Playing Dead

CHAPTER 10

I no longer know who I am.

I said it out loud, in the pickup, halfway home to Sadie.

I am a product of lies.

The knowledge was making me reckless.

I shouldn’t be doing this alone.

I should never have followed Jack Smith into that hotel. My cell phone buzzed in the seat beside me and I jumped, skittering into another lane, nearly hitting a Volkswagen Beetle.

I straightened out the wheel, grabbing the phone, staring at the readout, my heart tripping erratically.

Marcia. W.A.’s secretary.

I stabbed at the touch screen.

“Hello? Marcia? Hello?”

She started in immediately.

“Hi, honey. Just wanted to let you know that W.A. is in a five-foot hover. As you know, he does not like loose details. He had no idea, no idea ta’tall”-she emphasized these last two syllables with Texan flair-“that your mother was carrying on secretly with that bank. He’s over there right now. Made ’em open up past quittin’ time just for him to get things settled. Thank goodness, I calmed him down a bit before he called the bank president.” She drew in an audible breath. “Wild West. Even for Texas, that’s a silly name for a bank. I’d sooner shoot off my right pinkie toe than put my money there or shop at Walmart on a Sunday afternoon. But the president was quite cooperative. Turns out his dad was Billy Bob Jordan, who used to go up against W.A. back in the day. You remember him?”

Marcia was always asking whether I remembered people I never knew. If I didn’t hop in quickly, she was sure to give extensive details of Billy Bob’s lineage going back to the Confederacy.

“Well, at least he’s not in an eight-foot hover. Or a ten-foot hover.”

Marcia had been assessing W.A.’s hovers for many years. Anything past five feet required a bottle of whiskey and a policeman.

“Do you know when I’ll be able to get into the box?”

“Well, honey, it’s late. I told W.A. it would be best not to put out the bank any more than we have to. A Miss Billington over there seems to have quite a bird up her skirt. But they open right up at 8:30 a.m. I suggest you hustle over there first thing. Want me to have W.A. meet you there?”

Her curiosity was clearly piqued, but I didn’t take the bait even though I trusted her to be discreet. Marcia once told me that a man with a hot cattle brand couldn’t get a scrap of information out of her, and I believed it. What she knew and kept to herself about W.A.’s rich and powerful clients could fill every safe deposit box in Tarrant County.

“Thanks, but I’m good,” I said, watching the yellow Bug disappear ahead of me over a hill.

Daddy always said life was a game of inches.

A few more inches when I had swerved the wheel, and all of this could be over.

I could be over.

Just like Tuck.

Sadie’s trailer door was unlocked.

Until two days ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I also wouldn’t have moved my.45 from under the seat to the glove compartment or put Daddy’s pistol, which I’d stopped at the house to load, back in my purse. Or stood outside for five minutes after pulling up by the trailer to make sure that headlights weren’t following me up the dirt road.

“Sadie, why the hell isn’t the door locked?”

I had made my entrance into the trailer, fully meaning to say hello first, but spewing a furious admonition instead.

An iPod blaring in her ears, Maddie waved cheerfully while stirring yellow, toxic-looking cheese powder into overboiled noodles. Crumbled browned hamburger was in a skillet waiting to be tossed in. Two empty blue boxes stood on the counter. A double recipe. I was invited for dinner.

Sadie, immersed in her task at the red booth, looked up when I shot the deadbolt with more vigor than necessary.

“Maddie just fed the cats and probably forgot. No need to overreact.”

You don’t get it. Something evil is parachuting into our universe. And you’re playing cards.

“Maybe she left them in the same order,” Sadie said, acknowledging my presence, but as if we’d only been away from each other for five seconds instead of five hours.

Now I realized what she was doing. Laying each of Granny’s cards in consecutive rows on the black Formica top. They stood out starkly, each one a knife in my chest. It seemed like a sacrilege to Tuck’s memory to take ourselves back to that awful day. Sadie was too young to remember this, I reminded myself. All that pain. The sobbing and the screams. It was just a story to her.

“She probably did a quick spread,” she said.

Granny favored two techniques when telling fortunes. The more elaborate was called the Four Fans. Her subject randomly picked thirty-two cards out of a deck and she arranged them into four fan-shaped spreads of eight cards, each fan representing an aspect of the person’s life-past, future, relationships, work. She’d do this mostly at Bible study teas for the ladies in her Sunday school class, who considered it blasphemous while believing every bit.

Before Tuck’s death, Granny had always used the same cards-this dog-eared deck with two entwined pink swans. After his death, if you could talk her into a reading, Granny employed decks that Daddy and the ranch hands dealt at their Friday night poker games. I’d seen her use this deck only once after Tuck died.

For us kids, she favored a method she called “the quick spread,” often accompanied by the words, “We don’t have time for this nonsense.”

She took fifty-two cards, plus one joker, and laid them flat on the table, facedown. We’d be instructed to move our hands over the top, spreading them into a chaotic mess until Granny told us to stop and pick exactly twenty-one cards.

We watched, hearts in our throats, as she flipped them over one by one.

Sadie continued her own reading. “The jack of diamonds represents Tuck, followed by the three of hearts, which stands for celebrations. And his birthday was on the third of September. I bet Granny didn’t think that was a coincidence.”

She flipped over the next card. The ace of spades. Why did it hold such power? “The closer that ace is to the card that represents Tuck, the sooner the tragedy,” Sadie said.

She flipped over four more cards. The king of spades. The queen of diamonds. The queen of hearts. The joker.

“Look at all these face cards. At the king of spades. He represents someone evil, a man. Or it could be an authority figure.

“The two queens in a row suggest some kind of betrayal. Queen of diamonds could represent Mama-it’s a blond woman-or she could be the queen of hearts-that’s a mother figure. I’m not sure what the joker means.”

Clearly, Sadie had paid more attention to Granny’s readings than I had. As if reading my mind (and maybe she was), she nodded to her laptop and said: “I just gave myself a quick lesson online.”

My favorite reading from Granny included the ace of hearts-love, of course-and a jack of clubs, a promise that I’d meet a mysterious dark stranger. I kept my eye on one of the handsome young migrant workers on our farm all that summer. I blew off her warning about the card that followed-the two of spades. Deceit.

Snap out of this.

“Sadie, stop. Don’t put another card down. It’s crazy to think these are in the same…” I lowered my voice. “That these are in the same order after all these years.”

Maddie was reaching into the refrigerator, pretending she wasn’t listening.

“It’s morbid,” I continued. “And silly. Tuck had an accident because some stupid, selfish man got drunk. Unfortunately, it happens every day. How do you even remember Tuck’s birthday?”

“Because it’s the same date as his death. Because Granny told me to stay out of Mama’s way on that day every single year. Didn’t she tell you the same thing?”

She hesitated, picking up the cards.

“I know you believe,” she told me. “You saw the cane.”

“The cane?” Of course I knew what she was talking about.

“The night of Granny’s funeral. Mama let us sleep together in the guest room downstairs, in the big feather bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up. You were sitting there, just staring at the floor. On the carpet, we could see the shadow of Granny’s cane.”

The cane, with a brass snake’s head handle, that our grandfather massaged smooth out of an oak branch. The cane that trudged up and down Bailey Street on Granny’s Saturday walk. The cane that snapped in two when she slipped and broke her hip on the back porch steps two weeks before her death from pneumonia.

“She came to say goodbye, Tommie. It was her way.”

Enough. I changed the subject.

“I saw Jack Smith today. Now he claims to be working on a profile of Anthony Marchetti. He says Mama is messed up in this somehow.”

Sadie looked up from the cards and stared at me. “Do you believe him?”

“Yes… no… he’s not very specific. And he’s a liar. But what about the letter from the woman who claims I’m her daughter? My mysterious Social Security number? Jack Smith says it belongs to some dead girl.”

Maddie handed each of us a bowl of macaroni and cheese and hamburger coagulated with powdery clumps. The wedge of iceberg lettuce was almost hidden by the glop of Hidden Valley Ranch.

“Will you please eat?” she pleaded. “It’s starting to look gross. And y’all are freaking me out.”

Sadie smiled at her. “Just a minute, honey.”

To me, she said, “You need to call Hudson Byrd.”

I woke the next day in my little-girl bedroom after enjoying a dreamless seven hours of sleep thanks to a pink pill I found in Daddy’s medicine cabinet.

No hangover, no guilt, no worries about ill effects, at least not until the inevitable study years down the road finds otherwise. It seemed careless of me to knock myself out in an empty house with everything going on, knowing I wouldn’t hear an intruder. But if I didn’t sleep, I decided, there was no hope of surviving this anyway.

It worked. I met the morning with some semblance of the old me. The first thing I did was survey the living room, hands on my hips, dressed in a yellow cotton high-school-era nightgown I’d dug out of a drawer. I yanked the sheets off all the furniture, including the grand piano, and piled them in the laundry room. No more ghosts.

I took a deep breath before removing the old quilt from Daddy’s place, a worn brown easy chair that faced a large picture window.

The second move was to pop a Dr Pepper. The third was to call Wade and tell him to make the deal on the wind farm in Stephenville.

“But don’t give them the Big Dipper property,” I said. “I have plans for it. Also, you’re in charge, officially. Just run the big decisions by me, like you would Daddy.”

“You’re making a good call, Tommie,” Wade said. “I’ll take care of things. I’ll honor your Daddy. And Tommie… I’d still like to take that ride sometime.”

As I hung up, I wondered again how much Wade knew about my family’s secrets. His loyalty was impenetrable, like the black waters around Alcatraz.

Still in my nightgown, I headed back upstairs and dug a package of Post-its out of a backpack that held a tangle of printouts and notes related to my Ph.D., the one I was finishing up online, courtesy of Lydia Pratt, my thesis adviser and former college professor at the University of Texas.

I stopped briefly at a Xeroxed picture of Alex Wharton with his Harry Potter scar. Alex was a thirteen-year-old from Texas who visited the ranch a year ago. Daddy had read about him in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He’d worked with social services to send Alex to me at Halo Ranch, paying his full scholarship.

Two summers earlier, Alex had watched his father knife his mother to death on the sidewalk in front of their rent house because he didn’t like his dinner. Pork chops with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup topping, mashed potatoes, and a frozen Green Giant medley. When that son of a bitch found Alex cowering in the laundry room, he stood up and shot him three times with the gun his mother kept buried in a box of Tide.

He’d paralyzed his father for life. Some people won’t die.

“Put Alex back together,” Daddy told me.

I wondered if that was possible, if a soul could hold that much plaster, as I rolled up the gold cotton rug and set up trails of Post-its in the middle of the oak floor between the twin beds. This was my typical approach to research or to any problem with a kid at Halo Ranch that I couldn’t reach.

The word Mama stood out on a pink Post-it in the center of my little project, with every question I could think of trailing chaotically from her in blue paper spokes. I’d written the names of all the other players on yellow squares and lined them up vertically. Anthony Marchetti. Rosalina Marchetti. Jack Smith. The mysterious “brother.” Even Sue Billington, who I was certain knew more than she said.

I jumped as the thirty-year-old air conditioner thumped on, the rush of cool air from the vent making me shiver and the Post-its tremble, ready to fly.

None of it made sense.

It was the web of a demented spider.