Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

“Whatever,” he said.

“Pay up front to Chester there before y’all come in,” said Ruby, turning to go back into the trailer. “Don’t want to get stiffed if y’all don’t like what I tell you.”

“Does that ever happen?” Kate asked as Bobby divested himself of a twenty-dollar bill, passed it to an appreciative Chester and motioned for me to follow them.

“From time to time,” Ruby answered over her shoulder.

The inside of the trailer reeked, of course, of cigarettes. It smelled like every gas station and bowling alley I’d ever been in, an odor so strong that years later, when I got old enough to start going to bars and clubs and other places where large numbers of smokers congregated, I would remember Ruby’s trailer. Smell, Allie once told me, is more closely linked with memory than any other sense. I believed her because of the way every puff of smoke reminded me of that afternoon at the flea market, and the way every one made me shiver.

But that day, the intense aroma of tobacco was nothing more than a stink trapped inside a camper trailer that had probably cost its original owner a great deal of money. Ruby and Chester, I felt, not so much. The interior was as dated as the outside, with a thick shag carpet that had seized and held every unpleasant odor that ever passed over it. I had only the briefest opportunity to observe the paisley upholstery before Ruby drew shut the blackout curtains on the sunny side of the trailer and plunged us into a darkness that she replaced moments later with a sickly light dangling over what passed for a kitchen table. She motioned for us to sit down.

“How’s she going to read our palms if she can’t see them?” Bobby whispered to me.

If Ruby heard him, she gave no indication. She stubbed her cigarette out in a little gold foil ashtray, then took Kate’s hand and flipped it over to expose her palm. “What’s your name, sugar?”

“You can’t tell?” Bobby quipped, prompting an irritated scowl from Kate.

“I’m Kate,” she said, turning back to Ruby.

“Pleasure to meet you, Kate,” Ruby said. “You ever had your fortune told?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, here’s how it works; I’m going to read your palm, but I’m going to feel your energy, too. I studied palm reading with the Gypsies—real, honest-to-God gypsies—but I come by my other talents naturally.”

“Other talents?” Bobby asked. I could hear the raised eyebrow in his voice.

“I’m also a psychic.”

“Oh. I see.”

“No,” Ruby said, “ I see.” She looked down at Kate’s palm and said, “Let’s take a look at what you got here, sweetie.”

Kate, she divined, hadn’t had an easy life (true, but highly generalized). But she’d managed to do well for herself within its confines, and her lifeline showed her avoiding the mistakes of her parents (highly generalized, future prediction impossible to disprove at the present time). She stood on the cusp of a major life change (like every other seventeen-year-old girl in America). She may have already met the man she would marry, and she would marry him soon. Not soon as in during the school year, but within a relatively short time after graduation.

Kate smiled. She liked this.

Now Ruby took Bobby’s hand. She grimaced then, like she’d suddenly experienced a bad cramp. She let his upturned hand fall to the table as she made a fist and coughed into it. We listened to her scrawny body struggle to expel the black tar from her lungs, struggle with a force so pronounced it seemed almost cartoonish.

“You okay, ma’am?” Bobby asked.

At last, she spoke again. “Don’t join the Army,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t join the Army,” she said again. “You’ve been thinking about it. Don’t do it. Bad idea. Go to college and get a desk job.”

She meant this as an ominous warning, I saw, an attempt to wipe that wry, this-is-bullshit grin off his face. It failed. Bobby raised one eyebrow and said, “O-kay.”

“I’m serious,” Ruby said. “You’ll die.”

“I don’t want to die, so… okay, no Army.”

The reading proceeded. He would also get married soon, Ruby predicted. He came from privilege, but he’d experienced his share of hardship. He would find peace in marriage, and he hungered for that above all else: peace. Life without worry, without drama, the simple life of a man who works, who pays his bills and who has not the slightest difficulty falling asleep at night. This would provide a welcome change from what he had experienced in the past, because while many words applied to his life, peaceful didn’t number among them. He suffered a great deal of inner turmoil, explosive amounts of it. He sought peace, and he would find it if he made the right choices.

Bobby’s expression didn’t waver for the duration of his reading. As soon as Ruby stopped to draw a breath, he pulled his hand away and dragged me forward, standing up and depositing me in his seat in one graceful motion.

“Read his,” he said. “Can you read hairy palms?”

“Bobby!” Kate admonished.

My face burned, but Bobby just laughed and smacked me on the back right in between my shoulder blades.

“We tried to get a Ouija board to tell us when he was finally going to get laid, but the damn thing clammed up, so now we need a psychic.”

Ruby took my hand. Her palms surprised me with a softness I didn’t expect from that leathery skin, and the impact of expectation against reality momentarily prevented me from speaking.

But before I could say anything, she dropped—no, threw —my hand on the table. Her eyes widened as she stared down at it like it held a fistful of rattlesnakes. I stared down at it, too, but seeing no rattlesnakes, I looked back up.

Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. When she finally spoke, she blurted, “Don’t get married. Live alone always.”

“Why?” I asked, confused.

Ruby turned her head from one side to the other, faded green eyes narrowing as she stared into my face. She looked shocked, bewildered. Scared.

Terrified.

She pushed her chair back and leapt to her feet, shaking her head vehemently. She jammed a hand into her back pocked and came out with a wad of cash. She withdrew a single twenty-dollar bill and threw it on the table in front of me.

“I can’t give you a reading,” she said. “So there’s your money back. Your brother and his girlfriend are on the house.”

“I want you to read his palm,” Bobby complained. “Go on, do him like you did us.”

But she continued shaking her head. She backed away from the little table until the stove stopped her. Unable to retreat further, she held up both hands.

“No,” she said. “This session’s over. Ma’am, those cassettes are on the house, too, y’all just go on now.”

“Man, this is some bullshit,” Bobby said.

“Y’all go on.” She grabbed a pack of cigarettes—Kings, like Chester—and withdrew one. As she tried to light it, I noticed her hands were shaking.

“Let’s go,” Kate said softly. “We got our money back.”

“Go on!” Ruby snapped.

Confused and unsure of what to make of all this, I rose from the table and stumbled towards the door. Kate grabbed Bobby and shoved him after me.

“Man, I can’t believe this…”

Kate cut him off. “Will you please shut up and get out of this lady’s trailer like she asked?”

Chester blinked at us as we descended the metal steps to the ground, but he didn’t say anything about the tapes in Kate’s hands. Maybe he heard, I thought. Then again, maybe he doesn’t need to hear; maybe he’s psychic, too.

I didn’t understand what had happened, and I didn’t get time to think. Kate pushed Bobby away from the table and the trailer, and Bobby pushed me. We made it about ten steps before Ruby threw open the door and called out to me.