The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Andrew walked into the kitchen, rummaged in the cupboard until he came up with the kitchen bottle, and poured two inches of scotch into the bottom of a tumbler. He filled the tumbler with water and drank it down, steadying himself against the counter. Then, breathing evenly, he went back out into the hushed cafe and announced that they’d all be able to use a round on the house. He pulled down bottles of sauterne and port and sherry, and nodded at Pickett. “Where’s the spoon?” Andrew asked.

  Pickett shrugged. “Trust the cats,” he said, and set out to take orders.

  “Where’s Fitzpatrick?” Andrew asked Rose, as she pulled down glasses.

  “I chased him off. Told him I’d call the police. He didn’t want that. You were right. The man’s stark. The other one, Dilton, wanted to fight him, right there on the street, and said something about his hundred dollars. They’re out there right now, for all I know, beating each other up. I don’t pretend to understand it.” Andrew grinned, half-thinking to go out and watch. But things were too hot for that.

  Aunt Naomi, appearing to be utterly unruffled, went over to talk to the four ladies. In a moment they were shaking their heads and clucking their tongues and exchanging reminiscences about medical troubles that they’d known. Aunt Naomi moved away, toward the old couple and the young couple.

  “What was that god-awful smell?” the old man demanded. The couple at the adjacent table, the ones who had arrived first, nodded and leaned in.

  Andrew heard Aunt Naomi say, “That’s rather delicate, isn’t it?” and he stepped up, clearing his throat, to save her the embarrassment.

  “Sorry, folks,” he said. “This has been a rough night. Poor Mr. Pennyman. When he’s taken with this sort of fit, he suffers total muscle relaxation. I’m afraid he’s …” And he bent over and whispered into the ears of the young man and the gentleman at the next table. Each of them whispered into the ears of their wives, and the young lady whispered to her grandmother, who said, “Oh, the poor man; what an embarrassment!” and then whispered the grim truth into the ear of the old man, who sat stock still and with a look of puzzled dissatisfaction on his face.

  His mouth fell. “He what! Soiled his … The filthy …”

  ‘‘He couldn’t help it, for goodness sake. It was uncontrollable.’’

  “A hanged man does that,” the old man announced out loud.

  “I dare say he does,” muttered Andrew, moving off but happy enough that the old man had said it. The rest of the restaurant knew now. Or at least they thought they knew.

  Rose collared him as he slipped toward the kitchen. “What on earth did you tell them about poor Mr. Pennyman?” she asked.

  “Well,” said Andrew. “I told them the only thing I could think of—that he’d had a fit and lost control of his bodily functions. What else would explain it? It’s no crime. The man is old.”

  Rose looked at him steadily. “What was wrong with the gumbo? What did you do to doctor it up, to stretch it?”

  “Not a thing!” said Andrew, looking hurt. “Take a look in the pot.”

  Rose did. In fact there wasn’t anything wrong with it. It was fine. “Well,” Rose admitted. “Don’t get a swelled head, but the woman from the Recliner said she’d never eaten better than this or felt so at home in a restaurant.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, and the couple across the way said the same. Your gumbo was a hit, apparently.”

  Andrew wiggled his eyebrows at her. Then the street door opened and into the cafe came the cameraman and the lumberjack, having put away their equipment. Andrew’s face clouded and he headed out of the kitchen, but Rose grabbed his arm. “I’ve asked them to drink a beer. Let’s not aggravate things. I told them that we were very anxious that their program, if they aired it, would reflect well on the restaurant and hinted that if it didn’t we’d take action. But I don’t want to put too fine a point on it. I don’t want to make them mad.”

  “Ah,” said Andrew, thinking hard. “Settle them down, is it? A beer, a friendly chat. Sure. You’re right. They can take a stab at the gumbo, too. What the hell. There’s some left. It’s in their blood, I guess, waving cameras like that.” He smiled at the two of them and gestured toward a table.

  A half hour later the cafe was almost empty. Aside from Andrew and Rose and Pickett, only the two from KNEX were left. Aunt Naomi had gone up to her room, but had to have Rose’s help climbing the stairs. Andrew considered every word he said to the two from the cable station. He was breezy, unconcerned, nonchalant. He supposed that they were mystified by the night’s proceedings. They certainly couldn’t have imagined that they’d be witness to such a wild display.

  When they left, the cafe was six beers down, but the two seemed congenial enough. It was just possible that they’d changed sides, that they’d been good men who had been caught up in Pennyman’s web without half-knowing how they’d gotten there, and had, over the course of the evening, been wooed away from the enemy by the cafe and the gumbo and the beer and the cheerful talk. Andrew almost felt friendly toward them.

  Five seconds after they were out the door, the shouting began. Andrew, Pickett, and Rose headed for the street. “Trouble!” Andrew shouted, thinking that the two of them had—what?—been jumped? Maybe Ken-or-Ed had come back again, out of his head finally. But no, there the two were, arguing on the parkway. Yelling. The Chinese man was nearly out of his mind. Some damned thing had gotten at the camera, had torn all the tape out. Something with claws.

  “It was the stinking cats!” shouted the lumberjack, suddenly sober and enraged.

  But it hadn’t been the cats; Andrew was sure of it. An almost electric thrill of joy and mystery shot through him, and he felt suddenly like a man with friends, like a shaman who could call up the wind and the birds and send them on missions, who could make oak trees dance in the forest. The frame over the crawlspace had been pushed aside. Andrew squinted at it surreptitiously, hardly believing that it could be true, but knowing it nonetheless. It was the ‘possum that had dealt with the film, that had scuttled Pennyman’s last ship. There it was, under the house. Andrew could just barely see it in the soft glow of the streetlight, looking out at him with goggly eyes. It ducked back into the shadows.

  There was a monumental amount of tape on the street, ragged and dirty and trailed nearly to the beach and back. A car or two had run over it. Andrew wouldn’t have guessed there’d be half so much tape in a video camera. Every last inch of it, apparently, had been hauled out and shredded, chewed and trampled on, heaped into the gutter, tangled in the bushes.

  “Hell,” said the cameraman, standing very still. And it seemed to Andrew as if he was worried, as if he had someone to answer to. Five minutes later they were gone, the wadded-up tape nearly filling one of the trash cans in the backyard.

  Within a half hour, Pickett was gone, too, and Rose had shuffled wearily upstairs to bed. Thank God, thought Andrew, they wouldn’t be open tomorrow night. Just cleaning up would kill half the day. So what? He whistled merrily despite his aching joints. Pennyman had come in smug and gone out a wreck. Ken-or-Ed was a broken man. The cafe would get a bang-up review in the Recliner, not to mention the Herald, Pickett’s newspaper. Pickett had written his review three days ago; Andrew had helped him.

  He went outside for the last time that night, wearing the second chef’s hat, which he’d inflated dangerously full, and carrying with him a saucer of milk. Clicking his tongue outside the crawlspace to alert the ‘possum, he lay the milk just within the shadow, and then strolled around to the front of the house.

  A light burned in the Fitzpatricks’ living room, but as Andrew drew up across the street, the light blinked out, as if they’d seen him, and wanted, perhaps, to hide behind the drapes and watch. He stood on the sidewalk, his hat billowing around his head, lit by the streetlamp and valleyed with shadowed folds, like a cumulus cloud blowing in the sea wind. After a moment he turned and headed back around, satisfied that they wouldn’t know what to make of him, that the sig
ht of him wearing the floating hat and standing dead still on the midnight sidewalk was a vision from outside their ken. They wouldn’t be able to fathom it.

  He slipped back into the house, tolerably satisfied, and climbed the stairs to bed.

  FOURTEEN

  “Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water.”

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  “Crabbed Age and Youth”

  THE SPOON WAS in his pants pocket next morning when he awakened early, well before dawn. It fell out and bounced on his foot when he picked the pants up. Who had put it there? The cats? Why not, Andrew thought, tiptoeing around the bedroom. The cats were probably downstairs right now, playing gin rummy with parrots and ‘possums and toads, plotting against the Soviets.

  Rose still slept, and the house was dark and quiet. Hustling downstairs, Andrew went out onto the service porch, took the brick and the lid off the toad tank, and buried the spoon in the gravel at the bottom, laying a lump of petrified wood over it.

  The toad floated as ever, innocently, as if he hadn’t just last night thwarted a lunatic and hid out among eucalyptus logs until Andrew had found him and put him back. Toads, thought Andrew, were an inscrutable lot. Andrew wished there was some sort of toad treat he could give it, but nothing came to mind. The toad drifted down to the bottom of the tank and sat on the petrified wood, giving Andrew the slack-faced, deadpan look of a serious martial arts assassin, as if anyone who dared retrieve the spoon would have to deal with him first, and would regret it.

  Satisfied, Andrew went off to work, and an hour later was washing dishes moodily in the cafe kitchen. The casements were open, and he could smell the Santa Anas blowing again, the warm desert and sagebrush odor mingling with the smell of popping soap bubbles. The cafe itself was cleared and swept clean and the tables arranged despite their having to sit idle until next Friday night. On the counter next to him lay a cheap walkie-talkie, silent, but with the volume turned all the way up.

  It might be today that the crisis would come. The treasure hunt was that night. The moon would be full, the tale told. The dawn light radiating now above the eastern rooftops was a bloody slash, dwindling into a gray and violet sky, and the air was heavy with the sighing wind. There had been a pair of jolting little earthquakes some time after two in the morning, and then a third two hours later, a deep, rolling quake that had brought him up sharp out of a dreamless sleep. Rose had got out of bed and wandered through the house when the first of the quakes struck, convinced that she’d heard something fall downstairs. She had slept through the third, though, and that’s when Andrew had climbed wearily out of bed, thinking to get a jump on cleaning the cafe.

  He had never before been so filled with premonition, with the absolute certainty that everything in the world was connected, that like Pickett’s circles and serpents, everything whirled in a vast, complex pattern—the wind, the rhythmic crashing of ocean waves, the wheeling gulls and the distant cries of parrots, the earth-muted grumbling of subterranean cataclysms—all of it was linked, and all together it was the embodiment of something bigger, something unseen, something pending.

  If Andrew were called, he would go. No trickery with fishing poles, no gunnysacks full of junk. Come tomorrow, Rose would understand. She might think he was crazy, but she’d understand. It was his destiny that was blowing on the Santa Anas, sailing along on the backs of newspapers and tumbleweeds and dust and dead leaves.

  He’d been to the window a half dozen times, watching the sky pale and wondering at the cool, silent morning. There was fire in the foothills, out in the San Gabriels, and the northwest horizon was sooty-black despite the rising sun. He felt weirdly enervated, as if he were light and weak, built out of Styrofoam or woven out of the ashy smoke blowing up out of the hills. With luck, he’d have got through the dishes and drained the sink before the call came. That way, when Rose looked in and found him gone, at least she’d see that he hadn’t been idle, that he hadn’t left a mess again for Mrs. Gummidge.

  He was just polishing the last glass when the walkie-talkie erupted into static. Andrew pushed the talk button and said, “Yo.”

  “He’s come out.” It was Pickett’s voice.

  Andrew threw down the dish towel. “Is there a cab?”

  “Around on your side. You can see it through the window. Don’t bother to look, though. Go out the back and around through the garden gate. I’m down on the seat. Don’t make for the car until I honk. He’ll have left. Then run like hell so we can catch him. He was carrying the bag of dimes.”

  “Dimes?”

  “The bag of silver dimes that was in his drawer. He’s got them.”

  Andrew switched off the machine, shoved it into his coat pocket, and rummaged in the pantry for a bite of something to take along. Then, leaving the light on so that Pennyman wouldn’t see it blink off abruptly, he slipped out through the back door, leaped across Mrs. Gummidge’s weedy garden, and pushed the gate open, peering past the corner of the house at the departing taxicab. Immediately a horn honked, and there was Pickett, sitting up and gunning the engine of the Chevrolet. Andrew was off at a dead run, climbing in through the thrown-open door as Pickett sped off.

  They followed him down to the Pacific Coast Highway and around onto Seal Beach Boulevard. There was little traffic, so they stayed almost two hundred yards back. Andrew tore open the top of a variety pack box of Corn Pops, shaking out a handful and eating them one at a time, cracking them like nuts with his teeth.

  “What else do you have?” asked Pickett.

  Andrew patted his coat. “Let’s see. Frosted Flakes and Honey Smacks.”

  They crossed Westminster, Pickett driving with his left hand and shaking Honey Smacks into his mouth with his right. “Bet you ten cents I know where he’s going.”

  “Of course that’s where he’s going. But what’s he up to? Is he going to dig?”

  Pickett shrugged.

  “Maybe we better head into Leisure World—roust Uncle Arthur. Maybe he ought to know that the game’s afoot.”

  “Let’s not,” said Pickett. “Let’s just follow along. If we sidetrack now we might miss the whole business. Besides, after the other day they might be watching for us at the gate. We can’t afford trouble. Not now.”

  Andrew nodded, dropping his empty carton into the sea of trash and books and jackets on the floor. The cab pulled in just then at the Leisure Market. Pickett slid past, angling up a driveway farther on and cutting the engine in front of Mrs. Chapman’s Doughnuts. “Duck,” he said.

  Both of them hunkered down, and Andrew watched above the seat as Pennyman tapped his way across the lot and onto the dirt shoulder of the street, down toward the oilfields. He disappeared from sight beyond the edge of a cinderblock wall. Andrew and Pickett were out, scrambling toward the wall and peering over. Pennyman picked his way along the road, dust blown up by the wind swirling around his feet.

  “Half a sec,” said Andrew, heading in after a doughnut.

  “Two glazeys,” Pickett said at his back. “And leave the coffee. This might take some running.”

  In minutes Andrew was back, trying to fit the edge of one of Mrs. Chapman’s puffy, angel food doughnuts into his mouth. “I got a break on a half dozen,” he said, holding out the open bag.

  Pickett plucked one out. “He’s heading for the oilfield across from the steam plant, where Arthur let the turtles loose. There’s no use following him yet; he’d spot us in an instant. When he goes through the oleanders, though …”

  “Right,” said Andrew, looking again over the fence. Pennyman was a good way down now, cutting across and into the field.

  “There he goes,” said Pickett. “Give him to the count of ten. Now!” The two loped across the road and down, ducking around into the field and behind an oil derrick fence, then across and behind the mountain of pallets from
where they’d watched Uncle Arthur launch the turtles.

  Pennyman peered through the foliage into the oleanders, then bent over, ducked in, and disappeared.

  Pickett thumped Andrew on the shoulder. “There he goes. Give him a moment. Let’s go!”

  They were off and running again, as quietly as they could, certain that Pennyman couldn’t see them but anxious not to be heard. The wind would cover most of the noise. The oleander was dense and deep, maybe fifteen feet broad, and from three yards away it looked impenetrable. Just inside the perimeter of leafy branches, though, someone had hacked out a tunnel, and you could shove in past the outer branches and get around to the back, in against the chain-link. The oleander grew right through the links, so that over the years the old barbwire-strung fence had disappeared into the bush.

  “There it is,” whispered Andrew. He could see where the fence had been cut and then hooked back together along one side with baling wire so that it was sort of hinged, the cut panel held up by oleander branches. The baling wire was clean and free of rust, very likely wound through the cut links within the last couple of months. On beyond the fence were the fields of the Naval Weapons Station, half of them up in tomatoes now, the other half fallow, waiting for autumn pumpkins. Bundled tomato stakes were the only cover in the open fields, so there was no question of their following; they’d be seen for sure. And besides, they could see Pennyman clearly, stepping through the clods of the harrowed pumpkin field. Some distance away to the west rose a cloud of dirt where a tractor cut the earth, and off to the east sat the green humps of sod-covered weapons bunkers.

  Andrew could hear flies buzzing and the drone of a distant, unseen airplane. “God, it’s lonesome out here,” he whispered, polishing off a second doughnut.

  Pickett was silent.