The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  “Those little biscuits of pressed-together flakes?”

  “Indeed I do.” She paused and squinted at him. “Were you a crusher or a non-crusher?”

  “A non-crusher. Absolutely. The only way to do it was to lean them against the sides of the bowl, so that half of them were out of the milk, like you were saying before, then skive off sections with a spoon so that you got a little bit of the dry flakes with the rest. There was always a heap of soggy flakes in the bottom, of course, but that couldn’t be helped. Have you, by any chance, come across Weetabix?”

  “Not in years,” she said, remembering. “I ate them in London, when I was feeling better. I used to travel a good bit, alas. That’s the problem with being bedridden. The world isn’t your oyster any longer.”

  “Well,” said Andrew, “it happens that I’ve got a line on some Weetabix. For the cafe. My friend Pickett is driving them down from Canada. I think I can keep you supplied, actually.”

  “I’d like that. A person has so few surprises nowadays, so few little comforts.”

  “It must be rotten,” said Andrew. “I don’t at all mean to be nosey, Aunt, and you can tell me to mind my own business, but I’ve never entirely understood what it was that ailed you. It must be something fairly grim, to keep you holed up like that.”

  She shook her head, staring out toward the kitchen door. “It’s merely a cross,” she said euphemistically, “that I’ve had to bear.”

  “I see,” said Andrew, who actually saw nothing at all. He decided not to press the issue, though, just in case there was nothing, really, to see, or in case it was some sort of vaguely indefinable female trouble that he didn’t want to hear about anyway. “How did the chocolates agree with you?”

  “They were quite moderately nice, thank you. You say your new chef made them?”

  Andrew blinked at her. Lies seemed to have a way of perpetuating themselves. He was stricken with the urge to haul out his wallet and give Aunt Naomi the leftover fourteen hundred dollars and to admit everything. He gasped instead and grinned and nodded, and just then Rose walked in, squinting in the light, and saved him. “Well!” he said, standing up. It was awfully good to see Rose all of a sudden, and not only because her arrival clipped off the French chef discussion. It was a chance to make amends. “Bowl of cereal?”

  She looked at the table, winked pleasantly at Aunt Naomi, and said, “Yes, I believe so. That looks awfully good.”

  Andrew scrambled around after another bowl and spoon. Anticipating her, he picked up the box of Grapenuts and inclined his head at it. She smiled and nodded, yawning and putting her hand over her mouth. “Aunt Naomi and I have just been discussing the mysteries of breakfast cereals.” said Andrew.

  “She’s something of an authority.”

  They ate in silence for a moment, and there was no sound but the scraping of bowls. A cat wandered in just then, looking around. Andrew bent down to pet it. He laid his cereal bowl on the linoleum floor. The cereal was gone, but it was still half full of sweetened milk. The cat sniffed it and then set in to lap it up, pausing now and then to look around, as if wondering why it was he hadn’t made this a regular practice long ago.

  “I’m finished,” said Aunt Naomi, standing up and leaning on her cane. She looked dangerously thin, with sharp cheekbones and an aristocratic face that made it clear she was once frighteningly handsome. Andrew was struck with her resemblance to Rose. Both of them were tall and patrician, as if they’d come from some royal family in the mountains of Bohemia. But whereas Naomi was polished and prim, Rose was slightly disheveled and earthy. Taken together like this, they made Andrew feel just a little bit like a bumpkin.

  “This has been delightful,” Aunt Naomi continued. “Perhaps we’ll meet again like this. I’m feeling very much better this evening. Better than I’ve felt in thirty years. It’s as if I’ve had a fever for years and it’s finally broken. Good night, Rosannah, Andrew.” And with that she hobbled away, shaking her head at Rose’s offer to help her up the stairs. Rose let her go.

  “Time for bed, don’t you think?” she asked, smiling at Andrew. “You’ve had a tiring day.”

  Andrew shrugged. That was the truth. “So have you,” he said.

  “That’s why I’ve been sleeping. You’ve been wearing yourself out, wrestling with things. Quit thinking so much. Sleep more. Why don’t you go fishing more often? Do you remember when we used to get up in the morning and be out on the pier at dawn? Why don’t we do that any more?”

  “Not tomorrow, you don’t mean. Not at dawn?”

  “No, not tomorrow. But sometime.”

  “Of course,” said Andrew. “I didn’t think you liked that sort of thing anymore.”

  “Quit thinking, then, as I said. It’s not doing you any good. You’re full of anticipation—worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and probably won’t. You’re half-wornout just getting ready to dodge phantoms. You don’t have to dodge me. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Andrew mumbled, unable to say anything more. He did know it, too. What he didn’t know was why he so often failed to remember it.

  “You’re probably right.” He stood up and cleared away the dishes, running water into them and stacking them in the sink. “Look,” he said, “paper towels. I’m being good.” And he yanked two towels off the roll, dried his hands, and threw them into the trash. Rose shook her head, giving him a mock-serious look.

  He was frightfully tired all of a sudden. It had been a long day. With Rose following, he wandered into the library to turn out the reading lamp. On an impulse, he read her a bit out of his book, and she took the book from him and read a little more to herself. Then she shelved the book and switched off the lamp, and the two of them went up to bed.

  BOOK II

  Reason Not The Need

  “Oh, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous.”

  William Shakespeare

  The Tragedy of King Lear

  SIX

  “Let James rejoice with the Haddock, who brought the piece of money to the Lord and Peter.”

  Christopher Smart

  “Jubilate Agno”

  ALL IN ALL, the changes in Vancouver appealed to him—the ruination of Gastown especially. Every second shop was littered with tourist goods, with ceramic dolls and souvenir plates, with idiot wood carvings of non-existent totem poles and with pot metal ferry boats—the china-hutch dreams of travelers who preferred a homogenized, cleaned-up waterfront to what had been the dark and gritty reality of the place. Jules Pennyman was indifferent to the place itself, except that in general he preferred a sterilized world with the wrinkles ironed out of it. The deadening, prefabricated emptiness of the new tourist-appealing waterfront was just the sort of thing he approved of. It had become a place almost without spirit, a shallow place of surfaces and mirrors. Although some of the old shops were left—a few bookstores and bars—they’d be modernized and sanitized in time, too, and the sooner the better.

  His meeting with August Pfennig had been interesting. Pennyman hadn’t wasted words; he’d finished his dealings with Pfennig and slipped away, the whole business reminiscent of his meeting with Aureus in Jerusalem. He had driven south, boarded a ferry, and now had stopped at Vashon Island with about an hour to spare before the outward-bound ferry departed for Seattle. His flight left Seattle/Tacoma in four hours.

  Fifty yards away, at the base of a hill, sat his rented limousine, its driver polishing the dust from the fenders with a rag. Pennyman sat on his unfolded handkerchief atop a step stool outside the rusty, white-painted metal shed that passed for a gas station. There were two pumps anchored in dirty asphalt, and beyond the asphalt was forest and more forest, with here and there a house hidden in the trees. It was too idyllic—all the greenery and outdoorsy atmosphere of the place, but its lonesome silence was attractive, empty and cold as it was and devoid of human illusion. Away behind him stretched Puget Sound, the gray and shifting home of pilot whales
and porpoise and octopi. There was too much life beneath the surface of the sea to satisfy Pennyman. He could barely stand thinking about it.

  The Cascades, snowcapped and stretching away south toward Oregon, were what the common man would call majestic and sublime. Pennyman didn’t believe in such things; he despised the tendency of stupid people to want to turn dirt and rock into something more than it was. His shoes were murdering his feet, and he’d run out of Pepto-Bismol on the ferry. His throat was full of acid. This morning his hair seemed to have gotten back some of its life. It had begun to fall out in clumps, just before he’d paid his visit to Adams and then traded the carp for another bottle of the elixir. It hadn’t seemed to have the same restorative effect on his feet, though. And of course it wouldn’t have. He didn’t dare remove his shoes, although it felt as if there were a rock in each, jammed in against his toes. It was as if his shoes were three sizes too small now and shoved onto the wrong feet. He thought he knew why.

  He looked at his watch. It wouldn’t do to miss his plane. There was no use exciting suspicions among the members of his new-found family in California—Rose especially. He rather liked the look of her, and there was a certain satisfaction in using her to torment her idiot husband. Alone, Andrew was too easy a mark; there was more sport in bringing the whole family down together.

  Someone was coming from up the road. It was the gas station attendant and the boy. The boy had been the only witness to the sinking of a rowboat and the drowning of an old man, whom Pennyman knew to be a bearded Caretaker named Simon Denarius. Pfennig had told him that much before they’d parted company.

  There had been a trifling little article in yesterday’s Tribune. Pennyman would have missed it, except that Pfennig had circled it in red ink, and left the newspaper laid open on the countertop in his shop. There was damn-all Pennyman could do about it now, of course, except to make certain. A fish had been caught, according to the article, fouled in a drag net in Puget Sound. It had been enormous—the few eyewitnesses had agreed to that. It might have been a whale, they supposed, except that it was impossibly large and was coruscated with undersea life, as if it wore a thousand years of coral polyps and hydra and sea fans and blue-green algae—a deep-ocean coat of many colors.

  They had towed it to Vashon Island and cut it open, only to find another fish in its vast stomach, and then another fish in its stomach and yet another and another, like a set of dwindling, Peruvian gourd dolls. Out of the stomach of that last fish—so the newspaper article read—they’d taken an old silver coin. Early the next morning the coin was bought for an unlikely sum by an old man with a vast beard like an Old Testament prophet, who’d come in out of the fog on the Seattle ferry. Directly afterward he’d rented a rowboat and gone fishing. That was the end of Simon Denarius.

  The boy who finally stood goggling in front of Pennyman had a baseball cap cocked around sideways and pulled down over one ear. His jeans were torn out at the knees, and there were dirty, candy-stained smears around his leering mouth and down his chin. He chewed moodily on something—his tongue, maybe, or a half-dozen sticks of gum wadded together. Dull wasn’t the word for his eyes; vacant was better. Probably inbred, Pennyman thought, repelled by the boy, who might have been eight. Pennyman shivered inadvertently and a wash of acid churned up into his throat. Children in general were intolerable, but a filthy, gum-chewing urchin like this was an argument for something. A hundred and fifty years ago he might have been crippled and set to begging, but in the modern world he was merely useless, a bit of filth. Pennyman smiled at him. “So you saw the big fish, did you?”

  “I ain’t saying nothing.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I ain’t saying I ain’t, but I ain’t saying I am, neither.”

  The gas station attendant grinned stupidly. “That’s it, Jimmy,” he said, nodding and blinking his eyes. “What’d I tell you?”

  The boy looked up at Pennyman, screwing his eyes half-shut, and spit between his teeth at the ground, the result landing on his own foot. “How much will you pay me? If you don’t pay, I ain’t telling you nothing.”

  “Pay is it!” laughed Pennyman, pretending to be vastly amused. “This is a surprise.”

  “It ain’t no damn surprise,” said the gas station man, running a greasy hand through his hair. “This is business. The boy got a living to earn, ain’t that right, Jimmy?”

  “Yep,” said Jimmy, and he chewed his gum and squinted. “Maybe I see the old man go out, maybe I was asleep, maybe you can kiss my ass.”

  “How much do you want?” said Pennyman flatly. He’d had enough of both of them.

  “Soak him, Jimmy!” said the attendant, and he slapped Pennyman on the shoulder as he said it, as if Pennyman would especially appreciate it.

  Pennyman recoiled in horror, in sudden revulsion, as if he were a slug curling away from a droplet of lye or as if he’d discovered a rat’s nest in a clothes closet. He flailed at the sleeve of his white coat, which was smeared with dirty oil from the man’s hand.

  The attendant grinned at him. “Sorry, pop,” he said, wiping his hands on his pants as if to make amends. “Jumpy bastard, ain’t you?”

  “Talk first,” croaked Pennyman, pulling forty dollars out of his wallet.

  Jimmy stared at it with faint loathing on his little-boy face. “That ain’t shit,” he said.

  Pennyman started to speak, but stopped himself. His chauffeur lounged against the newly polished fender, talking to two men in overalls, one of whom waved happily back up toward the gas station and shouted something that sounded like, “Ream ’im, Gus!” The gas station man smiled wider. “That’s me,” he said, nodding. “Gus.” He held a tire iron in his right hand and slapped it against his left.

  “What do you got in your shoe?” asked Jimmy, blowing an enormous bubble that popped across his nose and chin. He plucked the gum out of his mouth, rolled it in his dirty hands, then, using it as stickum, tugged the glued-on gum off his face.

  “In my shoe?” asked Pennyman, suddenly horrified.

  Gus said, “He means give him all you got. And if you got any in your shoe, cough it up. We ain’t a-going to talk to the whole world. First it was the newspaper, then yesterday a guy name of ‘Fence post’ or something who come all the way up from L.A. in a beat-up Chevy. Burnt oil like a fry pan. He give Jimmy fifty bucks, and here’s a cheap-ass slick like you waving two twenties. This ain’t the Salvation Army, Holmes. Empty it out.”

  “That’s right,” Jimmy said. “This ain’t the Army.”

  Pennyman sighed, trying to contain himself. He couldn’t afford to be beaten with a tire iron. He couldn’t afford to miss his plane. He couldn’t afford to think that the limousine driver would do a damn thing to help him. In fact, all he could be sure of was that the two men talking to the driver were doing something more than passing the time of day. He angled his open wallet at Gus and Jimmy and pulled out all the visible money inside—almost three hundred dollars altogether.

  Gus yanked it out of his hand, then snatched up the wallet itself, pulling out bank cards and papers and dropping them onto the asphalt. Pennyman let them lie there. If it had been within his power, he would have killed both of them then and there. They found a folded hundred dollar bill hidden under a flap, and Gus said, “Look-a here,” and nodded down at Jimmy, who in one swift movement kicked Pennyman in the knee, then dodged in around behind Gus, who cocked his head on the side and gave Pennyman a don’t-you-try-nothing stare.

  Pennyman shook with rage, biting his tongue until it bled, thinking that he’d be back for a visit. Soon. When he was immune, when all the coins were his and he could do as he pleased. He forced a grin, trying to look as if he’d come up against better men in his life and laughed at them, too. “You’ve got it all,” he said. “Now what about the old man and the coin? What about the coin?”

  “He was nuts,” said Jimmy. “Sewed that coin up in the belly of one of them fish, rented a boat down at the dock from Bill Nayler, and rowed out
onto the Sound, trolling with a big old marlin rig and using the fish for bait. Set out there for half an hour burnin’ crap in a bowl. I heard him singin’ to himself. Then this thing come up out o’ the ocean and ate him up, boat too, like in Pinochio. I got that movie on video. Same fish, I suppose.”

  “You think the boy’s lyin’ to you,” said Gus flatly, making it a statement rather than a question. “Goddamn rich bastard driving down here in a stinking limo. Ain’t you a ungrateful …”

  But Pennyman had turned to go, walking stiffly across the weedy asphalt toward the limousine. In fact, he didn’t disbelieve it at all. It was just the sort of thing he expected—and half-feared. He wasn’t sure what it meant. He anticipated a tap on the shoulder at any moment, Gus’s hand spinning him around, a greasy shove on the back. He wouldn’t travel again without carrying a gun. But there was nothing except wild laughter and the blubbering rip of a tremendous raspberry—probably the high-spirited work of Jimmy. Then a credit card zinged past his ear. There was the sound of small feet running. He stiffened up, ready for a blow, just as a hand shoved him on the back. It was the push of a small hand—Jimmy’s hand, no doubt.

  Pennyman stumbled forward, caught himself, and strode on. He wouldn’t turn around. They wanted him to turn around. He bent into the limousine and ordered the driver to back out and go. He settled into the seat, and then, thinking for the first time about the man from L.A. with fifty dollars to spend, he bent forward to loosen his shoelaces. That was when he felt Jimmy’s wad of gum stuck onto the back of his coat, stretching away from where it had glued itself to the upholstery.

  The sunlit fog was white instead of gray—as if Andrew were sitting in a house among the clouds. It seemed to be thickening, though, as the morning wore on, and there wasn’t a bit of a breeze. Everything was wet—sidewalks, tree trunks, roof shingles, the windshield of the Metropolitan. Andrew sat in his car, idly working the wipers and watching the street.