Shadow Man
Ruby ordered a deck of tarot cards from a magazine advertisement that promised the real deal. Prophecies. Answers. Her favorite card showed a young woman in a robe covered with foxes and dragons. The card was called the Priestess. Ruby thought of walking in the woods whenever she could, gathering herbs for the potions she had begun to make. She wasn’t sure what her potions were for, but she loved their hot, bitter tastes. She read in a library book about charms for love. About an undoing—a spell for making sure what someone believed in most got undone. The Radiance diner had to be full of souls who wanted spells like those.
At a diner booth, she tasted sugar from the bowl and ordered coffee with extra cream. Another piece of chocolate pie. The waitresses weren’t afraid of her exactly, but there was the small downturned smile when they saw the cards she laid down. At first she practiced for her own self with three cards and Celtic crosses, but then a big-handed carpenter man stopped and asked what she was after with all those cards. She noted the calluses on his palms as he shuffled and split the cards into the three piles for his past and present and, his fingers fumbling and letting cards go by then, his future. Some of the waitresses brought her coffee refills, lingered as she told them about the possibilities for marriages, for jobs, for lost faith in God. One waitress brought her every kind of pie on the house, lemon and banana and coconut, until she finally got up the nerve to sit in front of Ruby and ask. “I need you to tell me about how it would be,” she said. “About heading up to Indianapolis and getting me a place and, you know, singing at night somewhere fancy?” The girl’s hair shone, fresh washed and hopeful. They were all hopeful, the ones who sat with her for their futures, and Ruby liked that, the imparting of hope.
He stood a long while by the register, reading the menu. His body had an ease about it, a coiled energy she already wanted to see unwind. He shrugged, took a seat at the lunch counter, and gave the redheaded waitress his order. She watched him as he drank from his water glass, the swallow, the way he spit ice cubes back in. He cut his sandwich into neat parts, poured pools of ketchup, eating his fries whole. She watched his black eyes and his full mouth as he glanced around the Monday-empty room. When he looked at her for the first time, she memorized his face.
Esther had said Ruby’s hands reached out for a body, as if her fingers could climb inside you and turn your heart over. It was true enough that Ruby’s hands seemed to reach toward the man as she watched him. He stood, kicked the toe of a muddy boot against the lunch counter. Took his black felt hat off and shook it, looking puzzled as he set it back on his head. Could he hear her all the way over there, across the diner? Who are you, mister? Her tongue went dry and she felt her hands laying themselves down, the fingers drumming on the table. She laid one hand over the tarot deck, sure she felt warmth rising from the cards.
As he made his way over to her and stood there, that hat in his hands, she laid one hand out in his direction. Palms and cards, mister. She said that and turned one of her own hands over, palm up, waiting until he laid his own hand there and she touched the warm, rough feel of his skin.
She didn’t see him again until a week later when her daddy was on the street in Radiance. He was playing along with a man with a washboard strapped to his chest and another one with a guitar he made sing so sweet. It was a song about wanting and not-having and Ruby held her fingers against her face, hoping there was some scent there that was still his. She memorized the crowd, looking for him.
Him with his felt hat and his black eyes. He made her want fire.
At night she took to dreaming of mountains opening up, swallowing other mountains, one by one by one. She dreamed herself swallowed up and disappearing inside love. Dreams, he said when he lay atop her and looked down into her eyes. Her fingers, he said, were like dreams their own selves, moving down his back. Dreams, she said, were like birds that took wing at daybreak. Dreams weren’t real as him, he said. She dreamed ravens as big as storm clouds, and they made her afraid.
They stayed in Radiance, him and his logging crew. After they’d been here awhile, mountains were split open like hardwood, and the scent drifted in the open windows at night. Musk. Tearing. A scent of blood and birth. And behind them the coal men left their machines. Earthmovers. Excavators. Extractors. Big machines with names of companies bold across them. Smyte. Black Diamond. Ruby would walk home from town some nights and see a huge shell of a thing that had taken a mountain’s insides in its wake. Prongs of a forklift, held out like empty arms in prayer.
And when they are finished with us, her daddy said, they will spit us out and go on like we never were.
He will be that way, too, that drifter man, that man you say you love, her mother said. The world, Esther said, used to be a circle of earth. Mountains and trees and water so sweet. Then it became a circle of camp houses at the foot of a mountain chipped away. It was him who made the world crash open.
Men like him reached inside the mountains and pulled out their hearts. He did this and Ruby loved him anyway.