With our first coin, Stormy and I received YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. We didn’t spend a second quarter. There was nothing else we needed to know.
In the six years since my previous petition to Gypsy Mummy, the machine had been modified to require two quarters per fortune. When offering their divinations, even deceased Gypsies needed to account for inflation.
“How long do I have to wait,” I murmured, “before your promise to me comes true?”
For fifty cents, I received a card that offered no prediction on either side.
I supposed that in any stack of pre-printed fortunes put into the machine, there might be a blank or two.
Another fifty cents got me a second card with not a word on it.
Wondering if I had been expected, if someone might be watching me right that minute, I looked around, but the other patrons were preoccupied with their claptrap prophets. The cashier had her nose in the romance novel.
I studied the stitched eyelids beyond the glass. Stormy used to insist that after we received the card so desired by Johnny and his girlfriend, the mummified dwarf had opened one eye and winked. It made no sense that sewn-shut eyes could wink, especially when the coarse black thread wasn’t broken. Whether the wink might have been a moment of magic or whether it was nothing more than a little fantasy that Stormy wanted to believe, I never questioned her claim because it gave her such pleasure to think it had happened.
Again I asked, “How long do I have to wait before your promise to me comes true?”
I paid two more quarters, listened to them clink into the machine’s cash box — and received a third blank card.
After a fourth of the same, I pretended interest in some of the nearby soothsaying contraptions and waited for someone to feed coins to the Gypsy.
Maybe ten minutes passed before two girls, about fourteen years old, approached the machine. Each spent fifty cents for which she got a printed card that she shared with her friend. They conferred over the meaning of their fortunes, giggled, and then swapped cards, each apparently preferring the other’s future. They wandered away, sharing the popcorn.
Neither girl had spoken aloud to the Gypsy, as instructions above the coin feed directed, and I’d had no opportunity to see the messages on their cards, which they took away with them. Clearly, however, they had not received blanks.
You might say that it was just a machine, that the cards were stacked in the mechanism in no particular order, that getting four blanks for two bucks was nothing more than happenstance. All of that is rational, and certainly in the case of the two girls and others who consulted Gypsy Mummy, your point would be irrefutable. But in my life, uncanny things had happened to me with some regularity, not just related to my ability to see lingering spirits and to find my way by psychic magnetism. Because of my other experiences, I could not be shaken from the belief that the four cards without fortunes would have come to me if I’d consulted Gypsy Mummy hours earlier or hours later.
Besides, for six years, I had believed in the message on the card in my wallet, and for most of the past two years, that promise — and sometimes it alone — had sustained me. I could no more stop believing in Gypsy Mummy than I could stop believing in my own existence.
Leaving the arcade, I was able to imagine two meanings that the blank cards might have been intended to convey. First, that the promise to me would not be kept. Second, that I had so little time to live that I didn’t have any future on which the mummified oracle could comment.
I much preferred interpretation number two.
Just outside of the tent, watching the people who busied along the concourse, I had a sense of time running out. I checked my watch—7:40. The crowd would keep growing for another couple of hours. Because of the jackpot drawing, the carnival wouldn’t close until well after midnight, perhaps not until one in the morning. If there was something important for me to learn here, I still had plenty of time to discover it.
I concentrated on the name Wolfgang and tried to hear his whiskey-soaked voice in my mind’s ear. Had I seen his face when he and his companions had pursued me through the dark mall, psychic magnetism would now be more likely to draw me to him. But because his voice had been so distinctive, perhaps it would serve nearly as well.
Turning right, I joined the crowd and headed along a length of the midway that I had not yet explored. I had taken no more than a dozen steps when I turned abruptly, colliding with a woman in a green fishnet top and red culottes. I apologized, though considering her outfit, she should have apologized as well, and I set off back the way I had come. Past the Dodgem Cars, where drivers crashed into one another with glee. Past the high-striker, where a muscular customer swung the sledgehammer and rang the bell. Toward the flatbed truck with the two huge swiveling spotlights. Toward the major sideshows that occupied the east end of the southern concourse. Psychic magnetism had never before worked so quickly, had never drawn me with such power and urgency as this.
Twenty
I was compelled to move, move, move. The compulsion grew so strong that I almost broke into a run, but to avoid drawing attention to myself, I exercised restraint as best I could. On rare occasions, when this curious talent of mine grew especially powerful, I was to a degree at its mercy, crashing forward almost recklessly, afraid that I might plunge into some peril that I would not recognize until too late.
A hundred people had gathered in front of adjacent sideshows where two barkers ballyed their attractions. I slipped through the crowd and between the two large tents, heading off the midway, hoping that no carnies or security guards would notice me. Shadows closed in quicker than I expected. I slowed down a little, fearful of tripping over something and impaling myself on one of the steel tent stakes or garroting myself on a guy rope. Such a death was exactly the kind of end I might decisively — if unconsciously — bring upon myself to prove once and for all that I didn’t deserve the unwanted label HERO, that I was only a fry cook and a clumsy one.
Behind the tents, the elevated midway withered down to a service road. I sprinted across the blacktop and checked my pace again as I found myself on another slope, this one darker and much longer than the first, covered in wild grass as high as my knees.
The hullabaloo and razzle-dazzle of the midway faded significantly. The most immediate sound became the chorus of crickets all around me. The night was warm enough that I worried about rattlesnakes, which in the right conditions liked to hunt in the dark for just such prey as crickets and grass toads.
Below lay a large graveled area that, during fair week, became a campground for the carnies, with water and electrical hookups. At least two hundred travel trailers and motor homes were parked in rows. Some were owned by concessionaires who operated independently within the carnival, on-the-road homes for them and their families. Others belonged to Sombra Brothers and were rented to those carnies who didn’t have their own accommodations.
From about the age of twelve until Stormy and I became an item, every fair week I had hung out in the carnival. I had gotten some part-time work at a grab joint, flipping hamburgers and manning the deep fryer, which is where I first discovered my inner fry cook. I’d met a lot of carnies, and I’d liked most of them. In the mainstream culture, they lived as outsiders, and so did I to some extent, though by necessity rather than by choice.