Ivory and the Horn Read Free Page B

you ever see anything so mysteriously beautiful? Just looking at it, really Considering it, has got to fill the most jaded spirit with awe.”
    I think about how ghosts have that trick down pretty good, too, but all I say is, “And what about the curse?”
    “We all know it’s just an over-sized rock hanging there in the sky. We’ve sent men to walk around on it, left trash on its surface, photographed it and mapped it. We know what it weighs, its size, its gravitational influence. We’ve sucked all the Mystery out of it, but it still maintains its hold on our imaginations.
    “No matter how much we try to deny it, that’s where poetry and madness were born.”
    I still don’t get the curse part of it, but Shirley’s already turned away from this line of thought. I can almost see her ghostly mind unfolding a chart inside her head and plotting a new course for our conversation. She looks at me.
    “What’s more important?” she asks. “To be happy or to bring happiness to others?”
    “I kind of like to think they go hand in hand,” I tell her. “That you can’t really have one without the other.”
    “Then what have you forgotten?”
    This is another side of Shirley I remember well. She gets into this one-hand-clapping mode, asking you simple stuff that gets more and more complicated the longer you think about it, but if you keep worrying at it, the way Rexy’ll take on an old slipper, it gets back to being simple again. To get there, though, you have to work through a forest of words and images that can be far too zen-deep and confusing— especially when you’re tired and your brain’s in neutral the way mine is tonight.
    “Is this part of the riddle you were talking about last night?” I ask.
    She sort of smiles—lines crinkle around her eyes, fingers work the pocketed buttons, clickety-clickety-click. There’s a feeling in the air like there was last night just before she vanished, but this time I’m not looking away. I hear a car turn onto this block, its headbeams washing briefly over us, bright lights flicker, then it’s dark again, with one solid flash of real deep dark just before my eyes adjust to the change in illumination.
    Of course she’s gone once I can see properly again and there’s only me and Frank sitting on the steps. I forget for a moment about where our relationship stands and reach out to give him a pat. I’m just trying to touch base with reality, I realize as I’m doing it, but that doesn’t matter to him. He doesn’t quite hiss as he gets up and jumps down to the sidewalk.
    I watch him swagger off down the street, watch the empty pavement for a while longer, then finally I get up myself and go inside.
     
    4
    There’s a wariness in Angel’s features when I step into her Grasso Street office. It’s a familiar look. I asked her about it once, and she was both precise and polite with her explanation: “Well, Maisie. Things just seem to get complicated whenever you’re around.”
    It’s nothing I plan.
    Her office is a one-room walk-in storefront off Grasso Street, shabby in a genteel sort of way. She has a rack of filing cabinets along one wall, an old beat-up sofa with a matching chair by the bay window, a government surplus desk—one of those massive oak affairs with about ten million scratches and dents—a swivel chair behind the desk and a couple of matching oak straightbacks sitting to one side. I remember thinking they looked like a pair I’d sold a few years ago to old man Kemps down the street, and it turns out that’s where she picked them up.
    A little table beside the filing cabinets holds a hot plate, a kettle, a bunch of mismatched mugs, a teapot and the various makings for coffee, hot chocolate and tea. The walls have cheerful posters—one from a travel agency that shows this wild New Orleans street scene where there’s a carnival going on, one from a Jilly Coppercorn  show—cutesy little flower fairies fluttering around in a junkyard.
    I like