As he shuffled, Dianna rubbed at the spot on her forearm where he’d touched her. Near her rose. It repulsed her as much as if it had been one of those flies crawling on her. The odd sound intensified for a moment and she had the sudden, irrational thought that it was the buzzing of blowfly wings. Which was impossible. Silly, really, and she forced the idea away. Then Owen Minor tapped the deck on the table to smooth the cards. Before he handed it back he put it to his nose and sniffed. Not merely a quick sniff, but he ran his nose along the long side of the deck, taking a deep inhale. His eyelids fluttered as if the smell gave him an erotic thrill.
Dianna felt a flush of disgust and wished she could just end the session, but that was against store policy and her own professional integrity. It was not required that the customer be likable or even nice as long as they did nothing that was overtly and inarguably offensive. Most often with male customers they spent a lot of time looking at her chest. Having very big breasts came with challenges. Apart from being a source of frequent back pain, they were an eye-magnet. During puberty that was humiliating. As a young woman hunting her way through the club scene it had been fun, but the novelty wore off very quickly because her breasts became a way-obvious focus of attention, comment, and groping. Guys would find ways of standing so close to her that a brush of their arms or hands against her breasts was inevitable. Hugs were often wraparound so that there was some side-boob touching. All perfectly innocent. Right. And the stares. She even once had one of those novelty T-shirts that said MY PERSONALITY IS UP HERE, with an arrow pointing to her face. It backfired. For a couple of years she wore clothing that covered her chest and blocked any hint of cleavage, but that felt like a defeat, it felt cowardly. Over time she reclaimed her sense of clothing style, and tried to just ignore drifting gazes and obvious lustful glances. Once in a rare while someone would make a deliberately crude comment. If it was in a club—and it happened in lesbian bars, too—she would either freeze that person out of her awareness or wither them with a biting comment. If it was here at the shop, she reserved the right to end any sessions that smacked of sexual harassment. Ophelia accepted that, but they differed a bit on where the line was. Staring was not really actionable. Sniffing tarot cards wasn’t, either.
All of that said, this man skeeved her out on a deep level. Everything about him felt transgressive, though it was hard to land on exactly what was wrong with him. Maybe it was those blowfly tattoos.
Maybe only that.
She held the cards and went deep into herself. Listening with senses not listed among the standard five. Unnamed senses that connected her with energies that flowed subtly or dramatically all around her. Then she dealt three cards facedown on the table, took a breath, and turned over the first card.
“This card represents you,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
“Dianna…?”
She blinked and looked up at Ophelia, who stood a few feet away, hands clasped as if nervous.
“What?”
“I asked if you were ready for your next client?”
Dianna blinked again. “Next…?”
It took her a moment to come back to the moment. To be where she was. She looked around at the store, and it was as if the overhead lights were just now coming on, though they had been on all along. The client chair was empty, placed orderly across from her. Her deck of cards stood in a neat tower. A few customers browsed, talking with one another in low voices. Rain pattered on the window.
“What?” she asked.
Ophelia gave her a queer look. “You okay, sweetie?”
Dianna nodded vaguely and glanced down at her client list. The first name was Owen Minor. Odd name. She wondered who he was or what he’d be like.
“Um … yes,” she said. “You can send Mr. Minor over.”
Ophelia’s expression changed into one of confusion, with half a smile as if she was trying to figure out a joke. “You mean Gertie Swanson. She’s in a hurry, too. Has to get back to the station.”
“No,” said Dianna, tapping the list. “Owen Minor. He’s the first…”
Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of the clock above the window. The hands had moved and the time was wrong.
“Mr. Minor left already,” said Ophelia.
“What?” asked Dianna again.
“Sure, he was very pleased with the reading.” Vertical lines now formed between Ophelia’s brows. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” said Dianna quickly. “Right. Gertie. Sorry, I guess I had a hard time coming back from … well, you know.”
Ophelia nodded, but looked unconvinced.
“It’s good. It’s fine,” insisted Dianna. “Everything’s fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Forty-nine minutes of her life was gone and she had no memory at all of the customer whose name was at the top of her list. No memory of him, of the reading, of anything. She sat there, rubbing the inside of her forearm, listening internally for even the echo of a memory. Finding nothing. A fly, trapped inside the picture window, buzzed faintly.
No, she thought, nothing is fine at all.
13
Monk sat in his car and wondered if he was going to get storm-surged the fuck back to the Delaware River.
Streams of muddy water came running out of the fields to fill the gullies on either side of the road. A torrent slapped its way past his car, gurgling along the doors. He had the heater on but didn’t know if he had enough gas to keep the engine running until the storm let up.
“Should have gassed in goddamn Doylestown,” he told the night.
The perverse and contrary voice that lived inside his head told him he should have stayed in New York. He told that voice to shut the hell up, but it only laughed at him.
Monk thought about Patty and tried her cell four more times. Got nothing. Nerves made him try to get to her, but his car never made it off the muddy verge and back onto the road. The wheels spun mud into the storm and accomplished exactly nothing beyond digging him deeper into the muck. Monk slammed it back into park and glared through the slap-slap-slap of the wipers. Thunder was continuous, as if the storm had parked itself overhead and simply refused to move on until it had beaten Pine Deep to a pulp.
“Fuck you,” Monk snarled.
The storm just laughed, just rained harder.
14
Patty stood by her window for a long time, trying to remember if Monk had actually called, or if that had been a dream. She was almost positive she’d fallen asleep in one of the chairs. The time on the wall clock didn’t match her memory. If it was right, then the customer was gone and out the door three hours ago. She was pretty sure it had to be less. Half an hour. That’s how long ago it felt like he’d been there. The clock kept being an asshole and telling her different.
“I’m tired,” she said to the empty room. “I’m blown out and burned down.”
Even her voice was tired. A slur.
Time for a catnap?
Her body needed one, but Patty hated naps. They always left her feeling like she’d been mugged—logy and stupid and usually a bit anxious. Like she hadn’t prepared for a test in school and now the teacher was handing out papers.
The clock on the wall was an ancient retro Marilyn Monroe. It, along with the three barber chairs and some termites, had come with the place. A spike was drilled through the bridge of Marilyn’s nose and crooked black hands kept telling Patty the wrong time. The motor hummed and the second hand ticked.
Had Monk called?
She could have picked up her phone, checked the call log. Or, fuck it, called him back. Didn’t.
Just stood there.
Her tattoo shop was on a corner and both streets seemed empty even though there were a lot of people out. But she wasn’t feeling particularly social. Never had felt less social, in fact. So they were just figures in motion. Not real in any way that seemed to matter.
If her store had been something other than a tatt
oo studio, then maybe people would do that small-town thing—stopping by to introduce themselves. To say hi. To be neighborly. The exact opposite of how people were in New York.
Not the same as back home in Tuyên Quang, where she’d grown up. In small-town Vietnam everyone was pretty much born knowing everyone else. You never went very far from home. She hadn’t been farther away than ten miles until she was nineteen. After that … well. After that she’d gone to hell. And back, just not all the way back.
After that was the fire and everything that went with it. The big soldier. The other tattoo women. The little girl—what was her name? Patty tried to remember as her thumb went round and round on the back of her hand.
15
Owen Minor stood in the shadows and the rain. That fact that he kept shivering had nothing to do with the cold or wet.
He was so goddamn turned on he couldn’t bear it.
Owen leaned against the alley wall behind Patty’s store, his coat pulled tight around him, head cocked to listen. Blowflies, some as thick as the last joint of a woman’s little finger, crawled all over his face and throat and down into his clothes. His hands deep in his pockets, pushed through the slits he’d made so he could touch himself. As he did now. The wind had been blowing steadily all day and into the evening, but the shivers began as soon as he’d touched her hand. The little Vietnamese woman. That broken doll with all those memories inked onto her skin. And after her, the psychic. He had so many things to play with, so many memories to devour.
First, though, was Patty Cakes. Her. Her. For sure, her.
His hand moved frantically beneath his clothes.
Her memories were wonderful. So deeply awful. So beautiful.
The shivers continued all the way through his orgasm.
Aftershocks of it lingered long after Owen Minor got into his car and drove away.
16
It took Patty a long time to shake it off. Whatever it was. She couldn’t come up with any label for the fuzzy, detached way she was feeling.
Focusing on the town helped, because moving here was part of a personal salvage operation. Raising her sunken hopes from the bottom of the muddy river that was New York.
Pine Deep was nice, but she wasn’t sure it was home. She desperately wanted it to be, because New York had never really been that. Or, maybe, it had been home for a while and stopped. Like a battery running dry. Wherever she lived and worked had to matter to her on a lot of deep, important levels. And so far, Pine Deep seemed to hold that promise. The street where she’d set up shop seemed like it might be the kind of street in the kind of town where Patty felt she could breathe.
Moving here hadn’t been an accident. When she lived in New York, there always seemed to be a reason to come down to Pennsylvania, to Bucks County. It always seemed to be autumn in this part of Bucks County, as if the rest of the year and all the other seasonable changes were nothing more than garments it wore briefly and then discarded. It was an October kind of place, even when the sun was blistering its way through an August sky or snow heaped up on the pumpkins left unharvested in remote fields. October people lived here, and although Patty was born in a place where it was never cold and always green, even during the grayest monsoons, that climate had never defined her. It was always October in her heart.
Bucks County, and particularly towns like New Hope and Pine Deep, felt like they should have been where she was born. Maybe Pine Deep more so because it was a little strange. Darker and less obvious than her town in Vietnam. Beautiful, too. It invited the artist’s touch, drew the artist’s eye. She drove down here at every opportunity. To shop at the organic farms and coast the fringes of happy crowds at the apple festival. To drum up business at the biker rallies and the fringe festivals. To be where there were people who were all alike because none of them was alike. It was the first place where she didn’t feel like she was actively fleeing from somewhere else.
Life in New York had been a lot like washing your hands in acid. You got clean, but there’s such a thing as too clean. Her tattoo parlor there had been a refuge, but Boundary Street was home.
Cold, strange, broken, but home.
The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED, but Patty didn’t notice. She hadn’t done that. Had not seen the customer do it.
She stood and watched the rain.
It was like the downpours back in Tuyên Quang. The kind of rain that looked like a wall. Her mother once said that it was like ten thousand arrows falling, but that was too poetic for Patty. To her it was a wall. Gray and unbreakable.
The kind no one could get through to touch her.
As she had been touched.
She liked the wall of rain.
But this wall, in this town, was translucent and Patty could see lights come on in clubs that opened early and stores that closed late. She turned off her own neon, except for the one right above the door. INK was all it said, in harlot red. The color was named that in the vendor’s catalog, and though Patty tried to explain to the salesman that it was offensive and old-thought bullshit, the man’s eyes glazed and he had no good comeback. She bought the sign anyway. It wasn’t harlot red to her. She was Vietnamese and that color represented happiness, love, and luck.
Putting it up over her door was like a talisman. It was like putting up a cross in vampire country. And it made her happy to know that it was burning bright, night and day, clear weather or storms.
Where was Monk? she wondered. But she still didn’t check her phone. It kept not occurring to her to do that.
She turned away and went through the studio, through the beaded curtain, past the customers’ bathroom and then into her apartment. Her bright-red raincoat and hat were in one of the unemptied boxes and she found them, pulled them on, and went out into the storm.
The rain smelled like tilled earth, moss, incense, and ozone. With her hands buried deep into pockets, drops pattering on the broad hat brim, Patty began walking down the side street. Down Boundary Street.
Boundary Street.
The fact that Pine Deep had a street with that name was a big part of the draw for her. There’d been one in New York, though try and find it on a map. GPS couldn’t. Uber drivers back in the city could, though, which was weird.
The street wasn’t on MapQuest, Google Maps, or GPS here, though. She’d had to ask, and the first five people she’d stopped when she first arrived didn’t know. It was a guy with a lot of skin art, a flannel shirt, and a lumbersexual woodsman’s beard who gave her directions. Boundary Street was just off the main drag, which made her wonder why the other people didn’t know.
Maybe it was because this part of town was new, built since the Trouble. Maybe nobody bothered to tell the people at Google Earth about it. Or however that worked. She didn’t know and really didn’t care. It was here, that’s what mattered. And, sure, there were some sideways mentions of it in the kind of downbeat indie documentaries hipster filmmakers concocted for their thesis. Strange, but then there were a lot of strange things in life, Patty knew. She was one of them. Monk sure as hell was another.
At times, when she was really drunk, Patty wondered if Boundary Street wasn’t on the map because it was more a state of mind. Not always a good one, but that spoke to perspective. The kind of place that Tom Waits had to be talking about when he said you couldn’t find it unless you started out with bad directions. Maybe every big city had a place like Boundary Street.
Probably. After all, the debris has to wash up somewhere.
It was home to her in New York, and now it was home to her here.
She passed a small knot of drenched twenty-somethings huddled under an awning. Short skirts, push-up bras, makeup applied with a trowel, and a lot of money wasted at the hair salon during the rainy season. Patty hated them and feared them. Every single one of them was prettier than her. Prettier and younger, and there wasn’t a single person on the street who didn’t know it.
Patty had one really good trick, though. Most Americans can’t read an As
ian face worth a damn, and she went full Vietnamese as she passed. Eyes that said exactly nothing, mouth that offered no emotion, teeth locked together to create the wax mask. It had been foiling white people for thousands of years and it gave these women nothing to go on. No lever for the scorn in their eyes.
Even so, they shared conspiratorial grins as she passed, but Patty could see shadows lurked in their eyes. Trying to fool each other that this—whatever tonight’s plan was—was still a good idea. The Joker grins were plastic but necessary, because none of them had reached the point where fiction was going to buffer them from the realities of life down here. The shadows in their eyes told Patty that they were each feeling it. The Boundary Street vibe. That look must be similar to what young zebras showed when they realized that being a young, tough herbivore didn’t mean a whole lot to the tawny cats smiling at them from the dark shadows beneath the trees.
She walked on.
Seeing the women started Patty thinking. The Fringe had become a destination, drawing people from New York, Philly, and elsewhere. It was a place you wanted to find, because art and music and acceptance were exploding there. But Boundary Street? No. People who came to Boundary Street seldom understood how they got there. It was not even the real name of the street, though it’s what everyone called it. Somebody—an artist, maybe, or a drunk—made up a bunch of street signs and glued them over the official ones. The department of streets kept taking them down, but they were always back up a day or so later. After a while, the town stopped trying.
Pine Deep didn’t try to do much else down there, either. Took so long to get the gutters clean that people used persistent items of trash as meeting points. The rain washed some of it away, but even Mother Nature wasn’t trying all that hard.
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