Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  She laughed, but I shifted my feet, uncomfortable. I said, “You have plenty of kick left in you, Mrs. Fancy.”

  She waved that away. “Only thing older than me in this airport is God,” she said. “But I’m telling you, I looked a lot like her when I was thirty.”

  She nodded her head at the dark-haired lady, a leggy object with a hint of a cleavage and a saucy way of standing. Mrs. Fancy’s powdered cheeks hung down off her face in ladylike jowls. She wore walking shoes with high-waisted polyester slacks and a blouse in a fussy floral print, but under, I could see good bones and the ruins of a tight and curvy figure.

  I sized up the brunette and said, “Welp, you at thirty is…” I paused. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “dead sexy” to someone who smelled so strongly of talcum powder, so I ended with, “a looker.”

  “I turned some heads,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then peeped at me through her lashes, like she knew I’d been thinking dead sexy. Then she spun in a slow circle, peering around until something stopped her.

  “I found little you, I think.” She tilted her head over to the water fountain where a black-haired girl was standing with her parents. The child was about nine, wearing a stiff, frilled dress that told me there was someone to impress waiting at the other end of the flight. The dad looked relaxed, slouching beside the bags in chinos, but the mother was gussied up in a full face of makeup, and she had teased and sprayed her hair into a shining hump. My guess was she was flying toward in-laws. The mother kept sending one nervous hand down to smooth her girl’s pigtail, but it was more like a love pet than grooming.

  I looked away. The mother’s hair would fall on the plane, and the child’s girly dress would be a mass of crumples and likely stained with juice by the time they arrived.

  I said, “That’s me all right,” tight, still too annoyed to play with her. In truth, she’d got me all wrong. At that age I had a long rat of unbrushed hair and hand-me-down clothes from the church box. I spent all my free time with a book, up trees or under the crawl space, reading and hiding from all the chores my mother wasn’t there to do.

  “Let’s find you older,” Mrs. Fancy said. “Let’s find you, say, twenty years from now.”

  She rocked faintly up onto the balls of her feet, lifting herself, having a fun time playing line games like she was no older than that starchy little girl.

  She couldn’t find an older me, and I didn’t look, just stood by her as we wound our way slow to the head of the line. The man in front of us had been called to check in when I saw Mrs. Fancy wasn’t looking anymore either. She was staring straight at the me I was right then, and her eyes had gone dangerously soft. It was a look so close to pity that I could feel my mad cresting again even before she spoke.

  “Maybe there’s a reason we don’t see you older, Ro,” she said.

  “Don’t. I told you,” I said, but her eyes stayed all melty chocolate colored. I blinked hard and said in a fierce whisper, “Don’t say things. You’ll wreck it. You can’t wreck it. You’re my only friend.”

  She darted out her hand and put it on my cheek. I could feel her age in the folds and creases of her palm. She said, “Then I’ll only say, I pray better things for you, like I used to do for Janine.”

  An airline girl called, “Next,” right then, so I didn’t have to decide if I was going to yank her hand away so hard that the hollow bird bone in her wrist would snap, or drop my head down on her shoulder and bawl like a toddler. I bent down and jerked up her luggage, practically hurling it onto the scale, piece by piece. The girl checked it, and I watched it roll away down the conveyor.

  Mrs. Fancy said, “I land at eleven o’clock on Friday.”

  “Fine,” I said. Three days, and by then I would have put this conversation away. I could be Ro Grandee next time she was in my kitchen, helping her get enough cans for her church’s food drive with my skirt swirling around my knees and my happy smile tucked firm into place. “That’s fine.”

  I turned to go, but she said, “Wait, Ro! There you are, at last! The face is you in twenty years to a dime, although I can’t imagine you would ever wear those clothes.”

  I was already walking back toward my life, ready to pick it up and keep living it as if Mrs. Fancy hadn’t spoken, but I couldn’t help but glance the way she was pointing.

  That’s when I saw the gypsy, and the gypsy was me.

  Me in twenty years, exactly as Mrs. Fancy had said. She stood across the small expanse of the airport by a coffee stand, a slight figure in her forties with long dark hair. At first glance, I thought I’d turned out to be homeless, because the woman was wearing so many layers that she looked like she’d wound everything she owned around her. All her layers were clean and well tended, though, and her face was clean, too. She had a long red paisley print skirt tied up in a knot to show a yellow flowered skirt under. She wore a simple purple top, but at least three shawls were layered over it: a blue one slung around her waist and tied, a green one, and then another, in an entirely different green, knotted haphazardly around her shoulders. She had a suitcase and a huge cloth handbag with bamboo handles, the kind of thing a different sort of woman might keep her knitting in. Both bags sat at her feet, and her hands were busy shuffling through a deck of outsize cards, as if she was setting up a magic trick.

  She must have felt my stare because her hands stilled, and she looked up, straight back at me. Her eyes were so black that I could see their darkness from halfway across the airport. They were magic eyes, nothing like the lavender-blues I’d gotten off my daddy. Even so, her gaze left me poleaxed with all my breath pressed out.

  Her mouth dropped open when she saw me staring so intently, and she fumbled her cards. They went sliding in a fall to scatter at her feet.

  Mrs. Fancy had her back to me, checking in. I said a vague good-bye, and I started to walk toward the gypsy. My feet went toward her like called dogs. She dropped into a crouch and scrambled to gather up her cards, breaking eye contact, scooping up the deck as fast as she could.

  As I got closer, I saw her quick hands pause over one card. Most of the deck had landed facedown, but the card that paused her had flipped over as it fell. It lay faceup, directly between her feet.

  She stared from the card to me as I approached her, then back to the card. She picked it up last, tucking it into the deck, her movements slower, more deliberate now. She seemed somehow reconciled, waiting for me to reach her. Her hands busied themselves straightening her deck back into a neat packet.

  I found myself slowing down, too. All at once I was at a creep, like the air around me had turned thick as honey. It felt both familiar and strange to move this way, so slow. I realized I was doing a kind of float-walk I’d perfected back in high school, back in Alabama, where I’d been Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest girl at Fruiton High.

  Rose Mae had called this kind of going “walking underwater,” and she had thought of it as the opposite of what Jesus could do. She would imagine herself upside down, her feet touching the surface and the whole world way above her, dizzy from having her head pointing downward into blue depths that chilled and darkened.

  I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was Ro Grandee. Married lady. Cashier at my in-laws’ gun store. Texan. But walking this way called up that girl again. Back then, boys were always watching Rose’s body, and girls had watched her face. Rose had figured out that slow, underwater movements bored the eye. Everyone turned and looked when she first came into a classroom or the cafeteria, but as long as she kept moving in a consistent, almost continental drift, people’s attention would slide away. Ten minutes after she came into a place, Rose learned, was the best time to steal things.

  Not to keep. It was more about moving things, getting objects to the place they most belonged. Rose had an eye, even then, for what went where.

  Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrike’s copy of Forever and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was head do
g in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation, wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair, never once cut. They were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near constant headaches.

  Esther had a pretty face with a pointy mouse nose, and the next two times Rose saw her around town, the nose was pointed down at that book. Her gaggle of dowdy friends were crowded around her, all of them listening as she whisper-read the dirty parts to them. They probably had no more than an inkling about what might go where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had dog-eared the sex parts.

  Rose also spent a solid week hooking the wallets of every boy on the football team and removing the hopeful condom. In one fell swoop, she transferred the entire handful to Myla Richard’s lunch box. She’d gotten ribbed and plain, latex and lambskin, even one exceptionally optimistic Trojan Magnum XL lifted off a jock whose ex-girlfriend had once said, in an unrelated conversation, that he emphatically did not need the accommodation. “I can tuck the whole thing in my cheek, like a Tootsie Pop drop,” she’d told Rose, her tone fond. “I call it Little Turtle Head, but not out loud anymore. He gets mad.”

  Myla found a condom assortment in her lunch that was as plentiful and varied as the boys she took up to the old tree fort behind her house. She made a fuss when she found them, though, demanding to know who had put them in her food. Then she made a big show of dumping them out in the trash with her sandwich rind and empty fruit cup. She should have shut her pie hole and used them; by the end of the year, she’d dropped out to have a baby.

  Ro Grandee had no reason in her life for Rose Mae’s brand of object-shifting thievery. I’d lost the habit of moving with sleepy slowness, but as I walked toward the waiting gypsy, it came back to me. As I got close, I had time to see all the ways that we were different. Her long hair had salt white stripes running through it, and it was chocolate brown, not dark as mink. She had my small-framed, curvy kind of figure, but even with the layers I could see she was bigger on top. Her skin was olive where mine was paper white. Still, she had a tippy-tilt nose and my same kind of bowed, fat-lipped mouth. We were so alike, and even before she spoke, I believe I must have known her.

  As I reached her, she gestured toward a table near the coffee stand. Her hands were bare of rings. No bracelets, and no watch, either, as if all her extra clothes had made jewelry unnecessary. I could see beads at her throat, though, peeping through the scarves. A rosary.

  I nodded and she flowed past me, moving easier in her body than I ever had, and I found myself turning as smoothly as if I were on a lazy Susan, carried by her momentum. I followed her five steps to the table, still so slow that she was seated and settled two breaths before I eased myself down in the chair across from her.

  “If you want coffee, you have to get it at the counter,” she said. Her voice was throaty and low, like she was hoarse or a heavy smoker, but she didn’t smell like ashtrays. She smelled tangy, like ginger and orange peel.

  “I don’t want coffee,” I said.

  Her lips pressed together, exasperated. “I’m not sure we can sit here if we don’t get coffee.”

  I shrugged, my shoulders coming up slow, slow, and then I eased them down an inch at a time instead of dropping them.

  “What are those cards?” I asked.

  “A tarot deck,” she answered. I had never seen tarot cards, but I knew what they were all right. She fanned the deck out, facedown on the table. They looked well thumbed and soft around the edges.

  “One fell faceup,” I said.

  She nodded. “That’s why I’m sitting here.”

  “What card was it?”

  She cocked her head to one side, considering that, and then she said, “Say I told you. Say I said three of wands or nine of cups, would that mean anything to you?” I shook my head no, and she seemed to think that through. She said, “I don’t think I’ll tell. That card’s message was for me, not you. Do you want your own reading?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “At home, I get fifty dollars to lay a full deck.” She had a flat, plain way of talking, but I could hear an old accent under her words, something ripe that bulged out around the edges of her television vowels.

  “Where’s home?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been asking myself that question my whole life. I haven’t found the answer yet.”

  I had to manually stop my eyes from rolling. I put my hands flat on the table, and I could feel the difference in my movements. Anger made me faster, and I had to stop myself, slide back into being slow. I moved like I was fifty fathoms down, spreading my fingers, fanning my hands out like she had fanned the cards. Hurried travelers strode past us toward security. Their passing pulled her eyes away from me for half seconds at a time. That’s when I understood that I was moving like this because I was going to steal something. Had to steal something. She had some object on her, I wasn’t sure what, that belonged elsewhere. Belonged to me.

  My lips creaked open and I said, “I don’t have fifty dollars.”

  Her response was prompt, like she’d loaded it in her mouth and aimed while I was thinking. “I do a half-deck read for thirty.”

  “Don’t have thirty,” I shot back.

  After a brief, blank pause she said, “Why don’t you have thirty dollars? Everyone should have thirty dollars. Don’t you have a job?”

  I thought about saying I was a wife. Or that I worked part-time in my father-in-law’s shop, right under his broad thumb, and that it was plenty crowded there, since it was the same space where my husband lived crammed up most days. I thought about saying, “I’ve been asking myself that question,” to pay her back for going all Zen-ass cryptic on me when I asked where her home was. But in the end, all I said was, “Yes. I’m pretty.”

  “For a living?” she said, dry, and then when I nodded she looked me up and down, as if weighing that. “Well, you’re good at it. One would think it would pay more.”

  “One would think,” I said, but I wasn’t agreeing with her so much as trying to catch her inflections. She hadn’t picked up that flat accent anywhere in Texas. “You don’t live around here.”

  “No,” she agreed.

  She looked away, and I took the opportunity to flick my gaze down and glance into the large, open handbag that now rested beside the table. I clocked a wallet, a compass, the paper folder with her ticket in it, a can of WD-40, a jumble of pens and mints, a bottle of water, and a hardback book pressed against the side, the jacket protected by a clear plastic duster. I thought, Ticket, but my body, reverting to Rose Mae Lolley’s old slow ways, had ideas of its own. My hands slid back down into my lap and stayed there, biding.

  I said, “Why are you here?”

  “Not for this,” she said, flicking her hand at the table, the fan of cards, me. “I went out to Cadillac Ranch yesterday. Have you ever been?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should,” she said. “People travel across the world to look at wonders, and here you have one in your own yard you’ve never seen.”

  “So I’ll go,” I said.

  She flicked her eyelids in a disbelieving blink. “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  She made a scoffing noise and then intoned, “There’s no such thing.” My eyes wanted to roll again.

  The coffee shop guy called from the booth then. “That table is for customers.”

  When she turned in her seat to face him, my fast hand darted down. I thought it would be the wallet. The wallet would have a driver’s license, an address. But my hand plucked out the hardback book and then slid it into my lap, under the table.

  “Then bring us coffee,” she called to the guy.

  “I’m not supposed to co
me out from the booth,” the guy said. His voice had a whine in it. I looked right at him until he felt it and looked back. I smiled and warmed my eyes for him.

  “Please?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  When I looked back at her, she had turned to face me again and her eyes had narrowed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re very good at your job,” she said. “I remember, in my twenties, especially, how I would feel a young man turn and see me. I’d watch his face become bright and greedy. Always made me feel like a naked Christmas tree, how he’d be hanging things all over me, expectations and wants. Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed down you can’t move.”

  She shut up as the guy came over with the coffee, and then she picked up her handbag and paid him for both. I let her pay, glad I hadn’t taken her wallet. She might have missed the ticket too soon as well, but she wouldn’t go rooting around for that book until she was settled on the plane headed toward her secret home.

  When he was gone, she turned back to me and said in an impatient voice, “Ten dollars. For a three-card read. I’d do it for free, but then the cards wouldn’t answer. Nothing is free.”

  “I’ve read that before, in fairy tales,” I said. “You have to cross a gypsy’s palm with silver. To make the magic work.” I got very sarcastic with the word magic.

  She shrugged. “If you like. I would say it’s an energy force, but you can say magic.”

  “Thank you,” I said, even more sarcastic. I pointed at the rosary beads peeking out between her shawls and asked, “Do you still go to mass?”

  She chuckled and said, “Goodness, no!” She sent a hand searching through the shawls to touch the beads. I saw her index finger was stained metallic silver. It looked shimmery, as if she had recently been arrested and fingerprinted by fairies. “Madonna wears one of these. You think she goes to mass?”