Wolf in White Van (4 page)

It doesn’t have anything to do with me, I thought. Just out on the edges, maybe. I am in a unique position to understand that. But back down where the old me lived, somewhere near
the brain stem where everything gets basic, I could see how Lance would want to just forge forward. It seemed less crazy to me than it would have seemed to his parents. I picked out the “Dig Near Unit” move from the filing cabinet and I stuffed and sealed the envelope. I wrote
getting close!
over the seal. And I noticed that the envelope would be going to Lance in care of somebody else—a neighbor? a friend from school? I didn’t know; I didn’t need to know. I let the moment sort of evaporate as I slid the stuffed envelope into the tray marked
outgoing.
And I thought, you know, maybe tomorrow I will go to the park, or if not tomorrow, next week. I should go to the park, just to sit in the park and look at the world. I am working too hard, not that I mind. But I need to get out more. I’ll go to the park and just sit, and see what comes up.

4
It was Teague I thought of when I first drew up the Tularosa fortune shack, and it was his face I saw when I dreamed up the astrologer inside it. I knew Teague from junior high. We’d gone to different elementary schools, but everybody in town got dumped into the same junior high. It was a scary place. Some of the kids from the other schools were bigger, meaner; you had to spend a lot of energy trying to avoid them. Teague was kind of short. His shoulders were starting to broaden, but he wore his hair long, and it opened him up to a lot of grief. Kids threw food at him when he walked through the cafeteria. He never even looked back at them.

We had Composition I together but Teague sat by himself, his head hanging low. Everybody called him Tits; they’d say it a bunch of times to try to make him look up. He’d be sitting there, eyes down, head tucked, pencil working, worlds away, when the hissing would start up. Just this through-the-teeth whispering chant, almost empty of meaning: not
Teague, you suck
, or
Teague, fuck you
, or anything. Just
Tits
over and over. During tests it sounded like a forest at night in the classroom.
Voices rising singly or several at a time from the focused quiet.
Tits. Tits. Titssss.

I didn’t call Teague
Tits
, because I wasn’t any more popular than he was: I was just better at staying invisible. Sometimes he and I sat together on the metal tables over by the date palm in a corner of the lunch yard. He collected these handcast metal figurines of characters from
The Lord of the Rings
and he’d show them to me if I asked. I’d find him sitting there combing intensely through a stack of magazines with his right hand while holding a neglected sandwich in his left. He always looked like a guy who wanted to be left alone, but we’d talked about movies a couple of times in class and I felt like we were on the same side. I’d leave a little distance between us when I sat down just in case I was reading him wrong.

One day I was working on a slab of beef jerky and leafing through a book while I ate; it was Fritz Lieber’s
Swords Against Death.
After a while, I noticed Teague peering over at me. He’d stopped looking at his magazines; all his attention was on me. It was like he was looking at a bug that’d been flipped over onto its back.

“What,” I said when I noticed him.

“What’s that book?” he said.

“
Swords Against Death
,” I said.

He looked down at the cover, which had a boat on it and a monster with a trident rising out of the ocean. “Is it supposed to spell
sad
?” he said after a while.

“Is it … what?” I said.

“
Sad
,” he said. “
Swords Against Death.
” He tapped his index finger on my book, three times, harder than he needed to. “Look down the left side, that spells
SAD
.”

“I don’t think that’s on purpose,” I said.

“It’s probably on purpose,” he said. “They put a lot of things onto the covers of books and stuff.” I didn’t know what to say to that; Teague, with his figurines and his bound notebooks bulging with sketches of imaginary mountain ranges or mysteriously numbered dodecahedrons, their lines meticulous, was someone whose opinion I valued. He wasn’t a big talker. When he spoke it carried weight.

So I didn’t say anything. I went back to reading, and at some point Teague just wandered off toward the water fountains. The mood was different after he left. Nothing I could point to directly, just a feeling in the air, in the movement of the wind in the palm. Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.

I could pace the perimeter of the backyard if I wanted, but you feel stupid walking around a fenced yard in the middle of the day. The dermatologist’s wasn’t too far from the house, and I knew the way; Mom drove me there twice a week. Everybody was still avoiding arguments, so when I said I wanted to walk to my appointment, Mom said, “OK,” and Dad said, “You sure?” with his eyebrows raised gently. For a minute it felt almost like a normal family scene.

It was a Saturday morning; traffic was light. Just a block past the unmarked boundary between Pomona and Montclair was a place I’d been half noticing all my life, a house; there were plain houses on either side, but somebody ran a business out of this one. It stuck out. I remember seeing it from the car as a kid: this big red glowing plastic hand in the bay window,
a banner reading PALMISTRY spannning the entire second-floor balcony rail. There was also a sandwich board halfway up the front walk, impossible to miss if you went by on foot. I knew its top line by heart. It said
A MAP OF THE FUTURE
? in rounded black letters. But you couldn’t read the smaller text underneath from the street; most of it was written in cursive, painted directly onto the board. I had been curious about it forever.

Today the banner was down, and the sandwich board had been moved up to the porch. The door to the house was open; there was a moving truck in the driveway. There had to be some people around, but I didn’t see any. Soon this place will be gone; who knows what will take its place. I thought how I’d walked past it innumerable times, wondering what it was like inside, and figured this was my last chance. So I climbed as casually as I could up the stairs to the porch, and then I’d breached the boundary, like entering a dream.

Close up I could read the rest of the board; what it actually said beneath the splash, in black letters on white primer bearing traces of visible effort, was
Science of palmistry reaches back over three thousand years.
That was the top line. It was followed by a dozen others, evenly spaced, nearly uniform, each headed by a small, hand-painted tricolor image of Saturn.
Identify spiritual patterns using ancient techniques
was one.
Secrets of the Seven Minor Lines
was another.
Reunite a lost love.
The big door, beveled glass in oak, had to be at least fifty years old, maybe eighty. Old California stuff. Its decorated oval brass handle was half-black from wear.

What happens if I go inside? I wondered; it felt like a speech bubble forming over my head. Are all the people already gone?
I thought I might sneak in and steal something cool, maybe disappear before anybody knew I’d been there; I fantasized for a minute about making off with some small, secret object infused with magic power. I try to be careful about the things I think, but I was still young then, and in my rapidly forming dream scenario I could feel the mystery object in my hand, hot and dense. I was sweeping it from a glass end table in one smooth gesture. It had a deep, dark hue and hard hexagonal edges. When my vision cleared, I looked up to see some guy in painter’s pants coming down a staircase inside, carrying a cardboard box.

He was probably a mover, but he could have been one of the people who lived there. Maybe the palmist himself, who knows. But he walked down the side of the porch right past me, undistracted by my glistening folds and reconstructed arches, too busy to notice. He looked back at me and smiled once he’d loaded the box onto the truck. “None today, friend,” he said in a very neutral voice; he sounded calm and kind, but I felt afraid of him, as if some threat were implied in the deep recesses of the moment. So I went back down the steps and out to the street, imaginary eyes following my path as I went. I was still getting used to the feeling of being watched. I hated it.

Sometimes I can’t remember whether this empty exchange happened before the accident or after, even though the details as I remember them point toward “after”: the dermatologist, the place closing, the moving truck. If, for a few seconds, I entertain the idea that this scene takes place much earlier than it actually must have, something happens to me: I picture myself young and free, whole, getting gently warned off the property by the palmist or the palmist’s husband for no real
reason. And then some secret forms in a distant nebula somewhere, and somehow I get news of it, and I close my eyes and fall weightless through inner space for as long as I can stand it.

I dropped the astrologer shack into the middle of the New Mexico desert; I got the idea for it that day at the dermatologist’s office, going through old issues of
National Geographic.
There was a big spread about the Tularosa Basin. The pictures called out from the pages: white sands with miraculous green growth jutting up in patches, skies whose pretty clouds held some empty menace that the lens couldn’t translate fully. The Tularosa Basin was where they’d tested the atomic bomb before dropping it on Japan. I sat waiting for the secretary to call my name, gazing into these pictures of the basin, how it looked years later. When I got home that day, I took out the Trace Italian master map and sketched a little line drawing of a hut no bigger than my fingernail, and around it I drew a loose oval, its line quivering with cilia and sudden jagged outcroppings. In small capital letters I wrote
TULAROSA FORTUNE SHACK HERE.

I saw Teague at the Book Exchange last week. It’s twenty years on now, but there we were, still both haunting the science fiction section, running our index fingers down the fraying spines. His hair’s shorter now but he looked more like his younger self than a lot of other people might after so much time.

He started talking like he was picking up a thread I’d just set down a minute ago. “Hey, man,” he said. “I just want to say I meant to stop back by after the first time but I didn’t think
your folks were too into it. I sent some books with Kimmy but they might have gotten intercepted.”

“Teague!” I said.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “I was gonna come some more but your dad, you know.”

“I don’t even remember ever seeing you after my last day at school,” I said.

“I guess not,” he said. “I was there on, like, the second day. You were in the ICU. They had you on a lot of drugs. You called me Marco. Your dad thought it was some kind of code.”

It was like talking to a character in an old movie, hearing lines read out from some earlier, remembered time.

“Out in the hallway he told me just not to come back. I wasn’t really in a place where I could fight with your dad, and he was out there pacing around in front of your door like he was itching for an excuse to go off on somebody. And, like … didn’t you guys used to go on hunting trips?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, man,” he said. I wished I’d kept in touch with Teague. We could have talked. But the path from there to here consisted of infinite switchbacks in countless interlocking chains. The trail broke off from the main road almost the second the shot rang out.

“I knew your mom OK, and I thought I could probably finesse things if I tried, but—I just didn’t, is all. I didn’t really think you were going to make it,” he said, as blunt as when he was young, an old friend.

“I did, though.” It was good to see Teague, still in the world.

“Oh, I know,” he said, flipping a copy of
The Dreaming
Jewels
out from the shelf. “I played one of your games through once. Teague’s just a nickname, you know.”

“Wait, really?” This was news.

“Yeah,” he said. “
Tigger.
From the Winnie-the-Pooh books. From when I was a kid.”

I played one of your games through once.
I wanted to ask, but there was something special in not knowing.

“Anyway, sorry I never said anything. I guess I figured since you never let on you knew me maybe you just didn’t want to talk.”

“It was pretty hard to talk to me then,” I said.

“Aww, man,” he said. “Are you OK, though? I saw some news story.”

“Recently?”

“Yeah, yeah. Recently.”

I’d been wondering; now I knew. “Yeah,” I said. “It looked bad but it’s OK now, I guess. Blew over after a while. Just in the past couple of days. Still getting my head around it.”

As we spoke I kept digging around in my mind trying to place his last name, but Teague was just Teague. I wouldn’t have heard his last name since roll call in some unremembered class over twenty years ago.

“Keith Jones,” I said when it came to me.

“Man, don’t call me that, nobody calls me that,” he said. We wrote each other’s numbers down, but in my heart I knew this was it.

Inside the shack the first thing you learn is that the astrologer is dead.
You see the body of a man in a strange costume
is how
the turn begins:
He is lying on the floor, his face twisted into a grimace.
Smart players will spend the next turn searching for protective clothing and masks; overeager players will get sick when they leave this scene, and they’ll stay sick for a while. The air inside the shack is unbreathably thick with the smell of blood and candle wax and lamp oil and empty insect bodies. Charts and notebooks lie open around the corpse in a constellation; if you marked its points and drew a line connecting them, you’d have a shape that would later help open a door deep within the Trace, but nobody will ever notice this, or learn the name of the door, which you have to say when you open it or you end up in a blind corridor that traps you for at least four turns, which would probably outrage any players who made it that far. But who knows. What it would be like to make it that far is sheer conjecture.

Players who’ve got their protective gear on are free to look around and loot the place, but of course the whole point is the charts. You have to read them, and then you have to remember what you’ve read, or keep your game organized enough to go back and consult them later. You should, anyway; that’s the good they can do. But even if you just read through your turn passively,
READ CHARTS
tries to pay you back for your effort.
HOUSE OF SCORPIO SCORPIO HOUSE STONE SARDONIX COLOR GOLD
, it starts.
IF SCORPIO ENTERING SOUTH DOOR HIGH LIGHT ALL OTHER DOORS WEST LIGHT, ALL OTHER SCORPIO DOORS WEST LIGHT WEST
. I feel my own freedom remembering this turn, what it means to find a place where the world’s shut out for good at last, where all signs point back at one another and the overall pattern’s clear if you look hard enough.
HOUSE OF NEPTUNE MARSH BEAST, RIVER BEAST, CLOUD-COVER GOOD, DRY
COVER AVOID/AVOID. HOUSE OF LIBRA FISH NAME SECRET, SAY W/ EYE CONTACT AT ALL DOORS IN HOUSE OF LIBRA, ALL ADMITTANCE GAIN, ALL DOORS. HOUSE OF GEMINI GEMINI HOUSE STONE CHRYSOPRASE COLOR GREEN
, the chambers in the Trace outnumbering stars in the sky and all the sands on all the beaches:
IF GEMINI ENTERING FROM NORTH BEAR ORCHID, MY RESEARCH INDICATES
and then three lines about various kinds of orchids and where they’re from, cribbed from who knows where and saved here, forever. There are twelve charts in all; it’s one of the longest turns in the game, and I probably overdid it a little, but every time I have to triple-crease the several sheets that make up the move, I smile.