Pain Management

noticed each other, they gave no sign. Cheerleaders mingled with the multi-pierced. If there was a shade of human color not represented, it was one I’d never seen. Some of the kids pawed through stacks of books, others sat in battered chairs or flopped down on the floor. Nobody was smoking, or drinking coffee.

In a far corner, a pale, skinny young guy with long hair was bent all the way over a battered twelve-string, strumming so softly I couldn’t pick up the notes.

I was scanning for Rosebud, focusing hard on each girl’s face, putting it on the left-hand side of the screen in my head, comparing it with Rosebud’s photo on the right. I had gone through about a dozen when I felt Ann pulling on my coat sleeve.

I followed her lead . . . over to where a heavyset mixed-blood Indian woman in a red caftan sat behind a counter.

“Hello, Choma,” Ann said to her.

“Ann,” the woman said back. I could see the shutters open and close in her black camera eyes.

“This is a friend of mine. B. B. Hazard.”

“Yes?”

“He’s looking for Borderland.”

“We don’t use the Dewey Decimal System here.”

“I know,” Ann said patiently. “That’s why I brought my friend over to ask you.”

“Does he speak?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I was trying to be polite.”

“What does a hunter want with a book?” she asked.

I didn’t waste time denying what she already knew. “There might be something in it of value to me.”

“Might be?”

“I didn’t know Borderland was a book. Not until a few seconds ago.”

“Ah. It is an expression you heard?”

“Yes.”

“So it is you who made the connection?” the Indian woman asked, head swiveling to Ann.

“It’s no secret,” Ann said, shrugging.

“Not to some. It was to him,” the woman said.

“He is not a danger to any of your—”

“He is a hunter.”

“I do other things,” I said gently.

“Yes. I am certain you do. I was saying not what you do, only what you are.”

I bowed slightly, the way Mama taught me a million years ago. Done properly, the gesture crosses cultures, conveying respect without submission.

She focused hard on my good eye. Finally, she nodded, said: “Ask Berto. . . . Ann knows him, he’s right over there. Ask Berto where he’s got the Charles de Lint books.”

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my face blank as the synapses fired in my mind, looking for the connection. Crow girls? Was that it?

The Indian woman gave me a look that said, “You better be telling me the truth,” and turned away just enough to be a dismissal.

Berto turned out to be a Latino kid—I guessed Panama, but it was a guess—maybe sixteen years old. As soon as Ann said “Borderland” to him, he led us over to a whole wall of paperbacks, and deftly plucked a copy of Life on the Border from a high shelf. It showed a young man and a girl dressed in a combination of street gear and club clothes, leaning against a telephone pole in front of an ancient Cadillac sedan with a taxi light on top and bullet scars all over its doors. It said the author was Terri Windling, and I was beginning to think the kid had confused the title when I saw Charles de Lint’s name up top, next to the title.

“How much?” I asked the kid.

He gave Ann a glance, his eyebrows raised in a question.

“Give him twenty,” she said to me.

I did it. The kid didn’t offer me a courtesy shopping bag. Or a receipt.

“Is that a rare-book store?” I asked Ann, examining my prize on the front seat of her Subaru.

“Not especially. They have some hard-to-get stuff there, but it’s not exactly antiquarian.”

“This one cost five bucks new. And it’s ten years old.”

“What’s your point?”

“Twenty bucks seemed a little steep.”

“They work on a sliding scale there. Kids pay whatever they can afford, like on the honor system. When . . . someone your age comes in, they try to get whatever the traffic will bear.”

“And that keeps . . . people my age out of there for the most part.”

“That, too,” she said, smiling. “Is the book going to help you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“All right. You know where to find me.”

“That’s it? That’s all you got?”

“No, Mr. . . . Hazard, that’s what you call yourself, yes? . . . I’ve got a lot more. But you might as well see what this is worth first.”

“Fair enough. Whatever’s in this book, it might give me a clue or two, but it isn’t worth—”

“Here you are,” she said, as she slid the Subaru alongside where I’d left my car. “Things don’t have ‘worth.’ That’s a nonsense concept. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. You think a hit of street heroin is ‘worth’ what they’re getting for it?”

“That again.”

“Yes. That again. I told you—”

“Thanks for the book,” I interrupted. “I’ll let you know.”

As I was climbing out of the car, she said, “Madison might be a lot more willing to talk to you if she thought you and I were working together . . . ,” letting the words trail out behind her as she pulled away.

“What is that you are reading?” Gem asked me that night.

I held up the paperback so she could see the cover. “It’s a book about kids. Runaways. And this place called Bordertown that they all run to. It’s a place that runs on music and magic.”

“A fantasy?”

“More like a fable. About the kind of community kids wanted to build in the Haight-Ashbury days. Maybe the kind of community they saw in their heads if they dropped enough acid, I don’t know. It’s not one of those post- apocalyptic jobs—this is kind of a parallel universe. I mean, this Borderland, it’s not perfect. There’s a kind of racism—or species-ism, maybe—there’s two different species, and a third that comes from mixing. People have to have jobs or they have to scrounge. There’s a goods-and-services economy, just like here. But the kids are building something out of their own needs. Something real different from what’s out here for them now.”

“Why is this important?” Gem had been a child in a place where dreams kill as surely as bullets, only with a lot more pain.

“The note . . . the one Rosebud left. It said she was going to find ‘the Borderlands.’ Not Bordertown, like in this book. And not Borderland, singular. It says here there was a book of that title, by these same people. I think it means she’s looking for this kind of life. And there’s another connect, too. The crow girls . . . in that picture on her wall . . . they’re from a Charles de Lint book. And Charles de Lint, he’s one of the writers—I guess maybe one of the architects—of this Borderland thing. At first I thought the crow girls were supposed to be Rosebud and Daisy, but after I read it a couple of times, I don’t think so.”

Gem let her impassive face ask the question for her.

“The crow girls are . . . contemporaries. Not just sisters. They’re about the same age. Different personalities, but . . . a lot alike.”

“Who do you think the other one is, then?”

“I’m going to try and find out. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Your daughter lent me a book,” I told the psychologist on the phone that night. “I’d like to come