Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  “Is that so? So which do you think it is that he’s doing, something of great good or great evil?”

  “You’re the soldier. I’ve had no reason to spend my time thinking it over.”

  “My name’s Emery, by the way.” I hold out my hand, we shake, but she doesn’t offer anything back to me. I press her, “And yours?”

  “I didn’t ask for your name, Emery. If I’d had any intention of giving you mine, I would have.”

  I tell her about my home, about my family. My little sister Ingot, who I think I might miss most of all even though I’d barely noticed she’d been around most of the time. I tell her about how I hope that I might die so that my father will blame himself. I tell her, for some reason, about losing my virginity to the receptionist at the hospital where my mother works, Kate I think her name was, or at least something with a K or a hard C, though I could be completely wrong, right there in the supply room on an out-of-commission gurney. She, the woman on the train, only asks questions or asks me to elaborate on what I’ve said, and about herself she tells me only that she has come from South America. I ask what she was doing there and she tells me, “Waiting.” Waiting for what? I pursue.

  “Waiting to come here.”

  Late into the night, as the conversation pauses, she takes it as an opportunity to bring it right back to where it had begun. “So tell me, Emery. Suppose that what General Anselmo is doing out there on the beach is something evil. Or, supposing that it might be something good, but that it will require you to do something that, in other contexts, could be seen as evil.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do I mean? Well we all know that the General uses his Cannery to produce low cost food that he then distributes across the country to help low-income families and the homeless. If that is his one and only aim, then we can probably agree that he’s doing something of great good. But what if he assigns you to be the night guard, and he gives you the explicit instruction to shoot upon sight any intruder in the case that they might be a saboteur? Do you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t thought much about any of it.”

  “Well, Emery, I get the sense that, whatever your reasons for being here are, they aren’t strong enough to convince you that this is where you need to be, is it? Is it, where you want to be?”

  I take a long look around the train, at least it seems long to me, hoping futilely that my answer will be printed on some wall. But there is no answer. And there are no ghosts to be seen here. There is no mouth of hell swallowing me down. There is only me, this woman from South America in front of me, and two tired men minding themselves patiently, and occasionally the fat conductor passing through. Certainly, there is nothing here worth the years of curiosity I had reserved solely for it. “No,” I say, letting my eyes loose around the train car like a pair of wild aimless dogs. “No, I don’t want to be here.”

  “Well then, Emery, my suggestion would be for you to take your bag, wait for this train to pull into the next station, and get off.”

  “And what about—”

  “No, don’t ask what about. Don’t ask about your father, don’t ask about your mother or sister. Don’t ask about what the General will do when he finds your name on his list but he can’t find you. Just go, if that’s where your heart is, then that’s what you should do.”

  She gets up and steals my eyes as she passes into the next car, squeezing past the bulbous midsection of the conductor as he makes another round through. I put my forehead on the thick glass of the window after she is gone and try to bore through the glare but can’t quite discern anything other than a faint orange line on the distant horizon. I think about what she had said and try to elucidate it to myself in one simple line, am I willing to die to prove a point? Was there even a point that I was trying to prove? To leave home, to find my ghost train, to torture my father’s conscience. They are such paltry rewards for a lifetime of servitude to a general whose cause I don’t even know, let alone believe in. So when the sway of deceleration pulls my back off my seat before we re-collide with softness, I grab my backpack and my uniform and I hurry to the doors.

  I step down onto the sand and look around. It is not quite morning yet. Back home I often woke at this hour to go and sit on our front porch, when the world feels empty and abandoned. Just last night, the night before I was to leave, I had done so for the last time. Neither the sun nor the moon is risen and the sky is fallen into an odd state of gangrene. Only the fireflies, blinking buoys, transform the low fog into a smooth mauve gauze. As a boy I would pinch my thumbs to my forefingers, and then pinch those pairs together to create a diamond pinhole that I pretend is a telescope. And through it I would watch the fireflies as though they were angels darting about millions of miles from me. Now, they seem so small and insignificant, and no matter how I try I can’t help but see them for what they are, just meters away. Far from me a car passes on the street. Cars at this hour always seem to run on a quieter engine than those during other hours of the day. As though the sheer presence of others makes them roar the louder, makes them fight to have their voice heard. It is a strange feeling to watch someone, as they walk or, in this case, drive by, and know that you have gone completely unseen by them. You feel invisible, you feel dead. You feel horizons away.

  I wonder, if the driver of that car had held his fingers up to his face he might have seen me floating here in space with the angels promenading about me. One of them lands on my arm and I watch it blink and crawl. There comes a sour sting before it peels back its onion-skin wings and alights again. I had never thought that fireflies could bite, but the tiny welt like being branded by the tip of a needle shows how little sense it would have made for them not to. I think, everything has teeth in some form. Behind me, the kitchen light flicks on through the windows. I straighten up and hold my back against the back of the bench, I squeeze myself into the pores of the shadows, I will myself to become molecular and vaporize. I hold my breath. If the porch light comes on I will have to explain why I am awake at three in the morning. I want it to be my mother so she can tell me not to go, and so I can tell her that I don’t want to go, but I am going to go anyway. These things are always easier to say in the dark when you don’t have to see the face of those you tell them to. I silently curse the firefly that flies past and lights up my face to betray my position. It is just another form of tooth. The kitchen light shuts off a moment later. Probably just Ingot, up for a glass of water or a piss. I close my eyes and feel the fog fill my sinuses, make my head light and my body that much more contrastingly heavy. And then I fall asleep here, nestled warmly amidst a nest of angels, just meters away tonight, thank God. When I wake up the next morning, I know that I have seen my last midnight at home.

  Here, in the morning dusk horizons away from that old porch, I can’t see much more than outlines, contours, and shadows blending into each other and pulling apart again. The orange line on the horizon has grown, and the black sky has become a muted, de-saturated blue. A figure approaches me. It is a tall, stalwart, wide-shouldered body whose hands are folded neatly behind its back. “Emery Fasch?” it asks.

  “Yeah,” I answer. I am uninterested in this person in front of me, I am surveying my surroundings, waiting for the dusk to infiltrate my eyes so that I can begin planning my journey back home. They do, and when they do I see a long line of stiff-standing men in the sand down by the train station, dressed in light gray slacks and stiff-buttoned cloud-blue jackets. They stand with their arms at their sides and their chins in the air. I finally look at the man in front of me, towering over me, an obelisk casting a shadow over all that is his, which at this moment, is me.

  “I think you can do a little better addressing me than that, son.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, kicking my feet together beneath me and straightening my back. Everything about me becomes statue-like.

  “Welcome to the coast, son. I’m General Anselmo.”

&nbs
p; Behind me, someone steps off of the train. I feel the vibration of the booted feet hit the sand. The doors of the train swish closed behind me. The woman who had sat across from me steps around, pauses briefly to nod at the General before sliding a tight black cloth hood over her head, and then continues to the line of recruits waiting for instruction. I look behind me, but the train is already gone.

  * * *

  “Hey Stalls, get your ass out here already!” The shadows of hands flutters over the canvas of my tent like sparrows and then they alight. Pecker’s head appears in the front flap, “Ja-Ja and Robinson are back. It’s time, pus. Wake up.” I sit up. My first thought is, where is the train? I dig the meaty parts of my thumbs into my eyes until I see two thick black stars. I pull on my uniform jacket, button it as I lurch out from my tent and feel to be growing as I stand up straight and erect my back. Ja-Ja is a fair-haired Swede with a penchant for slipping into his native tongue at random moments. Robinson is stout, short, one would hardly peg him as a soldier, with greasy dark hair that hangs over his face and leaves strands of acne in its wake like the lashes left behind by a smoldering flay. They are sitting around the fire, which Tens is tending as though he revived it, though I suspect it must have been Peck who’d done so.

  “Come here,” Robinson says, waving me over. He is holding a long suede wine skin, doling out portions of beverage to the others who hold small plastic cups. I reach into my tent and pluck my own cup out of my bag before taking my place on the logs.

  “What is it?” I ask as the transparent red fluid fills a generous portion of my cup.

  “Tarot sour, the General’s recipe,” Robinson answers. “He’s got a cauldron of it bubbling back at the Cannery. Told me to bring some out here for us. Inflate the backbone.”

  Peck downs his and has Robinson refill it. Then he lifts it to the canopy and says, “Tarot sour, here’s to the unluckiest sons of bitches the stars ever frowned upon. Raise glass, boys. Today you make men.”

  Peck has been here for a dozen years already. The General had no reluctance in charging him with the four of us when he sends us out here to the coast yesterday morning. Ja-Ja and Tens have been here for a couple of years but have never seen battle. Ja-Ja is a computer tech who has been working backstage at the Cannery since he’d arrived and Tens was administrative until he’d requested a change, the reason for which nobody can quite tell seeing how he consistently ensures that he is too injured to perform any duty asked of him. Robinson was recruited at the same time as me. I don’t know why the General had assigned me to go to the beach with only two weeks of training behind me, especially with a group of seasoned vets, except that the General claims he sees special potential in me. Robinson wasn’t originally assigned to come with us, but the man who was supposed to be our fifth had to be admitted for an emergency appendectomy, and with everyone else who would have been suitable already assigned to other strands of beach among other missions, the General chose another new recruit somewhat randomly to take the extra place.

  One at a time, like solemn dominoes, we place our cups on the grass and stand. Our rifles all lean against trees. We go to them and begin the waltz. Take its hand, a gentle two-step spin, lift, lower its strap like an arm around your shoulder, bow and slide the barrel beneath your arm. Tens wishes us luck and pokes the fire. The four of us begin our march, out of camp, toward the tree line where the beach waits.

  We stand with the toes of our boots testing the sand for a long time. The little black spots that lined the distant waves earlier are gone, and now the hot reflection of the sun on the sand is broken with their black backs. It is a legion of sea tortoises, some larger than any of us, sifting their fat flippers through the sand to lay their eggs. “We provide a noble service here!” the General had proclaimed that first night shortly after my arrival. The slithering metallic labyrinth of pipes and cylinders that forms his Cannery shines like a temple in the sunrise, atop the low cliff behind him. “But there are those who would shut us down! There are forces in this world that would gladly see what little there is left in it, annihilated. It is our job to make sure they do not succeed, by whatever means necessary!”

  We sink out of the forest like clouds, and stand for a longer moment. The tortoises swarm the sands as far down the beach as we can see. Reverend Wiley had told us that demons possess the beach, demons that will render the General’s Cannery useless by devouring the sea life before it can be netted into the slaughtering machinery. With the slow stop-motion movement of their paddles, the ferocity of red burning in their ringless eyes and the monstrous snapping of the tapered jaws, I momentarily believe in demons. One of the tortoises down the beach lifts its head into the air and lets out a bellow like a sea lion. A smaller female next to it begins burrowing into the sand so that it can dispel its sac of eggs. Sense regains me and I know again that everything the Reverend says is just a tactic to build devotion in his new recruits. We aren’t holy soldiers fighting a religious war, we are men who have given up all other opportunity so that we can work low-wage, potentially dangerous manual labor for, in my case, a minimum five-year agreement. We are economy.

  There is a wooden crack and we all wince, all close our eyes. For a moment I am not sure if I am alive or dead. Ironically, it is a very liberating feeling. My eyes open again just in time to see Robinson’s body slump to the ground. His head has evaporated, become a bloody stump of ribbons. The three of us drop to a knee and hold ourselves close to the ground. Peck raises his rifle and begins circling his own footprints in narrow circles on his knees, one eye trained on the sight of his gun. They warned us about the animal rights activists who sometimes hide in the woods, sometimes in the sea with only the muzzle of a shotgun and a hollow reed through which they can breathe above the angry surface. I hold onto the barrel of my own weapon though my fingers are miles from the trigger. I hold it to my chest for comfort, the way I had once held onto my mother’s legs. At my feet is the lifeless body of Robinson. His real name hadn’t been Robinson, it had been Phillip Carrusoe. Peck had given him the name Robinson because he thought his last name had been Crusoe.

  “I think it’s okay,” Pecker says. We stand cautiously and lower our rifles. Ja-Ja uses his thumb to cross himself, then he turns away from Robinson forever. The pool of blood draining from the shredded throat is soaking down into the sand where it leaves a grainy stain.

  “What the fuck was that?” Tens screams from the woods.

  “Shut up, Tens,” Pecker says, though not nearly loudly enough for Tens to hear. He is looking at Robinson’s body. “Alright let’s get this over with.”

  From our jackets we take our carving knives, long serrated things better suited for butchers than soldiers. Yet here we are. We slaughter the tortoises. Those that have already lain their eggs, we destroy the eggs as well. Pecker suffers a nasty bite to the calf but it’s inconsequential. Ja-Ja loses a finger trying to pry off the shell of one of the bulls he thinks is dead. Peck and I help tourniquet the bleeding and then we go off down the beach to finish our job.

  I head south along the beach, skewering the smaller or slower tortoises with the knife and shooting the more trying ones with the rifle. I reach the end of the beach, a tall open-mouthed cave, and then head back north to find the others. I find Peck standing on the coastline with the slow tide washing up over his boots, soaking the cuffs of his pants with blood and salt. He is holding the blackened knife by its hilt, carelessly at his side. His gun is dug into the wet sand. There is a pile of bleeding tortoises around him. He is staring at the low island off in the distance, the island the tortoises come from, supposedly. I approach slowly. He looks over at me and tries to smile but goddamn does he look sad. I shunt my gun into the sand next to his and then I sit down and let the water rise up and chill my ass.

  “So why are you here, Stalls?”

  I look out over the water. The sun is beginning to set. The water is a coalition of collapsed rainbows. If the world were a rainbow, I would bet that the r
uins after the descent of civilization would look like an ocean at sunset. I don’t answer him.

  “You know I’ve been here for just over a dozen years,” he tells me. “When I left home, it didn’t look the way it does now. The forest, that forest,” he nods his head back at the woods that separates us from home, “it was grown out, into the town, into the desert. It wasn’t a desert back then. The trees grew between the homes, lined the streets, there was dirt instead of sand. Grass, flowers, instead of nothing as there is now. It was a beautiful place. Lush. I remember I was just younger than you, maybe fifteen, when the apparition appeared in the bell tower at the center of town. It showed up without warning. We could all see it there, the shimmer moving around the defunct rusted iron curve of the bell of the town hall. We could all see it there, clearly through the wide, flat frilled leaves of the cacao palms, whether midday or deep night. It was always there and we all saw it, but none of us would acknowledge it to each other. We watched it secretly, peripherally, when nobody was watching us.

  “At first we grew nervous for what it portended. Was it a doomsday angel? The spirit of a town founder come to share a warning? Then we grew quiet, realizing that it was a private ghost, meant for one, not for all. Walking the streets you could see everyone glancing above their newspapers, over their own and each other’s shoulders, up at the bell tower. We grew quiet. Guilt spread for the sins we had all committed against the dead. Then, paranoia spread, sins again, but for the ones that hadn’t yet been found out. Still, we could say nothing, not until we knew, was the apparition here for me? For her, or him, or them?

  “Everyone seemed concerned with it except for my father, who remained disinterested in the specter and remained as stoic as he always was. Finally, on the third night, we were woken by the tolling of the bell. It hadn’t sung in fourteen years, since they’d installed the citywide public announcement speakers. I threw on my clothes and I joined the rest of the town outside where we listened to it toll slowly, heavily. Eleven strokes to mark the time. We were finally all looking directly at it, you could see the upturned faces in the pall of the lanterns and flashlights some of the people thought to carry out with them. They could look because now they knew, it wasn’t for them. You could see the relief and satisfaction transform their faces like a magnetic wave sweeping the town as one by one they applied the numbers to all the dead they knew and realized the ghost hadn’t come for them.”