Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

“You’re Teddy,” Adrian said.

  “Mr. Telemachus to you. And I’m on the phone.” To Smalls he said, “So do we have a deal?”

  The agent took a long time to answer. Smelling a trap? Maybe, but he was so hungry.

  “Deal.”

  Teddy hung up the phone, satisfied. One task finished—or at least on hold for now.

  “Mom says you do magic,” the boy said.

  “I do magic tricks. There’s a difference. But I only do them for money.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “Oh, you have money,” Teddy said. “Just look at this house.”

  The kid didn’t get it. “Can’t you show it to me for free?”

  “Sorry. No cash, no trick.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “Yes, but it’s the kind of mean that teaches you something.”

  Graciella reappeared from the basement, holding that green cartoon lunch box. The boy wheeled toward her and said, “He won’t show me a magic trick.”

  “Leave Mr. Telemachus alone. We’re going to tae kwon do now. Go get your uniform.”

  “What’s in there?” the boy asked, reaching for the lunch box.

  She lifted it out of his reach. “Robe and belt. Go!”

  She watched him run out of the room. “He doesn’t understand what’s happening. I’m trying to do the right thing, but I’m never sure what they can handle. If they were older, they might be able to handle it.”

  “You never stop worrying,” he said. “You never stop being their parent.”

  She sat down absently, still contemplating the damage. Being this close to her intoxicated him. He loved the way she smelled. The gleam of her tanned legs. Her painted toes. He even loved the way her brow furrowed.

  “Take my grown son,” Teddy said, to distract her from her nervousness. “He’s got himself into a mess.”

  “Buddy? He did seem a bit…”

  She didn’t want to finish that sentence, and Teddy let her off the hook. “Naw, Buddy’s just crazy, it’s Frankie who’s the trouble magnet. I’m just hoping his bad habits haven’t rubbed off on Matty.”

  “He’s in trouble, too?”

  “He’s been experimenting a little,” Teddy said. “Got mixed up with the wrong kind of people, drew some attention from the authorities.” This may have been the finest nonexplanation he’d ever delivered.

  “Is that why Irene’s upset?”

  “Irene’s upset? Did she say she was upset?” He’d kept his daughter out of all of the Matty business. He needed her focused on the Nick thing, not worrying about spies and agents.

  “She hadn’t called me since she came back from her trip, so I called the house,” Graciella said. “She gave me an update on what she’d found with the company papers, but she sounded…wounded.”

  “Irene’s touchy. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Graciella’s frown was there and gone in an instant. He didn’t know how to interpret that. If they were playing poker, it would have telegraphed that she’d picked a bad card, and he would have bet against her. But in the game of Real Women, he was forever a novice.

  He said, “She’s sure working hard on those papers, though.”

  “I guess that’s something.” She handed him the lunch box. “Hold this, I need to round these boys up.” She went to an intercom and pressed a button. “Adrian! Luke! We’re going to tae kwon do! Julian, you better have your homework done before I get back!”

  A burp of static, and a voice said, “It’s a holiday weekend, Mom.” He sounded bored.

  “Done before Sunday night, that’s the rule. The rest of you, I’m leaving in thirty seconds. Twenty-nine!”

  She looked at Teddy. “Only a week into school, and Julian’s already behind.”

  “He’ll be fine. You said the new school was better, right?”

  Graciella walked Teddy to the front door. She glanced at the lunch box, winced. “I don’t like this, showing them to him.”

  “He’s not going to believe unless he sees them. It’s too crazy otherwise.”

  “So let’s say he believes, and he makes his promise. How do I believe him?”

  “That’s why you’ve got to let me do the negotiating. I’ll know if he’s lying. I’ve got my secret weapon.”

  “I’m sure Irene is really happy you talk about her like this.”

  “You gotta admit, she’s a pistol. And not just for the mind reading. That girl’s a financial wiz.”

  “I need her,” Graciella said. “No matter what happens in the trial Tuesday, the real estate office has to be clean from now on.”

  The defense was about to rest. Bert the German and several others had already implicated Nick Junior in the murder. If Nick Junior didn’t testify against his father—and there was one last chance for him to take the stand, on Tuesday—then it was on to final arguments. The jury could hand back a verdict by the end of the week.

  “Nick’s going to jail, or his father is,” Graciella said. “Either way, I’m not going back to him. I can’t have all this follow my boys around for the rest of their lives like a bad smell.”

  Teddy wasn’t sure a grandson of Nick Pusateri Senior was ever going to smell like roses, but he kept that to himself. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

  She unlocked the front door, nodded at the lunch box. “You think if I held on to that, he’d break into my home?”

  “Let’s not think about that,” he said. Because Nick Senior would have to come for it. He couldn’t just let it sit in the house, waiting for Graciella to change her mind about the cops. “So…you got anybody living here with you?”

  “Besides the boys? No. But I’ve got an expensive alarm system.”

  He nodded as if that would make a bit of difference. Nick Senior’s guys had shot people in their own homes. They’d blown up cars by remote control, right in the suburbs. The Sun-Times had been running stories about suspected mob hits all through the trial.

  Graciella seemed to know what he was thinking. “He’d never risk hurting his grandsons,” she said.

  “No, no. But still.” And thought: Still, there’s you.

  “I need them out of this, Teddy. No more contact with the Pusateris, all that family business.”

  “I promise you, I’ll make this work.”

  Adrian galumphed down the stairs, white robe open and green belt dragging behind him, followed by a lanky brother a few years older. That one was Luke. His uniform was cinched tight, and he wore a swoop of brown hair over one eye like a sixties cover girl. Adrian said, “That’s him,” as if ratting Teddy out. “He won’t do magic.”

  “No tricks! We’re late,” Graciella said.

  Teddy waved the smaller boy over. “Come here, your shoe’s untied.” Adrian reluctantly stepped forward and offered a scuffed, yet still garish shoe decorated with green cartoon animals wielding swords and such, each no doubt possessed of unique abilities and an elaborate backstory. Teddy went down on one knee. “I know people who can do magic. Real magic. And what does it get them? Nothing.” He struggled to hold the shoelace between finger and thumb. His fingers had turned into rusty shears. Once—decades ago, before Nick Senior—they could make cards dance. Coins and papers and even engagement rings would wink in and out of existence, his touch as silent and quick as a mirror flicking sunlight. Once, he was a phantom of the card table. Maybe it was time for the phantom to strike back.

  “Doing real magic,” he went on, keeping up the patter like a professional. “That stuff makes those folk unhappier than if they had no magic at all, because it doesn’t do ’em a damn bit of good. But if you can do a magic trick, you get paid. Do you want to get paid?”

  Adrian nodded.

  “Other shoe. Good. Now here’s the thing.” Graciella stood in the doorway, listening. “Magic’s easy. It’s tricks that are hard. You gotta be smart, you gotta be prepared, and you gotta be patient. Sometimes it takes a long time for a trick to pay off. Years even. Most people can’t wait that
long. They just want the magic, right now. Poof.”

  “I’m patient.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “So when are you going to show me the trick?”

  “You beg, borrow, or steal a fresh one-dollar bill, and then we’ll talk.”

  Graciella laughed. “In the car! Now!”

  Teddy stood up with an embarrassing pop of the knees.

  “You can’t tell a kid to steal money, Teddy. However…” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m still glad I ran into you that day in the grocery store.”

  “I have a confession to make,” Teddy said. “I didn’t run into you by accident. I saw you, I thought you were a pretty woman, and I made sure I got close enough to do my mind-reading trick.”

  “Oh, I know about that.”

  “You do?”

  “How many women have fallen for it?”

  “I plead the fifth, my dear.”

  “Well, that wasn’t the miracle. It was the fact you were there at all. That you turned out to know Nick Senior, and that you’re willing to help—that Irene is willing to help, too. You two are my pair of pocket aces.”

  She knew he’d like that metaphor, and he liked that he knew that she knew. He strolled to his car, humming to himself, swinging the plastic box full of a dead man’s teeth.

  He used to have no problem making promises. When he proposed to Maureen, he said, “You’ll never regret this.” When their daughter was born, he said, “I’ll be the best dad in the state of Illinois.” And when Maureen told him she was sick, he said, “You’re going to be fine.”

  It was a freezing morning in late winter. He found her in the bedroom, her face wearing that peculiar expression of the working clairvoyant: head tilted, mouth tight, eyes twitching under closed lids like a dreamer.

  “There’s a tumor,” she said.

  She’d discovered it on her own. She’d been feeling sick to her stomach for weeks, and had stopped eating. Then, following what she called “an intuition,” she’d turned her attention to her own body. Not-so-remote-viewing.

  He said, “You’re not a doctor. Stop being dramatic.” It wasn’t the kindest he’d ever been. It was seven in the morning, and he was tired, unemployed, and in pain. He’d spent most of the night in the basement, watching the TV and doing physical therapy, which in this case took the form of repeatedly lifting a heavy bottle with his bandaged hands.

  “I’ve already gone to the doctor.” What she meant was “doctors.” Weeks ago she’d made an appointment to see first their family physician, then her gynecologist, then an oncologist. She said, “I couldn’t tell you until I was sure.”

  “But we can’t know for sure until they do a biopsy. Did they do a biopsy?”

  “It’s scheduled for next week.”

  “Then it could be nothing.”

  After the test results came back, with undeniable evidence of epithelial cell tumors, he doubled down: the doctors were wrong, the tests were wrong, and even if they weren’t, she could go into remission at any time.

  She stood at the entrance to the basement, arms crossed, keeping her tears behind her eyes. “We need to talk about what to tell the kids,” she said.

  “Tell them what? There’s nothing to tell,” he said from the couch. “We’re going to beat this.”

  In 1974, nobody he knew “beat” cancer. Half a dozen friends had caught the lung variety—they were a generation of chimneys—and had croaked in a few years. One died of colon cancer, another of some kind of melanoma. Ovarian cancer, that was something else. They called it “the silent killer” because early symptoms—stomachaches, the urge to pee, loss of appetite—were easily dismissed. The tumors grew, and it wasn’t until the bleeding started that you knew something had gone terribly wrong. By then it was too late.

  All through the spring and into summer, he avoided all mention of the Big C. Wouldn’t have the conversation with Maureen. Her dogmatic belief that she was doomed infuriated him. It was surrender. Negative thinking. He knew that if they talked about death, if they planned for it, they would only give it power over them. Why invite the specter into their house, pour it a cup of coffee, let it put its bony feet all over their couch?

  No. They’d beat cancer, by cheating if necessary. Teddy had been training for the job his entire life.

  But even he couldn’t remain blind to the changes in her body. She grew thinner through that summer. Their age difference once had bordered on the scandalous, but now she was catching up to him, aging at three times his speed, and angling to pass him. By August she was coming home from work exhausted. Irene was cooking then, and Maureen would sit with Buddy in her lap and look out the window as if she were already on the other side of it.

  One night late in August, she roused herself to wash the after-supper dishes, and he watched her thin arms scrub the pots. That was the night she made him promise never to allow the children to work for any government. He’d made fun of her, and she’d shouted at him, wasting the last of her energy on him. He felt terrible. He apologized, and promised to do everything she asked—all without allowing himself to think there’d ever be a time he’d have to take care of the kids without her.

  “I want you to come back,” she said that night. “Back to the bedroom.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Jesus, Teddy.” Exasperated. She leaned against him, and he put his hand around her shoulders. She seemed so light. A girl with eggshell bones.

  They went into the bedroom and lay down side by side, on their backs, as if trying out burial plots. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

  His chest went cold, dreading what she’d say next.

  “I’ve done something bad,” she said.

  He was relieved. There was nothing Maureen could do that was as bad as what he’d done, no weight as big as what he’d brought down, and he welcomed any shift in the scales. “You can tell me anything,” he said.

  What she told him was impossible to believe at first. She had to go through parts of it several times.

  After she’d finished, he thought for a long minute, and then said, “You’ve betrayed the American government.”

  “Yes.”

  “And disrupted our nation’s intelligence-gathering networks.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what else? Oh—allied yourself with a dissident Russian to also bring down the Soviet psychic warfare program.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My God, Mo, you’re an international criminal!”

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  They laughed together, like the old days.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

  She begged him to stop talking, because her stomach hurt. No, really hurt. He rolled onto his side to watch her face. That fast, her concentration had moved away from him, down into the pain.

  A minute or so later, she spoke without opening her eyes. “We have to talk about what to say to the kids.”

  “Is this about the government thing? I promised you—they’ll never work for them.”

  “I’m talking about me,” she said. “Buddy already knows, but—”

  “You told him?”

  “He already knew. He drew my grave.”

  “Ah.” He thought that had all stopped for the kid. But maybe there was still a bit of the talent there. He was so God damn unreadable, that one.

  Mo said, “But Irene and Frankie have to know what’s coming, too.”

  “I’ll help you tell them,” he said. He touched a scarred hand to her cheek. “Tomorrow, I promise.”

  He was so good at making promises, because he’d had so much practice.

  From the basement came the high whine of a drill going full tilt into wood studs. Did he even want to look? For weeks he’d avoided going down there, afraid that he’d see the damage and burst an artery. But the mountain wasn’t coming to Teddy, so he had to go to the mountain.

  Buddy stood at the base of the stairs, using both hands to drill into th
e wall beside the basement door. The door frame was shiny new metal, and the old wooden door had been replaced by a steel one. A fucking steel door.

  Jesus Christ.

  At Buddy’s feet lay an alarm clock, busted and sprouting wires. A spool of new wire was set beside it.

  Teddy took a breath before he spoke. “Buddy. Buddy. Hey.” The big lump finally heard him and released the trigger on the drill, but did not turn around. “Could you put that down for a sec?”

  Buddy looked over his shoulder, drill tilted up, a cowboy holding his fire.

  “I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing,” Teddy said. “I’m sure you got your reasons.” Buddy said nothing. Waiting for the interruption to be over.

  “I just want your advice on something,” Teddy said.

  Buddy winced.

  “Come on,” Teddy said. “Sit down with me, one God damn second.”

  Buddy reluctantly set the drill on the floor, and Teddy led him through the steel door into the basement. It was dark in there, darker than it should have been. The row of garden-height windows were all covered.

  Teddy flipped on the lights. The windows had been sealed with sheet metal.

  “What the hell did you—?” He stopped himself. He wasn’t going to criticize. He wasn’t going to question.

  Buddy hadn’t limited himself to remodeling and fortifying—he’d also been redecorating. A secondhand love seat and three ratty armchairs, all different colors, were set up around a twenty-six-inch TV, with a video-game gadget wired up to it. Lamps of various vintages were set up but not yet plugged in. The desk Irene had been using was pushed off to the side, the computer missing. And against the far wall were four unpainted bunk beds.

  “Have a seat,” Teddy said. Each of them took an armchair. “I gotta go somewhere this afternoon, talk to somebody I don’t want to talk to. You know anything about that?”

  Buddy looked off to the side.

  “If it’s going to go bad, I’d like to know. Are you getting any, you know, glimpses? Anything like you used to?”

  Buddy refused to make eye contact.

  “Okay, fine, you don’t want to talk. I get it. You and me, we haven’t talked much lately. I know I used to put a lot of pressure on you, back in the day. And I know that was wrong.”