Nebraska

And I said, “Love. Love killed it. Love as sharp as a knife.”

Slick gazed upon me strangely, and my husband looked at me with grief as I sank to the earth among the cattle, feeling the warmth of their breathing. I knew then that the anguish I'd experienced over those past many months was going to disappear, and that my life, over which I'd despaired for so long, was going to keep changing and improving with each minute of the day.

Sleepless

She walked her house by day, discovering it. She sat on the rough wooden staircase to the basement in order to look at the singing orange light of the gas water heater. She used a letter opener and stripped up a cattail of gray wallpaper in order to know how the front parlor was back when white folks occupied the room without speaking and sent their hard eyes down the newspaper and percolated their nasty opinions. She sashayed along the upstairs hallway, from the yellow sewing room past the second bedroom with the pretty girl-things in it, the hidden clothes hamper that sent your dirty laundry down a tin drop to the washer and dryer, the pink, wallpapered bedroom that was hers and Claude's and into the ugly, turquoise bathroom with the iron eagle-claw tub and the bleary green view of the yard. She would peer into the spotted mirror over the sink but could only see herself. She would trail her own fingers along the fingerprinted walls but get no history from them. Her family had been moving into the old house for four days before she knew about the wickedness in it, but that was like hearsay or a butterfly of gossip that Avis overheard in the yellow room. She could make out seventy years of ordinariness downstairs, but it was like the upstairs had been soaped clean, like the evil memories had been painted over, the conversation interrupted.

***

Avis predicted a girl for a pregnant woman in Gretna, and that there would be no complications. She guessed, but didn't say, that the woman was twenty-eight or so, a Cancer, husband worked with his hands. Avis got a pledge of five dollars from her but knew she could forget about ever seeing it. Husband would say, “You what?” And that would be that. One of her weekly people complained that Avis had moved without giving him her new telephone number. She apologized but said she would have recommended his standing pat in the options market, anyway; she wasn't getting great signals. Avis told a white woman in Papillon to get a second opinion before going ahead with the hip surgery. She'd come up with twenty for Avis, probably mail it in a card with pink begonias on the cover, and inside the card she'd write, “Your prophecies have helped so many!” Claude phoned to get the numbers at noon, but Avis only saw a zero and nine and her husband said maybe he'd skip the play. She got a crank call from the Nebraska chapter of the white supremacists. A pregnant girl at Mercy High School wouldn't say why she was calling, only that she had a big problem and needed Mrs. Walker's advice. Avis suggested the girl say nothing to her parents just yet, that the problem was going to be ironed out in a week or two. The girl promised her a hundred dollars but Avis said, “You keep it, honey.”

Her four-year-old scuttled in from the green screened porch, singing out that they'd gotten their first mail, and Avis opened the striped film processor's envelope in order to see the color prints she'd had made to promote herself: a jolly, overweight, sorta-pretty woman with cocoa-brown skin and lavender eyes and maybe an excess of jewelry. “You like me in these, Lorna?”

The little girl said yes.

Avis wasn't sure. She supported herself on the pantry countertop and pored over each snapshot, but could only exclude the garden one with the jagged light along her neck. Her ten-year-old came in from the pantry room with a box of cups and saucers that were wrapped in tissue paper. Avis turned a slightly overglamorous photograph toward her older daughter and asked, “You like this one, Priscilla?”

Priscilla cut through the box's strapping tape with a paring knife as she scowled at the photograph. “Give you the likeness of a fish.”

Avis saw what she meant. “You sure are plainspoken.”

She clipped out an Omaha World-Herald newspaper coupon and printed out the classified ad she wanted inserted in the personals: “Anxiety—Questions—Curious? PSYCHIC READINGS, Mrs. Walker.” She went to the telephone to read the new number strip and there was another call. She guessed it was from Bellevue. Offutt Air Force Base. White man saying, “You the psychic?”

Avis thought he was probably in his fifties, possibly a widower, sandpaper in his deep voice, nights misspent in a working-man's bar, and sleeping with a girl many years younger. He ought to stop it. She said, “You want to hear my advice or your prospects?”

He coughed out a laugh and said, “You tell me.”

Her secret impressions were that he wanted a new occupation. Hated his job. Could be an Air Force sergeant getting near retirement. She could see a green shirt. She could smell gasoline. Avis pressed the receiver between her ear and shoulder, put a notepad on the pantry countertop, shoved six bracelets up from her wrist. “You know a lot about engine parts,” she said. “You want to open a shop?”

She heard him light a cigarette. “Go on.”

“I see some problems scraping up the money, you know? You're thinking about some government insurance, you got a notion to take your cash out? Keep your money in there, you hear? And maybe you ought to get some more on-the-job experience before you jump into this.” Avis was cartooning on the notepad, a boy with big eyes and hanging arms, his head angled over to the right. She said, “You can't jump into owning a motor-repair shop with just your pension.”

She was getting more certain as the guy sighed cigarette smoke away fro

m his phone and said, “You still got my attention.”

Avis covered her eyes with one palm and interpreted all she was picking up. “Okay. I am perceiving a whole lotta pain. Your wife, she's older, and she maybe had some bad operation in the hospital and stayed poorly from it? Also, there's this sweet young girl coming into your house to sorta take care of your missus and clean up and so on. And you, you been creeping down to her room, nightly, saying please, sugar, please, please, please, and just once more and such. You know what I'm talking about. A pretty young thing. She's a nurse? You ought to stop it. Evil things could happen.”

“Hate to say it, but you're way off in left field.”

Avis asked, “Has your wife passed away?”

“Nope. She's right here, sipping her Java.”

“Huh.” Avis could see a dayroom and his urgent body and the girl's legs high and snugging him in. And she could see another room and a gray-haired woman asleep, or dying, purple flowers arranged all around her.

Her caller said she was right about the shop idea and the insurance policy, but then she'd gone off on a tangent.

“We don't usually mess up like this,” Avis said.

“I know that,” the sergeant said. “The wife had her palm read by you at that psychic fair in South Omaha. She got me to believing you were accurate as radar.”

Avis said she was sorry and that she must've been picking up impressions from another person close by. She explained that it was simply like getting a couple of overlapping stations at one spot on a radio; or like when you snapped one picture on top of another and came up with a double exposure.

“Had days like that myself.”

After he'd hung up, Avis peered at her notepad until she knew what was missing. And where the boy's head angled over to the right, she penciled in a rope and a noose.