Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

short-sightedly, and leer toothiessly, and flutter her bony claws. A nice harmless old squaw, who’d gather the tribe’s children around her (always that hunger for youth!) and tell them legends. But her jaw would still be able to snap like a steel trap, and her clawlike hands would be deft at applying arrow poison, and she wouldn’t really need her eyes because she’d have other ways of seeing things, and oven the bravest warrior would grow nervous if she looked too long in his direction.
    “Those experts at the top table are awfully quiet,” called Gunnison with a laugh. “They must be taking the game very seriously.”
    Witch women, all three of them, engaged in booting their husbands to the top of the tribal hierarchy.
    From the dark doorway at the far end of the room, Totem was peering curiously, as if weighing some similar possibility.
    But Norman could not fit Tansy into the picture. He could visualize physical changes, like frizzing her hair and putting some big rings in her ears and a painted design on her forehead. But he could not picture her as belonging to the same tribe. She persisted in his imagination as a stranger woman, a captive, eyed with suspicion and hate by the rest. Or perhaps a woman of the same tribe, but one who had done something to forfeit the trust of all the other women. A priestess who had violated taboo. A witch who had renounced witchcraft.
    Abruptly his field of vision narrowed to the score pad. Evelyn Sawtelle was idly scribbling stick figures as Mrs. Carr deliberated over a lead. First the stick figure of a man with arms raised and three or four balls above his head, as if he were juggling. Then the stick figure of a queen, indicated by crown and skirt. Then a little tower with battlements. Then an L-shaped thing with a stick figure hanging from it — a gallows. Finally, a crude vehicle — a rectangle with two wheels — bearing down on a man whose arms were extended toward it in fear.
    Just five scribbles. But Norman knew that four of them were connected with a bit of unusual knowledge buried somewhere in his mind. A glance at the exposed dummy gave him the clue.
    Cards.
    But this bit of knowledge was from the ancient history of cards, when the whole deck was drenched with magic, when there was a Knight between the Jack and Queen, when the suits were swords, batons, cups, and money, and when there were twenty-two special tarot, or fortunetelling cards in the pack, of which today only the Joker remained.
    But Evelyn Sawtelle knowing about anything as recondite as tarot cards? Knowing them so well she doodled them? Stupid, affected, conventional Evelyn Sawtelle? It was unthinkable. Yet — four of the tarot cards were the Juggler, the Empress, the Tower, and the Hanged Man.
    Only the fifth stick figure, that of the man and vehicle, did not fit in. Juggernaut? The fanatical, finally cringing victim about to die under the wheels of the vast, trundling idol? That was closer — and chalk one more up to the esoteric scholarship of stupid Evelyn Sawtelle.
    Suddenly it came to him. Himself and a truck. A great big truck. That was the meaning of the fifth stick figure.
    But Evelyn Sawtelle knowing his pet phobia?
    He stared at her. She scratched out the stick figures and looked at him sullenly.
    Mrs. Gunnison leaned forward, lips moving as if she might be counting trump.
    Mrs. Carr smiled, and made her lead. The risen wind began to make the same intermittent roaring sound it had for a moment earlier in the evening.
    Norman suddenly chuckled whistlingly, so that the three women looked at him. Why, what a fool he was! Worrying about witchcraft, when all Evelyn Sawtelle had been doodling was a child playing ball — the child she couldn’t have; a stick queen — herself; a tower — her husband’s office as chairman of the sociology department, or some other and more fundamental potency; a hanged man — Hervey’s impotence (that was an idea!); fearful man and truck — her own sexual