she was looking for, that hiphop swing that Strummer and the Mescaleros had given the song. By the time she found it, the piano and bass had come in, locking them into the groove.

She glanced at Eddie. He stood on the side of the stage, holding his horn, swaying gently to the rhythm. Smiling, she turned back to the mike and started to sing the first verse.

f
or 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.