Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Matty said. Thank God Smalls didn’t have his mother’s ability.

  Agent Smalls smiled. “All I’m asking is that you keep your eyes open. Can you do that for me?”

  Matty thought, Does he want me to spy on my own family?

  “The threat to America didn’t end with the Cold War, Matt. Not by a long shot. The Soviet Union is dead, but the Russians still have their own psychics, don’t doubt it. How many other governments have their own operatives? How many fringe groups and terrorist organizations? Worse, how many of these bad actors are trying to recruit gifted Americans?”

  Smalls delivered this line with Old Testament gravity. Or at least Old-Hollywood-Bible-Movie gravity. Matty sat back in his seat, milk forgotten.

  “That would be bad,” Matty said.

  “Not only that, these foreign powers might decide that they can’t afford to have us hire these people, either. They might decide to neutralize the psychic.”

  “You mean, like, kill—?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure that won’t happen,” he said, in a way that suggested that was exactly what could happen. “But there are other ways to neutralize the psychic. There are devices that can simply remove those abilities.” He snapped his fingers. “Like turning off a light switch.”

  Oh God, Matty thought. He’d neutralize me.

  Smalls reached inside his jacket, and Matty gripped the arms of the chair. The agent’s hand came out holding a business card. “I’m on your side, Matt. I want to protect your family. I want to help them. Your grandfather doesn’t want me talking to any of you, because he thinks you’re too young to understand how important this is. Another Telemachus could step into your grandmother’s shoes. The nation would breathe a sigh of relief.”

  Matty looked at the card, then put it in his jeans pocket.

  “If there’s anything I can do, reach out to me,” Smalls said.

  —

  Matty emerged from the van with the feeling that much time had passed, though it had only been minutes. The sun shone at a more oblique angle. The trees whispered together conspiratorially. Even the milk jug seemed heavier, weighted now with hidden significance.

  Cliff shook his hand again. “Great to meet you, Matty.”

  “I…yeah.”

  “Someday I want to tell you about something your grandmother did for me once. She took me along on one of her long-distance journeys, way beyond what I could do on my own. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.”

  “That would be great,” Matty said. Unless Destin Smalls turns me off like a light switch.

  He walked home and into the house. He was sure his family would see all this new knowledge cooking his insides like radiation, but no: Grandpa Teddy barely looked up from the newspaper, while across the table from him, behind a fence of empty beer bottles, Uncle Frankie explained something about the Van Allen belt. “Sure, robots could get past the belt to the moon, but human beings?” Mom was busy at the stove. Only Uncle Buddy, chopping onions and green peppers at the counter, looked him in the eye. Matty, suddenly embarrassed, tucked the milk into the fridge. But before he could escape to his room, Mom told him to set the big table.

  He was forced to ferry plates and glasses from the cupboards to the dining room, walking back and forth like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  Matty went to his mother and said in a low voice, “Is Uncle Frankie staying for dinner?”

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Mom frowned at Matty as if to ask, What’s your problem? Then she said over her shoulder, “Frankie, you eating or not?”

  “You don’t have to make more on my account,” Frankie said.

  “Jesus, there’s enough pasta to go around. Yes or no?”

  He sighed elaborately. “Wish I could. But Loretta and the girls are waiting.” He stood up, drained the last of his current bottle, and set it on the table.

  “You’re welcome,” Grandpa Teddy said.

  Frankie raised a hand in salute. “Hey, Matty, help me get something out of the van.”

  Matty froze.

  “Come on,” Frankie said, already in motion. “The rest of you, enjoy your fine repast. It’ll probably be mac and cheese at my house.”

  Matty hesitated, then finally followed his uncle out to the driveway.

  “So anything happen today?” Frankie asked.

  “Nothing happened,” Matty said.

  “No trips? No visits to the tavern?” He was so eager. So desperate. “We really need that combination.”

  “I can’t do it,” Matty said.

  “What? What’s the matter? Is your mom getting in the way?”

  “No, it’s not that, I just don’t think—”

  “Self-confidence. I knew it.” He put his hand on Matty’s shoulder and leaned close. “I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to doubt yourself. You just have to push through.”

  “I mean I can’t do it, ever.” He struggled to make eye contact with Frankie, and couldn’t pull it off. His uncle’s right ear became his focus. “I’m out. I quit.”

  “Quit?” His voice was so loud. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Matty didn’t know what more to say. The government is on to me? They can track me? They can erase me? Frankie would argue him out of every point.

  “You can’t quit,” Frankie said. “You’re a Telemachus. We don’t quit!”

  “I know, I know.” But wasn’t quitting what they were most known for? The Amazing Telemachus Family had walked offstage and into mediocrity. Frankie gave the benediction years ago at the Thanksgiving table: We could have been kings.

  “I’m sorry,” Matty said. He was tearing up. He didn’t want to cry in front of his uncle. “I’m sorry.”

  Frankie kept talking, cajoling and shaming and pleading in fast-paced combinations, like a bantamweight working the heavy bag. Matty weathered the blows, unable to speak, unable to move. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to fly out of the top of his head and let his body flop onto the driveway like a bag of wet grass. But that was exactly what he could never do again.

  12

  Teddy

  Love was waiting for him in the mailbox, coiled like a rattlesnake. A plain white envelope. He knew what it was even before he saw his name in Maureen’s razor-sharp cursive, and in a trice the old, sweet poison raced to his heart.

  Oh, my love, he thought. You knock me out, even from the grave.

  The letters were coming more frequently now, and he had no idea why. There’d been a flurry after she died, then a tapering off, so that for years at a time he’d thought they’d finally stopped. But this was the second one this summer. Was it a sign of the end-times? He was getting old. The obituaries were full of hardier men, younger men, struck down by strokes and prostate cancer and heart attacks. The stress of these letters was enough to do him in. Mo was going to kill him at the mailbox.

  “Are you all right?” Irene asked. She was twenty feet away, standing by the car. Too far away to see the handwriting on the envelope.

  “Paper bullets,” he said. He tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket. There’d be time to look at it later. “Straight to the brain.”

  “How are you getting mail on a Sunday?”

  With anyone else he would claim that it was misdelivered and a neighbor must have put it there—but this was Irene. His only choice was to dodge the question entirely. “Let’s go,” he said. “Graciella’s waiting.”

  Irene made no move to get in the car. “We have a deal, right? If I go with you, no matter what happens, you’re watching Matty for me.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Four days, next Thursday through Sunday.” He’d made the mistake of giving her the keys so she could get the air-conditioning going, and now she was holding them ransom. She stood by the driver’s-side door, one hand drumming the roof. He winced to think of her rings scratching the paint. She said, “And
you will watch him this time.”

  She would not let him forget about the time he babysat Matty when he was two. “He’s a teenager now, not a toddler,” he said. “This time if he drinks a glass of gin it will be on purpose.”

  Irene groaned, but surrendered the keys.

  She managed to sit in silence until the third stoplight. It was more than he could have hoped for.

  “Do you trust this woman?” she asked. Meaning Graciella.

  “Do you? You’re a better judge of character than I am.” In fact, that’s why he kept bringing Irene along.

  “She’s using you,” she said.

  “I want her to use me. That’s the point of friendship, Irene.”

  “She’s not a friend if she’s after your money.”

  “Money? What money? I’m on social security, for Christ’s sake.”

  “This car’s a year old. You get a new one every eighteen months.”

  “That’s just good sense. New cars are dependable. You break down on the skyway, you’re likely to get killed.”

  “And the suits? And the watches?”

  He took a breath. How to phrase this, for a woman who can smell a lie? “Just because I don’t dress like a hobo doesn’t mean I’m rich.”

  “I know about ATI, Dad.”

  He pretended to concentrate on the traffic in the side-view mirror. “What’s that now?”

  “Checks were coming to the house all through high school, and they’re still showing up.”

  “You’re going through my mail?”

  “Don’t have to. I can see the envelopes. Advanced Telemetry Inc.’s a privately held electronics company, but there’s suspiciously little on file.”

  “You investigated me?”

  “Them, Dad. Turns out they’re some kind of consulting business.”

  “You’re a snoop. It’s your greatest failing.”

  “I’m sure you’ve got a list. So what is this, Dad? Are you a consultant? Is this a holdover of what you and Mom did?” Her eyebrows rose. “ATI is the front that Destin Smalls uses to pay you, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m just worried, Dad. I don’t care about the money, but I don’t like that this woman is taking advantage of an—of you.”

  “Of an old man. Say it.”

  “Don’t have to. It’s obvious you’ve gone senile.”

  “She doesn’t need my money. She’s mob royalty.”

  “So what’s her angle, then? You said she wasn’t interested in you romantically, so she must want something. Why are you smiling?”

  It warmed his heart to hear his eldest child musing about angles. Irene was always the sharpest of his children. She had all of Maureen’s intelligence and a good dose of his craftiness. Maureen used to think that Buddy was the genius of the family, but it was little Irene who had a mind like a Ginsu knife. The Human Lie Detector. And that was why, if he was going to help Graciella, he needed Irene at his side.

  “I thought you liked her,” Teddy said, trying to sound hurt, and failing even to his own ears.

  “Liking has nothing to do with it,” she said. “This is business.”

  He laughed until the next stoplight.

  “How much is ATI paying you?” Irene asked. Hanging on like a God damn terrier. “In round numbers.”

  “They are not paying me any numbers,” Teddy said. “Round, square, or rhomboid. I am paying myself.”

  She made a skeptical noise, even though she had to know he wasn’t lying.

  “I’m half owner,” he said. “Stop making that face. It was my idea to start the company. Once I got a glimpse of how government worked, how could I not? It’s the craziest damn business. Skinny bakers, top to bottom.”

  “You’re saying that like it’s a saying.”

  “Skinny bakers! ‘Never trust a skinny baker.’ That’s absolutely a saying.”

  “And what does that have to do with the government?”

  “Allow me to expound,” he said. “The people inside don’t get to eat any of the cake, but they compensate by throwing cakes out the window. Barrels of cake. The military industrial complex is made entirely of barrel throwers and cake eaters. In this metaphor, cake equals money.”

  “Let’s just call a moratorium on metaphors.”

  “A metatorium.”

  “And coinage.”

  “The point is, Destin Smalls is the most gullible man on the planet, and yet he could funnel millions into dubious projects. He’d pay G. Randall Archibald outrageous sums for the most transparent flimflammery. Torsion field detectors. Micro-lepton guns that never quite worked, oh, just need another half mil in development—”

  “Oh my God,” Irene said. “This is about competing with Archibald. Still. Again.”

  “This is about making money, plain and simple,” Teddy said.

  “Did Mom know about this?”

  He started to answer, then thought better of it.

  “Then no,” Irene said.

  “She knew,” he said. “Eventually.” Before Irene could ask he said, “Your mother, she was very conservative about money, very conservative. Didn’t like anything speculative. The start-up costs were significant, and took a long time to recoup. I was very sad that the company didn’t start earning back on our investment until well after her death.”

  “You can’t say ‘our’ if she didn’t agree to it.”

  Yet she paid all the same, Teddy thought.

  “Help me find the address,” he said. “One-thirty-one. Look for a real estate sign.”

  They found it soon enough. NG Group Realty. The parking lot was empty except for Graciella’s Mercedes wagon. He eased his car next to hers and Irene put a hand on his arm.

  “Answer this: Has Graciella asked you for money?”

  “No,” he said. The honest truth.

  Irene shook her head. “I don’t get it, then.”

  “You’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “It’s not what she’s getting from me, it’s what I’m getting from her.”

  “Which is?”

  He couldn’t lie, not to Irene, but he could choose what true thing to say. He thought of saying, “Revenge,” but that sounded melodramatic. He considered “Justice,” but that was both melodramatic and out of character.

  “I get to be back in the game,” he said.

  One of the great regrets of his life was that he never told Maureen about ATI. Another one of his great regrets was that she found out on her own.

  He remembered the night. He’d driven home through a snowstorm and entered the house like the Great Hunter, bearing the finest pizza in the Chicagoland area. Maureen cleared the papers and crayons from the kitchen table, and the whole family sat together under the warm lights, Frankie excitedly describing fantastic sled crashes, getting them all to laugh, even Buddy. It was when they all huddled together like this that he was most happy. They were coconspirators, happy thieves dividing up the take, laughing it up while the mundane world went on with their dreary lives. It was the next best thing to being onstage together.

  After dinner, Teddy lit a cigarette and watched Maureen wash the dishes. He was not by nature a content man, but this came pretty damn close. Then he noticed, on the counter next to his elbow, the stack of pages that Maureen had moved from the table to the counter. They weren’t Buddy’s coloring pages, as he’d assumed after seeing all the crayons. They were bills and bank documents. He lifted a few pages, and saw the red logo of their mortgage company. It was Teddy’s job to handle the money and the house payments. He’d insisted on it.

  He replayed the past hour in his mind, knowing that Mo had been looking at those pages before he arrived. Now her laughter seemed a bit forced. Her attention had been elsewhere.

  “You want to talk about anything?” he asked.

  Maureen didn’t turn around. “Is there anything to talk about?”

  He knew that arid tone.

  In retrospect, he was a fool to think she wouldn’t find o
ut sooner or later. How could any mortal hide anything from Maureen Telemachus? He’d dipped into the family savings, if you could use the word “dip” for such a thorough excavation, and he’d also taken out a second mortgage.

  “Tell me what you did with it,” she said. “Are you gambling again?”

  She thought he’d gone back to his wicked ways. Ironically, he had returned to his wicked ways, but only to make up the money sunk into ATI.

  “What I used to do wasn’t gambling,” Teddy said, unable to keep the indignation from his voice. In those days, he was even more of a peacock than now.

  Maureen, without even looking at him, made it clear she was taking none of his bull. Why should she? She’d taken so much of it for years. “Oh, Teddy,” Maureen said. “Everything we worked for, you’re throwing it away.”

  “I certainly am not,” he said. “I’m investing it. There’s a big difference.”

  “Investing in what?”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Just sit down. Please.”

  She dried her hands and took a seat opposite him at the table, quiet as a hanging judge.

  “A business opportunity presented itself,” he said. “I had an idea for a company, and a coinvestor to create it with me. This company would create an ongoing revenue stream, but it required some initial capital, just to get things rolling. Short-term start-up costs, long-term returns.”

  “Ongoing revenue stream,” she said.

  “That’s right!”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” she said softly.

  “I want you to listen to me,” he said in a reasonable tone. “I’m trying to put food on the table. What choice do I have? Everything else I’ve tried—”

  “The act,” she said. She shook her head in a way that years later would be echoed by their daughter. “You’re still angry. You can’t let it go.”

  “We had a plan, Mo. Everything depended on you coming out, and you didn’t do it.” Teddy knew Archibald was scheduled to interrupt their act. He deliberately gave the skeptic something easy to expose, the old séance trick with his foot, something the cameras could pick up. The family wasn’t debunked; their defeat was bunk itself, the setup for the big reversal. Mo would do the telephone gag, flummoxing Archibald. The famous skeptic would admit on national television that they were the real thing, and their fortunes would be made.