Tapping the Dream Tree Read Free

years ago now—but she looks about the same. Straw-colored hair cut short like a boy’s, the heart-shaped face and those big green eyes. Still fancies those denim overalls, though the ones she’s wearing over a white T-shirt tonight are a better fit than those she had on the last time I saw her. Her slight frame used to swim in that pair.
    I see she’s still got that old army surplus knapsack, hanging on her back, and her fiddle case is standing on the floor by her feet. What’s new is the raggedy-ass rabbit she’s carrying around in a cloth shopping bag, but I don’t see that straightaway.
    â€œHey, William,” she says when I open the door on her, my eyes still thick with sleep. “Remember me?”
    I have to smile at that. She’s not easy to forget, not her nor that blue fiddle of hers.
    â€œLet’s see,” I say. “Are you the one who went skinny-dipping in the mayor’s pool the night he won the election, or the one who could call up blackbirds with her fiddle?”
    I guess it was Malicorne who told me about that, how where ravens or crows gather, a door to the otherworld stands ajar. Told me how Staley’s blue spirit fiddle can play a calling-on music. It can call up the blackbirds and open that door, and it can call us to cross over into the otherworld. Or call something back to us from over there.
    â€œLooks like it’s not just blackbirds anymore,” she tells me.
    That’s when she opens the top of her shopping bag and shows me the rabbit she’s got hidden away inside. It looks up at me with its mournful brown eyes, one ear all chewed up, ribs showing.
    â€œSorry looking thing,” I say.
    Staley nods.
    â€œWhere’d you find it?”
    â€œUp yonder,” she says. “In the hills. I kind of called him to me, though I wasn’t trying to or anything.” She gives me a little smile. “ ‘Course I don’t try to call up the crows either, and they still come with no nevermind.”
    I nod like I understand what’s going on here.
    â€œAnyway,” she goes on. “The thing is, there’s a boy trapped in there, under that fur and—”
    â€œA boy?” I have to ask.
    â€œWell, I’m thinking he’s young. All I know for sure is he’s scared and wore out and he’s male.”
    â€œWhen you say boy … ?”
    â€œI mean a human boy who’s wearing the shape of a hare. Like a skinwalker.” She pauses, looks over her shoulder. “Did I mention that there’s something after him?”
    There’s something in the studied casualness of how she puts it that sends a quick chill scooting up my spine. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary on the street behind her. Crowsea tenements. Parked cars. Dawn pinking the horizon. But something doesn’t set right all the same.
    â€œMaybe you better come inside,” I say.
    I don’t have much, just a basement apartment in this Kelly Street tenement. I get it rent-free in exchange for my custodian duties on it and a couple of other buildings the landlord owns in the area. Seems I don’t ever have any folding money, but I manage to get by with odd jobs and tips from the tenants when I do a little work for them. It’s not much, but it’s a sight better than living on the street like I was doing when Staley and I first met.
    I send her on ahead of me, down the stairs and through the door into my place, and lock the door behind us. I use the term “lock” loosely. Mostly it’s the idea of a lock. I mean I’m pushing the tail end of fifty and I could easily kick it open. But I still feel a sight better with the night shut out and that flimsy lock doing its best.
    â€œYou said there’s something after him?” I say once we’re inside.
    Staley sits down in my sorry excuse of an armchair—picked it out of the trash before the truck came one morning. It’s