by Lila Shaara
“Hey, Harry,” said Judd, his arm tightening around Ronnie Ho. He touches her in public, thought Harry, but he never looks at her. “You’ve been to the purple shrine thing south of town, haven’t you? Crazy cult types. All right up your alley.”
“You mean the Purple Lady’s shrine?” said Julie. “I thought it was a witch coven. I went to the palm reader out there once.”
One of the male students whose haircut and white shirt looked equally crisp said, “That’s the scientist psychic, right?” A few people started laughing as he added, “Try saying that fast three times.” Harry knew he should know the male student’s name even though he hadn’t had him in a class, but he couldn’t think of it. “What are you talking about?” he said, appalled that he had some difficulty getting the sentence out clearly.
Judd said, “You haven’t heard the story? It’s pretty funny. It was Ronnie’s roommate, right, Ronnie? The physics girl?” A rare glance at her face. The beautiful Ronnie nodded but said nothing. Judd went on for her. “This psychic tells her that she was buddies with a scientist who invented something big.”
Ronnie spoke so softly it was hard to hear over the music from the sound system. A new song blared; Harry couldn’t recall the title, but he knew that he hated it. “It was the Ziegart effect.” She looked at Judd, who was looking at Harry, then said, “She said that Ziegart stole it.”
“Didn’t a lot of people say that about Watson and Crick and DNA?” asked the crisp young man.
“They were right, weren’t they?” Julie said. “Allegedly?” she added, law school having taught her caution.
“What is it?” Harry said. The good thing about being drunk, he thought, is that you no longer care if people think you are smart or not.
Judd said, “Something about physics. Or gravity. I don’t know. The witch doctor woman lives in a trailer, so I don’t imagine she’s hanging out with too many Einsteins.”
“Her name is Madame Dupree. She told me that my mother was sick,” said Ronnie. “It was true. She had diverticulitis.”
There was some hooting at the psychic’s name as the crisp boy said, “Anyone over forty probably has something that would show up on an MRI. These gypsy folks learn how to read people and tell them what they want to hear.”
There was agreement and dissent at this comment, and Harry was too bleary to follow the conversation very well. He was only thirty-seven, but the idea of his impending middle age being littered with ailments depressed him so much that he drained his beer and waited patiently for someone to refill his mug.
“She’s not a gypsy,” said Ronnie. “I don’t think so, anyway. And not all gypsies are criminals, you know.”
Judd interrupted. “There’s your book, Harry. It’s got everything. Religious weirdos, science, and intellectual property.” Yuk-yuk, thought Harry.
“Madame Dupree has helped my roommate a lot,” said Ronnie, a little louder now, her reticence fading as the alcohol took hold. “I think she’s for real.” Ronnie stopped, looked around, regained her embarrassment, and looked at Judd again. Harry finished his new beer and poured another as someone asked where this psychic could be found. The name of the hated song flung itself at him from the bowels of his unconscious: “Pink Houses.”
Now his sober self realized that he didn’t know what time it was, didn’t know how long it had been since he’d left the Brew House. Eerily, he knew exactly where he was; he had the directions to the psychic’s home clearly in his mind, the mental map distinct and sharp. He’d spent a lot of his free time over the short north Florida winter driving around, getting to know the layout of most of Stowe County. When Ronnie had described the location of Madame Dupree’s trailer, he’d seen the sign in his mind, dredged up from some Saturday ramble through the outskirts of town. A sign shaped like a saluting hand and covered with painted blue stars and the words Psychic Readings in large, curly letters. He had only a hazy recollection of the trailer itself, a double-wide, he thought, placed well back from the road. The hand-shaped sign would have been memorable enough, even if it hadn’t been for the shrine that you passed first, a huge concrete edifice, terraced and topped with a giant purple heart surrounded by lights, some ten feet off the road. The Shrine of the Purple Lady. Given his past, he should have had more interest in it before now, but he hadn’t wanted to ask anyone about it. He was outsider enough.
The road was straighter now, and Harry could see a bright light in the distance, notable because he had long passed all the normal lights of the town; he was out in the true country, where the black was so thick it had a texture, and then he could see the shrine itself, huge and brilliant. His foot finally rose off the accelerator as the thing took real form and he could see that there were spotlights in a semicircle on the ground, feeding it with light, and there were colors around the heart itself, Christmas lights strung insanely around and around the heart and the terraced platforms beneath it. Harry stopped singing.
But the car kept moving, slowly now, thank God, past the great gaudy shrine, and then he could see the hand, dim and small even in the high beams. As it grew, it was as clear to the drunken Harry as anything had ever been, the now-giant hand was signaling Halt.
2
THE TOWER
Unexpected disaster.
Old lifeways shattered
Josie Dupree laid out the cards as Maggie came in from the temple; she looked as tired as Josie had seen her. She went to take a shower; when she came back from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, Josie said, “You’d be pretty if you ever got any sleep.”
“Thanks. What’s there to eat?”
“Some spaghetti. Peanut butter and jelly. You forgot dinner again. I’m going to read for you.”
“Not tonight.”
“Can’t help it. I have the urge.”
“Busman’s holiday,” said Maggie, opening the refrigerator and peering inside.
“What?”
“It’s an expression. It means that even when you’re off work, you’re still doing your job.”
“Oh. You’re looking mighty brown today.”
“Dark brown or light?”
Josie paused, a large card in her hand, then said, “Light. Only flecks, though. Mostly you’re blue.”
“Hmm.” Maggie shut the refrigerator door and walked to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the combined living and dining area. “What do they say?”
Josie looked down at the eleven cards spread on the table, then gathered them together and put them on top of the deck, facedown. “Not too much.”
“What was in the center?”
Josie paused, then shrugged. “The Tower. That’s the main one.”
Maggie stared at Josie and then said, “Big change.”
“Yes. Soon.” After a minute Josie added, “I went to a meeting tonight.”
Maggie said, “Good. You stop going, you drink. I’m glad you’re going again. I want you around forever.”
“Nobody’s around forever.”
Harry staggered up the wooden steps and pushed through an unlatched screen door onto a wooden porch. The door slammed and bounced against its frame when he let go, unable to summon the coordination to close it more gracefully. In front of him was what appeared to be the main entrance into the double-wide, a narrow fiberglass door with a window, covered on the inside by a yellow curtain. There was light filtering through it; someone was up. He still didn’t know what time it was, and the sober part of his mind seemed to have gone to sleep. He knocked on the door, hitting the frame beside the window with his fist. He was trying to be gentle but was afraid that being too gentle would mean no one would hear him, so he alternated the strength of his blows. Sometimes the door seemed to shake in its frame, making him guess that he was hitting too hard. Other times, he could hear no sound at all; too soft. He was pondering this, trying to calibrate the pressure to somewhere in the middle, when a light came on, hurting his eyes, and a short, dark woman opened the door. Her hair was curly and long, sh
e was wearing a caftan covered with pink and purple flowers, and she was holding an enormous flashlight. She was speechless as he swayed before her, and his palsying pupils couldn’t let in enough light for him to make out her face. He said, “Lawrence,” then managed to turn to the side before he threw up.
He found himself sometime later in a small living room, sitting on a sofa with a coffee mug half-filled with ginger ale in his hand and a green blanket around his shoulders. The blanket was soft and smelled wonderful and he was trying to thank the two women in the room, but he couldn’t seem to talk. His stomach felt trembly and vacant, so he was optimistic that he was’t going to be sick again. He sipped the ginger ale, which tasted extraordinarily delicious. A thought struck him; fortune tellers expected to be paid, maybe even before services rendered, he didn’t know. So he reached for his wallet, which stuck in his pants pocket alarmingly so that he had to tug and tug, and when it finally escaped from his pants, he rolled a little to the left from the momentum. Time was elongated; he felt he was moving through oil. He finally corrected, with his wallet in the hand not holding the mug. He couldn’t make out what the women were saying till one of them took the flashlight out of the other’s hand and said something about not needing it. Of course, he thought blearily. There’s plenty of light in here. Way too much. It hurt his eyes.
“Here,” he said, holding out his wallet.
The older woman took it, opened it, and pulled something out. He wondered if he should trust her with his credit card. He had only one, but it had a high limit. Maybe she was a gypsy, he thought; maybe she was a thief.
His mind went for a walk again, and he was only later to remember being led gently to the door and down the wooden steps to a car, not his, a smaller car with cracked leather seats that smelled of something like incense. A voice he liked, low and warm and slightly raspy, told him to get in, helped him to get the seat belt buckled, leaning over him with a smell of lemon mixing with the incense. Another blank, then he was being helped up the front steps to his porch by someone shorter than he was. The person unlocked his door, miraculously having his keys, then hands pushed him into his front hallway.
“Can you get yourself into bed?” the nice voice said.
“Uh,” said Harry.
By the time Maggie got home, it was almost two a.m. Josie was still awake, not too worried but wide awake, not wanting to be as unguarded as she’d been when she’d let the drunken stranger into her home. Maggie came in the front door and said, “It’s fine.”
“Did he look green to you?” said Josie.
“Light green. Some black, though. Poor guy.”
“Yes, I got that, too.”
When Harry awoke, it was’t quite morning. He didn’t feel as terrible as he had when he’d found himself chewed by mosquitoes in his backyard, but he felt bad enough. His mouth tasted of vomit and sugar, and his head felt swollen and hot. He was on his couch, his shoes off, an afghan over his legs. “Jesus,” he said out loud, then repeated, “Jesus.” His voice sounded hollow, made out of paper.
After a trip to the bathroom, he made his way to the kitchen for coffee and a grapefruit; he saw the note on the kitchen table, his wallet and keys acting as paperweights. Small, neat printed letters said, “Your car is still at our place. You can come get it, or I can come get you.” A phone number followed, and a name. Maggie Roth. Nothing was missing from the wallet.
3
THE FOOL
The Seeker has a choice.
Beware
Harry called the number on the note. The phone was answered by a woman with a southern accent; it was not the pleasantly low voice of the person who’d given him a ride the previous evening. “Maggie isn’t here,” she said and made it clear that she wanted his car gone sooner rather than later.
There was silence in the car as the two men drove down Highway 21 until Harry’s friend Serge asked why he had a yellow plastic bucket with a blue scrub brush and a bottle of Murphy oil soap rattling around inside it.
“No reason,” Harry said.
When the purple-hearted tower loomed on the horizon, Harry asked Serge if he knew anything about it. Serge said, “Not much. I know they call it ‘the Shrine of the Purple Lady.’ ” Serge slowed as they approached it, and at Harry’s request, they pulled over. Neither man got out of the car; they gaped at it through the windows. In the daylight it looked shabbier than it had in the dark, the paint chipped and peeling, a few small chunks of concrete littering the ground in front of it. Now Harry could see that the Christmas lights weren’t even hanging straight around the arch that encircled the big heart. But it was still impressive, the whole structure at least twelve feet tall, with cinder-block steps leading up on either side to the heart itself, a solid mass of concrete at least three feet across, painted a bright purple.
Harry said, “What does it mean? Who’s the Purple Lady?”
“I think she’s still alive. She’s got some cult or something. I think it has to do with UFOs.” Harry’s eyebrows went up as Serge went on. “She used to have services out here. There’s some kind of temple on the property, or at least that’s what I heard. I’ve never investigated, myself.” His voice dropped. “You know that Wiccan group on campus? They used to make pilgrimages out here a few years ago when they were more active, calling it a ‘place of power.’ I heard that they swore lightning bolts used to come out of the place.” He smiled as his voice went up to a normal volume. “I don’t think she liked the attention much. Just a crazy old hermit lady. The South is full of them.”
The fortune teller’s trailer was set farther back from the road than Harry remembered, which was good because his car had traveled a few yards into the front yard before stopping at an angle three feet from the front porch. He’d missed the oyster-shell driveway altogether and must have driven through the shallow storm ditch that lay between the grass and the highway. He didn’t remember the bounce at all, though it must have been enough to whack his head against the ceiling of the car.
Age had turned the once-white aluminum walls of the double-wide a light gray. It looked clean and reasonably well-kept, with a sturdy screened porch attached to the front. The roof of the trailer looked new, covered with shiny green shingles with black borders, unlike any roof Harry had seen, although it was’t something he paid much attention to in the normal course of things. The lot looked large, although maybe not so much by country standards. As he got out of the car, he could see that all the homes out this way were spaced widely apart. Across the highway was what looked like untended brush leading into deeper woods; a hundred feet or so south was another rusted trailer, this one a single-wide. The same distance in the opposite direction there was a small clapboard house, white with gray streaks of weather, which drew the eye downward, giving the impression the whole thing was slowly sinking into the ground. An old Ford truck whose wheels had long since been amputated sat in the yard on cinder blocks. There was no way to discern the truck’s original color; the metal was oxidized from its tailgate to the rims of its missing headlights. The whole area was depressing, but woodsy and beautiful at the same time; even the squalid housing was somehow picturesque. Harry thought if you had to be poor, this was better than in a city; there was air, a little room, and no terrible winter cold. You could at least grow your own tomatoes.
A decorative windmill stood on one border of the fortune teller’s property, wide silver fans turning grudgingly in the breeze. Nothing else separated her yard from that of her neighbors some fifty feet away; they lived in what Harry had heard called a “shotgun shack,” painted yellow with green trim. It had the same unusual shingles on the roof and another overly cute windmill in the front yard. Beyond it was a small, disreputable-looking business standing alone amid the broken pavement of a minuscule parking lot. It was impossible to see what it was called from this angle, and Harry couldn’t bring himself to care anyway.
“No flowers,” said Serge after he’d gotten out of the driver’s side of the car.
“What?”
“They’ve got a vegetable garden on the side.” Harry looked to where Serge was pointing and saw a brown rectangle of tended earth by the side of the house. “This time of year, people are growing stuff. People out here usually pretty the place up with flowers. See next door? Those azalea bushes must be really old to get that big.” Serge’s wife was very proud of her flowers; Harry knew that his friend was far more knowledgeable about them than his interest would dictate.
Harry left Serge standing by the driver’s door without answering. He walked to his own car, unsurprised to find it unlocked. He got in, turned the key, and was relieved that the engine started. He turned it off, got out, and walked around the car, inspecting the tires. None were flat, and he could see no other damage. “You can leave now,” Harry said, taking the bucket and its contents out of his friend’s car. “Thanks,” he added.
The woman who opened the door was beautiful in a frowsy, middle-aged way. She was plump and curvy, wearing something drapey and colorful, reds and yellows in a swirling pattern, and she smelled like honeysuckle.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m sorry.” She nodded as he stood on the little screened porch tacked to the front of her home. The pool of vomit by the door was gone, although Harry could see its damp ghost on the wood and there was a lingering noxious scent in the morning air. He asked if she had a hose. She pointed to the side of the trailer, and after leaving the bucket on the porch, he found it curled behind the small vegetable garden. He uncoiled the hose, then turned on the spigot. He pointed the nozzle away from himself and held it so the spray hit only grass until he got up the wooden steps. Then he brought the business end of the hose quickly around so that it splashed through the screen and rested it on the planks. He poured some Murphy’s into the bucket and picked the hose up again, filling the bucket with foamy, fragrant water. He got on his knees and began to scrub the dark patch on the wooden floor.
