Psychic Friends
by Pearce Hansen
part 1
It was three a.m. Carmel sat at her kitchen table. Deck — that tattered old stack of slatternly Tarot cards — lurked atop its red silk cloth in the exact center of the table, awaiting Carmel’s touch.
Carmel sucked at her first cuppa of the shift as she dialed the master number and got the automated menu recording: “You have reached the Psychic Dragon,” the breathy and obscenely chipper woman’s voice chirped. “If you are a reader logging in, please press ‘one,’ and then use your touch-tone phone to enter your login number.”
After Carmel logged in there were several disembodied clicks. The voice said, “Thank you. Depending on your priority ranking, callers to our advertised number will be routed to your home phone.”
Carmel hung up and shuffled Deck: warming up her fingers and seeing if Deck was awake yet. She dealt the cards onto the silk cloth in a Celtic Cross pattern and studied the layout. All she got was white noise. She could read them the old-fashioned way, but Deck had really spoiled her.
Deck needed a lot of downtime, though Carmel had learned not to make an issue of it. Deck was off doing whatever it did when it was incommunicado, and the cards were just dead pasteboard.
Carmel got the most calls, made the most cash, here on the graveyard shift when people’s demons clamored as loudly as hers. A mob of insomniacs, reaching out to one of their own over the telephone. Deck liked the wee hours better anyways.
The phone rang. Carmel picked up on the first ring. “Psychic Dragon,” she said, her voice sounding all-knowing. “I’m Carmel. What’s your name?”
Carmel riffled Deck and peeked. The card was the Five of Cups, showing a man looking down at three spilled cups in front of him, distracted from seeing the two cups still full and standing behind him.
“Joe.” If this customer’s body matched his voice, he was one big beefy boy. Cornfed by the accent.
Deck came online within the Cards, erupting into existence like an invisible jack-in-the-box. Carmel felt the rising thrum through her fingertips and smiled. It still awed Carmel whenever she felt that buzz after being separated from it for a while. She was addicted to that first jolt, so like seeing the sunrise after a desperate night.
“What can the cards tell you this evening, Joe?”
“It’s like this, see? I been putting in way too much overtime at the bottling plant: 60 hours plus, every week.”
Carmel took a swig of coffee. “Heavy workload.”
“It’s the bills, see? The wife maxed out our Mastercard, and now I get to clean up the mess.” He sounded as proud of his complaint as he was bothered by it. Deck was amused: Despite the resentment tingeing his voice, Joe reveled in the role of the good provider doing right by his spendthrift woman.
Carmel took another peep at her cards and saw the Nine of Wands, showing a beat-up, war-weary guy clutching a fighting staff. Deck “edited” the card: As Carmel had envisioned, the guy was a large, healthy Midwesterner.
The guy stood guard amid a wall of staffs, planted in the ground around him like the palisades of a frontier fort. Deck morphed the background so that Carmel could barely make out a couple fornicating, tiny in the distance behind the man.
Joe said, “It’s my wife, see? She moved this other fella into the house. He’s sleeping on the couch in the next room right now. He’s home with her while I’m working my 12’s. She says she doesn’t love me anymore, see? She says she loves him now.”
Carmel riffled Deck open with her thumb but did not need to look. Deck gave a psychic impersonation of inspecting nonexistent fingernails. “Joe, Deck says give this guy the old heave-ho. Toss him and his trash out your front door.”
“Really?” Joe had needed permission from an outside source. “Okay,” he said in a hoarse shout.
Carmel winced as Joe’s dropped handset clunked against some solid surface. She could hear a real hullabaloo kicking up through the phone: yelling, smashing sounds, breaking glass, a woman’s screech.
“Deck thinks you need a better old lady, too,” Carmel told the fight noises on Joe’s end of the line. Which was a lie: the subject was irrelevant to Deck.
The phone was still off the hook on Joe’s end, and Carmel considered milking it, leaving the connection open. The company encouraged keeping the customers on the line for as long as possible, no matter what. With all the excitement on Joe’s side, it would be a while before he noticed the dangling phone handset and realized he’d been charged a dollar a minute for as long as it took him to remember.
If you did not hold the customers on the phone long enough, the company punished you by lowering your priority number. The further down you were on the list, the further back you were in line to have calls routed your way. Everyone with a higher priority number than yours got automatic cuts in line. You could wait an hour for even a short call if the company did not like you. And Deck did not handle such frustrations well.
The fracas was still going strong on the other end when Carmel hung up on Joe’s domestic disturbance. She took a sip of her coffee and shuffled Deck to wipe Joe’s aura off the cards for the next call. Deck purred. Carmel kissed Deck and whispered to it. The phone rang.
“Psychic Dragon, how can the cards help tonight?” Carmel heard a radio turned low in the background, Gloria Estefan singing Doctor Beat.
“Hola,” a girl whispered, and then rattled off something in Spanish.
“No habla, okay? I’m Carmel. Who’s this?” Silence again except for the radio’s sunny beat on the other end.
“Maria,” the girl said after a long moment. Her tone was disgruntled, perhaps at having to provide a fake name.
“What can the Psychic Dragon do for you, Maria?”
“Okey, engles es bueno,” Maria conceded. “I have this girlfriend, si? So she works for this cliqua in Miami, fellows from Bogota. You know what they move from Bogota?”
“I know of Bogota.” A peek at the deck showed the Five of Swords, with a ferret-faced guy holding a bunch of swords, sneering at the backs of several other men walking away from him looking all forlorn. The thief’s face morphed into that of a feral-faced Latina. Deck had grown quite warm and tingly beneath Carmel’s hand. Deck was paying attention to this one.
“Okey. So my friend, she takes this briefcase from the house of these men from Bogota. It’s full of the white powder, ¿Sabes? Primo A-1 ye-yo. But they find out who took it. I need the cards to tell her what to do.”
Carmel took a sip off her coffee. “Maria, Deck knows it’s you. There is no friend.” Silence on the other end, except for the cheerful radio. “These men are looking for you.”
“Sí.” Maria’s voice was calm. “I am at a motel now. You do not need to know where. When I look out the blinds, I see their people walking or driving.”
Deck flung up a tiny diorama in Carmel’s mind of Maria, trapped in her motel room surrounded by neon-lit streets and sidewalks teeming with killers all a-troll for her. Deck showed a couple of blurry escape paths from Maria’s door bypassing the orbiting killers. None grew solid enough for Carmel to stake her nonexistent reputation on, but the southeast corner led to some routes which showed promise.
“What about the cops?” Carmel asked.
“No.” Maria’s voice quavered with fear she had not displayed discussing cartel hit men who Deck predicted were fixing to award her a Colombian necktie. “No policía.”
Carmel peeked into Deck: it was the Ten of Swords, somebody pinned to the ground with swords stabbed through their body, blood flowing away to soak into the earth. Deck showed a mental movie of Maria rearranging her hair and makeup. Deck changed it to a snapshot of drama masks hanging on a wall. Carmel rolled her eyes. Chatterbox Deck.
Carmel said, “Maria, you’re going to be fine. Everything is gonna be all right. Look around, check the bathroom, change your appearance as much as possible. Whip up a disguise. Are you willing to leave the coke behind, lighten your load?”
“No,” Maria said.
“Okay. Leaving to the southeast might work out for you. It’s your best bet, just hook past the dumpster and you’ll see an embankment. Follow it along the waterline south. Stay low. And Deck still doesn’t think the policía is a bad idea.” A click as Maria hung up.
Some of Carmel’s customers called her back by inputting her direct extension number on the Psychic Dragon phone menu. But she doubted she would be hearing from this Maria again.
Carmel had heard enough tales of moral weakness and depravity that she felt like the underside of a bench where everybody stuck their snot and bubble gum. Only not so much bubble gum.
Dumping ground. Uncertified therapist.
Copyright © 2022 by Pearce Hansen
