Burning (8 page)

“Lucky dog,” laughed Hog Boy. I laughed, too, and so did Pete. Lala smiled, too. Her smile—the white flash of her teeth—seemed dangerously beautiful. I imagined her teeth on my lips, my neck.

“The Three of Cups,” Lala said.

The card showed three pretty girls—one blonde, one brunette, and one redhead—dancing in a meadow, each holding
a cup. The sky was blue, and fruit trees bloomed in the background. At their feet were baskets of grapes and apples and plums.

“UCSD,” said Pete.

“This is the atmosphere of your situation,” said Lala. “Bountiful and joyous. On the surface it seems that you are heading to the land of milk and honey—see, the grass is soft and green, the maidens are happy. It appears that you are going where there is no pain, only good fortune and beauty.”

The guys didn’t say anything. All three of us were uncomfortable, I guess. We hadn’t talked too much about the inequality of our situations, but this was pretty much how I figured they imagined my life in San Diego.

But the card didn’t show the early-morning runs, the late nights of studying I knew would make up my life if I intended to earn that scholarship for another year. And it didn’t show all the work I’d done to earn it for
this
year, either.

“But it won’t be like that,” I said, almost apologizing. “It’s not going to be all sorority girls and partying.”

“Are you telling
me
this, or your friends?”

“Fuck you, Stanley,” said Hog Boy. “Poor little scholarship boy’s gonna have to work so hard. Not that hard, if you ask me, compared to what’s in store for me and Petey.”

A hot wave of shame washed over me, knocking the fight clear out of me. Hog Boy was right. I wouldn’t trade places with them, not for a million dollars.

“It won’t change anything.” I felt the sting of the lie I spoke.

“Bullshit,” said Hog Boy. “It already has.” But there was no bitterness in his voice. Just a straight-up statement of fact.

On my other side, Pete shifted uncomfortably. “It’s okay, man,” he said. “You’ve earned it. We all know you have.”

We sat there for a minute, the three of us with our dicks in our hands, not knowing what to say. Then Lala said, smooth as silk, “Shall we go on?”

I wanted to say, “Fuck you.” I wanted to wipe the cards off the table and get out of the fucking tent, but I nodded miserably, as if I deserved this, like a bad boy taking his spanking.

“Next comes the Root of the Matter,” she said, tapping a card underneath the first pair.

The Hanged Man
, read the card. On it was a man, swinging from one knee upside down from a tree branch, his hands behind his back as if bound, his face corpse white. The same color as my dad’s face after a day of work at the mine, coated with a fine layer of gypsum dust.

“Here we find what is really going on at the heart of your situation,” said Lala. “Perhaps we see exposed here a secret you have been keeping.”

“No secret,” I said. “That’s my dad.”

Lala was still before she spoke. “Bound, helplessly hung, emasculated?”

“The chick doesn’t pull any punches,” chortled Hog Boy.

I just nodded, miserable.

“You see your father as out of options, out of time. His livelihood is gone. His hands are not free to help his family, or even to help himself out of his predicament.”

I remembered my father sitting at the breakfast table,
thumbing through the Help Wanted section of the
Reno Gazette
. Hopeless.

“But you see,” said Lala, lifting the Hanged Man, “when we invert this card, we find the situation may not be as dire as it may seem.”

I blinked. Flipped over, the Hanged Man didn’t look imprisoned anymore. One leg crossed over the other, a serene expression on his face, he looked instead to be relaxed, perfectly at ease.

“Sometimes what looks like a hopeless situation to one man can be an escape route to another,” Lala said. “It is just a matter of perspective.”

I considered that. Could she be right? But no matter which way I tried to manipulate the situation in my mind, Pops was screwed. No, she was wrong with this one—Pops was the Hanged Man, all right.

“What’s next?” I asked, wanting to get away from that card as soon as possible.

She gestured to a card to one side of the first pair. “This is the Recent Past,” she said. “You have been a busy boy.”

It was the Eight of Pentacles. This was clear enough; the number “8” was in a circle at the bottom of the card and it pictured a boy, ten or twelve, working at a table. He was carving a pentacle into a piece of wood. Shavings littered the table and you could tell he’d been working a while; seven other carved pentacles were hung on the wall behind him.

There was a doorway, too, behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice the view. He was focused on what was in front of him, his work.

“You see,” said Lala, pointing to the green hills, the blue sky and clear lake just outside of his workroom door. “Look at the pleasures of life that this boy—that
you
, Ben Stanley, have turned your back on. So much for a boy to enjoy out there. But not this boy. For this boy there is his work. But see! He wears a smile on his face. For him, his work is a pleasure, too.”

I found myself arguing with her. “Even if he likes his work,” I said, “look how much he’s giving up.”

“True,” she acknowledged. “And those sunny days, once lost, will not come again. Still, his work will be preserved. And it can be shared with others.”

Not like running. That was just for me. I was the only person who gained from it; I couldn’t bring James or Hog Boy or Pete along with me to college.

There was movement behind the screen. I’d almost forgotten there was someone else in the tent with us. “Is that your sister?”

Lala looked displeased, as if I’d said something that upset her. “Let us keep our focus on
you
, Ben Stanley.”

“Dissed,” said Hog Boy. Sometimes I thought he’d look much better with a few missing teeth.

“Next comes your Immediate Future,” said Lala, ignoring Hog Boy. She tapped a card on the other side of the first two crossed cards. “Ah, the Page of Cups. Remember, I said these face cards of each suit, along with the Major Arcana cards, could represent actual people in your life?”

The figure on the card she was pointing to wasn’t anyone I knew. I shook my head.

“Try not to be so purely literal,” Lala urged. “This card can represent a person … a child, perhaps, or someone with a childlike nature. Don’t you have a sibling?”

How could she know that? “Yeah,” I said, “But he’s a
brother
. The Page of Cups”—I jabbed my finger at the image—“is a
girl
.”

“The gender is not so important,” she said.

I felt myself beginning to panic. I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it.

“The person represented by the Page of Cups may be an apprentice of sorts, someone who is just coming into his or her self-realization. Perhaps it is a child who enjoys the arts, someone who is in touch with his or her emotions and imagination. A creative person.”

Next to me, Hog Boy was doing his best not to blurt out something stupid. I knew from experience that it was just a matter of time.

Pete picked up the card and looked at it. “What’s that in the cup she’s holding?”

“It is a bird,” said Lala. “It can represent freedom, or joyful self-discovery. Do you see the rays shooting out from the cup, the hopeful colors of the sky? This is a hopeful card. A very happy one, indeed.”

Not much happiness that I could figure. Everyone in Gypsum knew that James was a little funny. So he wasn’t a cowboy—so what? He was still a
kid
—only twelve. It was too soon for everybody to be whispering about him, labeling him behind his back.

And I’d spent the last five years making sure no one did,
at least not when I was around. I’d been in fights with most of the guys in my high school, including those who graduated years ahead of me, all of them wanting to make smart remarks about James. Only a couple of them made those kinds of comments more than once.

So what if that had earned me a standing appointment with Mrs. Howell, the history teacher who had doubled as our school counselor? She could tell me all she wanted to about the power of positive thought and the benefits of mindful meditation. I’d keep kicking asses as long as it took to keep James safe.

But next fall, when James started up at Archie Clayton Middle School in Reno, I wouldn’t be there to protect him. I’d be on the beach in Southern California, working on my tan.

I could feel Hog Boy itching with his comment. We’d better move on before he ran out of self-control, I knew. “So that’s me, right?” I asked, tapping on the card closest to Lala’s right hand. “The Fool?” This was the card Hog Boy had laughed about earlier; a rainbow of colored ribbons was attached to the backpack the figure carried.

“Yes,” said Lala. “Our next card. The Fool. This space in the spread represents the Questioner—that’s you, Ben. Remember how I said the cards of the Major Arcana tell the story of a journey? You’ve chosen the card that corresponds with the beginning of an adventure. See how he steps out, full of hope? There are snowcapped mountains, but they are far in the distance. In this moment all is spring. See the
flowers at his feet? And he has a pack on his back and a song on his lips—see the flute? He is off on a grand adventure.”

Pete peered closely at the card. “Hey—isn’t that the edge of a cliff?”

I looked closer too. It was easy to miss at first—the banner with the card’s name,
THE FOOL
, obscured it—but Pete was right. The guy was just about to dance off the edge of a cliff.

“There is danger in every journey,” Lala said. “This card reminds us that even when things may seem rosy and the path appears easy, the road can drop out from beneath us at any time.” She leveled me then with her eyes. “Things can change in an instant,” she said. “Remember this.”

This time she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. Things had changed the instant I’d seen her.

The road I had been on—packing my bags, seeing my family begin their new life without me, boarding a bus to UCSD—that road hadn’t been complicated. Fraught, maybe, with well-earned guilt, but not complicated.

But the way I was feeling right now, on this uncomfortable little folding chair in this sweltering tent in the middle of the desert … 
that
was complicated. And it didn’t make any sense. How could I feel the way I was feeling right now—like it would be okay with me if I never stood up again, if I just sat here, across from this stranger, for the rest of my life? Hell, even Hog Boy didn’t seem as annoying right now, though I would have loved it if somehow he and Pete—and the pregnant chick behind the divider, too—all disappeared.

I wasn’t the romantic type. I didn’t dance. I’d never given a girl flowers. But something about Lala White made me want to write a fucking sonnet.

“This is you, as well,” she said, touching the card above the Fool. And there I was—even though the guy looked nothing like me, I recognized myself.

Seven of Swords. He wore a hooded cape, drawn up to hide his face, and he was clambering over a wall, his arms full of stolen swords. The look on his face mirrored exactly the way I felt about leaving town—sneaky, underhanded, despicable.

He was leaving behind him a cluster of tents. His town—temporary housing, like Gypsum—about to fold. He was out of there.

“He cannot carry it all,” said Lala. “Two swords are left behind.”

So they were. “But he’d take them if he could,” I said. “He’d take it all if he had more hands.”

Her gaze was appraising. “Do you think so?” she asked. “Others do, too; the position of this card reveals the Views of Others. Perhaps this card shows not what the man would actually do, but what others in his circle might think of him.”

The air around me seemed charged now. Hog Boy kept his fat mouth shut, which told me that Lala had pretty much hit the nail on the head. That was how Hog Boy saw me, and Pete, too? A thief in the night, sneaking away?

Well, that wasn’t so different from how I saw myself.

“Keep it moving,” I said, miserable.

“Holy shit,” said Hog Boy. “Check out the fur burger on that one!”

No inner monologue. That was Hog Boy’s problem. One of them, anyway. He was looking at the card above the Seven of Swords; this one was labeled
The Lovers
. He was right; the pubic hair on the naked woman was something fierce.

The only naked girls I’d seen had been in magazines and on a couple of pornos that Hog Boy had downloaded. None of them looked like this chick. They were all waxed and shaved until they were practically bald down there, and all of them had big, hard, round boobs. The girl on this card looked healthy—her breasts were round but not huge, her thighs touched at the top, meeting at a dark triangle of hair.

With a start I realized she looked like Lala—dark eyes, full pink lips, superlong black hair. And a red flush climbed up my neck as I looked at the naked guy pictured next to her—he could have been me. Blond, muscled, taller than the girl beside him. They stood together under a tree. She held a moon in her outstretched hand, he held the sun. Their other arms were wrapped around each other.

When Lala spoke her voice was even, nothing like I felt inside. “This card represents your Hopes and Fears,” she said. “It can refer to a decision you must make, one which may define who you ultimately become on this journey. This card tells you to look carefully at your options—to not be hasty in your decisions.”

“But”—I couldn’t stop myself from asking—“this is one of those major cards, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, the Major Arcana.…”

“And didn’t you say that the Major Arcana … that the cards in it can, you know, represent actual
people
, too?”

Lala looked at me as if she was considering something. Her head was cocked slightly to the side. A wisp of hair was caught in the corner of her mouth. It took all my effort not to reach across the table and stroke that curl back away from her face.

“It can,” she said, “if you wish it. You are the Questioner—as I said, you determine meaning. But”—her hand touched the final card. This one needed no interpretation. It was a heart, bloodred, stabbed through by three swords. Rain darkened the landscape behind it. “This card represents the Final Outcome. Your path—depending on the path you choose—may not end the way you would will it to.”