The Deuce of Pentacles
by
ã 1997 S.A. Gorden

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Granny for the great job editing. Couldn't have done it without her. And Linda, Ben and Sheena deserve praise for living in the same house as this crazy writer.


The Opening of the Deck


        In the darkened room, a click is heard. A high intensity desk lamp turns on. A figure shrouded in shadows places a new deck of cards on the table. The words Rider Tarot Deck can easily be read on the box. Bone-white hands, disembodied by an oval of light illuminating only the tabletop, break the seal on the deck. The deck is placed so a card can be seen.
A robed figure stands behind a table with a disk inscribed with a pentagram, a sword, a cup, and a green stick. The figure's right hand is raised with what looks like a small white wand of unknown substance. His left hand is pointing to the ground. Over the figure's head, two circles twisted and joined, forming infinity. The card is arrayed with a garden of flowers that overflow its sides.
        After a pause, the deck is turned over. The cards shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut. The deck is then placed in the middle of the table and the top card is removed and placed face up next to the deck.
A man leaning on a green staff, his head bandaged, appears on its face, and behind him stands a row of eight more green staffs in a barricade. The man has a vaguely lost, melancholy look as he gazes off to his right.
        A noncommittal, "Humfff" comes from the figure cloaked in darkness. The hands reach up, a click, and the room plunges to black.

The Nine of Wands

        His name was James Makinen. He was cleanly dressed but appeared slovenly. His appearance had declined over the last five years when his marriage started to come apart. James' disintegration accelerated when three years ago he had stopped by his old house to pick up his two kids for the weekend and discovered his wife had left for California with both children. After spending all the money he had left after the divorce in court trying to get his kids back, he gave up. His despair and lack of money accounted for most of his disheveled looks. The rest of his looks came mostly from his genetics.
        James had thin, wispy, light caramel-colored hair and slightly tarnished wire-rimmed glasses. His fair skin had a tendency to break out at the least excuse. He had the overweight look of middle age. With his pale skin and pudgy appearance, everyone considered him as sickly. Healthy by current standards was a bronze complexion, broad chest and thin waist, the exact opposite of his looks. No one believed that he had never missed a day of work for sickness in the last ten years. His current health had less to do with care and more to do with depression. After his wife and children left him, he would lay in bed for hours unable to sleep. Six weeks after being served the divorce papers, he had tried to exercise instead of tossing back and forth in bed. After an hour of push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks, he had slept. This went on until he discovered T'ai-Chi and the other forms, or katas, of oriental shadow boxing. Now every night he would spend hours practicing the different forms and designing his own. In complete exhaustion, he would crawl into bed and the oblivion of sleep.
        When the clock's alarm rang in the morning, he would climb into the first clean clothes he found in his closet, check his face in a mirror to see if he had to go to a barber, eat anything he found in the refrigerator that hadn't turned green yet, and drive to the high school to teach. With everything that had happened in his personal life, you would think that he had become a bad teacher. He had been a great teacher, spending hours before and after school to supplement the course work. Now he just put in his time. However, since he had been great, his marking time was better then most people's best.
        Every day Makinen had hall duty during the lunch hour. The school had a large open commons area where the kids would mill about while waiting for their fifth-hour classes to start. He stood on the second floor balcony looking over his right shoulder at a group of girls. Most people thought of teenage girls as pretty and sexy, but although he considered them pretty, he was repulsed. When he was younger, he'd had a large fish tank. The tropical fish would form up in schools. They would swim back and forth through the water ignoring the other fish with their strength of numbers. A fish would dart from the school and nip the fins of a lone fish swimming by itself. As if this was a marking of a victim, the other fish in the school would take a turn harassing the marked fish. It would take days but finally he would find the fish in the tank, floating belly up with a hole eaten halfway through its belly and the school pecking at another fish.
        Today James watched a girl leave her clique, make a remark to a friendless girl, and leave her in tears. He knew the others in the clique sensing blood would soon join in the game. In a weariness that soaked through his bones, he eased himself away from the railing to break up the group. He was too late.
        The new history teacher, Lori Waithe, moved the girls along. She had graduated five years earlier from this same school. James remembered her in the vague way he remembered the hundreds of other former students. But now it was different. She wasn't a member of some girlish clique anymore, but an individual, a woman. She had graduated from the school, the clique, to become an individual to be admired and appreciated. He watched her move, studied her profile. His eyes followed the clean smooth lines of her body until he got to the curve of her butt. That had always been his favorite part of the female anatomy. The only thing he could still remember without anger or remorse about his former wife was tracing the curve of her buttock with his fingertips after lovemaking.
        From the other end of the commons another person watched. The softening look on James's face made it obvious what he was thinking. The watcher followed his gaze to the group of girls. Anger flared. The watcher lusted for one in the group. Since the watcher lusted, so must the teacher on the balcony. The teacher must be destroyed.

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        The door opens. Click. The light is on. The hands seem to be slow and deliberate as they turn over the next card.
An angel pouring water between two cups is the figure on the upside down card.
The shrouded figure gazes for a time at the card before reaching for the light.

Temperance reversed

        People who have not taken heat baths cannot believe how good they feel. The Native Americans consider it a religious experience. Finlanders reject that idea for very practical reasons. If it is religious act, then you can only take the bath at certain times or with certain ceremonies. Finns want their saunas whenever they can.
        James Makinen was sitting in his father's sauna for his regular Saturday night bath. He loved his father's sauna. His father had worked for years to get the size of the room to match the size of the stove. Too large a stove and the heat could get too intense and ruin the tranquility of the bath. Too small and the room could become cold - under 100 degrees - by Finnish standards during the bath. James had only been in the sauna for five minutes barely able to get acclimated for the normal one-hour bath. His father sat next to him. Neither man talked. They let the dry heat soak into their bodies.
        Used to the heat, James poured some water on the top bench to cool it and climbed up to the hotter ceiling temperatures. As the heat penetrated his body, he considered what had happened to him that week. By the time he reviewed in his mind the phone call he placed on Friday to the union lawyer, he had relaxed enough to calmly analyze everything she had said. She had told him that over the last three years, seventeen teachers in the state had formal sexual complaints filed against them. Only two had been proven. Out of the remaining fifteen, five teachers had kept their jobs. Those five districts had not made any public announcements and had let the professionals investigate their cases. Six of the others had won their cases and had received back pay but had not been given their jobs back. The remaining four had won every case in court, but instead of paying any money, the districts had kept appealing the awards. She felt that the remaining four teachers would never receive any back pay. The districts had already paid more in lawyers' fees than the court awards.
        The more James thought about the conversation, the more he became convinced he would not take it anymore. He heard his father fill the dipper at the faucet near the cement floor. He handed his wash cloth to his dad to wet. James covered his face with the cold wet cloth. He heard his father throw the water on the rocks covering the stove. He listened to the rocks sizzle, then felt the hot steam roll down off the ceiling. Needles of heat penetrated his body as the steam transferred its heat. Finally, James had to go to the lower bench. Careful to sit where his feet had been resting so his bottom wouldn't be burnt, he let the heat slowly soak through his body, dropping the blood pressure and relaxing the muscles. In the calm of the heat-induced lethargy, he let his mind plan his moves for the coming week.
        He heard his father wet some cedar boughs and briefly heat them on the rocks. He took one and gently slapped his body. The heat had relaxed his muscles and dropped his blood pressure to close to dangerous levels. The gentle slaps would tighten the muscles and bring the pressure back up.
        James and his father cycled the heat up once more, then doused themselves with cold water and went into the cool dressing room. There they stayed until the steam stopped rising from their bodies. They repeated the process.
        The only conversation between the two men occurred when they were cooling in the dressing room. The heat from the sauna seemed to let each know everything they needed to know from the other. The only two unusual items talked about were Jim's request to borrow a 200-pound nail magnet from his father and his father's request that Jim join them on Sunday morning at their church. His father sensed that his son was in trouble.
        A 200-pound nail magnet didn't weigh 200 pounds but it was capable of lifting a 200-pound weight. They were used for collecting small metal objects such as roofing nails from the ground after re-shingling a roof. His father wondered what Jim would be using it for.

        Tom Peterson was a young pastor. He had been minister of the Chapel of God Church for only a year. He still felt the passion and enthusiasm of life in the Bible College when they talked about The Church fighting the things of the world. What he didn't know and what most people attending the politically active Protestant denominations don't know, is that the fight against the 'world' now being waged by the churches is mostly a creation of their own making. Peterson's bible college teachers knew that competition brought the best out of a group. In sports, the competition is easy to define. But bible colleges taught theology, and for theological competition, you needed an opponent. Any education the religious couldn't control has always been a safe target for a church to compete against. The college instructors taught that the public education system was a religion called secular humanism with the school's educators as the religion's priests and the school buildings as its churches.
        One of Peterson's first memories of his college days was a group of classmates driving to a public school passing out Christian flyers. In that group was a pretty young girl who would soon become his wife. It was in his second year at college during another evangelistic push that he decided that he would become a pastor of a church. He never knew that his church's fight against humanism, Darwinism, secularism and any other newism was just made up so they could have an opponent to compete against in every town and village in this country.
        Tom Peterson, still fresh from the indoctrination of the Bible College, hadn't as yet tempered his thoughts of the schools as churches of secular humanism and of teachers as their priests. When he heard the rumors of a teacher having sexual relations with a high school girl, his anger flared. He pulled his class notes from college. He called the good Christians and asked them to find out who the teacher was. He prayed and prepared for the calling down of hell and damnation.
        Tom stood in front of his congregation. He had heard that the name of the teacher was James Makinen just before the service. He recognized the name. When he asked his deacon, Mr. Shermon, about the name, he was told that he was the son of the older couple who always sat in back. He decided to ask them to come up to the front of the church after the service to pray for their son. The congregation was waiting.
        "The text today will be coming from Second Peter chapter two." Tom waited as the people turned to the pages of their bibles. He loved to hear the rustle of the pages. While he waited, he noticed a few new faces in the congregation, a lone man in back, a young woman in front, and a family in the third row.
        "I will read verses one, fourteen, and fifteen.
        "'But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
        "Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children:
        "Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bo'-sor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness;' Amen!"
        "False teachers!" Peterson yelled. "Bringing damnable heresies!"
        "Teachers! Heretics! Teaching lies to your children. How we came from monkeys. The false prophecies of humanism...." Peterson stamped and yelled and pranced about the altar. He told of teachers denying the Lord. He told of humanism permitting drugs and sex. He told of one teacher in their own school! He had gotten to the section in his sermon where the adulterous teacher had just beguiled the unstable soul of an innocent student when the young woman in front got up and left. Everyone watched her. The man in back and the Makinen couple left next. The young family followed. Unknown to Peterson was that half of his congregation either were teachers or had sons and daughters or mothers and fathers that were. Before he could start his sermon again, the auditorium had emptied. The only ones left were two deacons and their families and an old man in a walker who had to wait for a ride to pick him up.
        In the silence of the nearly empty church, the old man spoke up. "Son, you sure acted dumber than Balaam and not as smart as his ass today. You need to know what you're talking about and who you are talking to before you open your mouth. I guess you now know how many teachers you had in your flock."

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