13 1/2 (19 page)

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Authors: Nevada Barr

BOOK: 13 1/2
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He said nothing, just kept looking out of the window. Cows were grazing by the road. If he could choose a life, that would be the one he picked, the life of a cow munching grass never knowing one day it would be hamburger.
“I can see why you might not want to go back to Rochester, son,” the man in the backseat said carefully.
The “son” grated on Dylan. He was nobody’s son.
“Reentering life on the outside is hard. Lots of boys don’t acclimatize. Maybe even most boys. They end up back inside. I hope that’s not the case with you, but it could be.”
Dylan thought about that for a while. It wasn’t news. In his seven years in Drummond he’d seen the revolving door spinning, kids in, and out, and in again. Mostly, they came back boasting about the time they’d had outside, like they were sailors back on the ship bragging about their conquests during shore leave. He could do that—boost a car or get in a fist fight and get himself thrown back in jail. The state or federal pen this time. He was eighteen.
“Guaranteed,” Dylan said.
“Why? You’ve got no more family to do in but me,” Rich said. He laughed, but the words were sharp as knives. Dylan had hurt his feelings; he’d not appreciated what his brother had done for him, continued to do for him.
“Fistfights,” he said succinctly. “In Rochester I’ll be fighting all the time. Eventually, I’ll kill somebody.” There was no boast there; it was just fact. Dylan was big and he was strong. Hit somebody wrong, and they were dead.
Nobody argued with that.
After a time Rich said, “I got you enrolled in the junior college where I went. You don’t want to sling hash all your life do you?”
“You have to go to college, son,” said the brown suit from the backseat. “Phil Maris said you were one of the smartest kids he’d ever taught. You don’t want to waste that on fistfights and the like.”
College.
The word rang through Dylan, reverberating like the morning bell at Drummond. Guys in Drummond didn’t go to college; guys bound for the pen at eighteen didn’t think about it any more than they thought about flying out the window on a magic carpet.
The one true, clean, linear joy he’d had in Drummond was Phil and math class.
Phil hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. He’d never even written.
For Dylan the peaceful order of planes, dimensions, numbers doing precisely what they should eventually returned. Phil Maris never did. Until now, Dylan figured he’d forgotten about him.
“College?” He said it so softly Mr. Leonard, in the backseat, didn’t hear him.
“Why not?” Rich said. “I can afford it.”
“They let guys like me do that?”
Mr. Leonard caught up with the flow of ideas. “It could be done,” he said slowly.
“Not in Rochester. Not in Minnesota,” Dylan insisted.
Richard laughed. It wasn’t the bitter laugh he often had; it was a good, fat laugh, like he’d thought of some grand scheme, something cool to do.
“Hey, the winters are too damned cold up here anyway,” he said.
LOUISIANA, 2007
 
Andrea Yates. Drowns five kids. I can’t condemn the woman. I can’t even get up a good steam of outrage. How can anybody blame her? She’s young, alone, depressed; her husband is off at his job but micromanages her life. She can’t send the kids to school. There’s no money for help. She’s supposed to be teaching them lessons. The whole religion thing is coming down on her.
 
Then a voice tells her there’s a way out.
 
You’ve got to hand it to Andrea. She fought the voice. Tried to get help. Told her husband she had thoughts of killing her kids. That must have taken courage. Jesus, is there any worse thing that a woman can admit? Nobody helped her, or not enough, and she landed back with that killing pressure.
 
And the voice, telling her there’s a way out.
 
Poor woman must have been so desperate by that point, I doubt she could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Her reality was insane, so insanity looked logical.
 
The voice gets pushier. The kids get wilder. She thinks she’s a lousy mother, and anything’s got to be better for the kids than a lousy mother.
 
Then, one day, the voice wins. She drowns them because there is no other choice left.
 
I admire Andrea Yates. Not for the killings, but for the heroism and strength she showed in fighting insanity in an attempt to save them. Had anyone stepped in and helped her with this battle the kids would have survived. And so would Ms. Yates’s mind.
 
22
Married.
Standing on the cathedral steps at twilight, watching the lights come on around the square, Polly resisted the urge to look at the rings on her left hand. A breeze filtered through the cooling bodies of the tourists ruffling her hair. Letting the magic take her as she always did when she came for a reading, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The French Quarter smelled like a traveling carnival: cotton candy with a whiff of naughty sex, stale beer, and urine dressed up with French perfume, and running through it like a current of unstoppable life, a mother on a rampage, a teenaged girl on a tear, the smell of the river.
On such a fine evening the tarot card readers were out in force, lined up umbrella to umbrella in a postpsychedelic mushroom patch, facing off against the gleaming white stone of St. Louis, the forces of the old magic in tawdry defiance of the Christian interloper. While debating which reader to patronize, Polly wondered what the cards would say. For years they’d hinted at a mystery man waiting in her future to sweep her off her feet. There’d been men and there’d been mystery but only with Marshall had she been swept away. Surely the Lovers would be in her reading, and the World, and the Moon. Polly smiled. Love had made her such a fool.
Two girls—children in Polly’s eyes but of the age she’d been the first time she’d come to Jackson Square—rose from a table tucked between the benches opposite the cathedral doors. They were tricked out in the unfortunate fashion that decreed female children dress as prostitutes in a world full of predators.
The girls looked around like actors searching for an audience, then, catching her eye, the bolder of the two—at least that was what Polly surmised from the acreage of skin exposed—called, “If you’re going to get a reading, you should go to the Woman in Red.”
“The fat-fat one,” the second girl said rudely, but at least quietly.
“The Woman in Red,” the first girl repeated insistently, “is truly awe-some.” Stretching out an arm displaying half a dozen bracelets, she pointed to the table they had just vacated. There a voluminous woman—the very air around her swelling and rippling along with her layers of scarves—beckoned. Palms up, her screaming scarlet nails waggled as if she tickled a trout from midair.
“The Woman in Red it shall be,” Polly said and smiled as ghosts of her past walked away giggling. She’d noticed the reader on previous pilgrimages to the square in search of her future. It was hard not to. Shades of shrieking sunset, roses, and hearts of fire, cherries, apples, blood, and wine were thrown together. If one shade of red was loud, this woman’s ensemble was cacophonous.
Before time and sunlight had taken its toll, her khaki-colored setup had evidently been as red as the rest of her. As she shifted her considerable weight, her chair’s wooden frame moved and flashed thin ribbons of the canvas’s original color, that of freshly butchered meat. Polly descended the cathedral steps and the fortune-teller leaned forward, reaching out with a beggar’s aspect—or that of a drowning woman bent on pulling her rescuer down. “For zee lady, zee reading eez free,” she said in a voice both ruined and childlike, the worn-out voice tape of a Chatty Cathy doll with a fake French accent.
Hucksters and harlots never honestly meant anything was free. Having been a little of both in her time, Polly knew “free” just opened the bargaining. She settled into a rickety captain’s chair.
Crimson fluttered, cheap jewelry jangled, and the woman shuffled the oversized cards with the ease of long practice. Grubby things, told through her fingers many times, the corners were dog-eared and the edges worn soft. Polly cut the deck. With a theatrical flourish, the reader began dealing.
Tarot cards depicted hanged men, hearts pierced by swords, priestesses, forts, golden goblets, astrological signs, wands, Jungian archetypes, numbers, and a thousand other symbols cobbled together in a mishmash of the world’s myths and religions, a dim sum of the spiritual, psychic, and psychological worlds.
Candle flames igniting the colors, the cards kaleidoscoped down with hypnotic speed. Fabric, paper, dye, paint, and uncertain light confused the eye. The familiar pattern of staff and cross seemed to rise up from the designs on the tablecloth.
“The Celtic Cross,” the reader said. Her voice was no longer accented. France had been replaced by the echo of someplace cold, the northern Midwest or upstate New York. Fingers flying over the filthy bits of cardboard, long acrylic nails creating colorful exclamation points, words began to pour out flat and fast.
Like a third grader terrified of forgetting her lines,
Polly thought.
But these weren’t the words of a child. Repelled and fascinated, Polly moved closer to hear the hushed rapid-fire monologue. An errant thought sparked: in his sleep, had Hamlet’s father leaned just so, anxious to receive the poison in his ear?
Paralyzed, she listened as the reader told her of real things, secret things: the abortion Polly had seven hours before the high school prom, one of her stepfathers watching her through a hole he’d drilled in the bathroom wall, the student-aid counselor she’d seduced to get a full scholarship her freshman year at Tulane, Gracie at eight months rolling off the bed and Polly living in terror she’d grow up brain damaged.
As suddenly as it had begun, the outpouring stopped. The woman pursed her lips, the lipstick so heavy it ran in bloody feathers up wrinkles, and studied the cards lying between them on the table.
Around the edges of Polly’s consciousness, like dancers around a fire, thoughts came in and out of the light: of knocking the cards to the ground, of rising and running, calling the police.
The reader pushed her face nearer to the cards, and Polly saw the white roots under the Lady Clairol-red hair. Without relaxing her lipsticked mouth, she began to speak in a Halloween-like moan. “You are mired in deceit. Lies grow up around you in choking vines. Your children are threatened. Your life hangs by a frayed rope. Old evil has taken root and begun to grow.”
Her eyes, heavy with mascara, narrowed in the fleshy face. She pressed her bulk across the small table, so close Polly could smell cigarettes and alcohol. A hand bearing a burden of dime store rings shot out; acrylic nails dug hard into the skin of Polly’s forearm.
“Your husband is not who you think he is,” the woman hissed. “You will kill him.”
Polly tried to jerk free. Acrylic talons dug deeper. The woman shoved her nose within inches of Polly’s.
“Your husband will die at your hands.”
For a short eternity, Polly stared into the reader’s face. Drugstore foundation, showing orange in the strange light of dusk, caked in the wrinkles. The black-rimmed eyes were rheumy, the whites yellowed with age and abuse. The cloying stench of despair rolled off her, a mental levee breached, poison waters flooding out.
“No,” Polly managed finally. Finding strength in the sound of her own voice, she yanked her arm free, leaving pieces of her flesh beneath the Woman in Red’s fingernails. Standing so fast her chair toppled over, she backed from the table.
“Open your eyes,” the beast was saying. “Open your eyes.”
Polly fumbled in her purse, pulled out three twenties, and threw them on the table.
“The reading is free,” said the beast, but she eyed the money greedily.
“Nothing is free,” Polly whispered. She ran to the corner, turned, and walked rapidly down the shadowed lane between the park and a row of shops.
She would have cut through the garden, but it was locked at sundown. At a side gate a young woman, hands clutching the wrought iron bars, gazed into the garden. As Polly neared, she turned and looked at her. “Cats,” she said. “Everywhere.”
Polly saw only the cockroaches. They lived like kings on the crowds’ droppings. A nauseating clot of the insects fled from around the girl’s sandal-clad feet. She didn’t seem to notice.
Or she didn’t mind
.
“What are all the cats doing?” she demanded of Polly.
Polly stepped up beside her and looked into the fenced garden. A spangling of tiny white lights on the trees deepened rather than illuminated the shadows beneath. Pale concrete paths caught the lights and glowed. Into this almost colorless dreamscape had come at least a dozen cats: grey tigers with long legs, short fur, and languid attitudes. They bathed. They stretched. They napped with half-open eyes. They stared without blinking. Safe behind the wrought iron fence, they preened with studied indifference.

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