He went out with Becky a few times after that, but soon he got bored and dropped her. She was angry, but he didn't seem to care. He didn't think he was cold, though Becky and all her friends seemed to think so. It worried him a little that he didn't care. You saw kids like that on TV shows, or in commercials for anti-depressants or help lines, and Jack was scared he'd become an adolescent cliché. But he knew that this need he had, to be somewhere else, to do something, was real. And important.
School ended, and he didn't have to see Becky every day, which was good, but now there wasn't even geometry class to interest him. There were guys he could hang out with. No matter what he did to discourage it, they still saw him as big city tough. He just didn't care.
One night in July he felt too hot to sleep, even with the A/C, or maybe he was restless and called it hot. He found himself throwing on some clothes from the floor and stepping quietly downstairs. At the front door, he stood awhile, his hand reaching out to the doorknob, then pulling back. What if those dogs were there? Shit, he thought, I'm losing my fucking mind. He meant it as a joke, but the fact was, he'd been reading up on crazy, and they said it often started at his age, especially in boys. "Bullshit," he whispered, "there's no giant dogs out there. And even if there were, fuck ‘em." As quietly as he could he turned the knob and stepped outside.
His father had built a small covered archway, his mother's idea, to set the house off from all the others, and now he stood there and looked around. No people, no cars, and no giant dogs. Only one or two houses had a light on, but they were pretty far down the street.
He walked left, the longer direction, and the one that didn't come to a dead end, but curved round and met up with an older street, from an earlier development, with brick houses instead of the wooden ones he sometimes thought of as his parents' ‘hood. When his family had moved in, and Jack had seen the older houses around the corner, he'd told his parents that those were the ones that would stop the Big Bad Wolf, who would then turn around and make his huffy-puffy way back to their wooden shack. His parents hadn't found the joke very funny, and now neither did Jack.
Just as he approached the point where he could see around the curve, Jack heard noises. There were shuffling sounds, and faint clicks, and whispers, and a hissing noise that took Jack a moment to realize was laughter. The dogs, he thought, and almost ran home, but then he realized, no, it had to be people, and he was too curious to turn back. If he'd been in the city he might have stuck to the sides of buildings as he moved forward, but here there was nothing but lawns, and if he did try to slink from house to house probably some insomniac racist housewife would call the cops.
As soon as he saw the women in the road, he just stopped and stared. Three of them, old, he thought, though they were dressed so strangely, and had their backs to him, so it was hard to tell. They were skinny, but had big asses, accentuated by their bending forward as they moved, a sideways shuffle with frequent stops. They all wore long tattered dresses with fringes, like something a bunch of hippies had thrown out as too old and embarrassing. Two of them wore flat sandals with woven thin straps, the third went barefoot. It was hard to tell what color they were, though their arms were bare, or mostly. They could have been light-skinned black, or Hispanic, or maybe even Arabs. One had long flyaway hair, another had clumps of curls that bounced and tossed every which way, while the third, well, her hair was such a mess it seemed to have gathered twigs and leaves and bits of paper, and even insects that couldn't work their way out. Jack half-expected to see a family of mice poke their heads up.
Every few steps the women would cast some stones or pebbles on the ground, stare at them and whisper or laugh, then scoop them up and do it again some seconds later. At another time in his life, Jack would learn that they were called the Old Ladies, and they were old indeed, possibly even older than Sam and Lily. And he would learn how very rare and special it was to see them, that even people who had studied about them, and spent years tracking them down, would miss them entirely, or find them and not even know it.
In fact, Jack discovered it was indeed hard to see them. They kind of flickered in and out, like the hologram princess in Star Wars. No—it was his mind that flickered. It kept trying to insist there was no one there, the street was empty, even as he stared right at them. Suddenly, he just couldn't help himself. He had to know if they were really there. So he called out, "Hey! What are you doing?"
The three straightened up and turned around to look at him with as much surprise as he was staring at them. In a voice that was weirdly young and even sexy, the one with the rat's nest hair said, "Oh my. A natural. And a strong one too." Unconsciously, Jack touched his hair, which in those days he cut short in what he considered "Denzell-style." But he knew they didn't mean his hair, even if he wasn't sure just what they meant.
Silver-hair lazily twirled a finger towards him. "Go home, boy," she said. "There's nothing here. You're just dreaming. Sleep-walkin' and dreamin'."
Jack felt his eyelids falling, his body about to turn, but he shook himself and held steady.
The curly-haired one said "Oh my," and rat-hair said "I told you he was strong, didn't I?"
Suddenly they chanted at him, a nursery rhyme or something, and then broke out laughing. "O live! O live!" two of them cried, and the third answered, "and I'll anoint you with aleph oil!"
Fucking crazy, Jack thought. That's all they are, a bunch of crazy old bitches.
And then they did the strangest thing of all. They quoted, or slightly mis-quoted, a folk song Jack's father used to sing when Jack was seven or eight. Jack had always thought that this was the single most humiliating thing his dad had ever done. It would have been bad enough if his father had gone around mangling Marvin Gaye or something, but a folk song? And here were these weird women repeating it. In a tuneless rhythm they recited,
If you want to be a traveler too
Run inside and bar the door
Nail your shoes to the kitchen floor
And thank the stars for the roof that's over you.
Jack did, in fact, run home right then, and he certainly locked the door before he dashed up to his room, where he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling until morning. But he knew he wouldn't stay there. At home. For that night Jonathan Michael Shade had discovered the single most important lesson any of us can learn in this life. The world is not what we think it is. And once you know that, what else can you do but Travel?
Jack's opportunity to make a move in his life came a few weeks later, when the County fair opened about twenty miles north from where Jack lived. In the years since he'd lived in the area he'd never gone. What did he care about a bunch of hicks showing off their favorite cows just before bludgeoning them into Big Macs? Or the contest for best daisy grower. There was even some contest where they dressed pigs up in little costumes. And the food—people went on for weeks about fried bread, and shit like that. But it also had games and rides and contests, and Jack figured it wasn't local people who did that, and maybe when they moved on he could move with them.
So he joined some guys he knew from school, two of whom had cars, and rode up on opening night. His friends went straight for the rides and the fried bread, but Jack mostly walked around, checking everything out, especially the games. There were some where you threw things, baseballs or rings, and tried to knock something over or circle it, and win a prize. It didn't take Jack long to figure out they were rigged, one way or another, and people only won when the guy who ran the game wanted it.
There were other games that were more like gambling, though officially "games of skill." And there was even a fortune-teller, "Mme. Clara" the sign said, in a small metal booth painted with stars and hands and cards with names like "The Lovers," and "The Tower," and one called "The Juggler," though he wasn't tossing things in the air, he just stood behind a table with some dice and a knife and a few other things. A velvet curtain served as a doorway and Jack c
onsidered having his fortune told, but he just kept moving around.
Just before closing time his friends found him watching a game where you put quarters through a slot onto a tray that moved back and forth, and if your quarter was the trigger point a bunch of quarters would fall into a cup where you could get them. He'd been watching it for a while to try and figure out how it was rigged to prevent more than a few bucks being paid out over the evening when his friends came up. "Christ, Shade," one of them said, "you're gonna stand here all night? Come on, we're going."
Jack went back every night after that. He told his parents the guys were going, and his folks didn't question him, since they were glad he'd found some friends, but he took the county bus or hitchhiked. The second night he walked around again, saw little tricks he hadn't noticed the night before. A kind of current ran through the place—or maybe slithered, since he couldn't feel it all the time, but when he did it didn't move in a straight line. He tried a few rides, both to avoid suspicion and to see if that current might run stronger in moving objects, but he couldn't feel it at all. It only showed up in the rigged games and the fortune-telling booth.
The fair lasted six nights, Tuesday to Sunday. On the third night Jack worked out who ran things, a tall white man, skinny, with thinning hair and black-rimmed glasses. He wore black jeans and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and with the sleeves rolled up. A lot of the time he sat on a wooden stool near the ring toss, but every now and then he would stroll around the booths and machines. He had a trick of seeing everything while looking at nothing. Some of the workers called him "Marty," but most said "Mr. Green."
On the fourth night, with half the crowd at the costumed pig contest, Jack went up to Marty Green, who was sitting on his stool, looking at spread sheets. "Excuse me, Mr. Green?" Jack said.
For a couple of seconds Green seemed not to notice, then he slowly lifted his head. "Yeah?"
"Umm, there's a guy in a brown suit walking around. I think he's a cop."
"Really? You don't say."
Shit, Jack thought. Green knew that, of course he did. Like all sixteen year old boys, the one thing Jack hated most was humiliation. He was about to leave when Green asked "What's your name, kid?"
"Jack. Jack Shade."
"Huh. Sharp-eyed Jack. You're okay, kid. Thanks." He went back to his spread sheet. Jack didn't know what to do, so he started to walk away. Without looking up, Green said "Did you get your fortune told?"
"Nah," said Jack, "I don't believe in that stuff."
"Yeah? Well, you might want to try it. And tell Clara it's on me."
"I can pay for it."
"That's not the point."
"Umm, okay. Thanks."
He didn't visit Clara until the next night, the fifth. It was Saturday, and crowded, and Jack had to wait online behind a group of white girls his age—they managed to shoot glances at him, and he managed not to notice, and a middle-aged grim-faced Latina woman. Jack tried to guess what she'd come to ask, and almost immediately he could hear her tight voice: "I want to know if my husband is cheating on me."
Finally it was his turn through the velvet curtain. The booth was flimsy, aluminum sides and roofs that could be set up easily and taken down, but the walls inside were covered with the same symbols as outside. Mme. Clara herself was a short dark-skinned white woman in a shimmery long blue dress, with several fake silver necklaces and a transparent blue scarf draped over her dyed black hair. Jack figured she was supposed to be a Gypsy, but she looked a lot like Mrs. Parke, his homeroom teacher, who was a light-skinned brunette, so he figured Clara had dyed her hair and used a tanning bed. He kind of liked the idea of a white woman who made herself look darker. On a small wooden table in front of her, covered in a black cloth with yellow stars, sat a small crystal ball on a white cushion, a teapot and an empty cup, some thin sticks, and a pack of cards face down. A sign pinned to the cloth declared "Mme. Clara, Sees All! Tells all!" and then in smaller letters, "For entertainment purposes only."
As Jack sat down on the wooden chair across from her the woman said, in an obviously fake accent, "Good evening. How may Mme. Clara help you?"
Jack said "I want to know what I should do."
She nodded, "Ah. I sense a girl is involved."
"What? No. That's not—I just—some weird shit has been happening, and I want to know what to do about it."
She looked a bit uncertain, then said, "Do you wish tea leaves? Or the palm? With such a deep question, perhaps only the cards will do."
Jack guessed that the cards cost the most. "Sure," he said. She was just picking up the deck when he added, "Oh, Mr. Green, Martin, he wanted me to tell you that this was on him."
She hesitated a second before picking up the deck. "Very well," she said. She began to mix the cards.
Jack said "Shouldn't I be doing that?"
"Oh no," she said, her accent thicker than ever. "Only reader must touch cards." Quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with and return to people who were paying, she set down six cards. Some of them just looked like a collection of swords or cups, but the others looked like old-fashioned paintings, with titles he could read, even upside down. One, called the Lovers, showed some guy standing between a couple of women, with Cupid about to shoot an arrow at the poor sucker. The second, called the Wheel of Fortune, showed a bear turning the crank on a big wooden wheel, with monkeys in clothes going up one side and down the other. Jack wondered if it was a circus act. The third was that "Juggler" guy.
Carla just glanced at the cards and then said, "You are a good person, brave, but the people in your life do not understand you. They do not see the true you. You will face many hardships in life, but also joy. You will find a great love, lose it, and find another."
"What?" Jack said. "You're talking shit. You could say that to anybody."
Clara glared at him. "How dare you? I have told fortunes for the great and powerful. I—"
"There's a cop walking around outside. You want me to get him and tell him you're scamming people?"
She crossed her arms and smirked. "Go ahead," she said, her accent slipping. He got his cut already. Besides, how could I scam you when you didn't pay anything?"
"That's right," Jack said. "Mr. Green sent me here. How do you think he'll like it if I tell him you just used your standard shit on me?" He leaned forward. "Do it for real. Come on."
Her hands trembled slightly as she picked up the cards she'd turned over, put them back, shuffled the deck, cut it into three stacks, put them back together, and shuffled some more.
"Quit stalling," Jack said.
"Shut up. You want this ‘for real,' you have to let me do it." Finally she turned over four cards. The Juggler was there again, and the Lovers, but now Death, which showed a skeleton wearing a cloak and wielding a scythe, and then the Moon, with a couple of wolves or dogs howling at the Moon. She stared at them, then murmured "You have abilities you might not know about."
"I'm starting to guess."
"You will learn. Someone—someone will train you. And then you will find love. And believe you are happy."
"Love." The idea seemed remote to Jack. He just wanted to know where he belonged.
She said, "But you will lose almost everything. I'm sorry." Jack shrugged. "And wander. In . . . strange places." Now her hand hovered over the deck, uncertain, it seemed, whether to turn over another card. Finally, she did, then jerked her hand away as if the card had caught fire. "Fuck!" she said.
"What?" Jack said. "What's wrong?" He stared at the card. It was called "The Drowned Sailor," and showed the body of a man washed up face down on a beach. "What is it? What does it mean?"
"No, no," she said. "It's not what it fucking means. It just shouldn't be here."
"Why not?"
"Because it doesn't exist! It's not part of the deck."
Jack frowned. "What do you mean?
"
She placed a fingertip on the face down pile. "This is the Tarot deck. Seventy-eight cards. Four suits of fourteen cards each, plus twenty-two extras. Got that?" Jack nodded. She held up The Lovers. "See this? Number six. Six out of twenty-two." She reached for The Drowned Sailor, but only pointed at it. "What is this one? What's the goddamn number?"
Jack leaned over to see better, and noticed that Clara pulled back, as if afraid he'd touch her. "XXV," he said, "twenty-five."
"Right! But there's only twenty-two of them! It's not part of the deck."
"So what? You slipped it in with the others."
"No, no, no. It doesn't—Please listen. This card, this thing, was not in the deck when we started. And if I put it back, and we look through the whole deck, it won't be there. I swear."
Jack said, "But what does it mean?"
Carla pulled away. "Oh no," she said.
"What? Tell me."
"You didn't say ‘that's ridiculous,' or call me a liar. Or a crook." Jack stared at her. "Oh Jesus," she said, "you're one of them, aren't you?"
"One of what?"
"A Traveler."
If you want to be a traveler too . . .
Jack said, "What is a traveler?"
"You think I can tell you that?"
"Then you're not—"
"I'm just a fucking fortune teller." In her fake accent, she said "Knows all, tells all."
"Then tell me what this means. This card you say you've never seen before."
In her normal voice again she said, "I didn't say that. I've seen it once. And before that I heard about it. From other readers. I didn't believe it, of course. I figured they were screwing with me. And then there it was."
The Fissure King Page 27
