Lucky Strikes (15 page)

It was very near a relief, rummaging in the dark for the keys. Meant I didn't have to look at her head-on. Wasn't till we was all standing at the bottom of the stairs that I dared a peep.

She was slumped against Hiram's shoulder, so all I could see at first was a blue kimono and a pelt of wet hair, reddish brown with worries of gray. Then her head tipped back, and I saw a round face caked in white powder—like a pork chop dredged in flour. On her mouth was a painted Cupid's bow.

“Say, now,” she said. “What
is
this dump?”

“Why, it's the Willard,” said Hiram.

“For real?”

He give me a signal, and I took her by the left arm, and between us, we got her up the stairs. She was lighter than she looked, but she rattled the whole way. Brooches and pins and necklaces. Rings on near every finger. Fumes of bourbon rising off like swamp mist.

“Geez,” she said. “What happened to the damned elevator?”

“Broken.”

Took some doing, but we lowered her onto Hiram's mattress. She laid there, still jangling, eyelids aflutter under penciled-in brows.

“Hiram, honey. Tell 'em not to wake me before noon. I can't do a thing before noon.”

Then she rolled onto her side. The jangling stopped. Half a minute later, she was snoring.

“Go back to bed,” Hiram told me.

“Where you gonna sleep?”

“Floor's fine.” He looked at me. “Don't worry. Nothing un-Christian is gonna happen.”

“It ain't that.”

But I couldn't say what it was, neither.

“You'd best get some shut-eye,” he said. “We open in a few hours.”

Well, naturally, I didn't catch a wink from then on. When dawn come, I was already up, watching the mountains bleed out of the dark. No eggs for breakfast, so I made myself eat some old coconut macaroons. Even with the moldy edges cut off, they was dry as bark, but it was all my stomach could get down.

To my surprise, Hiram was up, too. Washed and shaved and setting out the old root table in front of the store.

“You didn't sleep, neither,” I said.

“Too much coffee in Warrenton.”

He reached into an old turnip sack and pulled out an oilskin cloth and arranged it over the table. Then he pulled out a crystal ball and a deck of tarot cards.

“We'll need a chair,” he said.

“I'll get one from the house. This where she's gonna sit?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I ran my finger round the table's rim. “When's she planning on comin' down?”

“When the time's right.”

“You don't mind my saying, she looked pretty tight.”

“I've seen Barrymores tighter than that. She'll come through.”

Problem with getting up so early was there wasn't too much to do right off. I fed the kids two bowls of Aunt Sally rolled oats and a couple slices of bread soaked in Wesson. (“Can't you at least fry it?” Janey said.) I made sure the pumps was in order, made sure Earle knew how to work 'em. Mostly I roamed. Up the road and back. Some point or other, I swung a glance over toward the front porch and saw Janey, hunched over some pasteboard, with a box of crayon stubs by her elbow.

“Melia!” she called. “How do you spell
haunted
?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Me.”

“To what end?”

“I'm gonna make me a haunted house.”

“No, you ain't.”

“In the root cellar.”

“I said you ain't.”

She jumped to her feet. “Don't you
dare
tell me no! There ain't nothing in that root cellar 'cept for mice and rotten parsnips and Emmett Tolliver's moonshine, and even
you
don't like going down there, so there's something gotta be haunting it. And Earle's already helping with the gas, and Daddy Hiram's got the store, and I mean to pull my weight.”

I could see there weren't no turning that child's mind. She even drug me down to the cellar and made me stand there in the dark while she hid behind an old joist.

“Ready?” she said.

Into that dark, musty, dripping space, she sent scream after scream, each higher in frequency than the last, bouncing off wall and ground and ceiling and shredding every last nerve. When she was done, she stepped back out, grinning and bashful.

“What do you think, Melia?”

“It's just gonna be you screaming your fool head off?”

“Well, sure. Don't I sound fearsome?”

Had to admit she did.

“But you ain't gonna have no voice left by day's end.”

“That's okay, it'll get me out of school.”

“Well, okay. But you can't charge more 'n a penny.”

“Make it two, and we got ourselves a deal.”

*   *   *

The cars started pulling in after ten. Not much at first—wagons and delivery vans. It was around eleven when a new crowd started rolling in. Adler Standards and a Hudson Greater Eight and a Pierce-Arrow and the cutest ol' Nash Ambassador, but there was Buicks, too, and Plymouths and Ford coupes. Some of the cars was driven by folks I knew—Basil Buckner, Ella Preston, Minnie-Cora Harper and her latest beau. Some I'd never seen in all my days.

Earle was mighty pressed to keep the gas flowing, and since a good third of the customers wanted the lubrication deal, I ended up in the service bay for the rest of the morning. Somewhere around eleven thirty there came a lull, and I stepped out of the bay, smearing the sweat off my face with my forearm and looking round.

It was a whole new world.

All those cars that had driven in … well, they hadn't driven off. They'd parked themselves. On the gravel, on the shoulder, wherever they could find a spot. And from those cars had spilled out half of Walnut Ridge.

Women talking in low, bustling tones. Men with their hands in their overalls, chewing their quids. Earle striding from car to car and Hiram calling out “Lemonade! Coffee! Iced tea!” Kids
everywhere
. Rocking themselves dizzy on our tree swings or rotting their teeth with our Coke-and–Life Savers cocktails or stumbling white-faced out of Janey's haunted house, grabbing at their chests.

And that didn't count the two dozen or so folks who was lined up for Madame Ouspenskaya. Persons of every age and station, waiting with that air you see sometimes outside a WPA office. Quiet, but tensed like arrows. I thought of the woman I'd helped up the stairs that morning, and I thought,
There's no way these folks is gonna walk away happy
.

Hiram was already working the line like some small-town mayor, shaking hands, tousling kids' hair. “Don't you worry,” I could hear him saying. “She'll be down here before you know it. And it'll be the best nickel you ever spent, I guarantee it.”

But noon came, and she wasn't there.

“Aw, you know how women are,” Hiram chuckled. “Let me go check on her. Don't go anywhere, friends.”

If it were me, I'd have gone home, but those people stayed where they was, and by the time Hiram come back down, there was a good hundred folks lined up. And now they really
was
starting to stir and grumble, and it was all I could do not to go up to each and every one of them and tell 'em how sorry I was and would they go away if I give 'em each a nickel?

Then the door to the store opened, and out she came.

Thought I was pure dreaming at first. The woman who'd come staggering in out of the rain had changed into someone else altogether. Someone bigger, for starters. What with her heels and her crazy black wig, she must've grown half a foot. Her face was even whiter, and she'd rimmed her eyes in something that looked like charcoal, and she'd switched out her kimono for a long black robe with half-moons and stars. Oh, and her Cupid's bow was now a gash of purple that only kinda resembled a mouth.

“It is she!” cried Hiram in a ringing voice. “The one who sees all! Madame Ouspenskaya!”

With great dignity, the fortune-teller set herself at that table, settled her robe around her, then turned on the crowd and said, in a low growl, “Who weeshes to see the trroooth? Who
dares
to see the trroooth?”

A shudder went through the citizens of Walnut Ridge. It was some time before the first person in line worked up the nerve to come forward. She was a heavyish lady with gold spectacles hanging from a cord, and before she'd got out two words, Madame O stopped her.

“Please to deposit five cents,” she said. Then she swung her head back toward Hiram.
“And please to bring Ouspenskaya her tea!”

Hiram had the thermos already waiting. The fortune-teller took a sip, winced a little, then took another. From the way it went down her, I suspicion it was something other than tea.

“Now, my dear,” she said. “Tell Ouspenskaya all your troubles.”

Just when I thought the world had no more bodies to offer, more kept coming. From Riverton and Riverside, from Waterlick and Nineveh, from Chester Gap and Happy Creek. By mid-afternoon, cars and trucks was jammed along both sides of the road—two hundred yards in each direction—barely enough room for a tricycle to get by. It was like a county fair or a carnival, and, for the first time in our lives, we was in the heart of it. All these grinning, chattering, back-slapping people. All these children, swinging by the half dozen or going back for more of Janey's wails or running in circles like guinea hens.

The gas and lubricant kept flowing, the store shelves got emptier and emptier, and the line to see Madame O showed every sign of being perpetual. Even from the service bay, I could hear her snarling at her customers.

“A dreadful curse hangs over you! Only blood can remove it!… The devil and the moon sit opposed! You must give up this man you call Billy Bob!… Make peace with your dead grandmother now, for tonight
you yourself will die
!”

Didn't matter how dire the forecast—people wanted more. I'll confess I wished for a couple minutes myself, but I had too much going on with batteries and spark plugs and fan belts.

There was a few locals who declined to partake in the day's festivities. Chester Gallagher swung by for a couple gallons and a hello, but Mina stayed in the car with the windows closed. Pastor Goolsby drove by, real slow, like someone taking the measure of Gomorrah. (Mrs. Goolsby had already snuck in to get her palm read.) And somewhere round three in the afternoon, the butternut Chevy Eagle of Harley Blevins come rolling past.

Dudley was back at the wheel, in his Buck Rogers outfit. I saw the car stop for a few seconds, long enough for Harley himself to push his head out the window and take in everything he needed to see. He snapped his fingers, twice, and the car drove on. Dudley never took his eyes off the road.

I can't tell you how many thermoses Madame O downed over the course of that day, but by four o'clock, her head was tilting hard south. It'd lift a little when someone set down next to her, but then it'd start sinking all over again—till finally it was resting right on the table.

“Madame Ouspenskaya!” cried Hiram. “Are you all right?”

From somewhere in that tangle of black hair come a low droning.

“What'd she say?” someone called.

“The shadow world has grown dim,” said Hiram. “No
more
can Ouspenskaya see.”

“But we ain't heard our fortune,” said someone else.

“It's a rotten deal,” allowed Hiram. “If I could make the spirit world operate like a business, you bet I would. But tell you what, everyone still in line is going to receive a chit. The next time Madame Ouspenskaya's in town, you'll
all
get a free reading, you've got my word on it. Till then, how about some saltwater taffy, folks? It's on the house.…”

Funny thing. For all the people who'd lined up to see her, nobody paid her much mind once she was conked out. Me, least of all. It was only that night—when the crowd had finally cleared out and taken their cars and kids and left behind all their wrappers and bottles and straws and paper cups—that I saw Hiram bending over some bundle and realized the bundle was her.

“Tell me she's alive,” I said.

“She is.”

“What are we supposed to do with her?”

“Same as we did before.”

Only she was a lot heavier this time. Weren't no point dragging her back up the stairs, so we took her into the house and laid her in Mama's bed. By now her wig had fallen half off her head, and her string of beads had somehow wrapped itself round her forehead like a rani's headdress.

“Hiram,” she muttered. “Put a sign on the door, would you? I don't want any maids waking me up.”

“We don't got no door,” I whispered.

“She won't notice.”

True to form, she dropped right back to sleep. Like some anchor come and dragged her down.

“How do you know her again?” I asked.

“My theater days.”

“She an actor, too?”

“Wardrobe mistress. I figured, with this kind of thing, the clothes are more important than the acting.”

Watching Madame O laying there, with the snores pouring out her open mouth, I got a little stab thinking on Mama. Only 'cause she would've got such a laugh out of it.

“Guess it's okay to leave her,” I said.

“She wouldn't have it any other way. Got something to show you.”

The bag of change was sitting behind the store counter under Hiram's stool. He picked it up, hefted it in his hand with a tiny cracked smile.

“You want to count it yourself?” he said.

“Just tell me.”

“One hundred ninety-four dollars and fifty-six cents.”

I had to sit down, but there weren't nowhere to sit.

“You ain't shitting me, are you?”

“I should add that eight dollars and seventeen cents of that came directly from Miss Janey Hoyle. Who can no longer speak.”