Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  It was an odd experience for Teddy. He’d been intending to keep Graciella away from the males of the family, so as not to scare her off. But she seemed charmed by Buddy’s shyness, and laughed at Matty’s hesitant jokes. In retrospect, that made sense: Graciella was raising three boys, and Buddy was as much a kid as any of them. Fortunately, he was a kid with a hobby. In the basement he’d been building deep shelving units out of spare lumber. The file boxes fit perfectly into place, like they were meant to be there.

  Graciella said nothing about the metal window shades, but she asked about the large structure taking shape at the other end of the basement.

  Buddy ducked his head and went upstairs.

  “I think they’re bunk beds,” Matty said.

  “Best not to ask questions,” Irene said. She’d pulled on the polyester Aldi’s smock. “I’ve got to go. Graciella, I’ll get back to the ledgers tomorrow.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Graciella said. She went to Irene and took her hand in hers. “I mean it. I can’t. But I’ll try to make it up to you someday.”

  Teddy thought: They’re having a moment! My girls are having a moment!

  Graciella said that she should be going, too, because her mother was probably getting tired of watching the boys. Teddy said, “You can’t go, I need your help with something. I have entirely too much gin in the freezer, an oversupply of tonic, and an abundance of cucumbers.”

  “Not limes?”

  “It’s Hendrick’s, my dear. Cucumber slices, always.”

  “I suppose I can do my part during this difficult time,” she said.

  They took their drinks outside, into the August sunlight, and Graciella said, “You have hammocks!”

  “We do?” They did. Two Mexican hammocks, slung in the shade between the three oaks. Another Buddy project, Teddy thought, financed by yours truly.

  “I love hammocks,” Graciella said. She skirted the dirt patch—Buddy had provided as much explanation for filling the hole as he had for digging it—and eased into one of the hammocks, laughing while trying to keep her drink from spilling.

  Teddy carried over one of the lawn chairs. “Aw, what are you doing with that?” she asked. “Take the other one.”

  “I’m not a hammock person,” he said. He set up the chair across from her, removed his jacket, and draped it across the back. The white envelope slid out onto the seat of the chair. He’d forgotten about it. He picked it up nonchalantly and slipped it into the jacket side pocket. Graciella noticed but didn’t remark on it.

  He sat across from her and they sipped their drinks while Graciella said pleasant things about Matty, the house, the yard. Perhaps some were lies but he didn’t care. The moment was as fine as any he could remember. A warm day at the end of summer, a beautiful woman in orange and green like a tropical flower blooming in his own backyard, a cold glass in his hand. It made him want to say philosophical things to her. He tried to construct a sentence about old age, bitter gin, and sweet tonic—the sweet tonic of youth!—but then lost concentration when Graciella kicked off one shoe, then the other.

  “Did I ever tell you the story about how my act was stolen by the king of late-night?”

  She laughed. “I think I would have remembered.”

  “At last! A fresh audience,” he said. “It was 1953, and me, a high school pal who did magic, and L. Ron Hubbard were all sitting in a watering hole in L.A.”

  “The Scientology guy?”

  “The very same. We were discussing how easy it was to separate a mark from his money—especially one who was a true believer. I began to demonstrate my abilities as a billet reader—”

  “The three wishes thing?”

  “Again, spot-on, my dear. I dazzled the barflies in attendance, and afterward, a kid from Nebraska introduces himself, buys me a drink, and tells me he works on the radio but got his start as a magician. Tough to do magic on the radio, I say. He asks me to show him the billet gag, out of professional courtesy. Now, I’m not one to show some fresh-faced mook how I make my living, but he keeps after me, keeps buying me drinks, so I figure, why not, he’s bought himself one trick. I walk him through the gag, and you know what he asks me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Why the hat? That’s the question. Why the hat? I tell him, the hat’s the whole act! It’s not just that it distracts the audience from looking at your hands; it concentrates attention! The hat is the theater, it’s the drama!”

  “I have to agree,” Graciella said.

  “And the kid says, Maybe it could be bigger. I coulda punched him. He walks out of the bar, and ten years later, I turn on the TV, and what do I see? That kid, with his own talk show. And what does he do for laughs? He does my act, wearing a God damn turban!”

  “Johnny Carson stole your act?”

  “Carnac the Magnificent my ass,” he said.

  He loved the way she laughed. “How much of that is true?” she asked.

  “As much as you’d like,” he said. “As much as you’d like.”

  Graciella began to swing toward him, then away from him. Her toenails were pink.

  “Ever hear of a guy named Bert Schmidt?” she asked. “They called him Bert the German.”

  “I may have heard the name,” he said.

  “He testified against Nick Junior this week.”

  “Huh.” He never would have thought Bert would turn on any Pusateri.

  “He said he heard Nick Junior bragging about killing Rick Mazzione.”

  “But not Nick Senior?”

  “Nope.”

  Maybe Bert was still loyal to Nick Senior after all. Was the father really setting up his own son? Or had Nick Junior been stupid enough to brag about a murder he didn’t commit?

  “It’s looking like I’ll be on my own soon,” Graciella said. “I really hope Irene can figure out what’s happening with the NG Group.”

  “I have complete confidence,” Teddy said. “She’s got a head for numbers. It’s a crime that she’s not running her own company.” He loosened his tie. “But are you sure you want to know what’s going on?”

  Graciella made a questioning noise.

  “Say that NG really is a front company,” Teddy said. “Would you shut it down on principle, forgo all that income?”

  “If Nick Senior is involved, then yes.”

  “My guess is that Nick Senior is involved up to his God damn neck.”

  He’d never been much of a sleeper. Restless mind, restless fingers. But after the accident (for that was what he called it when he came home from the hospital with his hands in bandages, and that was what Maureen told the kids, even if Maureen didn’t believe it herself), neither fingers nor mind were working and he found it nearly impossible to get out of bed.

  Or rather, couch. He’d moved down to the basement after coming home, like a wounded dog going to ground. The pain pills made all hours equal, and in the basement he could watch TV or sleep at any time, night or day. The boys accepted the living arrangement without questioning it, though Frankie did ask if he could sleep in the basement, too. Irene repeatedly attempted couch-side interrogations, but even in his pill-fogged state he knew it was better to evade her questions than to try answering them. He’d open his eyes and there she’d be, frowning down at him. She’d ask blunt questions like “Why aren’t you sleeping in your bed?” and “Why is Mom crying?” He’d say something like “This is where the TV is,” or “Everybody cries.” What choice did he have? The truth was off the table. He couldn’t tell a ten-year-old, “I lied to your mother, betrayed her, and put our entire family’s future at risk.” The real reason he’d moved to the basement was so he didn’t have to see the expression on Maureen’s face when she looked at him. He wanted to stew and sulk in darkness.

  He sat in that basement through the winter and into the spring, and slept in a bed only when he was at the hospital for the hand surgeries. Every morning Destin Smalls picked up Maureen and drove her to a government office downtown. (So vital was
she to the project that living in D.C. was not a requirement; remote viewing, after all, could be done remotely.) Smalls dropped her off in the afternoons, though not always on time. Sometimes Mo—or her new assistant cook, Irene—didn’t get supper on the table until six. Sometimes it was little more than stove-top C rations: macaroni and cheese; bean and bacon soup; or the kids’ favorite, Breakfast for Dinner.

  Mo tried to talk to him. When that failed, she tried to get him to talk to someone else—friends, his doctor, his hand surgeon, or “anyone who might help”—without using the word “psychiatrist,” which she knew would set him off. Men of his generation did not go to shrinks, certainly not men who’d emerged from the war unscathed. Teddy’s luck was largely due to the fact that he’d never left the States. He served on the front lines of the bureaucracy, deploying his typewriter with machine-gun speed, while at night embarking on daring raids to local bars and engaging in furious hand-to-hand poker games.

  But after the accident, he knew his luck had run out. He began to see his body as an unreliable vehicle, prone to failure and breakdowns, and as protective as cardboard. Was this how Mo thought of herself, when she was out traveling the astral plane? Did she know how fragile this shell was? One day he climbed out of the basement—aka the pit of self-pity—to ask her what it was like.

  Mo was washing up after dinner, scrubbing the cheap JCPenney pots she bought after their wedding. It was summer, months after she’d told him the diagnosis. He was alarmed at how exhausted she looked, how pale.

  “Where’d you go today?” he asked. He made his voice cheery. “You know. Out there.” He’d not asked about her job since she started it.

  “You know I can’t talk about it,” she said flatly. She was too tired to make that sound angry.

  “I have a security clearance, too, you know.”

  “Had.” She moved the sponge automatically, as if she wasn’t seeing what her hands were doing.

  He said, “Agent Smalls must know that he can’t keep a wife from talking to her husband.”

  She looked at him, and her face was so sad. “I was in the ocean,” she said.

  “In the ocean?” Hunting for submarines, he thought. Smalls was obsessed with submarines. “Was it beautiful? How deep did you go?”

  “Deep,” she said. “It was so beautiful.” She dried her hands with a cotton towel. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  He braced himself. He knew he’d been failing her. But he didn’t have the words ready to apologize. Or to tell her what he was going to do different. He had no plan, no scheme. What he had was two useless hands, a couch, and a TV.

  She sat down next to him. “It’s about the children,” she said. Immediately he felt relieved. “I want you to promise that you’ll never let them do what I do. Never let them work for the government.”

  “That’s an easy promise,” Teddy said. Buddy had stopped being able to predict anything. Frankie couldn’t bend a paper clip. And Irene was too honest to work for the government.

  “This includes the grandchildren,” she said.

  “What grandchildren?”

  “Someday our children will have children.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Don’t argue with me!” Mo shouted. The anger seemed to erupt from nowhere. Her body looked too worn out to make such a noise, and it had left her even emptier. Her eyes welled with tears.

  “I promise,” he said. He was good at promises. They came easily to him. “You can depend on me,” he said.

  He was touched when Graciella fell asleep in the hammock. Even after he finished his drink he did not get up to refill it, for fear that he’d awaken her. He watched her for a while, and then pushed back the Borsalino to gaze up at the leaves moving in the breeze. Two squirrels scampered across high limbs. The hat began to slide off his head, and something about touching the crown of the hat reminded him of the letter.

  He took it from his jacket pocket and looked again at his name in Maureen’s sharp cursive. Then he held the envelope, unopened, to the crown of the hat in the traditional manner, just in case Graciella happened to peek. Then he opened the envelope, the glue so old the flap almost popped free on its own. Inside was a single page of coarse drawing paper. He unfolded it, then grunted in surprise.

  Graciella stirred, but did not awaken.

  He picked up the envelope and thought, God damn you, Mo. God damn you and Buddy.

  The crayon drawing was as crude as you’d expect from a six-year-old. On a field of green, two stick figures lay inside a rectangle. One of the figures wore a triangle on its head.

  At the top right, Maureen had written him a message:

  My Love. Buddy says that the one with the hat is you, and the one beside you is “Daddy’s girlfriend.” He doesn’t know why you’re in a grave, if it is a grave. Be careful, Teddy.

  I’m glad you found someone. No, that’s not quite true. I want to be glad. I will be glad. As I write this I’m so sad, but I’m trying to take the long view. Buddy’s view.

  Speaking of our boy, I ask you again—please don’t get in his way. Give him his space.

  Love,

  Maureen

  13

  Irene

  “Not exactly Barbie’s Dream House,” she said to Graciella. The two women stood on the street outside a 1967 ranch home with foot-high weeds in the yard, a cracked driveway, and a garage buckling under the weight of gravity. The FOR SALE sign leaned against the front door, even though the house had sold two months ago. No one had moved in, and no one probably ever would.

  “You’re saying NG Group sold this?” Graciella said.

  “Yep. Ask me for how much.”

  Graciella looked at her over the top of her sunglasses.

  Irene said, “One point two million.”

  Graciella looked again at the house. “Is it on top of an oil well?”

  Irene laughed. “Nope. Strictly a fixer-upper.”

  “Then my husband’s a real estate genius. Who bought it?”

  “That’s the interesting part,” Irene said. “You did.”

  “NG Group?”

  “Not immediately. But eventually, yeah. It’s now back in your portfolio.”

  “And you’re dying to tell me why.”

  “I am.”

  “Go on, go on. Don’t let me stop you.”

  “Say you have a million in cash you don’t want to explain,” Irene said. “You can’t just deposit it in the bank—banks have to report big deposits. So you go to a friendly real estate agency and buy a little starter home for a million. But a week or a month later you decide you don’t want that crappy house. So you sell it back to the company for the same price, they take their realtor’s cut, and they deposit the rest in your bank account.”

  “And banks don’t raise an eyebrow for house sales,” Graciella said.

  “In practice, you don’t buy and sell to the same company,” Irene said. “There’s a handful of real estate companies that NG works with, and they’re all passing cash and properties around to each other like chips in a poker game—it’s not real money till someone cashes out.”

  “You mean when the cash is all clean.”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, damn,” Graciella said. “I don’t own a real estate company. I own a laundry.” She looked at Irene. “And you’re smiling.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

  “Don’t apologize! You love it. Figuring it all out. How they’re fooling people.”

  “I can’t help it,” Irene said. “I was raised by a cardshark.”

  “When I first met Teddy, I was hoping for a miracle. But I think the real miracle is that I found your father at all. And you. It’s funny how these things work out, from one chance meeting. That wasn’t even a grocery store I go to. An envelope showed up in my mailbox full of coupons and cash gift certificates for that Dominick’s. Some little girl must have sent it—my address was written in pink crayon.”

  “What?”r />
  Graciella frowned at Irene’s extreme reaction. “You know something about pink crayons?”

  “No, no,” Irene said. And thought, Buddy. “Go on.”

  “There’s not much else. I decided to try out the store. Then I met your father, and it turned out that he knew my husband’s family. It’s kind of amazing.”

  “That’s the word for it,” Irene said. She’d have to talk to Buddy and find out what the hell he was up to. She changed the subject. “I’ll be able to get more done on the financials after my trip.” She was going to fly out to Phoenix tomorrow morning. She’d been referring to it as “my trip.” Not “my trip to Arizona” or “my big job interview” or “my long weekend of hot sex.”

  “Whenever you can,” Graciella said. “I’ll make sure you’re paid for your time.”

  “You don’t have to do that. Dad asked me to help. It turns out I could be of use, so—”

  “Your father, sweet as he is, doesn’t get to loan you out like a lawn mower. You have useful skills, Irene, and you’ll be compensated.”

  With a shock, Irene realized that Graciella was not simply being nice. She believed she was telling the truth.

  That was the great catch in her ability, the reason it hardly ever helped: she could only detect when people knew they were lying. If they believed what they were saying, she was powerless to determine the truth of it. The great lesson of her childhood was that most adults, but especially her father, believed much of the bullshit they generated. When she was ten, she went to him and said, “Something’s wrong with Mom.”

  He was sitting on the couch in the basement, his headquarters since the car accident, watching the Cubs on channel nine, dressed in his uniform since the accident: undershirt, Bermuda shorts, black dress shoes. It was deep August, and that year they’d had nothing but the three Hs: Hot, Hazy, and Humid. The basement was slightly cooler than the rest of the house—but only slightly.

  “Mom’s fine,” he said.

  “She is?” Irene asked. Relieved, disbelieving, wanting to believe. Tears pooled hot behind her eyes.