Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

Hucksters and harlots never honestly meant anything was free. Having been a little of both in her time, Polly knew “free” just opened the bargaining. She settled into a rickety captain’s chair.

Crimson fluttered, cheap jewelry jangled, and the woman shuffled the oversized cards with the ease of long practice. Grubby things, told through her fingers many times, the corners were dog-eared and the edges worn soft. Polly cut the deck. With a theatrical flourish, the reader began dealing.

Tarot cards depicted hanged men, hearts pierced by swords, priestesses, forts, golden goblets, astrological signs, wands, Jungian archetypes, numbers, and a thousand other symbols cobbled together in a mishmash of the world’s myths and religions, a dim sum of the spiritual, psychic, and psychological worlds.

Candle flames igniting the colors, the cards kaleidoscoped down with hypnotic speed. Fabric, paper, dye, paint, and uncertain light confused the eye. The familiar pattern of staff and cross seemed to rise up from the designs on the tablecloth.

“The Celtic Cross,” the reader said. Her voice was no longer accented. France had been replaced by the echo of someplace cold, the northern Midwest or upstate New York. Fingers flying over the filthy bits of cardboard, long acrylic nails creating colorful exclamation points, words began to pour out flat and fast. Like a third grader terrified of forgetting her lines, Polly thought.

But these weren’t the words of a child. Repelled and fascinated, Polly moved closer to hear the hushed rapid-fire monologue. An errant thought sparked: in his sleep, had Hamlet’s father leaned just so, anxious to receive the poison in his ear?

Paralyzed, she listened as the reader told her of real things, secret things: the abortion Polly had seven hours before the high school prom, one of her stepfathers watching her through a hole he’d drilled in the bathroom wall, the student-aid counselor she’d seduced to get a full scholarship her freshman year at Tulane, Gracie at eight months rolling off the bed and Polly living in terror she’d grow up brain damaged.

As suddenly as it had begun, the outpouring stopped. The woman pursed her lips, the lipstick so heavy it ran in bloody feathers up wrinkles, and studied the cards lying between them on the table.

Around the edges of Polly’s consciousness, like dancers around a fire, thoughts came in and out of the light: of knocking the cards to the ground, of rising and running, calling the police.

The reader pushed her face nearer to the cards, and Polly saw the white roots under the Lady Clairol-red hair. Without relaxing her lipsticked mouth, she began to speak in a Halloween-like moan. “You are mired in deceit. Lies grow up around you in choking vines. Your children are threatened. Your life hangs by a frayed rope. Old evil has taken root and begun to grow.”

Her eyes, heavy with mascara, narrowed in the fleshy face. She pressed her bulk across the small table, so close Polly could smell cigarettes and alcohol. A hand bearing a burden of dime store rings shot out; acrylic nails dug hard into the skin of Polly’s forearm.

“Your husband is not who you think he is,” the woman hissed. “You will kill him.”

Polly tried to jerk free. Acrylic talons dug deeper. The woman shoved her nose within inches of Polly’s.

“Your husband will die at your hands.”

For a short eternity, Polly stared into the reader’s face. Drugstore foundation, showing orange in the strange light of dusk, caked in the wrinkles. The black-rimmed eyes were rheumy, the whites yellowed with age and abuse. The cloying stench of despair rolled off her, a mental levee breached, poison waters flooding out.

“No,” Polly managed finally. Finding strength in the sound of her own voice, she yanked her arm free, leaving pieces of her flesh beneath the Woman in Red’s fingernails. Standing so fast her chair toppled over, she backed from the table.

“Open your eyes,” the beast was saying. “Open your eyes.”

Polly fumbled in her purse, pulled out three twenties, and threw them on the table.

“The reading is free,” said the beast, but she eyed the money greedily.

“Nothing is free,” Polly whispered. She ran to the corner, turned, and walked rapidly down the shadowed lane between the park and a row of shops.

She would have cut through the garden, but it was locked at sundown. At a side gate a young woman, hands clutching the wrought iron bars, gazed into the garden. As Polly neared, she turned and looked at her. “Cats,” she said. “Everywhere.”

Polly saw only the cockroaches. They lived like kings on the crowds’ droppings. A nauseating clot of the insects fled from around the girl’s sandal-clad feet. She didn’t seem to notice.

Or she didn’t mind.

“What are all the cats doing?” she demanded of Polly.

Polly stepped up beside her and looked into the fenced garden. A spangling of tiny white lights on the trees deepened rather than illuminated the shadows beneath. Pale concrete paths caught the lights and glowed. Into this almost colorless dreamscape had come at least a dozen cats: grey tigers with long legs, short fur, and languid attitudes. They bathed. They stretched. They napped with half-open eyes. They stared without blinking. Safe behind the wrought iron fence, they preened with studied indifference.

Polly looked at them, and they looked back through her. “I don’t know,” she said to the girl. “I don’t know what they are doing.”

“Probably waiting to kill something,” the girl said darkly.

Polly fled.

The story of the tarot reading, as Polly told it over dinner, was funny and silly, the scary parts exaggerated for comic effect. Emma and Gracie took up the tale and predicted even direr events.

Their laughter was torture, eating was torture. Peas, bread, even the mashed potatoes stuck in Marshall ’s throat. He worked to get them down. A snake swallowing, swallowing, swallowing a rat down the length of its body. A rat in his throat, not clawing, not fighting, but alive; he could feel it swell against his esophagus as if it struggled to breathe.

“Don’t.”

Marshall had spoken aloud. Conversation around the table stopped. Three sets of eyes looked at him: Emma, Gracie, Polly. They’d been a family for only a few months. It had started after they got back from Venice. It had come into the house. Now, somehow, it was reaching out, touching Polly. “Jesus, no,” he murmured.

“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity,” Gracie said. “I read that somewhere.”

“Uh oh,” Emma joined in. “Tell us if you start hearing voices.”

“Especially in dog language. Who was that guy whose dog told him to kill people?”

“Sam,” Emma said.

“Son of Sam,” Marshall corrected. Too abrupt. Too loud. Startled into silence, Emma, Gracie, and Polly stared at him.

“Neither Sam, nor his son, nor his son’s dog are welcome at our dinner table,” Polly said, shooing away the unpleasant silence with the ease of a born hostess. With the tip of the serving spoon, she scooped up three peas and put them on her younger daughter’s plate. “I am so sorry, darlin’, but I believe I inflicted more of these on your sister, and one does strive to be fair with one’s offspring.”

Normalcy reinstated for at least the three of them, she asked Marshall, “Don’t what, sugar?”

“Don’t mind me,” he said and tried for a smile. It must have passed muster. The girls looked relieved. “I’ve got a little indigestion is all.”

“If it was my cookin’, I’ll make it up to you. The kitchen isn’t my best room.” Polly batted her eyes at him, a fluttering of the lashes that was both sexy and satiric.