Travel

It was the mothballs that made him gag, not the black murky chunk he coughed onto the carpeted hallway outside of her apartment. Clara cast him an evil glare, but Sousa, who immediately opened her door, didn't seem to mind being woken from her bed. She had a thick line of red outlining her wrinkled mouth, and when she yawned it was as though she were about to consume them. A heavily manicured hand met her mouth as she lazily hid her yawn, and with a gesture that suggested tired inevitability she waved them into the cramped confines of her upper floor apartment.

Hot water screamed from a teapot on the stove and she waddled over to it, bare feet dirty on an equally dirty plank floor. There was the pungent smell of boiled cabbage permeating every crevice, as well as an indefinable spice that hovered somewhere between cinnamon and red peppers. He would have liked to open a window and continue listening to Langley's depressed morning solo, but the windows here were nailed shut with thick layers of paint. The only music here was the screaming lilt of the teapot that died into a limp weeping as she pulled it off the stove and began her ritual. Clara sat at the crowded kitchen table, its surface strewn with bits of string, bobbins and chunks of lace and bowls and multicoloured material obviously cannibalized from pieces of old clothing.

"This is so exciting," Clara said, her eyes dancing in glee. She pulled out her compact and gave her ruby red lips a good study. "It's all going to be top drawer, I just know it!"

"Your father," he said, unsure of how to approach the subject she hated most. "He didn't sound well on the telephone."

She snapped her compact shut in practised impatience. "He never does."

"Where is your mother? I didn't hear her."

"She's around."

That was as far as the conversation went, for Sousa had finished stirring the black tea leaves into the pot, and was now pouring them into the delicate cups she used for the purpose of divining a person's future. With strong, steady arms and hands that would have intimidated a construction worker, she placed the cups on a tray and brought them over to where they were seated. Sousa did not offer candy or cakes to go with her tea, for it was a special brew, one full of promise and bitterness that always sat ill on the back of his throat. Clara grabbed her cup, and Sousa placed a firm, meaty paw over her pale knuckles, halting her.

"You wait. Is not good to be so rushing." Sousa tsked as Clara took the cup anyway the minute her hand was released. "Always with the rushing. You'll rush right into death and not even think twice about it."

"It's better than lying around here, waiting for something exciting to happen," Clara whined. She sipped her tea, though it was clearly a struggle for her not to gulp it in order to get her fortune faster. "All I ever do is go to stupid parties full of stupid people. It's about time something real happened, something I can really get my teeth into. And I've got a plan, so Sousa, you have to tell me how well it's all going to work out because everything, and I mean everything, is riding on it."

Sousa shrugged. "I just say what tea says."

"It has to be more than that," Clara insisted. "I need details, I need names and dates and roads and addresses and…." She gulped back the last of her tea, wincing as it burned her throat. She thrust the teacup at Sousa. "There. Go on. Read me."

Sousa refused to take the cup. She sighed as she sank her large, round frame into the chair opposite them, its legs creaking under her bulky weight. "Rushing, rushing," she muttered. She cast a black rimmed eye on Clara's silent companion, her pencilled in brow raised high on her forehead, like a check mark. "You," she said, as though meeting him for the first time. Her eyes became black slits. "You are so boring. So dull and stupid. You make me tired looking at you."

"You always say this," he reminded her.

"Why is this true? No one is so painfully slow, but you, your life, it is not just open and plain, it is like a legal insurance form. Boring, dull like the dishwater. This is strange, this. It's like you have no future at all, and no past to investigate. Bah! Why bother you, to waste my tea? You leave me nothing but dead leaves."

She groaned and ran her vast, meaty palm across one of her several chins, a bead of sweat captured within it. Clara pushed her teacup towards her, and she flicked a wayward piece of dried tea off of the side of the cup, and pushed it along the inside of her index fingernail. Sousa's divining was always an intensely physical process, her shoulders hunching, her garish lips smacking and always that meaty palm swiping across the bottom of her frog-like face, with thick, burgundy nails scraping along the fat folds of her cheek.

"There is a journey…" she began.

Clara whooped as though she'd been told she won a contest. "I knew it! I knew I was on the right track!"

"You are too rushing," Sousa said, frowning over the cup. She cast Clara a withering look that nearly took all the confidence out of her joy. "There is trouble coming on this trip. It is very far, through many lands you will go…."

"California," Clara blurted out, and he took the news as though she had brutally stabbed him. She cast him a wild, happy grin, a sentiment of happiness that he clearly didn't share. "We're leaving right after this. Right after Sousa gives me her blessing."

"I don't understand," he said. He frowned, trying to piece together the fragments of lies and truths she had told him since they had first met. "You said my target was still here, in Chicago."

"Well, now they aren't. Now they are in California, and you are coming with me, because there's no other way to find them, is there? Look, I know you think I steered you wrong last night, but fact is, I was talking to a copper who had a few too many just before I went out to meet you both. He said he saw a person matching your target's description getting on the train bound for Los Angeles not four hours before the party. I do my homework, I do. You don't have to look at me like that, I'm not fibbing." She turned her attention back to Sousa. "Keep reading. That leaf, that one right there near the bottom, what does it mean? It's captured my eye, and I have to know, it's got to mean something important, right?"

Curious, he stared into the cup, but all he could decipher was that it was cracked and dirty, with a hideous pale blue flowered pattern adorning it. The handle was splintered, and it pinched Clara's fingers when she used it to pick it up.

Sousa shrugged, taking the cup from her. "It is the death. The one I tell you of earlier."

Clara frowned. "What do you mean?"

Sousa fixed her a blackly slit glare. "I don't repeat."

"I don't understand. I'm going on a trip, a long one, to California. I'm going to get my name known in Hollywood and get into the moving pictures, like I've planned. My friend here is coming along for the ride and he makes a fine enough companion, so there's no need for all this talk of doom and gloom and death. How rude, Sousa. I thought better of you than this."

"You think nothing at all of me or anyone," Sousa firmly shot back at her. She got up from her creaky chair with a series of groans and tossed the chipped teacup into the sink. "I tell you your future. You can go now and let an old woman get her rest."

Clara was furious. She clenched her fists, her thin knuckles turning bone white. In his mind, he could hear the click of the blade, and in her eyes was that ever present flash of steel, a glint that cured her disappointment. "You harpy!" she shouted at Sousa. "You fat, ugly old harpy!"

He was worried, because despite her appearance and her strange ways, he did have what might be interpreted as a fondness for Sousa. True, it was more about knowing a familiar body and place in a world that was always fluctuating and changing, a vista of unfamiliarity from one moment to the next. He needn't have been concerned, however, for Sousa was used to these kinds of tantrums from selfish customers, and she knew what to say to ease their shallow consciences. "But there is a man," Sousa said, smiling with sneaky mirth. "A very handsome man. He is a beacon of light in a place of darkness. But beware, lest he steal away more than your heart!"

"A very handsome man," Clara repeated, and her fury instantly morphed into joyful giggling. "Oh, did you hear that? We can head out without a care now, Sousa has cinched it. We're going to California!"

"No," he said. "I'm not."

He waited for the fury she had visited upon Sousa to greet him, but she remained cheerful, blissfully oblivious to his concerns. "I've already packed. You should have heard the way Daddy hollered at me, but it's no matter. The parties around here are boring me, and there's more to this world that some stupid jerk with a gun in his hand and nothing in his pocket. I want to go where the real men are, the ones who know how to recognize beauty in a woman. I want to take a snap at Hollywood, shouldn't be any big deal. I got a name, a good contact, and I know it's real because the one who gave it to me had nothing left to lose for telling me." She snatched at her pearls and brought one of them dangerously close to her ruby lips. "Let's go, the usual way, through Route 66. It's a long road that goes on forever. You'll probably like that."

"No," he said, an edge of desperation riding in his voice.

"Don't be a fusspot."

"You lie to me. Over and over…."

"And you believe me, so get over it."

His frustration reached its peak, and he clenched his host's fists, the strength in them enough to snap the neck of a strong man. "I have wasted enough time with you already."

The pearl spun in her fingers and she clicked it against her front teeth, the grin she gave him insufferable. "You don't remember how good I've been to you," she said. "All those days when you lay weeping on the chapel floor, sure that you weren't able to survive. That first day, you thought I was going to step over your corpse, but oh, no, stupid me. I helped you." She tossed her pearl into her lap. "Fat lot of good that's done me. You're an ungrateful fiend, you are. After all I've done for you, and now you just sit there, moping, saying how you don't want to go on the most amazing trip you could ever experience. All because of your stupid target, and your mission. Well, fat luck on you getting what you want without me. You know I'm the one with the connections. I told you, that copper saw your prize getting on that train. It's California here we come, for you and for me."

He glanced over at Sousa who had no interest in their cryptic conversation, her duty completed, thus the only involvement that remained was her patient waiting for them to leave. The silent request was understood by Clara, who reached into her purse and paid Sousa her usual sum of fifteen cents for the reading. "I got us a car, a real beauty. You're going to like it."

"I don't care about such things," he said. He wanted to lash out, and it took all his willpower not to grasp her neck between his forefinger and thumb and neatly snap it. Let Sousa see it, let his superiors see how far he had fallen since they had dumped him here, with barely a warning as to the perils of this murky, confusing place.

She picked up her small handbag and held it close to her as she sidled past him and opened the apartment door. "Thanks bunches, Sousa," she cheerfully called behind her. Sousa didn't answer, but spit into her sink. When they were finally in the apartment corridor, Sousa slammed the door shut behind them both and bolted the door with three locks.

"I don't get why you're being so difficult about this," Clara said, rolling her eyes in exaggerated drama. "It's not like you're doing anything, and besides, with what happened last night, you need to get as far away from this place as possible."

He stopped short at this. The crumbling, dark, musty smelling hallway took on a new, sinister dimension as he pondered her words. "I did nothing last night," he reminded her. "That was all you."

"So you think," she said, tutting. She swung her arms from side to side as she walked, a cheerful spring to her step that did not at all coincide with his very dark mood. "You were so wasted on motor oil you've forgotten a bit of your history. Shame, really. it was the most interesting thing you ever did."

He pressed against the rib cage, feeling the sharp splinters dig into his pliant essence. "You're lying. I'm nothing like you."

"I don't always lie," she assured him. "And come on, when would I lie about something like that? It's my favourite kind of night, one that ends properly, with me winning in the end. I remember it well, the way you dragged the body to the back of that car, and how easy it was for you to jimmy the trunk. Kind of obvious, I thought, but who am I to argue?"

"It was you," he insisted, the splintered rib digging deep into his consciousness. "You were the murderer. I do no such things."

"Funny how they all say that. I guess I would, too, it's at least worth a shot not going to the gallows, am I right? Do they still hang people here? Isn't that hysterical, I don't rightly know." She laughed at the irony, her pearls dancing against her midriff as she made her way down the back stairs, crumbling walls leaving bits of cement on her palms as she steadied herself. "I know, I shouldn't be so cruel to you about your motor oil problem, especially seeing how I'm a real teetotaller myself these days. I think I'm still drunk!"

"I have only one target," he reminded her. He clenched his host's teeth as he seethed in pain, the ribs now joined by a bruised kidney. "I am meant to find, destroy, and return. That is my goal. Not making you 'happy', not going to California to make it in moving pictures. Target. To be reached. Nothing more."

"Well aren't you the most many layered person I've ever met," she said, dryly. "I don't care about your mission, Mr. One-Dimensional. What I want, despite this little tantrum of yours, is exactly the same as what you want. A resolution to a problem. Your problem is the need for destroying someone, and I can certainly sympathize. But I'm on a building mission, one for myself. I'm dragging my sorry ass life out of this muck and getting rich and famous like I'm supposed to be. And if you stand in the way of that, my own mission, well I guess I'll just have to call you one more silly obstacle I'm going to have to get rid of so I can keep moving."

"You can't threaten me."

"I did. I liked doing it. I think I might do it again sometime." She dangled a set of keys at him as they walked out of a side door and into another alley. He was always visiting alleyways with her, he thought. Like a stray cat rummaging through garbage.

She walked out of the building and into the bright morning sunshine, her arms outstretched towards its warmth in worship. "It's like this every day in California. Not a cloud anywhere, not even in your soul."

"You're sure of that?"

"Always doubting me and calling me a liar. Does that car look like a lie?" It was a streamlined white convertible, the latest model that hugged the open road in glamourous style. Unless it rained, in which case one would simply have to suffer a drowning, which considering his present mood, thunderclouds were forming in his future. He didn't need Sousa to know that.

"How long will it take us?" he asked, resigned to the plan. She was right, of course, he had nothing to wait for here, even if she was lying. His target could be anywhere, and he had to trust that somehow his superiors were right in the method they had chosen. He moved away from the splintered rib and the bruised kidney and filled his borrowed lungs with the gasoline taint of a windy Chicago summer morn.

"Look at this!" she exclaimed, and pulled out a ridiculous looking leather riding hat. She put it on and it hugged her skull close, her large eyes suddenly huge without that shock of bobbed hair to absorb some of the attention of thick kohl. It had wide goggles buckled tightly on top. She looked ready for flight rather than a simple car ride across the country.

He sank behind the steering wheel, the angle hurting his borrowed spleen. He was sure it had sprung a leak since last night. He would need to patch it later, and hopefully before the internal bleeding became so severe he had to pop a hole in his side and release it, like a gory balloon.

He made a face as he placed his hands on the steering wheel. "What is that terrible odour?"

"Frankie," she said, shrugging. She had out her compact and dabbed her nose with powder. "Like I said, it was your idea. Poor guy, it's a bit harsh, I wouldn't have done it, but you insisted. It's a scorcher of a summer morning. He's a real ripe banana in that trunk."