by Rod Redux
She wouldn’t say something rude like that out loud… but she might think it!
I read her mind! 17-year-old Francis Fontaine thought, and the realization came with a kind of giddy wonder. That’s what those voices are!
He quickly stifled the look of surprise that had flashed across his face. He didn’t want his mother or Terri to see him lying there in front of the TV, grinning like a goon, and wonder what he was all gaga about. His mother had a way of getting things out of a guy—as, he supposed, all mothers did—and he didn’t want to share this new development with anyone else, least of all his Ma, who made mountains out of molehills with irritating regularity. He didn’t want to share it until he had explored it for himself. Plumbed the width of depth of it. Played with it all by himself for a while.
As Skipper chased Gilligan around the island, trying to smack him with his hat over his latest act of bumbling tomfoolery, Francis stilled his racing thoughts... and concentrated very carefully on his mother’s best friend.
Terri Hader-- tall, buxom, brunette. She had long wavy hair, big lips, big teeth. She was divorced, he knew, and sometimes she came over to the house smelling so strongly of alcohol that it was like an invisible halo. She smoked long skinny cigarettes and had a loud husky laugh that he thought was very enticing. Years later, he would meet a shy brunette named Ruth McClellan and fall instantly in love with her because she reminded him of his mother’s old friend Terri, but that was still years and years away. For now, he simply concentrated on Terri, and just when he was starting to think that he had imagined hearing her thoughts, he caught another one.
It wasn’t as loud or distinct. It was sort of jumbled, had something to do with a miscarriage she’d had when she was younger, not so much words but feelings: jealousy, sadness, love. The jumble of feelings made him melancholy, but the bitter longing he snatched out of her brain was overshadowed by his triumph and excitement.
He did it! It worked!
He pressed harder, and saw Terri set her glass down on the table and massage her temple. He knew in a distant way that he was making her head hurt, but he pressed anyway, and he snatched one last thought—Oh, this hangover! – and the image of Terri, drunk, berating herself in the bathroom mirror last night for being such a pathetic, fat, ugly boozehound. No wonder Hank had left her!
Francis had withdrawn from her mind, feeling suddenly nauseous and exhausted, but from that day forward, he began to cultivate his strange talent, practicing it every chance he got, even though it made him feel woozy and tired.
He researched psychic phenomena at the library, reading by himself at one of the back tables, never bringing any of those books home for fear his mother might deduce the reason for his sudden interest in the paranormal. He didn’t intend to keep it a secret forever, but he wanted to be in full command of his ability, and well versed in the lore of psychic phenomena, when he did come out of the closet about it.
He practiced his mind-reading on the other kids at school, getting better and better at interpreting the jumble of words, images and feelings that comprised a person’s thoughts.
Mary Jo Breckenridge, in English II, considered Francis cute (cool!) but thought it was sad that his genes were all messed up. She wondered if it was true what the boys who had PE with him said, that he had no body hair and a little baby’s dinkie (no so cool). His art teacher, Ms. Kerry, was having a secret affair with his American Gov teacher, Mr. Bradley. Mr. Hodge, the chemistry teacher, spent half the day fantasizing about the girls in his classroom, feeling guilty and excited all at the same time. An endless parade of tiny breasts and tight little hairless genitals kicked through his imagination like a Rockette’s chorus line, even though he was almost fifty years old. Gross!
And Bobby Landon, a senior in his PE class, thought about his little brother, who had drowned when Bobby was ten, whenever he was around Francis. It was probably why Bobby was nice to him and kept the bullies at bay.
By his senior year of high school, when he’d gotten about as good at it as he thought he was ever going to get, he decided to tell his mother about his paranormal talent. Before he could, however, his mother’s job was outsourced to some squalid factory in Asia, and Francis discovered a strange lump in his armpit.
It was a bad time for them. His dad had died when Francis was a baby—killed by a drunk driver—and now they had no income, and they lost their health insurance when his mother lost her job. The night of his high school graduation ceremony, Francis was being prepped for surgery. The cancerous lymph node was excised—and came back benign, thank God!—but the surgery bill was shocking. His mother filled out the hospital charity forms and filed for a medicare card, but many of Francis’s medications were not covered by the state medicare program.
Then one night, as he lay in bed recovering from the lymphectomy, it occurred to him that maybe he could use his telepathic talent to make money. He could become a famous mind-reader like Uri Geller!
It seemed like a grand idea.
He told his mother the next morning: about his gift, and about his plan to use his gift to pay his medical bills and maybe even make them a living. She thought he’d gone crazy. When he tried to convince her with a display of his strange powers, he made an unexpected and dismaying discovery. He discovered that he couldn’t read his mother’s thoughts. As soon as she believed he was trying to read her thoughts, a barrier sprang up in her mind, completely blocking his probes.
He would later come to realize that it was an instinctive reaction, like bracing one’s body before receiving a blow, but that morning he didn’t understand why his power had suddenly failed him. He was embarrassed, frustrated, frightened. His mother consoled him, but he knew that she didn’t believe him, and he didn’t need telepathy to know that she was wondering if he had gone crazy from all the drugs he took, or the genetic disorder he took those drugs to treat.
It was a while before he figured it out, and he did it mostly by experimenting on his mother.
He found he could pick up her thoughts every now and then, when she wasn’t concerned that her mind was being read, but let her think he was trying to pick her brain and it slammed shut like a steel vault door. He was a smart boy, and he finally put two and two together. It’s a flinch! he thought. Like when a bully pretends he’s going to punch you in the arm!
It took some time, but he convinced her he wasn’t crazy. He accomplished this by quoting some stray thought he snapped out of the air while she was distracted—cooking or cleaning or writing down a shopping list—but that didn’t solve his dilemma.
His dilemma was this: he was never going to become a rich and famous mentalist if his powers didn’t work when people were aware he was trying to use them. It was like being able to turn invisible, but only when no one was looking. And he understood completely. He wouldn’t want someone peeking inside his head either. It was a terribly intimate thing. It was kind of like walking up to a stranger and asking them to let you stick a finger in their nostril.
It was his mother who finally steered him onto the right path.
“The problem is, people don’t want their thoughts read,” she said one afternoon, as they were experimenting with card games, trying to see if his talent would give him an edge at gambling. “People want to know the future. They want to… to talk to the spirits of their loved ones. They don’t want someone poking in their brains, looking at all the naughty things they’ve thought or done.”
Francis had gaped at her, flabbergasted by her insight. “You’re right!” he’d gasped. “Ma, you’re one hundred percent right!” He’d run his fingers through his hair, his mind racing at the implications. Their cards lay on the table, completely forgotten.
Not a mind reader…! No!
A week later, a sign went up in Marie Fontaine’s front yard, advertising Francis Fontaine, Gifted Fortune Teller. “Psychic Investigations, Commune With the Dead,” the sign said in bold red letters underneath.
Francis took a crash course in palmistry that week
, learned the basics of tarot and astrology. He and his mother converted the parlor into his “reading room” and spent the last of their savings on a new suit. A white one. His mother insisted. It would be more impressive, she said, and imply that Francis’s powers were positive, not some kind of “dark art”.
That evening, a woman named Delores Freemantle came in to have her palm read. What she really wanted to know was if her husband was cheating on her. Since she didn’t know that Francis was probing her mind as he pretended to read her palm, she didn’t block him from her thoughts.
What he discovered in her head was that Delores had once cheated on her husband with his brother. Her husband had caught them in the act when he came home early from work one day, suffering from a mild case of food poisoning. They had moved past it eventually, mostly by pretending it had never happened, but now she was paranoid that he had cheated on her in revenge.
He didn’t tell her one way or another whether her husband was cheating. How could he know? The guy wasn’t present for Francis to pick his brains. What Francis did do was reveal that he knew she had cheated, and that her fears were based more on her own feelings of guilt than anything her husband might or might not be doing.
She was stunned.
“You have unfinished business. You need to go home and talk to your husband about these suspicions and the guilt that’s still lingering in your heart, Delores,” he’d told her. He was holding her hand, staring intently into her eyes. “We’re all human and make mistakes, but if you cannot forgive one another, and forgive yourselves, your marriage is not going to last.”
Shaken, Delores had rushed home to mend her marriage… but not before paying Marie on the way out.
A crisp, freshly minted one hundred dollar bill.
Francis walked into the kitchen where his mother was sitting, staring at the bill on the table in front of her. She had peered up at her nervous son with tears in her eyes, and then stood up and pulled him into her arms.
The next day they had two customers. The day after that, five.
A month after he hammered the sign advertising Francis Fontaine, Gifted Fortune Teller into the front lawn of their little house on Maple Street, Francis received a request for his first house call. A family in town believed their home was haunted and wanted Francis to investigate it. They were friends of Delores and Stan Freemantle.
Francis was on his way.
3
Francis’s cell phone rang as he drove toward the Forester house. His ringtone was “Night on Bald Mountain”, from Disney’s Fantasia. Appropriately, thick wooded hills crowded both sides of the road. He popped the rest of a half-eaten peanut butter cracker in his mouth and fished the tiny device from his shirt pocket. After checking the caller ID, he flipped it open. “Hello, Allen!” he cried, speaking loud to be heard over the rush of the wind. “How was the flight?”
“Good,” Allen said over the phone. “Where ya at, bud?”
“Route 3, headed your way. Had to stop for a potty break and something to drink. Are you at the site?”
“Just got here.”
“What do you think?”
In reply to that, Allen chuckled. Francis could tell it was a good chuckle, though, and he felt a tingle of anticipation in his guts.
“We’ve got most of the equipment set up, and we’ve started doing some establishing shots,” Allen said. “Raj wanted me to check in on you. Make sure you were on schedule.”
“I should be getting pretty close by now,” Francis said. “Is there a sign or a marker so I know where to turn? I got some directions when I stopped for gas, but the guy I talked to wasn’t real clear. Just said it was ten miles outside of town, at the end of a little gravel road.”
The highway rose and fell in gulps as he talked, making him a little lightheaded. He felt like he was riding a roller coaster. He tried to keep his eye open for a gravel turnoff, but he couldn’t see further than the next rise.
“You don’t have a GPS?”
“I’m psychic, Allen,” Francis replied, tongue-in-cheek. “That wouldn’t be good for my reputation.”
Allen laughed. “I gotcha! We had trouble finding the turnoff this morning so I ran to the end of the driveway and tied a red hanky on a tree limb. It’ll be on your left as you come from town, just on the other side of a little creek.”
“Sounds great,” Francis said.
“Just be careful coming up the drive. It’s in pretty rough shape. Jane ran off in a ditch coming out here last night. Had herself a nasty scare.”
“Is that right? Poor dear. I’ll have to get her to tell me the story.”
“That might not be a good idea just yet. The guys teased her about it all night. She’s a bit testy.”
“Oh… Okay.”
“I’ll see you in a few minutes. If you have any problems, give me a ring.”
“Okay. Later!”
“Bye.”
Good ol’ Allen. Francis smiled as he folded his cell phone and stuffed it back in his breast pocket. Allen was a nice guy. Very open. Protective of him even, knowing the always delicate state of Francis’s health. He wasn’t closed off like Billy. Billy’s brain was like a locked vault, and he was always prickly around Francis, as if he were hiding some dark secret. Perhaps his affair with Jane…? Jane was pretty closed-minded as well.
Francis was thinking these things when he rounded the hill and shot past a sign that read NARROW BRIDGE AHEAD. He tromped the brakes, but the Bel Air still jounced across the short wooden bridge that followed, bouncing him roughly in his seat and making his kidneys give out a yelp. A few yards ahead, a red bandana fluttered from the limb of a tree.
His seatbelt tightened as he decelerated. He leaned forward to see over the wheel, muttering, “There’s the bandanna, but where’s the road?” Even with the bright red marker, he couldn’t see the turnoff. The woods marched right up to the highway, and the weeds and underbrush there were at least chest high.
There!
Obscured by leafy tree limbs and the tangled forest undergrowth, a neglected and overgrown gravel drive angled into the wooded hills. There was no mailbox, no gate, not even a NO TRESPASSING sign. Just waist high grass and sticker bushes and two graveled ruts running parallel into the wilderness.
Francis hit his blinker, thankful no one had been following closely behind him. He eased the Bel Air onto the rough gravel tracks as his own dust tail washed across the open cab.
He saw a flash of pale pink and gold at the periphery of his vision and looked to his left. A little boy had peeked his head out of the gully that ran beneath the bridge.
Francis frowned in consternation. A boy that young shouldn’t be playing by himself in a creek! He might drown or… or get snake bit or something! Where in God’s name was his mother and father?
The boy, who couldn’t have been more than eight years old, looked just as surprised as Francis. Surprised and guilty. His head dropped out of sight as quickly as it had appeared.
Francis pulled completely off the main highway and stopped at the foot of the driveway. He threw the Bel Air into park, set the parking brake and unbuckled his seatbelt. Rising from his seat, he yelled, “Hey! Little boy!”
He intended to ask the child what he was doing playing in the creek all by himself, tell him he needed to get home before he got snake bit—or worse, kidnapped by some pervert! Francis, who couldn’t have children of his own, was always appalled at how irresponsible some people could be with their kids.
“Hey, kid!” he called again.
Francis pushed out with his thoughts, searching for the child with his second sight. He was hoping to pick up the boy’s thoughts, find out what he was doing way out here in the boonies all by himself. There hadn’t been a house for miles.
He frowned.
No one was there.
“That’s not possible,” Francis muttered to himself.
Even when someone was closed off, like Billy Kasch or Jane, he could still feel their presence. He might not be
able to pick the thoughts out of their skull, but he could tell that they were there. He could discern a kind of muted murmur, like someone whispering in the next room. Especially if he was actively trying to sense them. He’d gotten very good in the last two decades as a “for pay” psychic.
But from the child: nothing.
Strange…!
Francis scowled. He and Ruthie would love to have children of their own. He was sterile because of his scrambled chromosomes, but if they could, they would have had a house full. Cursing the boy’s neglectful parents, wherever they were, Francis tried to decide what to do.
He was reluctant to get out of his car and chase after the boy. He didn’t want to scare the poor kid. But he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he continued on and the child got injured or kidnapped.
But that was not all. He was curious. The child was invisible to Francis’s second sight. In all his years, he had never met anyone with psi as strong as his own. He’d come across plenty of people who were what he might call “sensitive”… but no one whose psychic gifts were anywhere near his caliber. Not even close.
He would love to meet someone gifted like himself, and wondered what strange ability the boy must possess.
Curious, Francis put aside his misgivings and opened the car door.
“Don’t be scared,” he called as he stepped out into the grass. “I just want to talk to you.” He wondered how many weirdos had used just that line.
He picked his way carefully to the shoulder of the blacktop, skirting around a thick hedge of thorns, before heading toward the bridge.
Kids usually weren’t nervous around him. He was nearly forty years old, but due to his genetic affliction, he looked barely nineteen, and a small nineteen at that. A person could tell he was older if they looked close enough at his face—there were fine lines around his eyes, a couple creases bracketing the corners of his mouth—but otherwise he was deceptively youthful-looking. A veritable Peter Pan, as Dr. Altug had once observed. Most kids loved him, and they were especially taken with him when they found out he was as old as or older than their parents-- a man whose sickness had, but for the hormones and medications he took every day, condemned him to an eternal adolescence. He supposed little people also found themselves the object of childish fascination.