Crime Spells

“Just as light illuminates the dark, so we see that there is a clear distinction between darkness and light, between confusion and clarity,” Dietterich says. “To linger in the light is to know wisdom. To know wisdom is to banish loneliness and doubt and fear. So we are sad as we take leave of this Shabbat and of this soul, which has blessed us by its touch, yet we take comfort in what we have shared and what lies ahead knowing that what is now will be again.”

As the rabbi douses the flame in a small dish of leftover wine and for some reason I do not understand, I close my eyes. Maybe it is because, for the first time, I do feel something leaving. Something is letting go. It is not quite loss, but it’s that same feeling when Sarah touched my face.

Is it-was it-Adam? Has he always been there and it’s only that I’ve never rediscovered my old friend, there all along, because I haven’t known how to look? How to see?

How many other souls are worth knowing?

“Jason.” I open my eyes, and it’s the man to my left. Saul, I think his name is. He extends the basin of wine. “Your turn.”

“Thank you, Saul.” I dip my finger in the wine, close my eyes once more, and dab a drop to each.

The command of the Lord is clear, enlightening to the eyes.

Psalm 19:9.

We live in hope.

And when I open my eyes and pass the basin, Sarah is there.

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It used to be more than a grift. She’d never meant this to be a con. Even now, she could sense her grandfather frowning from the spidered darkness of his grave. “My sweet patoot,” he’d say in that gravelly voice that always brought in a few extra dollars from the middle-aged women in the audience. “You can’t never lose track of which part is from the world of light and which part is from the world of shadow.”

“Yes, sir, pappy,” she whispered.

Bringing in money through the mails was a risky proposition even at the best of times. Postal inspectors took a dim view of mail fraud. The murmured cant by candlelight in a sideshow tent became a felony when she wrote it down and put a five-cent stamp on it.

It wasn’t the money that was interesting.

She lived in a little walk-up on the third floor of a decaying Victorian apartment house on Portland ’s east side. Buses and trucks wheezed in the street by day, railroad cars rumbled down the pavemented sidings by night. It was never silent here, always too damp, nothing like the bright fields of home. There was little to do here except listen to the ache of her bones. If it weren’t for the mail, she’d have cracked like an old chamber pot long before.

The mail was interesting, not the money. It brought questions-the same kind of sad and quiet whispers people had come into her tent with during the years before and during the Depression.

Dear sir can you pleese find my dog Freeway?

How will I find love?

Where did Aunt Irma hide the silver?

She didn’t even mind the sirs. A whole generation had grown up since the war not knowing that women had done anything besides wear sunglasses and capri pants while lounging outside their husbands’ Levittown homes. The ones who were old enough to recall the Depression, and women working swing shift at the factories after that, they preferred to forget, to pretend. Now America had that nice Catholic boy as president, who’d fought the Japanese armed only with perfect teeth and a Cape Cod tan. He was every woman’s dream and every man’s envy. Not like the wrinkled old men who reminded everybody of the bad times.

She took the money in, a few dollars some weeks, more others, because without it she would have been living on dog food in someone’s cellar. But the money was nothing more than the river on which the questions flowed.

This past week there had been a postcard from Dallas, Texas. A question, of course-money came in envelopes.

Why must he die? it said on the back. The handwriting was strong, with a thick marker pen, like a man labeling a box. There was no return address, only the postmark.

She turned it over as she had every day since receiving it. Texas Theatre, Oak Cliff, Dallas, the letters on the front proudly proclaimed. The movie house’s marquee advertised Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener, which made the photo several years old. Somehow she doubted the postcard concerned itself with the passing of an actor.

No clues at all. The question was nonsense, and there was no way to answer it anyway. She tucked the postcard into the frame of her mirror, where she kept the saddest and most puzzling ones. It was past time to fold a few more of the brochures to mail to the people who’d sent actual cash money. The money orders she simply tore up and threw away, though those people also received a brochure for their efforts.

There is magic everywhere in this world. From the voodoo priests and priestesses of New Orleans to the smoldering altars beneath castles and palaces of Nazi-occupied Europe, misguided persons have always come together to call power. Professor Marvel LaCoeur’s patented magical pathways will show you the true secret of magic, safe and effective. Win over friends! Get the girl! Have more money than you’ll ever need!!!

Her favorite time to walk was twilight. That was the hour when the distinction between light and darkness melted to a quiet silvery glow, and anything was possible. Sometimes her grandfather whispered to her then, or even walked a few paces beside her. It was hard for him to reach back from where he had gone, but she knew he loved her.

The city was that way everywhere-the day birds were not quite all sleeping, and the night birds were not quite all out. Mercurys and Buicks fled downtown, heading for the nicer homes in Gresham and Milwaukie, even as the first cab loads of drinkers and louche women were already passing west, into the bars that were just awakening. Sun touched the West Hills, but she could see stars over the mountain.

Her time, her day, when answers would come unbidden to questions she had not yet heard. The challenge in her life was matching them up once again.

Blue shall always be unlucky for you.

Trust her tears far more than you trust your smiles.

Take the job, even if it means moving to Mexico City.

It was like having one piece each out of a hundred different jigsaw puzzles. Still, she kept a pencil stub and a pocket memo pad in her purse. When the answers came, she wrote them down. They always mattered again later.

Papa leaned so close she could smell the cloves and hemp on his breath. He whispered: Because otherwise the boatman would be king.

She hadn’t put her memo pad away yet, but she thought long and hard before she wrote that answer down.

The next day she shuffled off to the post office to mail the three brochures she’d received payment for the previous week, as well as the one money order she’d thrown away. Portland at the end of summer was already crisp. The air was like the first bite of an apple even though the sun was still brass-bright. Nothing like the golden fields of her youth, but little else in life was like her youth either.

There was no one outside the East Portland postal station. She stopped to examine the rhododendrons that struggled in their concrete-lined beds. The season’s last spiders hung on in their optimism, webs strung to catch the straggling flies.

She looked up through the windowpane by the door to see a man in a cheap gray suit looking back at her. Time to go home, she thought, but even as she turned away he stepped out the door.