Chapter 44

(Washington D.C.)

It was comforting to know that I had managed beyond my wildest expectations to transition my accumulated funds from the past into my hot little hands in present day. I must confess that my success in this area was more accidental than carefully planned because I am a sort of helter-skelter person from one day to the next just moving like a random chess piece at the whim of some unknown grand master.

In this instance, it all worked out beautifully well and I now had heaps of available cash deposited in several banks all insured by the good old Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to the maximum limit. In point of fact, this was just my “mad money” used for oddball reasons that generally came up on the spur of the moment.

Of course, I had resigned my previous position because the commute time was ridiculous and in all honesty I never really felt that it was worth my while to spend so much time sitting on my ass following orders from some unknown source. I guess I had done a lot of that in my life and the first chance I had to think for myself was on the journey into the past when I had the advantage of foresight from living one hundred and fifty years into the future.

In a sense, that transparent fact was liberating in and of itself because it germinated inside me like a determined weed giving me strange thoughts about making a similar journey into the past or even into the unknown future to alter the course of events detrimental to improving the human condition. I was not the sort of altruistic person one finds in a fictional account of such foolishness but just a simple everyday man with faults and hidden desires that shaped my personality in ways that were totally out of my control.

I had recently visited a middle-aged woman of some degree of occult ability to see if she could divine an inkling of the reasons for my time-traveling escapades.

She was comfortably ensconced in a grand first floor apartment on the east side with a fantastic view of the East River from her panoramic window on the world.

One of the things that I liked about the East River over the more famous Hudson River was the glorious sunrises that filled one with the wonder of life and how insignificant we mortals are in our own little worlds.

Her name was Madame Natasha and I suppose it was completely bogus unlike her gift of seeking out and revealing future events. She was a bit of a fraud but underneath it all, had this God-given ability to sniff out the truth in ways that most of us understood better at one time. That was a time long ago when we spoke in grunts and actually had little tails just above our backsides like other mammals alive and mobile but minus a soul.

Madame Natasha was in her early forties and liked to wear dresses that went way down because her nasty Aunt constantly reminded her that her knees looked “terrible” in comparison to all other nubile females still able to attract a man. She was not a very sexy person because she suspected most males of evil intent and only spoke to them in the demands of her livelihood to divulge the unknown. In strictest confidence, I will tell you that the story about her knees was sheer bullshit and she had a pair of legs that made my mouth water like I just spied a plate of spare ribs sitting in bar-b-que sauce still warm from the oven.

Please don’t ask me how I got to peek under Madame Natasha’s long dress because a gentleman doesn’t tell about such things, no matter how skilled the interrogators.

She had her daughter as a helper and the tiny young thing couldn’t be a day over twenty. I noticed the girl was somewhat dark-complexed and jumped to a conclusion that she was the sort of white woman that consorted with gentlemen of color as a confirmation that they were without prejudice in a world of multiple biases. I actually could not be further from the truth because she related to me over a nice sushi lunch that she had been raped in the Bronx when she took the trash down to the basement trash bins because the abominable dumb-waiters were so aged they didn’t work properly any longer. She told me that the sight of pretentious tenants making the daily trek into the filthy basement alleyway was a sight to behold. I imagined she included her own participation equally disconcerting. She looked me straight in the eye and told me that the smelly black man had “taken advantage” of her off-balance effort to deposit the trash and had flipped up her long dress and pulled down her undies before she could even mount a reasonable verbal protest. Apparently, the perpetrator was a premature ejaculator and was in and out in a matter of seconds and nine months later, her beloved Tatiana arrived with her vociferous presence and her light chocolate skin. She confided she was Eastern Orthodox and an abortion was never under serious consideration.

In all honesty, young Tatiana was a delightful young girl with a friendly and submissive attitude that impressed me along with her obvious loyalty to her mother.

I did the reading with her mother and she witnessed it silently from the corner.

Sometimes, young Tatiana was so quiet that she blended into the background and you didn’t even notice that she was watching every move that you made.

Natasha asked me,

“Do you have any Indian blood in you?”

I thought that a strange question but I honestly answered that I didn’t think it was a possibility.

“The reason why I ask is I keep seeing you holding up what appears to be human scalps and you are waving a long bloody knife like you are enjoying every minute of it.”

That momentarily shook me because I had a couple of instances where the taking of scalps was expected. Not during the Civil War, of course, but in Indian Territory when the reservation jumping renegades were running amuck and hacking up settlers wherever they found them. It was the only lesson they understood and their culture respected an enemy that robbed them of their place in the after-life without a decent scalp to show their face.