Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
—Ovid
The horses run the empty length of the lake shore, strung out like a long ragged necklace, perfect in their beauty. They run wild. They run like whitecaps in choppy water, their unshod hooves kicking up sand and spray. The muffled sound of their galloping is a rough music, pure rhythm. Palominos. Six, seven . . . maybe a dozen of them. Their white manes and tails flash, golden coats catch the sunlight and hold it under the skin the way mine holds a drug.
The city is gone. Except for me, transfixed by the sight of them, gaze snared by the powerful motion of their muscles propelling them forward, the city is gone, skyline and dirty streets and dealers and the horse that comes in a needle instead of running free along a beach. All gone.
And for a moment, I’m free, too.
I run after them, but they’re too fast for me, these wild horses, can’t be tamed, can’t be caught. I run until I’m out of breath and stumble and fall and when I come to, I’m lying under the overpass where the freeway cuts through Squatland, my works lying on my coat beside me, empty now. I look out across a landscape of sad tenements and long-abandoned factories and the only thing I can think is, I need another hit to take me back. Another hit, and this time I’ll catch up to them.
I know I will. I have to.
There’s nothing for me here.
But the drugs don’t take me anywhere.
Cassie watched the young woman approach. She was something, sleek and pretty, newly shed of her baby fat. Nineteen, maybe; twenty-one, twenty-two, tops. Wearing an old sweater, raggedy jeans and sneakers—nothing fancy, but she looked like a million dollars. Bottle that up, Cassie thought, along with the long spill of her dark curly hair, the fresh-faced, perfect complexion, and you’d be on easy street. Only the eyes hinted at what must have brought her here, the lost, hopeful look in their dark depths. Something haunted her. You didn’t need the cards to tell you that.
She was out of place—not a tourist, not part of the bohemian coterie of fortune-tellers, buskers, and craftspeople who were set up along this section of the Pier either. Cassie tracked her gaze as it went from one card table to the next, past the palmist, the other card readers, the Gypsy, the lovely Scottish boy with his Weirdin discs, watched until that gaze met her own and the woman started to walk across the boards, aimed straight for her.
Somebody was playing a harp, over by one of the weavers’ tables. A sweet melody, like a lullaby, rose above the conversation around the tables and the sound of the water lapping against the wooden footings below. It made no obvious impression on the approaching woman, but Cassie took the music in, letting it swell inside her, a piece of beauty stolen from the heart of commerce. The open-air market and sideshow that sprawled along this section of the Pier might look alternative, but it was still about money. The harper was out to make a buck, and so was Cassie.
She had her small collapsible table set up with a stool for her on one side, its twin directly across the table for a customer. A tablecloth was spread over the table, hand-embroidered with ornate hermetic designs. On top of the cloth, a small brass change bowl and her cards, wrapped in silk and boxed in teak.
The woman stood behind the vacant stool, hesitating before she finally sat down. She pulled her knapsack from her back and held it on her lap, arms hugging it close to her chest. The smile she gave Cassie was uncertain.
Cassie gave her a friendly smile back. “No reason to be nervous, girl. We’re all friends here. What’s your name?”
“Laura.”
“And I’m Cassandra. Now what sort of a reading were you looking for?”
Laura reached out her hand, not quite touching the box with its cards. “Are they real?” she asked.
“How do you mean, real?”
“Magic. Can you work magic with them?”
“Well, now. . .”
Cassie didn’t like to lie, but there was magic and there was magic. One lay in the heart of the world and was as much a natural part of how things were as it was deep mystery. The other was the thing people were looking for to solve their problems with and it never quite worked the way they felt it should.
“Magic’s all about perception,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?”
Laura shook her head. She’d drawn her hand back from the cards and was hugging her knapsack again. Cassie picked up the wooden box and put it to one side. From the inside pocket of her matador’s jacket, she pulled out another set of cards. These ones were tattered around the edges, held together by an elastic band. When she placed them on the tablecloth, the woman’s gaze went to the top card and was immediately caught by the curious image on it. The card showed the same open-air market they were sitting in, the crowds of tourists and vendors, the Pier, the lake behind.
“Those . . . are those regular cards?” Laura asked.
“Do I look like a regular reader?”
The question was academic. Cassie didn’t look like a regular anything, not even on the Pier. She was in her early thirties, a dark-eyed woman with coffee-colored skin and hair that hung in a hundred tiny beaded braids. Today she wore tight purple jeans and yellow combat boots; under her black matador’s jacket was a white T-shirt with the words DON’T! BUY! THAI! emblazoned on it. Her ears were festooned with studs, dangling earrings, and simple hoops. On each wrist she had a dozen or so plastic bracelets in a rainbow palette of Day-Glo colors.
“I guess not,” the woman said. She leaned a little closer. “What does your T-shirt mean? I’ve seen that slogan all over town, on T-shirts, spray-painted on walls, but I don’t know what it means.”
“It’s a boycott to try to stop the child-sex industry in Thailand.”
“Are you collecting signatures for a petition or something?”
Cassie shook her head. “You just do like the words say. Check out what you’re buying and if it’s made in Thailand, don’t buy it and explain why.”
“Do you really think it’ll help?”
“Well, it’s like magic,” Cassie said, bringing the conversation back to what she knew Laura really wanted to talk about. “And like I said, magic’s about perception, that’s all. It means anything is possible. It means taking the way we usually look at a thing and making people see it differently. Or, depending on your viewpoint, making them see it properly for the first time.”
“But—”
“For instance, I could be a crow, sitting on this stool talking to you, but I’ve convinced everybody here that I’m Cassandra Washington, card reader, so that’s what you all see.”
Laura gave her an uneasy look that Cassie had no trouble reading: Pretty sure she was being put on, but not entirely sure.
Cassie smiled. “The operative word here is could. But that’s how magic works. It’s all about how we perceive things to be. A good magician can make anything seem possible and pretty soon you’ve got seven-league boots and people turning invisible or changing into wolves or flying—all sorts of fun stuff.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yeah. Now fortune-telling—that’s all about perception, too, except it’s looking inside yourself. It works best with a ritual because that allows you to concentrate better—same reason religion and church works so well for some people. Makes them all pay attention and focus and the next thing you know they’re either looking inside themselves and working out their problems, or making a piece of magic.”
She picked up the cards and removed the elastic band. Shuffled them. “Think of these as a mirror. Pay enough attention to them and they’ll lay out a pattern that’ll take you deep inside yourself.”
Laura appeared disappointed. But they always did, when it was put out in front of them like this. They thought you’d pulled back the curtain and shown the Wizard of Oz, working all the levers of his machine, not realizing that you’d let them into a deeper piece of magic than something they might buy for a few dollars in a place like the Pier.
“I. . . I thought it might be different,” Laura said.
“You wanted it all laid out for you, simple, right? Do this, and this’ll happen. Do this, and it’ll go like this. Like reading the sun signs in the newspaper, except personal.”
Laura shook her head. “It wasn’t about me. It was about my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“I was hoping you could, you know, use your cards to tell me where he is.”
Cassie stopped shuffling her pack and laid it face down on the table.
“Your brother’s missing?” she said.
Laura nodded. “It’s been two years now.”
Cassie was willing to give people a show, willing to give them more than what they were asking for, sometimes, or rather what they were really asking for but weren’t articulating, but she wasn’t in the business of selling false hopes or pretences. Some people could do it, but not her. Not and sleep at night.
“Laura,” she said. “Girl. You’ve come to the wrong place. You want to talk to the police. They’re the ones who deal with missing persons.”
And you’ll have wanted to talk to them a lot sooner than now, she thought, but she left that unsaid.
“I did,” Laura told her.
Cassie waited. “And what?” she asked finally. “They told you to come here?”
“No. Of course not. They—a Sergeant Riley. He’s been really nice, but I guess there’s not much they can do. They say it’s been so long and the city’s so big and Dan could have moved away months ago. . . .”
Her eyes filled with tears and voice trailed off. She swallowed, tried again.
“I brought everything I could think of,” she said, holding up her knapsack for a moment before clutching it tightly to her chest again. “Pictures. His dental records. The last couple of postcards I got from him. I. . .” She had to swallow again. “They have all these pictures of. . . of unidentified bodies and I. . . I had to look at them all. And they sent off copies of the stuff I brought—sent it off all over the country, but it’s been over a month and I know Dan’s not dead. . . .”
She looked up, her eyes still shiny with unshed tears. Cassie nodded sympathetically.
“Can I see one of the pictures?” she said.
A college-aged boy looked back at her from the small snapshot Laura took out of her knapsack. Not handsome, but there was a lot of character in his features. Short brown hair, high cheek bones, strong jawline. Something in his eyes reflected the same mix of loss and hopefulness that was now in his sister’s. What had he been looking for?
“You say he’s been missing for two years?” Cassie asked.
Laura nodded. Showing the picture seemed to have helped steady her.
“Your parents didn’t try to find him?”
“They never really got along. It’s—I don’t know why. They were always fighting, arguing. He left the house when he was sixteen—as soon as he could get out. We live—we lived just outside of Boston. He moved into Cambridge, then maybe four years ago, he moved out here. When I was in college he’d call me sometimes and always send me postcards.”
Cassie waited. “And then he stopped?” she said finally.
“Two years ago. That’s when I got the last card. I saw him a couple of months before that.”
“Do you get along with your parents?”
“They’ve always treated me just the opposite from how they treated him. Dan couldn’t do anything right and I can’t do anything wrong.”
“Why did you wait so long?”
“I. . .” Her features fell. “I just kept expecting to hear from him. I was finishing up my master’s and working part-time at a restaurant and . . . I don’t know. I was just so busy and I didn’t realize how long it had really been until all of a sudden two years have gone by since he wrote.”
She kept looking at the table as she spoke, glancing up as though to make sure Cassie was still listening, then back down again. When she looked up now, she straightened her back.
“I guess it was pretty crazy of me to think you could help,” she said.
No, Cassie thought. More like a little sad. But she understood need and how it could make you consider avenues you’d never normally take a walk down.
“Didn’t say I wouldn’t try,” she told Laura. “What do you know about what he was doing here?”
“The last time I saw him, all he could talk about were these horses, wild horses running along the shore of the lake.”
Cassie nodded encouragingly when Laura’s voice trailed off once more.
“But there aren’t any, are there?” Laura said. “It’s all. . .” She waved her hand, encompassing the Pier, the big hotels, the Williamson Street Mall further up the beach. “It’s all like this.”
“Pretty much. A little further west there’s the Beaches, but that’s all private waterfront and pretty upscale. And even if someone would let him onto their land, I’ve never heard of any wild horses out there.”
Laura nodded. “I showed his picture around at the racetrack and every riding stable I could find listed in the Yellow Pages, but no one recognized him.”
“Anything else?” Cassie asked.
She hesitated for a long moment before replying. “I think he was getting into drugs again.” Her gaze lifted from the card table to meet Cassie’s. “He was pretty bad off for a few years, right after he got out of the house, but he’d cleaned up his act before he moved out here.”
“What makes you think he got back into them?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling—the last time I saw him. The way he was all fidgety again, something in his eyes. . . .”
Maybe that was what she’d seen in his picture, Cassie thought. That need in his eyes.
“What kind of drugs?” she asked.
“Heroin.”
“A different kind of horse.”
Laura sighed. “That’s what Sergeant Riley said.”
Cassie tapped a fingernail, painted the same purple as her jeans, on the pack of cards that lay between them.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
“The Y. It’s all I can afford. I’m getting kind of low on money and I haven’t had much luck getting a job.”
Cassie nodded. “Leave me that picture,” she said. “I’ll ask around for you, see what I can find out.”
She was looking at the cards. Cassie laid her hand over them and shook her head.
“Let me do this my way,” Cassie said. “You know the pay phone by the front desk? I’ll give you a call there tomorrow, around three, say, and then we can talk some more.”
She put out her hand and Laura looked confused.
“Um,” she began. “How much do you want?”
Cassie smiled. “The picture, girl. I’ll do the looking as a favor.”
“But I’m putting you to so much trouble—”
“I’ve been where you are,” Cassie said. “If you want to pay me back, do a good turn for someone else.”
“Oh.”
She didn’t seem either confident or happy with the arrangement, but she left the picture and stood up. Cassie watched her make her way back through the other vendors, then slowly turned over three cards from the top of the deck. The first showed a set of works lying on worn blue denim. A jacket, Cassie decided. The second had a picture of an overpass in the Tombs. The last showed a long length of beach, empty except for a small herd of palominos cantering down the wet sand. In the background, out in the water, was the familiar shape of Wolf Island, outlined against the horizon.
Cassie lifted her head and turned to look at the lake. Beyond the end of the Pier she could see Wolf Island, the ferry on a return trip, halfway between the island and the mainland. The image on her card didn’t show the city, didn’t show docking facilities on the island, the museum and gift shop that used to be somebody’s summer place. The image on her card was of another time, before the city got here. Or of another place that you could only reach with your imagination.
Or with magic.
Cassie and Joe had made arrangements to meet at The Rusty Lion that night. He’d been sitting outside on the patio waiting for her when she arrived, a handsome Native man in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, long black braid hanging down his back, a look in his dark eyes that was usually half solemn, half tomfool Trickster. Right now it was concerned.
“You don’t look so good,” he said as she sat down.
She tried to make a joke of it. “People ask me why I stay with you,” she said, “and I always tell them, you just know how to make a girl feel special.”
But Joe would have none of it.
“You’ve got trouble,” he told her, “and that means we have trouble. Tell me about it.”
So she did.
Joe knew why she was helping this woman she’d never seen before. That was one of the reasons it was so good between them: Lots of things didn’t need to be explained, they were simply understood.
“ ’Course you found Angie too late,” he said.
He reached across the table and took her hand, wanting to ease the sting of his words. She nodded and took what comfort she could from the touch of his rough palm and fingers. There was never any comfort in thinking about Angie.
“It might be too late for Laura’s brother, too,” she said.
Joe shrugged. “Depends. The cops could be right. He could be long gone from here, headed off to some junkie heaven like Seattle. I hear they’ve got one of the best needle-exchange programs in the country and you know the dope’s cheap. Twenty bucks’ll buy you a 30 piece.”
Cassie nodded. “Except the cards . . .”
“Oh, yeah. The cards.”
The three cards lay on the table between them, still holding the images she’d found in them after Laura walked away. Joe had recognized the place where the horses were running the same as she had.
“Except I never heard of dope taking someone into the spiritworld before,” he said.
“So what does it mean?” Cassie asked.
He put into words what she’d only been thinking. “Either he’s clean, or he’s dead.”
She nodded. “And if he’s clean, then why hasn’t he called her, or sent another postcard? They were close.”
“She says.”
“You don’t think so?”
Joe shrugged. “I wasn’t the one who met her. But she waited two years.”
“I waited longer to go looking for Angie.”
There was nothing Joe could say to that.
It was a long time ago now.
Cassie shows them all, the white kids who wouldn’t give her the time of day and the kids from the projects that she grew up with. She makes top of her graduating class, valedictorian, stands there at the commencement exercises, out in front of everybody, speech in hand. But when she looks out across the sea of mostly white faces, she realizes they still don’t respect her and there’s nobody she cares about sitting out there. The one person who ever meant something to her is noticeably absent.
Angie dropped out in grade nine and they really haven’t seen each other since. Somewhere between Angie dropping out and Cassie resolving to prove herself, she and her childhood best friend have become more than strangers. They might as well never have known each other, they’re so different.
So Cassie’s looking out at the crowd. She wants to blow them off, but that’s like giving in, so she follows through, reads her speech, pretends she’s a part of the celebration, but she skips the bullshit parties that follow, doesn’t listen to the phony praise for her speech, won’t talk to her teachers who want to know what she plans to do next. She goes home and takes off that pretty new dress that cost her two months’ working after school and weekends at McDonald’s. Puts on sweats and hightops. Washes the makeup from her face and looks in the mirror. The face that looks back at her is soft, that of a little girl. The only steel is in the eyes.
Then she goes out looking for Angie, but Angie’s not around any more. Word on the street is she went the junkie route, mixing crack and horse, selling herself to pay for her jones, long gone now or dead, and why would Cassie care anyway? It’s like school, only in reverse. She’s got no street smarts, no one takes her seriously, no one respects her.
She finds herself walking out of the projects, still looking for Angie, but keeping to herself now, walking all over the city, looking into faces but finding only strangers. Her need to find Angie is maybe as strong as Angie’s was for the drugs, everything’s focused on it, looking not only for Angie but for herself—the girl she was before she let other people’s opinions become more important than her best friend. She’s not ready to say that her turning her back on Angie pushed her toward the street life, but it couldn’t have helped either. But she does know that Angie had a need that Cassie filled and the drugs took its place. Now Cassie has a need and she doesn’t know what’s going to fill it, but something has to or she feels like she’s just going to dry up and blow away.
She keeps walking further and further until one day that jones of hers takes her to an old white clapboard house just north of the city, front yard’s got a bottle tree growing in the weeds and dirt, an old juju woman sitting on the porch looking at her with dark eyes, skin so black Cassie feels white. Cassie doesn’t know which is scarier, the old woman or her saying, “ ’Bout time you showed up, girl. I’d just about given up on you.”
All Cassie can do is stand there, can’t walk away, snared by the old woman’s gaze. A breeze comes up and those bottles hanging in the tree clink against each other. The old woman beckons to her with a crooked finger and the next thing Cassie knows she’s walking up to the porch, climbing the rickety stairs, standing right in front of the woman.
“I’ve been keeping these for someone like you,” she says and pulls a pack of tattered cards out of the pocket of her black dress.
Cassie doesn’t want to take them, but she reaches for them all the same. They’re held together with an elastic band. When the old woman puts them in her hand, something like a static charge jumps between them. She gets a dizzy feeling that makes her sway, almost lose her balance. She closes her hand, fingers tight around the cards and the feeling goes away.
The old woman’s grinning. “You felt that, didn’t you, girl?”
“I. . . I felt something.”
“Aren’t you a caution.”
None of this feels real, none of it makes sense. The old woman, the house, the bottle tree. Cassie tries to remember how she got here, when the strip malls and fast-food outlets suddenly gave way to a dirt road and this place. Is this how it happened to Angie? All of a sudden she looks at herself one day and she’s a junkie?
Cassie’s gaze goes down to the cards the old woman gave her. She removes the elastic and fans a few of them out. They have a design on one side; the other side is blank. She lifts her head to find the old woman still grinning at her.
“What are these?” she asks.
“What do they look like, girl? They’re cards. Older than Egypt, older than China, older than when the first mama woke up in Africa and got to making babies so that we could all be here.”
“But. . .” It’s hard to think straight. “What are they for?”
“Fortunes, girl. Help you find yourself. Let you help other people find themselves.”
“But. . .”
She was valedictorian, she thinks. She has more of a vocabulary than her whole family put together and all she can say is “but.”
“But there’s nothing on them.”
She doesn’t know much about white people’s magic, but she’s heard of telling fortunes with cards—playing cards, Tarot cards. She doesn’t know much about her own people’s magic either.
The old juju woman laughs. “Oh, girl. ’Course there isn’t. There won’t be nothing on them until you need something to be there.”
None of this is making sense. It’s only making her dizzy again. There’s a stool beside the woman’s chair and she sits on it, closes her eyes, still holding the cards. She takes a few deep breaths, steadies herself. But when she opens her eyes again she’s sitting on a concrete block in the middle of a traffic median. There’s no house, no bottle tree. No old woman. Only the traffic going by on either side of her. A discount clothing store across the street. A factory outlet selling stereos and computers on the other side.
There’s only the cards in her hands and at her feet, lying on the pavement of the median, an elastic band.
She’s scared. But she bends down, picks up the elastic. She turns over the top card, looks at it. There’s a picture now, where before it was blank. It shows an abandoned tenement in the Tombs, one of the places where the homeless people squat. She’s never been in it, but she recognizes the building. She’s passed it a hundred times on the bus, going from school to the McDonald’s where she worked. She turns another card and now she’s looking at a picture of the inside of a building—probably the same one. The windows are broken, there’s garbage all over, a heap of rags in one corner. A third card takes her closer to the rags. Now she can see there’s somebody lying under those rags, somebody so thin and wasted there’s only bone covered with skin.
She doesn’t turn a fourth card.
She returns the cards to the pack, puts the elastic around them, sticks the pack in her pocket. Her mouth feels baked and dry. She waits for a break in the traffic and goes across to the discount clothing store to ask for a drink of water, but they tell her the restroom is only for staff. She has to walk four blocks before a man at a service station gives a sympathetic look when she repeats her request, hands her the key to the woman’s room.
She drinks long and deep, then feels sick and has to throw up. When she returns to the sink, she rinses her mouth, washes her face. The man’s busy with a customer, so she hangs the key on the appropriate hook by the door in the office and thanks him as she goes by, walking back toward downtown.
Normal people don’t walk through the Tombs, not even along well-trafficked streets like Williamson or Flood. It’s too dangerous, a no-man’s-land of deserted tenements and abandoned factories. But she doesn’t see she has a choice. She walks until she sees the tenement that was on the card, swallows hard, then crosses an empty lot overgrown with weeds and refuse until she’s standing in front of it. It takes her a while to work up her nerve, but finally she steps into its foyer.
It smells of urine and garbage. Something stirs in a corner, sits up. Her pulse jumps into overtime, even when she sees it’s only a raggedy boy, skinny, hollow-eyed.
“Gimme something,” he says. “I don’t need to get high, man. I just need to feel well again.”
“I. . . I don’t have anything.”
She’s surprised she can find her voice. She’s surprised that he only nods and lies back down in his nest of newspapers and rags.
It doesn’t take her long to find the room she saw on the second card. Something pulls her down a long hall. The doors are all broken down. Things stir in some of the rooms. People. Rats. Roaches. She doesn’t know and doesn’t investigate. She just keeps walking until she’s in the room, steps around the garbage littering the floor to the heap of rags in the corner.
A half hour later she’s at a pay phone on Gracie Street, phoning the police, telling them about the dead body she found in the tenement.
“Her name’s Angie,” she says. “Angie Moore.”
She hangs up and starts to walk again, not looking for anything now, hardly able to see because of the tears that swell in her eyes.
She doesn’t go home again. She can’t exactly explain why. Meeting the old woman, the cards she carries, finding Angie, it all gets mixed up in her head with how hard she tried to do well and still nobody really cared about her except for the friend she turned her back on. Her parents were happy to brag about her marks, but there was no warmth there. She is eighteen and can’t remember ever being embraced. Her brothers and sisters were like the other kids in the projects, ragging on her for trying to do well. The white kids didn’t care about anything except for the color of her skin.
It all came down to no one respecting her except for Angie, and she’d turned her back on Angie because Angie couldn’t keep up.
But the cards mean something. She knows that.
She’s still working at the McDonald’s, only now she saves her money and lives in a squat in the Tombs. Nobody comes to find out why she hasn’t returned home. Not her family, not her teachers. Some of the kids from school stop by, filling up on Big Macs and fries and soft drinks, and she can hear them snickering at their tables, studiously not looking at her.
She takes to going to the library and reading about cards and fortune telling, gets to be a bit of an expert. She buys a set of Tarot cards in The Occult Shop and sometimes talks to the people who work there, some of the customers. She never reads or hears anything about the kind of cards the old woman gave her.
Then one day she meets Joseph Crazy Dog in the Tombs, just down from the Kickaha rez, wild and reckless and a little scary, but kind, too, if you took the time to get to know him. Some people say he’s not all there, supposed to be on medication, but won’t take it. Others say he’s got his feet in two worlds, this one and another place where people have animal faces and only spirits can stay for more than a few days, the kind of place you come back from either a poet or mad. First thing he tells her is he can’t rhyme worth a damn.
Everybody calls him Bones because of how he tells fortunes with a handful of small-animal and bird bones, reads auguries in the way they fall upon the buckskin when he throws them. But she calls him Joe and something good happens between them because he respects her, right away he respects her. He’s the first person she tells about the old juju woman and she knows she was right to wait because straightaway he can tell her where she went that day and what it means.
It was almost dark by the time Cassie and Joe reached the overpass in the Tombs that was pictured on the card. At one time it had been a hobo camp, but now it was one more junkie landmark, a place where you could score and shoot without being hassled. The cops didn’t bother coming by much. They had bigger fish to fry.
“A lot of hard times bundled up in a place like this,” Joe said.
Cassie nodded.
Some of the kids they walked by were so young. Most of them were already high. Those that weren’t, were looking to score. It wasn’t the sort of place you could ask questions, but neither Cassie nor Joe were strangers to the Tombs. They still squatted themselves and most people knew of them, if they’d never actually met. They could get away with showing around a picture, asking questions.
“When did heroin get so popular again?” Cassie said.
Joe shrugged. “Never got unpopular—not when it’s so easy to score. You know the drill. The only reason solvents and alcohol are so popular up on the rez is no one’s bringing in this kind of shit. That’s the way it works everywhere—supply and demand. Here the supply’s good.”
And nobody believed it could hurt them, Cassie thought. Because it wouldn’t happen to them and sure people got addicted, but everybody knew somebody who’d used and hadn’t got strung out on it. Nobody set out to become an addict. Like most bad things, it just snuck up on you when you weren’t paying attention. But the biggest problem was that kids got lied to about so much, it was hard for them to accept this warning as a truth.
They made a slow pass of the three or four blocks where most of the users congregated, showing the photo of Laura’s brother when it seemed appropriate, but without much luck. From there they headed back downtown, following Williamson Street down Gracie. It was on the gay bar strip on Gracie Street that they finally found someone who could help.
“I like the hair, Tommy,” Cassie said.
It was like a close-cut Afro, the corkscrew curls so purple they had to come from a bottle. Tommy grinned, but his good humor vanished when Joe showed him the picture.
“Yeah, I know him,” Tommy said. “Danny Packer, right? Though he sure doesn’t look like that now. How come you’re looking for him?”
“We’re not. His sister is and we’re just helping her out. Any idea where we could find him?”
“Ask at the clinic.”
Cassie and Joe exchanged glances.
“He’s working there?” Cassie asked.
Tommy shook his head.
“What is this place?” Laura asked.
They were standing in front of an old yellow brick house on McKennitt Street in Lower Crowsea. Cassie had picked her up outside the Y a little after four and Joe drove them across town in a cab he’d borrowed from a friend.
“It’s a hospice,” Cassie said. “It was founded by a writer who died of AIDS a few years ago—Ennis Thompson.”
“I’ve read him. He was a wonderful writer.”
Cassie nodded. “His royalties are what keeps it running.”
The house was on a quiet stretch of McKennitt, shaded by a pair of the tall, stately oaks that flourished in Crowsea. There wasn’t much lawn. Geraniums grew in terra cotta planters going up the steps to the front door, adding a splash of color and filling the air with their distinctive scent. They didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Laura. She was too busy studying the three-storied building, a small frown furrowing the skin between her eyebrows.
“Why did Dan want me to meet him here?” she asked.
Cassie hesitated. When they’d come to see him last night, Laura’s brother had asked them to let him break the news to her. She understood, but it left her in the awkward position of having to be far too enigmatic in response to Laura’s delight that her brother had been found. She’d been fending off Laura’s questions ever since they’d spoken on the phone earlier and arranged to drive out here.
“Why don’t we let him tell you himself,” Cassie said.
Joe held the door for them. He nodded a greeting to the young woman stationed at a reception desk in what would once have been a front parlor.
“Go ahead,” she told them. “He’s expecting you.”
“Thanks,” Joe said.
He led the way down the hall to Dan’s room. Rapping softly on the door, he opened it when a weak voice called out, “It’s open.”
Laura stopped and wouldn’t go on.
“Come on,” Cassie said, her voice gentle.
But Laura could only shake her head. “Oh god, how could I have been so stupid? He’s a patient here, isn’t he?”
Cassie put a hand on her arm and found it trembling. “He’s still your brother.”
“I know. It’s not that. It’s just—”
“Laura?”
The voice pulled her to the door and through it, into the room. Cassie had been planning to allow them some privacy for this meeting, but now she followed in after Laura to lend her moral support in case it was needed.
Dan was in bad shape. She only knew him from the picture that Laura had lent her yesterday, but he bore no resemblance to the young man in that photograph. Not anymore. No doubt he had already changed somewhat in the years since the picture had been taken, but now he was skeletal, the skin hanging from his bones, features hollow and sunken. Sores discolored his skin in great blotches and his hair was wispy and thin.
But Laura knew him.
Whatever had stopped her outside the room was gone. She crossed the room quickly now, sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully took his scrawny hands in her own, leaned forward and kissed his brow.
“Oh, Danny. What have you done to yourself?”
He gave her a weak smile. “Screwed things up as usual.”
“But this. . .”
“I want you to know—it wasn’t from a needle.”
Laura threw a glance over her shoulder at Cassie, then returned her attention to her brother.
“I always knew,” she said.
“You never said anything.”
“I was waiting for you to tell me.”
He shook his head slowly. “I could never put one past you.”
“When were you going to tell me?” Laura asked.
“That’s why I came back the last time. But I lost my nerve. And then when I got back to the city, I wasn’t just HIV-positive anymore, but had full-blown AIDS and . . .”
His voice, already weak, trailed off.
“Oh, Danny, why? What did you think—that I wouldn’t love you anymore?”
“I didn’t know what to think. I just didn’t want to be a bother.”
“That’s the last thing you are,” Laura assured him. “I know . . .” She had to swallow and start again. “I know you won’t be getting better, but you’ve got to at least have your family with you. Come home with me.”
“No.”
“Why not? Mom and Dad will want to—”
Dan cut her off, anger giving his voice some strength. “They won’t want anything to do with me.”
“But—”
“You never understood, did you? We lived in the same house, but it was two different worlds. I lived in one and the rest of you lived in the other. I don’t know why things worked out that way, but you’ve got to accept that it’s never going to change. That not even something like this could change it.”
Laura didn’t say anything for a long moment. She simply sat there, holding his hands, looking at him.
“It was so awful for you,” she said finally. “Wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “Everything, except for you.”
That seemed to be too much for her, knowing that on top of his dying, how hard his life had been, right from when he was a child. She bowed down over him, holding him, shoulders shaking as she wept.
Cassie backed out of the room to join Joe where he was waiting in the hall.
“It’s got to be tough,” he said.
Cassie nodded, not trusting her voice. Her own gaze was blurry with tears.
“You never told her how you found me,” Dan said later.
When Laura had gone to get tea, Cassie and Joe came back into the room, sitting on hardbacked chairs beside the bed. It was still hours until dusk but an overcast sky cast a gloomy light into the room.
“And you won’t, will you?” he added.
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “I guess I just don’t want her to get the wrong idea about the cards. You don’t use them or any oracular device to find answers; you use them to ask questions. Some people don’t get that.”
He nodded slowly. “Laura wouldn’t. She was always looking for miracles to solve everything. Like the way it was for me back home.”
“Her heart was in the right place,” Joe said.
Dan glanced at him. “Still is.” He returned his attention to Cassie. “But those cards aren’t normal Tarot cards.”
Cassie had shown him the cards the night before, the three images that had taken her and Joe up into the Tombs and eventually to Dan’s room here in the hospice.
“No,” she said. “They’re real magic.”
“Where did you get them? I mean, can I ask you that?”
Cassie smiled. “Of course you can. They come from the same place where your wild horses are running.”
“They. . . they’re real?”
“Depends on how you translate real,” Joe said.
Cassie gave him a light tap on his shoulder with a closed fist. “Don’t start with that.”
“What place are you talking about?” Dan asked.
For once, Joe was more forthcoming than he usually was with a stranger.
“The spiritworld,” he said. “It’s a lot closer than most people think. Open yourself up to it and it comes in close, so close it’s like it’s right at hand, no further away than what’s out there on the other side of that window.” He paused a moment, then added, “Dangerous place to visit, outside of a dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream that took me there,” Dan said.
“Wasn’t the drugs either,” Joe told him.
“But—”
“Listen to me, what took you there is the same thing that called Cassie to the old juju woman who gave her those cards. You had a need. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes that’s enough to take you across.”
“I still have that need.”
Joe nodded. “But first the drugs you kept taking got in the way. And now you’re dying and your body knows better than to let your spirit go visiting. It wants to hang on and the only thing that’s keeping you going is spirit.”
“What about Laura’s need when she was looking for me?” Dan asked. “Why didn’t the spiritworld touch her?”
“It brought her to me, didn’t it?” Cassie said.
“That’s true.”
Dan looked away, out the window. The view he had through it was filled with the boughs of one of those big oak trees. Cassie didn’t think he was seeing them.
“You know,” he said after a moment, not looking away from the window. “Before all of this, I wouldn’t have believed you for a moment. Wouldn’t have even listened to you. But you start thinking about spiritual things at a time like this. When you know you’re going to die, it’s hard not to.” His gaze returned to them, moving slowly from one to the other. “I’d like to see them again . . . those horses.”
Cassie glanced at Joe and he nodded.
“When you’re ready to leave,” he said, “give me a call.”
“You mean that? You can do that?”
“Sure.”
Dan started to reach for the pen and paper that was on the table beside his bed. “What’s your number?”
“We don’t have a phone,” Joe said. “You just think about me and those horses hard enough and I’ll come take you to them.”
“But—”
“He can do it,” Cassie said. “Even at the best of times, he’s walking with one foot in either world. He’ll know when you’re ready and he’ll take you there.”
Dan studied Joe for a moment and Cassie knew what he was seeing, the dark Coyote eyes, the crow’s head sitting just under his human skin. There was something solemn and laughing wild about him, all at once, as though he knew a joke no one else did that wrapped him in a feral kind of wisdom that could scare you silly. But Dan was past fear.
“That’s something else you discover when you’re this close to the edge,” he said. “You get this ability to cut away the bullshit and look right into a person, see them for exactly as they are.”
“So what are you seeing?” Joe asked.
Dan smiled. “Damned if I know. But I know I can trust you.”
Cassie knew exactly what he meant.
Summer gave way to fall. On a cold October night, Cassie woke near dawn to find Joe sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his boots. He came over to the bed and kissed her cheek.
“Go back to sleep,” he said. “I might be awhile.”
They’d been up late that night and she fell back asleep before she could think to ask where he was going.
Dan’s funeral was two days later. It was a small service with few in attendance. Laura. Cassie. A few of the caregivers from the hospice. After the service, Cassie took Laura down to the lakefront. They sat on a bench at the end of the Pier where they’d first met, looking out at Wolf Island. A cold wind blew in off the lake and they sat close to each other for warmth.
“Where’s Joe?” Laura asked.
“He had to go out of town.”
Laura looked different to Cassie, more sure of herself, less haunted for all her sadness. She’d been working as a bartender for the past few months—”See, I knew that M.A. would be useful for something,” she’d joked—spending her afternoons with Dan.
“It’s been really hard,” she said. “Especially the last couple of weeks.”
Cassie put her arm around Laura’s shoulders. “Probably the hardest thing you’ll ever do.”
“But I wouldn’t give up any of it. What Dan had to go through, yes, but not my being with him.”
“He was lucky you found him in time.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Laura said.
Cassie raised her eyebrows.
“He told me about the cards.” She shook her head before Cassie could say anything. “No, it’s okay. I understand. I know it would be so tempting to use something like that to make all your decisions for you. I’m not asking for that.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “But I was wondering . . . can they show me Dan one last time? Just so I can know if he finally caught up with those horses? Just so I can know he’s okay?”
“I don’t know,” Cassie said. “I think the only way we ever find out where we go in the end, is when we make the journey ourselves.”
Laura gave a slow nod, unable to hide her disappointment. “I . . . I guess I understand.”
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t look.”
She took her arm away from Laura’s shoulders and brought out the set of cards the old juju woman had given her, sitting there on her porch with the bottle tree clinking on the lawn. Removing the elastic, she gave the cards a shuffle, then offered the pack to Laura.
“Pick one,” she said.
“Don’t you have to lay them out in some kind of pattern?”
“Ordinary Tarot cards, yes. But you’re looking to see into someplace they can’t take you now.”
Laura placed her fingers on the top of the deck. She held off for a long moment, then finally took the card and turned it over. There were horses running along the lakeshore on it, golden horses with white manes and tails. The image was too small to make out details, but they could see a figure on the back of one of them, head thrown back. Laughing, perhaps. Finally free.
Smiling, Laura returned the card to the pack.
“Where he goes,” she said, “I hope he’ll always be that happy.”
Cassie wound the elastic back around the cards and returned them to her pocket.
“Maybe if we believe it strongly enough it’ll be true,” she said.
Laura turned to look at her. Her eyes where shiny with tears but that lost, haunted look Cassie had seen in them that first time they met was gone.
“Then I’ll believe it,” Laura said.
They leaned back against the bench, looking out across the water. The sound of the ferry’s horn echoed faintly across the water, signaling its return from the island.