The Gum Thief Read Free

with something. Every moment felt like five o'clock quitting time. Paradise!
    You know how I met Joan? I was coming back from lunch with Alex and Marty. I'd had three glasses of red, and I knew it wouldn't be too smart to show up at the office-it was the tail end of the days when you could still plausibly drink during lunch and not immediately be suspended, and I didn't want to push it-this was my third job in five years. So I pretended I had to pick something up from the dry cleaners. It was a sweater-optional weather day, and the sun came out from behind a cloud and I was standing on the corner of Seymour and Nelson in a wonderful liquid yellowness. I felt like I was being teleported into the sun, and the heat on my skin felt like music. Then the sun went behind the clouds, and I felt like I was locked inside an airliner's bathroom. And then I closed my eyes and opened them again and across the street was a fortune teller.
    What the hey!
    So I walked over, laid down a five and said, "Fill me in."
    The fortune teller certainly wasn't cultivating an aura of mystery. She dressed like her welfare cheque had just arrived and she was off to buy a carton of smokes for her six illegitimate toddlers: sweats; no makeup; a pair of men's brown leather shoes.
    But I still wanted my fortune told. It's a mood you get maybe once a decade, like a thirst, and once you have it, you have to slake it. So I pressed forward. "What can you tell me?"
    She looked at me like I was homework. She grabbed my hand, pressed the meat of my thumb for a few seconds, looked up at me and said, "I see you sitting in a glade, all of the creatures of the forest sitting around you. There's a blue jay on your left palm, a black squirrel on your right - it's dozing-it's resting, it feels completely at peace."
    That's not what I was expecting, but I liked the way the words made the inside of my head feel.
    She looked down at my palm, then back up at me and went on: "You were trouble as a teenager, and you probably pushed your parents too far, and they probably gave you up for lost."
    She was good.
She said, "You were about twenty, and you saw something that scared you into changing your ways. What was it?" "Aren't you supposed to be telling me?" "A car accident." Shit, she was good. "How many people were killed?" she asked. "Four." "Four people-and afterwards you went to your par ents' house. You said to them something along the lines of,
    Mom, Dad, I've seen the error of my ways, and I've decided I no longer want to be the person I was before. I'm going to be someone new now, someone better, somebody I can respect. Your mother cried."
    Traffic and people thrummed around us, but they might as well have been on a TV muted in the background. I didn't know what to say.
    "The thing is," she continued, "you changed only a little bit, and only for a little while. You lacked the courage to follow through on the criminal promise of your teens, and you were too lazy to become a genuinely good person. You wonder why I look at you funny, well, now you know why."
    I was tipsy, so I said, "I know about my past. Tell me about my future."
    She said, "What am I supposed to tell you-that your future's going to be different, or better? I can't, because you're never going to change. You may have a red-haired son and a left-handed daughter. You may be stung by a jellyfish in Mexico and die within an hour. But so what? In your head, you're this neither-here-nor-there person. The experiences won't change you. Who cares?"
    She said, "You think I'm trailer trash, but so? What of it? I have a certain power, but having it doesn't mean I have to embrace it. Most of the time I reject my powers, but today I needed money, and that money is going to come from you. A hundred dollars. Pay me now."

"Why should I?"
"Because otherwise I'll tell you even more things about yourself you'd rather not know. Buy my silence."
    I did.
    She folded up my five twenties and her card table and walked away. Then,