The seller also had a box of cassette tapes from bands whose music had reached that difficult age where albums tend to migrate from cars and bedrooms into cardboard bins at flea markets just like this one. Kate busied herself separating out the wheat from the chaff. When she found one she liked, she’d open the case and inspect the tape itself, looking for bends or discoloration, winding the spools with her index finger to see if they actually turned or if one of them would bind up the moment she popped the cassette into the dashboard. If it passed muster, she’d set it aside. Suddenly, she stopped rifling through the tapes and stared at a small placard displayed in a card holder on the table next to her box of treasures.
“Are you a palm reader?” She asked the seller.
The man looked sixties-ish but could have been any age behind his gray beard shot through with flecks of black. He wore a red trucker’s cap advertising some tree removal service out of Conover and a red tee shirt with a pocket on the left breast that read “Marlboro” but held a pack of Kings. Steel wool covered his forearms. He opened his mouth to reveal a set of teeth that appeared relatively intact but bore the telltale stains of too much tobacco and not enough toothpaste.
“Naw,” he said, “That’s my missus. She’s in the trailer.” He pivoted his head a half-turn on his fleshy neck and shouted, “RUBY! YOU GOT CUSTOMERS!”
The awning attached to a large camper trailer itself hitched to a pickup truck that looked big enough to tow the space shuttle. The trailer was obviously old, its beiges, browns and harvest golds worn and pitted. The same held true for the woman who stood now in the doorway, leaning against the metal frame. Ruby was a tiny shred of shoe leather in a blouse and blue jeans, hair graying like her husband’s, cigarette dangling from the fingers of her left hand. Rode hard and put away wet, Dad would have said. I thought it now as Ruby spoke in the sandpaper rasp of the ancient smoker.
“Y’all looking to get your fortunes told?”
“How much?” Kate asked.
“Normally ten,” Ruby said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “But it’s a slow day. I’ll do all three of you for twenty.”
Kate shot a hopeful look at Bobby, who rolled his eyes as he set a battered Enfield rifle back on the display table. I didn’t know why he cared; it wasn’t even his money, cadged as it was from Mom’s purse. But Kate had asked. That meant that she would receive.
“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 rattlesn
akes. 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.
“Kevin!”
I stopped and turned. Bobby ran into me, but I didn’t fall. Fat, gray-haired Chester looked from us to Ruby, Ruby to us, back to Ruby.
Her cigarette hand shook like mad. The smoking cherry on the end quivered in the darkness that enveloped the inside of the trailer, but she held onto it. She pointed at me with the index finger of her other hand. This one didn’t shake at all.
“Beware the Bald Man!” Her voice rose in a raspy cry above the shuffle and chatter of the flea market. All over, heads turned. From a tent full of stereo equipment immediately to my right, Terrence Trent D’Arby sang the praises of a wishing well, but Ruby outblasted him. “You steer clear of the Bald Man, Kevin!”
“We’ll do that!” Bobby hollered back. “Thanks for the heads-up!”
We left. And we returned to the business of killing time.
And only later, as I lay awake in my bed that night staring at the model airplanes dangling from my ceiling, did I realize I’d never told Ruby my name.
5.
Out in the gravel parking lot next to the building that housed the radio station, I paced back and forth as Craig leaned against my BMW, head hung low. I had exhibited behavior unbecoming a member of the largest law firm in Burlington—an old law firm, a well-regarded law firm, a law firm whose clients paid it large sums of money at least in part because the words Carwood and Allison, when placed together, evoked images of well-heeled, well-trained attorneys solving complex legal problems with class.
I had gone on the radio and talked like I’d just stumbled out of the trailer park across the road. I had invited someone to come fight me at the office tomorrow.
“I don’t know,” Craig said, raising his head. “Maybe there’s a positive angle to this. You sounded like an asshole; isn’t that supposed to be a good thing for a divorce lawyer?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t think about damage control or public relations or Carwood, Allison at all—I thought only of the Bald Man. But I couldn’t discuss this with him. If my recent behavior left any doubt in his mind that the softball bat to the head had scrambled my brains, talking about the palm reading would erase it.
“What was his problem?” I asked in a mutter. The leather soles of my shoes crunched in the gravel. Despite the coolness of this particular September night, sweat ran in rivulets down my face, my neck, and disappeared into my collar. I loosened my tie. “What does he mean, he’s going to show the world that I’m no hero? That’s a threat!”
Craig raised both palms. “Kevin? Chill.”
“Chill? Whatever! That guy threatened me on the radio!” My hands curled into fists and pounded against my legs. My trigger finger had begun twitching, and while I didn’t know if Craig would see it in the darkened parking lot, I didn’t want to risk it. “I want to know who that son of a bitch is! I want to know where he called from!”
“Kevin…”
“And then I want to march right up to his house or his trailer or his cardboard box or whatever the hell he lives in and tell him say it to my face!”
“Listen.”
I pivoted on my heels and marched back down the length of the BMW, fists clenched, shaking my head.
“There’s obviously something wrong with the guy, okay?” Craig said. “Strike One, he listens to Billy Horton. He sits around on weeknights and listens to AM radio, which tells you he probably doesn’t have a whole lot going on in his life. The other thing to remember is, you are a hero, okay?”
“Whatever,” I mumbled.
“You are. You really are. Everybody in Alamance County looks up to you. You faced their worst nightmare and you came out on top. So they admire you, they praise you, they put articles in the newspaper about you…and here’s this psychopath collecting disability in his rented trailer. When he’s not watching daytime TV, he fantasizes about doing something remarkable, being somebody special. Then Kevin Swanson hijacks his fantasy. So he gets pissed and he says, I’m going to take this guy down a peg. And that’s exactly what he does.”
Craig paused.
“He was screwing with you,” he said. “That’s the last you’re going to hear from him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I spend most of my time in District Court,” he answered. “I know all about crazies. I’m like the Jane Goodall of wackjobs.”
He picked himself up off the car.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “Let’s get you back before Allie sends a search party after your ass.”
I lived off Highway 62 in Burlington. Way off Highway 62. My house, old and stately and far larger than I needed, sat nestled among the rise and fall of cleared land that had once held tobacco, cotton, corn and wheat. Now it just held grass that a man with a Bushhog and a hay rake cut for me every month. A dirt road shooting off the highway curled into thick woods that screened the house from 62 even in the wintertime, when the leaves fell to the ground and the house concealed itself behind denuded branches and the topography of the land.
This privacy, this sense of removal from the rest of the world, had drawn us here when we went looking for a bigger house after Dad’s estate settled. With all our money then, we could have bought a place at the country club, but then we’d have had to look at our neighbors every time we stepped onto our front porch. Allie didn’t want that. She had grown up in the country in Pennsylvania, had enjoyed the privacy and the peace and the nature there and wanted to give Abby the same thing. In the age of automobiles, a person could mitigate the seclusion with a ten-minute drive up the road to Burlington. “You can always seek out people when you get lonely,” she had said. “You can’t make them go away when you get tired of them.” Out here, privacy abounded. Set back as we were from the highway and surrounded by woods, I could have wal
ked out on my porch and drank my coffee naked and no one would have seen me. In the evenings, I could have stood in the driveway and screamed my frustration at the world and no one would have heard me. Good money bought a man square footage, acreage and freedom from the prying eyes of his neighbors.
But there existed a flip side to this coin, and I noticed it the day we moved in. A bottle of Heineken in one hand, the other arm wrapped around Allie’s waist, I stood on the porch and stared out at my land, my estate. “We’re isolated now,” I said then. “Do you realize that? We’re going to have a devil of a time getting pizza delivered out here.”
“I guess we’ll have to eat healthier,” she replied before going back inside to resume unpacking. “Got plenty of land now. Maybe we can grow our own vegetables.”
Plenty of land, screened from the highway. At least twenty acres between any part of my house and the nearest property line. At least forty acres between the nearest property line and the next house. I had seen this coming even then. I had understood that if the pizza guy couldn’t find us, neither could a police car or ambulance. My newfound seclusion from society’s problems came at the price of seclusion from its security. I had calculated how long it could take a sheriff’s car to respond if I called 911 after hearing a suspicious noise in the night and I thought of the rifle then, which I kept locked by itself in a gun cabinet in the basement. The circumstances under which I had come to own the AK-47 weren’t the typical ones surrounding a man obtaining his first gun, but standing on my new porch—new to me, anyway—I understood that on some level, I must have somehow known I would end up here. I must have known I would need it.
Pinnix and Ramseur probably slapped each other high-fives when they saw where we lived. They would have seen the physical layout of our property and realized that they could have raped my wife and our daughter right there in the front yard and no one would have disturbed them. They had seen this, I felt sure, and experienced a rush of delight at finding such desirable prey this far removed from the herd’s protection. These people are vulnerable, they said. We can do anything we want to them. We can take our time.
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