Moonlight & Vines (40 page)

“I've been keeping these for someone like you,” she says and pulls a pack of tattered cards out of the pocket of her black dress.

Cassie doesn't want to take them, but she reaches for them all the same. They're held together with an elastic band. When the old woman puts them in her hand, something like a static charge jumps between them. She gets a dizzy feeling that makes her sway, almost lose her balance. She closes her hand, fingers tight around the cards and the feeling goes away.

The old woman's grinning. “You felt that, didn't you, girl?”

“I. . . I felt something.”

“Aren't you a caution.”

None of this feels real, none of it makes sense. The old woman, the house, the bottle tree. Cassie tries to remember how she got here, when the strip malls and fast-food outlets suddenly gave way to a dirt road and this place. Is this how it happened to Angie? All of a sudden she looks at herself one day and she's a junkie?

Cassie's gaze goes down to the cards the old woman gave her. She removes the elastic and fans a few of them out. They have a design on one side; the other side is blank. She lifts her head to find the old woman still grinning at her.

“What are these?” she asks.

“What do they look like, girl? They're cards. Older
than Egypt, older than China, older than when the first mama woke up in Africa and got to making babies so that we could all be here.”

“But. . .” It's hard to think straight. “What are they for?”

“Fortunes, girl. Help you find yourself. Let you help other people find themselves.”

“But. . .”

She was valedictorian, she thinks. She has more of a vocabulary than her whole family put together and all she can say is “but.”

“But there's nothing on them.”

She doesn't know much about white people's magic, but she's heard of telling fortunes with cards—playing cards, Tarot cards. She doesn't know much about her own people's magic either.

The old juju woman laughs. “Oh, girl. 'Course there isn't. There won't be nothing on them until you need something to be there.”

None of this is making sense. It's only making her dizzy again. There's a stool beside the woman's chair and she sits on it, closes her eyes, still holding the cards. She takes a few deep breaths, steadies herself. But when she opens her eyes again she's sitting on a concrete block in the middle of a traffic median. There's no house, no bottle tree. No old woman. Only the traffic going by on either side of her. A discount clothing store across the street. A factory outlet selling stereos and computers on the other side.

There's only the cards in her hands and at her feet, lying on the pavement of the median, an elastic band.

She's scared. But she bends down, picks up the elastic. She turns over the top card, looks at it. There's a picture now, where before it was blank. It shows an abandoned tenement in the Tombs, one of the places where the homeless people squat. She's never been in it, but she recognizes the building. She's passed it a hundred times on the bus, going from school to the McDonald's where she worked. She turns another card and now she's looking at a picture of the inside of a building—probably the same one. The windows are broken, there's garbage all over, a heap of rags in one corner. A third card takes her closer to the rags. Now she can see there's somebody lying under those rags, somebody so thin and wasted there's only bone covered with skin.

She doesn't turn a fourth card.

She returns the cards to the pack, puts the elastic around them, sticks the pack in her pocket. Her mouth feels baked and dry. She waits for a
break in the traffic and goes across to the discount clothing store to ask for a drink of water, but they tell her the restroom is only for staff. She has to walk four blocks before a man at a service station gives a sympathetic look when she repeats her request, hands her the key to the woman's room.

She drinks long and deep, then feels sick and has to throw up. When she returns to the sink, she rinses her mouth, washes her face. The man's busy with a customer, so she hangs the key on the appropriate hook by the door in the office and thanks him as she goes by, walking back toward downtown.

Normal people don't walk through the Tombs, not even along well-trafficked streets like Williamson or Flood. It's too dangerous, a no-man's-land of deserted tenements and abandoned factories. But she doesn't see she has a choice. She walks until she sees the tenement that was on the card, swallows hard, then crosses an empty lot overgrown with weeds and refuse until she's standing in front of it. It takes her a while to work up her nerve, but finally she steps into its foyer.

It smells of urine and garbage. Something stirs in a corner, sits up. Her pulse jumps into overtime, even when she sees it's only a raggedy boy, skinny, hollow-eyed.

“Gimme something,” he says. “I don't need to get high, man. I just need to feel well again.”

“I. . . I don't have anything.”

She's surprised she can find her voice. She's surprised that he only nods and lies back down in his nest of newspapers and rags.

It doesn't take her long to find the room she saw on the second card. Something pulls her down a long hall. The doors are all broken down. Things stir in some of the rooms. People. Rats. Roaches. She doesn't know and doesn't investigate. She just keeps walking until she's in the room, steps around the garbage littering the floor to the heap of rags in the corner.

A half hour later she's at a pay phone on Gracie Street, phoning the police, telling them about the dead body she found in the tenement.

“Her name's Angie,” she says. “Angie Moore.”

She hangs up and starts to walk again, not looking for anything now, hardly able to see because of the tears that swell in her eyes.

She doesn't go home again. She can't exactly explain why. Meeting the old woman, the cards she carries, finding Angie, it all gets mixed up in
her head with how hard she tried to do well and still nobody really cared about her except for the friend she turned her back on. Her parents were happy to brag about her marks, but there was no warmth there. She is eighteen and can't remember ever being embraced. Her brothers and sisters were like the other kids in the projects, ragging on her for trying to do well. The white kids didn't care about anything except for the color of her skin.

It all came down to no one respecting her except for Angie, and she'd turned her back on Angie because Angie couldn't keep up.

But the cards mean something. She knows that.

She's still working at the McDonald's, only now she saves her money and lives in a squat in the Tombs. Nobody comes to find out why she hasn't returned home. Not her family, not her teachers. Some of the kids from school stop by, filling up on Big Macs and fries and soft drinks, and she can hear them snickering at their tables, studiously not looking at her.

She takes to going to the library and reading about cards and fortune telling, gets to be a bit of an expert. She buys a set of Tarot cards in The Occult Shop and sometimes talks to the people who work there, some of the customers. She never reads or hears anything about the kind of cards the old woman gave her.

Then one day she meets Joseph Crazy Dog in the Tombs, just down from the Kickaha rez, wild and reckless and a little scary, but kind, too, if you took the time to get to know him. Some people say he's not all there, supposed to be on medication, but won't take it. Others say he's got his feet in two worlds, this one and another place where people have animal faces and only spirits can stay for more than a few days, the kind of place you come back from either a poet or mad. First thing he tells her is he can't rhyme worth a damn.

Everybody calls him Bones because of how he tells fortunes with a handful of small-animal and bird bones, reads auguries in the way they fall upon the buckskin when he throws them. But she calls him Joe and something good happens between them because he respects her, right away he respects her. He's the first person she tells about the old juju woman and she knows she was right to wait because straightaway he can tell her where she went that day and what it means.

It was almost dark by the time Cassie and Joe reached the overpass in the Tombs that was pictured on the card. At one time it had been a hobo camp, but now it was one more junkie landmark, a place where you could score and shoot without being hassled. The cops didn't bother coming by much. They had bigger fish to fry.

“A lot of hard times bundled up in a place like this,” Joe said.

Cassie nodded.

Some of the kids they walked by were so young. Most of them were already high. Those that weren't, were looking to score. It wasn't the sort of place you could ask questions, but neither Cassie nor Joe were strangers to the Tombs. They still squatted themselves and most people knew of them, if they'd never actually met. They could get away with showing around a picture, asking questions.

“When did heroin get so popular again?” Cassie said.

Joe shrugged. “Never got unpopular—not when it's so easy to score. You know the drill. The only reason solvents and alcohol are so popular up on the rez is no one's bringing in this kind of shit. That's the way it works everywhere—supply and demand. Here the supply's good.”

And nobody believed it could hurt them, Cassie thought. Because it wouldn't happen to them and sure people got addicted, but everybody knew somebody who'd used and hadn't got strung out on it. Nobody set out to become an addict. Like most bad things, it just snuck up on you when you weren't paying attention. But the biggest problem was that kids got lied to about so much, it was hard for them to accept this warning as a truth.

They made a slow pass of the three or four blocks where most of the users congregated, showing the photo of Laura's brother when it seemed appropriate, but without much luck. From there they headed back downtown, following Williamson Street down Gracie. It was on the gay bar strip on Gracie Street that they finally found someone who could help.

“I like the hair, Tommy,” Cassie said.

It was like a close-cut Afro, the corkscrew curls so purple they had to come from a bottle. Tommy grinned, but his good humor vanished when Joe showed him the picture.

“Yeah, I know him,” Tommy said. “Danny Packer, right? Though he sure doesn't look like that now. How come you're looking for him?”

“We're not. His sister is and we're just helping her out. Any idea where we could find him?”

“Ask at the clinic.”

Cassie and Joe exchanged glances.

“He's working there?” Cassie asked.

Tommy shook his head.

“What is this place?” Laura asked.

They were standing in front of an old yellow brick house on McKennitt Street in Lower Crowsea. Cassie had picked her up outside the Y a little after four and Joe drove them across town in a cab he'd borrowed from a friend.

“It's a hospice,” Cassie said. “It was founded by a writer who died of AIDS a few years ago—Ennis Thompson.”

“I've read him. He was a wonderful writer.”

Cassie nodded. “His royalties are what keeps it running.”

The house was on a quiet stretch of McKennitt, shaded by a pair of the tall, stately oaks that flourished in Crowsea. There wasn't much lawn. Geraniums grew in terra cotta planters going up the steps to the front door, adding a splash of color and filling the air with their distinctive scent. They didn't seem to make much of an impression on Laura. She was too busy studying the three-storied building, a small frown furrowing the skin between her eyebrows.

“Why did Dan want me to meet him here?” she asked.

Cassie hesitated. When they'd come to see him last night, Laura's brother had asked them to let him break the news to her. She understood, but it left her in the awkward position of having to be far too enigmatic in response to Laura's delight that her brother had been found. She'd been fending off Laura's questions ever since they'd spoken on the phone earlier and arranged to drive out here.

“Why don't we let him tell you himself,” Cassie said.

Joe held the door for them. He nodded a greeting to the young woman stationed at a reception desk in what would once have been a front parlor.

“Go ahead,” she told them. “He's expecting you.”

“Thanks,” Joe said.

He led the way down the hall to Dan's room. Rapping softly on the door, he opened it when a weak voice called out, “It's open.”

Laura stopped and wouldn't go on.

“Come on,” Cassie said, her voice gentle.

But Laura could only shake her head. “Oh god, how could I have been so stupid? He's a patient here, isn't he?”

Cassie put a hand on her arm and found it trembling. “He's still your brother.”

“I know. It's not that. It's just—”

“Laura?”

The voice pulled her to the door and through it, into the room. Cassie had been planning to allow them some privacy for this meeting, but now she followed in after Laura to lend her moral support in case it was needed.

Dan was in bad shape. She only knew him from the picture that Laura had lent her yesterday, but he bore no resemblance to the young man in that photograph. Not anymore. No doubt he had already changed somewhat in the years since the picture had been taken, but now he was skeletal, the skin hanging from his bones, features hollow and sunken. Sores discolored his skin in great blotches and his hair was wispy and thin.

But Laura knew him.

Whatever had stopped her outside the room was gone. She crossed the room quickly now, sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully took his scrawny hands in her own, leaned forward and kissed his brow.

“Oh, Danny. What have you done to yourself?”

He gave her a weak smile. “Screwed things up as usual.”

“But this. . .”