Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  I dress in the bathroom where I had the forethought to strip the night before and then I grab my folio and hood and I leave. I place the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob so that nobody will wake him anytime soon. Hopefully not before I am already back on the train.

  This town seems closer and closer to death each time I come to visit, which fortunately is not very often. The sun is like a ball of waxy clay. I thank God it doesn’t look like that over the coast, where it is effused with the exuberance of color. I head to the police station where I will finally be able to relieve myself of the burning burden of the papers scooped yesterday afternoon off my desk. When I get there, I tuck my hood into my back pocket so as not to raise any curiosities. I ask for Sheriff Barilla, whom I’m hoping isn’t out on patrol at this time. I planned to come early enough to catch him in his office, and, with luck, I do. His secretary, a buxom thing he’s no doubt fucking on his desk during their coffee breaks, tells me to go in. I do.

  His desk is cluttered with papers. There is a coffeepot on a narrow counter behind him that, at some point, has overflowed to leave an oblong black stain on the floor that he hasn’t bothered to clean up. He looks tired, his face is unshaven, his clothes give off a faint reek of body order, his hair, thinning though it is, looks unkempt and out of place. “Are you alright, Sheriff?” I ask. We are not friends, there is no point in pretending. But we do work together often enough to keep up pleasantries.

  He takes in a deep breath and closes a manila folder spread out before him, replete with satin-tinged photographs. I choose not to look at them. “It’s a bad time, Annie,” he says to me as he leans back in his chair. “We had a double murder-suicide here just two days ago. And on top of that, we still have two kids missing, stolen off by their father. What kind of fucking sick world is this, Annie? This town, of all places, should be exempt from these sorts of things.”

  This town, exempt? I ask myself. The world is ending and it’s spreading out from this town like algae. This town is dead. “That’s awful, Anthony. I really am sorry to hear it.” I really am. “Sorry to have to make things worse, but the General sent me with—well. Here.” I open my folio and take out the papers and hand them to him. I almost sigh with relief once they’re out of my hands.

  A sweat breaks out on his forehead. He starts to sift through the pages, searching for the name of his brother—the brother he hasn’t seen for nearly thirteen years—among the list of dead from this past quarter. He won’t see it there. His brother was killed eight years earlier but under the prudence of the General was kept off that list so as not to upset the local authorities.

  “There’s a lot this time.” His voice gives definition to bemoan. There are exactly the same number there are every four month period when I bring another set of names to him from the coast so that he can inform the families. “Shit,” he says, stopping on a page halfway through. “Emery Fasch.”

  I think of the night before, as we slithered around each other’s bodies beneath the starch-stale cotton of the hotel quilt. When I called out the name Emery as I came, thinking at the moment that it might be the last time he is paid the dignity of being called by his real name. “What about him?” I ask it shyly. I feel as though I have his scent on me. I suppose I still do, but I feel as though Sheriff Barilla can smell it.

  “The double murder suicide,” he says, “Frank Fasch, Emery’s father, murdered his mother and another man whose body was so disfigured and beaten that it still hasn’t been identified, and then he shot himself. The little girl, Ingot, she went to stay with neighbors for the time. Son of a bitch, I don’t want to be the one to tell her that her brother’s dead.”

  Son of a bitch. I think it referring to my father the venerable General.

  * * *

  I can see the Fasch home from where I stand outside the wide double doors of the church. The horned demon-faced handle stares at my back and sneers gleefully. From this angle I can see the roll of yellow and black police tape that has been emptied to keep the neighbors from going in and paying their respects to the blood spatter that is, no doubt, a horridly vulgar and widespread display. Thank God we didn’t go by the front of the house last night when we came through the woods. We went around the back and through the alley that passes the house that will become Mr. Henrik’s permanent residence once I pay the down payment out of the General’s personal funds. Well, at least it could have become Mr. Henrik’s permanent residence. I can’t quite say now what’s going to happen, once he finds out. Thank God I won’t be the one to tell him. If he has any sense, and I feel quite strongly that he is one of the few who still does, he will take that little girl, Ingot, he said her name was, and run away where the General can’t ever find him.

  I turn my back to it and thank God again that I am not going to have to see that police tape hanging there any more than I already have. The church is empty and warm, which is nice because the winter is still coming. At the moment, it is only fingers reaching stealthily over the dunes to taste the cream of the desert but in a few weeks, it will come to devour it whole and wholeheartedly. I swim through the barrier reef of glass walls that separates the wide wood-paneled crescent entrance hall from the sanctuary and I become plainly jaundiced under the many-candled chandeliers that hang from the high-arched ceiling. The stained glass saints look to be avoiding eye contact. I’ve seen paintings where the eyes seem to be looking directly at you no matter where you stand. Always disquieting. But I’ve never before seen a tapestry like this where their eyes make a point to avoid you. A chill shoots down me.

  I pause at the first pew and fall gracefully to a knee where I cross myself with a thumb. I bow my head without thinking anything in particular, and then stand again and go to the rectory door, just off to the side of the altar. I put my hand on the doorknob but can’t quite bring myself to turn it yet. I back up and take a seat where I’d knelt just moments before. I bend my head down between my knees, I clasp my fingers at the base of my brainstem and hold it in place. I close my eyes and hope that when I open them again I might be dead and flown to Heaven. Fat chance, I think.

  There is only one time that I can remember sitting quite like this, as tightly pinched into myself as I can become. Before the train station had fallen into ruin, before the coast had become a battlefield that needed to be reshuffled with its own sand to cover the deep purple bloodstains, before these meadowlands became a desert, I sat there at the station where Adolphus had sat just yesterday waiting for our train to come. My father, standing next to me like a statue, a sentinel, a looming gargoyle with his uniform neatly pressed and his arms rigid and his hands folded in the small of his back.

  “It’ll be alright, Annie,” he says as the first plumes of smoke appear over the crest of the furthest dunes. “You’ll see.”

  I hold myself like that for as long as I can stand it, until the blood flushed to my head becomes too thick and syrupy and I have to unroll and sit back against the bench. The bulge of my hood is apparent to me, tucked into my back pocket, as it is now while I sit here in the church. The truth is that I’m not as fearful as my father thinks that I am. I am half anticipatory, excited at the prospect that perhaps, perhaps, all those dreams I had mouthed silently to myself in my vanity as I brushed my hair each morning by the light of the coastal sunrise are coming true. The fact that he assumes I am, or perhaps he just assumes that I should be, entirely fearful of it, only signals to me that my best interests are not his main concern.

  When the train arrives, I stand and my father steps around to stand in front of me. And we wait there, I trying to suppress the nerves that are shaking me like the living filaments of a shining bulb, for Billy Wiley to step down. When he does, my father approaches him and shakes his hand, claps him on the back and speaks quietly with him until the train pulls away. I stand back by the bench shyly while they laugh together, and I wait for my father the General to lead him with a hand on his back to come meet me. Billy takes my hand in his, bows and kisses it.
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  When I enter the rectory, he is sitting on the short sofa with one leg over the other and a bottle of brandy open on the coffee table. The snifter is in his hand, ice twinkling around the rim. When he sees me he stands, smiling, and comes to meet me. He never takes my hand to kiss anymore, instead he wraps his arms around me and burrows his lips into the small crook behind my earlobe, sucking the skin down to my neck. The perspiration of his glass held against my back is chilling, and the perspiration of his armpits on my sides is uncomfortably warm.

  “Oh, I missed you, Annie,” he whispers to me through his busy lips. Though I have the sense that he isn’t saying it for any reason besides habit. He leads me with his body like a brick wall to the long counter and he presses me up against it and keeps himself at my back to lock me in place. His hands engulf me and large, haired spiders creep up beneath my shirt. I curse my skin for puckering up into gooseflesh at the touch and I think, at least he isn’t wearing the robes. It disgusts me when he wears the robes. Soon he has my pants undone and brings them down to my ankles so that the arch of my legs forms a tri-point constellation with destiny portending that the North Star be shattered.

  I think of the days when I would come to town and he would ask me where my ring is, as though it mattered to him, as though it offended him that I took it off. I always tell him the same thing, “My father says not to wear it. If the boys know I’m married, they might lose what interest they have in keeping me impressed.” Though the truth is that my father never says any such thing. The ring was long ago tossed out my bedroom window high atop the Cannery in a bout of frustration. The questions had decreased in the recent years and then ceased altogether at some point, except for the ones that I consider to ask myself. Chiefly among them is that I can never quite decide whether I am the wife and his job with my father the dowry, or if it is the other way around. I, the prize that needs to be possessed and owned and devoured, and reminded that this is the way things are, though that explanation always comes off in my mind as a bit pompous and conceited. I never have been much of a prize.

  He had been a sweet man at first. Though I suppose they all are. My father’s second-in-command. While I command his troops around the Cannery, Billy is off managing the federal committees and the recruitment centers. We are a family in business, and my father had wanted to make sure that we become a family in law as well. I try not to think about it much, except as a deterrent for other gentlemen who might show interest in me. Such as the man on the train. As my body begins shaking I remember realizing the night before that it wasn’t my father I remembered speaking about Signor Cifezzo at all, but the man on the train, as though in my sleep I had forgotten the entire walk through the woods. I look down and I see the hood hanging out of the back pocket of my pants, brushing the floor with every thrust the good Reverend takes.

  Though I’m sure he has his share of whores, widowers, and worshippers during the months when I’m gone, he seems to save his most violent spasms for me. I look at my face reflected in the mirror above the counter as Billy Wiley shakes my body with his pent-up passion. I think of Carrusoe, the boy who wasn’t supposed to be there that day. A last minute replacement. I’m sure he had been ecstatic at the sudden promotion. Something to write home about, though he never considered he might not have a chance to ever write the letter. I think of the quick slump of his body after the bullet passes through his head, just above his neck. Like a ragdoll that’s suddenly lost its stuffing. And I think of the frenzied terror that comes over the other three. Henrik, Fasch, Bjorgne. If they were real soldiers they would have had the foresight to search the tree line for me before they crouch by the dead body. But they aren’t soldiers, they are just boys. I think of the way I tear my hood off and tuck it into my pocket as I run through the woods for their camp. I have bought enough time now, now that the other three have to make up for Carrusoe’s share of the work.

  I think of the way I stand at the edge of the small clearing cursing Henrik, the tall crop-haired one who is in charge, for letting Jaspers stay behind because of his ankle. I’d spent more than a few evenings sharing dinner and conversation with Jaspers over the years. Always platonic, though his underlying romantic intentions are always obvious. If he hadn’t been so shy about it I might have let him have me once or twice. He looks up at me, confused because he’s only seen me a few times without my hood and it has always been in dim candlelight. He tries to stand up from the log, smiling at me and probably thinking that, unable to resist his subtle flirtations any longer, I have come to ravage him in the woods. Instead I shoot him in the face.

  I give him the dignity of closing his eyelids on my way past him to the tents. The papers my father sent me for, the ones I am to steal for no reason other than so that he can bitch out the boys for letting them get stolen by the fabled conservationalists who supposedly haunt the woods, are tucked away somewhere in Henrik’s belongings. I can’t find them, and I curse Henrik again for being so responsible with them. I curse a third time when I hear Bjorgne come into camp early and run to Jasper’s body. I shoot at him from the tent where I’m still hidden. He’s a smart boy, he doesn’t wait to see who shot at him and missed to merely graze his shoulder, he just runs. So I chase him and I tackle him, and I roll him over so he can see my face, and then I reach into his coat and take his butcher’s knife. The butcher’s knife my father gave them to massacre the tortoises. And I massacre him with it.

  I think of the reflection I see on his canteen, clipped to his belt, as I stand up off of him. And I’m making the same grimace, the same horrid grimace, I see in the mirror now as Billy Wiley massacres me. My father the General would never approve if he knew I took my hood off every time he sends me out to help meet his precious quota. But I have always done it and always will. On the day God comes to me for judgment, I want them all lined up there behind Him. And I don’t want them to have any confusion about who I am or where I should be sent.

  I feel the magnetic weight of Billy’s body lift itself off and away from me. I pull my eyes away from the mirror because I can’t yet stand to see the face that’s waiting for me there. I pull my shirt down from where he had deposited it folded above my breasts, and then I bring my jeans back up. When I turn back to look at him, he is sitting calmly on the sofa again, composed, with his glass of brandy still in one hand. “How was it?” he asks me. Though he asks it with the same exuberance he’d said that he had missed me, which is to say none. Mechanically, lifelessly. It occurs to me that I am living a mechanical life, and that everything I do, I do only to appease the routine of things. His attention is not on me but on the newspaper he has folded on the coffee table next to the bottle. He leans forward and picks it up. The paper ruffles and the sound sickens me.

  It has been years since my father gave me the hood and it has always been a reviled thing to me. My hand goes to my back pocket without my approval. Recently, I have found myself beginning to crave it at moments. Crave its secrecy and the fact that when I put it on I disappear entirely.

  “Wonderful, Billy,” I say. “I love you.”

  Six: The Son

  At first I try to notice some way in which the town has changed since the last time I was here. As I walk from the train, across the desert and into town, I find nothing. The dust blows the same way. The sun gleams off the bulb of the water tower exactly as it used to. Scattering the light in long rays upon the sand. I inspect the people I pass. I am a stranger to them but I know them all well. Their inflections are the same, their mannerisms. Not even God could have recreated it with such precision, such accuracy. I head toward the hotel, a squat three-story building that casts a wide square of shade onto the town hall. Only its bell tower rises above the shadow.

  I find myself standing in front of the old ice cream shop my mother used to take us to when we were little. It’s still abandoned, a thick sheet of dust streaked with happenstancial finger marks. I press my face against it and peer inside. The counter has been torn out, frayed wires and the
jagged edges of pipes reach out of the ground like the claws of a beast trying to pry the earth open from the inside. I see the flutter of motion of a rat scurrying across the floor. It disappears into a shadow but it’s enough to enrage me. I step back and punch the glass. It doesn’t break but a backlash of sharp pain rinses from the knuckles of my fist up to my elbow.

  “Is there a problem?” I turn around, rubbing my fist with my other hand. A stocky, bordering on fat, man is standing there with a star pinned to his bland beige uniform chest. Tony Barilla, the town’s sheriff. He’s cradling a packet of papers in his arms and the way he is avoiding paying them any real attention, they seem to be the source of the misery that he wears on his face.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” I say, bowing my head slightly in an attempt to convey that it was a momentary lapse in judgment and that I realize it. “Just having a bad day.”

  He pats me on the shoulder as he walks away. “There seem to be a lot of those going around these days. Just watch yourself, buddy.”

  I watch him walk away down the street and turn a corner and then I take a final look into the ice cream shop. The rat is gone. I continue toward the hotel that, by now, I can see looming like a monolith against the sky. This is the street, I think to myself, inspecting the tire tracks that are dug through the dust that covers the road. This is the street. It must have been years ago. I’ve quite forgotten my age by now. Not to say that I’m old or that I interpret myself as old. Only that such things have really stopped having meaning enough to pay them any attention. I think of the day it began. I think of sitting in the backseat, the hem of the vinyl seatbelt rubbing into my shoulder, singing together. A senseless song we picked up from the cartoons we used to watch mornings before being rushed out to catch the school bus. Watching the occasional appearance of our father’s eyes in his rearview mirror as he glances back at us and tries weakly to harmonize.