Spirits and the Two-Step at Dill’s Five-and-Dime
I’d like to say things were easy after my mother died. That whoever shot her was found and that I became a good woman with a nice yard, one where I danced a jig in Ruby’s memory every summer. The truth is, whoever shot Ruby disappeared like a ghost before sunrise and I never could get my own story straight. Twenty years passed. Towns and roads and faces passed, and I spent way too many nights sipping lemonade and vodka at whatever bar was handy. Tonight it was Dill’s, a country-punk fusion in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. The crowd was small for happy hour, but it was a Thursday. Some business-suit guy was winding a skinny tie around an index finger and pointing it at a kid with fishnets and a pleather skirt. The place had promise, but the truth is, I was tired before the night even started. I was thinking about the room I’d rented at the Red Sari, whether I’d asked for pillows that were nonallergenic. I hadn’t much thought about my mother in years.
A woman in a sweatshirt with a kitten on the front sat by herself at the end of the bar. Blonde-headed, with hair she’d cut herself and none too well. Spotty makeup and take-care-of-me eyes as she watched me shuffle my cards. There were lots of women like her out there. Ones with windows open to springtime, them listening to night sounds, afraid but still wanting love and not sure how to get it.
I was there to tell them love was a possibility. I’d pick a table for myself and lay out my business cards and my sign. Miracelle Loving. Fortune Teller Extraordinaire. I’d nod after I traced a lifeline on some palm over coffee or a quick beer. I said yes and yes while they went on about wedding rings lost in the weeds or husbands bad as the day they’d married them. Ordinary cards were twenty bucks. Tarot was thirty. For fifty I’d hold hands with them and wait until one or the other of us said they felt vibes. What should it feel like? some mascaraed woman would ask, and I’d tell her to keep her eyes shut. Sweet pea, I’d say. It’s all about touch. I’d hold on tight to her hands or the tabletop, whichever came first, and she’d later tell me it felt like a cross between an electric fence and revelation, and I’d say, okay.
Telling fortunes had rung a little hollow the last couple of years. For one thing, right over in the corner of Dill’s was one of those quarter-for-a-swami vending machines, with a lot more customers than I had tonight. I would have been better off with a nice night job telemarketing cemetery plots or sex, but I liked the mystique. Woman alone, traveling the roads here and back and yonder. No kids. Too many boys from before and now not enough of them. Always looking for another night of drinking and more palms to read and other people’s secrets to unfold. But boy howdy, me and my shitkicker boots had sashayed myself around dance floors aplenty, and I was beginning to look like I felt. Rode hard and hung up wet.
The blonde was fiddling with a napkin wrapped around her drink, waiting for me to ask her to sit down at the table I’d claimed. “I loved him more than anything.”
I wanted to ask her what “anything” meant, but I said, “Honey. I’ve been there.”
She began to cry, but I took it slow. I reached inside my brain and picked around some and found a couple sweet young things and a few cigar-toting elders to offer up as commiseration.
“Anstor,” blonde said, like she hadn’t heard me. Like I knew exactly who Anstor was, and I sort of did. Anstor was like anyone else I’d heard about from women whose fortunes I’d told. He did this, he did that, he did nothing at all, and still they wanted their Anstors, these women whose lives I told.
I bent my cards nearly double shuffling them, but I was gentle with her. “Oh, girl, I’ve been there. Late at night on that phone. I know how it is.” I fanned the cards out in a nice arc and looked at her. “Calling some 1–800 number and waiting on someone you don’t know from Adam’s housecat to tell you what might happen or what won’t.”
Her eyes were teary-bright.
“Sweetie, what you need’s a little dose of truth.”
I laid one of my business cards on a palm that felt all lotiony and damp.
“Just give it a try. One card, on me.”
Pink lights flashed above the bar, signaling two for one on the drinks. Anstor, blonde-headed was saying, had gambled away everything he owned but his skivvies, and I was kind of listening but I also wanted another lemonade and vodka. A song started up, one about a fortune teller named Madame Rue, her and her gold teeth and love potions. Blonde was telling a story about Mr. No Good. How he’d bought her this really nice diamond ring and it was too big but she wore it in the shower and next to her heart on a string. It near about turned her finger green. Cheap and no good and didn’t that prove itself every dang time?
That was the very second when it all happened and in a way I would have said was mystical if I was into such things. I felt this itching, low down, at the back of my neck. The itching turned to words, and then to a voice way too familiar, one I hadn’t heard in years. Miracelle, you oughta have more heart for women like her. I nigh about fainted.
The voice had a pleased-with-itself sound. Look at you, fortune-teller girl. I shrugged and concentrated as I told blonde how I’d seen my share of smooth talkers and Bad Men and, why, look at me.
By that time she was poking in her purse for the twenty bucks for half an hour’s card reading, though I’d already talked with her that long, minus the cards. She was telling me about how Anstor had moved in, moved out, taken over everything in her life from her Grand Prix to her calico cat.
What’re you doing, girl? the voice said. My heart rippled.
Smoke rings rose from the bar crowd and I followed their trail to the filthy ceiling. Felt up under the table and found wads of old gum, like they’d tell me what was what. The voice was inside my ear and it had taken a seat. Just when you think I was gone for good, Miracelle Loving. A voice like Southern Comfort at the bottom of a glass.
“My name’s Beatrice,” blonde said, her eyes pleading as a little dog’s. She handed me a twenty folded up into a neat little square.
“Hush,” I said. “I got to listen.”
Come on now. The voice was so close to my collarbone I shivered.
The blonde looked a little scared, like maybe one of us was crazy. “Listen to what?”
I didn’t answer because I sure didn’t know. Haints, they use to call them. Ghosts. Stray souls. Nothing but leftover voices from too many times before, and I’d had my share. Voices down long empty halls, like that time I was cleaning cabins at a state park in the swamps of South Georgia. Hey, Miracelle, you done Number Four yet? Another time, working the register and renting a little RV camper behind a store beside the highway to the Grand Canyon. Mothers and daddies and kids stopped for pop and chips. Hey, you watch them kids at that edge, the store owner would say, every time. A woman alone, why, she could hear just about anything, good or not.
I stuck the twenty in my shirt pocket. I wasn’t ready to leave yet and I wasn’t ready to stay, and I sat there while the jukebox played that fortune-teller song again. Love potions and ghost voices from some past I’d just as soon have left in the dust. What did I expect on a Thursday night in a no-account bar?
Dill’s had country style and lip rings, plus enough rhinestone-shirted women and toupeed men to fill up every DeVille in a used Cadillac lot. I pushed my way past a bunch of pretty girls with brand-new cowboy boots, stopped in front of the mirror next to the bar, and checked myself out. My dress was a blue so deep I could taste it. I told myself I didn’t look a bit crazy.
“Feeling lucky tonight?” The bartender was Indian, and he nodded his head in that back and forth and all at once way.
I laid down a ten. “I’ve been luckier, mister.”
“That so?” He handed me my drink.
A tattooed boy drummed on a tabletop as I headed out onto the floor. I sipped and danced by myself for a little, then found some quarters. I needed some George Jones bad, but even with his twang and croon, I found myself humming another song I couldn’t quite remember. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night. The music climbed up my arm, settled in the hair tucked behind my ear.
“This dance free, sweetheart?” A cowboy-looking guy, gray haired, with a stomach traveling over his belt buckle, loomed next to me.
“I’m not into dancing, tonight, mister,” I said, but I sized him up. Tall, with snakeskin boots that looked real and a checkbook stuck in his front pocket.
“You should be rocking somebody’s world tonight, sweetheart.” He wrapped a strand of my hair around a finger and I shook my head no, but he followed me back to the bar.
I ordered a beer for the bottle since, I’d recalled, spirits and bottles attracted. You hung them on your trees in your yard, blue and green and red ones, and they caught all the spirits, all the kith and kin, and held them, forever if you wanted. I drank the beer quick so I could sit there and see if that voice would curl up in the bottom of the empty like smoke and leave me be.
Cowboy wasn’t leaving anybody be, and neither was Beatrice. Blonde had followed me over to the bar, waving my Miracelle Loving, Fortune Teller Extraordinaire card and asking me did I also read palms. Before I could help it, her and Cowboy were sitting on either side of me downing shots two for two. I had one, even though I hated the taste of anything straight. It was like fire.
“What’d you say your name was, sweet thing?” The cowboy wasn’t choosy, ordering tequila once, Jack another time.
“She’s Miracelle,” Beatrice slid the business card over to Cowboy and he peered at it.
“What’s this here?” He pointed at a pyramid with beams of light on it that I’d had printed on the cards.
I mumbled something about Masons and the new age of light, though I didn’t actually know.
“Miracelle’s a prophetess,” Beatrice said. She smiled like this was a joke, but then got serious. “She told me some things.”
“What kind of things?” Cowboy asked. He leaned in close, lit me another cigarette.
Smoking was a thing I didn’t usually do, but Beatrice kept feeding me Lucky Strikes as she started into another story about all the nights she’d spent waiting up for Anstor to drag-ass in. She drew a heart in the sweat rings on the bar.
Cowboy was as drunk as Beatrice.
“What was your name again?” His turquoise ring made his hand feel heavy on my arm.
“Miracelle.”
“If you’re a prophet, what do you predict for me?”
He ordered me another drink and I settled back. A stray ten had fallen out of his wallet and sat there on the floor until I scooted it under my boot for later while I traced my finger down the center of his palm. He’d give up cowboying, I told him. He’d buy himself a forty-acre farm in West Tennessee and he’d meet a neighbor lady.
“Didn’t I just meet you, sweetheart?”
I brushed his question aside, turned his hand from left to right and examined the lines on the edges of his fingers. “Now, this.” He leaned in as I pointed to the lines on the edge of his hand. “I’m not too sure, but it looks like children are in the picture. You got kids?”
His breath was smoky and stale and he looked annoyed, then smiled. “Guess I’m not too sure either when it comes to the kids,” he said.
It was ten or eleven o’clock by then, and the place was filling up with leather fringe and spray-netted high-rise hairdos and a few Goth types. Somebody had picked Kitty Wells, a song that slowed the crowd down, left them tight wired.
Beatrice was crying and drunk dialing on her cell phone and headed out onto the dance floor. I went with it, him and me. We circled the floor, a stumble-and-hold-yourself-up kind of thing between table and bar and jukebox and back, a spoof of every dance he knew, which wasn’t much. A feeling settled over like there were eyes on the two of us as we did a clumsy two-step. A clumsy do-si-do toward the jukebox. Five solid minutes of clogging to Hank Jr. left Cowboy’s face red, and I led him back to an empty table.
“I could use me someone like you,” he said.
“Use?”
“Don’t fine-tune my words.” He coughed into a handkerchief embroidered with roses.
Beyond us, the dance floor spun with lights. Blue and neon pink pulsed across faces. Mustached ones, pockmarked ones, a clean-shaven head covered with blue tattoos. The place rocked with heat and cigarette smoke as I studied him. Cowboy was spit shined, with good leather not broke in yet, but he had places that were soft, a paunch and the lips he lowered to my level hoping for a kiss. “I could take care of you, sweet thing,” he was saying as I sighed, considering my options just as the voice spoke up all over again. Don’t just remember what your mama taught you, girl. I flinched enough that Cowboy looked concerned. He raised my hand up to a mouth that looked like a little boy’s.
Truth be told, I could remember plenty my mother taught me. I could tell whole lives by looking at eye color and the shapes of irises. I could read cards. I could use a poker deck for fortunes, with the one-eyed jack for good luck and the queen of hearts for love. And just like she had done for ones like Mister Cowboy, if they looked at me just right, I broke out a fancier deck I’d ordered called Poets and Planets, cards with writers and musicians. But between you and me and the salt on the rim of a glass, I couldn’t live on any of it, and I’d learned ways and means my mother would never have dreamed of.
It was easy, watching all of them smoke fancy cigars and fall all over themselves to buy me another round. Businessmen. Women in suits and high heels. Farmer-men you’d see bellying up for a beer or three at a dive bar way more country than this Knoxville place. I’d follow them out to a parking lot and a big fine car. We’d roll up the windows and smoke a little of this, snort a little of that. I’d tell them just enough about me and what I knew and how. Been spinning fortunes, I’d say, since I was knee high to nothing. Yes, one of them would say as they reached over and touched my nose or my lips like they were testing the waters.
I’d pull out just enough fortune-teller rigmarole to be convincing. The ten of wands, I’d say, a release of all the energies you have built up over time. By that time we’d be staggering out of the fine car, a Corvette if I was lucky. They’d zero in for a kiss tasting like mint and gin, and soon I’d see myself in the mirror in an elevator headed to the top of some fine tall place with so many floors I could have gone out on the roof and seen forever if I’d wanted to. In the room, I’d help them unbutton themselves, help them unbutton me. Massage feet smelling of old leather, read soles, follow their empty roads of skin up and up to the planes of their backs and bellies. I was Miracelle Loving and I had the power of the future, power of the past. I had the power to taste their sweat as I rode them down. I let them read me too, their hands following all the lines, a map to everywhere I’d ever been, everyone I’d ever touched, if only they’d known how.
None of us was lonelier than anyone else, and one night was as good as the next when it came to comfort. Touch never lasted. And love? Come the end of the night, the most I could count on was just enough money and a little more to take me to the next town.
Right about then, rockabilly took over and Cowboy pulled me to my feet for a dance, but the voice was louder and peskier. I’m still here, girl, it said. Ready or not. It wasn’t just a voice this time. The words had a cold edge, and they moved down the back of my neck. They tickled their way underneath my right ear, made the shape of a circle on my cheek. A rodeo song yodeled from the jukebox, a skip and hop of a song, and a whole bunch of them were trying their best to do a drunk line dance. Don’t the fools abound, girlie? The voice shook me hard, and I turned around so quick Cowboy spilled his drink down my front.
He dabbed at me with his handkerchief, and his hand lingered.
“Give me a minute.” I felt the room tilt, and I steadied myself and pulled away from him. He put both arms around my middle, a strong hold, and we stood that way. I could see a shape of myself across the way in the mirror behind the bar. The glass was speckled with tiny blue stars, and there was a giant photograph over there too, some country music singer with wide white teeth in a smile that went on and on. Beatrice sat, blonde head down and in her arms, and beside her was a young girl in leopard skin tights and motorcycle boots. She was laughing fit to kill.
“I think I made a mistake, mister,” I said.
“What’d you say?” Cowboy spun me toward him but I could hardly hear him. The voice was as jangly now as car keys on a metal ring. About time you listened up, girl. I wanted to swallow and hold my breath. To cover my ears and say, No.
I broke the hold his arms had.
“What was that?” He looked at me like he’d been bit.
“Leave me be,” I said, but I didn’t know if it was him I was talking to or the voice. I should have told you more. The words inside my head now were as loud as glass breaking, and I was scared.
Cowboy looked taller, the round edges of him hot and mad. “Leave you be?” He laughed and the sound was hard. “I’m a night of standing drinks the other side of leaving anyone be.”
I wanted to run, toward my motel room or at least to the first street out. Wanted to run until my lungs hurt or until I could hold my head over good dirt and empty myself out. I headed through the tangle of arms and faces and dancing.
The voice ran too, pushing its way with me through the crowd. Should have told you about the power of fortunes, girl. The voice had the taste of chalk. About time we told the truth, you and me, it said. The voice was full of midnight sounds. Bottles falling into a trash can in an alleyway, tops ripped from sweet cans of Coca-Cola in the heavy heat of summer.
As the room wove and spun, I knew that voice once and for all, whether I wanted to or not. I remembered some night and a drink or two. I remembered her. How she stumbled out into the street after a night of drinking, me with my arm around her waist. What would I do without you? Ruby Loving. And here she was, the first time in nigh on twenty years, making mother sounds, telling me to hold still now. Listen, listen. All I wanted to do was heave until I was empty, of her and Cowboy and everything that came before.
The next thing I knew, I was standing on the sticky floor of the closest restroom. The place was empty and it smelled like cheap cologne. I held my breath as I steadied myself against the sink. Stay put for a little, I told myself. Check the hallway. Find a back door out. I needed a minute, that was for sure. I was a sight. I hadn’t combed my hair all evening, and in the mirror I looked like a wild woman down to my eyebrows, which needed plucking, bad. I looked like what I was, actually. A thirty-something hangdog woman with a cowboy waiting for her on the dance floor.
I turned on the faucet full blast and then forgot why I was there. The water sounds made everything else drift off, the bar noise and out beyond, car horns and sirens. And Ruby’s voice was now so clear she could have been sitting at my feet on the bathroom floor. Miracelle Loving. You need to get on with it. Clear as when I was little. Her fingers combing through my hair and telling me and her both that everything would be all right. What was I supposed to get on with? A cowboy palm, open on my knee? Get on with it, she said again, and I touched my own face, and that made me so sick again the room turned. I realized I was holding my breath, but I wouldn’t cry. I would not.
Suddenly the door swung open and somebody was standing there. The first thing I saw was an arm tattooed with a circle that had two words inside it. Harmonic Convergence. The arm was attached to a young man, who wanted the men’s room that, I now saw, I was standing in. He had about the gentlest face I’d ever seen, a face like light so soft it wanted to soothe me.
“Excuse me, ma’am.” He looked embarrassed. He put his hands in his pockets. “You don’t look so good.”
“You think?” I asked, but I could see what he did. I looked pale and sweaty. I looked haunted, and I was.
Ruby’s voice was inside me like I was nothing but pieces of myself. She was inside me as I started to fall and as I took the only hands there were to hold on to.
He helped me look for my things, then paid my bar tab with a twenty I handed him out of my pocketbook. I stumbled as we stepped down from the curb, headed across to his car, though I told him I was fine, that I could call a cab.
“I’ve got the time.” He waved me toward his car.
I didn’t much care where we went as long as we just went. There’d been odder things on the roads I’d traveled, strangers who’d loved me and fed me and taken me in.
“Can we just drive?” I said as I rolled the window down, stuck my head out, breathed and loved the street-scent of old oil and asphalt.
“You look like you’ve already ridden somewhere and back.” He uncapped a water bottle from between the seats and handed it to me.
We rode past power lines and office windows lit all night while he skate-boarded with his open hand against the air out his window. “Then there’s the who-are-you question.”
“Card Reader Has Been.” I reached a hand across to him. “Miracelle Loving,” I said after that.
“Miracelle,” he repeated, like he was tasting my name.
We took a way he knew through the late-night Knoxville streets, took exits and ramps, drove until the suburbs gave way to open fields and fireflies.
“In there just now,” he said after a bit. “You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
He pulled over at a wide spot and a sign. The Starland Drive-In.
Ruby Loving was a ghost, all right. This is a little better now, she said. She was riding shotgun on the hood of a car belonging to some man who’d saved me.
The drive-in was playing a late-night marathon of old movies. They were halfway through The Snake Pit, and they were just at the part where Olivia de Havilland is being straitjacketed as we parked across the road where the two of us and Ruby too could watch for free. I could have sworn I felt her tickling the back of my neck and laughing a little as he and I began to talk.
“What brought you to Knoxville, Miracelle Loving?”
“The road. Fortunes now and again.”
“You tell fortunes? What kind do you tell?”
“I’d read a chicken bone if I had to.”
“Do you figure out much people really want to know?”
“I aim to please.”
“Ever find out much about yourself?”
I tucked my legs under me on the car seat. “I’m the teller, not the told about.”
“Don’t you have to figure out where you’ve been,” he said, “before you can tell anyone else where they’re going?”
“How’s that?” I started to say, but I didn’t. I said, “Maybe you’re the fortune teller.”
“Just saying what I see when I see it.” He flicked a match out the window. “Really all I know of late is a good day’s work.”
“What would that be?”
He folded his arms like I wouldn’t believe him. “I work at what you could call a museum of freaks, though I myself hesitate to use that word.”
“Do they have live freaks or just little plaques?”
He raised his eyebrows. “It’s the largest museum this side of the Mason Dixon. It’s full of wonders otherwise overlooked.”
There you go, I thought. Mermaids with cardboard for tails. But that wasn’t what he meant.
“A kingdom of the dispossessed,” he said.
I had no idea what that was, but I nodded.
“It’s called Willy’s Wonderama.”
We drove along a length of deserted building, past coal piled high in a railroad car. I could see the city lights in the distance, and I closed my eyes a little, studying him. He had a smooth, shaved head and a thin goatee. He was good looking enough, but it was some kind of knowing in my belly that unsettled me. If I’d believed in past lives, or even the one I was living right then, I’d have said I’d known him for years, but I hadn’t even asked his name yet.
Her voice came to me one more time at the end of that long, long night, as we drove past a truck-stop sign. The sign flashed yellow and red and blue and I wished for a minute that was where I’d ended up. Roadside waitress, white shoes all spit polished and a starched, new uniform. Running away isn’t about highways, girl, Ruby said. She tickled my ear. She stomped on my heart. What would being happy look like, she asked me, if you painted it like a picture?
I wasn’t really a fortune teller, and I knew that well enough. I mean, glimmers of this and that came to me. Moments from what might be, but more often moments that had been. Mainly I could see a whole long line of blonde-headed women ahead of me in other bars like Dill’s, all of them wanting to feel better about love. What did I have to give them but my own nights full of cowboys and empty palms waiting to be read?
He asked me if my head was clear enough now as he let me out at the curb near my car. Then he gave me a card with a number to call. A job, he said, if I wanted one.
“You never know,” he said. “You might like staying put.”
“Maybe.”
I watched his car pull into a far lane, watched the shark eyes of his taillights disappear. Willy’s Wonderama, the card said under the streetlight, with curlicues and a drawing of a little man with a fox head. On the other side was a scrawled name. Cody Black.
The voice came to me one more time. Joy abides, it said. Was there such a thing?
Once upon a time, my mother held her hands out the car window and surfed the air like we were flying. I was happy, a long time ago. I remembered that self like I was a ghost riding shotgun down a highway. All I knew for sure right now was that I was lonelier tonight than I’d ever been.