Her thick eyelashes suddenly glistened with tears that she held back. “I really want that ice-cream shop of my own.”
“I bet you’ll have a chain of them.”
“This far in life, I’ve been nobody.”
“You’ve been somebody to me. You’re everything.”
“I want to be somebody, odd one. I want to have a business that I can be proud of, a place where people like to go. When people hear my name, I want them to think of ice cream. I want my name to make them happy, the way ice cream makes them happy.”
If I assured her that she would achieve her dream, I would be failing to provide her with the one thing that she demanded of me: the truth, whether it was easy or hard to hear. I could not see the future. If I happy-talked her through this moment, if I insisted that my paranormal gifts would only enhance our lives together and would all but guarantee her success, if I minimized the difficulty of my own struggles with my sixth sense, I would be lying to her.
At last I said, “What do you want to do?”
Without opening her eyes, she reached out to me, and we held hands as the desert darkened and the carnival on the midway painted the night with more color than the aurora borealis.
After a minute, she opened her eyes, smiled at me, and answered my question with seven words that were a welcome reprieve. “I want to go to the carnival.”
We ate snow cones with orange syrup, cheeseburgers, and jalapeño french fries. We rode not just the Tilt-a-Whirl but also the Whip, the Big Drop, and the Caterpillar. Neither of us threw up.
From time to time, I saw Mr. Presley wandering the midway. He was watching people eat the hot dogs, burgers, fried ice cream, fried Almond Joys, and french-fried butter that he could no longer consume.
In time, Stormy and I came to a large tent where fancy lettering above the entrance promised ALL THINGS FORETOLD. Within, a sawdust floor spread wall to wall. In five rows stood thirty-three fortune-telling machines. Some were quaint contraptions dating from previous and more magical eras of carnival life, but others were fully of the moment, digital.
In a shadowy corner of the tent stood a machine the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth. The lower three feet were enclosed. The upper four feet featured glass on three sides. In that display sat—so a placard declared—the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf who, in the eighteenth century, had been renowned throughout Europe for her predictions.
Gypsy Mummy wore much cheap jewelry and a colorful headscarf. Her eyes and lips were sewn shut, and her mottled skin pulled tight across her face. For a fortune-teller who supposedly had been counsel to three kings, her price for a prognostication was remarkably reasonable: a mere quarter.
As we arrived at the machine, a couple in their early twenties sought revelation ahead of us. The woman put her mouth to the round grille in the glass and asked, “Gypsy Mummy, tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
The man, Johnny, pushed the ANSWER button. A card slid into a brass tray. He read its message aloud: “A COLD WIND BLOWS, AND EACH NIGHT SEEMS TO LAST A THOUSAND YEARS.”
Stormy squeezed my hand, and we smiled at each other. Johnny and his date were not satisfied. They sought again the approval of the long-dead sage.
Gypsy Mummy’s unrelenting negativity did not at first deter them from feeding additional quarters to the machine. They’d spent two bucks before, in frustration, they threw all eight cards to the sawdust floor and, bickering about the meaning of the predictions, left the tent. In answer to their question about a long and happy marriage, some of the other warnings they had received were THE FOOL LEAPS FROM THE CLIFF, BUT THE WINTER LAKE BELOW IS FROZEN; and more ominous still, THE ORCHARD OF BLIGHTED TREES PRODUCES POISONOUS FRUIT; and not least troubling of all, A STONE CAN PROVIDE NO NOURISHMENT, NOR WILL SAND SLAKE YOUR THIRST.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Stormy suggested when we were alone before the centuries-old corpse, which was more likely to have been a figure constructed of plaster and wire and latex.
Nevertheless, I gave Gypsy Mummy a quarter, and she presented to us the message that Johnny and his fiancée had hoped to receive: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
“She just winked at me,” Stormy said.
“Who did?”
“Gypsy Mummy.”
“How could a sewn-shut eye wink?”
“I don’t know, Oddie. But she did, she winked.”
I am superstitious, for good reason. But you don’t have to be superstitious to think that it’s a bad idea to doubt the reliability of a fortune-teller’s prediction when it is word for word the very assurance that you desperately wanted to hear. We had no doubts as, there in the arcade called ALL THINGS FORETOLD, we kissed each other to seal the promise.
I have written this brief memoir not merely at the encouragement of my friend and mentor, Ozzie Boone, but at his insistence. Because my paranormal talent must remain my secret, nothing that I write can be published in my lifetime. In fact, I doubt that I will ever write another piece like this, for my life with Stormy Llewellyn will be too full to allow time for memoirs. I will have my work as a short-order cook, the griddle and the deep fryer, and she will have her ice-cream career, and we will both have the needy spirits of the lingering dead to deal with in the years ahead. I believe there will be children, too, each of them as beautiful as she is, perhaps one or two as strange as their father. She and I will grow old together in Pico Mundo, too busy for the wider world beyond, grow old here with our many friends, in the warmth of family that she hardly knew before being orphaned, that I never knew with my troubled parents. We will grow old together, for so it is promised by Gypsy Mummy, and if God is good—which He is—I will be with Stormy on the distant day, decades hence, when she leaves this world. I will hold her hand at the end, and I will pass soon after, for we are one heart, and neither of us would be of use without the other.
You’ve witnessed the beginning. Join us for the end.