Lucky Strikes

by Louis Bayard

  I set my hands in my lap. Give the station as hard a look as I could stomach. All I saw was the patched-up air hose and the gas pump that didn’t ring no more when the gallons was ticked off and the outhouse door that wouldn’t shut the whole way. And stains and pits and gouges that weren’t never going away.

  “Reckon they liked Mama,” I said.

  “But they’re still coming, aren’t they? By the dozens.”

  “If I got so many folks on my side, Hiram, then how come I ain’t winning?”

  “I’ll answer that with another question. Would Harley Blevins go to this much trouble if you were losing?”

  I set for a time, studying on that. I said, “We owe the First Bank of Virginia one hundred and thirty bucks by June the first.”

  “That so?”

  “I don’t have a hundred and thirty bucks. And lest you got some rich relation you never told us about, you don’t neither.”

  “Not at present.”

  “So maybe it don’t even matter what the price of gas is tomorrow. Maybe nothing matters.”

  “Do you know?” he said. “Now might just be the right time for Madame Ouspenskaya.”

  Chapter

  FOURTEEN

  He didn’t say another word about it, but next morning, he asked me where the Western Union office was, and Thursday afternoon, he took the truck over to Front Royal, and come back that evening with a stack of handbills.

  “Janey and Earle, you two done your homework? All right, I want you to walk these into town. Stick ’em wherever they won’t blow away. Best place is on the windshield of a parked car, right under the wiper, but if you can squeeze ’em under a doorway or against a window, that works, too. Oh, and anyone passes you by, you be sure to give ’em one. Along with your best smile, Janey. Yep, that’s the one I mean.…”

  “Hold on, now,” I said. “What exactly you planning to hand out here?”

  “Oh,” he said, and handed me the bill right on top.

  READS PALMS, TAROT, CRYSTAL BALL

  OFFERS LOVE SPELLS, MONEY SPELLS, PROTECTION SPELLS

  CARRIES MESSAGES FROM THE GREAT BEYOND!

  *

  5 CENTS PER VISION

  *

  Just below was a drawing of a gypsy lady. She had dangly earrings and a pair of heavy ol’ lips and something on her chin that was either a beauty mark or a bullet hole. But mostly she had eyes, black as new tires, rising right off the paper.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “That’s the good madame herself.”

  “You’re telling me this old hag is coming to our station?”

  “Sure she is.”

  “She can’t be for real.”

  “Close enough.”

  Those eyes was hard enough to cut through bone.

  “Is this even what she looks like?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Well … where is she?”

  “I’ve still got to fetch her. Say, can I have the truck Friday night?”

  “Friday…”

  “I’ll have her back here by Saturday morning.”

  It come flashing over me then. The image of that evil-looking lady sitting in my truck.

  “I don’t know, Hiram.”

  “I’m telling you, the townsfolk will love it. The worse the economy gets, the more people seek guidance from above.”

  “Ain’t that what Pastor Goolsby’s for?”

  “Pastor Goolsby won’t tell them how long they’re going to live. Or carry messages from dead Aunt Sadie. Oh, but you missed the most important part of the deal.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there, at the bottom of the bill.”

  Lubrication Special

  Any car 98 cents

  “Ouspenskaya’s just the hook,” said Hiram. “You’re the one who’s gonna pull ’em in. Once they get a load of what you can do, they’re ours.”

  Was the peppiest I’d ever heard him talk.

  “But this is just two cents less than we normally charge,” I said.

  “Which is what makes it a special. Keep reading.”

  “FREE! Inspect tires. Inflate tires. Check wheel alignment. Test brakes … Hiram, we already do that stuff for free.”

  “So what? People are always looking for a break. Oh, and I came up with a slogan, too. What do you think?”

  If Your Car’s PARCHED …

  Bring It on by Brenda’s Oasis!

  “See, I chose the word parched because it makes a person think desert, doesn’t it? Imagine now. You’re dragging your sorry carcass over sand dunes. Sun beating down, no water in sight. Camels all dead. Lo and behold, out of nowhere comes an oasis. Not a mirage, either—the real thing. Praise the Lord.”

  “They’ll get all that from a single word?”

  “Sure.”

  I set the bill down on the dining table.

  “Where’d you learn to think like that?”

  “Oh.” He shrugged. “I used to write copy for J. Walter Thompson. Back in the day.”

  Name could’ve been J. Venus Mars for all it meant to me.

  “Listen, Hiram, our people ain’t lawyers or bankers or Rotary wives. Our people is truckers and tourists.”

  “God bless the truckers and the tourists, but they won’t keep you afloat. You’ve got hours and hours every day where nobody’s stopping by. This afternoon, I drove by three of Harley Blevins’s stations. Pumps working around the clock. You wouldn’t think it in the middle of a depression, but they’re there, everybody’s there. Farmers and coal men and schoolteachers. Bank clerks, stationmasters. They’re going to Harley because they don’t know about you.”

  “And Madame Whatsherhoozit is gonna bring ’em?”

  “She’s going to start. The rest is up to us.”

  I stared into those bottomless oil-black eyes. Then I glanced up at Janey and Earle.

  “Well, what you waiting for?” I said. “Get moving!”

  The bills all got put somewhere, and not another word was said on the subject of fortune-telling till after supper Friday when Hiram was climbing into the truck.

  “Wait,” I said. “You haven’t even told me where this crazy lady lives.”

  “Washington,” he said.

  “As in DC?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s a far piece,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad. I’ve got a full tank.”

  “It’s dark out, though.”

  “Fewer cars that way.”

  “You sure you don’t want Earle to go with you?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Well, okay.” I closed the door after him. “Just don’t—drive in a ditch or get yourself killed.”

  “I will do neither of those things. Tell me something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When did you stop being an uh-melia?”

  “Sorry…”

  “On your birth certificate, it says Amelia Hoyle.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Got shortened.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. Mama always said I was in too much of a dang hurry to be dragging all those letters after me. Guess it was just easier to chop one off.”

  Hiram nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “it appears I have sufficient time in my day for extraneous letters. So if it’s all the same to you, I’ll tack it back on.”

  I didn’t say yes or no. Truth is, I’d never figured such a thing for being possible. Putting a name back to where it had been.

  “Good night,” he said. “Good night, Amelia Hoyle.”

  He held down the clutch till the engine was of a mind to go.

  “See you in the morning,” he said.

  *

  An hour after he left, the rain come. One of them sincere rains that wants to claw up every last smell from the earth. Most of the time, Earle and Janey love to go to sleep to the sound, but that night, they was on edge and kept asking for more Sinbad stories. I had to really put the poor feller through his paces�
�crocs and apes and man-eating giants and I don’t know what else. Enough, I said finally, but even then, they wouldn’t go off.

  “Where’s Washington?” asked Janey.

  “Oh,” I said, settling into the bed space between her and Earle. “It’s due east of here.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Two, three hours by car. We’ll get there ourselves someday.”

  “Franklin Delano Roosevelt lives there,” said Earle.

  “That he does.”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt, too.”

  “When she ain’t busy.”

  They was quiet for a bit, but Earle spoke up again.

  “That fortune-teller throws any evil my way, I’ll send it right back.”

  Seems I wasn’t the only one troubled by that picture.

  “She don’t really look like that,” I said. “That’s just, you know, art.”

  “I’ll give ’er what for,” said Earle.

  They finally nodded off around midnight. Me, I was up another hour, listening to the rain. Don’t know how long I slept before I jerked up in the bed. A pair of lights was sweeping across the front of the house.

  I crept to the door. In the driving rain, I saw two shadows, queerly joined, rising and falling together.

  “Hiram?” I whispered.

  “Give me a hand,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Up to my room.”

  It was very near a relief, rummaging in the dark for the keys. Meant I didn’t have to look at her head-on. Wasn’t till we was all standing at the bottom of the stairs that I dared a peep.

  She was slumped against Hiram’s shoulder, so all I could see at first was a blue kimono and a pelt of wet hair, reddish brown with worries of gray. Then her head tipped back, and I saw a round face caked in white powder—like a pork chop dredged in flour. On her mouth was a painted Cupid’s bow.

  “Say, now,” she said. “What is this dump?”

  “Why, it’s the Willard,” said Hiram.

  “For real?”

  He give me a signal, and I took her by the left arm, and between us, we got her up the stairs. She was lighter than she looked, but she rattled the whole way. Brooches and pins and necklaces. Rings on near every finger. Fumes of bourbon rising off like swamp mist.

  “Geez,” she said. “What happened to the damned elevator?”

  “Broken.”

  Took some doing, but we lowered her onto Hiram’s mattress. She laid there, still jangling, eyelids aflutter under penciled-in brows.

  “Hiram, honey. Tell ’em not to wake me before noon. I can’t do a thing before noon.”

  Then she rolled onto her side. The jangling stopped. Half a minute later, she was snoring.

  “Go back to bed,” Hiram told me.

  “Where you gonna sleep?”

  “Floor’s fine.” He looked at me. “Don’t worry. Nothing un-Christian is gonna happen.”

  “It ain’t that.”

  But I couldn’t say what it was, neither.

  “You’d best get some shut-eye,” he said. “We open in a few hours.”

  Well, naturally, I didn’t catch a wink from then on. When dawn come, I was already up, watching the mountains bleed out of the dark. No eggs for breakfast, so I made myself eat some old coconut macaroons. Even with the moldy edges cut off, they was dry as bark, but it was all my stomach could get down.

  To my surprise, Hiram was up, too. Washed and shaved and setting out the old root table in front of the store.

  “You didn’t sleep, neither,” I said.

  “Too much coffee in Warrenton.”

  He reached into an old turnip sack and pulled out an oilskin cloth and arranged it over the table. Then he pulled out a crystal ball and a deck of tarot cards.

  “We’ll need a chair,” he said.

  “I’ll get one from the house. This where she’s gonna sit?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I ran my finger round the table’s rim. “When’s she planning on comin’ down?”

  “When the time’s right.”

  “You don’t mind my saying, she looked pretty tight.”

  “I’ve seen Barrymores tighter than that. She’ll come through.”

  Problem with getting up so early was there wasn’t too much to do right off. I fed the kids two bowls of Aunt Sally rolled oats and a couple slices of bread soaked in Wesson. (“Can’t you at least fry it?” Janey said.) I made sure the pumps was in order, made sure Earle knew how to work ’em. Mostly I roamed. Up the road and back. Some point or other, I swung a glance over toward the front porch and saw Janey, hunched over some pasteboard, with a box of crayon stubs by her elbow.

  “Melia!” she called. “How do you spell haunted?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Me.”

  “To what end?”

  “I’m gonna make me a haunted house.”

  “No, you ain’t.”

  “In the root cellar.”

  “I said you ain’t.”

  She jumped to her feet. “Don’t you dare tell me no! There ain’t nothing in that root cellar ’cept for mice and rotten parsnips and Emmett Tolliver’s moonshine, and even you don’t like going down there, so there’s something gotta be haunting it. And Earle’s already helping with the gas, and Daddy Hiram’s got the store, and I mean to pull my weight.”

  I could see there weren’t no turning that child’s mind. She even drug me down to the cellar and made me stand there in the dark while she hid behind an old joist.

  “Ready?” she said.

  Into that dark, musty, dripping space, she sent scream after scream, each higher in frequency than the last, bouncing off wall and ground and ceiling and shredding every last nerve. When she was done, she stepped back out, grinning and bashful.

  “What do you think, Melia?”

  “It’s just gonna be you screaming your fool head off?”

  “Well, sure. Don’t I sound fearsome?”

  Had to admit she did.

  “But you ain’t gonna have no voice left by day’s end.”

  “That’s okay, it’ll get me out of school.”

  “Well, okay. But you can’t charge more ’n a penny.”

  “Make it two, and we got ourselves a deal.”

  *

  The cars started pulling in after ten. Not much at first—wagons and delivery vans. It was around eleven when a new crowd started rolling in. Adler Standards and a Hudson Greater Eight and a Pierce-Arrow and the cutest ol’ Nash Ambassador, but there was Buicks, too, and Plymouths and Ford coupes. Some of the cars was driven by folks I knew—Basil Buckner, Ella Preston, Minnie-Cora Harper and her latest beau. Some I’d never seen in all my days.

  Earle was mighty pressed to keep the gas flowing, and since a good third of the customers wanted the lubrication deal, I ended up in the service bay for the rest of the morning. Somewhere around eleven thirty there came a lull, and I stepped out of the bay, smearing the sweat off my face with my forearm and looking round.

  It was a whole new world.

  All those cars that had driven in … well, they hadn’t driven off. They’d parked themselves. On the gravel, on the shoulder, wherever they could find a spot. And from those cars had spilled out half of Walnut Ridge.

  Women talking in low, bustling tones. Men with their hands in their overalls, chewing their quids. Earle striding from car to car and Hiram calling out “Lemonade! Coffee! Iced tea!” Kids everywhere. Rocking themselves dizzy on our tree swings or rotting their teeth with our Coke-and–Life Savers cocktails or stumbling white-faced out of Janey’s haunted house, grabbing at their chests.

  And that didn’t count the two dozen or so folks who was lined up for Madame Ouspenskaya. Persons of every age and station, waiting with that air you see sometimes outside a WPA office. Quiet, but tensed like arrows. I thought of the woman I’d helped up the stairs that morning, and I thought, There’s no way these folks is gonna walk away happy.

  Hiram was already working the line li
ke some small-town mayor, shaking hands, tousling kids’ hair. “Don’t you worry,” I could hear him saying. “She’ll be down here before you know it. And it’ll be the best nickel you ever spent, I guarantee it.”

  But noon came, and she wasn’t there.

  “Aw, you know how women are,” Hiram chuckled. “Let me go check on her. Don’t go anywhere, friends.”

  If it were me, I’d have gone home, but those people stayed where they was, and by the time Hiram come back down, there was a good hundred folks lined up. And now they really was starting to stir and grumble, and it was all I could do not to go up to each and every one of them and tell ’em how sorry I was and would they go away if I give ’em each a nickel?

  Then the door to the store opened, and out she came.

  Thought I was pure dreaming at first. The woman who’d come staggering in out of the rain had changed into someone else altogether. Someone bigger, for starters. What with her heels and her crazy black wig, she must’ve grown half a foot. Her face was even whiter, and she’d rimmed her eyes in something that looked like charcoal, and she’d switched out her kimono for a long black robe with half-moons and stars. Oh, and her Cupid’s bow was now a gash of purple that only kinda resembled a mouth.

  “It is she!” cried Hiram in a ringing voice. “The one who sees all! Madame Ouspenskaya!”

  With great dignity, the fortune-teller set herself at that table, settled her robe around her, then turned on the crowd and said, in a low growl, “Who weeshes to see the trroooth? Who dares to see the trroooth?”

  A shudder went through the citizens of Walnut Ridge. It was some time before the first person in line worked up the nerve to come forward. She was a heavyish lady with gold spectacles hanging from a cord, and before she’d got out two words, Madame O stopped her.

  “Please to deposit five cents,” she said. Then she swung her head back toward Hiram. “And please to bring Ouspenskaya her tea!”

  Hiram had the thermos already waiting. The fortune-teller took a sip, winced a little, then took another. From the way it went down her, I suspicion it was something other than tea.

  “Now, my dear,” she said. “Tell Ouspenskaya all your troubles.”

  Just when I thought the world had no more bodies to offer, more kept coming. From Riverton and Riverside, from Waterlick and Nineveh, from Chester Gap and Happy Creek. By mid-afternoon, cars and trucks was jammed along both sides of the road—two hundred yards in each direction—barely enough room for a tricycle to get by. It was like a county fair or a carnival, and, for the first time in our lives, we was in the heart of it. All these grinning, chattering, back-slapping people. All these children, swinging by the half dozen or going back for more of Janey’s wails or running in circles like guinea hens.