The Twelfth Card

the sunsets, the lava beds, coyotes, the sidewinders, which moved like music but could still sting you to death in a flash.
    He recalled his mother’s life of church, packing sandwiches, sunbathing, sweeping Texas dust out the trailer door and sitting in aluminum chairs with her girlfriends. He recalled his father’s life of church, collecting LP records, spending Saturdays with his boy and weekdays wildcatting on the derricks. He recalled those wonderful Friday evenings, going to the Goldenlight Café on Route 66 for Harleyburgers and fries, Texas swing music pumping through the speakers.
    Thompson Boyd wasn’t numb then.
    Even during that hard time after a June twister took their double-wide and his mother’s right arm, and nearly her life, even when his father lost his job in the layoffs that swept the Panhandle like an Okie dust storm, Thompson wasn’t numb.
    And he sure wasn’t numb when he watched his mother gasp and stifle tears on the streets of Amarillo after some kid called her “one-arm” and Thompson had followed and made sure the boy never made fun of anybody again.
    But then came the prison years. And somewhere in those Lysol-stinking halls numbness crawled over feeling and put it to sleep. So deep asleep that he didn’t even feel a blip when he got the word that a driver snoozing at the cab of a Peterbilt killed his parents and aunt simultaneously, the only thing that survived being the shoe-shine kit the boy had made his father for the man’s fortieth birthday. So deep asleep that when, after he left prison and tracked down the guard Charlie Tucker, Thompson Boydfelt nothing as he watched the man die slowly, face purple from the noose, struggling desperately to grip the rope and hoist himself up to stop the strangulation. Which you just can’t do, no matter how strong you are.
    Numb, as he’d watched the pendulum of the guard’s corpse, twisting slowly to stillness. Numb, as he’d set the candles on the ground at Tucker’s feet to make the murder look like some psycho, satanic thing and glanced up into the man’s glazed eyes.
    Numb . . .
    But Thompson believed he could repair himself, just like he fixed the bathroom door and the loose stair railing at the bungalow. (They were both tasks, the only difference being where you put the decimal point.) Jeanne and the girls would bring the feelings back. All he had to do was go through the motions. Do what other people did, normal people, people who weren’t numb: Paint the children’s rooms, watch Judge Judy with them, go on picnics in the park. Bring them what they’d asked for. Grape, cherry, milk. Grape, cherry, milk. Try an occasional cuss word, fuck, fuck, shit . . . Because that’s what people said when they were angry. And angry people felt things.
    This was also why he whistled—he believed music could transport him back to those earlier days, before prison. People who liked music weren’t numb. People who whistled felt things, they had families, they’d turn the heads of strangers with a good trill. They were people you could stop on the street corner and talk to, people you could offer a french fry to, right off your Harleyburger plate, with giddy music pounding in the next room, ain’t them musicians something, son? How ’bout that?
    Do it by the book and the numbness would go away. The feeling would return.
    Was it working, he wondered, the regimen he’d set up for himself to get the feeling back in his soul? The whistling, reciting the things he felt he should recite, grape and cherry, cussing, laughing? Maybe a little, he believed. He remembered watching the woman in white that morning, back and forth, back and forth. He could honestly say that he’d enjoyed watching her at work. A small pleasure, but it was a feeling nonetheless. Pretty good.
    Wait: “Pretty fucking good,” he whispered.
    There, a cuss word.
    Maybe he should try the sex thing again (usually once a month, in the morning, he could manage, but truth was he just didn’t want to—if the mood’ s not there, even Viagra won’t do you much good). He now debated. Yes, that’s what he’d do—give it a couple of days and try with Jeanne. The thought made him uneasy. But maybe he’d give it a shot. That’d be a good test. Yeah, he’d try it and see if he was getting better.
    Grape, cherry, milk . . .
    Thompson now stopped at a pay phone in front of a Greek deli. He dialed the voice-mail box number again and punched in the code. He listened