Three Sisters (2 page)

What Cassandra Saw

Hunched like an old toad in her rocking chair, eyes half shut, hands folded in her lap, knees toasting before the stone fireplace, Daisy Perika appears to be asleep. Or dead. She is neither.

Since supper, the Ute tribal elder had hardly stirred, and was very close to dozing—when she heard the patter of feet.

These particular feet belonged to Sarah Frank, the fifteen-year-old Ute-Papago orphan who had lived with Daisy for almost a year, and loved Charlie Moon for as long as she could remember. Having completed her algebra and American-history homework assignments, Sarah switched on Daisy’s television, inserted a blank disc into the DVD’s thin mouth, and set the controls to begin recording at one minute before the hour. The devoted viewer had every single episode of
Cassandra Sees
in her collection.

Daisy did not spend many of her precious remaining hours purchasing what the medium had to offer. On a lonely weekday morning, while the girl was away at school in Ignacio, the Ute elder might watch a talk show for a few minutes before falling asleep, and on a Friday night she would tell Sarah it was “all right if you want to turn on that
Country Music Jamboree
you like so much and watch them silly hillbillies.” Though she would pretend to have no particular interest in the energetic
matukach
entertainment, Daisy waited all week for the high-stepping, foot-stomping clog dancers, thunder-chested yodelers, nimble-fingered guitar pickers, and whoopin’-it-up hoedown fiddlers whose sounds and images traveled (at the speed of light!) all the way from gritty, spit-on-the-sawdusted-floor Texas honky-tonks, pine-studded Arkansas ridges, and mist-shrouded Kentucky hollers—into her cozy parlor. Their merry exuberance would curl Daisy’s mouth into a little possum grin and set the old woman’s shoe toe to tappity-tapping on the floor. But no matter how good the beginning and the middle were, the end was the best part. After all the crooning about Momma, railroad trains, prison, adultery, fornication, drunkenness, theft, lies, slander, and murder were finished, the closing was invariably an old-time gospel song.
Hidden deep in the heart of every sinner is a yearning for God
. Last week, when an ancient, snowy-capped black man had called upon those angels to Swing Low in that Sweet Chariot, tears had dripped from the old woman’s eyes. Daisy was ready to hitch a ride and go arolling up yonder—last stop, that unspeakably lovely mansion her Lord was preparing in His Father’s House. Home at last! It could not come too soon.

Daisy raised her chin, looked over the thin girl’s shoulder. “What’s coming on?”

“Cassandra.”
Sarah was clicking through the satellite channels.

“Oh.”
That’s pretty good
. She turned the rocking chair to face the expensive “entertainment center” Charlie Moon had contributed, along with other furnishings for her new home.

Sarah was perched on a footstool, her face close to the television screen. She would not miss a thing.

Mr. Zig-Zag (Sarah’s spotted cat) padded in from the kitchen, stretched out on the floor beside her, yawned at the flickering picture.

The broadcast began with a sooty-black screen, and an eerie strain of organ music that was the psychic’s trademark. Then, on the dark electronic velvet, a bloodred script was traced by invisible pen: Cassandra Sees.

“Yes!” The girl clapped her hands.

Having had its say, the title bled away. As the last crimson drop fell into an unseen reservoir, the psychic’s all-seeing eye appeared, filling the screen. Iridescent it was, and opalescent—the platter-size iris mimicking a blooming cluster of multicolored petals, turquoise blue, twilight gray, spring-grass green!

That is
so
cool,
Sarah whispered to herself. “But I don’t know how she keeps from blinking.”

The enormous eye faded, Cassandra Spencer’s pale, masklike face appeared. The oval countenance, at once strikingly sinister and hypnotically attractive, was framed in long locks of raven hair, artfully tucked behind her ears. The psychic’s eyes were aglow with terrible secrets, arcane knowledge. They seemed to say:
We not only See; we Know
.

“Oh,” Sarah breathed. “Cassandra just gives me
goose pimples.
” As she held out a skinny arm so Daisy might see the proof of this claim, her frail little frame shuddered with a delicious fear. “I wonder if she’ll talk to a dead person tonight.”

The Ute shaman, who was certain she talked to more ghosts and spirits in a month than this uppity young white woman had encountered in her entire lifetime, offered a “Hmmpf.” But Daisy was leaning ever-so-slightly forward in her chair.

Mr. Zig-Zag, who had his own visions to pursue, drifted off to sleep.

As the psychic uttered her usual greeting, Sarah silently mouthed the words:
Dear friends…welcome to my home.

Her face faded off the screen. A camera panned the walnut-paneled parlor in the star’s Granite Creek mansion, sharing with the audience a cherry cupboard housing delicate bisque figurines of ballerinas on tiptoe, a miniature flock of crystal swans, a cranberry vase that held a single, gold-plated rose. Then, as an unseen technician threw a switch, viewers were transported out of the parlor-studio to a scene in the host’s dining room, where several enraptured guests were seated, smiling at images of themselves on a cluster of video monitors.

“What a bunch of dopey half-wits,” Daisy muttered.
You’d never get me on a dumb show like that.

The psychic’s face appeared again, the lovely lips speaking: “This evening, we deal with the controversial subject of reincarnation. Our special guest is Raman Sajhi, a citizen of India, who is touring the United States to discuss his best-selling new book—
My Five Thousand Lives.
”

Five thousand lives my hind leg!
Daisy snorted at such nonsense.

Camera 3 picked up the turbaned guest’s pleasant face. He responded to his host with a polite, semiprayerful gesture—delicate fingers touched at the tips, a modest bowing of the head.

Daisy Perika eyed the bespectacled foreigner with no little suspicion. “Raymond Soggy don’t look a day over a half-dozen lives to me.”

Sarah giggled.

Mr. Zig-Zag, who still had eight to go, dozed on.

Mr. Sajhi commenced to pitch his book with thumbnail sketches of selected previous lives. In addition to his miserable stint as a convict on Devil’s Island, the poor soul had also done time as a golden carp in a Shanghai pond, an Ethiopian dung beetle, a camel (of no particular ethnicity or distinction), a wealthy rajah’s hunting elephant, and a ferocious female Bengal tiger who had devoured several citizens, including a British subaltern who was a close friend of Mr. Kipling. Though a combination of jet lag, TV appearances, and signings at mall bookstores may have been contributing factors, the author reported that he was tired-to-the-bone from the hard labors of his many incarnations, the current of which was, by his meticulous calculations, appearance number four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.

Mr. Zig-Zag abruptly awakened, gaped his toothy mouth to whine.

During a commercial break, Sarah Frank addressed Daisy Perika: “Do you think people can really come back to live more than one time?” The girl, who had once dreamed of returning as a butterfly, glanced at the cat. “Do you think we could come back as animals?” Before the Ute elder could respond, Sarah asked: “If we could, what kind of animal would you want to be?”

Three questions too many.

Resembling a ruffled old owl, Daisy scowled at the impertinent girl. Which settled the issue.

Cassandra appeared on the screen. “Now we will discuss a particularly fascinating category of spirits—those who return for the sole purpose of communicating an important message to the living.”

Daisy and Sarah watched the psychic introduce a second guest, who provided a fascinating account of how her deceased grandfather had, once upon a certain snowy night in December “nineteen-and-eighty-two,” appeared by her bed and told her where to find a Havana perfectos cigar box stuffed with rare and valuable nineteenth-century coins. The box was there, of course, under the loose floorboard in the smokehouse where the old fellow had stashed it, half full of coins. But that was not all. The mournful specter had also confessed several youthful misdeeds to his astonished granddaughter—including a colorful account of how he had dealt with a Tennessee sharpster who had made a pass at his first wife. Granddad had, so he said, used a scythe to remove the unfortunate fellow’s head from his shoulders. The lady explained to a rapt television audience that this was “very unsettling to hear.” No one in the family had the least notion that Grandpa had been married but once, to Grandma. The fact that he had “killed his man” was of little consequence. “Back in those days in the Ozarks, that was just the way things was.” The guest was about enlarge on how things was back in those days in the Ozarks, when—

With an alarming suddenness, Cassandra dropped her chin.

The psychic’s eyes seemed to be gazing blankly at her knees, which were modestly concealed under a black silk skirt—or, as the many viewers assumed, at something (other than her knees) that they were
not able to see.

“Murder.” This was what Cassandra saw, and what she said.

A hundred thousand viewers (more or less) are holding their breaths.

Let us leave them in that uncomfortable state while we visit another, more sensible
Cassandra Sees
fan, who is breathing approximately twelve times per minute.

We fly over the Cochetopa Hills, the northern neck of the San Luis Valley, skim the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—halt at a location 172 miles east-by-southeast of the TV psychic’s home in Granite Creek. See, down there, that isolated spot glistening in the darkness beside Interstate 25? It is the Silver Dollar Truck Stop, which, in addition to dispensing diesel fuel, provides a large restaurant for hungry truckers—where we shall find our subject.

His rig (tagged by the DEA as the “I-25 Pharmacy”) was parked among some two dozen other long-haulers. The driver, a heavyset ex-con known only as Smitty by his customers from Buffalo, Wyoming, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, was seated at the sixty-foot lunch counter. Having taken delivery of Dinner No. 39, he was applying fork and knife to a hearty supper of meat loaf, mashed potatoes (with brown gravy), and Great Northern beans. Smitty had planned the run from Casper down to Albuquerque so he would be here in the Silver Dollar Restaurant, astraddle his favorite stool, staring goggled-eyed at—as he had told a friendly trucker just this morning during a quick biscuit-and-gravy breakfast in Cheyenne—“the biggest doggone TV screen I’ve ever seen.” Smitty’s taste leaned toward football and
The Simpsons
reruns, but he was to be counted among those Cassandra fans who rarely missed one of the psychic’s weekly appearances. Unbeknownst to Smitty, the “friendly trucker”—who had never driven anything bigger than an F-250—had tailed him south along the interstate, and was—at this very moment—outside. Looking in. Who might this be?

An undercover DEA agent, tailing the trucker in the course of an investigation?

Some kind of stalker-pervert, harmless or otherwise?

Or, try this on for size—a hired gun, employed by another distributor to rub out the competition.

Or even a—But let us dispense with pointless speculations. Soon enough, the sinister presence on the dark side of the window will play out his hand. In the meantime, back to television land.