Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  He goes silent, and he tries to pull his hand out of mine but I hold on tightly. Neither of us says anything for what seems like the rest of the night. Though by the time we next speak, I look above at the dismal moon and it appears only meters from where it had been. I satisfy myself by memorizing the tight fibers of muscle beneath the web of his thumb and in his palm.

  It is the boy who first breaks the silence. “Do you see that?” he asks. He stops, balancing one foot upon a raised root. If one were to have looked at us just then they would have seen a woodcut bas-relief of pioneer vagabonds standing above a great and undiscovered valley. I stop behind him and try to decipher where it is that he’s looking, but in the darkness of the midnight woods I can’t quite make out the angle of his jaw from where I stand behind him.

  “I don’t know where you’re looking,” I admit. He pulls his hand out of mine. I feel utterly abandoned for the moment. He sinks away into the shadows and when I try to find him again after gazing into the woods, I can no longer see his form. I feel awash in a tide, carried out a great distance where I might be dropped off on some small and desolate island. It is only when I feel his fingers on my chin that I regain my bearings and steady my nerves. He turns my head and lets go.

  “There, do you see it?” Through the trees I can make out a dim light. I tell him that yes, I do see it. “Is that the town?” No, I tell him, we are still a good couple of hours away from town, unless the conductor lied or had been ignorant about where we really were when the train broke down. Which I doubt he had. We head for it, and when we come into a clearing in the trees we find that we have stumbled upon a small cabin. It is built from the trees chopped down to form its own clearing, thick trunks bundled at the ends with frayed twine, looking as though a shiver would send it crumbling back to pieces. The light we had seen was a lantern hanging on the wall next to the door, though this close to it we can see several coronas of light glowing inside from between the wide spaces left between the trunks.

  As a girl, my father had often taken me camping. In retrospect it was probably just his way of easing me into the life he had planned for us on the coast, as he waited for his proposal to be properly reviewed and ratified by the half dozen requisite federal committees. We hike together, hand in hand, singing children’s songs and regaling each other with how our week had gone, at school, at work. He makes sure that I take an integral part in constructing the site, erecting our tent, tying our cooler to the high branches, scouting the area for snake holes or fox dens or bear droppings. Every time we go, which is at least twice a summer, I wake the first morning to find that he has vanished. I never expect it, though I really should after just the second or maybe the third trip. He always returns the next day, having taken the car back to town, hoping that I have taken the opportunity to fend for myself. Survivalism, he tells me, is next to godliness. And that is why, he continues, you and I are going to outlive this whole goddamned planet. In any case, I have no desire to spend any unnecessary time in the woods. It puts me at unease. It is why just letting go of the boy’s hand for a moment gives me up for lost. The boy urges me to let him investigate. He is still at a curious age, an age of adventure. The cabin in the woods is a bit cliché, but so much so that it is at the point that were one to actually find such a thing, as we do this night, one would be so shocked to see it, that it would seem entirely novel.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’ve got a schedule to keep. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of free time to explore after you get back home.”

  He relents and tears himself away from the gravity of the cabin when a man comes out from the woods, just opposite us, with a bundle of kindling in his withered arms. “Can I help you?” he asks. He tosses the kindling into a pile on the side of the cabin and comes closer to us. I notice that the boy takes half a step in front of me so as to buffer me from any ill intentions the old man might bear. I think I might be blushing. But even I can see that the old man’s welcoming smile is genuine, and even if it isn’t, he probably couldn’t have mustered the strength to pierce skin with knife. I step around the boy and give my hand to the old man.

  “My name’s Anne,” I say. My mind finishes the thought with the boy’s unpleasantly caustic label, the General’s daughter. “This is Adolphus. Our train broke down on the way to town. We figured this might be faster than waiting for the service crew to show. We saw the light. We don’t want to bother you, we were just passing through.”

  “Oh! Oh, no bother, really.” He goes on to introduce himself and what he’s doing out there in the woods, all of which is really of no interest to me. What I do notice is that the old man bears an unnatural resemblance to my father the General. Only slightly less aged. No, that isn’t it. Better kept, not less aged. I am taking a detailed account of the old man’s wrinkles and beard and so I don’t hear his invitation to tea fast enough to decline before the boy accepts and hurries in after him. I go reluctantly, the hot package of my folio itching me through my shirt. I want to be rid of the damned thing, I want nothing to do with it. I think that I should have forgotten it on the train. Though I know that I could no more have done that than I had been able to forget it at the station back on the coast.

  The interior of the cabin is larger than I would have imagined from the outside, though I suppose the shadows of the woods shave off large portions of the corners and the true breadth of it. All of the furniture is hand carved, and he sits us down at a small table off to the side. It wobbles because the legs aren’t quite even, and our chairs share the symptom. The old man goes to the corner where a potbelly stove is sitting, already burning. The source of one of the lights that we had seen through the spaces between the walls. The other source is a lantern set up by his bed, a straw-thatched mattress atop a poorly built wooden frame.

  “How long have you lived out here, Signor Cifezzo?” the boy asks, turned in his chair to face the old man as he sets a kettle down on the stove. I must have been preoccupied when he gave his name, though it sounds familiar to me. As though my father might have mentioned it at some point or another. I begin searching my memory for it. I feel as though it was recent, and involving something of great importance to him. Though I can’t quite grasp it.

  The old man brings us our tea and places the kettle on a hand-carved trivet. Our cups are porcelain, decorated with petite pink flowers. They are at odds with the rest of his home, too modern to fit with the rest of his backwoods survivalist décor. Too manufactured. I thank him. He explains that he makes the tea himself, gathered from clover and berries, dried and then pressed and then combined into a finely grained potpourri which he stores in little cheesecloth sacks that he then drops in the boiled water. It’s a light and gingery taste, and it steadies the lightheadedness I still wear like a spinning halo from the tarot sours I had on the train. Then it occurs to me, it isn’t my father who had mentioned Signor Cifezzo at all, it was the man, Nick, who had offered me dinner on the train. I had been distracted by what he’d said about my father, that he had come to assassinate him. Too distracted to pay any attention to anything else the man had to say. Though now that I’d connected this Signor Cifezzo to Nick from the train, I wished that I had.

  I am focused on my tea while the boy and the old man have their discussion. When I finally raise my eyes to pay attention, the end of the old man’s speech implies that their conversation had gone deeper than mere pleasantries. “Of course the world is ending,” he says. “It’s certainly not beginning, is it? So what else could it be doing? I’m sure you’ve noticed it. The inexplicability of things, the irrationality of decisions.”

  It signals in me a very clear memory of the speech my father once gave me as we toured his Cannery, just after taking the train to the coast for the very first time, the day it became my home and only weeks before he daunts me with the weight of my hood. He had said to me, “Of course the world is ending. It’s certainly not beginning, is it? So what else could it be doing? The only conscientious thing for us to do is
not to fight it. We are all children of the universe. It gave us life and it will give us death. If it has decided to end itself, who are we to deny it that pleasure? We, as any good children, are tasked with obeying our convalescing mother.”

  Signor Cifezzo continues, “Let me tell you something. When I was a younger man, much older than you, boy, but still much younger than I am now, I went home for a time. Back to where it was that I had been borne and raised by my parents. It was there, as a young boy, that my mother told me the tale of a tailor with blessed hands, a gifted man who could stitch together anything but his own sad, miserable heart. Why anyone would have told that story to a child I could never understand. It was a devastatingly sad tale, a grim reminder of the futility of earnest diligence in trying to make something of one’s self. Without doubt, it colored my perspective on the world in more ways than I may ever know. Years later, when I went back to where I had been raised, I found myself in what appeared to be a city that was a re-wound version of the one I’d grown in. It was as though a glitch, a blip, in the space-time continuum had caused a single seed to sprout twice, only a hundred or so years and several miles apart from itself. They had the right year, the right date, except that the state of things, the age of the town and its people, was where my version of it had been when my mother was a young girl.

  “I tracked her down, in fact, to my grandparent’s old farm. Of course they were youthful now, barely touching middle age. And my mother was a smooth, innocent little girl playing dolls in a blue-trimmed skirt on their front porch. I sat next to her, observing the people who would eventually become my grandparents busy in their field. My six-year-old mother sat oblivious of me, jouncing her doll in her lap. I recognized it as the precursor of the ragged bundle of dangling buttons and torn stitches that sat now on my mother’s bureau back home. I watched her for a time, thinking of all the things I could tell her. Don’t marry Darryl Black. Don’t let sister Alice go out into the woods by herself. Get your family out of the Valley after you marry Father. When Pastor Henry declares his love for you, for god sakes run away with him and be happy. And above all else, whatever you do, don’t take me south with you when you go south. All the misery I could save her. And myself at the same time. But the longer I watched her, her naï;ve little form still ignorant of all the pain and resentment she would cause her children, I became angry. Until finally I hated this little girl for still being happy, for not recognizing in me her dirty, irresponsible fingerprints. So finally I said to her, ‘Do you know what a tailor is?’ She shook her head and looked up at me with wide, eager eyes, resting her doll in the drape of her skirt between her knees. ‘Well,’ I said to her, patting the ground next to me for her to come closer. ‘Come here and let me tell you a story about one.’ And then I told her the story she would later tell me, as her little boy. I told her so that it would scar her, and so that she would have it to tell to me.

  “How else can you explain such a thing, if not that the world is ending? The only conscientious thing for us to do, as any good children will do for convalescent mother, is help to heal it. To calm the ravaging death throes and carry it back to healthier times. At the time, I did what I did out of spite. But thinking back to it, I’m glad I didn’t try to alter my own past by warning my mother of the mistakes and miseries to befall her. The universe requires consistency.”

  The boy continues on a tangent with the old man about his short time working for the General at the coast, and why he is returning home after such a short conscription. When he tells the part about Henrik’s being shot in the back of the head, he mentions only that it was done by one of the General’s hooded thugs. The old man clicks his tongue sympathetically and says, “What a shame that the world must endure such harshness.” When he inquires about me, “Did you work for the General, also?” the boy interrupts before I can answer and says that no, he only met me on the train.

  We finish our tea and thank the old man for his kindness. He insists that we don’t clean the dishes, he will take them to a creek near his home the next morning. “I have more than enough time to do my own chores and anyone else’s who happens upon my cabin,” he says smiling widely. The smile is the same that my father often wears, though my father’s always hides behind it the gnashing teeth of sharks, a malicious connotation most people sense but cannot explicitly decipher. Signor Cifezzo follows us out into the clearing and gives us our bearings back to town. He says that it shouldn’t take more than an hour to get there, that we are closer than we had thought. We thank him again for his hospitality and, before leaving, the boy assures him that he will come back again soon to visit. The old man offers him an open invitation. “Whenever your heart speaks to you about me,” as he puts it.

  The boy takes my hand in his before we enter the shroud of the forest. I wonder if perhaps he senses my discomfort with the woods. And then the lantern hanging on the front of the cabin is blown out, the sound of a door closing peacefully, and we are heading back for town. We speak only once more on the way. He asks me, “If it isn’t because of the dice, why do you say that you know your father’s lost his mind?”

  I tell him, “My father couldn’t give a shit about feeding the poor. The federal commission that approved his proposal knows how dangerous a job a coastal cannery can be. Fishing boats, off shore rigs, having to kill off the turtles that threaten the supply. There’s a magic number, a magic number of how many employees will statistically die each year working at such a place. If that number isn’t surpassed, there is no investigation. So my father makes sure that just that many die every year. No more, no less.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he thinks that it’s his duty to help end the world. And in his infinite wisdom he says that it’s more prudent to do so legally than illegally. A killer might get a dozen or two dozen before he’s caught. A government-approved corporate leader with a magic number at his disposal can do it for years, and claim hundreds.” I pause for a moment before continuing. “The tortoises that come to the shore each season, they aren’t indigenous, which is why he has permission to purge them. They are hell to the coastal ecosystem. They don’t belong there. But to make sure that they come back year after year, my father has a private farm on that island off on the horizon where he breeds them. He releases them himself every autumn just so they can swim to our coast and be massacred.”

  Minutes pass in silence. “Why would you tell me that?”

  I want to say, So, Emery, you can do something about it. I say, “Because, Adolphus, if you were to tell people, the only ones who might believe you are either too powerless to do anything about it, or already on the General’s side.”

  “So why do you do what he tells you to do?” the boy asks me.

  “When I was a girl, maybe fifteen or so, he told me why I never met my mother. She died, giving birth to me. It was, he insists, the same moment that he was truly born. One moment, he was a man, with all the knowledge that he was going to walk away and leave me, his little girl, all by myself. He didn’t want me. And somehow, he became two men. He says he can’t explain it but that it isn’t metaphorical. His body peeled a duplicate off of itself. And he says that, while he watched one of those bodies walk away never to see me again, the other one, out of pity and duty, and only eventually out of love, his body, stayed and took me in his arms, and he never let go of me again. So I stay with him, I obey him, because part of that story is true. Because he never has left me. I’d see him dead before I’d break his heart by walking away from him.” There are truths easier to admit in the dark.

  * * *

  I wake to the cawing of a crow that, when I look, is perched outside the hotel window staring in at a plate of the remnants of a roast beef, which has by now gone cold, and two half-flutes of champagne, which have by now gone warm. I roll out from beneath the covers, leaving the boy naked and wrapped in the tousle of the thick goose down comforter. I walk to the bathroom to take a piss and notice the hood and folio sitting o
n the small card table between the bed and the toilet. The empty eye sockets of it are watching me like a gaudy painting. I whisper a curse at it and then check over my shoulder to make sure he hasn’t heard. He hasn’t. There are two men I have to see today. And I might as well see them early so that I can go home, back to the coast, more quickly.

  I use the toilet and take a washcloth to rinse off the parts of my body that need it. I would shower but I don’t want to wake the boy. More accurately, I don’t want to have to speak to the boy. To explain why I have to leave and why he won’t be seeing me again. He is homesick, despite the fact that he is home, he is weary and his mind is ravaged with the horrors of a short but bloody war. He takes comfort in me and my body—though he surely can’t have any real desire for it—because I am the only one who knows who he really is, the only one who will ever know who he really is, and what’s happened to make him the way he is sure to become. Old, lonesome, haunted. Haunted by the ghosts of those he lost, and by the living ghosts of his own family. Or rather by the fact that he will become a ghost haunting his family from afar. As we come to town the previous night, we pass by his house on our way to the hotel. He points out his mother’s room and his little sister’s room to me. Both of which are dark at that early hour. Then I check him into a room here and, at his invitation, come up to join him for a late dinner. He tries to mix himself a tarot sour, the only drink he has ever had, he admits to me, by mixing the champagne with a shot of rum from the honor bar and the blood squeezed from the roast beef we then eat together, for its color and alkali bitterness. He cringes and says it tastes like shit and I don’t tell him that, actually, it’s a pretty close facsimile of the real thing.