Telling Fortunes in Phoenix
Chapter Nine

Sara

The day had been long as Sara gave her best. There were sad tales and brave tales and lives of tedium and remorse but Sara tried to show each of them the glimmer of a path through the dark. By evening she was wrung out and lay like a stone in Tent City, paralyzed and immobile, felled by a lucid dream.

She sat across from Fatima who passed her a cup of strong sweet coffee in a tiny cup. They sat together in a Bedouin tent. The goat hair walls were died scarlet, causing the setting sun to stain the interior red as blood. The air, though, was cool and moving and the ladies enjoyed their coffee in comfort.

In the real world her older companion lived in a cream and white apartment in Riyadh. Sara had seen her teacher’s home but the new construction, the vast empty walls and low expansive couches did not suit the old lady as well as this amalgam of favorite elements from her youth. Since they studied and visited in some non-physical sphere, Fatima could furnish their study as she liked and what she liked was the smell of goat-hair canvas, a crackling fire in the brazier and Chanel #5. Throughout the years the two ladies had met here for lessons. Sara relaxed and sipped her coffee, happy to be away from the stinky prison cot on which her real body lay. She was in no hurry to tell the old lady where she was.

“Your mind is very full,” Fatima said. “Shall we speak of your concerns?”

“If you wish.” Sara gave a sigh. “I met a young girl a few weeks ago…” And so, in chronological order, Sara began telling her teacher the steps that had brought her to her current circumstances, her recent activities and visions, Jewel, Maureen Sturgis and the detective. Fatima listened closely, asking the occasional question, until they came to the present with Sara sleeping in the Buckeye temporary holding facility. The coffee was drunk, the story complete. Fatima closed her eyes and leaned back in her comfy chair.

“Jail,” she said. “You are in prison.”

Sara was glad that there were no secrets between them. She breathed a sigh of relief and awaited advice or succor but it did not come. Instead the tent began to morph and the red light changed to white. The smell of cardamom and goat hair disappeared to be replaced by the chalky smell of modern dry-wall, the dimensions changed from round to rectangular. Fatima was now at the head of a long marble table in a hard chair, the high white walls lit in a harsh desert light. The old woman fastened a judicial stare on the younger American.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Sara said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No?” Fatima shielded her eyes. “You are working with slavers.”

“I think someone is selling humans, but I’m not working with them.”

Fatima’s lips thinned. “Sara, I am familiar with slaves and those who sell them. The ones you are working with--“

“Stop saying that!”

“They are very bad people.”

“Absolutely. The worst.”

“People came to your door. You knew that they carried trouble,” Fatima said. “You had only to turn them away. Instead you tried to peek into their lives without becoming involved. They do not exist for your entertainment.”

A door appeared behind the old woman. She rose. “You say to me that spying into other’s hearts is for their own good but your arrogance is the seed of evil.” Fatima opened the door. “You think to fight evil with good, but you are already less honest and more confused in your self-importance.”

The open door exited into a garden full of trees and flowers and birds. “I must leave you,” she said. “I have stayed longer than I should and my teacher will call me to task.” And then she retreated to the garden, closing the door behind her.

“Don’t leave me here.” Sara cried. “Don’t leave me alone here, I need you.” Sara surrendered to depression and remorse, allowing the tears she’d held back all day to escape. The avalanche, once started, escalated into loud hysterical sobs that pulled her from the cold clean room and back into Tent City surrounded by sleeping women in the dark.

“Shut the fuck up,” a nearby voice hissed. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”

Sara shut the fuck up, but began a fierce internal argument with herself.

This is none of my doing. I didn’t invite those people to my house, I didn’t throw myself in jail. I was minding my own business. I was ethical. I didn’t tell Jewel about her father or Maureen about her son.

No, she answered herself, you left Maureen desperate and Jewel to stew.

All right, maybe I handled that badly. But why did they come to me? I can’t help these people!

Stop! she told herself. Okay, Fatima doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. That is her right. But there must be a reason I am being drawn in. Jewel is a good person. She knows something is amiss and she’s trying to help. Maureen is a good person and even though she has no clue at least she knows something is very wrong. Blake is a good person and he’s being pulled in as well. I’m not just involved because of prurient interest.

Sara had spent her life understanding others and giving advice and guidance. Hers was a passive study. Other people made things happen but this had always seemed presumptuous to her; the universe probably knew what it was doing. But wasn’t all this unwanted knowledge a cry for help? Wouldn’t it be presumptuous and cruel to turn away? Well what can I do from this prison? How can I help?

She would have to see. Maybe a Shamanic Journey.

In olden times and probably in the present as well, little tribes and groups had a spiritual leader, someone to see ahead and sometimes intervene to keep the tribe and all its members on the right path. The Shaman.

The Shaman had helpers, power animals, and would journey to confer with them in times of trouble or confusion. At least that was what Sara had read from the little book she’d learned the technique from. Sara herself had never met a Shaman nor had Fatima, but there weren’t really tribes around these days, were there?

Anyway, Sara followed the written instructions. One entered the Middle World through visualizing a crack or hole or cave while listening to a drum beat and while there you would meet a power animal that would thereafter assist you.

Usually Sara would come to a flat plain near a shallow, winding river. There were flat rocks near the water and trees and mountains in the distance and she had met several power animals. It was certainly different from a straight read; the beating drums lent a visceral reality to the experience.

Sara laid back down. She closed her eyes. Imaginary drums filled her head in a steady pounding beat, a wooden stick on stretched parchment, BOOM, boom, boom, boom, BOOM, boom, boom, boom, BOOM, boom, boom, boom. The sound was grounding and perilous, each BOOM reminding her that this was serious business.

When the booming filled her head and she was safe to let it keep up by itself she went to her entrance to the Middle World. Her personal place was a mining shaft in New Mexico, round and thirty feet across, a dangerous pit that she’d never seen into in reality because it had been wisely fenced off by the Forest Service with sturdy cyclone fencing.

Her imaginary body had no trouble making it from Phoenix to the abandoned pit in the Rocky Mountains and she swooped into the hole and went down, down, down to the African plain where her power animals lived.

Giraffe was already running so Sara landed on the slope of her back, feeling the muscles bunching and extending as they made for the horizon. In the distance she saw the ranch where the trafficked victims were collected before being moved on. The sky darkened and Giraffe found the dirt road and slowed to follow a ghost grey van. She and Sara stopped at the edge of the yard when the vehicle came to a stop.

Sara slid off Giraffe. A man, glowing with a sinister light, hobbled out and headed for the rear of the vehicle. His creaky legs warmed up and he’d resumed his usual rangy gait by the time he made it to the rear of the panel truck. He used a key to open the cargo bay and glanced in, shining a flashlight around before stepping away and walking to a house at the other side of the yard with glowing lights.

Sara looked into the dark interior of the van’s hold. Nine bodies lay flaccid, drugged. But the tenth supine form pretended to sleep but was actually alert and terrified. She focused on him.

“Escape. Rescue the others.”

She had not meant to be so peremptory. In her planning, which admittedly was rather vague since she had no idea what she might encounter, she assumed she would make a gentle suggestion but the situation was too fraught.

A little boy scrambled over the unconscious bodies and into the dark surrounding bushes, his heart beating fast and fear radiating off of him in billows.

“I know you are frightened but you are the only one who can help. You are a brave boy.” With these words she cast white light on the child, then added red and gold sparkles of energy and determination to the egg of protection around him. The boy soaked in the sparkles and light like seeds into fallow ground. He was such a good boy.

She remembered that Blake wanted names and dates and locations. Well, the time was now, she was certain, but she had no idea of the location. She hadn’t gotten here in the usual way.

The evil man was returning with a woman. She wore blue jeans and a work shirt and her hair was long and blonde, in a braid that wrapped around her head like a crown. The tall cowboy wore a white Stetson hat. He was a simple read, just a miser who’d stumbled into crime and money and had no real motivation to extricate himself. And she knew, suddenly, that this was Jewel’s father. The cop.

The woman was far more complicated; Sara could not pierce her motivations. Blake had smelled drugs in this case and this queenly monster oozed their scent. She took them herself and was the one that had drugged the bodies lying in the van. Sara looked from the man to the woman. The handsome cowboy looked like a goober next to this gal; she was definitely the brains in the partnership.

Giraffe had moved silently across the yard and was now leaning on Sara. With a start Sara nodded and leapt onto the animal’s back again so they could race back into the day.