She laughed, and it was a soft low laugh, like the flow of water in a brook. There was no tension in the girl at all. I couldn’t imagine anything affecting that pool of relaxation around her. Just sitting there, I felt the knots in my back slowly sliding apart.
“No. Well, not really. I’m listening for the future.”
“The future.”
“Do you know anything about the Native Americans?”
“Only the usual stuff about poisoning them with infected blankets. I always wondered why we don’t give little blankets to each other at Thanksgiving.”
There was almost a frown there. “That’s just nasty.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out of me without really thinking. I suddenly didn’t want to spoil her and her zone of no-tension.
“The Native American shamans,” she said, “listened for the future in the sound of horses. They divined it, from the patterns of hoofbeats. They would sit like this, and just listen. In those days, horses were the sound of their world, the true sound of motion, and they believed that their movement through time let in leakages of the future. Presentiments of what will be.”
“I don’t see any horses.”
“Then you’re not looking.” She smiled, indulgent. “This is the sound of our world in motion, right here. Cars. The strike of hooves became the point where the rubber meets the road. Now, I’m a new American. My family came over on the boat from Spain only a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the people who were here before. In fact, I think it means I ‘must’ learn from them, if I’m going to stay here and look after this land properly. If only to make up for your smallpox-infected blankets, right? So here I sit. A New American shaman, divining the future from the sound of cars.”
As the strangeness of my days go, this was really kind of benign in its insanity. And I was enjoying the peace of her. So I drew my knees up and around until I was cross-legged like her, and we sat together like Zen hoboes on the corner of the street.
“What do you hear?” I asked.
She inclined her head slightly, toward the constant blur of metal accelerating past us. Just listening. It took a minute before she gave a little laugh.
“What?” I said.
“I hate the way this sounds. It makes me sound like a carny fortune-teller.”
“Go on.”
“You’re going on a long journey, Mike.”
“Oh, God. Tell me there’s no tall dark stranger.”
She giggled. “I think you’re the tall dark stranger. But, no, you’re going on a long journey. Sounds like you’re going to cross the country before you’re done. And yourself. It’s going to be strange for you. But that’s not a bad thing. Traveling is good.”
“You travel a lot?”
“I do nothing but travel,” she said, glancing at me. “Look at my face. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can’t get a job, buy a house, any of the things we’re supposed to want to do. When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society. But that’s okay. It stops me from giving up on myself. It stops me from settling for something ordinary. You shouldn’t want ordinary things, either. You’re unusual. I know you can’t hear the future, but it comes to you, anyway, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it the future.”
“That’s because you can’t hear it.”
“Back up a second,” I said, feeling like I’d missed a step. “I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you my name.”
“No.” She smiled. “You didn’t.”
“I should really get moving,” I said, standing up, suddenly very cold.
She beamed up at me. “Yes, you should. You just came into quite a lot of money. You should spend a little on yourself before you have to spend it on necessities. You don’t need to start your journey just yet. Enjoy yourself a little bit.”
“I just thought of an old song,” I said.
“Which one?”
“‘Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.’”
“That’s right,” she said, eyes drawn back to the traffic. “It’s always later than you think. I won’t be here tomorrow. And neither will you. Go have a drink.”
Chapter 3
An hour later, I walked into some freak bar on Bleecker Street and yelled, “I’m buying a hundred drinks—for
Oh, they beat the shit out of me.
