Suddenly she was terrified to have made this admission — but he seemed a man of such kindness, prepared to receive any news with a friendly neutrality and a slight nod of the head, like one gone deaf. But he wasn’t deaf. “Do you have some business inside this bank, Ma’am?” he said.
“Of course I do,” Mrs. Houston answered. “Don’t you know me?”
He made a face of weary apology. “I probably see five hundred people—”
“I’ve been here fifty times or more,” she interrupted. “Every first of the month.”
He shook his head, and the sadness with which he did it made her sad. “You don’t know me,” she said, and moved in some confusion into the tellers’ line. It wasn’t that she expected to be known by all the bank’s employees; it was just that she had been lovely once, and had never really believed that time would make her faceless.
For a second, standing in line behind a half dozen people, she felt as if no one part of her was connected to any other. At times like this her stomach made a fist, and she saw that it was useless to cry out to the Lord.
Mrs. Houston walked seven blocks toward the low humps of South Mountain. It was hot. Whenever she glanced toward the sun inadvertently, it turned black upon her retinae. Down by Carter Street she turned in at the doorway of the only three-storey building for blocks.
At the bottom of the stairs inside, she paused and collected her strength — not that she was frail, or that the stairs were arduous; but she had no idea what might await her, what might be foretold, in Rosa’s Cantina. In a minute she began to climb, passing the second floor with its closed tattoo parlor, its second-hand record shop and its Chicano drug rehabilitation office. On the third floor, having paused to pray Dear God let it be true and happy, she entered the permanent cool opium moment of Rosa’s.
It was an afternoon of slow business. Around most of the half dozen collapsible card tables, folding chairs painted a brilliant enamel purple waited empty. The floor was linoleum, the wall spangled with the glued-on six-inch silhouette cut-outs of guitars and mariachis and G and Treble clefs, an interior decorating touch retained, like the name “Rosa’s,” from an earlier time when the place had actually been some kind of cantina. As she entered, wishing she could be told which table was absolutely the right one for this afternoon, Mr. Carlson hurried out of nowhere to guide her — a tall man with a bald head and a pathetic toupee he sported ostentatiously, like a hat. Mrs. Houston made no resistance as he steered her by her elbow to the table precisely in the center of the room, equidistant between the portraits, on either facing wall, of a grave and beautiful dancing girl in a red gown, and a young toreador in his traje de luces—his suit of lights.
She let herself breathe easy. The air seemed cooler than in fact it was, because the late sun was filtered through curtains that were gauzy and white. Two tiny air conditioners laid a mild pale noise along the air, rendering almost inaudible the Latin disco issuing from automotive stereo speakers placed on a windowsill. Mr. Carlson brought her some black tea in a cup stamped with the logo of Thomas’s Cafeteria.
At the only other occupied table, Mr. Miguel Michelangelo entertained a group of three young Chicana girls with a humorous reading of the Tarot cards. The girls were satisfying some curiosity and brought only discord into Mrs. Houston’s afternoon, having no appreciation of the state of things. Staring at her cup, she held back a moment before letting herself take a sip of her tea. She herself approached these occasions seriously, with the purpose of gaining some knowledge of her sons, the three of whom were harassed, plagued, and intermittently controlled by the Evil One.
Miss Sybil, who had been sitting quietly by the window, who had in fact been staring minutely at the curtain as if looking out into a world of white meaning, now recognized Mrs. Houston’s presence and glided over and sat down. Miss Sybil waited politely and wordlessly with her hands folded, a Jewish lady from Queens, the outline of whose monstrous brassiere showed plainly through her sheer yellow blouse. When Mrs. Houston had drunk half her tea, Miss Sybil lifted her cup and began stirring the leaves, dragging them up the sides of the cup with the spoon. “I see you making progress,” she said. “I see you suffering a setback. I see you going forwards and backwards but I see you only going backwards a little, I see you going mostly forward into the future. You got children? I see children, I see boys — boys? How many? Three? And do I see how many girls — two, one? No girls, okay. Any boys living at home still? That’s right, I see one who almost lives at home — comes to visit a lot. The youngest?” She paused for breath, stirring the leaves. Mrs. Houston felt a vague annoyance that Miss Sybil seemed never to remember anything about her, but always had to rediscover everything in the tea leaves — prompted, Mrs. Houston knew, by her own involuntary answers to the questions Miss Sybil asked. “What’s this?” Miss Sybil asked now, and went silent again. The hum of the air conditioners evened everything out; the atmosphere was without a ruffle. “I see you’re very concerned about something — something — something…”
“William Junior, my oldest boy — what do you see?”
“I see the oldest boy, the oldest boy — he’s not in town now? No, doesn’t live here anymore — you gonna see him pretty soon? Maybe?”
Mrs. Houston gripped the woman’s wrist. “When?”
She shook herself free. “Pretty soon, I think — maybe pretty soon, maybe not for a long time. Maybe in a few days.”
“Has some kind of evil got my boy?”
Miss Sybil put down the teacup. Beneath their exotic make-up, her eyes were simple — beady, and vexed by the visible world. “Evil?” She had two sons of her own. She had emigrated from Queens eleven years before. “What, exactly? — evil.” She regarded the elderly lady across the table from her — the tense mother, unshakeably hillbilly. It required no scrutiny of leaves to know the kind of existence that lay behind her and ahead of her, a life very much like the life of Miss Sybil, who blinked twice, looking at Mrs. Houston, and said, “Yes. The Evil has him.”
Mrs. Houston was confused by the definiteness. “But won’t…?” She trailed off, her speechlessness blending with the white voices of the air conditioners.
“Won’t what?” Miss Sybil looked at her own palm.
Mrs. Houston gripped her by the wrist again, almost violently. “Won’t the good triumph? You always see the good in things. You always say in the end—”
“That’s in the future,” Miss Sybil said irritably. “It’s easy to talk about the future being so good and all, because it never comes, dear. But all you gotta do is look around you for half a minute. Nobody’s keeping it a secret from us that we’re all in the toilet. We’re in the sewer. Forecast tomorrow is more of the same. Don’t tip me, darling, I don’t want your money.” She stood up abruptly, a motion that attracted the attention of Mr. Miguel Michelangelo and the three young ladies. “You’re too unlucky.” She disappeared with the teacup into the little kitchen.