Not for reprint or publication without permission from Carolyn Wall
Carolyn Wall
416 N.W. 92nd Street,
Oklahoma City, OK 73114
(405)848-3096
2334 words
Queen of Hearts
By Carolyn Wall
When he thought about it, Broom Anderson walked fine and upright. When he didn’t think at all, he tended The Countdown and minded his business, favoring a pain in his left knee, a groaning hip, and an old rib injury around back, left of center. And every day of his life, he staved off the dire predictions of Miss Fiona Muffin who read tea leaves and a pack of filthy cards at the end of his bar.
Thing was, over the years, he’d caught himself favoring his rheumatics more and more and attending Fiona less and less -- which only served to remind him that while you could fool some of the people some of the time, you could put nothing over on Fiona Muffin and her Queen of Hearts.
Fiona was short and wide and dark as mud, her hair wound up in a golden rag.
“Ain’t no sin, Broom, honey,” she said on a Friday afternoon, “be to winded from stockin’ the storeroom, or stove up from heftin’ boxes from the cellar. But it is a cryin’ shame for a man of your age not to be wedded and bedded and taken to heart.”
Fiona knew little and talked a lot -- or the other way around, he never could figure out which. Her jaw flapped like a batwing, and he could not understand why his customers loved her. In any case, she was right about this one thing. He was falling apart, and he was doing it alone.
Even in his decrepit state, Broom was entranced by the pretty young girls who came through on Friday and Saturday nights, playing flutes and picking guitars. Their eyes were liquid, and their waists were narrow. Weekend after weekend, they awakened his soul and fed his spirit. Perched on a leggy stool, they played their Emmie Lou Harris imitations and counted the bills in their battered cases. On Sundays they swept out of The Countdown and left him alone. But Liddy was different.
In her long black skirt and serviceable shoes, and with eyes that saw beyond his retinas, she bought a ticket to his heart. On Sundays she drove down to Kingman to stay with a girlfriend and sing in an artsy place called the Reuben on
“I ain’t ever seen a man so mooney-eyed,” Fiona said, licking her thumb and shuffling the cards.
The big clock over his head clucked away the minutes. He opened the door and propped it there with a stick. “Why’nt you get a decent deck of cards, Fiona?” said Broom. “Look a little less like a derelict gypsy. Then maybe you’d have more customers -- and not so much time for commentin’.”
Fiona bristled. “I ain’t no gypsy, old man. And you ain’t one to be talkin’ ‘bout derilects. Lookit you -- whinin’ and pinin’ after that sweet young thing.”
He wrung out his wiping cloth and hung it to dry. “She wouldn’t look at me twice.”
“Well that’s for sure,” she said. “--And just how’d you know that?”
Broom scratched his chin whiskers and watched Liddy on her stool. She ran a comb through her long dark hair and put the comb in her pocket.
“Maybe you oughta just go on and tell her you love her,” said Fiona Muffin, “Give her a chance to speak her mind.”
“More like a chance to drive off in that ol’ silver Chevy. And who could blame her? What pretty young thing would want to be saddled up with this bag of old bones? And anyway, your advice isn’t worth spit.”
“I call ‘em as I roll ‘em.” Fiona looked up from a six of hearts and a black seven. “If you don’t ever turn over a card, old man, you ain’t gonna learn a thing.”
Broom shook his head. “You know something, Fiona? In all the times you’ve read those rat-pack cards for me, you’ve never turned up a single queen.”
“Eight, nine, ten, Jack,” she said, laying them face up on the bar.
“See what I mean? A stacked deck if I ever saw one.”
“You nasty sack of goat cheese,” said Fiona, “you ain’t ever gonna get a Queen, neither. Not with that attitude.”
A couple wandered in and sat, holding hands. Broom brought them menus.
“Could I have a glass of water, Broom?” Liddy called from the stage in the corner, where she was plugging in and turning on and tuning up.
He took it to her, and she thanked him with a coral smile and eyes that were pool-tile blue. Broom hoped Fiona was watching. She was not.
Fiona had a customer, a young guy, hunched and swaying slightly to the slap-slap of a red nine and a pair of aces. “Lord, Lord, young man,” said Fiona Muffin. “Ain’t you just the luckiest one.”
Luck had never visited Broom. It had not got him a job at The Countdown -- nor after eight years of work had it made the down payment on the bar. Back-breaking labor had bought the place, and paid off the twelve barrel tables, and the overhead glasses that clinked and shone and caught the rainbow light.
He loved it all – the roll-down awnings, bathrooms down the hall, and a deep, dark cellar for keeping things cool. Broom thought of the two rooms upstairs as The Hotel Heaven, merely because they were his. So was the dance floor.
“Well sure, Broom,” said Liddy when he asked her to dance. The place was empty. He plugged the juke box and punched in a mild little waltz with a trombone throb that matched the slide of his feet. He took her in his arms. It was like holding something full and throaty, and softly newborn, all at the same time. She hummed under her breath. She smelled like a peach.
“Guess it would be downright rude if I asked you to stay,” he said when the song was done.
“Stay?” she said. “As in – play for your customers? That sort of thing?”
Broom rubbed his aching shoulder. “Not exactly,” he said. “Although I could pay you for Saturdays and Sundays. I was thinking more along the lines of a royal flush.”
“Cards?” she said.
Broom pared away a fingernail. A few customers had come in. At the bar, Fiona Muffin hooked the heels of her crimson pixies on the rung of the stool. Slap slap went the cards.
“I kinda been lookin’ for a Queen of Hearts,” he said. “And I was thinking it might be you.”
“Oh Broom,” she said. “What a touching thing to say.”
Broom had touching in mind, all right, a whole mess of touching. He looked at the floor. “You can’t tell me driving up and down in your car with your guitar and your smile and your hair smelling like
“Well sure, here and there. One had a ring, one called his mama.” She touched her top lip with the tip of her tongue. “Broom, it’s a funny thing about men. I was in
“I won’t,” he said. “If you stay.” He lifted her chin and kissed her coral mouth.
And she let him, and said, “We’ll try it for a week. One week. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” he said.
She took him first to her bed in the Starlite Motel, in a soft play of passion he hadn’t been dealt in a long, long time. She eased his bones with the heat of her body. In the morning, he bought her breakfast at the 66 Truckstop. She spread marmalade on her flapjacks while
He moved her into the other half of his bed in the Hotel Heaven. When she wasn’t playing, she sat at the bar and drank up a lot of coffee. He drank up a lot of her. His eyes were sore from looking at her, his heart beat backup for her guitar. And the customers loved her.
She was soft and warm and breathless as a downdraft. She washed his back in the four-legged tub, easing the ache from his knee and the pain from his rib around back, left of center. She tasted like marmalade to his mouth and honey to his soul. And every night, after she played, she folded up bills in her little green purse.
“Broom,” Liddy said one night when they had shuttered The Countdown and climbed the stairs. They lay wrapped in the sheet, the stars beyond the window giving the sky a real classy look. “You ever been in love? I mean – really?”
He blinked his eyes once. In his tangled bed, he was helpless and hopeless, and paradoxically naked – the only one who had given his heart.
“A few times, I guess,” he said, loosening the sheet and rolling onto his back.
“Nothing serious?”
“Well, you know – one was too fat, one was too thin—“
“One had a ring,” she said softly, “One called her mama—“
“Right.” Broom closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
On Friday morning, she drifted into the kitchen like a shampooed vapor. She took a skillet from a nail and broke two eggs into it. “You ever been to Vegas, Broom?” she said.
He poured coffee for them both and sugared his. “Sure I have. Drove my truck up to the Grand Hotel and stayed on a blackjack table three days.”
“That’s a long time,” she said.
He nodded. “I lost so much they paid for my meals and brought them to me.”
“Didn’t you sleep?”
“Nope. Lost a lot of shut-eye, and I learned several valuable lessons – all of which I seem to have forgotten.”
“Then how do you know you learned them?”
The coffee was hot. It burned his tongue. “They’re coming back to me now,” he said.
She lifted an egg onto a plate, opened the refrigerator and took out butter and marmalade. “Like what?”
Broom dropped bread in the toaster and watched the little coils blaze, and the crumbs of bread darken and dance. “There are laws of chance,” he said. “One-eyed jacks are made for splitting – and a man almost never draws to an inside straight.”
For the Friday nighters, she sang as if her heart was breaking – or maybe it was his. After the crowd went home, she went on singing into the knobby fist of the microphone. Her eyes were closed. At the end of the bar, Fiona Muffin sat contemplating a pair of sevens.
Broom hunched on his stool behind the bar. He polished the keys of the old cash register with a dry dish rag and knew if he got up and locked the door, Liddy would be on the other side.
Then someone else would come, and climb on the stool, and he’d give his heart away to the sound of her voice or the look in her eyes. It was who he was, what he was made of, and maybe the best he could ever do was just to remember that. And maybe the weeks would become shorter, and nights would just be nights, and maybe sometime in the far, far future, he’d be happy just to be alone.
Or maybe not.
Out in the street, it had begun to rain, and low in the west the sky whitened with storm. “You better go,” he said.
Her smile was slow and uncertain. “I’m sorry. You knew I would--“
“I figured.”
She climbed down off her stool and laid her guitar in its case. “You’ll find someone else.”
“Singers and silversmiths,” he said, counting her pay on the bar. “In this town, they’re a dime a dozen.”
She bent his head down and kissed his forehead, once for each line and twice for his pain. Then she got into the silver Chevy and drove away. He leaned in the doorway of The Countdown and rubbed his aching shoulder and watched the puddles refigure on the sidewalk.
“So,” said Fiona Muffin from her stool. “Alone again, old man.”
“I got you, gypsy,” he said, coming around to lean on the bar.
“Even though you got a smart mouth,” she said, “Fiona will shuffle and deal, and tell you the future—“
“Will they say I’m a one-eyed Jack, Fiona? That The Countdown is a real full house even without a queen, is that what they’ll say?”
Fiona put her round, brown eyes on him. She folded her hands under her chin and exhaled through her teeth. “You ask too much. Young girls, pretty girls, fall in love, stay.”
“Something wrong with me, Fiona?”
“More better you fall in love with an old woman, Broom. Codger like you.”
“That’s a wild card, old girl.” He shook his head. “I don’t know—“
“Huh,” she said. “Don’t mean you gonna die tomorrow—“
Broom ran his hand over the bar. “A wild card with long legs, strong legs—“
Fiona sucked on a tooth, shuffled the cards.
“Maybe a coral mouth and eyes that are pool tile blue—“
“Maybe.” Slap, slap, slap went the cards. “Meantime, you got this old gypsy.”
Broom smiled. He leaned over to kiss her soft, dark cheek. And to get a better look at the cards – Jack, Queen, King. Ace.
#