No clues at all. The question was nonsense, and there was no way to answer it anyway. She tucked the postcard into the frame of her mirror, where she kept the saddest and most puzzling ones. It was past time to fold a few more of the brochures to mail to the people who’d sent actual cash money. The money orders she simply tore up and threw away, though those people also received a brochure for their efforts.
There is magic everywhere in this world. From the voodoo priests and priestesses of New Orleans to the smoldering altars beneath castles and palaces of Nazi-occupied Europe, misguided persons have always come together to call power. Professor Marvel LaCoeur’s patented magical pathways will show you the true secret of magic, safe and effective. Win over friends! Get the girl! Have more money than you’ll ever need!!!
Her favorite time to walk was twilight. That was the hour when the distinction between light and darkness melted to a quiet silvery glow, and anything was possible. Sometimes her grandfather whispered to her then, or even walked a few paces beside her. It was hard for him to reach back from where he had gone, but she knew he loved her.
The city was that way everywhere-the day birds were not quite all sleeping, and the night birds were not quite all out. Mercurys and Buicks fled downtown, heading for the nicer homes in Gresham and Milwaukie, even as the first cab loads of drinkers and louche women were already passing west, into the bars that were just awakening. Sun touched the West Hills, but she could see stars over the mountain.
Her time, her day, when answers would come unbidden to questions she had not yet heard. The challenge in her life was matching them up once again.
Blue shall always be unlucky for you.
Trust her tears far more than you trust your smiles.
Take the job, even if it means moving to Mexico City.
It was like having one piece each out of a hundred different jigsaw puzzles. Still, she kept a pencil stub and a pocket memo pad in her purse. When the answers came, she wrote them down. They always mattered again later.
Papa leaned so close she could smell the cloves and hemp on his breath. He whispered: Because otherwise the boatman would be king.
She hadn’t put her memo pad away yet, but she thought long and hard before she wrote that answer down.
The next day she shuffled off to the post office to mail the three brochures she’d received payment for the previous week, as well as the one money order she’d thrown away. Portland at the end of summer was already crisp. The air was like the first bite of an apple even though the sun was still brass-bright. Nothing like the golden fields of her youth, but little else in life was like her youth either.
There was no one outside the East Portland postal station. She stopped to examine the rhododendrons that struggled in their concrete-lined beds. The season’s last spiders hung on in their optimism, webs strung to catch the straggling flies.
She looked up through the windowpane by the door to see a man in a cheap gray suit looking back at her. Time to go home, she thought, but even as she turned away he stepped out the door.
“ Box 47.” It wasn’t a question. His voice, though… this one could have worked beside pappy back in the good days. A big man, shoulders that pushed skinny kids around on the playing field not so long ago, with close-cropped black hair and narrow gray eyes.
She might have fancied him, decades past.
“Es tut mir bang?” She used the voice she always used for pushy strangers and people who asked questions-thick, European, confused. “I’m sorry?”
“Ella Sue Redheart.” His smile didn’t try very hard. “You’re no more Yiddish than I am, lady.”
So much for the accent. “That’s ma’am to you, sonny.”
“Ma’am.” You could have sliced the sarcasm in his voice and sold it by the pound. He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his coat pocket. No, letters, she realized, two envelopes and a postcard. “You are the box holder at number 47?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged.
His smile quirked again, with a dose of sincerity this time. “I do.”
“Big government man, shaking down little old ladies. Your mother know you do this?”
“Cut the crap, granny.” He reached in again and pulled out a badge. “We both know I’m a postal inspector, and we both know you’re Miss Redheart of Box 47.” He snorted. “Magic? Really? You got supernatural powers?”
“Oh, I got supernatural powers, boy. They tell me you’re going to buy me a cup of coffee down the street there, and we’re going to talk real nice.”
“How’s that?”
“Because you haven’t yet told me your name. A cop always starts out either with the truncheon, or the I’m Officer Blueshirt of the pig farm routine. You want something. Don’t try to grift a grifter, boy.”
“Coffee it is.” This time he really did smile. He didn’t give her the letters, though.
The source is within you. Every one of us is born with a shard of the Pearl of World deep inside our hearts. Most children have it taken out of them by spankings, by prayer, by the mindless lockstep of school. Free yourself and you can find that Pearl. Once you take it in your hand, you can make the world your oyster! You begin by looking back before your first memories, when even your mother was a stranger to you.
She blew across the coffee cup. It was beige with green striping and could be found in any diner in America. The coffee within was as dark as a Chinaman’s eyes. No cream, no sugar, not her.
The postal inspector stirred his tea. She’d been surprised by that. She’d have thought him a coffee man. All the big ones were. Coffee, and scotch in the afternoons.
Pappy’s first rule was never volunteer anything to the heat. She wasn’t pappy, and besides that she was as small time as they came. Still she held her silence as tightly as she held her cup.
He finally put the letters on the table. “Two days, three letters. That’s what, six simoleons in your pocket?”
“Less advertising, printing and mailing,” she said quietly.
“I’ve seen your little booklet.” He leaned close. “A moron wouldn’t believe that stuff.”
“You’d be amazed what people believe, copper.” She sipped her coffee. “You’d be even more amazed how many of them are right.”
He kicked back and drank some of his tea. “Maybe. I seen a lot. First Korea, then a flatfoot in Seattle, now minding the mails for Uncle Sam.” He examined the letters. “That’s six years right there, three instances of postal fraud. For you, I’m guessing it don’t matter what the fine is, you can’t pay it.”
She hunched down. She wasn’t often ashamed of herself, but this man opened doors in her memory. “I live on ten dollars a week, fourteen in a good week. What do you think?”
“I think, why the hell is someone committing federal offenses for ten dollars a week?”
“It’s a living.”
“Not much of one.”
She put her cup down and took the letters from his hand. “Sonny, I’ll be seventy in a couple years. I ain’t never had no Social Security number, been cash and carry all my life. It’s what I got.”
He tugged the postcard out of his pocket. “No, this is what you got.” He turned it over in his finger like a stage magician with the Queen of Hearts.
She looked, suddenly terrified it might be from Dallas, Texas. But no, this one said, “Greetings from Scenic Lake of the Woods!”
The card stopped flipping. He read aloud, “I can make fifty dollars a week and send my kid to college, but I have to go so far away. What should I do?”
“Take the job,” she whispered. “Even if it means moving to Mexico City.”