Burning (7 page)

“That’s you, Ben,” snorted Hog Boy. “The fool going on a journey.”

“We are all fools,” I corrected. “And each of us takes many journeys. In this reading, you are right, Ben is the Fool”—I tapped on the card in the seventh space, the one that Hog Boy had joked about—“and he is beginning a journey.

“You see,” I continued, “each of us begins every journey as a fool—unknowing, stepping out into the void. The Major Arcana tells that story—of the Fool as he travels, developing as he learns and progresses. There are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana. The final card is called the World.”

Ben’s reading did not include that card. I shuffled through the remainder of the deck and found it. “Look here,” I said, showing the boys. They were all interested now, leaning forward to see the card. It depicted a woman, full of vitality and smiling, one breast bared as she leaped through space, encircled by a wreath of flowers and ribbons, a wand in each hand.

“Her tit’s hanging out,” said Hog Boy.

Ben elbowed him. I forced myself not to smile. “She has nothing to fear,” I said. “She is everything.”

I tucked the World back into the deck and set it to the side. “But you did not draw that card,” I said. “To continue … besides the Major Arcana, there is the Minor Arcana. This will most likely seem familiar to you. It is similar to a traditional deck of cards—four suits, each numbered ace through ten, including its own set of face cards. The numbers are important. The ace represents newness—a new job, a new house, a new way of thinking about things, perhaps. The early numbers—two, three, sometimes four—are still concerned with the beginning stages. The most tumultuous numbers are the middle ones. Nines and tens correspond with endings, both happy and unhappy.

“Each suit also contains face cards. But with Tarot, instead of jacks, kings, and queens, there are Pages, Knights,
Queens, and Kings. When these cards are drawn, they may represent actual people in your life who in some way embody the qualities or characteristics of that suit. For example, the Pages are apprentices, the childlike versions of the energies they represent. Knights are the young, strong, sometimes virile form of the suits. Finally there is the adult female—the Queen—and the adult male—the King—for each of the four suits. Of course, a female card might not necessarily represent a female person. It could be that the person to whom the card refers has a female energy in some way. Nurturing, perhaps, or fiercely protective of those he loves.”

Hog Boy looked poised to make another comment here, but he seemed to think better of it and instead opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water.

I continued. “The suits of the Minor Arcana are not the same as those in a deck of playing cards. We do not see diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs. The Tarot has its own symbology. In the place of diamonds, we have the Pentacles. These represent the material world—earth, money, shelter, food, work.” I tapped on one of the cards in Ben’s reading, the Eight of Pentacles.

Pete swallowed hard. “Isn’t that symbol …,” he said, pointing toward the five-pointed star on the card, “isn’t that … you know … satanic?”

I shook my head firmly. “You are wrong. This is something different. The star represents the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—crowned by spirit, or, I like to think of it as the four limbs of man, with the highest point representing the head.”

He didn’t look convinced, but I moved on. “Then there are the Swords. These correspond to the spades, and they are associated with the element of air—those things that are more mental, more abstract than the physical world of the Pentacles, but no less important. Hopes, thoughts, fantasies … cunningness as well. The ability to plan and betray.”

When I said the word “betray,” it seemed that Ben flinched.

“Then there are the Cups. In a regular deck of cards these would be the hearts. And like hearts, the Cups represent emotions … feelings … romance. Relationships. The element connected to the Cups is water.”

“How come?” asked Pete.

“You are in love, are you not?”

He nodded. Hog Boy snickered.

“Then you should know that love, like water, changes its form according to the vessel into which it is poured. Water,” I said, “like love, flows into whatever holds it.”

Pete seemed to think about this, and he winced a little. I suspected that his love—his Melissa—might be less than overflowing with love when she learned what had become of her twenty-two dollars.

“And finally there are Wands, representing spirit. These correspond to clubs in a deck of playing cards. These we can think of as fire.” Here I faltered, thinking of the fire that had been lit in me by one look at this stranger, this fool Ben. I placed this thought to the side and pressed on. “The Wands, like fire, represent creative imagination. Like fire,
the Wands act as a catalyst—they can transform others, as fire can turn a tree to ash without itself being changed.”

I looked at the cards spread before me. “Ben,” I said, “you have not drawn any Wands.”

“Is that bad?”

“It is neither bad nor good. It simply is. Are you ready to begin?”

“Wait—” he said. His eyes were difficult for me to read. There was so much in their depths … nervousness, perhaps, still some irritation with his friends, and attraction, I thought. “What’s your name?”

“My name? Lala. Lala White.”

“Lala. That’s pretty.”

I liked the way my name sounded in his mouth. He said it slowly, like a caress.

“I’m Ben Stanley.” He stretched his hand to me, across the cards I had dealt. “Pleased to meet you.”

His grip was solid and warm. I looked down, suddenly bashful and unsure of myself. It was not a feeling I was accustomed to. I did not like it.

I took my hand back and placed it in my lap.

The flaps of our tent were not tied shut, and the sudden gust of hot wind that blew in set them to dancing wildly. My hair blew across my face in a tangle of curls, but I ignored it as I rushed to keep the cards in their places on the table. Ben leaned forward too and both our hands reached for the same card—the Lovers—to keep it from blowing away.

Again I looked into the blue-gray eyes of Ben Stanley, and this time the message in them was easy to interpret.
They were like a mirror now into my own secret heart, and I saw twinned in them the desire that grew within me. The wind died down and the tent was silent, and the other boys and my sister waited silently as Ben and I released the card, each of us slowly returning to our seats.

I’m not the kind of guy who believes in things. Ask anyone—they’ll tell you. It irritated the hell out of my mom when I was little, my unwillingness to believe that some fat fuck came down the chimney each December to drop off presents.

For one thing, our matchbox of a house didn’t have a chimney. For another, if some magical guy was going to bring me presents, he sure as shit wouldn’t have bought the same crap you can pick up at the Walmart in Reno.

Mom used to say wistfully that there had been a time when I believed, but I don’t remember it. My first memories about all that—Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny—are all about incredulity, about hammering my parents with questions until they were forced to admit that those magical incarnations were really just them.

And that was better, right? I mean, that I had actual, living parents who wanted to give me presents, who wanted to hide plastic eggs full of candy for me? The reality of them seemed to me clearly better than the fantasy of a magical crew of creatures that snuck into my house.

God, too—nope. Not for me. On Sundays most of the families in Gypsum filed into one of the two churches on First Street, but not the Stanleys. I guess my parents, as much as they wanted me to believe in Santa Claus, didn’t themselves totally swallow the God thing, because the only time we ever went to church was for Pete’s dad’s funeral.

Things don’t just happen. Things don’t magically appear, or disappear, or transfigure. You make things happen through hard work. End of story.

I wasn’t a good runner because God was more interested in me being fast than Hog Boy, and it wasn’t because of the fancy sneakers Santa Claus put under the tree. I ran fast because of my lucky genetic makeup and I ran fast because I ran hard, and consistently, even when there was something better to do, even when it was too hot to run, even when I hated running.

And yet here I was, wedged between Pete and Hog Boy in a tent that hadn’t been here last week on the side of Highway 447, across from a girl who seemed magical to me, who seemed able to look inside my soul.

I couldn’t think straight. That was the problem. I couldn’t think straight enough to figure out how she knew these things about me, how she seemed to
know
me. She was bewitching me.

I’d never seen anyone like her. As she straightened the cards that had been shifted by the gust of wind, I had a minute just to stare at her without her looking back. Her gaze was on the table and her lashes, long and dark, hid her eyes.

Her hair—a mess of dark curls—had settled since the
wind had stopped, but even so it made her seem like she could take flight at any time. It was wild, tumbling around her shoulders and down her back, and occasionally she tucked a strand of it behind her ear. It would spill forward again, as if even she couldn’t control it.

I tried not to look at her chest, but her white shirt split at the neck and I could see the edge of her lace bra—white, like her shirt—and the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed.

The cards all arranged to her satisfaction, Lala looked up at me. I pulled my gaze up away from her chest, but she smiled a little as if she could read my mind.

Maybe she could. That was why we were here, right? To have my fortune told? Of
course
the guys would bring me here—they knew how I felt about all that mumbo jumbo stuff, and they wanted to see me squirm.

And any other day, in any other situation, I would have refused to play their game. But this girl—she paralyzed me. As long as she wanted me there, across the table from her, there was no way I could move.

Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair. Maybe they were the darkest brown imaginable, or maybe they were black.

“We begin with this first card,” she said, tapping a card in the center of the table, one that was half-covered by another. “Here is the situation you find yourself in.”

She slid the card from the table and held it up for me to see.

THE TOWER
. On it was a tall, spiraling tower jutting up out of a black sea, set against a raging storm. Lightning had
struck the top of it and it was on fire. People were jumping from it to their deaths; the base of the tower was ringed with craggy, pointed black rocks. The tower itself was cracking.

“Does this have meaning for you?” Lala asked, and suddenly I felt angry. She couldn’t make me say it out loud—that the Tower was our town, Gypsum, and that the people diving to their deaths were my friends and neighbors.

I shook my head, my mouth tight.

“It reminds me of the Twin Towers,” Pete piped up. “You know, on 9/11? How all those people jumped out the windows after the terrorists crashed the planes into the buildings? It looks like that.”

Yep. It did look like that. But come on. Didn’t Pete see how it fit our situation, too—or
his
, anyway? Not mine. I wasn’t on that card.

I looked up at Lala. She was watching me with those dark eyes. I was afraid of her for a second—afraid she would tell Pete that he and Hog Boy were the ones in the picture.

She chose her words carefully. “This card is Ben’s situation … or perhaps more to the point, this card represents how Ben sees his situation, at this point in time. But it is complicated, you see, by this second card.…”

She laid the Tower card back on the table and replaced the card that had covered it.

“This is the Crossing Card. Here, Ben, is what is crossing you, what is holding you back, perhaps. The Five of Cups.”

This card showed a hooded figure, with a face pale as death, staring down at the ground. Three gold cups lay spilled at his feet, a red liquid—wine or blood?—staining
the ground. Behind him was a gray, cloudy sky, a cliff in the distance, a lone bird.

“This figure has lost something,” Lala said. “Three cups are emptied into the earth.”

My family. There were three of them—Pops, Mom, and James. And there I was, staring down at them, unable to pick them up, to siphon the liquid back into the cups. There was nothing I could do.

“But notice,” said Lala, her long, slim finger caressing the card, “what he does not see.” She touched two more cups, still standing. “Look,” she said. “All is not lost, Ben Stanley. The danger in your situation is to focus too much on what you cannot repair without remembering to preserve that which you still have the power to save.”

I hadn’t noticed the other two cups until she pointed them out. But their presence didn’t make me feel any better.… What about the three spilled cups? How could you be happy about what you still had when so much was lost?

Then Lala touched a third card, one that lay directly above the other two. “This is the Crowning Card,” she said. “We can see this as an overview, the way your situation looks from a distance.”