The Paper Grail

by James P. Blaylock

  Uncle Roy beat on Mrs. Lamey’s door again, kicking it finally with the toe of his boot. “Wake the hell up, you old pig!” he shouted, cupping his hands and yelling toward the second story. The banging reverberated through the darkness. Sylvia and Bennet both pulled him away again, but it was like trying to shift a piano. Uncle Roy leaned past Sylvia and kicked furiously at the already broken front window. What was left of the pane shattered to pieces, tinkling to the floor inside.

  “I know that’s you, Roy Barton!” Mrs. Lamey’s voice called down from upstairs. Howard could see her face outlined in the dark, half-open window. “The whole street knows it’s you! I’ll have you jailed for assault!”

  “Try me!” Uncle Roy shouted back. “Come down here and I’ll shove your damned rent money down your throat!” Wrenching furiously loose again, he picked up the bowl still half full of fish blood and splashed it over the front door as if to mark the house in some grisly, Old Testament manner. He allowed himself to be pulled away toward the street then, still cursing, as Mrs. Lamey slammed the upstairs window. Lights blinked on then.

  “She’s calling the cops,” Bennet said.

  Uncle Roy breathed hard, nearly flattened by the exertion. “Shit” he said, hauling the wad of bills out of his pocket again. “Ditch this in your house.”

  “Sit down somewhere,” Sylvia said to Howard when she saw him limping across toward them.

  Bennet nodded at him. “Come up on my porch and sit in the rocker.”

  The four of them stepped onto Bennet’s lawn, and it was then that Howard saw that the Humpty Dumpty had been wrecked. It lay crazily in the flower bed, smashing down wooden tulips. Someone had pried its arms and legs off and thrown them here and there around the yard, and its spring mechanism had been wrenched back and forth until it hung from half-torn-out screws, twisted and bent. The plywood head and body of the thing were cracked in half, and long splinters of fragmented plywood had torn away so that the painted face was mostly obliterated by what looked like jagged, grass-blade shadows.

  “It’s a wreck,” Bennet said. “There’s no fixing it, not busted in half like that.”

  “Dirty, rotten sons of bitches … Did you see them do this, Howard?” Uncle Roy looked at him, not angrily now, but as if suddenly worried.

  “Not this, no. They kicked the flowers around a little when I was here. That’s all. I broke it up and then sneaked back into Mrs. Lamey’s house and blew up her clothes dryer.”

  “Did you!” Uncle Roy said, as if hearing good news at last. “Why?”

  “Well, they’d stolen Graham’s cane, and I decided to get it back. So I blew up the dryer and when they all ran downstairs, I went up and got it. Then they chased me down to Mrs. Moynihan’s.”

  “You were here, though, for some of this?” Uncle Roy gestured at the lawn.

  “At first, yes.”

  “How about the old lady? Was Mrs. Lamey out here, too, raising hell?”

  “No,” Howard said. “She stayed home.”

  “Of course she did. When you were gone she and whoever was left over came back out here and finished the job.” Uncle Roy stood thinking for a moment. “Sylvia,” he said, “get Howard out of here. Quick. We’ll handle this. If Howard sticks around, she’ll finger him, too—say she saw him with the other hooligans out breaking up Bennet’s stuff. She’ll get us all if we don’t look sharp. We’ll skin through, though, as long as that damned Stoat doesn’t make it back down the hill while the cops are here.” He thought for a moment, squinting his eyes. “Yes, that’s it. You and Howard vamoose. Get home and put Howard to bed. He’s earned his pay.”

  Bennet stepped back out of the house just then. “Coffee’s on,” he said.

  “Did you ditch the money?” Uncle Roy asked him.

  “Under the floor.”

  “Get four hundred back out, will you?”

  “Now you tell me,” Bennet said. “You aren’t going to give me change, are you?”

  Uncle Roy shook his head. “There isn’t going to be any change.” He waved decisively at Howard and Sylvia, gesturing toward the road. “Get going,” he said.

  Howard climbed gratefully back into Sylvia’s Toyota, and together they drove down to Main Street and swung left toward the highway, cruising past Sylvia’s darkened store. In his mind he didn’t want to abandon his uncle. The rest of him, though—his muscles and joints and bones—was happy to. Anyway, Uncle Roy was good at this sort of thing. Howard couldn’t teach him any tricks. And there was no doubt at all that Mrs. Lamey would implicate Howard in something if she had half a chance to—the clothes dryer atrocity at the very least. She had invited him over with the most friendly and hospitable intentions, and he had blown her service porch up with a homemade bomb …

  “Go to sleep,” Sylvia said. “He’ll be all right. Here.” She pulled a parka out of the back and handed it to him, and he stuffed it against the seat and door as a pillow, settling himself against it. “What the heck happened to your neck?” She touched him on the spot where Ms. Bundy had raked him with her fingernails, and he winced at the raw streak of pain.

  “I had a little fracas with another woman tonight,” he said sleepily.

  “Another woman?”

  “I’m afraid so. She was a feisty one, too.”

  “Another woman?” Who’s the first one? You can’t have another one without having one to start with.”

  She was being playful, but Howard was too tired to carry on in that vein. “Maybe you are,” he said, watching her face out of half-shut eyes.

  She smirked at him, as if to say that she knew he was being silly, as usual. At least she hadn’t denied it. But was she being agreeable or putting him off? This was no time to work through it. She looked worried and doubtful and tired, Howard realized. She was single-handedly keeping the whole family afloat, working overtime to sell her strange wares to the Mrs. Moynihans of the world and trying to save Howard and Uncle Roy from themselves with what little time she had left over.

  “You’re a brick,” he said to her. “Will you help me break into Jimmers’ place tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Enough!” she said. “Give it a rest.”

  “No time for that now. The merry-go-round’s spinning too fast. We can’t crawl off anymore.” She sighed, shrugging her shoulders as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything. Howard squeezed her arm again. “He will be all right, you know. It would be better for you to believe it.” She cast him a little smile and then winked, as if recalling just what sort of a man her father was.

  Up on the highway they passed a patrol car turning down onto Lansing Street.

  THE whine of the power saw woke him next morning. It was eleven o’clock, and sunlight streamed through the window. Uncle Roy hadn’t spent the night in jail, then. Howard had slept dreamlessly through the night and morning, and he could easily turn over now and drift off again.

  There was too much to do, though. He bent his lame knee, and it was stiff and sore, although far better than it had been last night. He wrapped the bandage around it again, then grabbed the cane and hobbled to the window. Uncle Roy was bent over the saw, cutting up the rest of the lumber. He tossed a couple of pieces of scrap into the weeds and laid a clean piece on the pile, then stopped to drink from a coffee mug.

  Fueled by the idea of coffee, Howard dressed and went out into the kitchen, taking the cane with him. He was determined not to let it out of his sight again, although he didn’t know quite why. His knee loosened up when he moved, and he felt like the Tin Man, creaking back to life after rusting stiff in the rain.

  Aunt Edith appeared, carrying a feather duster. She had the look on her face of someone longing for past, simpler times. “Good morning,” she said. “Coffee’s probably cold by now.”

  “Hot enough,” Howard said, pouring milk and sugar into the cup she handed him. She was looking steadily at him, as if taking his measure. He wondered what she knew about yesterday’s shenanigans, and suddenly he felt as if he were twelve or thirte
en and had been caught throwing eggs at houses. “Uncle Roy all right?”

  “He’ll always be all right. He doesn’t know how to doubt himself. He just rides along on his enthusiasms.”

  “He got home late last night.”

  “After two. He said that Bennet and him closed down the Tip Top Lounge, but he hadn’t been drinking.”

  “No,” Howard said. “It wasn’t that. There was a little bit of trouble down in Mendocino, and he bailed me out.”

  “I know what kind of trouble, or can imagine it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes, pinning it up so that half of it fell back down again. There was no hint of a smile on her face. “He’s one of the lilies of the field,” she said. “He’s blessed, I think. I’m worried about you, though. You haven’t been here a week, and you’re in trouble. I can feel it. It’s deep, too. I know it’s nothing of your doing. It was waiting for you up here, in the weather. You drove into it like a boat into a storm. You could probably leave—sail right back out of it.”

  Howard was silenced by the abrupt finality of this last statement. He knew she wasn’t being rude, that she wasn’t ordering him out of the house.

  “Talk Sylvia into going back down south with you. This is no place for her. She could make a go of it down there. I’ve thought about it, and if she opened a little store, in one of those big malls, there’s nothing she couldn’t accomplish. She could establish a chain of them. I was reading about someone who did that, a woman who sold cookies and made her fortune at it. It’s too small for her up here. She hasn’t got a chance. She’s staying for us. We’d get by, though.”

  “Maybe she thinks you’re worth staying for.”

  “Maybe she thinks you’re worth leaving with.”

  It was another statement that struck Howard silent. And it was a strange statement, too, coming from his aunt. But Aunt Edith, he was finding, often said just what she meant. He shrugged. “I can’t leave yet,” he said. “There’s something that’s only half done.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure what it is, but I can feel it. You know—this thing with old Graham …”

  “What thing, Howard? Can you tell me? You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?”

  He shook his head. The saw started up outside again, and Howard could hear his uncle tossing boards around.

  “Maybe that’s good,” she said. “Maybe that’s some kind of charm. Take care of my daughter, though. She’s not as tough as she thinks she is. We all lean on her.” Aunt Edith smiled proudly then, and in that moment her face softened and she looked like Sylvia. Then the saw blade shrieked outside and the saw abruptly stopped.

  “Chingatha!” Uncle Roy shouted, and the lines of worry and care and work reappeared in Aunt Edith’s face. They both looked out the back window, where Uncle Roy wrenched at a board that was cocked up into the jammed saw blade.

  “I don’t see any blood,” Aunt Edith said, pushing the window open. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Uncle Roy said, hammering at the piece of wood with his fist now.

  “Turn the saw off, then. Watch out it doesn’t come on while you’re working with it.”

  “Overload switch shut down. It can’t come on. Damn if,” he shouted, looking around for something to hit it with and picking up a short length of two-by-four. His eyes were wide, as if he were going to show the jammed board a thing or two, and he smashed the two-by-four against the board, driving it down and out of the saw blade, denting and splitting the wood in the process. Once out of the blade, the board tumbled off the saw table onto the ground, and Uncle Roy slammed away at it another three or four times for good measure, splintering the board into rubbish. He stood over it, legs spread, his stomach heaving with exertion. Then he straightened up and yanked on his suspenders, kicking the pieces of board out of the way.

  Aunt Edith still stared out of the open window, her hand over her mouth.

  Uncle Roy gaped back in at her. “Had to kill the patient,” he said. Then he felt around under the saw motor until he found the overload button. The saw whined and took off, and he reached up and shut it down with the on-off switch. “Sometimes you have to beat the bastards up,” he said.

  Aunt Edith stayed silent, but she gave Howard a look. He realized that he hadn’t talked half enough to her. It was a shame that they couldn’t have sat down over coffee and really chewed things over, gotten to know each other. There were a hundred questions he would have liked to ask her, about her and Mr. Jimmers, about Sylvia’s father, about the spirit museum and their lives on the north coast. Uncle Roy was just then coming in at the door, though, and it was too late. It would have to wait.

  On the back corner of the kitchen cabinet sat a ceramic Humpty Dumpty—exactly like the one that had fallen and broken in the earthquake. “Hey,” Howard said. “Another one.” He pointed at it, and Aunt Edith picked it up.

  “Same one,” she said. “Sylvia went to work on it with a tube of glue. She’s good with her hands—good at fine work. You can hardly see the cracks.”

  Howard inspected it. “Just looks like cracks in the glaze, doesn’t it? I like that, actually—like old china in an antique shop. I like a bit of age in his face. He doesn’t look so smug.”

  Aunt Edith smiled at him. “That’s our Sylvia. She has that effect on people sometimes.”

  “She got that from her mother,” Uncle Roy said, kissing his wife on the cheek. Then he shrugged, threw his arms around her, bent her back clumsily, and kissed her on the lips. “Hah!” he said, straightening them both up. “Wonderful dinner last night, wasn’t it? Sylvia hit the nail on the head with that place.”

  Aunt Edith smiled at Howard. “It was,” she said. “We don’t go out very often. When was the last time, Roy?”

  “Back in eighty-three, wasn’t it? Remember, we went to that polka dive. I could dance back then.” He winked at Edith. “Dirty shame I had to go out last night, after we were through with dinner. Poor Bennet, he—”

  “No need to lie,” Edith said. “Howard’s told me why you went out. There’ll be other nights.”

  “By golly, you’re right.” Uncle Roy lit up, as if a momentous thought had just struck him. “There’s one later today, isn’t there?” He kissed Edith again. “Call me insatiable,” he said.

  “Call you an old fool,” Edith told him, dusting the wood chips off the front of his shirt with her feather duster. She headed toward the door then. “I’ll just let you men talk shop. I’ve got cleaning to do while you two live the life of Riley.”

  Uncle Roy watched her go. There was a look of longing in his face. He sighed deeply. “Never underestimate the value of a wife,” he said. Recovering, he asked, “How’s the knee?” and poured the last of the cold coffee into his empty cup.

  “Better, I think.”

  “Sandwich?”

  “Sure.” Howard realized that he was half starved.

  Uncle Roy hauled out mustard and mayonnaise and lettuce and packages of bologna and American cheese. “Well,” he said, “we skinned out of it last night.” He went to the door and stuck his head out into the living room as if to see whether Aunt Edith was still around.

  “What did you want the four hundred for?” Howard asked.

  “Payola. I gave it to Mrs. Lamey.” He stopped squirting mustard onto his bread slice and looked steadily at Howard, who widened his eyes in bewilderment.

  “I told the cop that Bennet and I had just come up from Petaluma, where we’d got a load of chicken manure for old Cal down in Albion. You remember Cal. I said he’d paid us off, along with money he owed us for six more loads. And then when I dropped Bennet off, I figured that even though it was late, I’d knock on Mrs. Lamey’s door and wake her up, in order to pay her overdue rent money. That way she could get the money into the bank tomorrow, which is today, of course. Anyway, I said that I couldn’t wake her up at first so I knocked harder, and she must have waked up out of a dream or something and thought there was a nut at the door.” Un
cle Roy chuckled, layering meat and cheese onto the bread and smashing it all down with an inch of lettuce.

  “So you gave her the four hundred?”

  “Right there in front of the cop. Just handed it to her. Pissed her off, too.”

  “Did they check the story, the chicken manure story?”

  “Damned right they did. These hick cops aren’t stupid. They called Cal up and grilled him, right then and there. Used Mrs. Lamey’s phone. We’d got to him first, of course, right after you left. Iron-clad story.”

  “How about the window? Did she accuse you of breaking the window?”

  “Of course she did. But what was lying in the bushes outside? An ashtray. Someone had pretty clearly thrown it through earlier. Why? That’s the question I asked, right there on the spot. It was obvious that I hadn’t broken the window at all. Someone else had done it, from inside the house. When I knocked on the door a piece had fallen out. She didn’t deny it. Not for a moment. She didn’t want cops snooping around there, getting suspicious. You should have seen her. Looked like something out of a nightmare. I’m pretty sure the cop wanted to lock her up on general principles. They don’t like being called out at midnight to deal with a batshit old woman when nothing’s wrong except she’s been offered four hundred dollars.

  “Then of course there was the fish blood all over everything. I pointed that out before she had a chance to. ‘What the hell’s all this?” I said, stepping back. The cop looked hard at it. Stunk like a cannery. He thought it was some kind of creep joint. You could see it in his face. I reasoned with him, though—said she was an eccentric old woman but not dangerous. Luckily he didn’t know who she really was. She probably owns the mortgage to his house. Anyway, it blew over and he left without any trouble. Between her place and Bennet’s place, though, he was a confused man.”