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Read books online » Fiction » Vigorish by John Berryman (books to read as a couple .TXT) 📖

Book online «Vigorish by John Berryman (books to read as a couple .TXT) 📖». Author John Berryman



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Let her try me.

I sat up on the parapet, swinging to put my feet on the gravel of the root. "So tonight you found the husband God's been going to give you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said softly.

"And I'm the one?"

"Yes!"

"Not that again!" I growled, grabbing her thin shoulders and shaking her. Her glasses bobbled on her nose. "I'm not your darlin' Billy, and you well know it. Admit it!"

She closed her lips over her buck teeth and sniffled. "I reckon not," she said, raising her head and looking at me without flinching. "I lied to you."

"Why?"

"Kind of made me feel more decent about bein' divorced."

I gave her a last shake for the lie. "Let's have it," I went after her. "How much of what you've been feeding me is just window dressing?"

She shrugged, but stayed silent.

"Have you been married?" I insisted.

"Yes, Billy Joe."

"And divorced?"

"Oh, darlin' Billy," she sighed. "I jest shouldn't never a done that. But I did," she added.

"Talk English," I snapped. "This chitterlin's and corn pone are just more window dressing, right?"

Her face was solemn behind the glasses. "When you are a smart girl, and you know the future, too, they hate you and try to hurt you," she said. "They don't seem to mind it so much if it comes from a piece of white trash that never could be 'no account.' By the time I was twelve or so I had learned to act just a little stupid and corn-fed."

This, her longest speech, she delivered in quiet, Neutral American, the speech that covers the great prairie states and is as near accentless and pure as American English ever is. It branded her Ozark twang as a lie, and a great many other things about her. But it added something very solid to her claims of prophecy.

"All this," I said. "Because you see the future?"

"Yes, Billy Joe."

"And this talk about losing your prophecy because of divorce was just that, talk?" I insisted.

Her mouth worked silently. "I talk like trash, and sometimes I start to think like it," she confessed. "I even act like it. I've tried not to see things acomin'. But," she added, drifting back into her Ozark lingo. "Always I knowed I was to find you. I knowed I was to go and search in spots of sin, for there you would be. And it kept getting stronger on me where to seek. This night I knew it was the time. I never got a dress and all before."

The chilly fingers touched me again. Still, what she was saying made some weird kind of sense. "What about the healing?" I tried, feeling a trap slowly descending over me.

She smiled at that. "I guess I put that punishment on myself for what I done," she said.

"Then you can still heal the sick?" I asked. She shrugged. "I want you to try," I added.

"Not till I get a sign," she said, moving uneasily. "I'm to get a sign."

I waved my hands in disgust and turned away from her. "There had to be some fakery in it somewhere," I said. "You couldn't heal a hang-nail!"

"Not a fake!" she said hotly. "I have healed the sick!"

"Don't get uppity," I said. "So have I. You see," I told her. "I'm a doctor. Not much of a one," I admitted, pointing to my weak right arm. "I can't heal myself."

"Oh, yore pore arm," she said.

"Show me," I said, turning on her. "Heal me!"

"I'm to have a sign!" she wailed.

Well, she got one. I took her to my room, pointed at the dresser. One of the glasses on the tray beside a pitcher rose, floated into the bath and, after we had both heard the water run, came back through the air and tilted to trickle a few drops of water onto her head.

Her words gave her away—she was no mystic. She swung her eyes back to me: "TK!" she gasped. She recoiled from me. She'd had a viper to her bosom.

"Heal me!" I snapped at her. "You've had your sign, and I'm your darlin' Billy."

"I got to find it," she said desperately. "The weak place."

I flopped on the bed, stretched my arm out against the counterpane. She ran her fingers over it—the old "laying on of hands." If she were the real thing, I knew what it was—perception at a level a TK can't match. The real healers feel the nerves themselves. I'd been worked on before. The more hysterical healers, some really creepy witches, had given me some signs of relief, but none could ever find the real "weak place," as she called it.

She was mumbling to herself. I guess you could call it an incantation. I got a picture of a nubile waif, too freakish to fit where she'd been raised. What had her Hegira been like? In what frightful places had she found herself welcome? From her talk, it could have been an Ozark backwater. I didn't want to know what backwoods crone had taught her some mnemonic rendition of the Devil's Litany.

Her hands passed up beyond my shoulder, to my neck. "It's in yore haid," she said. "In yore darlin' haid!" Fingers worked over my scalp. "Oh, there!" she gasped. "Hit's ahurtin' me! Hurtin', hurtin', and I'm a draggin' it off'n yuh!" Her backwoods twang sharpened as she aped some contemporary witch.

Hurt? She didn't know what it meant. She fired a charge of thermite in my head, and it seared its way down my arm to my fingers. My right arm came off the bed and thrashed like a wounded snake. She wrestled it, climbed onto the bed, and held it down with her boney knees. Her fingers kneaded it, working some imaginary devil out through the fingertips, till the hurt was gone.

We sat close together on the edge of the bed at last, as I worked and moved my arm, one of us more in awe of what had happened than the other. It was weak—with those flabby, unused muscles, it had to be. But I could move it, to any normal position.

"I never done like that before," she breathed. "Jest small ailin'."

"You're a healer, all right," I said. "And a prophetess, too, from what I saw at the dice table. You know what a Psi personality is?" I asked her. "Say, what is your name, anyway?"

"Pheola," she said. "Yes, I've heard of them," she said.

"You're one," I told her. "You can heal many people."

She shook her head. "Only could do it because I love you, Billy Joe," she said.

"We'll teach you," I promised her. "Would you like to learn? You've heard of the Lodge, haven't you?"

"Lordy!" she gasped.

"You're as good as in it," I told her. "Now tell me, what am I going to do tomorrow morning?"

She got up and started to pace the room, sniffling. "Why would you do that?" she said at length. "You are going to the bank, first thing. You've got all that money. It's thousand dollar bills! And you're writing on them." She frowned at me, sniffling again. "Do I really see it?" she asked. "Is that right?"

"I'll make it right," I said. "Come on," I told her. "If we're going to stay up all night, we need fuel. How long since you've tackled a twenty-ounce sirloin?"

The Lodge has unmentioned influence. No, Psi powers aren't a secret government. But what high official can afford to be at odds with us? They know where the Lodge stands. A little while on the visor as the east pinked up got me what I wanted. Because of the three-hour time difference, the Washington brass got me carte blanche before banking hours at the Tahoe bank that supplied the Sky Hi Club with its cash.

Working with the cashier, who hadn't even taken time to shave after getting his orders from the Federal Reserve Bank, I went over their stock of thousand dollar bills, as Pheola had PC'd I would, and marked down the edges of the stacks with grease pencil. Mostly I did it to make my grip firmer. When the time came, I could make that money jump.

Pheola let me get her a cocktail dress in one of the women's shops. The right dress helped, but more steaks would have helped even more. I'll bet I put five pounds on her that day. She was one hungry 'cropper. Hungry and sniffly.

We idled away the afternoon and waited until nearly midnight to go back to the Sky Hi Club. Action is about at its peak then, and if the cross-roader had been tipping dice again, as they suspected, they would have had time to notice which table wasn't making its vigorish.

Plain enough where they were having trouble. Fowler Smythe was scowling through his glasses behind a table with Barney, the dealer I'd hit with the Blackout. Their faces were sweating in the dry desert air. The table was being taken.

"Now watch it, Pheola," I said, as we squeezed into the crowd, opposite the dealers. "Almost anything can happen. I want to know the instant you get a feeling. You understand?" She nodded and wiped at her drippy nose with a clean handkerchief. I'd gotten her a dozen.

There was the same old racket. The burnt out voice of a chanteuse, coming over the PA system from the dining room, tried to remember the sultry insouciance with which it had sung "Eadie was a Lady" in its youth. Waiters in dude-ranch getups swivel-hipped from table to table like wraithes through the mob of gamblers, trays of free drinks in their hands. This time Pheola didn't have the same greedy grab for the hors d'oeuvres. She'd wrapped herself around a couple pounds of high-quality protein before we had come to the casino.

The gamblers were urging the dice with the same old calls, and the stick-men were chanting: "Coming out!" "Five's the point!" "And seven! The dice pass!" and all the rest. The ivories had a way to go before they reached us. I gave Pheola a stack of ten-buck chips and let her bet, without making any effort to tip the dice. She still had it. She moved the chips back and forth from "Pass" to "Don't Pass" and won at every roll. I could see Fowler Smythe begin to scowl as she let her winnings ride, building up a real stack.

Without warning she dragged down her winnings and leaned close to me, sniffling. "You'll get all wet!"

I looked around, seeing a waiter near me. He had just served drinks to the rear, half of the table, to the gamblers nearest the dealers. His tray was still half-full. This was the moment. It was a generalized sort of lift, the kind of thing that qualifies a TK for the Thirty-third degree. I heaved at the thousand-dollar bills I had had marked in the morning, without the faintest idea of where they were. The tray lurched in the waiter's hand, throwing glasses to the floor. Most of them shattered when they struck the real wood planks, splashing whisky and mix on our legs.

I looked across the table and grinned at Fowler Smythe. His scowl had an awful lot of forehead to work on. "What the devil!" I could read his lips say over the racket. But Barney, the stick-man who'd felt my Blackout, caught on a lot quicker.

I was about to freeze him with a clamp on his thyroid. It's just as effective as wrapping your fingers around the throat. But Pheola upset the apple cart.

She grabbed my right arm, so newly powerful. "No, Billy Joe!" she cried. "I don't want to die!"

"Who's dying?" I snapped.

"He's shooting me!" she gasped.

Shoot? With what? I had one terrified moment—what to lift? What was aimed at her? At the last possible moment I saw it. His crap-stick was a hollow tube, and he was raising it toward me, not toward Pheola. I'd heard of things like that—a gas-powered dart gun. Silent, and shooting a tiny needle with a nerve poison in grooves cut in its tip.

I lifted, but half in panic. Fowler Smythe squeezed his trigger and the tiny dart leaped unseen across the crap layout. My lift had been way off—it should have thrown the stick toward the ceiling, where no one would have been hurt. Instead it merely twitched the crap-stick, and the dart struck Pheola in the left hand. She screeched a little and grabbed at the needle-prick with her fingernails.

You never know how much power there is in Psi until you use it without restraint. I threw the crowd back away from us with a lift that nearly blacked me out, and had Pheola on the wet boards of the floor before she could blink. She had only seconds

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