Chapter 3: On Gen. Jackson’s Square
That evening Lucy Chloroform pushed herself along the Rue Conti, down the sloped brick pavement on the corner, and past the St. Louis Cathedral. Its smooth white face sat straight-backed looking across the Mississippi at the low-income shotgun homes on the West Bank, able to see over the antique iron cannons on the observation point atop the levee, aware those looking back saw it as an old building, nothing more.
The center of the square was a park with cement paths that wound through honeysuckle bushes, dogwood trees, and pedicured lawns. It was closed now as the city had taken to locking it at dusk to discourage the homeless. Along its perimeter on three sides sat fortune tellers, gypsies, and palmists. Lucy passed them slowly at a safe distance trying to judge which were real and which phony. The drug addicts and runaways might have a chair or two set up, and the well-to-do among them might have a card table. For the rest wood plackards were the norm, taped with testimonials and newspaper clippings, along with candles, canopies, and elaborate outfits in reams of flowing cloth. Lucy did her best to avoid their hungry attempts at eye contact.
The connection she hoped for happened in front of The Lady Rene. Her sign billed her as a practitioner of dark arts of her Cajun ancestors. Swamp voodoo. She was elderly and black which to Lucy suggested authenticity. The Lady Rene continued staring straight ahead until Lucy stopped in front of her.
“You can push that chair off to the side, child.”
“Okay.” Lucy forced a chuckle. Her smile was all upper teeth, and crow’s feet created small shadows near her temples as she unzipped her nylon warmup jacket.
“Pleasant night.”
“It’s so dark down here though,” Lucy said
“Explain yourself.”
“I, it’s just that, well they could get brighter lights in the street lamps. I think. Then it wouldn’t be so. Sorry, I. Sorry.”
“I am The Lady Rene. I don’t do cards, or throw polished gravel and call it runes, and I don’t care what the creases on your palms say, though I will take your hands in a moment. The Lady Anita, that’s my grandmother rest her, taught me how to open my mind’s eye and see into a body. Some are like the wind blowing across a mountain, one that has a different clime on the top than on the bottom. Some are like the feeling in your shoulders after you hug somebody on a holiday morning. They all say something. Every body. And they all say something that’n never thought of before. It takes another eye to see what you can’t see yourself.”
“Oh! I know what you’re saying. Exactly.”
“You’re getting on to 40.”
Lucy laughed involuntarily. “There’s time yet, but yes, well, yes.”
Lady Rene turned her stern nun gaze onto Lucy, who began rotating her wedding ban.
“Put your elbows on the table and put your palms up, like me.” Lucy did so and flinched at Lady Rene’s bony touch. Lady Rene tightened her grip. Lucy felt the silver rings jut into her callused hands, and she shifted in her seat.
“Be still,” said Lady Rene. She closed her eyes and let her mouth draw open as she leaned back her head. “Are they closed?”
“Yes,” said Lucy closing them.
Lady Rene began to speak in a language Lucy had not heard, one with the nasal breathy R sound of the French. Lucy focused on clearing her mind and keeping her eyes shut. She flinched again when the iron grip lifted her arms off the table. Lady Rene’s words grew louder and reached a pitch. Then she was freed. Her elbows struck the table.
Lucy froze a moment and then cautiously opened her eyes. Lady Rene was looking away from her pensively.
“Lady Rene?”
Lady Rene took a cloth scarf across her eyes and blinked into it several times. “Your aura is not calm. It storms. It storms because it is not complete. It wants to be complete, and that is why you feel the way you do. Anxious, always incomplete.”
“Yes.”
“There is something you want. Something more than anything.”
Lucy got excited.
“You have a husband. He loves you. But still there is something.”
“I want to be a…”
“A baby.”
“Yes!”
“You want a child but you are unable to have one.”
“Yes!” Lucy fiddled with her ring. “It, it’s a common problem with most parapalegics. We have tried. Jerry and I. But when I…”
“Had the accident?”
“Yes.” Lucy wheeled her chair backwards, and then pushed it to the edge of the table. “It didn’t just put me in this. It got some of my plumbing too.”
She paused for a kind word. Lady Rene was impassive.
“But I’ve had a long time to get used to being in a chair. I mean, it made me have to switch sports a little but I played them. Basketball still worked. But this. And Jerry says we can adopt but I know really he’s disappointed even if he never lets on.”
Lucy slumped back. She composed herself and looked back in expectant urgency.
“When did you lose the use of your legs?”
“When I was in high school. It was a hunting accident. I wasn’t even doing any, well.” Lucy laughed.
“Tell me, Lucy. What have your dreams been like of late?”
“My dreams?”
“Have you dreamt of late of majestic forests, kings and their court, of knights and ladies?”
Lucy gripped her armrests.
“And is there a woman? Something wrong with her?”
“I thought there was something wrong,” said Lucy.
“Is there a tower, like in the fairytales? Is she trapped?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?” said Lady Rene.
“She was in the tower. But I didn’t get the sense she was trapped. She might have been at home.”
“The woman. What does she look like?”
“I can tell you this. Usually dream people are so vague like you’re seeing them on TV with your glasses off but not her. She’s beautiful. Jeans and a fitted sweater. A bit exotic, a bit dark complected, dark hair.”
“I knew it was you,” said Lady Rene. “I’ve been waiting out here nights.” She looked around at the others, fortune tellers and fortune hearers. “Nights.”
“Did we have the same dream?”
“Yes.”
“That was me in the dream?” Lucy asked.
“No. Why do you think it was you? It was not you. But I knew you would come. I needed the dreamer.”
Lucy was unconsciously playing with the latch that locks her wheels. She was surprised when she began rolling backwards. She felt disoriented and her fight or flight response was triggering.
Lady Rene continued, “I can help you have a baby. There was a brew The Lady Anita once spoke of. One that she never used, not that I saw. For fertility. Said, ‘Power of life’s just as big and dangerous as the power of death.’ Which she had a brew for too.”
“Oh,” said Lucy.
“But I can make it.”
Lady Rene leaned forward, the tassles on the orange scarf stretched tight across the top of her head nearly landing in the candles, the light of which reflected in her all-pupil eyes. “I will do it for you, but you must do something for me. Where is the lady in the dream?”
“She’s in the tower.”
“No, where is she here. In the waking world.”
“I don’t know.”
Lady Rene did not appear pleased by this. “Then you know why she’s in the tower.”
“No, just what I said. I didn’t think she was being held there. She didn’t seem like a prisoner, I don’t know.”
“Then someone else knows. You must find the third dreamer.”
“Third dreamer?” Lucy asked.
“I saw that there were three dreamers. You, me, and another who had the same dream as we. You must find her, or him, and bring them here. They know why. They must.”
“You want me to find this person? How?”
“You will find them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When I had this dream it startled me such that I cast myself into it and saw two others, two others watching the same as I. We were brought together in the dream and so I knew we’d be brought together here in this world too. All’s I had to do was wait. Nights.”
Lucy shook her head. “I have a job. You must have foreseen that. I’m a manager, I have people. I need to be there. I can’t just go taking off. And I’m not exactly mobile.”
“You will find the third dreamer. I’m certain of it.”
Lucy said nothing. She thought of the people passing behind her, on their way to restaurants, bars, hotels, watching her sitting out here with this woman and judging her. Beside them a heavy-set man with a hippy beard spoke in low tones as he dealt tarot face up to the couple before him. She could not make out the words.
“I can’t just go up to every single person I see and ask if they’ve been dreaming about a woman locked up in a castle.”
“Do not fret. We were brought together, and you’ll be brought together too. Or they might find their way to me just as you did. But this I doubt. You don’t know where she is so you must have another role to play. As messenger.”
“Who is this woman anyway?”
Lady Rene placed her hand on Lucy’s. “All you must do is bring them here. Do this and I will make that brew.”
A spasm of sadness constricted Lucy’s throat. It was like when she was watching the news the other day, a segment on people from North Korea and how for the first time they were allowed to travel into South Korea to see family again. The cameras were rolling as the reunited fell crying into each other’s arms at the airport. Fifty years of godawful longing escaping in moans and sobs and hands matting in another’s tangled hair. Lucy teared up at that then, and she stifled a heave now.
“All right.”
Lady Rene smiled, her parched lips drawing across yellowed teeth. “And I will begin collecting what I need for the brew.”
“Is there anything else I should do? Help you collect your… ingredients?”
“No. But it is $120 for this reading.”
Lucy reached into the bag slung across the back of her chair seat. Lady Rene counted the money. “Now this is very important. Bring the third dreamer to me. Do not tarry. Bring them here and you will have your baby.”
Chapter 4: A Standing Shoulder Depth
What always surprises him about the beach is its discomfort. The sand is prickly from the heat and the gravel and the pine green beach briars, things the camera misses when it zooms in on a girl in a healthy one-piece running down the shoreline. The wind off the ocean is invariably more than he expects, and it blows his hair in unnatural directions. He arrives wearing trunks, a T-shirt, sunglasses, and a straw hat. Anything more that must be taken off in front of strangers brings pangs of hesitation, an early scarring from the men’s locker room.
He remembers her blush when he asks with a loud laugh for someone to rub sunscreen on his back. Her parents are along, and they stand from spreading the beach towels and stroll in unison toward the breaking waves. Her hands apply it in quick striking wipes leaving clumps on his shoulders. He smiles because he knows she dislikes showing a tick of affection in front of her father. He is a Vulcan, that one.
The ocean on the Carolina coast is robin-egg blue at the horizon and gray as a Bergman still when up to the waist. He brings his snorkeling mask but it is too murky and in the shallows the bottom as well is obscured. They venture out to a standing shoulder depth, looking around one another and her father looking over them, as the water reaches just over his prodigious belly, and she jumps into the swells gaining speed as they rush to spill over themselves on the shore. He grows nervous with what may be lurking in the murky water and wades back to dry sand, where he’s bashed in the shins by a man with a metal detector.
The tide recedes quickly beneath spotty clouds. He wanders searching for conch shells but the sea is stingy, and it gives no sand dollars, and he’s engrossed when he finds the tarantula legs of a hermit crab motioning piano scales from out its snail shell home. Seagulls swarm their towels when he makes the mistake of tossing one a cheddar popcorn. He sees her flash annoyance and brush it away with the tuck of a lock behind her ears. He thinks her curious like Esmerelda Villa-Lobos.
Later they ask to borrow her parents’ bicycles. She is convinced the sand closest to the wild grass and fence posts is packed solid from the receding tide. They strain pedaling into the jet engine wind. Some miles when they’re down the coast the sea begins to come back in. He yells to turn back, men, turn back, and they race the tide before it can swamp their path. This time the wind is at their backs and they laugh like baseball drunks. They dare Mother Nature her worst and touch home before they suffer the consequences.
Snoz thought that’s the way it went on that trip, part of the time. He knew his memory must be holey, he didn’t kid himself about the rose-colored spectacles. He remembered the weirdness of having sex with Emily though the parental consent was implicit in the gift of one room to share. Yes, he remembered, whatever it meant to have these thoughts in his mind. This trip happened. It was not happening now. And when he talked to someone who has only met him since she left, it was these thoughts that he dwelled on. These thoughts that were left when he strained out the rest of the world. The world he saw didn’t exist to anyone else, and no one else’s perception of him included these things, the very things that defined him. He was separate because no one else would know these things but her. He knew the separation had no tangible existence yet it continued to direct, to limit!, his behavior long after the times that left the memory occurred.
Yes, Snoz thought, as sleep took over and he lost the feeling of his body in the bed sheets, I will tell the truth: out back of her parents’ house I put on trunks, a mask, and fins and posed with a long bamboo pole. The picture she took was as silly as I’d hoped, and it made her smile. But she also tsk’d me, while I felt only delight.