Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Madonna was raised Catholic.”

  “She isn’t Catholic now,” the woman said. “She’s only using it, tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype.”

  She said it like that had already been determined, as if Madonna “tapping into the whole virgin-whore archetype” was a line from a conversation she had had with a bunch of shawl-wearing gypsy friends when they were out drinking wine and being mystical and deciding things.

  “People can’t stop being Catholic,” I said. “You’re born it. You are it. I’m Catholic, and I’ve been to mass maybe twice in the last three years.”

  “If you were still Catholic, you would go to mass,” she said, like it was that simple. She said it like a challenge.

  “My husband’s family doesn’t… Mass upsets them. But I’m Catholic. It’s a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can’t stop being it.”

  She looked away, and just like that, snap, I was dismissed. The tension that had held her thinned like rising fog and she said, “Anyone can stop being anything at any time. All they have to do is choose to.”

  “You would know,” I said, furious, my voice so loud that the coffee guy looked over again. My hands trembled around the book lying in my lap. I slid it between my knees and clamped my thighs on it to hold it, then leaned over and grabbed up my own purse. I scrabbled down to the very bottom of it until I found an old dime. It was dirty and tarnished. I slapped it onto the table between us. It landed tails-side up. “Silver,” I said, “to cross your fucking palm.”

  She stared at me with eyes so calm and foreign that I felt that scalp prickle I got sometimes, going eye to eye with the unblinking green lizards in my garden. Those lizards gave off a strong sense of other. Not a mammal, not like me, I would think, and I got that same creeping, separated tingle now, from her.

  She picked up the dime with a pursed mouth. “This doesn’t make us even,” she said.

  I pursed my mouth back just the same and said, “No.” I tapped her deck of cards, because I’d known her before she spoke, and I was sure now. “This doesn’t make us even. I can’t think of a single thing you could do that would.”

  That hit her low, and she dropped her gaze. She stared at the dime in her palm so hard that I was shocked it didn’t smoke. “I read for Wayne Newton once,” she said.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “He came all the way out to my place. He wore a slouchy hat, pulled down low, and he paid cash. He didn’t give a name, but I knew it was him. No, I suspected it was him. The first two cards told me I was right. Wayne Newton came all the way over from some show he was doing in town to ask me to read his cards.”

  The silence got long, and at last I said, “Is he a Catholic?”

  She truly laughed then. Threw back her head and let out a throbbing, hooty sound that turned heads toward us.

  “All right, then,” she said. She dropped the dime off the side of the table and let it clink its way down to the bottom of her purse. She extended the cards toward me. “Shuffle.”

  I took the deck. The cards felt worn from a lot of human touching, soft with oils. I thought of all the people who must have handled them—her kind, swathed in shawls and rattling with healing crystals—and I wanted to go wash.

  While I was shuffling, she said, “Now ask.”

  “Ask what?” I said, pausing.

  “Whatever question I can see in you, burning you up. You ask it while you shuffle, and then you stop when you feel the answer is in the cards.”

  I thought about it, turning the cards over and over into themselves.

  I said, “Why did you—” But she held one hand up, like a stop sign, and I paused again.

  “You’re asking the cards, not me. I don’t need to know the question.”

  I said, “But don’t you want to know my question?”

  People flowed around us, all trying to go home or to leave it. A good minute passed, and then she said, “I don’t think I do. No.”

  So I shuffled, and I chose a different question this time. Since it was only in my head, I didn’t think it in exact words, more like pictures. I thought about men, the men I chose and the men I had been given. My father flashed through my head beside Jim Beverly, my first love. I could only think of them together, like they were the two sides of the same thin dime.

  I saw the lineup of Rose Mae’s road men, the ones she left in a scatterpath as she waitressed her way along the coast from Alabama to Texas. Most of them had been like Daddy, hard drinkers with hard fists, with not much sweet to hold me. I’d kept moving until I came to my husband, a ball of charm and anger. He had an eager grin like Jim Beverly’s and overeager fists like Daddy. Two for the price of one.

  I had an uptilt of thought at the end, like a question mark. It wasn’t words, just a bafflement—why these men?—and a fear; Mrs. Fancy could not find a future me because she couldn’t imagine I would live to get much older. Maybe she was right.

  I didn’t feel anything from the cards, but I did start to feel silly, waiting for some inside yes to chime. I stopped shuffling and handed her the deck.

  “The first card is your past,” she said, her voice flat. She turned it, and I saw a slight widening of her eyes.

  It showed a tall and spindly tower, rising to a sky that was blue on one side and black with sooty clouds on the other. A narrow bolt of lightning, sharp-tipped like a crookedy pencil, was neatly slicing the tower’s top off. Bright flames licked at the edges, and people were running out the front door and away. One girl had been left behind, framed in the highest window, and she stared right out at me, peaceful, as if she didn’t see the flames or the people fleeing.

  “Rapunzel,” I said, tapping the girl with one finger. “Now there’s a chick who used a lot of hair products. Hope they weren’t flammable.”

  “Don’t be flip,” said the gypsy, her voice sharp. “This is major arcana.” She rapped the tower twice with her knuckle. “It can be the scariest damn card in the whole deck.” Her eyes met mine directly, and now there was a glimmer of something human in them. Maybe kindness, maybe apology, maybe a trick of the light. “In your case, I suspect it means you lost someone.”

  “Who hasn’t,” I said.

  “This loss haunts you,” she said, and I recognized the glimmer. Pity.

  I kept my face from changing, but on the inside, I was bristling. “I lost my high school boyfriend,” I said. “It must mean him.”

  The pity hardened over and she said, “No. This would be a big loss.”

  “It was,” I said, my lips pulled back, baring my teeth, and hoped it looked something like a smile. “Huge. He disappeared our senior year. We’d planned to marry right after graduation. He was sweet to me like no one ever had been. He loved my sorry ass. And then one day, boom, he was gone. A runaway, they said. I never saw him anymore. I felt like I’d gone missing, too. Up until then I was an honor roll kid, someone with a future. But losing him wrecked me. I never bothered to show up to take my final exams. He put me where I am right now.”

  “That is a big loss,” she said, tight-voiced. “Perhaps it’s him. But I don’t think so.”

  “Jim Beverly,” I said, firm, punching his name at her like a fist. “That’s the loss. Not—”

  “Fine,” she said, cutting me off. “This card represents your present.” She turned it. It took a second to make sense of the image. A slim woman in a blindfold stood in front of a lake. It was sunset, so the water had gone red behind her. There were twisted, mossy shapes humping out of the water. Logs, or maybe crocodiles. She held a long sword in each hand, crossed over her chest to make an X.

  The gypsy put her silver-tipped finger to her bottom lip and tapped, thinking. “It can’t have been that bad, losing this Jim. You married someone else, after all.”

  “How do you know that?” I said, spine a-tingle. She might have seen my rings. But for most of the conversation, my fingers had been hidden in my lap, touching her book. “Have you been watching me?”

 
She snaked one hand under the tiny round table and pushed a fist hard into my ribs, just under my left breast. I gasped, unable to help it as she pressed directly down on a fresh bruise.

  “You’ve married,” she said, as if the pain that flashed across my face confirmed it. Her hand hovered half an inch above the spine of her own book. I waited, breath held, until she leaned back. “This is the two of swords, and it stinks of violence. That’s some man you picked.” She put her hand back on the deck, readying to turn another card. “Want to see your future?”

  “Why not?” I said, still trying to sound casual, but the way her hand had gone straight to my freshest hurt spot had gotten to me. I didn’t want my question answered, did not want her to say out loud all the reasons Mrs. Fancy had not been able to imagine a future for me.

  At first I thought the card was upside down, but then I realized it was the figure in the center. It was a man in a wolf’s-head helmet, hanging from a grape arbor by one ankle. His feet were bare. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I thought he was praying, but then I realized they were bound by slim, thorned vines. The wolf-head on his helmet snarled, but beneath, his human face looked perfectly calm.

  I felt my eyebrows come together. “I’ve seen this card. It was on that mystery show with the old lady who solves crimes. She said it was a death card.”

  I looked up at her, and the gypsy’s eyebrows mirrored mine.

  “Most readers will tell you it isn’t a death card,” she said. “They’ll say it is a card about change.”

  “Being dead would be a pretty big change,” I said.

  The gypsy’s eyebrows were still pushing inward, as if they’d been exchanging letters for a long time and now they were trying to meet. “Some readers would say it only means you need to alter your perspective. Or you should do the opposite of what you would normally do, or you should make a sacrifice.”

  “So your stupid cards say I should, what, kill a goat?”

  “Literal and flip, are those your only settings?” she asked, sharp. “I’m telling you what other readers might say. They’d say it’s not a death card. He’s hanging by his ankle, not his neck.”

  “Still,” I said. “That can’t be all that comfortable.”

  She waved a hand at me to shush me, and then she spoke again in an urgent whisper. “Most readers would say it’s about change. But I’m looking at a girl with the tower in her past. I’m looking at a woman in a marriage made of swords. These cards are screaming. They are saying, Change or die. I suggest you change, and if not, then you should go see Cadillac Ranch today, because for you, there isn’t a tomorrow.”

  I found myself leaning in to catch her words, my hands clamped down tight on the stolen book, as she went on.

  “Sometimes, Mrs. Professionally Pretty, those ornaments men hang on your branches get so heavy they can crush you dead, and in this configuration, death is what I see. I’d say it’s either for you or your husband.” She looked up from the cards, her black eyes burning. I felt held by them, breathless, and she was a visionary in that moment. “Choose him. You live. It’s the choice that I would make. If it’s a death card, you choose him.” She leaned back from me and said, louder and slower, “Until you do, I don’t have one damn word more to say to you.”

  With that, she scraped up all the cards and dumped them willy-nilly down into her bag. She picked up her coffee cup and drained the last, cooling third. I didn’t speak, and she stood up and said more words to me anyway. Three of them.

  “You are welcome.”

  I hadn’t thanked her, but she wasn’t being sarcastic. She said it like she was opening a door, inviting me inside.

  “Why are you in Amarillo?” I asked. “You didn’t come here to see Cadillac Ranch.”

  She grabbed her purse and slung the bamboo handles over her shoulder. “It’s just a stop,” she said.

  I shook my head. This could not be coincidence. “Did you come here to see me?”

  “Everything is just a stop,” she said, picking up her suitcase.

  She walked away. I stared after her, sitting like roots had grown out of my hips and twined themselves around the chair legs. At the last moment, she did turn back, looking annoyed. “He’s the guy that sang ‘Danke Schoen.’ Mr. Vegas. You would know him if you saw him.”

  She went through security.

  I sat there, shaking, watching her disappear down the hallway.

  When she was truly gone, I scooted my chair back so I could look down at the book in my lap. My hands had been wise. They had understood what the cellophane wrapper meant before my stunned brain had: This was a library book. I expected some new agey self-help thing or maybe something by Robert Penn Warren or Flannery O’Connor. But it was The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King. Fairy tales again. She’d always been a scattershot reader.

  I flipped open the front cover and saw the manila pocket. There was no card in it, of course. The card would have told me the name she was living under, but it was filed at the library. The words, Property of the West Branch Berkeley Public Library, were stamped in black.

  The words looked more serious and permanent than ink to me. They seemed carved, as if the page was made of stone. The book in my lap felt heavy enough to be solid granite.

  I touched the word Berkeley, disbelieving.

  Until half an hour ago, I hadn’t seen my mother in twenty years. Now, suddenly, my mother was alive. My mother was a gypsy who lived and breathed and checked out books in California. This woman had left her child to save herself, and now she’d come back to flip the hanged man card and say I had to make a sacrifice. What did she know about sacrifice? I’d been hers.

  But she had said, “Live.”

  She had said, “Choose him.”

  My mother had appeared just long enough to tell me that if I wanted to survive, I would have to kill Thom Grandee.

  CHAPTER

  3

  I TRIED TO CHOOSE HIM, and I failed. What did that leave? That was all I could think as I tore through the woods, sprinting back to Mrs. Fancy’s Honda. The next thing I knew, I was zooming east down Highway 40 toward home, praying harder than I had ever prayed in my whole life. I called every saint it seemed might do a lick of good. I called them out loud, demanding intervention with the kind of flailing desperation that can rise when even hope has left.

  Francis, patron of cars and drivers, answered first. He was in the car with me. I could hear him breathing easy in the seat behind me. Then Michael took the seat beside Francis. He’d come to close the eyes of his policemen, making their radar guns heavy in their hands, sending them for coffee at any Dunkin’ Donuts that took them off my path.

  I should have been surprised. Hell, I should have been wetting myself. I’d been calling my saints my whole life, but I hadn’t had one show before. I must have wept out Mary’s name for comfort, because she was in the back as well, even though she had to squash into the narrow middle seat with her patient feet on the hump.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, but if saints were answering, then the place by me was only for Saint Roch, patron of both dogs and pestilence. I needed him for Gretel and for Rose Mae Lolley, in that order. As I thought his name, before I could call, he was already obliging me. He appeared beside me with his ankles crossed, one gentle arm’s length away.

  I was driving fast enough to make the blowsy air outside sound like a great wind. I was sweating hard. I could feel it clotting in my hair, which was once again tucked up inside my baseball cap. I reached up to pull the cap off, but my hand U-turned on the way up, going to the dash to flip on the AC instead.

  That was when the first shiver hit me: My body understood the danger long before my mind did. My hand had been right not to remove the hat. I needed it to shade my face and hide my hair.

  I was driving down the very road Thom would be taking. My heart bounded up from my chest, lodging in my throat. Each beat banged against my gag reflex, choking me. I could pass him at any second. Het up as he must be right no
w, if he saw me tearing down the highway in a borrowed car, he’d run it off the road and yank me out of the wreckage, demanding answers. Then he’d find Pawpy’s gun in the Target bag, and he’d know in two heartbeats where I’d spent my morning. I hadn’t looked down into the gun’s black eye since I was little and my daddy and I stared down into it together. You must never, never point that hole at anything, at anything, ever, unless you want to see it utterly destroyed. If Thom caught me now, I had no doubt I would be looking it in the eye again.

  My foot went weightless on the gas pedal, and the car slowed. Then I stomped down again. What if I had passed him already? I could have easily slipped by in Mrs. Fancy’s plain car while he was checking on Gretel, who I had to believe was absolutely still alive. Saint Roch nodded in comforting agreement.

  Thom could already be behind me, or he might be two cars ahead. There was no way to know. I twisted my head this way and that, trying to see all around me, searching for his Bronco. The road got away from me, and I listed so far right that I ran up onto the bumpy shoulder. I wrestled the wheel and got mostly back in my lane. I saw the next exit, mercifully close. In two minutes, I was safe off the highway, panting as I pulled into a gas station.

  I drove around to the back side of the building, letting the Honda idle by the restrooms while I tried to swallow my heart back down and breathe. Every piece of me hollered to keep moving, to run, to go far and fast. But where?

  I knew three things: That I had to get home. That Thom was somewhere on the road between me and my house. That I must not be seen as I made my way. These were facts, true and unchangeable, and they bounced off each other in hopeless, tangled equations. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t be still. Maybe I should start driving and hope that the Honda and my saints would know a safe path. If Mary had her way, we’d head east, very quickly, putting state after state between us and Thom Grandee until we came home to Alabama, to hill country, with its thousand places to hide. This flat state gave me nothing.