Manny Strikes Out
Mike Lee
Manny considered suicide. But instead, he called his parents. This ritual was a by-product of six years of banality since the moment a student assistant coach told him to leave football tryouts on a July afternoon at Memorial Stadium.
That whistle echoing through the stands ended Manny’s daydreams of scoring touchdowns as a University of Texas Longhorn, playing on national television, and possibly being part of a national championship team and a chance at the NFL. Clomping on cleats echoing through the tunnel, it finally dawned on Manny that he was the biggest idiot to ever have walked on a gridiron, wasting years of effort to engage in a useless endeavor.
With each step further toward the beastly afternoon sun glowering on San Jacinto Street, the shock wore off, and Manny sagged deeper into his psychic interior with a growing and impenetrable humiliation. At least no one laughed at Manny, or the other sixty and change walk-ons whistled off with nothing more than a dry, indifferent: You boys can go. Thank y’all for coming out, twanging insincere from the mouth of the student assistant, waving a clipboard in the direction of the tunnel.
Yeah, the eyes of Texas are upon you, indeed—for thirty seconds. Manny and the other star-struck and ultimately stupid boys from all parts of Texas, including New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, plus the Australian rules player from Perth who showed the guys he could punt backward, could have used a sorry, it didn’t work out, fellers.
Life flat-lined from there, beginning with his parents’ lack of disappointment when he came home to tell them. The female unit sat impassively in her easy chair, giving the impression she was more interested in watching Man of La Mancha, while the male, in a voice droning on from what seemed memorized from an overused Baptist sermon, reminded Manny that he was better off taking the scholarship at Concordia and that he was a fool to let that opportunity pass. By then, Marge and Charles were radio static, and he couldn’t recall it, but Coach Auer was Laurence Oliver as Marc Antony crying havoc and breaking open the kennel. Marge and Charles, he could only shrug at.
On the surface, they were not bad parents. They were not physically or emotionally abusive. Instead, they were publicly supportive, hardly raised their voices, and didn’t put him down when they felt Manny was not acting to their standards.
They didn’t notice their son, focusing on what they owned or wanted. After a childhood of disappointment, Manny resigned to the notion that Marge and Charles, or Margencharles, were never going to evolve from insecure narcissists and, wrapped in the bitter comfort of acceptance, tolerated attending the occasional family fun nights they still held for their friends, and the holidays with their country relatives.
Yet, this was what Manny had years to prepare for because this was Texas foot-BALL, as Coach Auer warned him senior year when he sat Manny down in his office.
He hadn’t watched a game except in passing or when unavoidable, much less picked up a bat and glove. Football was his sport. At age seven, he decided Danny Reeves—number thirty—of the Dallas Cowboys was his favorite player when he and Bob Lilly signed autographs for him at the Holiday House in the Tarrytown shopping center. As he grew to junior high, he covered his bedroom walls with first Walt Garrison, and after he retired, Robert Newhouse, transitioning from between cheek and gum Copenhagen cowboy to the battling sparkplug number 44 slithering out of tackles, twisting, turning, throwing flanker options, touchdown toss to Golden Richards Super Bowl.
~ ~ ~
Manny sat outside on the concrete slab by the front door and opened the cover. He wasn’t in a poetic mood but had read somewhere that the best writers tried to work every day. So Manny took it upon himself to attempt three hundred words. Rarely did he come up short. Usually, what Manny wrote was execrably awful—even to him. Yet he excused himself that the very effort was practice. One didn’t learn to walk by crawling, and most pages left the proverbial snail trails and the blue college rules well into the margins.
He wrote semi-readable blank verse. Manny’s poesy style was typically teenage misery with overtones of pseudo Beatitudes and an understandable, creative, writing annoying instructor misreading of A Season in Hell. Rimbaud’s harried writing ruined many a would-be poet, and Manny moved toward joining this growing list.
His prose was much better, although Manny had yet to realize it. So did everyone else because he took obsessive steps to keep it secret. He did this with his poetry to a certain extent, sharing much of it with Shannon. She seemed to like it, Manny hoped she did, but often she would respond with only one-word affirmatives and a kiss, even with the writing intended for and about her.
For Manny and Shannon, it came down to the future, and when it arrived, looking back to see what it was thought they had discovered.
When older, introspection often became defined by driving in a torrential rainstorm on a Texas Ranch Road with ghosts iridescent like fireflies appearing in the rearview mirror. This would bother them both because they needed to focus on the road; unavoidable because each, in their own manner, became weary of the rituals of avoidance and their consequences.
When letters appear from a dead hand, desperate answering machine messages from a man in an emotional breakdown, and epiphanies struck during inopportune moments, one has to look into that mirror and engage those ghosts and learn they’re trying to convey new meaning from half-forgotten events years ago.
However, when it came down to her, he, and the fireflies that night, Manny and Shannon were who they were, together; a different story altogether nine years later, while Manny thumbed sadly through middle-aged passages in a cheap spiral notebook.
It rained hard. Manny looked out the window, the sky almost lost behind the steam brought up by his breath. The room was curtained from the grayness outside. His vision blurred until he slipped on his glasses. Manny thought about turning on the light, getting out of the chair, and even leaning back to stop staring so close out the damned window but was immobilized.
He had been awake for nearly three hours, staring out the window most of the time. Manny bit his cuticles, rubbed his nose, and waited. How much longer? For two hours, he waited for Shannon to return.
“C’mon, Shannon,” he murmured. “I cannot stay riveted to this window. I know I should know better, Shannon, but what the hell? I believed in us.”
Finally, Manny turned his gaze from the window. He reached across the desk for his glasses. As he picked them up, he heard the telephone ring. Shit. Manny rose from the overstuffed chair and walked briskly to the kitchen. The caller had hung up when he pulled the receiver off the wall telephone. He replaced the phone, frustrated, assuming it was her.
Manny opened the refrigerator door to pull out the milk, drinking from the jug. He looked through the doorway at the curtained picture window, shielding the darkness and the rain outside.
This. Is. Bullshit. Tired of waiting and pining, Manny decided instead to take a bath.
As Manny got dressed, he went back to brooding. For instance, he came to grips with the fact that he liked the concept of solitude, especially lately after dropping out of ACC and settling into the waiting tables at Good Eats Cafe five nights a week.
Manny concluded most of the people he had contact with were insufferable assholes and beneath contempt. Manny theorized not from elitism but from the experience he was confronted with daily, molding to his purposes before shelving it and moving on. Manny became more than happy, content to spend as much time alone as he wanted with that in mind. He wanted time to think, which he liked to do frequently. Brooding became a hobby, then a fact in life.
Alienation and a sense of being the outsider tended to bring like-minded people together. Humans were social animals with a tendency for tribalization. Despite Manny’s experience with Margencharles, football, his girlfriend, and their friends kept him from feeling isolated and distant in the totality of his life. Manny was no misanthrope. He actually liked people. He treated everyone--the assholes, who were many, and the sainted, precious few--equally with respect and a distant kindness that kept the assumption that he was a prototypical nice Texas boy raised right by his elders. He felt he handled the emotional neglect okay, not great, and certainly not severely. However, Shannon was too much to deal with, and Manny began to sense her withdrawing from him. Subtle, always subtle at first, but when school started, she became attracted to hanging out at the Cactus Café and with the political groups at the tables set in the West Mall.
After high school, they moved out of their families and clustered together, replacing blood bonds to establish familial ties of friendship. They installed close relationships while living together in old houses in Clarksville and the Saltine box apartment complexes and converted frame houses scattered west of the University campus. Finally, they sank into a shading of adulthood, working part or full time in restaurants and bookstores, a few worming their way into the growing software industry as low-level techs and software designers.
~ ~ ~
Before work, Manny took a cab over to Horace’s house in Clarksville. Horace had returned to his life recently when he was hired as the night manager. Like everyone else on the team, he didn’t get recruited for football but landed a track scholarship at Southwest Texas State. However, bad luck intervened when he blew out an Achilles tendon at a warm-up the first year.
Horace concentrated on his academics and graduated. He applied with AISD, hoping to land a teaching job, and used his fast food-management skills. After a year at Lone Star Cafe, he landed the gig at Good Eats, bringing in fresh spices and vegetables from his garden. It felt like an old home week for Manny, who had long become a top salesman, though feeling still distant from his co-workers. Horace was someone he could talk to, renewing their friendship amid the chaos of dinner rushes.
The small frame home was near the Old Confederate Veterans’ Home site behind West Lynn. The buildings had long since been torn down, leaving the remains of the rock and mortar low walls demarcating the area, now overgrown with weeds and wild grass, spotted with trees. Horace’s house was built into a hillside half a block from where the cab let him off, and the door was open. He knocked on the screen and yelled for him.
“I’m over here, Kynard!” Horace yelled back. “Come around back to the garden.”
Manny stepped down the path paved from found stones and boulders buried into the ground, leading down the side of the house to the garden Horace worked below, next to the marshy creek behind the house. Horace picked red tomatoes from the vines, placing them in a wicker basket at his feet.
“Welcome to my life, dude,” Horace said, slapping Manny. “You got here in time to help me carry up the basket. I got a twinge in my back while picking the squash.”
“Sure, big man,” said Manny, crouching down to grab the basket. “Don’t worry, I can take it myself. You need to work tonight.”
“That I will appreciate.”
After Manny and Horace sorted the vegetables and bagged them up to bring to the restaurant, they sat under the ancient stand-up fan in the small living room, sipping iced tea before getting ready to work. Horace had stretched out on the couch with an ice pack, hoping an hour laid out would make it well enough for him to stand. Horace sighed, “Those years of football. Be glad you were usually on the bench. I got this shit going for the rest of my life.”
The shift went well for Manny. After tipping Alton, he had 85 dollars. Horace spent most of the shift in the office, working out produce orders for the following week and stretching his back. After the other employees left, Manny helped Alton and the dishwasher put up the dining chairs and barstools while Horace verified the receipts while sitting at the big round table next to the hostess’ stand. After Alton and the dishwasher left, Horace motioned him over. Manny reached the bar, pulled out a Rolling Rock from the corner beer cooler, and sat down.
“You ready for that reading?”
“I suppose.” Horace got interested in Tarot while in college. Kept it to himself because his mother was a rolling in the sawdust Baptist, but conversations with Manny opened him up. They occasionally did readings together to pass the time when the two of them were in the restaurant. Horace pulled the cards from the box. They were traditional Riders, slightly worn over the years. He shuffled them five times before handing them to Manny to cut. Manny had the question in mind.
“Doing a traditional spread.” He placed the first three cards on the table. “Oh, it’s about a woman again. No surprise, there.”
Wordlessly, Horace placed a card on top of the first three. “You’re getting better with the self-pity, I see, which tells me you act inwardly with more confidence.”
“Thanks.”
Horace slipped another card onto the pile. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“Oh, some crazy-ass fucked up shit you better not get involved with. Let’s see the next card.”
He placed another down on top of it. “Good, this card tells me that you have escaped it. You have learned your lesson. There is a God.”
“Do you mind telling me what that is?”
“Do not ask questions about things that will not happen. Let it go.”
“Okay.”
Horace tapped a finger on what Manny was told was a card from the minor arcana. “I find this interesting. There is someone out there, but she is not here. In Austin, anyway, and she has to come to you. This card opens a pathway toward an interpretation that she has yet to begin this journey, but when she arrives, be prepared. She is coming on loud and furious like a tornado, but she intends no harm, does not leave wreckage, and only searches for love. She finds you, instead.”
“Gee, you’re such a way with words, Jimmy.”
Horace smiled. “I’m only teasing. She’s definitely not there yet—she is at the window, but it remains closed is what I am thinking of—but the good thing is this person does not reek of negative energy—however, at the moment, she remains unseen. The card only lets me know that she is out there. I can’t tell you anything more regarding that.”
“That’s it? I am having a tough time believing this.”
“Sorry. I know it’s vague. Needle in a haystack, but I am not bullshitting you. I can tell you one other thing. I think you two may have met, but you just locked eyes in a situation where you didn’t speak. There is some thin connection at play here, a single strand. However, I tell you, this will likely happen if this path stands. You can take the path and be fine, but this isn’t just about you, Manny. It’s also about her.”
“So she has to make a move?”
Horace nodded. “Yeah. That’s what sucks about it.”
“Can you tell me anything else about her?”
Horace pursed his lips and glanced over at the neon Shiner beer sign. “I don’t know if she is the woman of your dreams. But she is who you are going to be with. But, again, remember, this is not soothsaying by any stretch of the imagination; this is a pathway among many. But, and this is a biggie, I suspect what I am reading here. She has a presence and is overwhelming, it seems. Maybe she has been in the restaurant or gone to Austin High with us. Or she is close to someone among us. Tarot is not a crystal ball—there is nothing to visualize because this is not intended to be a window into the future. I can only interpret the meaning of each of the cards I throw. So, Manny, the short answer is, how do I know?”
Manny smirked and lit another cigarette. “But you said earlier she is around.”
“Kind of. Yes, kind of around. There’s a connection somewhere. I guess you will know it when you see it. Generally, those things tend to smack you like a shovel when they arrive. You can prepare for it, but you really cannot. So, if you remember when it happens, then well and good. If you don’t, enjoy the wild ride.”
Horace slid the cards into their box, adding, “You know, Manny, there was a conversation I eavesdropped between two women at the bar the other day that struck me and had me thinking of you while I did this reading. One of them said to the other that it isn’t how you look but how you use it. Importantly, in the end, what matters is how you see yourself and present it. You also need to look more carefully and be choosy. Stop thinking like you’re the last girl at the bar at closing time and usually confusing the passive with the submissive. That one person who appreciates and protects both will find you. Trust me. I know. That is what the woman told her, and that got me thinking. Her voice replayed in my mind as I concentrated on the cards. So that is who will find you.”
“I want to believe.”
“We all do, Manny. Wait until we get older and start thinking about dying.”
“You know, Horace. You may be the only real friend I have.”
“I wondered about that. You don’t reveal much, tending instead to talk a lot without saying anything. That’s what I see in you often enough. This leads to another question: why do you brood so much?”
“I dunno. Artistic temperament, perhaps.”
“You are a true loner. A rebel among the rebels. Do you really enjoy your solitude?”
“No—not really.”
“It’s not that you are lonely, Manny. I think you are just incomplete without another person. Best known as your One. That’s the thing that always gets to me about you. All you require is that one person and the rest seems easy. It’s like me being with Francis. Great girl—I am going to marry her. I have that friend, Greider, fuck up that he is, and you are a friend too. We talk, work together, and I learn from you. You help make me a better person. But you are a hard man to get to know, and I think that’s summing you up. You just need that one in your life.”
“That seems to be the case.”
“Well, if you want another reading, we have to go out and dig a pit, toss in that damn game ball from the MacGavin game and set it afire. Maybe we can find answers then, but for now, this reading stands.”
Manny stared down. “Yeah, that MacGavin game. What the hell is digging a pit going to do?”
“Just trust me. Mama was from Louisiana.”
“You really should not be alone, young man.” Horace placed the tarot deck into his jacket. “We better get going. I’m meeting Francis at Steamboat.”
They put the chairs on the big round table, set the alarm, and locked up. Horace gave Manny a ride to Sixth Street, parked on Neches in front of the art gallery, and split up at Steamboat.
Manny walked the rest of the way home.
Mike Lee
Manny considered suicide. But instead, he called his parents. This ritual was a by-product of six years of banality since the moment a student assistant coach told him to leave football tryouts on a July afternoon at Memorial Stadium.
That whistle echoing through the stands ended Manny’s daydreams of scoring touchdowns as a University of Texas Longhorn, playing on national television, and possibly being part of a national championship team and a chance at the NFL. Clomping on cleats echoing through the tunnel, it finally dawned on Manny that he was the biggest idiot to ever have walked on a gridiron, wasting years of effort to engage in a useless endeavor.
With each step further toward the beastly afternoon sun glowering on San Jacinto Street, the shock wore off, and Manny sagged deeper into his psychic interior with a growing and impenetrable humiliation. At least no one laughed at Manny, or the other sixty and change walk-ons whistled off with nothing more than a dry, indifferent: You boys can go. Thank y’all for coming out, twanging insincere from the mouth of the student assistant, waving a clipboard in the direction of the tunnel.
Yeah, the eyes of Texas are upon you, indeed—for thirty seconds. Manny and the other star-struck and ultimately stupid boys from all parts of Texas, including New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, plus the Australian rules player from Perth who showed the guys he could punt backward, could have used a sorry, it didn’t work out, fellers.
Life flat-lined from there, beginning with his parents’ lack of disappointment when he came home to tell them. The female unit sat impassively in her easy chair, giving the impression she was more interested in watching Man of La Mancha, while the male, in a voice droning on from what seemed memorized from an overused Baptist sermon, reminded Manny that he was better off taking the scholarship at Concordia and that he was a fool to let that opportunity pass. By then, Marge and Charles were radio static, and he couldn’t recall it, but Coach Auer was Laurence Oliver as Marc Antony crying havoc and breaking open the kennel. Marge and Charles, he could only shrug at.
On the surface, they were not bad parents. They were not physically or emotionally abusive. Instead, they were publicly supportive, hardly raised their voices, and didn’t put him down when they felt Manny was not acting to their standards.
They didn’t notice their son, focusing on what they owned or wanted. After a childhood of disappointment, Manny resigned to the notion that Marge and Charles, or Margencharles, were never going to evolve from insecure narcissists and, wrapped in the bitter comfort of acceptance, tolerated attending the occasional family fun nights they still held for their friends, and the holidays with their country relatives.
Yet, this was what Manny had years to prepare for because this was Texas foot-BALL, as Coach Auer warned him senior year when he sat Manny down in his office.
He hadn’t watched a game except in passing or when unavoidable, much less picked up a bat and glove. Football was his sport. At age seven, he decided Danny Reeves—number thirty—of the Dallas Cowboys was his favorite player when he and Bob Lilly signed autographs for him at the Holiday House in the Tarrytown shopping center. As he grew to junior high, he covered his bedroom walls with first Walt Garrison, and after he retired, Robert Newhouse, transitioning from between cheek and gum Copenhagen cowboy to the battling sparkplug number 44 slithering out of tackles, twisting, turning, throwing flanker options, touchdown toss to Golden Richards Super Bowl.
~ ~ ~
Manny sat outside on the concrete slab by the front door and opened the cover. He wasn’t in a poetic mood but had read somewhere that the best writers tried to work every day. So Manny took it upon himself to attempt three hundred words. Rarely did he come up short. Usually, what Manny wrote was execrably awful—even to him. Yet he excused himself that the very effort was practice. One didn’t learn to walk by crawling, and most pages left the proverbial snail trails and the blue college rules well into the margins.
He wrote semi-readable blank verse. Manny’s poesy style was typically teenage misery with overtones of pseudo Beatitudes and an understandable, creative, writing annoying instructor misreading of A Season in Hell. Rimbaud’s harried writing ruined many a would-be poet, and Manny moved toward joining this growing list.
His prose was much better, although Manny had yet to realize it. So did everyone else because he took obsessive steps to keep it secret. He did this with his poetry to a certain extent, sharing much of it with Shannon. She seemed to like it, Manny hoped she did, but often she would respond with only one-word affirmatives and a kiss, even with the writing intended for and about her.
For Manny and Shannon, it came down to the future, and when it arrived, looking back to see what it was thought they had discovered.
When older, introspection often became defined by driving in a torrential rainstorm on a Texas Ranch Road with ghosts iridescent like fireflies appearing in the rearview mirror. This would bother them both because they needed to focus on the road; unavoidable because each, in their own manner, became weary of the rituals of avoidance and their consequences.
When letters appear from a dead hand, desperate answering machine messages from a man in an emotional breakdown, and epiphanies struck during inopportune moments, one has to look into that mirror and engage those ghosts and learn they’re trying to convey new meaning from half-forgotten events years ago.
However, when it came down to her, he, and the fireflies that night, Manny and Shannon were who they were, together; a different story altogether nine years later, while Manny thumbed sadly through middle-aged passages in a cheap spiral notebook.
It rained hard. Manny looked out the window, the sky almost lost behind the steam brought up by his breath. The room was curtained from the grayness outside. His vision blurred until he slipped on his glasses. Manny thought about turning on the light, getting out of the chair, and even leaning back to stop staring so close out the damned window but was immobilized.
He had been awake for nearly three hours, staring out the window most of the time. Manny bit his cuticles, rubbed his nose, and waited. How much longer? For two hours, he waited for Shannon to return.
“C’mon, Shannon,” he murmured. “I cannot stay riveted to this window. I know I should know better, Shannon, but what the hell? I believed in us.”
Finally, Manny turned his gaze from the window. He reached across the desk for his glasses. As he picked them up, he heard the telephone ring. Shit. Manny rose from the overstuffed chair and walked briskly to the kitchen. The caller had hung up when he pulled the receiver off the wall telephone. He replaced the phone, frustrated, assuming it was her.
Manny opened the refrigerator door to pull out the milk, drinking from the jug. He looked through the doorway at the curtained picture window, shielding the darkness and the rain outside.
This. Is. Bullshit. Tired of waiting and pining, Manny decided instead to take a bath.
As Manny got dressed, he went back to brooding. For instance, he came to grips with the fact that he liked the concept of solitude, especially lately after dropping out of ACC and settling into the waiting tables at Good Eats Cafe five nights a week.
Manny concluded most of the people he had contact with were insufferable assholes and beneath contempt. Manny theorized not from elitism but from the experience he was confronted with daily, molding to his purposes before shelving it and moving on. Manny became more than happy, content to spend as much time alone as he wanted with that in mind. He wanted time to think, which he liked to do frequently. Brooding became a hobby, then a fact in life.
Alienation and a sense of being the outsider tended to bring like-minded people together. Humans were social animals with a tendency for tribalization. Despite Manny’s experience with Margencharles, football, his girlfriend, and their friends kept him from feeling isolated and distant in the totality of his life. Manny was no misanthrope. He actually liked people. He treated everyone--the assholes, who were many, and the sainted, precious few--equally with respect and a distant kindness that kept the assumption that he was a prototypical nice Texas boy raised right by his elders. He felt he handled the emotional neglect okay, not great, and certainly not severely. However, Shannon was too much to deal with, and Manny began to sense her withdrawing from him. Subtle, always subtle at first, but when school started, she became attracted to hanging out at the Cactus Café and with the political groups at the tables set in the West Mall.
After high school, they moved out of their families and clustered together, replacing blood bonds to establish familial ties of friendship. They installed close relationships while living together in old houses in Clarksville and the Saltine box apartment complexes and converted frame houses scattered west of the University campus. Finally, they sank into a shading of adulthood, working part or full time in restaurants and bookstores, a few worming their way into the growing software industry as low-level techs and software designers.
~ ~ ~
Before work, Manny took a cab over to Horace’s house in Clarksville. Horace had returned to his life recently when he was hired as the night manager. Like everyone else on the team, he didn’t get recruited for football but landed a track scholarship at Southwest Texas State. However, bad luck intervened when he blew out an Achilles tendon at a warm-up the first year.
Horace concentrated on his academics and graduated. He applied with AISD, hoping to land a teaching job, and used his fast food-management skills. After a year at Lone Star Cafe, he landed the gig at Good Eats, bringing in fresh spices and vegetables from his garden. It felt like an old home week for Manny, who had long become a top salesman, though feeling still distant from his co-workers. Horace was someone he could talk to, renewing their friendship amid the chaos of dinner rushes.
The small frame home was near the Old Confederate Veterans’ Home site behind West Lynn. The buildings had long since been torn down, leaving the remains of the rock and mortar low walls demarcating the area, now overgrown with weeds and wild grass, spotted with trees. Horace’s house was built into a hillside half a block from where the cab let him off, and the door was open. He knocked on the screen and yelled for him.
“I’m over here, Kynard!” Horace yelled back. “Come around back to the garden.”
Manny stepped down the path paved from found stones and boulders buried into the ground, leading down the side of the house to the garden Horace worked below, next to the marshy creek behind the house. Horace picked red tomatoes from the vines, placing them in a wicker basket at his feet.
“Welcome to my life, dude,” Horace said, slapping Manny. “You got here in time to help me carry up the basket. I got a twinge in my back while picking the squash.”
“Sure, big man,” said Manny, crouching down to grab the basket. “Don’t worry, I can take it myself. You need to work tonight.”
“That I will appreciate.”
After Manny and Horace sorted the vegetables and bagged them up to bring to the restaurant, they sat under the ancient stand-up fan in the small living room, sipping iced tea before getting ready to work. Horace had stretched out on the couch with an ice pack, hoping an hour laid out would make it well enough for him to stand. Horace sighed, “Those years of football. Be glad you were usually on the bench. I got this shit going for the rest of my life.”
The shift went well for Manny. After tipping Alton, he had 85 dollars. Horace spent most of the shift in the office, working out produce orders for the following week and stretching his back. After the other employees left, Manny helped Alton and the dishwasher put up the dining chairs and barstools while Horace verified the receipts while sitting at the big round table next to the hostess’ stand. After Alton and the dishwasher left, Horace motioned him over. Manny reached the bar, pulled out a Rolling Rock from the corner beer cooler, and sat down.
“You ready for that reading?”
“I suppose.” Horace got interested in Tarot while in college. Kept it to himself because his mother was a rolling in the sawdust Baptist, but conversations with Manny opened him up. They occasionally did readings together to pass the time when the two of them were in the restaurant. Horace pulled the cards from the box. They were traditional Riders, slightly worn over the years. He shuffled them five times before handing them to Manny to cut. Manny had the question in mind.
“Doing a traditional spread.” He placed the first three cards on the table. “Oh, it’s about a woman again. No surprise, there.”
Wordlessly, Horace placed a card on top of the first three. “You’re getting better with the self-pity, I see, which tells me you act inwardly with more confidence.”
“Thanks.”
Horace slipped another card onto the pile. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“Oh, some crazy-ass fucked up shit you better not get involved with. Let’s see the next card.”
He placed another down on top of it. “Good, this card tells me that you have escaped it. You have learned your lesson. There is a God.”
“Do you mind telling me what that is?”
“Do not ask questions about things that will not happen. Let it go.”
“Okay.”
Horace tapped a finger on what Manny was told was a card from the minor arcana. “I find this interesting. There is someone out there, but she is not here. In Austin, anyway, and she has to come to you. This card opens a pathway toward an interpretation that she has yet to begin this journey, but when she arrives, be prepared. She is coming on loud and furious like a tornado, but she intends no harm, does not leave wreckage, and only searches for love. She finds you, instead.”
“Gee, you’re such a way with words, Jimmy.”
Horace smiled. “I’m only teasing. She’s definitely not there yet—she is at the window, but it remains closed is what I am thinking of—but the good thing is this person does not reek of negative energy—however, at the moment, she remains unseen. The card only lets me know that she is out there. I can’t tell you anything more regarding that.”
“That’s it? I am having a tough time believing this.”
“Sorry. I know it’s vague. Needle in a haystack, but I am not bullshitting you. I can tell you one other thing. I think you two may have met, but you just locked eyes in a situation where you didn’t speak. There is some thin connection at play here, a single strand. However, I tell you, this will likely happen if this path stands. You can take the path and be fine, but this isn’t just about you, Manny. It’s also about her.”
“So she has to make a move?”
Horace nodded. “Yeah. That’s what sucks about it.”
“Can you tell me anything else about her?”
Horace pursed his lips and glanced over at the neon Shiner beer sign. “I don’t know if she is the woman of your dreams. But she is who you are going to be with. But, again, remember, this is not soothsaying by any stretch of the imagination; this is a pathway among many. But, and this is a biggie, I suspect what I am reading here. She has a presence and is overwhelming, it seems. Maybe she has been in the restaurant or gone to Austin High with us. Or she is close to someone among us. Tarot is not a crystal ball—there is nothing to visualize because this is not intended to be a window into the future. I can only interpret the meaning of each of the cards I throw. So, Manny, the short answer is, how do I know?”
Manny smirked and lit another cigarette. “But you said earlier she is around.”
“Kind of. Yes, kind of around. There’s a connection somewhere. I guess you will know it when you see it. Generally, those things tend to smack you like a shovel when they arrive. You can prepare for it, but you really cannot. So, if you remember when it happens, then well and good. If you don’t, enjoy the wild ride.”
Horace slid the cards into their box, adding, “You know, Manny, there was a conversation I eavesdropped between two women at the bar the other day that struck me and had me thinking of you while I did this reading. One of them said to the other that it isn’t how you look but how you use it. Importantly, in the end, what matters is how you see yourself and present it. You also need to look more carefully and be choosy. Stop thinking like you’re the last girl at the bar at closing time and usually confusing the passive with the submissive. That one person who appreciates and protects both will find you. Trust me. I know. That is what the woman told her, and that got me thinking. Her voice replayed in my mind as I concentrated on the cards. So that is who will find you.”
“I want to believe.”
“We all do, Manny. Wait until we get older and start thinking about dying.”
“You know, Horace. You may be the only real friend I have.”
“I wondered about that. You don’t reveal much, tending instead to talk a lot without saying anything. That’s what I see in you often enough. This leads to another question: why do you brood so much?”
“I dunno. Artistic temperament, perhaps.”
“You are a true loner. A rebel among the rebels. Do you really enjoy your solitude?”
“No—not really.”
“It’s not that you are lonely, Manny. I think you are just incomplete without another person. Best known as your One. That’s the thing that always gets to me about you. All you require is that one person and the rest seems easy. It’s like me being with Francis. Great girl—I am going to marry her. I have that friend, Greider, fuck up that he is, and you are a friend too. We talk, work together, and I learn from you. You help make me a better person. But you are a hard man to get to know, and I think that’s summing you up. You just need that one in your life.”
“That seems to be the case.”
“Well, if you want another reading, we have to go out and dig a pit, toss in that damn game ball from the MacGavin game and set it afire. Maybe we can find answers then, but for now, this reading stands.”
Manny stared down. “Yeah, that MacGavin game. What the hell is digging a pit going to do?”
“Just trust me. Mama was from Louisiana.”
“You really should not be alone, young man.” Horace placed the tarot deck into his jacket. “We better get going. I’m meeting Francis at Steamboat.”
They put the chairs on the big round table, set the alarm, and locked up. Horace gave Manny a ride to Sixth Street, parked on Neches in front of the art gallery, and split up at Steamboat.
Manny walked the rest of the way home.
