The News of the World by Ron Carlson Page B

have three nickels, or this guy gives in to cholesterol at age forty-eight in a laundromat, no: now I was reading page one news, and I couldn’t stop.
    I tried. I took a job at a carnival in Winston-Salem. There I was Madame Razora, Palmreader, and I could read the palms. The job paid very well, though it was only for ten days. The secret to palm reading, if you want to know, is don’t look at the palm. Touch it with your fingertip, but while you do it look into the center of the person’s eyes. Most of my customers in Winston-Salem are going to outlive me, do better with marriage, and go gray slower, so it wasn’t too depressing. I was surprised to find two women who were going to marry the same man, but I figured they had something, so I never told them.
    But the headlines kept showing for me at night in the trailer I rented. I saw the helicopters burning in the desert, which scared the shit out of me, because I didn’t know what the hell that was and I thought I was finally just having nightmares. And I saw that plane hit the bridge in Washington D.C.
    However, based on something I’d said to a young couple in Winston-Salem about their getting pregnant and having a job change, a man came to see me, the girl’s father, Mr. Edwardo Shepherd, editor in chief of The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World. He was a handsome gray-haired man of about fifty, and he said he wanted a “clairvoyant” for the paper’s annual predictions and zodiac column. Clairvoyant. I laughed at the word. Clear seeing. If it was just that, oh God. But the pay was right and so I went to work.
    I told them about Reagan and the election; I told them about the Russian spaceship breaking apart and where it would hit. He told me easy, lady. Nothing too hard. Those were his words, too hard, and they hit the nail on the head if anything does. He said, “Tell us something about Farrah Fawcett; tell us something about Reverend Moon.” And he started coming to my apartment, this was in Tallahassee where the paper was located, and I saw that he was married, anybody can see that much about any man, but I was shot through with headlines and I needed some comfort. Can I say that?
    I told him about John Lennon, maybe you remember our paper being investigated afterward, but I got a raise. Madame Zelena, Mistress of Doom. That was my byline. As I said, the Zelena part was all his, but “Mistress of Doom,” that’s in the target area all right. I was the Mistress of Doom for almost three years and—like I said—I hit ninety percent or so, missing on all the celebrity stuff right down the line.
    Then Edwardo wanted something big. Circulation was down. They’d moved us out of the counter racks in Seven-Eleven to the newsstand, and advertising pages were off twenty percent. Edwardo was upset because of all that and because he was having to discount even the full-page ads now, ads like LISTEN TO BROTHER RUDY which ran every issue, a full page of small print mainly about how BROTHER RUDY could make a Mason jar full of money appear on your kitchen table. So Edwardo wanted something big. He told me he wanted something about World War III, something with H-Bomb in the headline, something with “millions will die, millions will be hideously deformed.”
    We met in a cafe on Crystal Avenue, an Italian dive called Ferdinand and Isabella’s, and he told me he wanted something about Nuclear Holocaust. I smiled at him and told him Lady Di was going to have twin girls. He said again: “Something about THE BOMB, come on.” I said, “No deal.” He said, “Give me something with a mushroom cloud in it or take a walk.” I looked at him. Men can be ugly sometimes. I told him an airliner was going to take out this entire block before dessert. He stood, as I knew he would. He said, “You can see the future and you won’t tell me. You’re fired, Madame Zelena,