Boys Life

told my parents, I would need something more solid to go on.
    We didn’t have to wait very long. Mr. Damaronde asked us to come back with him, and he led us not to the Lady’s bedroom but to another room across the hallway. In it, the Lady was sitting in a high-backed chair behind a folding card table. She wore not a voodoo robe or a wizard’s cap, but just a plain dark gray dress with a lapel pin in the shape of a dancing harlequin. On the floor of what was obviously her consultation room was a rug of woven reeds, and a crooked tree grew from a big clay pot in the corner. The walls were painted beige and unadorned. Mr. Damaronde closed the door and the Lady said, “Sit down, Tom.”
    Dad obeyed. I could tell he was nervous, because I could hear his throat click when he swallowed. He flinched a little when the Lady reached down beside her chair and brought up a doctor’s bag. She placed it on the table and unzipped it.
    “Is this gonna hurt?” Dad asked.
    “It might. Depends.”
    “On what?”
    “How deep we have to cut to get at the truth,” she answered. She reached into the bag and brought out something wrapped up in blue cloth. Then a silver filigreed box came out, followed by a deck of cards. She brought out a sheet of typing paper. In the overhead light I saw the Nifty watermark; it was the same brand of paper I used. Last out of the bag was a pill bottle containing three polished river pebbles: one ebony, one reddish-brown, one white with gray bands. She said, “Open your right hand,” and when Dad did she unscrewed the pill bottle’s cap and shook the river pebbles into his palm. “Work those in your hand awhile,” she directed.
    Dad gave a nervous smile as he did as she asked. “Did these come from Old Moses’s stomach or somethin’?”
    “No. They’re just old pebbles I found. Keep workin’ ’em, they’ll calm you down.”
    “Oh,” Dad said, rolling the worry-pebbles around and around in his palm.
    Mom and I stood to one side, to give the Lady plenty of room to do what she was going to do. Whatever that might be. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe one of those torchlit ceremonies with people dancing around in circles and hollering. But it wasn’t like that at all. The Lady began to shuffle the cards, and the way she did it I suspected she might have given lessons to Maverick. “Tell me about your dreams, Tom,” she said as the cards made a rhythmic whirring noise between her supple fingers.
    Dad glanced uneasily at us. “Do you want them to go?” the Lady asked, but he shook his head. “I dream,” he began, “about watchin’ the car go into Saxon’s Lake. Then I’m in the water with it, and I’m lookin’ through the window at the dead man. His face… all smashed up. The handcuff on his wrist. The piano wire around his throat. And as the car’s goin’ down and the water starts floodin’ in he-” Dad had to pause a minute. The pebbles clicked together in his palm. “He looks at me and he grins. That awful, smashed face grins. And when he speaks it’s like… mud gurglin’.”
    “What does he say?”
    “He says… ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’” Dad’s face was a study in pain, and it hurt me to look at it. “That’s what he says. ‘Come with me, down in the dark.’ And he reaches for me, with his hand that isn’t shackled. He reaches for me, and I pull back because I’m terrified he’s gonna touch me. Then it ends.”
    “You have other recurrin’ dreams?”
    “A few. Not as strong as that one, though. Sometimes I think I hear piano music. Sometimes I think I hear somebody hollerin’, but it sounds like gibberish. Occasionally I see a pair of hands holdin’ that wire, and what looks like a thick wooden baton wrapped up with black tape. There are faces in there that are all blurred up, as if I’m lookin’ at ’em through blood or my eyes can hardly hold a focus. But I don’t have those nearly as much as the one about the man in the car.”
    “Did Rebecca tell you that I’m pickin’ up some of those snippets, too?” She continued to shuffle the cards. It was a hypnotic, soothing sound. “I hear bits of piano music, the hollerin’, and I see the wire and the crackerknocker. I’ve seen the tattoo, but not the rest of him.” She smiled faintly. “You and me are plugged into the same socket, Tom, but you’re gettin’ more juice than I am. Can you beat that?”
    “I thought you were supposed to be the mystic,” Dad said.
    “I