I felt vaguely carsick as Willow careened wildly around sharp curves and spun in a never-ending series of long, looping spirals up one hill and down the next. Were we actually going round and round in circles, or did it just feel like that? When precisely, I wondered, did life stop being real? This was not real. This was fantasy. Excursions to see fabled drug users with hands like crystal balls, run-ins with undercover drug-enforcement agents, kids everywhere blowing their minds out on drugs in blatant disregard of everything that had ever been or ever would be … it was a bad dream. I wanted to wake up to a reality where I had a future that was something other than bleak.
“It’s right up here somewhere,” Willow said. “There’s a tree stump or a rock or something. Keep an eye out for it.”
So, I looked for tree stumps and rocks. I saw several. None, as far as I could tell, marked a hidden driveway.
“Would you rather be dead and know it, or alive and not know it?” I asked.
“I hereby ban morbid thoughts from my car.”
“That wasn’t morbid. That was philosophical.”
“I banned those two years ago.”
“You didn’t even have a license two years ago.”
“Whatever.”
“Who do you think you are, the thought police?”
“Mind control is a many-splendored thing. Shit, there it is!” Willow screeched on the brakes, but we still overshot the hidden dirt driveway by a good ten or fifteen feet. There was neither tree stump nor rock, but a silly cement garden gnome painted in various shades of neon pink, green, and orange.
Two Minutes Later
Nice place,” Willow said as we stepped out of the car.
A cedar-shake ranch house with bright purple shutters, its front lawn turned to waist-high weeds, sat alone amidst a sea of trees.
“Doesn’t look like anyone lives here,” I said.
“This is the place. Trust me.”
We trekked through the weeds and Willow gave the seafoam-colored front door a good knock.
“Told you,” I said when we failed to hear any signs of life.
“Oh, he’s here.” she knocked louder. “Hey! We know you’re in there!”
“Go away!” shouted someone from inside. I nearly pissed my pants.
“No!” Willow shouted back. “We need you to tell us our fortunes!”
“Forget it!” came the reply from the other side of the door.
“Just let us in,” Willow said.
The front door opened a crack. Long, tangled auburn hair and a matching beard concealed most of the face that peered out at us.
“Did the township send you here?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
The door opened a little wider. Pablo eyed us suspiciously.
“Hey,” he said. “I guess you can come in, but make sure you wipe your feet.”
“Cool,” Willow said. She pushed past me to get inside.
We stepped into a sort of living room. It was dark and dirty and it smelled funny. I didn’t know what the smell was, but I thought if someone had spent the past twenty years smoking marijuana their living room just might have this odor.
“So, who sent you?” Pablo asked. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see him better. The lack of hair-and-beard trimming made him look like the member of some fringe religious order or a serial killer. He had on a baby blue T-shirt that was too tight even though he was so thin. His green camo pants had been chopped off at about calf level, which might have given him a slightly beachcomber look, except that with the tight pastel shirt it made him look more like a half-hearted cross dresser.
“No one sent us,” Willow said. “My friend here didn’t believe you existed. So, we came here so I could prove her wrong.”
“Come to see Pablo, the freak, then?”
“You’re not a freak,” Willow lied. “You’re a legend.”
“Legend, freak, it’s all in how you look at things. Hang on, I’ve got something to show you. I’ll be right back. Have a seat.” Pablo ran out of the room.
“This is the part where he gets the chain saw,” I said.
“Have an open mind,” Willow said.
We tried to obey Pablo’s request, but there was no furniture in the room. Willow sat down cross-legged on a pillow on the floor. I did the same, but I couldn’t stay still. I kept imagining that fleas were biting my legs. At least, I thought I was imagining it.
Pablo returned to the room a few minutes later. He had something in his hand. It wasn’t a chain saw.
“See this?” he said. “It’s a Joe DiMaggio rookie baseball card.”
Pablo held up a badly worn and creased cardboard card. I squinted at it.
“It says Frank Burns, and he looks old. He doesn’t look like a rookie,” I said.
“You need glasses,” Pablo said.
“I have twenty-twenty vision. I was tested three months ago.”
“No, man, soul glasses. The kind that lets you see things as they should be seen. Who wants to see Frank Burns’ baseball card? Who’s Frank Burns? Now, Joe DiMaggio’s rookie card, in mint condition, that’s something. That’s awesome. You gotta learn to see things, Starburst.”
“Who’s Starburst?”
“You’re Starburst,” Willow explained.
“How’d I get to be Starburst?”
“It’s your soul name, man,” Pablo explained. “It’s your natural name.”
“I think I saw this episode of the Brady Bunch,” I said. “How is Starburst natural? It’s fruit-flavored candy made in a factory in Hackettstown. What’s that got to do with souls or nature?”
“You’re not wearing your soul glasses, Starburst. You’re seeing a candy, but what you should be seeing is a star in the sky exploding with energy, living out its life to the fullest in one giant, awesome, spectacular burst.”
“A supernova,” I said.
“Soul glasses, soul glasses,” Pablo reminded me. “Don’t get all technical and shit, use the natural names. Use the names that say what things are, like Starburst. That’s what life should be—a starburst. Once you’ve lived life, I mean, really experienced it, that’s it—you just explode like this brilliant fireball, explode with life. That way, there’s no down times, no sad and depressing shit. Once you’ve lived life, there isn’t any reason to go on living so you might as well just die.”
“Now that’s a morbid thought,” I said.
“Yeah,” Willow said, “but we’re not in the car anymore.”
“So, Willow says you do fortunes.”
Pablo made a flustered hand gesture. “No more of that,” he said. “That was long ago. I don’t do fortunes anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t be pushy, Scill, the guy said he doesn’t do them anymore.”
“No, it’s okay,” Pablo said. “You wanna know why I don’t tell fortunes anymore? See, people were always coming up here and asking me things, real specific things lots of times. Well, I’d look in my hands, and my hands don’t lie, and I’d tell them what I saw there. Sometimes people were cool with it, or maybe they didn’t like what I saw but they didn’t, like, bug out or shit, but then, see, there were these other folks who would listen to what I said and take it all to heart—I mean real literal, no soul glasses in sight—and worse than that, they wanted what I said to happen, like, right away. So, like, I would look in my hands, and I would tell this guy that he was gonna be taking a trip of some kind and in his life there would be a beautiful woman, and he would come back to me the next week and ask how come he wasn’t in the Bahamas with a Playboy Playmate, and I would have to say, ‘look, dude, I just tell you what I see there, but I can’t tell you when it will come true or how exactly it will work out.’ I mean, it could be that the trip is some spiritual journey and the beautiful woman could mean that he had this cute daughter or it’s his mother or something. Anyway, I couldn’t deal with all those bugged-out people. What a pain in the ass. It was, like, totally negative karma. So I don’t
do fortunes anymore.”
“But they still work, right?” I asked. “I mean, your hands.”
“Sure, but don’t be looking for anything from me, ’kay?”
“What if we promised not to come back here?” Willow asked. “What if we told you we weren’t gonna bug out, no matter what you said and how it turned out? What if we just listened to what you said and that was all?”
“See, but you won’t. You’ll come back here in a week ragging on me, and I just can’t take that. I can’t take people ragging on me.”
“We won’t. We promise,” I said. “We’ll even pay you if you want.”
Pablo seemed to consider the request.
“Couldn’t you just look at your hands and see that if you gave our fortunes we wouldn’t come back to harass you?” I asked.
“Man, you don’t know shit about telling fortunes. It’s never that specific, and you can’t really request what you’re going to see. The hands show you what they want you to see.”
“Can’t you just do it for us?” Willow asked. “My friend here has got a bad case of life sucksism going on. It would be good for her to see a little bright light, see that her life won’t always be miserable.”
“See, that’s what I mean,” Pablo said. “You want to see bright light, but what if I look and all there is is darkness? You’re gonna be pissed at me.”
“It can’t really get any worse than it is now,” I said.
“You should never say things like that,” Pablo said. “Look, if it’s really that bad, I’ll do your fortune.”
Pablo held his palms face-up next to each other, out in front of him like he was holding an invisible book. He cleared his throat a few times, then gazed into his hands. He seemed to be in a trance of some kind. I looked over at Willow. She shrugged. After a minute or so, he looked up, shook his head a bit as if to shake off the trance, then looked at me.
“Okay, Starburst, here you go. Right now it seems you’re pretty confused. You have questions about your place in the world. I cannot answer those questions—only you can figure that out. Future-wise, I see a lot of changes in store for you. You are going to mature and grow up a lot, soon. Big changes. You’ll have a long and healthy life, but you’ll long for your childhood days and always feel that you weren’t a kid for long enough. You’d like to do it all over again, maybe do it differently.”
“That’s it?” I said. “No sports car in my future? No coming into large sums of money? No great career success?”
“Look, maybe that will happen. I told you, I just see what the hands will me to see. Usually it’s pretty vague. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“My turn,” Willow said.
“No, I just did Starburst’s as a favor because she was so upset.”
“I’m upset too. Look, if you knew what my parents were like, you would feel so sorry for me that you would read my fortune every day for a week just to try to make it up to me.”
“No,” Pablo said. “I feel pretty strongly about this ‘no fortunes’ rule. Starburst had a good fortune, and she isn’t even happy with it.”
“Please,” Willow said.
Pablo sighed and went through the whole trance routine again. When he looked up from his palms he was frowning.
“See, my hands agree with me. No more fortunes.”
“That’s not fair,” Willow said. “You’re not even going to tell me what you saw?”
“I didn’t see much of anything,” Pablo said. “It was all murky and hazy. I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means Willow’s future is not determined yet. That’s why you couldn’t see it,” I said. “It depends on the choices she makes in life.”
“Ooh, very mystical,” Willow said in a mocking voice. “I think he’s just bullshitting us. He’s too worried I’ll get mad at him or something.”
“Hell hath no fury,” I muttered.
“Maybe you two should just go,” Pablo said. “You’re bringing me down.”
“We’re bringing you down?” Willow said.
“You just show up here without even being invited and start bugging me. You didn’t even bring me an offering or anything. The least you could have done was bring a tray of brownies.”
“Next time,” I suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” Pablo said. “But no more fortunes. I’m through with fortunes. I gave my last fortune today.”
We left the house and stood in the front yard, a meager amount of sunlight filtering down through the tall evergreens.
“Can you believe that guy?” Willow said. “What a flake.”
“I kind of liked him,” I said.
Sherman and Pablo had something in common. They could both see the future. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, Sherman could see the whole ugly mess of the Civil War. The endless marches, the bloody battles, the massive death toll.
Prescient though he was, Sherman shared Pablo’s inability to pin down the specifics. He never saw the role that he would play in the whole ugly affair. The way his attempt to choke the life out of the South would back him into a corner from which there was only one way out—the total war that he, one of the Union generals most sympathetic to the South, would exact upon the Confederacy. The way he would, with an unprecedented show of force, leave a path of destruction in his wake that is well-remembered to the present day. He had only a vague inkling of the hell that he would bring.
I lacked the foresight of either Pablo or Sherman. Yeah, I knew things weren’t going to be smooth sailing, but I didn’t have a clue just how rough and choppy the waters were going to get.
July
Andrea made the attendant at the concession stand give her popcorn three extra squirts of liquid butter, in case the first one wasn’t enough to clog all of her arteries. She offered some of her now-soggy kernels to me as we waited for the boys to get back from buying the tickets, but I turned her down, content to watch her shove a handful of popcorn into her mouth.
The double date had been one of Andrea’s brainstorms. When she suggested it, I spent a moment floating on clouds of pure heaven until I realized that the whole concept of a double date meant that we would both need to show up boy in tow. As much as I hated the idea of Andrea sharing her affections with a human being other than me, there was a bigger dilemma. I needed a date.
The most obvious choice was Randy, the subject of a whole shitload of confused heterosexual impulses, dark, squirmy animal-instinct Randy. The thought of him conjured up cramped and sticky back-of-the-car sex and acts of mutual desperation on shabby basement sofas. It seemed rather ridiculous to drag something as dank and dirty as Randy into something as innocent seeming as a double date, even if this was a double date with Skank of the Class Andrea. Were there orgiastic undertones to the whole double date thing? I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure, and once again I was in the position of feeling like a complete moron when it came to high school social behavior.
I decided there was no way I could bring Randy. At no time during our long and tortured relationship had Randy and I shared anything that could be construed as a date in the traditional sense. Randy just didn’t fit into this equation in any logical way.
I suddenly realized that I didn’t really know any guys. I had managed, through my ambiguous sexual identity, to not attract the attention of any male classmates. Nor had I ever gone out of my way to win the heart of a boy. Randy had happened purely on accident and the jury was still out as to whether it was fortuitous or ill-fated, though something told me no future Shakespeare would be telling our story in iambic pentameter (and there, Mrs. Costas, is proof that I did learn something in Freshman English).
Bailing out of this date was out of the question. I considered calling Willow. Willow knew lots of people. She could probably hook me up with someone. But Willow had been strange about Andrea and she wouldn’t like the idea of me going on a double date with her, would probably refuse to help me. So I came back to Randy, who was after all a college boy,
who must have lots of male friends that he probably wouldn’t want to fix me up with considering our present relationship. Shit.
Then, of course, I remembered Bill, pathetic nerdy boy, building a bomb in his basement, undermining the government. Okay, he was a freak, but I was hardly much better. What’s more, he was likely desperate for female companionship and would probably have no problem accompanying me on this stupid double date.
“Hi, Bill, this is Scilla. I, um, talked to you not too long ago. Randy’s friend.”
“Have you been interrogated by the FBI yet?”
“No. Um, I was wondering if you wanted to go out, on a double date?”
“Sure.”
It was the first time I’d ever asked anyone out on a date. I couldn’t believe how easy it was.
The movie was one of those romantic comedies that are never actually funny. I laughed in all the wrong parts. A few times, Andrea, who I’d positioned myself next to, turned to give me a puzzled look, and I let out a few more inappropriate giggles just so I could glimpse her face in the darkened movie theater. Bill actually made a move to hold my hand during the movie, and I put up with it for a while until the clamminess really started to get to me.
Dessert was better. For one thing, it was in a well-lit diner, and I got to stare at Andrea from across the table. There was no sight more heavenly than watching Andrea devour a brownie sundae oozing with gooey hot fudge and caramel and doused in whipped cream.
Andrea had chosen to bring Greg, a pseudo-jock, as her date. Greg, who opted for soccer rather than the more traditional football, thought very highly of himself, and throughout dessert insisted on regaling us with stories of how his summer training was going.
“So then coach had us run all the way from school down to 183 and back, and then after all that we had to go hit the weight room, and—”
“Did you read about that high school football coach in Arkansas who got fired after that kid died at practice?” Bill asked.
“That kid was an idiot,” Greg said. “Everyone knows you’ve got to make sure you drink enough water.”
Ferocity Summer Page 8
