But if he doesn't talk to anyone else about it, Joe's still thinking about her, always thinking about her, if he's on stage or walking down a street or back in their room, who she is and where she came from, and he finds himself trying out names on her, to see which one she might've worn before he called her Mona, which one her momma and poppa called her by when she was just a little girl.
Then one day he gets it right, and the next morning she's gone, walked out of his life like the straying cat in the story the grannies tell, once someone's called her by her true, secret name. What was her name, this woman Joe started out calling Mona? I never learned. But Joe knows the story, too, cats and names, and he gets to thinking some more, he can't stop thinking about Mona and cats, and then he gets this crazy idea that maybe she really was a cat, that she could change, cat to woman, woman to cat, slipped into his life during her straying years, and now she's gone.
And then he gets an even crazier idea: The only way to get her back is if he gets himself his own cat skin.
So he goes to see the priest— not the man with the white collar, but the hoodoo man— except Papa Jo-el's dead, got himself mixed up with some kind of juju that even he couldn't handle, so when Joe goes knocking soft on Papa Jo-el's door, it's the gris-gris woman Ti Beau that answers and lets him in.
Friday night Joe's back in the club, and he's playing a dark music now, the tone of his sax's got an undercurrent in it, like skinheaded drums played with the palm of your hand and a tap-tap of a drumstick on a bar of iron, like midnight at a crossroads and the mist's coming in from the swamp, like seven-day candles burning the wind, but those candies don't flicker because the gateways are open and les invisibles are there, holding the flames still.
Saturday night, he's back again, and he's still playing music like no one's heard before— not displeasing, just unfamiliar. Tommy and Rex, they're having trouble keeping the rhythm, but Johnny's following, note for note. After the last set that Saturday night, he walks up to where Joe's putting his sax away in its case.
"You been to see the mambo?" Johnny asks, "playing music like that?"
Joe doesn't answer except to put his sax case in Johnny's hands.
"Hold on to this for me, would you?" he asks.
When he leaves the club that night, it's the last time anybody sees him. Sees the man. But Heber Brown, he's been working at the Walker Hotel for thirty years. When he's cleaning out Joe's room because the rent's two months due and nobody's seen him for most of that time, Heber sees an old tomcat on the fire escape, scratching at the window, trying to get in. Heber says this cat's so dark a brown it's almost black, like midnight settled in the corner of an alleyway, and it's got one blue eye, so you tell me.
You think Ti Beau's got the kind of gris-gris potion to turn a man into a cat, or maybe just an old cat skin lying about that'll work the same magic, someone says the right words over it? Or was it maybe that Joe just up and left town, nursing a broken heart?
Somebody taped that last set Joe played at the Rhatigan, and I'll tell you, when Johnny plays it for me, I hear hurting in it, but I hear something else, too, something that doesn't quite belong to this world, or maybe belonged here first but we kind of eased it out of the way once we got ourselves civilized enough. It's like one of the loa stepped into Joe that night, maybe freed him up, loosened his skin enough so that he could make the change, but first that spirit talked to us through Joe's sax, reminding us that we weren't here first, and maybe we won't be here the last either.
It's all part and parcel of the mystery that sits there, right under all the things we know for sure. And the thing I like about that mystery is that it doesn't show us more than a little piece at a time; but you touch it and you've just got to pass it on. So if Joe's not with Mona now, you can bet he's slipped into someone else's life and he's making them think. Sitting there on a windowsill, maybe looking lazy, but maybe looking like he knows something we don't, something important, and that person he's with, who took him in, well she stops the tumbling rush of her life for a moment to take the time to think about what lies under the stories that make up this city.
Things may be getting worse in some ways, but you can't deny that they're interesting, too, if you just stop to look at them a little closer.
Like that old man playing the clarinet in the subway station that you pass by every day. He's bent and old and his clothes are shabby and you can't figure out how he makes a living from the few coins that get tossed into the hat sitting on the pavement in front of him. So maybe he's just an old man, down on his luck, making do. Or maybe he's got a piece of magic he wants to pass on with that music he's playing.
Next time you go by, stop and give him a listen. But don't go looking for a tag to put on what you hear or, like that cat that runs off when you name her, it'll all just go away.
The Bone Woman
No one really stops to think of Ellie Spink, and why should they?
She's no one.
She has nothing.
Homely as a child, all that the passing of years did was add to her unattractiveness. Face like a horse, jaw long and square, forehead broad; limpid eyes set bird-wide on either side of a gargantuan nose; hair a nondescript brown, greasy and matted, stuffed up under a woolen toque lined with a patchwork of metal foil scavenged from discarded cigarette packages. The angularity of her slight frame doesn't get its volume from her meager diet, but from the multiple layers of clothing she wears.
Raised in foster homes, she's been used, but she's never experienced a kiss. Institutionalized for most of her adult life, she's been medicated, but never treated. Pass her on the street and your gaze slides right on by, never pausing to register the difference between the old woman huddled in the doorway and a bag of garbage.
Old woman? Though she doesn't know it, Monday, two weeks past, was her thirty-seventh birthday. She looks twice her age.
There's no point in trying to talk to her. Usually no one's home. When there is, the words spill out in a disjointed mumble, a rambling monologue itemizing a litany of misperceived conspiracies and other ills that soon leave you feeling as confused as she herself must be.
Normal conversation is impossible and not many bother to try it. The exceptions are few: The odd pitying passerby. A concerned social worker, fresh out of college and new to the streets. Maybe one of the other street people who happens to stumble into her particular haunts.
They talk and she listens, or she doesn't— she never makes any sort of a relevant response, so who can tell? Few push the matter. Fewer still, however well intentioned, have the stamina to make the attempt to do so more than once or twice. It's easier just to walk away; to bury your guilt, or laugh off her confused ranting as the excessive rhetoric it can only be.
I've done it myself.
I used to try to talk to her when I first started seeing her around, but I didn't get far. Angel told me a little about her, but even knowing her name and some of her history didn't help.
"Hey, Ellie. How're you doing?"
Pale eyes, almost translucent, turn toward me, set so far apart it's as though she can only see me with one eye at a time.
"They should test for aliens," she tells me. "You know, like in the Olympics."
"Aliens?"
"I mean, who cares who killed Kennedy? Dead's dead, right?"
"What's Kennedy got to do with aliens?"
"I don't even know why they took down the Berlin Wall. What about the one in China? Shouldn't they have worked on that one first?"