Searching for Caleb (6 page)

   Actually my fourth wife's stepson, her ex-husband's boy by a woman from Tampa, Florida. Would you care for Turkish coffee?"

   "No, thank you," said Justine, and she stepped inside the little green trailer. Although it was crowded it was neater than her own house, with pots and pans arranged in rows in the tiny kitchen and account books stacked at one end of the corduroy daybed. There was a coffee table that had a stripped look, as if he had just recently cleared it. He smoothed it now with both hands. "For the cards," he said.

   "Thank you," said Justine.

   She sat down on the daybed. She removed her crumb-littered coat, although even here it was cold. From her carry-all she took the cards in their square of silk.

   "Where did you get the silk?" Alonzo asked. (He always did.)

   "They came with the cards," she said, unwrapping them. She shuffled them several times, looking off at the blue air outside the trailer window.

   "And where did you get the cards?"

   "Cut the deck, please."

   He cut it. He sat down across from her and looked at her soberly from under curled black brows, as if his future might be read in her face.

   Justine first met Alonzo Divich at a church bazaar in 1956, when she was telling fortunes in the Sunday school basement. She was with the white elephants and the potted plants; his carnival was outside. He came in to have his cards read. He was one of those people, she saw, who are addicted to outguessing their futures. Whenever he had an hour to kill, a layover in some town or a lull in his work, he would search out the local seeress. If there were five local seeresses, fine. He would go to all five. He would listen without even breathing. He had heard his fortune, he told Justine, from well over a thousand women, and it had not once been done right. He had not only had his cards read but also his palms, his skull, his moles, his fingernails, his dreams, his handwriting, his tea leaves and coffee grounds. He had been to astrologers and physiognomists, not to mention specialists in biblio-mancy, clidomancy, crystal-gazing, and ouija boards. A lady in Montgomery County had set a gamecock to pick corn from a circle of letters; a Georgia woman studied smoke rising from a fire and another dropped melted wax into cold water, forming small nubbly objects that she claimed to be able to interpret. In York County, Pennsylvania, he had had to bake his own barley cakes, which were then broken open and examined under a magnifying glass. And in a marsh near St. Elmo, Alabama, a very old woman had offered to kill a rice rat and study its entrails, but he had felt that such an act might bring bad luck.

   He had told Justine all this at once, leaning toward her across the table in her curtained booth while a line of church ladies waited their turns outside. Justine, although she did not know it, wore the tolerant, disillusioned expression of a doctor hearing that his new patient has been to forty other doctors before him, none of them satisfactory. It gave her a look of wisdom. Alonzo decided she was going to turn out to be special. "Lady," he had said, setting his palms on her table, "tell me the answer to my problem. I feel you can."

   "What is your problem?"

   "Don't you know?"

   "How should I?"

   "You're the fortune teller."

   So Justine had to give the speech she had made more often than she could count, and would make many times again, sometimes even to him. "Now I am not a mind reader," she said, "and I have no way at all of guessing what you want to ask, or where you come from or anything else about your past.

   I read the future. I have a talent for predicting change. If you help me we can search for an answer together; but I'm not going to outwit you."

   "My problem is this," Alonzo said instantly.

   And he sat on a Sunday school chair and took his hat off-a sudden, changeable man, all black and bright and multicolored like a fire that could leap in any direction at any second. "My name is Alonzo Divich," he told her. "I own a carnival business." He jabbed a thumb at the merry-go-round music above them, "The St. James Infirmary Blues" spinning itself out among the cries of children and hot dog vendors, and teenagers clinging to the Tilt-A-Whirl. "I'm divorced, I have this kid. Now I've met a rich widow woman who wants to marry me. She likes the kid, too. She would even live in the trailer. I don't have to change one thing in my life for her. And I'm a marrying fool. I love being married, I tried it twice before. So what's the trouble? The same day we start the talk about a wedding, exact same day, a man I used to know calls and asks me to come and prospect for gold with him beside a lake in Michigan. He says he's onto something. He's going to be a wealthy man, and so am I. But of course there's the kid, and the mortgaged machines, and the woman who doesn't like Michigan. So which do I do?"

   Justine was listening with her mouth open. When he finished she said, immediately. "Go look for gold."

   "Huh? What about the cards?"

   "Oh, the cards," she said.

   So she let him cut them and she laid them down, her beautiful cards as limp and greasy as her baby's oilcloth picture books. She chose the simplest formation she knew. She pointed out the meaning while he hung over the table, not breathing: a happy journey, reunion with a friend, a pleasant surprise, and no possibility of money.

   "Aha," he said, and she raised her face. "So it's lucky I ran into you.

   No money!"

   "Mr.-"

   "Divich. Just call me Alonzo."

   "Alonzo, is the money all you're going for?"

   "Well, but-"

   "Go anyway! Go on! Don't just sit around hemming and hawing!"

   Then she slapped his money back on his palm, for lack of any better way to show how she felt. And she gathered up her cards without looking at him even though he sat there a minute longer, waiting.

   It was four years before she saw Alonzo again. On Independence Day, 1960, she set up a booth at a picnic in Wamburton, Maryland. Nobody there seemed much interested in the future. Finally she repacked her cards and took a walk toward the courthouse, where rides were spinning and balloons were sailing and the merry-go-round was playing "The St. James Infirmary Blues," sending out little shimmering catgut strings that drew her in.

   She started toward the wooden horses. And there beside the tallest horse was-why, Alonzo Divich!-wiping his face on a red bandanna and quarreling with a mechanic. Only when she came up he turned and stopped in mid-sentence and stared. "You!" he said. He ringed her wrist with his hand and pulled her away, toward a bench where the music was not so loud. She came, holding onto her hat. "Do you know how long I worked to find you?"

   he shouted.

   "Who, me?"

   "How often do you move? Are you some sort of forty-miler all your own?

   First I asked at the church, who was the fortune teller? 'Oh, Justine,' they said. Everyone knew you, but they didn't know where you lived. And by the time I found that out you had moved but left no forwarding address. Why? Did you owe money? Never mind. I haunted all your ladyfriends, I hoped you were a letter writer. But you are not. Then at the tobacconist's where your husband used to work they said-"

   "But what did you want me for?" Justine asked.

   "To tell my fortune, of course."

   "I told your fortune."

   "Yes, back in nineteen fifty-six. Do you think my life is so steady? Now that reading has no bearing at all."

   "Oh. Well, no," said Justine, who saw that with him, that would certainly be true. She reached into her bag-at that time a leather pouch gouged by her neighbor's puppy-and pulled out the cards. "And you didn't go look for gold," she said.

   "You do read the past!"

   "Don't be silly. Here you are in Maryland; it's obvious to anyone."

   "I didn't, no. I thought about it. Instinct said to follow your advice, but I held back. You know the rest."

   "No."

   "Yes, you do. I married the widow," he said, "who turned out to be a disappointment. She had no money after all, the kid got on her nerves, what she had wanted all along was to start us a troupe of belly dancers with her as the star. Belly dancers, when half the towns make our game girls wear sweatshirts! I said absolutely not. She left me. I haven't heard from my friend in Michigan but I expect he has a whole sack of gold nuggets by now and meanwhile here I sit, where I was to begin with, only I happen to be married again-oh, you were right! If I had listened to you, think where I might be today!"

   "Cut the cards," Justine told him.

   "My new wife is pregnant and I have too many kids already," said Alonzo.

   "She is morning-sick, afternoon-sick, and evening-sick. When I walk into the trailer she throws fruits and vegetables at me. I don't think we are getting along at all. However, that's not my problem, no . . ."

   But what his problem had been Justine couldn't even remember now. There were so many years in between, so many different formations laid out for him on park benches, tent floors, and trailer furniture. Once he found her he never again lost track of her. He supplied her with change-of-address cards already stamped and filled out, with blanks left for the old address and the new. He adopted her entire family, unfolding for Duncan the mysteries of his diesel engines and his cotton candy machines and the odds on his games of chance, bringing Meg gaudy circus prizes for as long as she was a child, treating the baffled grandfather with elaborate old-world respect and sending Justine a great moldy Smithfield ham every Christmas. He would drive halfway across the state just to ask her a single question, and then overpay her ridiculously when she answered. He mourned her moves to Virginia and Pennsylvania and rejoiced when she was safely back in Maryland. He beat on her front door at unexpected times and when she was not home he threatened to fall apart.

   "I have to know!" he would cry to Duncan or Meg. "I can't make a move, I am utterly dependent on her!"

   Yet the peculiar thing (which Justine had seen too often before to wonder at) was that he very seldom took her advice. Look at all his marriages: seven, at last count. Maybe more. And how many of those had Justine approved? None. He had gone ahead anyway. Later he would come back: "Oh, you were right. I never should have done it. When will I learn?" His wives tended to leave him, taking the children along. Then sooner or later the children drifted back, and there were always a few living in his trailer-sons and stepsons and others whose relationship was not quite clear, even to him. "My wives are gone and

   I sleep alone but still I have three kids at me night and day, all ages.

   Next time I will listen to every word you say, I'll follow it to the letter," he said.

   He said it now, nearly seventeen years from the day he had first ignored her advice, while Justine laid out the cards on the coffee table in the trailer. "I'm going to do everything you tell me to this time," he said.

   "Ha," she said.

   She bent closer and peered at the cards. "Money and a jealous woman.

   You're not getting married again."

   "No, no." He sighed and stroked his mustache. "Who would marry me? I'm growing old, Justine."

   For a second she thought she had heard wrong.

   "I'm fifty-two," he said. "Do your cards tell you that?"

   It was the only fact he had ever handed her. For some reason it diminished him. Alonzo, possessing an age? When she first met him, then, he would have been thirty-five-a young, unsteady number of years for a man, but Alonzo had never been young or unsteady. She raised her eyes and found a sprinkling of white in his hair, and deep grooves extending the droop of his mustache. When he smiled at her, creases rayed out from the corners of his eyes. "Why, Alonzo," she said.

   "Yes?"

   "Why-"

   But she couldn't think what she was trying to say. And Alonzo shot his cuffs impatiently and sat forward on his stool. "Well, never mind that," he said. "Get on with my problem."

   "Tell me what it is."

   "Shall I sell the business to Mrs. Harry Mosely?"

   "Who's Mrs. Harry Mosely?"

   "What does it matter? A rich lady in Parvis, divorced, wants some kind of business different from all her friends."

   "The jealous woman."

   "Not of me."

   "Envious jealous."

   "She wears jodhpurs," Alonzo said, and shook his head.

   Justine waited.

   "Well?" he said.

   "Well, what?"

   "Do I sell or do I not? I'm asking."

   "But you haven't said what the choice is," Justine told him. "What are you selling it for? Are you joining another gold rush?"

   "No, I thought just something quiet. I have a friend who's in merchandising, he would find me something or other."

   "Merchandising?"

   "What's wrong with that?"

   "I'm going to have to study these cards a bit," Justine said, and she bent over them again and rested her forehead on her hand.

   "This life is hard, Justine," Alonzo told her. "That tent out there cost five thousand dollars and has a life span of only six years. I pay very high taxes on this pasture but Maryland has gypsy laws so we have to live here, it's too expensive to camp around. And occasionally people fail to pay me or the weather keeps the customers away, and a ride rusts to bits at exactly the time I clear the mortgage on it. I have so many people to be responsible for. Also these kids all the time. Can't you understand?"

   "Yes, yes."

   "Then why are you studying the cards for so long?"

   "Because I don't know what to say," she said, and she laid an index finger on the six of hearts and thought a moment. "I see the woman and the money, but everything else is indecisive. No sudden fortune and no disasters. A few petty reverses, a friendship breaking off, but otherwise just-weak."

   "Weak?" said Alonzo.

   She looked directly at him. "Alonzo," she said. "Don't sell your business."

   She left it up to him to decide whether it was she or the cards who spoke.

   In the late afternoon, when the sun grew warmer, they sat outside on a collapsed sofa and watched two of Alonzo's teenaged boys pitching a baseball back and forth in the long grass behind the trailers. A girl was hanging out diapers, and a man was rotating the tires on his Studebaker.