The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  He set the bottle down, recapped his flask, and put it away. He was torn between hauling open drawers and getting the hell out. What might he find there? Anything at all; that was the answer. It was odds-on that there was something incriminating in Pennyman’s goods—some telling affidavit, some revealing letter, a photograph, a recipe for brewing up poisons out of blowfish. It was tempting, but far too dangerous. He’d be back—when it was safer and he had more time. He’d bring Pickett along and do the job right; one of them to rifle Pennyman’s goods and the other to keep watch.

  He shined the penlight once more around the room, but the tiny beam wasn’t enough to reveal anything telling. One bit of real information; that’s all he asked for. The elixir was well and good, but what could it reveal? That it had been extracted from a carp? He already knew that much, or at least suspected it.

  He turned to the curtain across the bed, reached up and grabbed it below its wooden rings, and slid it open in a rush.

  Mrs. Gummidge lay there, asleep.

  Andrew shouted, hoarse and silent as if in a dream. He jammed his fist partly into his mouth and reeled back into the desk, paralyzed with heart-hammering fear and flinging his penlight away onto the floor. It blinked out when it hit, and he scrabbled after it, down onto his hands and knees. It had rolled under the chair. He flailed for it, looking back over his shoulder, certain now that Mrs. Gummidge was dead. He couldn’t bear to have his back turned to her.

  He twisted around and stood up, abandoning the flashlight and stepping toward the door in long, silent strides, squinting at Mrs. Gummidge and breathing through clenched teeth. He paused there for a moment. If she was dead he’d have to take action … Steeling himself, he squinted at her, lying there in the shadow of the alcove, stiff and awful like an old-woman doll. She was breathing, though. And she stirred just a little.

  It struck him suddenly that it wasn’t Mrs. Gummidge at all, but was Pennyman in a Mrs. Gummidge mask, and the thought propelled his hand toward the doorknob like a shot out of a sling. But that was madness, and he told himself so as he whipped the door back, stepped out into the hallway, and threw himself past the waiting cat and nearly head-first down the stairs. Straight into the kitchen he went and out into the bar. He poured a shaky drink out of the scotch bottle, and then for reasons he couldn’t define he slipped out through the street door into the night air, striding around and into the backyard and then into the garage, where he set the scotch onto the bench and then held onto the bench himself, breathing like an engine.

  He stood just so for minutes, not daring to turn on the light. All the old night fears of his childhood had rushed back in upon him. Mrs. Gummidge’s curl-encircled face had been horrible. She’d nearly gorgonized him. He shuddered and drained his glass, listening in anticipation for the sounds of pursuit. He could picture Mrs. Gummidge coming out through the back door like a wraith, like Lady Macbeth, drifting toward him through the night air with bloody hands and a loathsome automaton grin on her face. He shuddered again, cursing himself for not having hidden a bottle of scotch somewhere in the garage. Minutes passed and his breathing leveled out. It was cold. The concrete floor felt frozen through his socks. There was no sound of pursuit—no lights blinking on or back doors whispering shut. What he wanted more than anything, suddenly, was to go to bed. Rose’s company, even if she was asleep, was worth a fortune to him.

  The next day, Andrew was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the library when Pennyman came home. Andrew was happy to see him. It was late in the afternoon, and the mail had dropped through the slot just a half hour earlier. The note was there.

  Luckily, it had been beaten up in transit, no doubt having been routed through the downtown station, and seemingly used as a coffee cup coaster for a day or two and then trodden on before delivery. It had become a happy mess of wrinkles and dirty Scotch tape, of unidentifiable stains and childish, semi-literate lettering.

  Andrew had avoided Mrs. Gummidge most of the day, but she’d gone about her business as if she’d no idea that Andrew had come across her sleeping in Pennyman’s bed. In fact, she seemed weirdly high-spirited, winking at him once in an appallingly suggestive way. Andrew could hardly accuse her of being in the room, but in the cold light of day he’d begun to generate theories to explain things. It seemed fairly likely that, if nothing else, Pennyman and Mrs. Gummidge were tolerably familiar with each other, that they’d been carrying on in secret. There was nothing he could do about his suspicions except dwell on them, and he had been engaged in doing just that when in had come Pennyman, through the door, almost on the heels of the mailman.

  Pennyman was carrying his coat, folded over his arm. He looked particularly proud of himself; he had almost a youthful, damn-all appearance to him, as if he’d just finished off a half-bottle of wine and the world was a rosy place. The sight of him in such a state would normally have made Andrew seethe, but given the circumstances, the arrival of the anonymous letter and all … Andrew looked up and winked and said that Pennyman looked surprisingly well today, in such a tone as implied that on most days Pennyman looked uncommonly miserable and tired. Then Andrew began to whistle the tootling little melody from “Steamboat Willie,” and pretended to read his book while actually watching Pennyman sort through the mail and willing him to open the note then and there and not carry it away to his room.

  Pennyman picked it up and peered at it. Then he thrust it away at arm’s length and cocked his head, wondering at it with what seemed like vague loathing, as if he’d supposed at first it were a twig and then discovered that actually it was a cleverly camouflaged insect. He looked up at Andrew, but Andrew was reading harmlessly, swept up in his book and with a pencil in his hand. Pennyman produced a pocketknife and slit the envelope open, holding it suspiciously now between his thumb and forefinger. He peered inside, removed the folded message, and flattened it out. Andrew looked out over the top of his book, watching Pennyman’s eyes sweep back and forth across the note. He read it and then read it again, uncomprehending. He blinked at it, reading it once more, his lips moving this time as if he were concentrating furiously, thinking it to be in code, perhaps, and trying to unscramble it, to make sense out of nonsense.

  “Something wrong?” Andrew asked innocently, sitting up straighter in his chair as if ready to come to Pennyman’s assistance.

  “What?” said Pennyman. “No.”

  “Not bad news, I hope?”

  “Not at all. It’s nothing at all.”

  Andrew shrugged, implying that it was none of his business unless Pennyman wanted to make it so. “You seemed to go pale there for a moment. Not feeling under the weather are you? Sit down for a moment.”

  Pennyman’s face seemed to stiffen into something resembling the face of a skull, and he looked at Andrew with such a rictus of suppressed fury that a wave of cold fear washed down along Andrew’s spine, and for a moment he wished to heaven he hadn’t sent the note at all. Then the moment passed and Pennyman relaxed just a little, gaining control of himself. “I’m feeling very fit, thank you. I have no desire to sit down. The contents of this letter, I believe, are none of your concern.” And with that he gave the missive one last glance and refolded it—neatly this time—and slid it back into the envelope. Then he looked up suddenly at Andrew again, his expression having changed once more. He seemed to be studying the episode, seeing it and Andrew both, perhaps, in a new light.

  Andrew stretched his face into a look of indifferent resignation, shrugged, and said, “Sorry. None of my business. You’re right. Didn’t mean to butt in. You seemed almost helpless there for a moment, though, and … Well …” He waved the whole incident away, trying to give the impression that he would forget about it, that he had already forgotten about it, that he, certainly, wouldn’t be the cause of Pennyman’s further embarrassment. “By the way, the phone company came around today and installed a phone in your room. I thought it was high time. It’s on the house—all but long-distance calls, of course.”

  Penny
man was forced to thank him, although the effort of it was apparently painful. Then he turned toward the stairs, whacking his stick a couple of times against the carpet as if to recall the spirit of determination that he’d first come in with. He strolled away, humming now, brushing at his sleeve.

  He stopped at the first step, looking downward. Then he bent just a little, leaning on his stick. Andrew watched, biting his lip, suppressing laughter. Pennyman stooped to pick up the nickel that seemed to lie there on the bottom tread.

  It wouldn’t come up. It was stuck. He flicked at it with his finger, then whacked at it with his stick. Andrew leaned forward in his chair, ready with a comment. “Coin trouble?” he would say, raising one eyebrow as if mystified at Pennyman’s antics. That would do the trick. It would imply things. The day belonged to Andrew, and no doubt about it—the nailed nickel trick coming on top of the anonymous letter. Pennyman was a living ruin: one moment a thing of clockwork dignity tricked up out of hair oil and an ostentatious cane, the next moment a slouched old humbugging fake, scrabbling after joke nickels on the stairs.

  Pennyman stood up suddenly, not turning around. He gazed up the stairwell, straight ahead of him, thinking about something. Andrew couldn’t force himself to talk to the man’s back. He wouldn’t be able to speak if Pennyman didn’t look at him. Ah, well … Silence, perhaps, would say more under the circumstances. He watched Pennyman climb the stairs, humming again. Andrew didn’t like the humming. There was something in the humming that wasn’t good, as if Pennyman were humming him out of existence. Andrew popped up and stepped into the kitchen, pulling a little claw hammer out of the drawer and then heading out toward the stairs to pry out the nickel. It was a pity, really, to have driven the thing into the stair tread, although the runner would hide the hole easily enough. He worked out the nickel, shoved it into his pocket, and then pushed at the rug a little to press the hole shut. There it was, disappeared, and no one the wiser.

  The cafe, finally, was almost put right. It seemed to Andrew as if there were merit in the mere bulk of kitchen apparatus—all the stuff that Aunt Naomi had sprung for six weeks back and was only now being delivered and installed. He sat at the bar polishing years of dust from old salt and pepper shakers and taking notes in his spiral binder as three men in blue jeans and shrunken T-shirts hooked up a Wolf stove. It was enormous—six broad burners, a griddle the size of a playing field, and two ovens, each of which could accommodate a Thanksgiving turkey. Alongside it was a vast warming oven, and next to that was a cupboard with a cutting board top. Andrew had designed the cutting board himself, and was moderately proud of it. It was as big as would fit comfortably into the relatively small cooking area, and it had stainless steel bowls mortised in, so that a chef could sweep chopped odds and ends off into the bowls, pluck the bowls out, and dump the odds and ends into pans on the stove.

  He was itching to mess with it all, to make it work. It was impossible that the equipment could produce anything in the food line that wasn’t first-rate. A friend of Pickett’s had built the cabinetry and the bar—had done all the woodwork, in fact, under Andrew’s supervision, and it all looked just right. Andrew had bought the half-dozen draw-leaf tables for ninety dollars apiece from an importer of English antiques, and had searched out three dozen oak chairs at thrift shops in downtown Long Beach. He’d paid out ten or fifteen dollars for each of them, and so he had no sets of chairs to speak of, just a random lot of them that Pickett’s friend had worked over, regluing joints and replacing missing spindles and shimming up short legs.

  Andrew admired the general mess of old furniture and had decided to continue the theme. He’d bought up random silverware and cups and saucers and odd bits of china and porcelain and napkin rings. He’d found no end of old tablecloths of mid-fifties vintage, with deep pastel flowers and rectilinear designs. And he had collected pairs of salt and pepper shakers: comical ducks and head-bobbing dogs and painted clowns riding on happy-go-lucky pigs.

  Every table would be a mish-mash of shapes and colors, would remind you of a carnival, of a kaleidoscope, of a wooden box full of marbles, of the kitchen and pantry in Mr. Badger’s house. It would be a comfortable place, with a cheerful fire in the winter and the casement windows thrown open in the summer. There wouldn’t be two forks the same, or two wine glasses either, and serious, frowning businessmen, talking about updating supplies and finalizing documents and impacting infrastructures, would suddenly find themselves salting their potatoes out of the end of an elephant’s nose. He saw it as an experiment in the principles of Ruskin and Morris. It wouldn’t just be the food that sent them out satisfied; it would be something else, too, something that they couldn’t quite define. Satisfied and mystified at once, that’s what they’d be—and better off for it, too.

  He had sprung for the espresso maker just that morning. The old Andrew would have frittered away the bulk of Aunt Naomi’s money on odds and ends, and then looked about frantically for a means to buy the espresso maker. But he’d turned over a leaf on the night of the Cheerios meeting. He was working hard now at developing a strain of practicality in himself, at becoming the-man-who-got-things-done. The house painting was evidence of it. For the past couple of days, since the victory of the letter and the nailed nickel, he’d let Pennyman go pretty much about his business; he had acted as if what Pennyman was up to was no concern of his. He’d been tempted to listen in on one of Pennyman’s phone calls, but he hadn’t done it. Pennyman would suspect that very thing. Andrew would wait for Pickett’s return, and then the two of them would hold a council of war. After that, who could say?

  He’d been fiddling with a promotional notion, too—the idea of sewing up a couple of enormous chef’s hats, one for himself and one for Pickett. There was no reason at all that they couldn’t be inflated, say, with helium, like clouds hovering over their heads as they manipulated whisks and spatulas in the kitchen. A photo in the Herald would do nicely. It would advertise that here was no ordinary cafe, operated by ordinary chefs.

  Ordinariness was cheap; everyone owned it by the bucketful. Here at the cafe was something you didn’t quite expect, such a picture would reveal. What?—something pleasant, certainly, something compelling and utterly removed from the tedious humdrum of the workaday world. He’d get Rose to sew the hats up. She’d see the value in them. They were a practical matter, really, an advertisement. The tops, of course, might have to be cut out of thin, beach ball vinyl and the seams glued shut. It would be nothing for Rose—two hours’ work. Andrew sketched a hat in his binder, then flipped the page and sketched another one, bigger. He drew a comical picture of Pickett with a caricature mustache and a fabulous inflated hat perched on his head, like a double-dip mound of vanilla ice cream balanced on the wrong end of a cone. There was no point simply in a big chef’s hat. It had to be enormous—the sort of thing to make the public’s eyes shoot open; a tall order in these odd latter days, when men in helmets and wizard shirts searched for mysteries on the foggy seashore.

  Thank goodness the workmen were leaving. Andrew hated to have strangers mucking around in his cafe; they violated it, somehow, with their cussing and loud laughter and hooting out the doorway at women a block away on the highway. When their truck finally rumbled off, Andrew set in with a rag and a spray bottle of cleaner, swabbing down stainless steel and generally neatening things up. It was then that Ken-or-Ed walked in. Another man followed him, carrying a clipboard.

  “Ken,” said Andrew, standing up.

  “Ed, actually. Look here. I’ll get straight to the point …” At that juncture, though, the man with the clipboard snorted, and Ed looked at him, losing the point entirely. On the bar was a salt and pepper shaker set—two tiny ceramic tornadoes, interlocking and hanging on a ceramic fence rail. They each had winking eyes and flipper-like arms and hands, one arm of each entwined around the other one’s shoulder. Of the two free arms and hands, one held a sheaf of wheat, the other a sign that read, “I been to Kansas.” Andrew had been trying to wangle the jamme
d corks out of them.

  The man with the clipboard winked broadly at Ed and fumbled at his shirtpocket, pulling a ball-point pen out of an inky pen holder. He jotted something down.

  Andrew squinted at them both, wondering what in the devil they wanted. This didn’t seem to be a social call. “What’s the point, again?”

  His neighbor crossed his arms, looking uncomfortable. “I was saying that some of us have just learned about the cafeteria you’re starting up here, and …”

  “Cafeteria?”

  “That’s right. You can hardly deny it, can you?” He swept his hand around in a broad gesture, taking in the newly installed equipment. “This inn idea wasn’t quite as bad—was it? It wouldn’t have ruined the neighborhood. But a cafeteria is …”

  “Cafeteria?” said Andrew. “Do you mean like Clifton’s or something—hot turkey sandwiches and meat loaf and roast beef with gravy? Mashed potatoes? People in a line serving themselves with enormous spoons?” Andrew looked at him incredulously, as if he couldn’t quite imagine that the cafeteria subject had been broached. The second man wandered away, taking notes.

  Ed gestured the whole business into oblivion. “I don’t care about mashed potatoes. Will you listen to me? By God, we won’t have it. That’s what I’m saying. Mashed potatoes or no mashed potatoes. We don’t want this neighborhood turned into a fast-food restaurant! It’s illegal. This is Jack Dilton from the planning commission. He’s a personal friend of mine.”

  “I can easily imagine that he is,” said Andrew. “Even the least of us needs a friend. I have a variance, actually. This was all settled long ago. You’re a little late. And who set you off, anyway? Just the other night you were running around in the streets half-naked. It was an insult to my wife and to Mrs. Gummidge. Put on some clothes next time.” Jack Dilton stepped back across, sensing trouble. Andrew nodded to him and smiled politely. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Dilman.”