Ivory and the Horn Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I found him without hardly even trying. He was just setting up for the day.
Bones is a Native American—a full-blooded Kickaha with dark coppery skin, broad features and a braid hanging down his back that’s almost as long as Angel’s hair. He got his name from the way he tells fortunes. He’ll toss a handful of tiny bones onto a piece of deerskin and read auguries from the pattern they make. He doesn’t really dress for the part, eschewing buckskins and beads for scuffed old work-boots, faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the arms torn off, but it doesn’t seem to hurt business.
I don’t really hold much with any of this mumbo-jumbo stuff—not Bones’s gig, nor what his girlfriend Cassie does with Tarot cards, nor Paperjack’s Chinese fortune-telling devices. But while I don’t believe that any of them can foretell the future, I still have to admit there’s something different about some of the people who work this schtick.
Take Bones.
The man has crazy eyes. Not crazy, you-better-lock-him-up kind of eyes, but crazy because maybe he sees something we can’t. Like there really is some other world lying draped across ours, and he can see right into it. Maybe he’s even been there. Lots of times, I figure he’s just clowning around, but sometimes that dark gaze of his locks onto you and then you see this seriousness lying behind the laughter and it’s like the Tombs all over again—a piece of the wilderness biding on a city street, a dislocating sensation like not only is anything possible, but it probably already exists.
Besides, who am I to make judgments these days? I’m being haunted by a ghost.
“How do, Maisie?” he says when I wheel my mountain bike up to the edge of the fountain where he’s sitting.
I prop the bike up on its kickstand, hang my helmet from one of the handlebars and sit down beside him. He’s fiddling with his bones, letting them tumble from one hand to the other. They make a sound like Shirley’s buttons, only more muted. I find myself wondering what kind of an animal they came from. Mice? Birds? I look up from his hands and see the clown is sitting in his eyes, laughing. Maybe with me, maybe at me—I can never tell.
“Haven’t seen you around much these days,” he adds.
“I’m going to school,” I tell him.
“Yeah?”
“And I’ve got a job.”
He looks at me for this long heartbeat and I get that glimpse of otherness that puts a weird shifting sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“So are you happy?” he asks.
That’s something no one ever asks when I tell them what I’m doing now. I pick at a piece of lint that’s stuck to the cuff of my shorts.
“Not really,” I tell him.
“Want to see what Nanabozo’s got in store for you?” he asks, holding up his bones.
I don’t know who Nanabozo is, but I get the idea.
“No,” I say. “I want to ask you about ghosts.”
He doesn’t even blink an eye. Just grins.
“What about them?”
“Well, what are they?” I ask.
“Souls that got lost,” he tells me, still smiling, but serious now, too.
I feel weird talking about this. It’s a sunny day, the park’s full of people, joggers, skateboarders, women with baby carriages, a girl on the bench just a few steps away .who probably looks sexy at night under a streetlight, the way she’s all tarted up, but now she just looks used. Nothing out of the ordinary, and here we are, talking about ghosts.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “How do they get lost?”
“There’s a Path of Souls, all laid out for us to follow when we die,” he tells me. “But some spirits can’t see it, so they wander the earth instead. Others can’t accept the fact that they’re dead yet, and they hang around too.”
 “A path.”
He nods.
“Like something you walk along.”
“Inasmuch as a spirit walks,” Bones says.
“My ghost says she missed a bus,” I tell him.
“Maybe it’s different for white people.”
“She’s black.”
He sits there, not looking at me, bones