Gina reads tarot cards on the streets of downtown New Orleans. Amongst the slushy dirt and grime that flows in between cobblestone cracks, she kneels on a bed of soggy blankets. She is dirty, and that’s obvious, but she doesn’t smell bad. She smells like a wet flower, like a robe that used to have perfume on it. She is a short, very tiny little lady, maybe 5’3” or so in heels, and her hair falls in huge knots around her shoulders and down her back, with a few stringy pieces dangling over her eyebrows. Her skin is surprisingly pale for someone who I would assume has been outside in the disastrous heat for her entire life. Her teeth are spread apart, short and square, almost like she planned them that way, for decoration. 

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She is on her knees, in the praying position, when a man walks up to her. He is a businessman, or at least he is dressed like one. He wears a slightly wrinkled navy suit with a loose tie and orange-brown sneakers. He’s alone, and he doesn’t seem to be drunk. It’s loud out here already, and the sun is starting to set, which means the undead armies of impossibly hammered tourists will be descending on this very spot any moment now. 

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This man doesn’t seem to be one of them, though. His face is soft and wide, and he looks like he has Native American blood in him. Thick, black hair parted down the middle to reveal the line of a pink scalp down his skull. He seems gentle, the way he walks so lightly on his feet, stepping down from the curb to see Gina’s face. He’s worried. Maybe he doesn’t know what this place is like. Maybe he thinks this woman is in distress, which she might be, but not in the way he thinks, maybe. Maybe he knows exactly who she is, or what she is, and he’s here to buy a moment of her time, to experience the deliriously wicked craft of tarot reading. Maybe he knows, and he’s been looking for her. 

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She opens her eyes to see his tennis shoes, perched neatly in front of a thousand cans and bits of plastic cup and beads. Someone has stopped here, for her, and now she must put on her best theatrical mask, and do the dance for this man. 

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“Evenin’ mister,” she said, without looking up. “Getcha fortune read?” 

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The man didn’t answer at first. He was counting his money in his pocket, but without anyone noticing, so that he wouldn’t get robbed. He massaged a few bills in his palm and then, taking his hands out of his pockets, clasped them together, as if he was about to sell her a new rental property. 

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“I’m interested, yeah, what’s it cost?” he said. 

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“Ten dollas will get you a full-blown traditional tarot readin’ usin’ the mystical methods not known by any man on this continent.”

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“What about five dollars?” he said. 

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“Five dollas? I don’t nuttin for dat, cher” and she let out a gurgling laugh. “You wan go da Miss Marie Laveau down da street for dat. Five dolla! Ha!”

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All this time, she hadn’t looked up at the man. Just his shoes. Still kneeling, she kept her fingertips down on the ground, like a sprinter. 

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“Fine, ten.”

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He looked around, half expecting a full college fraternity to be laughing at him or a cameraman zooming in on his pathetic face for a live audience. What an idiot, he thought to himself, to be falling for some stupid scheme on the streets, in a place like this. 

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Gina looked up at him, a crocodile-toothed grin, stripped across her face. Her pegged teeth moving across her lips, like rocks in a stream. Her eyes were purplish black, with a murky layer of age stretched across them.

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“What’s ya name, cher?” 

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Gina was born in 1955 in a village named Four Top, Louisiana as Regina Jacqueline Preciouss. She was raised by a sculptor father and an actress mother in a rotten, desperately poor part of the State, so bad that the government had given out grants to dozens of non-profits over the years to help fix it up and save the people of Four Top. But that wasn’t going to happen, not in a place like here. 

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Four Top was a famously empty town, filled with beautiful art. There were flowers planted in mufflers of dead, rusted cars on the side of the road. Old gas stations painted bright pink and yellow, and gardens built out of piles of shoes and tires and mildewed cabinets. 

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There weren’t any schools for hundreds of miles, and even if there were, no one would go to them. The life of many people in Four Top involved low-level survival, stimulants and the wild, mysterious woods surrounding it. 

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The name Four Top came from its only natural landmark, a series of hills that surrounded the outskirts of the place, their pointed peaks encasing the wooded territory in a square. Estuaries flowed through the creaky old cypress trees and floating houses. It was more of a science experiment than a functioning place to live. 

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But that was where Gina lived. She grew up searching for shoes in the puddles and streams near the junkyard part of the village, where piles of debris and little knick knacks were her toys, and where kids would go to rip off their rags and yell and become just another animal in the wild. 

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When you grow up in a place like that, it’s hard to imagine what your life actually is. For most of her time as a kid, Gina didn’t know there were other places. She had two friends, Cane and Oslo, two boys that could barely speak a word of English or any other language. 

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They ran in the abandoned oil fields, punching each other in the stomach and trying not to throw up. They sang little songs and made up games like “hold your breath or hold a snake.” Gina’s dad, a man simply named Fox, was known among the Toppers (as they called themselves) as a master sculptor, his mother having taught him how to collect materials from the earth and harvest its energy for visual beauty, he told Gina one night while they gave their dog, Shake, a haircut. 

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Fox kept a collection of his work in the shed out back, and he’d wake up early in the morning to build. He used old, muddy door hinges and wire hangers and faded red tarp to make what he called “metal men,” contraptions that looked like the outlines of real people, hooked up to springs and strings that made them pop up at random times. He’d hang them around town to fool kids into thinking there was a gang of spies keeping an eye on things. But sometimes they fooled grown-ups, too. 

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One time, one of the old ladies who sold shrimp down at the big creek got spooked by a metal man and fell down into a mud pit. Gina remembered her mama almost took Fox’s head off, but he was bent over wheezing so hard into his lap that he almost peed his pants.

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When Gina was 16, a man came into town who she’d never seen before. He was tall and freckled with fiery red hair and a bushy red beard that curled down into his chest. He wore a bright orange vest and drove in on a truck with about eight wheels on it. Her ma had said he looked like something called a “viking.” He had come to tell them that they needed to leave, that this place wasn’t safe for the citizens of Four Top anymore because of the oil that ran through the veins of the earth below. He got into it with Fox, the two men yelling at each other from across their front yard. 

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Gina’s mother was a thin, wiley haired woman named Esther. She had been born rich, Fox told Gina a few times when her parents had been arguing. “That’s why she don’t know nothin’ bout livin’ out here like normal people.” 

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Esther had come from wealth, and Four Top had been her escape. When she had finished high school, she was given private acting lessons by theater professor and Broadway alum Leon Harlow. Leon taught her how to channel personas, how to listen and react, how to suffer on stage and feel the synthetic warmth of a rehearsed public affair. She spent three years under Leon, losing herself in the work, becoming other people over and over again. 

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She met Fox at an arts festival in Bastion, Mississippi. He was handsome and powerful, with striking soft green eyes and a bellowing wildebeest laugh. He was exhibiting a startling piece of sculpture called “Dawn Forever” - a brilliant silver orb floating by an invisible fishing line hoisted in the middle of a giant, flapping auburn parachute. They stared at each other through the reflection of the orb, laughing for no reason at all.

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Esther was forever an actress, and she rehearsed for plays all around their house. The hard part about growing up around someone like that is that you can’t tell the difference between them acting and them being a real person. Gina would walk in on her mother cursing at the wall or at one of her father’s sculptures. She would whisper things to herself that felt too strange to be real, even though there was no one watching her. 

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Esther’s performances became scarier and more life-like. She sat by the window in their small, crumbling home, drinking sour wine and quoting lines from plays that Gina had never heard of before. 

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After the viking man had come and stirred everything up, Gina asked her mom what they were going to do. 

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“If you want to leave, leave,” she said. She was lying on the floor, her eyes closed. “This place used to be something else, Regina. We used to dance and laugh and sing so that our voices echoed across the water. I came here because I wanted to be free, you see. I could’ve moved on to Memphis or Chicago and made it on stage. I should’ve left Fox and this pile of sticks before I had you, so you could have a chance.” 

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“Mama, I like Four Top. We got a good life here, don’t we?” 

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Esther sat up and looked right through Gina’s skull, out into the open air. 

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“This place gonna burn like all the rest of it. I guess it had to come to an end sometime. You can’t be truly free in this life unless you give up everything, and then you got nothin’.”

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Over the next several years, things got worse in Four Top. The water kept rising, and with it the clear, rainbow film of oil springing up out of the earth like a leak. When it rained, black sludge slid in through the front door and up from the surrounding water that engulfed everything into bedrooms and washrooms and kitchens. The smallest kids called it the Big Black Snake.

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It got so bad that, after one particularly violent rainstorm, a bunch of Toppers packed up and left, piling up what little they had onto carts and little puttering cars if they had them and made the exodus to elsewhere. The empty place became emptier overnight. 

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That same morning, when half of the world vanished, Gina woke up to her mother’s blood curdling screeching. She was out in the back, near Fox’s workroom. Gina ran in, wading through the flooded floors and pieces of furniture, to find Esther pulling Fox’s body from the black water, his sculptures floating all around him. 

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Gina and her mother left Four Top in search of a new home. Where does a former amateur actress go? Where is the money in a skillset that had never been tested nor witnessed by anyone except an empty home? 

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They rode into New Orleans on the hull of an oyster boat, sitting on top of one suitcase each. Gina carried a deck of cards with her, having learned a few tricks from a man in town a while back. She flipped and tossed them in the air, catching them, turning them, flicking their ears and shuffling in a whirl. She’d been practicing, and she figured she could make a few bucks on the corners in New Orleans if she tried hard enough. If she could make someone believe, just for a second, that this wasn’t what it was and they weren’t who they were.

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