Burning (6 page)

And then I watched, amused by their childish antics, as they yanked open the passenger door and tried, one and then the other, to pull some third, unwilling visitor from his seat.

I could not see the face of this reluctant guest, but still I noticed much that interested me. Neither boy—not even the fat one—could force him from the truck. So he must be strong. And the faces of the other two, the handsome one and the one who resembled swine—they were by turns affable and persuasive, but neither looked angry—whoever was so stubbornly immovable in the cab of the truck was someone they respected, someone each of them loved deeply.

Finally, the handsome boy held his hands up, supplicating, and at last the third boy rose from his seat, closing the truck’s door behind him.

Though I was not near them—I stood perhaps thirty feet away, near the door to our motor home, with Violeta beside me—I heard clearly the sound of the metal door slamming shut. It was a sound of finality, of the end of something—or perhaps this was just how I chose to hear it. Perhaps it was just a closing door.

His back was to me. His shoulders were broad and well muscled. An athlete—that was clear. His hair was a mixture of light brown and blond, lightened by the touch of the sun. So he was someone who spent his time out-of-doors, his head uncovered. No helmet, then, required for his sport. The back of his neck was brown from the sun.

When he walked around the front of the truck, flanked by his two companions, the difference between him and them was marked. Though I had thought the other boy handsome, this one, who was clearly full of reticence and did not want to be here, seemed to me like the answer to a question I had not known I’d asked.

Deep inside me, it was as if something was waking and stretching its limbs. Some secret dragon hibernating in my core had been stirred by the presence of this boy.

It was flames I felt, a fire as the dragon yawned. My body felt possessed, overtaken. I heard my words as I spoke to Violeta next to me as if someone else was speaking them—“I will take that one, the one in the center, if they are here for their fortunes.”

Violeta laughed quietly, so only I could hear her. “Why not?” she said. “You are not yet Romeo’s bride. Be young for a change. Have a little fun.”

Always Violeta said to me that I acted much older than my age, teasing and chiding me about my “old soul,” as she called it.

I did not look back at her as I stepped forward, smiling. I knew from the expressions on their faces that the way I looked was pleasing to them—why should it not be? I too was young, healthy, full of life.

The fat one ate me up with his eyes, his gaze fondling my breasts, probing my hips as I walked toward them. I paid him no mind. My focus was clear.

Even as I approached the boys, I did not stop watching. I saw the tanned limbs of the center boy, the way the golden
hairs on them glistened. He wore a thin T-shirt that read
GYPSUM HIGH
across the chest in block letters and shorts that left half his thigh exposed along with the length of his calf. For my people the lower body is unclean, but I was glad that the athlete did not cover his legs. I could not help but admire the thick, masculine muscles of them. I noticed his shoes—runner’s shoes, a good brand, much too expensive to belong in that rusty truck, in this arid desert. And they were well worn; my eyes did not miss that detail. He double-knotted the laces.

“Welcome,” I said. “You come for a reading?”

“No,” said the boy in the middle, and my heart saddened before the fat one contradicted him.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what you call telling the future, right? A reading?” He snorted his disbelief.

I raised an eyebrow. “You do not believe, and yet you are here. Why is that?”

“
You
tell
me
.” He laughed, pleased with his simple, common joke.

My voice was smooth when I responded. “You bring your friend, the reluctant one. You wish a reading for him, as he is about to begin a journey.”

At last, the fat one was out of words. His mouth hung open, his eyes were round and wide.

“How did you know that?” asked the boy with the shaggy hair.

I merely smiled again and gestured with my head for them to follow me into the tent. Violeta, to my annoyance, had preceded us into it and was sitting behind a folding screen,
working on her mending. Of course she would not leave me alone with the
gazhè
; always before I had welcomed her presence, but today her company seemed an annoyance.

I sensed the boys behind me. I could tell from the weight of his step that the fat boy had been the first to follow. He was my most ardent believer now, and all I had done was state that which was obvious.

Of
course
his friend was about to embark on a journey. It was not a secret that their town was on the verge of closing; Romeo had told me all about it the day before, after he’d returned from shopping at their little store.

“They walk around like ghosts,” he had said, sounding pleased with the predicament these
gazhè
found themselves in. “All of them hooked their wagons to the mine and factory. Now that there is no more money to be made, the rich men who own them are shutting everything down. And everyone must leave.”

It did not surprise me that Romeo had seen the
gazhè
’s ill fortune as a testament to our luck, but the smug tone he had taken when he talked about them irritated me. His happiness about another’s sadness seemed miserly, as if he believed there was only so much goodness in the world, and that seeing the lack of another’s happiness meant there would be somehow more fortune for us to harvest. I understood his satisfaction at their failure, though I did not approve of it and did not echo it in my own heart. The
gazhè
I had encountered had never made my people’s welfare a priority, and I know my people largely wanted it that way—separate, never commingling.

But these townspeople’s exodus from their home saddened me nonetheless. It was true that they were losing a measure of security that we Gypsies had never had in the first place; our families did not reap the benefits of steady salaries and company-provided health care, but neither did we suck at the teat of an unfeeling corporation that might cut us off if the winds of fortune changed.

Our families made our own fortunes, together, and together we tightened our belts when necessary. If one in our family was ill or injured, of course that would not mean less food for him and his children. That is what brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, cousins, and kin are for—to provide, to buoy one up when one is not strong on his own legs for a period of time.

The
gazhè
are not like us. Each of them feels the whole weight on his back, as if he alone carries the world. Each is alone.

Once inside the tent, I rearranged the chairs so that the three of them could cluster together on one side of the table and I could sit across from them.

Today I wore my favorite skirt: long panels of purple silk, all different hues, radiating out from my waist and pooling at my ankles. Around my waist I had belted a strap of leather and above this wore a cool white cotton blouse, its neckline showing off my throat and the rise of my breasts to their best advantage.

I sat first and watched the three of them in the tent’s doorway. The fat one shot forward quickly, an eager student now that I had made a believer of him.

“Hog Boy!” The athlete spoke, angry and embarrassed.

“You do not wish to be here,” I said. “But your friends have brought you for a reason. Sometimes to be a friend means to allow others to give to you.” I gestured to the chair in the middle.

His eyes glanced at the chair and then darted back and forth between his companions. I could see it there, his desire to bolt conflicting with an urge to do this for his friends, to allow them the pleasure of watching him. And I knew that his sense of duty would outweigh his reluctance.

Still, it took longer than I might have guessed for him to resolve his inner struggle and submit to his friends’ whim. At last he crossed the tent’s floor and sat himself in the chair across from me.

I had not realized that I had been holding my breath until I released it once he sat. Behind the screen my sister laughed quietly.

“You have money?”

Hog Boy nodded.

“Hang on.” The one I had thought was handsome—until I saw his friend—stepped forward, putting his hand on Hog Boy’s shoulder. “How much do you charge?”

I shrugged disarmingly. “I request a donation. There is no set fee for a reading.”

“Well, how much do people usually … donate?”

“It varies greatly,” I demurred. “Usually between fifty and a hundred dollars.”

Hog Boy whistled. “That’s a lot of dough,” he said. “We’ve got twenty-two bucks between us.”

“I thought we agreed no more than fifteen,” said the boy who was still standing. The athlete closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. I could tell he thought this was quickly going from bad to worse.

“Shut up, Pete,” said Hog Boy. He smiled at me magnanimously. “This chick is the real deal. If we’re going to give Ben a real send-off, we can’t cheap out now.”

Ben. His name was Ben.

“Dude,” hissed Pete. “I got that money from Melissa.”

“Easy come, easy go,” said Hog Boy. It seemed to me that for this Hog Boy everything must be like that—easy, someone else’s problem.

“You guys don’t have to do this,” said Ben. His voice was warm. Like honey.

That was when Pete dug into his pocket, retrieving a crumpled-up twenty and a couple of ones. He smoothed them flat before handing them across to me, then sitting down on Ben’s left. “Will that be enough?”

I nodded and folded the bills before tucking them into one of the pockets of my skirt. Now I could look at the boy in the middle, Ben—now it was my job to do so.

“Your friends have brought you for a reason,” I said. “They want to send you into the world armed with some measure of knowledge. I am here to provide it.”

Ben’s brows knitted together. Clearly he did not believe that I could provide any such thing; he was not as easily swayed as his fat friend.

“Do you wish the cards, or shall I read your palm?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

I was about to suggest that he let me read his palm—it would be an excuse to touch him—but Hog Boy said, “Do the cards.”

More reason to dislike him. But they could not see my disappointment as I nodded and reached to the table’s edge for my Tarot deck, sliding it from its velvet bag.

I began to shuffle the cards. All three boys watched as my fingers turned and splayed the cards, as they arched between my hands and fell one by one into a tight stack again.

“What are those?” asked Pete.

“These are Tarot cards,” I answered, passing them back and forth between my hands.

“What do they do?”

“There are many answers to that question,” I began. “I like to say that the Tarot allows the Questioner to come into contact with his own unconscious, higher self. The best information, the truest answers, are those we already know. The cards act simply as an aid in seeing oneself—one’s past, present, and future—more clearly.”

I placed the cards on the table and pushed them across to Ben. He sat still, but with the tightly wound energy of one who is happiest in motion. “Shuffle,” I said. “Your own hand will choose your cards.”

He looked at the cards and then up at me. Our gaze held for a moment that stretched longer and longer, neither of us looking away. His eyes were blue, but very dark, almost gray.

At last he looked down at the cards. His right hand rose
from his lap and hovered over the deck. Then he tapped the cards and pushed them back to me.

“Do you have a question you would like to address?”

Again, his brow furrowed. This boy was a stranger to me. I did not know him. And yet already there was something in that expression—intense, focused, disarmingly beautiful—that made me wish to know him, made me want to hear his stories.

He shook his head. “No question,” he said. “Just—”

But then he stopped. “No question,” he said again.

I took up the cards and began to place them, starting with the card on the top of the deck—the Tower—until I had laid out ten cards in all.

“Hey, Ben,” said Hog Boy, tapping his thick white finger against one of the cards I had dealt. “That one must be your brother. Check him out—he’s got a rainbow flag.”

I thought then that there was going to be a fight in my tent. I felt the energy shift, as if all the air in our small, hot space had been sucked out. Ben’s body stiffened and I could see even more clearly the athlete in him—a panther, poised to strike, quick and clean and deadly.

But Pete leaned in and muttered, “Take it easy, man,” and Hog Boy said, “Jeez, can’t take a joke, can you, Stanley?” and soon the boy across from me was a boy once more. It was interesting to watch him, and informative—the way he took measured breaths, in for several counts, then out for just as many, in a way that was forced and unnatural but seemed to calm him.

When peace was reestablished, Ben turned back to the cards. I could tell he wanted to say something, to show that he was in control of himself. What he asked wasn’t important to him, but asking it calmly most certainly was.

“Why do you lay them out like that?”

“Do you know anything about Tarot?”

He shook his head. So did Hog Boy and Pete.

“The Tarot is an ancient form of divination. Each card has a meaning, and each place a card is laid has meaning, as well. The same card in two different places would mean two different things. Do you understand?”

All three boys nodded. I waited to see if they would ask a question, and then continued.

“There are seventy-eight cards in a deck.” I should begin at the beginning, I decided. And though I usually did not do so much explaining, I felt content to fill extra minutes, extending the time I could sit with Ben across from me. “The deck is composed of two parts—the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana.”

Here Hog Boy cut in. “What’s an arcana?”

“An arcana is a secret,” I answered. “The Major Arcana—twenty-two cards—tells the story of a journey. The journey of the Fool.”