Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (6 page)

She put the rest of the Cherry Mash in her mouth and then she turned up the first five cards and laid them in a diamond shape. These were called the Ambience cards and they explained the background to what was going to happen in the near future. Two of the cards were the Drowning Men and the Faces of Mourning. She had expected this. Everything that happened in the next few days would be affected by the simultaneous arrival of the two storms.

The other three cards showed a widow sitting in a room carpeted with hundreds of live green frogs; and a small boy on a bridge, trying to catch a skeptical-looking carp; and a blindfolded man standing amid sand dunes, his face raised toward the sun.

The widow was Sissy herself, and the live frogs were undecided questions: which way were they all going to jump? The small boy was Trevor, trying to persuade her to go to Florida for the winter; and the message of the blindfolded man was obvious.
Those who look for meaning in the sun will lose sight of everything
.

She laid out seven more cards, on top of the five. These were the Imminence cards, which told her what signs to look out for. She must be wary of a childless woman; and a boy from a tropical country; and two men sawing wood. She must be careful when the wind changed; and watch for some kind of unexpected trap. This card showed a red-breasted bird caught up in brambles, and bleeding. She must also keep her eyes open for footprints that led into a lake; and a man concealed in a brass-bound chest. This last card took the center position, which meant that it was especially significant.

Sissy sat back and looked over the Imminence cards, tapping her fingers on the table top. It was difficult to work out exactly what they were trying to tell her, but she knew that even when they spoke in riddles, they were always very specific. She couldn’t understand why the man in the brass-bound chest was so important. Maybe it was Gerry, and he had left something hidden in a box for her to find. Maybe she was going to meet a new man, in an unexpected place.

So far, however, there was nothing to suggest that she ought to go to Florida.

‘What do you think, Mr Boots?’ she asked him. Mr Boots tilted his head on one side but said nothing.

She took a large swallow of vodka and then she turned up the two Predictor cards, laying them on top of the Imminence cards. The first Predictor was La Poupée Sans Tête, the Headless Doll. This depicted a young mother in a yellow dress trying to replace the idiotically smiling head of a little girl’s doll, while the little girl herself stood beside her, weeping. The other was La Faucille Terrible, which showed a man with a reaping-hook, trying to cut a path through overgrown weeds. The hook had slipped and he had stuck it into his own eye. On the other side of the field, another man was hysterically laughing.

Two more bad Predictor cards. And neither of them gave her any advice about leaving New Preston to spend the winter in Florida. La Poupée Sans Tête meant that a child or children were going to be tragically orphaned; and La Faucille Terrible warned that somebody was going to be injured while performing a mundane, everyday task.

All of the Ambience cards said that these events were going to happen here, and that she (the widow) was going to be part of them. If she were going to Florida, the Imminence cards wouldn’t have warned her about traps, and childless women, and the wind changing. This was her future, and she knew from experience that she couldn’t avoid it. One morning four years ago she had turned up Le Pêcheur Perdu, the Doomed Fisherman, which showed a man on a desolate beach, surrounded on all sides by crabs. She had known then that Gerry’s prostate cancer was going to kill him.

 

F
eely opened his eyes. He had never felt so cold in his life. In fact he was so cold that he thought he must be dead. The car windows were covered in plumes and feathers of frost, and the interior was filled with brilliant white sunlight. All that was missing was a heavenly choir.

It was only when he tried to move that he realized he was still alive. Every joint in his body had seized up. He had wedged himself sideways in the Chevrolet’s front passenger seat, with his head resting against the window. His hat was actually frozen to the glass.

‘Urrghh,’ he said. He managed to sit up straight, and look around. At first he thought he must be alone, but then he heard a catarrhal snort from the Chevy’s rear seat. He peered over and saw Robert lying under several spread-out sheets of newspaper, his stubble sparkling with ice. For the first time, Feely saw that he had a large BandAid stuck to his left temple.

Robert opened one eye. ‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Hold up. Five after eight.’

‘Jesus,’ said Robert, pushing the newspaper onto the floor. ‘The dreams I’ve been having.’

‘Me too,’ said Feely. ‘I dreamed I was back in school, and my teacher was throwing broccoli at me.’

Robert sat up straight and rubbed the window with his sleeve, but the ice was on the outside. ‘God it’s cold. Let’s get the engine started up.’

The rear door was stuck fast with frost, and he had to throw his whole weight against it to get it open. He eased himself into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine made a groaning noise, but at first it didn’t fire up.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ he snarled at it, and tried the key again. This time the engine burst into life. ‘You see?’ he told Feely. ‘You don’t have to take any crap from anything; or anyone. Your life is your own. You have inalienable rights.’

They waited while the interior of the car warmed up and the ice gradually slid from the windows. When it did, they discovered that they were alone in the middle of a disused railroad yard. The sky was golden, and the sun sparkled on the snow.

‘Can you feel your feet yet?’ asked Robert.

Feely nodded. His feet were beginning to itch, as if his boots were crawling with fire-ants.

Robert said, ‘This is when you have to respect guys like Peary.’

Feely said nothing, but blew on his gloveless hands.

‘You know who I’m talking about?’ Robert asked him.

Feely shook his head.

‘You never heard of Robert Edwin Peary, the first man to reach the North Pole? April 6, 1909.’

‘I never heard of him,’ Feely admitted.

‘Schools today,’ said Robert. ‘Just because Peary was white, and male. I’ll bet you’ve heard of Malcolm X.’

‘Malcolm X? Sure.’

‘There you are, see. But Malcolm X never went to the North Pole, did he? Malcolm X never went within a thousand miles of the North Pole. Just as well for him. He probably would have been eaten by a polar bear, mistook him for a giant penguin.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Feely. ‘Penguins aren’t indigenous to the North Pole. Only the South Pole.’

‘Indigenous,’ Robert repeated.

‘That means naturally living there.’

‘I know what it means. I just can’t get over the fact that you can say it at eight o’clock in the morning. Let’s go get some breakfast.’

He drove out of the railroad yard, past boarded-up sheds and rusted bogies. They had stopped here late last night after they had managed to get themselves hopelessly lost. Robert had tried to take a cutoff at West Cornwall, but they had ended up driving for three-and-a-half hours around Red Mountain and Lake Wononpakook with the snow falling so thickly that they felt they were being buried alive. Eventually they had found their way back to Route 7, only five miles north of where they had left it. Robert had sent Feely into a roadside store outside Falls Village for bread and Kraft cheese slices and Twinkies, and they had eaten a picnic in the car, with the engine running to keep them warm.

As they drove into the center of Canaan, Robert said, ‘Let me give you some advice, Feely. You can use all the twenty-dollar words you like, but these days nobody listens, and even if they
did
listen they wouldn’t understand half of what you’re talking about. So you should save your breath to cool your chowder.’

Feely said nothing, so Robert gave him a nudge with his elbow. ‘If you want people to respect you, Feely, you have to
do
something. And I don’t mean something pissant. I mean something cataclysmic. Now that’s a twenty-dollar word for you. Cata-freaking-clysmic.’

Feely looked out at the snow-covered houses. ‘Are we still talking about Peary?’

‘No, we’re talking about anybody. We’re talking about you and me and that old geezer standing on the corner over there. If you don’t do something cataclysmic, people will never take any notice of you, and they’ll never remember you after you’re gone, like your father’s sperm never even wriggled as far as your mother’s egg, and how tragic is that? Or if they
do
remember you, they won’t remember the good things you did, the little acts of kindness that you never asked for any credit for. Oh, they’ll remember the times you screwed up, or the offensive things you said after fifteen Jack Daniel’s. But if you want to make any kind of impression in this world, my friend, it’s no good trying to be persuasive. You have to do something that pulls the rug right out from under people’s feet. Something that makes them go
ho-o-oly shit
.’

As they neared the town center, they passed a small yellow house on a hill. It had a snow-filled yard that sloped steeply down to the road. Although it was so early, a small girl in a bright red coat was building a snowman, with twigs for arms and a carrot for a nose. Her mother was watching her from the kitchen window.

Robert slowed down. ‘What do you think
that
is?’ he said. But before Feely could answer, he said, ‘Happiness, that’s what that is. Completeness. The mother. The child. Beautiful.’

He drove on. Where the sun was falling across it, the snow was already melting, and the streets were thick with slush. Feely still hadn’t stopped shaking with cold and he urgently needed to go to the bathroom. After a few minutes, however, they reached a large Victorian railroad station on the right-hand side of the road, its rooftops covered in snow, and Robert slowed down again.

‘Union Station,’ said Robert. ‘This is where the Housatonic Railroad used to meet up with the Connecticut Western line. It used to be really something, this station, a grand historical monument. But there was a fire, four or five years ago, and all the timbers were soaked in oil, as a preservative. That was good thinking, wasn’t it? They were damned lucky to save anything at all.’

Feely could see that the building had once been L-shaped, but the southern wing had been burned down almost to the ground. A tower that stood at the corner of the L had been charred black, but restoration work was already well advanced, with scaffolding and freshly re-boarded walls.

On the left side of the station parking lot stood a diner made of converted railroad cars, painted red-and-cream, with a neon sign on top saying Chesney’s Diner. ‘This’ll do us,’ said Robert. ‘I think we could both use a cup of strong coffee and a shit.’

He parked around the side of the building so that the Chevy couldn’t be seen from the road. As Feely climbed out, the cold air cut into his nostrils like a craft knife. Robert said, ‘If anybody asks you, you’re my son, OK?’

‘Your
son
?’

‘What’s the matter, your ears frozen up, too?’

‘No, but we don’t share anything like the same physiognomy.’

‘What’s that in human?’

‘I mean I don’t
look
like your son.’

‘I know. And the reason for that is, you aren’t my son. All I want you to do, if anybody wants to know, is to
say
that you are.’

Feely frowned. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. This sounded suspiciously like part of the conspiracy. First of all they tempt you to deny your brother; now they want you to deny your father, too.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Robert. ‘I knocked up some Cuban girl, OK?’

‘I don’t understand.’

Robert took a deep breath. ‘It’s very simple. I don’t want any of the people in this diner to remember us, after we’ve left. I want us to pass through like ghosts. If we say that we’re father and son, we’re less likely to make any kind of lasting impression.’

‘But why should we?’

‘Because this is Canaan, Connecticut, where the straight people live. Because I’m a thirty-five-year-old white guy and you’re a teenage Cuban in a stupid hat.’

‘OK.’ Feely needed the bathroom too urgently to argue any more.

Inside, Chesney’s Diner was warm and steamy, with rows of cream-colored Formica tables and red leatherette seats. The radio was playing ‘This Old Heart of Mine.’

‘Hungry?’ asked Robert, breathing in the greasy aroma of breakfast. But without a word, Feely hurried to the door with the little railroad engineer on it.

Robert sat down and sniffed and pulled off his gloves. There were only about a dozen people in there: three huge construction workers in furry caps, their cheeks bulging with food; a spotty young realtor with property particulars spread out all over his dirty breakfast plate; a worried-looking middle-aged woman with a small fidgety boy who kept blowing bubbles into his raspberry milkshake; a black UPS driver; and—at the next table—a bespectacled girl in a khaki stocking-cap and a thick khaki sweater, who was eating yogurt and reading a dog-eared yellow paperback of T.S. Eliot.

An aluminum-trimmed counter ran the length of the railroad cars, with perspex cabinets filled with pound cake and donuts. Behind it, a chimp-like woman in hugely magnifying eyeglasses was busily making toast and clearing up dishes, while a mournful man in a folded paper cap was frying eggs and staring at nothing at all, as if he were waiting to be struck by a divine revelation or a fatal coronary, without too much hope of either.

‘This old heart of mine,’ sang Robert, along with the radio.

When Feely came back from the bathroom, his hands still wet, a large glass of orange juice was waiting for him. ‘I already ordered,’ said Robert. ‘I hope you like pancakes, and bacon?’