Free Tarot Sour by Robert Zimmerman Page A

affected her, but at the same time it has been deeply troublesome as well.
    I go to her one Sunday morning, as she marches back and forth with her children playing jacks on the sidewalk nearby, and I say to her, “Elizabeth, I think you’ve placed too much importance on me.”
    â€œI haven’t, Preacher Johns,” she says to me.
    â€œBut you have, dear. You have. What I do in there—” I nod my head toward the thick oak doors that, for some reason, have been jeweled with a horridly snarling gargoyle face, intricately carved, split straight down the center with a long curling horn on each side to grip. “What I do in there, anybody can do. It’s a profession, no different than a doctor, or a businessman, or a chef. I lost my job for reasons that, whether valid or not, were real. Going in there, Elizabeth, it doesn’t mean that you’re accepting what happened to me, it just means that you aren’t giving up on your faith. Reverend Wiley is a messenger, just as I was. It’s the message that matters, Elizabeth, not the voice delivering it.”
    â€œBut it does matter, Preacher Johns,” she answers. She up-ends her picket sign and leans on the post, looks over my shoulder at her children. “Because we both know that he isn’t delivering the same message you were.”
    I never quite know if she knows what she is talking about. If she knows who has sent him to town, who it was that secured the Reverend’s position as well as my dismissal by becoming a profligately superfluous benefactor to the archdiocese. Or if she just senses the subliminal differences, in infinitesimal degrees, between his sermons and mine. The way he stresses his words, the places he chooses to pause for dramatic effect. The analogies he makes to current events, to the coastal front, to the General, whom I have never mentioned to an audience.
    I wipe a line of sweat off of my forehead. The gravel beneath me is starting to bite into the soft parts of my thighs. Normally I would spend a few more hours before returning home, but the heat has slowly been rising the past two weeks, despite the coming winter, and I haven’t come quite prepared to deal with it. I gather my hat from the ground, into which passersby who didn’t know me, or who hardly knew me, have tossed three dollars and change, slide them with a rattle into my pockets, and then stand there until the streets are empty. I continue waving my hands in the air, waving the newspaper and smacking myself lightly with it from time to time until a break in traffic comes and I slink back out of the street and into the alleyways that forge the less-traveled paths of town.
    The coolness of my shaded kitchen sweeps over me as I step in from the street. I toss the newspaper into the wastebasket and shut the door behind me. I never lock my doors. There is no need to. Not in this town.
    I have gotten in the habit of, upon entering my home, stopping to listen to whatever sounds might be around me. There is the scurrying of the rats in the basement, hungry things with small, sharply focused eyes. There is the slow dripping of water in the sink. There is my breath. It comes heavier these days than it used to. I am older these days, than I used to be.
    I go to the refrigerator. I know before I look that there won’t be much in there. I don’t get out much, except during the mornings when I go out to spread the good word. There is half a packet of ham from the deli, leftover from two weeks earlier and, by the smell, not quite yet spoiled. I take it out and make a sandwich on two slices of bread that, though stale, haven’t quite yet begun to mold besides for a tiny white starburst on the corner of the outermost slice. The bread feels heavy, it’s surface as rough and crannied as the desert floor that leads up into the dunes. I slice it diagonally. The surface resists and snaps, shatters a screen of hard crumbs onto the plate.
    I