“You’re getting it, Stan. There’s lots more that I forget-I ain’t read mitts steady in many a year. If Sophie was here she could give you hundreds of things like that. She’s got a whole notebook full of stuff. It locks with a key. But you’ll make out all right. You always could read.”
Zeena and Joe were sitting in the shade of the porch, opening letters and shaking out dimes. The woman said, “Hand me some more Scorpios, hon. I’m fresh out.”
Joe ripped open a carton. The astrological booklets came in stamped-and-sealed envelopes. They addressed them quickly with fountain pens and threw them in a wire basket to be bundled up later for the postman.
Zeena said, “Beats all, Stan, how this mail-order business snow-balls up. We put in one little ad and plowed back the dimes into the business. Now we got five chains of magazines covered and we can’t hardly stop shaking out dimes to tend to the place here.”
The Great Stanton reached into a saucepan by the side of the steamer chair where he lay in the sun. Taking a handful of dimes he counted out five batches of ten and rolled them into a red paper wrapper-five dollars’ worth. The little red cylinders piled up in a china bowl on the other side of the chair, but he had carelessly allowed several to fall beside him. They were hidden between his thigh and the canvas chair-seat.
Joe hopped off the porch and over toward Stan, holding a basket of dimes in his teeth. He emptied them into the saucepan, smiling. “Little more and we’re going to buy another place-farm next to this one. We’ve pretty near got this place mortgage-free. Long as people want horoscopes, I mean, astro-readings-you can’t call ’em horoscopes through the mail unless they’re drawn to the hour and minute of birth-long as they keep going like this we’re set. And if they slack off, we’ve still got the farm.”
Stan leaned back and let the sun strike through his eyelids. He was gaining. A week had filled him out. Almost back to his old weight. His eyes had cleared and his hands hardly shook at all. He hadn’t had anything but beer in a week. A guy who’s good at the cold reading will never starve. When Joe turned back to the porch Stanton slid the red cylinders from the chair to his pants pocket.
The truck bounced off the side road in a cloud of dust, white under the full moon, and turned into a state highway. Zeena drove carefully to spare the truck and Joe sat next to her, one arm on her shoulders to steady himself when they stopped suddenly or slowed down. Stan was next to the door of the cab, his palmistry banners in a roll between his knees.
Town lights glittered ahead as they topped a gradual rise. They coasted down it.
“Almost there, Stan.”
“You’ll make it, kid,” Joe said. “McGraw’s a hard cookie, but he ain’t a nickel-nurser once you got him sold.”
Stan was quiet, watching the bare streets they were rolling through. The bus station was a drugstore which kept open all night. Zeena stopped down the block and Stan opened the door and slid out, lifting out the banners.
“So long, Zeena-Joe. This-this was the first break I’ve had in a hell of a while. I don’t know how-”
“Forget it, Stan. Joe and me was glad to do what we could. A carny’s a carny and when one of us is jammed up we got to stick together.”
“I’ll try riding the baggage rack on this bus, I guess.”
Zeena let out a snort. “I knew I’d forgot something. Here, Stan.” From the pocket of her overalls she took a folded bill and, leaning over Joe, pressed it into the mentalist’s hand. “You can send it back at the end of the season. No hurry.”
“Thanks a million.” The Great Stanton turned, with the rolled canvas under his arm, and walked away toward the drugstore. Halfway down the block he paused, straightened, threw back his shoulders and then went on, holding himself like an emperor.
Zeena started the truck and turned it around. They drove out of town in a different direction and then took a side road which cut into the highway further south, turning off it to mount a bluff overlooking the main drag. “Let’s wait here, snooks, and try to get a peek into the bus when it goes by. I feel kind of funny, not being able to see him to the station and wait until it came along. Don’t seem hospitable.”
“Only smart thing to do, Zee. A fellow as hot as him.”
She got out of the cab and her husband hopped after her; they crossed a field and sat on the bank. Above them the sky had clouded over, the moon was hidden by a thick ceiling.
“You reckon he’ll make it, Joe?”
Plasky shifted his body on his hands and leaned forward. Far down the pale concrete strip the lights of a bus rose over the grade. It picked up speed, tires singing on the roadbed, as it bore down toward them. Through its windows they could make out the passengers-a boy and a girl, in a tight clinch on the back seat. One old man already asleep. It roared below the bank.
Stanton Carlisle was sharing a seat with a stout woman in a gay flowered-print dress and a white sailor straw hat. He was holding her right hand, palm up, and was pointing to the lines.
Joe Plasky sighed as the bus tore past them into darkness with a fading gleam of ruby taillights. “I don’t know what’ll happen to him,” he said softly, “but that guy was never born to hang.”
CARD XXII
IT WAS a cheap straw hat, but it added class. He was the type of guy who could wear a hat. The tie chain came from the five-and-ten, but with the suit and the white shirt it looked like the real thing. The amber mirror behind the bar always makes you look tanned and healthy. But he was tanned. The mustache was blackened to match the hair-dyeing job Zeena had done.
“Make mine a beer, pal.”
He took it to a table, put his hat on an empty chair and unfolded a newspaper, pretending to read it. Forty-five minutes before the local bus left. They don’t know who they’re looking for up there-no prints, no photo. Stay out of that state and they’ll look for you till Kingdom Come.
The beer was bitter and he began to feel a little edge from it. This was all right. Keep it at beer for a while. Get a stake, working the mitt camp. Get a good wad in the grouchbag and then try working Mexico. They say the language is a cinch to learn. And the damn country’s wide open for ragheads. They advertise in all the papers down there. Give that mess with the cop time to cool and I can come back in a few years and start working California. Take a Spanish name maybe. There’s a million chances.
A guy who’s good at the cold reading will never starve.
He opened the newspaper, scanning the pictures, thinking his way along through the days ahead. I’ll have to hustle the readings and put my back into it. In a carny mitt camp you got to spot them quick, size ’em up and unload it in a hurry. Well, I can do it. I should have stayed right with the carny.
Two pages of the paper stuck and he went back and pried them apart, not caring what was on them, just so as not to skip any. In Mexico…
The picture was alone on the page, up near the top. He looked at it, concentrating on the woman’s face, his glance merging the screen of black dots that composed it, filling in from memory its texture, contour, color. The scent of the sleek gold hair came back to him, the sly twist of her little tongue. The man looked twenty years older; he looked like a death’s head-scrawny neck, flabby cheeks…
They were together. They were together. Read it. Read what they’re doing.
PSYCHOLOGIST WEDS MAGNATE
In a simple ceremony. The bride wore a tailored…Best man was Melvin Anderson, long-time friend and advisor…Honeymoon cruise along the coast of Norway…
Somebody was shaking him, talking at him. Only it wasn’t any grass tuft-it was a beer glass. “Jees, take it easy, bud. How’d ya bust it? Ya musta set it down too hard. We ain’t responsible, you go slinging glasses around and get cut. Why don’t ya go over to the drugstore. We ain’t responsible…”
Darkness of street darkness with the night’s eyes up above the roof cornices oh Jesus he was bleeding
