“About face!” I said on my way back to the Cruiser after my event that afternoon in Missoula.
Sitting on the sidewalk was a ragged young man with a pack of tarot cards fanned out in front of him.
“I’ll give you five dollars if you’ll answer one question for me,” I said. “All you have to say is yes or no.”
The five-spot seemed to vanish as I held it out toward him.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m a writer. On a book tour. What I’d really like to do, though, is stay right here in Montana and fish for a week, then go straight home to my wife in Vermont. Should I?”
He scooped up his tarot deck, shuffled the cards, and spread them out on the sidewalk again, facedown. “Choose one,” he said.
I should have anticipated this, but of course I hadn’t. Truth to tell, those arcane tarot figures, up to God alone knows what devilment, have always spooked me a little. But I couldn’t back out now. At least the cards wouldn’t tell me I was going to come down with cancer. I’d already managed to do that on my own. Reluctantly, I pointed to one.
“Pick it up,” the guy said.
Oh, Lordy. It was the seven of rods, a skeletal, malignant-looking bastard lugging seven sticks of wood on his back. Seven seven seven. Seven surgeries. Seven months to live. Seven Viagra prescriptions for radiation-related erectile dysfunction …
The reader took the card and studied it briefly. Then he said, “I think you’ve had a really bad setback at some point in your writing career that’s made you wary of touring.”
I couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Man,” I said, “like every writer I know, I have had hundreds of really bad setbacks in my career.”
The tarot reader, no doubt sensing a kindred spirit in the charlatan standing on the sidewalk before him, said, “Finish your tour, buddy. It’ll go fine. As for those other little matters you didn’t mention”—and at that moment I would have sworn that, like the Howard of Moses Lake, he gave me a knowing wink—“no need to worry on those scores, either. At least not for a long time.”
Oh, prescient Mr. Fortune-teller. Kind Mr. Fortune-teller. Even if you are a street-conning, scheming, lying-through-your-teeth Mr. Fortune-teller. Let me sign a book for you, give you the remaining two dollars in my wallet, erect a statue of you on the village green at home or right here in downtown Missoula, Montana. Go fine. Other little matters. No need to worry. Oh, happy afternoon. Thank you, thank you, thank you. “What do you think?” I said to Phillis on the phone that night. “Was he right?”
“He was,” she said. “I could have told you that much for nothing. By the way, do you think your road bud will reappear?”
“The West Texas Jesus? Now that he’s latched on to my fly rod, I doubt it.”
“Howard Frank?”
“Yes?”
“You didn’t really give your favorite fly rod to some old drunk who thinks he’s Jesus, did you? On second thought, don’t answer that. I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
That, gentle reader, was the one thing I was sure of. But what more, really, could anyone hope for?