by Lila Shaara
“What name are you afraid that people will call you?” said Dusty.
“Egomaniac,” Harry said. “Like I have to go slumming to find someone who’ll think I’m hot shit because I’m who I am and she’s a lowly waitress. I mean, cook. She’s not actually a waitress.”
“Is it true? Does she make you feel like you’re hot sh—hot stuff?”
“No. Actually, she’s a lot smarter than me, at least about some things.” Harry looked at the table, embarrassed to meet his son’s cynical gaze. “But maybe I’m just telling myself that because it makes me feel better. You don’t always know your own motives for things, you know.”
“Maybe you just like her,” Dusty said. Harry looked up and saw that his son’s gaze wasn’t cynical at all.
16
THE HERMIT
Warnings and wisdom. The Seeker finds a spiritual guide
Harry delivered Dusty to the Orlando-bound bus on Sunday afternoon. The first thing he did after he got back home was shave off his beard. Dusty had told him that “a lot of girls don’t like dudes to be all hairy and sh—stuff.” He thought of it as a sort of sacrifice, an irrational form of atonement for Maggie’s disappointment in him. The thought that she might no longer want his company on her walks bothered him enough to keep sleep even further away than usual. He was aware that part of his worry was nonsensical; she didn’t know he’d essentially denied her when she was in the Laundromat with the two girls. Still, it ate at him; friends didn’t pretend not to know each other.
He called her house after shaving to find out when she was going for a walk the following day. Josie answered the phone. When he asked for Maggie, she hesitated; Harry had the impression that she was about to tell him Maggie wasn’t home. But in a second, Maggie’s voice replaced Josie’s.
“Are you mad at me?” Harry said.
There was a pause. “No.”
“Good. Dusty was here this weekend and I couldn’t get out for a walk. Are you going tomorrow?”
“She’s not here,” Josie said as she let him in the door the next afternoon, and Harry could tell at once that she was drunk. She didn’t stink of it, exactly, but there was an odor, and he imagined that, if he could see her aura, it would be syrupy and brown, the color of bourbon.
“Can I wait for her?” he said, trying to psychically push his way in. “I told her I’d pick her up. Where is she?”
Josie looked confused and moved back from the door, which Harry took to be a gesture of welcome. She shook her head and said, “She’s just out somewhere. Errand. She’ll be back. Nobody is as good as their word as Maggie.” Her bleary gaze focused on him. “You’re not as ugly without all that hair on your face.”
“Thanks,” Harry said. He looked around for a glass or a bottle but saw nothing. She has it hidden, he thought. She’s been taking sips and putting it back each time, in case Maggie comes home. As if Maggie wouldn’t be able to tell that she’d been drinking. Poor Josie. Poor Maggie. Then Harry thought, Maybe I should go to an AA meeting, just once. Check it out.
Josie collapsed onto the sofa, making old springs chirp as her body caused them to bounce slightly. He sat down in a spindly chair opposite her, wanting to keep his distance because she seemed so hypersexual. He didn’t know why he found her slightly repulsive, but he had an idea that she felt the same way about him. The phone rang, and Josie answered it as though he wasn’t there. The conversation was brief, Josie telling someone else that Maggie wasn’t available. She didn’t reassure the caller that she’d be back soon.
As soon as the call was over, Josie burped and then said, “You pay someone to do your taxes?”
“What? Er, yes. Why? Do you need me to recommend a good CPA?”
Josie waved an irritated hand. “No. I was afraid you’d make Maggie do ’em for you. Everyone around here, they get Maggie to do their taxes. I keep telling her, she should charge. How much do you pay?”
“I don’t remember. Sorry. I could find out, if you really want to know.”
She looked mad at him, as if he’d said something stupid. “It won’t matter. She won’t charge anything. Everyone wants to know their lottery numbers, too. Maggie hates it. Calls it the poverty tax. So I don’t give ’em out. If they don’t hit, people get awful mad anyway. It’s like Baby. She doesn’t charge enough at the salon either. Doesn’t charge some folks at all. Miss Tokay. Maggie, of course. At least she’s smart enough to do her own taxes. Sometimes she even helps Maggie out. When there’s too many forms to do. Poor Baby hates that salon. But she’s stuck with it. Two granddaughters to raise. What the hell’s she gonna do? We’re all stuck, one way or another.” She burped again and said, “I take care of her.”
“Maggie or Miss Baby?”
She snorted with irritation. “Maggie, of course. She’s not real savvy, as you folks would say.” Harry wasn’t sure which group of folks she was referring to this time: academics or Yankees or something else. “I watch out for her. Always have. I was more of a mom to her than Marlene. Except for when Marlene lived next to the farm. With that man. Can’t remember his name now. Wait. Jimmy, Maggie’s daddy. That was only for a couple of years. Then she came back to me.” The phone rang again, and Josie was just as brisk with this caller as she’d been with the last one. “She can’t do it now. She’s working. You know.” A pause. “I’ll tell her.”
She hung up and then leaned over, opening a shallow drawer in the coffee table. She pulled out a pad of paper with lines; Harry realized that it was the kind waiters use in restaurants to record and add up a bill. Then she picked up a chewed-looking paperback book from the end table and used it as a lap desk. She wrote something on the pad; Harry tried to read Josie’s curly handwriting upside down with no luck. She tore the paper off and put it on the end table. She replaced the pad and pen in the drawer.
“Maggie’s popular,” said Harry.
Josie’s eyes squinted at him; her mouth squinted as well. “Don’t you go thinking like that.”
No, that kind of thinking fits you better, he thought. Harry figured that Maggie had to earn more than Josie did, even if it wasn’t much. He’d seen her doing the laundry, and he suspected that she did more of the housekeeping. He said, “It seems to me that she takes care of you.”
Josie threw the book at him, the front cover peeling off and fluttering to the floor as it became airborne. He was so surprised he didn’t have time to duck, and it hit him in the middle of the chest. It didn’t hurt much, but his heart was pounding with shock.
“Hey!”
“You’re not listening,” she said. “It’s a responsibility. Sacred, even.”
It was Harry’s turn to want to throw something. He said, more loudly than he liked, “You act like you care so much about her, but you talk like she’s retarded, just like Shawntelle does. There’s nothing wrong with her at all.”
“I know there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s my baby, and she’s so beautiful. I know you’re going to break her heart, and I’ll have to kill you, and then I’ll go to jail, and there will be no one to take care of her anymore, because Baby has enough to deal with, and Miss Tokay isn’t up to taking care of anybody, and you’re not going to do it because all you want to do is break her heart.”
Harry told himself that Josie had had patience with him when he’d shown up drunk at her home in the middle of the night, so he was bound by karmic law to return the favor. He picked up the book, whose pages were orange with age. It was a copy of the I Ching, and it was heavy. “It’s not like that.”
Josie looked at him with so much anger that he feared another projectile, but nothing seemed to be close enough to her hand. He tightened his grip on the fat book.
“You are such an idiot, as well as an asshole,” she said. “Asshole,” she repeated, looking at the floor, and Harry had an idea that she wasn’t drunk enough to suit herself, and she started crying.
The door opened and Maggie walked in, dressed the way she always was, in jeans and a T-shirt, although the
T-shirt had brown and black smudges on it. He’d never seen her anything but clean. She took in the situation in a moment, and Harry was embarrassed at his relief. She sat down next to Josie and put an arm around her shoulder. Josie was sobbing, her hands over her face, making soft glugging sounds. Harry’s pity was mixed with an embarrassment that made him feel as if his whole body was being rubbed raw. Maggie gave Josie a small shake, saying in her ear, “Come on, let’s get you to bed. Come on now, come on.” She worked Josie up and off the sofa, and alternately pushed and guided the older woman to the hallway. Harry stood and shifted from foot to foot, thinking, What do I do now? He sat down again and waited.
It was only about ten minutes, though it seemed longer to Harry, alternating between standing and looking out the living room window and sitting on the lumpy couch or on the rickety chair. Once he got up and got himself a glass of water, almost knocking a plate loose from the stack of dirty dishes on the counter. It was heading for the floor; Harry tried to catch it but succeeded only in knocking it into the sink. It didn’t break, for which he was grateful, but the noise had been fearsome. He really didn’t want to wake Josie up, if she had passed out. He had just placed the plate carefully back on the pile when Maggie emerged from the hallway. She’d changed her clothes; the jeans were slightly darker, and her T-shirt was a different color and free from stains. She sighed as she saw Harry, the dark patches of skin under her eyes darker than usual. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll take care of this mess. You want something to eat?”
She washed the dishes in silence, her movements fast and beautiful. Harry thought her hands looked like they were painting something in the water, or making a sculpture of the clean dishes in the dish drainer. Like a dance, he thought. Like theater. She was done in a few minutes and then made them each an omelet. Harry thought he could watch her work all night.
“Do you read cards as well?” He was halfway through the omelet. He was deliberately taking his time. It was very good.
“Of course. Palms, too. Horoscopes. I learned at my mother’s knee. And at Josie’s.”
“I remember now. Josie told me. Your mother was a fortune teller, too.”
“It’s the family business.”
“Do you believe in any of it?”
She took another bite of her omelet, which was noticeably smaller than his. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”
“Not a yes or no?”
“If I have to do that, I’d say yes. But with the cards, you’re not exactly predicting the future. It’s more like you’re looking at probabilities.” She ate a last bite and looked up. “You want a reading?”
Harry thought about it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything about the future, then was amused at himself for even that small moment of belief. “Sure,” he said. “What’s the charge?”
She smiled a little, looking so weary that Harry regretted letting her cook for him, letting her clean up the kitchen and put her sodden relative to bed all by herself. He was about to tell her that he’d changed his mind, that she didn’t have to do anything else for him tonight, but she said, “No charge.” Her eyes sharpened on him, and she added, “Sorry, I was so preoccupied, I didn’t notice at once. You shaved off your beard.” Harry had to force himself not to pull back, uncomfortable that she was looking so closely at his face. She said, “You have a good chin,” and the urge to pull away left him.
She got up, went to the desk in the corner of the living room, opened a drawer, and pulled out a carved wooden box. She opened the lid and lifted a small bundle wrapped in black cloth. She brought the bundle to the table and sat down. Harry sat opposite her. She unfolded the fabric, revealing a large deck of cards.
“I have my own spread,” she said, folding the square of fabric and putting it aside. She picked up the deck with her right hand. “The way I lay out the cards.”
“I know what a spread is,” Harry said. “Until I was eleven years old, I lived in a series of communes with my hippie parents.”
“Oh, my. What happened when you were eleven?”
“Social Services cracked down on weirdos that year, and Lawrence and I went into foster care. There was some concern in the ‘community’ that my parents and their friends were doing drugs and having too much sex. They were certainly having a good time, but I’m not sure we suffered much from it.”
Maggie placed the oversize deck of cards on the table. “How long before they got you back?”
“They didn’t.”
“What?”
“They visited every few months. Once our foster parents realized that they weren’t going to spirit us away, they even let us visit their camp a few times, until we came back once smelling of pot. We hadn’t been given any, but it was all around. My foster mother threw away the clothes we were wearing.” Harry pointed at the fat Tarot deck. “Our foster parents were fundamentalists. Lawrence and I went to church twice a week for six years. We went to Bible camps and tent meetings and miracle services. I send the Wileys a card every Christmas, but I haven’t been back in their house since I went to college, nor did I set foot in a church again till I did research for my last book. Exorcising some demons, although Bernie and May Wiley would hate for me to put it that way.” He pointed at the cards again. “They called those the ‘Devil’s Picture Book.’ All divination is satanic to them.” Maggie picked up the big deck. Harry continued, “They weren’t badly intentioned, just terrified of everything they didn’t already know.”
He realized he had no idea how she was going to react to any of his story—offended, angry, sympathetic. All she said was “The universe is big. People are small.” She broke the deck into two roughly equal halves. “Some people want their god to be as little as they are.” She started shuffling. Her handling of the cards was flawless, and he told her she could have a career in Las Vegas. She said, “Uncle Dunc told me never to gamble. He said the house always wins.”
“Uncle Dunk?”
“Duncan Dupree. Josie’s late husband.” She cut the deck again and said, “Where are your parents now? Your flesh-and-blood ones?”
“Dead.” At her look, he went on. “They took too many quaaludes and camped out in the Rockies in December. They died of exposure.” He smiled, feeling his dry lips catch on his teeth; not enough spit. “They died happy, in their sleep.”
“Oh, Harry.” Her face was so sweet he thought he might have to look anywhere else. “How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Dusty’s age,” she said, then shuffled the deck again.
Harry was never to remember the reading with any precision, although he tried to re-create it several times. It was dreamlike, as were the images on the cards. Their names meant nothing to him: the four of cups, the Hanged Man, the ten of wands. His childhood should have prepared him for some of this, he thought. He knew all the key words of astrology, which Maggie assured him was related to these cards, and a woman who’d lived in the commune with his parents had read palms. His life line, he remembered, was supposed to be long and jagged, and he remembered her telling him that he would die twice, although not literally.
Maggie told him he needed to ask a question, something that could be resolved in a few weeks and that didn’t require a simple yes or no answer. Harry couldn’t think of a specific question, so she suggested that he ask about the future in a general way. She shuffled the deck, the cards flowing between her fingers like a bright, colorful liquid, and he was thankful that she hadn’t made him do it, as they were much larger than normal playing cards and he imagined them spurting awkwardly from his hands and spraying all over the living room. She laid the shuffled deck in front of him. “Think your question into the cards as you cut the deck. Keep the time frame manageable, a few weeks or months.”
He actually tried to do it, to think about his anxieties about the near future, and the separate, caretaker part of his mind found this funny. She made him cut the deck, then picked it up and started taking cards from the top, laying the
m one by one in a line in front of her. There were a few with terrible imagery: a red demon holding a man and woman on leashes, beggars freezing to death outside a stained-glass window, a giant roulette wheel with hapless angels falling to their deaths. Although maybe these weren’t the actual meanings; maybe there was a Rorschach quality to them, and the reading told him more about Maggie’s psyche than his own. Likely, he thought. But still, he couldn’t help the intensity of his attention.
“Lots of loss in the past,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Deception, too. Violence. Bad luck.”
Harry was silent.
“See this card?” She pointed to an image of a caped figure hunched with sorrow over three spilled goblets.
“He looks pretty depressed.”
“Yes, and he’s looking at the spilled cups, but notice he’s ignoring the ones behind him that aren’t spilled. That’s you. You’ve suffered a lot, but you haven’t paid enough attention to the good things that are still there. Love, other things of beauty in your life.”
“Huh,” Harry said. He pointed to someone hanging upside down from a cross. “That looks bad.”
“Actually, it isn’t. That’s you now. You’re learning something, waiting. Allowing things to unfold instead of forcing them.”
“I got the Death card. That can’t be good. And it’s upside down. Yippee.”
“It’s hard to make it a happy card, but it’s usually not literal. Reversed it tends to mean you’re stuck repeating the same mistakes over and over. But these are your fears, not necessarily what’s going to happen. You have a lot more control over your life than you think.” She looked over the spread, her chin in her cupped palm. “You’re resisting a number of changes and making certain decisions. But you’ve got lots of choices.” She pointed at a number of the cards as though Harry could interpret these as choices. He tried to look intelligent but had already forgotten what she’d said most of them meant. “Some kind of trip. Possible success, but you’ve got to make some decisions first. There are some people around you who aren’t truthful, and some are abusing their power. Something in your professional life is going to surprise you.”
