The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (28 page)

Cort wanted to be a doctor. A real one. He, too, found her father amusing, a droll little man.

Her friends pulled their chairs over to make room for her. They were awaiting a pitcher of sangria and a plate of Roquefort sandwiches. When they finished eating and drinking, Ginger rose, light-headed, less somber if not exactly happy, and followed her friends into the heart of the city, toward the cathedral, the Gothic towers rising like a dark stony cliff before them.

This was how she spent her days here, drifting along sadly with her bubbly compatriots. She forced herself to eat and to drink. She forced herself to drink too much, to fake enjoyment. Every now and again she noticed something beautiful that briefly captivated her: a tiny fountain on an empty street; a hidden avenue with salmon-pink walls; a school of ancient Spanish women, huddled together in an old church, finally learning how to read. But these moments came to her as things happening to someone else. She wasn't there. She was back in Seattle, with Cort. Back in his bed, wrapped in his red flannel sheets, listening to Leonard Cohen and talking about James Joyce. She wasn't here in this beautiful sun-blanched city, this city that was both Roman and Moorish, Gypsy and modern. She wasn't here with these wealthy American girls from all over the United States, from the Midwest and Texas and California and Maine, from large lawn-dotted suburbs in random cities. She was now a satellite self, discharged to orbit a remote planet. She stared out at everything with a robot's eyes, merely collecting information, no emotional attachments forged. Like a good robot, she counted down every precise moment to departure. The return to Seattle. To Cort.

Her friends snapped photos and gossiped. They pitied themselves for their language program's lack of attractive American males.
Why is it,
someone mused,
that the boys stay home? Why are we girls the only ones studying abroad nowadays? Isn't that wrong? Aren't men,
one of the other girls said,
the more adventuresome sex, stereotypically speaking?
Ginger listened to the argument with a sick heart. She had her own opinions on the matter: that women were weaker somehow, less satisfied with the present; that the baubles and styles of Europe attracted them with shallow promises of beauty and fashion. Ginger hated the reasons that brought her here. Except that she couldn't really remember what any of them were. Maybe to learn Spanish? Or maybe that she had heard that it was something intellectual young women did in their third year of college? After all, she saw herself so very much as an intellectual young woman. It was how she wished for Cort to see her.

Someone tugged on her arm.
This way,
they urged. The girls were quite drunk. It was midday, crazy hot, and the alcohol made Ginger hotter. She rustled in her pockets for her change. She had stopped carrying a purse or a backpack—too many girls had fallen victim to thieves that way—and she carried almost nothing with her, finding that most of the time the bill was collected and paid for long before she even thought of asking for it. That was the thing with people her age who had lots of money: It was easy to be generous, so easy that it made all such gestures worthless. No one said thank you and no one noticed the lack of gratitude. Ginger did feel grateful, especially that these girls continued to humor her despite her clear misery. Some of them even listened with patient, kind eyes to her effusive monologues about Cort. Sometimes she lost control of herself, when she drank too much or her ache for him overflowed.

Mostly, Ginger tried to keep to herself. She hid from them her stuffed unicorn, Charlie, which she'd packed to help her through the difficult nights. She spoke to Charlie nightly, cried her fears into his matted, dissolving white fur. And she tried not to take it too personally when the other girls teased her about Cort, although it really did hurt.

The young women stepped together now beneath the high clean awnings of Calle Sierpes. A man painted entirely in gold stood perfectly still, regarding the world with the same empty robot eyes. Every now and again he shifted position, wondrously, mechanically, as though he were made not of flesh but of gears and gadgets. Ginger watched him for a long time, her friends slipping in and out of the nearby shops to try on shirts and dresses and shoes, and finally she gave him one of her few coins, depositing it in a hat at his feet. He rolled suddenly into a bow of thanks and remained frozen there, staring at the ground as if he had finally broken down. Ginger smiled briefly and then moved forward, looking for her companions, who had now gathered before an
heladería
a bit farther down the avenue.

A woman materialized just as Ginger began to order her ice cream, a beautiful older woman with dark hair and skin like boiled gold. Ginger shrank away, unnerved by the woman's closeness. She reeked of some sort of herb that Ginger could not place—something rustic and earthy. Rosemary? The smell was overpowering if not unpleasant. The woman took up Ginger's hand and stroked her palm, gurgling low in her throat, and Ginger tried to pull her hand away but could not. The woman gripped her wrist too tightly.

The woman began to ramble in Spanish about Ginger's future. Ginger understood parts of it but not others:
You'll have two children, blondes
—rubio.
You'll find wealth. You will live a long life but not one without sadness. Your one true love—the man who will love you the fullest—will be a
moreno.
You will make—

Ginger began to speak, too, with more-rapid Spanish than she had ever spoken.

“No,” she argued. “No. My one true love is a
rubio.
A
rubio.
Please. Look again.”

The woman lifted Ginger's hand up higher, peered down into her palm.

“Moreno,”
she confirmed, and dropped Ginger's hand roughly.

She extended her own long, bejeweled fingers for money.

Ginger reached on impulse into her pocket and then stopped herself. No. This woman would receive no money. Not for misinformation.

“He's a
rubio,
” Ginger repeated.
“Rubio.”

The woman laughed and shook her head.

Some of her friends approached, licking their ice cream, listening to their argument.

“Palm reader,” one of them exclaimed. “Gypsy!”

They shoved money into the woman's hands and presented their own palms. “Who will love me?” they demanded, laughing. More coins appeared, more palms. Ginger stood by, heartbroken, abashed, as the woman listed what color of hair to expect from their life's true loves.
Moreno, moreno, moreno
. In one instance, laughing,
calvo
. Only one girl was allowed a
rubio
, and she was ironically the one who wanted to stay in Spain forever, hoping to marry a native and live by the sea in Cádiz.

Ginger slipped her palm into the mix again, as though to come up with a different outcome, but the woman slapped her hand away.
Moreno,
she said firmly, and made a severe chopping motion with her fist, as though to say,
Enough
. She left the girls standing there, laden now as she was with their pesetas. Ginger watched her go, destroyed. Her friends giggled to one another, but soon their attentions wandered to a bar they'd never noticed before, a bar that likely served fried calamari and pale beer. Ginger faced away from the bar, watching as the woman slipped into a blue doorway across the avenue. She read the sign overhead. A
zapatería:
a cobbler's shop. The door snapped shut. Ginger waited a moment before allowing her friends to guide her inside the bar.

“Don't tell me you're taking that woman seriously,” one of them—the girl from Georgia with the small, perfect nose—said, noting her stricken expression.

“She said
moreno,
but Cort is a
rubio,
” Ginger said.

“God,” another of the girls cried, a more courageous girl than Ginger, a girl who had already banged a
sevillano
, “one more word about Cort and I'm going to shoot myself. In the guts. With a rifle.”

The other girls laughed. Then some of them cooed, saying,
Ah, Ginger, it's just a joke! Don't take it so hard!
All the while, the courageous girl flared her nostrils in annoyance. Ginger, flushing, bowed humbly over her small glass of beer. She stared into the golden liquid. Its warm tint matched a certain fleck of discoloration in Cort's right iris.

When the attention fully shifted to some other laughable subject, Ginger rose and mumbled something about going to the bathroom. She left the crowded bar and, with a quick look over her shoulder, crossed over to the blue door of the cobbler's shop. She stood anxiously before it for a few moments before trying the latch.

Inside was a display room of shoes. They looked comfortable and hand-sewn and uniquely fashionable—urban but sporty. If Ginger had been in a different state of mind, if she had been at all calm and content, she might have tried the shoes on. Instead, she ignored the beautiful shoes and pressed toward the back of the room, where a red velvet curtain hung over a doorway. She called out timidly, then more strongly, and rocked back on her heels, waiting. There was a rustling sound in the back, a slight wavering of the velvet curtain as though the air had changed, and then nothing. Ginger pushed the curtain aside and passed uninvited into the back room.

As charming and refreshing as the showroom was, the workroom was airless and cheerless. An old door lay flat on two paint-splattered sawhorses, forming a crude worktable. On it rested several metal tools that were stained a deep reddish brown. The concrete floor was murky with dust and strips of leather and empty tubs of polish and even more dirty tools. Ginger waded through a mess of discarded shoes, half-finished articles abandoned due to some small annoyance on the part of their creator. She could tell that some of these carcasses had been here for years and years. It seemed that this back room had never been tidied. She thought of how every person had a back room to herself. Only a few beautiful, well-adjusted details were allowed in a glittering front room.

Ginger suddenly felt that she was in love with this cobbler. She pictured the cobbler with Cort's face. She wanted to find where he was, to crawl into his lap and expire there, crooning.

But then a door opened at the back of the workroom, a door she hadn't even noticed in the dusky half-light, and in came the palm reader, a man following closely at her heels—a man who was certainly not Cort and certainly not anyone Ginger would ever love.

The woman saw her and smiled knowingly.

She said in rapid Spanish to the man behind her, Spanish that Ginger just barely understood, “Look here. It's the girl who loves the
rubio,
” and the man smiled kindly and approached Ginger to kiss both sides of her face.

Ginger accepted the gesture and then stood back to address the palm reader again.

“This is what I wish to speak to you about,” Ginger said in her halting Spanish. “About the
moreno
. Is this an act? An act you perform?” Then, in English: “How do you say
performance
? Do you know what I'm saying?” She sputtered a brief apology for her poor Spanish, and then continued: “Because it would comfort me if it were. If you could just admit that to me.”

“Oye, chiquitita,”
the man said to her. He switched on a small lamp over the makeshift worktable and took up one of his tools. He began to work it along a wide swath of leather, the sound like tearing flesh. Goose bumps rose on the backs of Ginger's arms. The cobbler continued in decent English, “My mother is very talented. She does not read a palm wrong. You do not ask her to give you a lie. It is underneath her.”

“Beneath her,” Ginger corrected miserably.

“You love this
rubio mucho,
” the man said. “I do not see other
chiquititas
chase my mother so.”

“Mucho,”
Ginger confirmed. “Yes.”

The man carved into the leather with fluid movements. The object in his hand did not resemble a shoe. It was stranger than that, shaped like a horseshoe, too large. Ginger wished he would make her a leather plane, a plane to soar home in, so she could forget about Spain and her fellow
extranjeras
.

“Pobrecita,”
the palm reader said. And then she rattled off something about silly young women in love, something Ginger couldn't quite understand.

Ginger wondered at the cobbler's age. His mother was a lovely woman, but he was stooped and ugly and almost crippled, as though he had been thrown from a great height at a young age. Yet his kind face was wondrous to behold, especially considering the cruel fierce swiftness of his mother's expressions. Ginger believed that he would tell her what she wanted to hear, even if his mother refused.

She asked him timidly, “Does he love me, do you think?”

He turned to her, holding his little knife in the air, a surgeon of delicacy. “You are beautiful and good. You are rich. Your family is rich, no?”

She shrugged.

“Yes, he loves you. Who would not? Anyone here would die for a
chiquitita
like you, smart and
muy linda
and good and rich. It is a rare thing. To be all of those things. Very rare.”

He turned back to his work, humming.

Ginger was not easily satisfied. “So she's good at predicting outcomes?”

“La mejora,”
he said apologetically.

“Can she also change outcomes?”

He shook his wide toadlike head. “Nah,” he said. “Do not ask that of her.”

“What is she saying?” the palm reader asked him in Spanish, grinning.

He explained. His mother looked back at Ginger. “You love this
rubio
so very much,” she said in Spanish to Ginger, slowly enough that Ginger followed. “Why?”