Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  I begin coming, in fact, just after he gives me the hood to mask my face. I remember sitting at my bureau, a gorgeous mahogany vanity he purchases from an antique dealer specifically for me, set up in front of my bedroom window where I can see out over the long beach and watch the turtles rise in the morning. I sit there brushing my hair with an opal-handled hairbrush whose bristles are fine stalks of leopard whiskers. It is longer in those days, my hair, much longer than the short-cropped style I wear now, embarrassingly similar to that of a pageboy. Though in many respects, I suppose it is a fitting do. He comes in, comes to stand behind me. I can see his figure in the mirror, with his hands on my shoulders, which he starts to massage gently. “Good morning, Daddy,” I say.

  “Good news, honey, the first recruits are coming in today. Can you come down to the station to greet them with me?” Well of course I will, I tell him. I pretend, vaguely, that I am as interested in supplying low cost food to low-income families as he is, or says that he is, though in truth I am hoping one of those trains carries with it a prince, a valiant warrior who will serve my father bravely while, upon seeing me and falling instantly in love, will secretly try to catch my attention. “Good girl. Here.” He slaps a swatch of black fabric down on the countertop and is already halfway toward the door before I can put my brush down and flap out its folds to see what it is. “I think it would be better for them not to see what you look like. And I think it would be appropriate if nobody knew that you were my daughter.” He pauses at the door for a moment, turns to look at me. I see him in my mirror. “And—we should do something about that hair. So it fits without bulging. I’ll set something up with the barber.”

  There comes, echoing from behind the dunes, the howl of the train. I push off of the wall and go back outside. There is the plume of smoke rising up over the peaks of the dunes that, in the setting sun, look like holographic, diaphanous cones of shadow twisted with orange fire. I stand next to the bench and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder again.

  “You could have told me you were his daughter,” he mumbles.

  “What’s that?”

  “On the train, on our way up here. I told you everything there was to know about me, you couldn’t even tell me your name. Or that you were General Anselmo’s daughter.”

  “No, I didn’t. Would it have made a difference?”

  I begin thinking about sweetly-smelling roses. He doesn’t say anything but he seems to have been deeply insulted. “My name’s Anne,” I say. “Annie.” He looks up at me. His eyes have dried, his flushed skin has begun to return to its former self. The train comes around the last dune and begins to pull into the station.

  “Anne the General’s daughter,” he elucidates for me. The way he says it makes it apparent that it is meant to be an attack.

  “Anne the General’s daughter,” I repeat.

  The train screeches as it stops, as the doors open. The fat old conductor steps down and waves us on. I help pull the boy up and then I release his shoulder. He climbs the shallow steps and I set foot on the first one where I stop again. I give a defeated little sigh and ask the conductor to hold on for just a moment, then jog back to the station. I realize I had left my folio and hood on the floor, elevated above the concrete on a millimeter foundation of rat droppings, just inside the door. Forgotten, no. Though God knows I was hoping that I might forget. To validly forget those papers, that hood, and then to be able to board the train and leave without obligation. But no, ma’am, no such luck for Anne the General’s daughter.

  I grab them and brush the crap off as I run back to the train, board, and find where the boy has taken his seat. I sit in the booth facing him just as I had only two weeks earlier on our way up to the coast. He sits with his head against the thick Plexiglas window, staring out and no doubt seeing nothing in the night except perhaps the vague contours of the dunes as we speed around them. When the conductor comes around I pull two tickets from the folio and hand them to him.

  “I’m sorry, Adolphus,” I say after we are well on our way. The truth is, I am sorry. The General has very specific instructions for me, and for the few others who work between him and the recruits, instructions not to become attached. “Treat them with the delicacy you would treat any tool. Which is to say, great delicacy. They are valuable, they are complex, they are necessary. But in the end, when they rust over and become useless, when they snap under the great torque we will apply to them, or when they simply stop doing what it is that they are supposed to do, don’t forget that they are expendable, replaceable. You can walk into any neighborhood store and find two dozen hanging in a single square foot of space, all for the taking. The real task, is determining how to put your words to not only convince your bundle of sticks that it is, indeed, a wrench, a chisel, a hammer, but also that in its heart it aspires to be such a thing. That is the key to winning our war.”

  “My name is not Adolphus.” He mutters it smugly, defiantly, the way a punished child might inform his parent that he is not going to his room.

  “Hey,” I lean forward, I put on the face and I summon the voice I imagine my mother might have used to comfort me if I had ever known her. “Your name is Adolphus Henrik. It has to be. I really am sorry for everything that happened. But it’s happened, it’s in the past. Once a thing’s happened, there’s no point in concerning yourself with whether or not it had to happen, whether it was good that it happened or bad. Once a thing happens, Adolphus, all you have left to do is adapt yourself to how the circumstances have changed as an effect of it. And that’s where we are, right now. You, and me. We have to adapt now, we have to assimilate ourselves to a world in which one boy has been killed and another has assumed his identity. If we don’t, we will never be able to be a part of that world. We’ll be outside of it.”

  He picks his head up off the window and leans back and he stares straight, directly into my eyes. They must be the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen but after a moment I realize they aren’t sad at all. They are sympathetic, they are pitying. “You make it sound like you’ve had a lot of experience. Adapting to unfortunate circumstances.”

  I smile, consider it, and nod. “More than I’d wish on you,” I tell him. I stand and tell him I’m going to go find us a drink. He tells me he’s too young to drink, as though he’s never before. And maybe he hasn’t. Maybe the art of war hadn’t had time to sink deep enough in his veins to crave its own tainted food and sour water. Two cars down I find a bar. The train is mostly empty. There aren’t many people these days with any need to get someplace other than where they already are. A symptom of the endtimes, my father might put it. Crazy old bastard. Besides the bartender, there is only one other customer already sitting at the counter. I sit and the bartender comes up to me. I order a tarot sour from him when he asks. When he brings it I take the shot glass in a single sip and clap it down again on the counter. The gentleman a few stools over from me gets up and takes the stool next to me. I don’t look up at him.

  “Two more of what she just ordered,” he says, waving his hand at the bartender. I turn to look at him. He smiles, “On me,” he says. He’s handsome, a few years younger than me but not as statistically different as the boys I’m used to bandying around. I recognize him as the man who had been meeting with my father just before I brought in the boys, Emery and Adolphus. I flinch away but then remember that he hadn’t seen my face through my hood and has no idea who I am. My arm tightens and I realize that the folio isn’t here, I must have left it on my seat. I feel a quick temper of fear at its absence, which surprises me because I’ve wanted for so long to leave those papers behind. The bartender places two more shot glasses down in front of us. The gentleman takes his immediately. I put my hand on it, soak up the cool condensation, but I don’t drink it.

  “You know, my father invented this drink,” I say offhandedly.

  “Is that so?”

  “It is,” I say.

  “Where are you heading to?” he asks me. I tell him I’m getting o
ff at the next town. He says he is too. He asks me where I’m coming from. I tell him the same thing I told Emery two weeks ago, that I’m coming from South America. It explains the coastal tan and most people around here don’t know enough about it to ask any follow up questions but in both cases it’s a blatant lie. He asks me about my life and I give him evasive answers and reflect so that he ends up telling me about his. He’s honest. He tells me he just came from the coast, from a meeting with General Anselmo. He asks if I’ve heard of him, down there in South America. I laugh and say, who hasn’t heard of General Anselmo? He tells me, “I met him while working as a consort for a man he works with overseas. But the truth is, I went to gather information because I’m going to kill him. Assassinate him, I suppose his status entitles him that much.”

  “Is that so?” I ask. Now I take my drink and I immediately order a third. I drink that one right away, too.

  “I’ve been working for someone. Gathering information. We became separated but, as soon as I find him, we’re going to put an end to what the General’s been doing all these years.”

  “And why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Because, the person I’m working for, he believes that General Anselmo is trying to end the world.” I order and drink my fourth tarot sour. I wasn’t lying when I say that my father invented it. A bitter, mind-warming concoction he provides his boys to boost their courage. Bitter but underlined with a sweet twist. The man I’m sitting with, he tells me his name is Nick, laughs and tells me I should slow down on these.

  “And what do you think?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know what I think,” he tells me. “That’s why I’m still gathering information.” I order a cola for the boy and the bartender brings me a chilled glass bottle. I stand up. He suggests that since we’re both going to be in the same place at the same time, we might consider getting dinner together some night. I thank him for the offer and for the drinks, and then I tell him that I’m married and I walk away. The boy is already asleep by the time I get back, his head lolling in the crook of the seat and the window. I place his bottle in the cup holder on the armrest and then I lean my head back and close my eyes and I try to sleep, too. I do.

  * * *

  I wake suddenly when the train comes to a quick halt. Actually, it’s the grinding scree of steel just before the jolt that wakes me. I look out the window in time to see the thickest part of the woods beneath a full moon. Then the train stops. My head whips and I hear something in my neck creak. The boy’s soda hops out of the cup holder and shatters on the ground, and the boy himself slides off of his seat and his head lands in my lap. A few suitcases fall to the aisle from the upper compartments. He mumbles something, probably the remnants of his fading dream, as I grab his arm and help lift him up to the seat next to me. I can feel his muscles as I do. He is firmer than most of the boys who come to the coast. Most of them are filled with unpracticed filaments, little lengths of twine they boast to each other by drunken firelight to be the lost armaments of Olympus. But I can tell in only these meager seconds of contact before he pushes himself away from me toward the window to see what the matter is that he has a body better formed, well-rehearsed, perfectly able without the taint of hyperbolean emphasis.

  I had sensed it, two weeks earlier when I’d boarded the train and found him sitting there by himself, by the way his clothes lie on him and inflate against his body with his inhalations. It was why I sat across from him. To observe him. To think for a moment that, upon waking, he might see in me the beautiful princess I had once been and then given up for lost. Had he, upon waking, gone from his seat to sit on mine next to me, and under the safety of our isolation give his hands up to wander around me with the same luxury the train we rode had upon the dunes, I would have let him do so with gratitude. He had, of course, made no such move on me and I’d satisfied myself just to have the short conversation with him. I wish now that I had given him my name then.

  We wonder between ourselves what happened to stop the train so suddenly. The boy calls over my shoulder to the only other gentleman in our car if he knows what had happened, he only replies with the mush-lipped slur of sleep that he didn’t even know we’d stopped in the first place. The conductor comes by a few minutes later and informs us that there are some technical problems with the engine. They are waiting for a service crew to come up the tracks to see what they can do about it. It might take an hour for them just to arrive, another hour to determine whether they can fix it or not. If not, they will have to summon another train to come and pick us passengers up to complete our trip. I ask him where exactly the train had come to a stop. He tells me and then walks away down the aisle to inform the other passengers.

  “Seeing as you’re a soldier, I don’t imagine you’d have a problem walking the rest of the way, would you?” I ask the boy.

  “Do you know the way home?”

  I lean over him to peer out the window. I feel myself against his taut stomach and chest, I feel the firm curvature of his arms trapped beneath his thighs and my chest. I peer through the glimmer of the train lights on the glass and take note of the position of the moon over the trees. “Yeah, I know the way.”

  I reach under the seat to fetch my folio and hood. The hood is soaked through with the spilt cola, and one edge of the leather folio is mossy with moisture. I think for a moment that the papers might be destroyed, the ink run into long black river deltas of inscrutable gibberish. That I can toss the whole damn thing in the trash. But when I peer inside as I follow the boy to find the conductor to let us out, I see that the edges are stained black with the drink but the ink is left unaffected. I curse to myself and tuck the folio back under my arm.

  When the conductor lets us out, the chill air comes over us. It is a refreshing contrast to the stuffy warmth of the train. The doors close behind us, casting two long ovals of yellow light out on the sand on which we stand. A few paces away is the edge of the woods, the same woods that separate the coast from town. There is something resolute and discomfiting in the way the doors close, the sound of the rubber door liners pressing against each other has an odd sound of finality to them. As though we have forever stepped from one world into another, much stranger, one.

  “Come on,” I say as I step around him and head into the woods. “We can probably make it to town by morning.”

  We continue for some time. The breadth between the trees is thick and inky. We guide ourselves by the moonlight, but even with its overhead sifting between the leaves that amble in the wind, we can barely see where we are going. We go with one hand in each other’s and the other at our sides searching for trees.

  “What happens when I get there?” he asks me at one point when the moon is at its height.

  “As far as the General and anyone else is concerned, Emery Fasch died in battle,” I tell him.

  “What about my mother, and my sister? Ingot?” His hand tightens when he mentions his sister and an arrow of despair drives itself deep into my heart.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t see them. We’ll set you up someplace nearby. You might need to stay at the hotel for a while until we can find something. You’ll be able to watch them, observe them, protect them. But you can’t let them see you, you can’t talk to them.”

  “I can’t do that, I can’t pretend like I’m not there. The only reason I came home was for them.”

  “When you claimed you were Adolphus Henrik, you took on his identity and everything that came with it. It will probably mean both our lives if the General ever finds out that anyone’s discovered that he let you do that. Let you make a mockery of his authority and walk away from it.”

  “Yours? He would do that to his own daughter?”

  “I love my father,” I tell him. “But he’s far from sane. His mind has been gone for quite some time.”

  “I noticed,” he says. He trips over a thick root and nearly pulls me down with him. I catch my weight on a tree and hold him up. “Does he use those
dice to decide everything?”

  I laugh. “He only wants you to think that he does. The fact is he only uses the dice to rid himself of accountability. He rolls them already knowing what the outcome will be. The numbers are meaningless.”

  “So he was going to kill Peck no matter what?”

  I think for a long moment how I should answer him. It seems that in the darkness it might be easier to tell the truth. And though I know that the moment I shot his friend in the back of the head I had destroyed whatever chance I might have had at any displaced affection, unlikely as it was since he had undoubtedly seen the age of my face and extrapolated the age of my body from its looseness beneath my clothes, I still hoped that here in the dark, with us both veiled, he could have made me anyone he wanted me to be and vice versa. In my eyes, of course if it happened, he would remain unchanged. But I would be anyone he asked me to be. I tell him the truth because I think it might bond us in some way, “He would have sent Henrik back home, and demoted you to clerical duty. It wasn’t until you decided to pretend to be Adolphus that the General decided to kill him. As far as he was concerned, that was your way of insisting that you knew better than him.”