Napier's Bones

by Derryl Murphy

  “Where did the word come from? Why check?”

  “The puck.”

  “The what?” This was Billy, his voice full of confusion.

  “The puck,” repeated Martin. He pulled the ratty bag up onto the table and slid its contents out onto the tray, where it sat beside his Coke.

  Dom reached his hand half forward, caught himself, looked at Martin and asked, “May I look at it?”

  Martin waved his permission, took a drink of his pop and then grabbed up another handful of fries.

  Dom picked it up, turned it over in his hands, feeling the strength ooze from the hard rubber. It was a hockey puck, NHL for sure, but looked like it was quite a few years old. He was pretty sure he knew exactly what it was, but thought he’d ask anyway. “Where’d you get this, Martin?”

  “From my dad.” Martin ate the last bite of his burger, chewing open-mouthed as he leaned back on the bench. “I stoled it from him when I left home, back in high school. Bastard stoled it himself, so I figured it was okay. Besides, the thing was always talking to me anyways, every day trying to tell me stuff.”

  “Do you know where this puck originally came from?” Dom knew, was sure, but he needed at least a vocal provenance, if only for his own ease of mind.

  “Dad told me it was from Bill Barylko’s last goal.”

  Sonofabitch. He could see it now, could feel the conjunction of numbers and freak events that had led to the creation of this specific piece of mojo, could see the events in his mind, even though they had taken place before he had been born. This was one serious punch of mojo, this puck.

  “Martin, do things drift in front of your eyes, always bugging you?”

  Martin cocked an eyebrow at him. “No. Not always, anyways. Sometimes, I s’pose.”

  Dom hefted the puck. “This is the reason it happens,” he said. “What if I told you I could help you get rid of those things?”

  Now Martin leaned forward. “How?”

  Dom leaned forward, too, trying to make it look like he was sharing Martin in something special. “I can take the puck and make it so it doesn’t bother you again. When you get it back, it’ll just be a regular puck. Still the one shot by Bill Barylko, but no longer one that makes all this stuff get under your skin and in your eyes all the time.”

  He felt a sharp stab of pain in his shin, looked over to see Jenna glaring at him. He kicked her back, smiled to see the look of surprise that accompanied the one of sudden pain.

  “No,” said Martin, who hadn’t seemed to notice any of the under-the-table shenanigans.

  “No?” Dom gritted his teeth. He had to have the puck.

  “I said no,” repeated the bum. “You can’t fool me. You take the puck and then I never get it back. I think you should pay me for it instead.”

  “Pay . . .” Dom coughed, choking for a second even though he’d swallowed nothing.

  “Yeah, pay me.” Martin cocked an eye at Dom, giving him a look that showed that, despite the free meal, he definitely didn’t trust him. “You figure you can get this from me with just a burger and fries and Coke, you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

  “Um.” Dom didn’t know what to say. He’d expected to have to wrestle this damn thing from the bum, at best grab the puck and run like a son of a bitch, at worst put Martin down so he wouldn’t get back up again. And here he was saying that all he wanted was some money.

  Martin stood and re-pocketed the ratty paper bag with the puck. “Maybe I’ll just go, then,” he said. “Looks like you don’t think it’s all that valuable, so maybe someone else will want to buy it someday.”

  Dom reached out and grabbed Martin’s forearm. “I would like it. What do you want in return?”

  Martin gave Dom a look that showed how remarkably stupid he thought he was. “Jesus Christ,” he said as he shook his head. “Money.”

  “You want money,” said Jenna. “For that puck.”

  Martin nodded.

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? It was your father’s, even if you don’t care about the history of it.”

  Martin pulled the puck from his pocket and removed it from the bag, rolled it around in his hand while he stared down at the floor for a moment. Then he sat back down and looked up, first at Jenna, then at Dom. “These things I see, they’re the reason I took this puck in the first place. I figured it would help me deal with the stuff, the little things that dance around the corners of my eyes.” He paused at this, then as if in response to this statement slapped at some numbers that briefly hopped around his face as they bounced to avoid Jenna. It looked to Dom like the numbers were only marginally visible to Martin; he had a tiny vestige of numeracy, it seemed, but not enough to allow him control of the numbers around him, only enough to make him susceptible to their presence.

  “And?” prompted Jenna.

  “And the thing didn’t help me with jack shit,” replied Martin. “It was like it called to me, but when I took it I didn’t get anything good out of it. I mean, it somehow let me do some things I wasn’t able to do before, like when I was trying to check the ghost out of you, but it’s only helped make my life crap ever since I took it.” He sat back and folded his arms, puck still in his right hand.

  “How much do you want for it?” asked Dom. It was all he could do to keep from licking his lips. Instead of fighting for mojo, or stealing it from someone, all he was being asked to do was pay. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  “Thousand bucks,” said Martin. The look on his face now was defiant, daring Dom to offer less.

  Dom pulled his wallet from his back pocket and flipped through the bills. “I’ve got seven hundred, but it’s American.” He dropped the money on the table between them. “That’s not quite there, with today’s exchange rates, but not too far off. Fair?”

  Martin rolled the puck across the table with one hand as he scooped up the pile of bills with his other. “Fair.”

  He stood to leave, but Jenna put a hand out to stop him. “Martin, please be smart about how you spend the money.”

  He smiled at her, then at Dom. “Absofuckinglutely.” And then he left, skipping a couple of times even before he had reached the door.

  Dom hefted the puck, a smile on his face. “Couldn’t have gone better,” he said.

  “I’ve never seen an easier time getting something that feels this powerful,” answered Billy. “Knocked down in an alley a couple of times, then you buy the fellow supper and pay him money that isn’t even your own.”

  “No sneaking around, no breaking in, no duels or brute force,” continued Dom. “Remarkable.”

  Jenna stood. “Why do I get the feeling that the two of you have just ripped off poor Martin?”

  Dom stood with her and they left, headed back towards the hotel. “You heard the man, Jenna,” said Dom. “He didn’t want the thing anymore, and even more important to me, he seemed to barely even use it. A good piece of mojo like this, it should be in hands that know how to care for it, how to use it the way the numbers intend it to be used.”

  “And how is that?”

  Dom shrugged. “That’ll take some time. I know the numbers are here. I’m sure you can see and feel them as well as I can. And I have an idea what the provenance of the puck is, just based on the memory of being a Canadian kid. I’d say that what Martin called ‘checking’ has a lot to do with it.”

  “Are you going to explain?” asked Billy.

  Dom turned the puck in his hands. Solid black rubber, National Hockey League logo on one side, but otherwise nothing to distinguish it. “Bill Barylko scored his last ever goal with this puck.” He frowned, trying to remember the story. “The goal was in the late fifties or early sixties, I think, and I do know that it won the Stanley Cup for the Leafs.”

  “Leafs?” Jenna shook her head. “That’s a hockey team, I take it?”

  Dom nodded, stepped sideways to avoid a pack of young teenage girls all carrying shopping bags. “The Toronto Maple Leafs. And then that summer he disappeared
on a fishing trip. I think the next time the Leafs won the cup was the year that they found his body. I don’t think they’ve won another since.” He laughed. “Hell, there’s even a famous Canadian rock song that refers to the story.”

  “So that would make this thing, this puck, a piece of mojo how?” asked Jenna. She looked sceptical.

  “The numbers likely took on their power after all the events played out,” said Dom. He opened the door to their hotel and let her walk in ahead of him. “The coincidence of the Leafs not winning again until the year his body was found means that the numbers built up a good amount of power. Already his scoring the winning goal would’ve given the puck a little extra something, but coupled with everything else it means that this thing carries loads of pent-up numbers, wanting nothing more than to amplify a numerate’s abilities in their own special fashion.” He pressed the button to call the elevator, and when they boarded let Jenna press the floor numbers.

  “If this is such a famous puck, shouldn’t it have been somewhere special?” Jenna leaned against the wall, hands in her pockets. “I mean, I don’t know anything about ice hockey, but baseball and football have halls of fame where special things end up sitting in displays, don’t they?” Dom nodded, smiling, which seemed to irritate her. “So if hockey has a hall of fame, why would this puck be out here, having just been bought from the hands of a street person, instead of in there, sitting under glass, on some sort of pedestal?”

  The door opened onto Jenna’s floor, but she let it close, rode up to Dom’s floor, obviously not willing to leave without an explanation. Dom got off first, led her to his room, opened the door with his key card and leaned in to turn on a light.

  Finally, sitting down on the lone chair in the room, he said, “I expect that if the hall of fame would hold onto Bill Barylko’s puck, then it thinks that it does have it.”

  Jenna sat on the edge of the bed. “What does that mean?”

  “What does it sound like it means?”

  She made a face, for a moment looking like she wanted to smack him upside the head, but then a look of comprehension appeared in her eyes. “You replace them.”

  “If by ‘you’ you mean the person who goes in and removes the object, then yeah, you’re right.” Dom hefted the puck, then tossed it into the air, caught it with a downward sweep of his arm. “Obviously, I had nothing to do with this. Wherever the puck was, it was likely Martin’s dad who scooped it.”

  “Provenance is usually important in finding numerate mojo,” interrupted Billy. “Just like it is in antiques. Most often, if you know where the mojo came from you have a better idea of what it’s capable of, to say nothing of knowing whether or not something isn’t quite right.”

  “What wouldn’t be right?”

  Billy shrugged Dom’s shoulders, but it was Dom who answered. “Don’t really know. It depends on all sorts of things. But there are some pieces of mojo out there that came about because of something bad that happened, and usually the numbers that come from those things are hard to reign in. Angry. Enraged, even.” Seeing the blank look on Jenna’s face, he cast about in his mind for an example. “Like from the Holocaust, for example. I bet there’s a whole pile of mojo that came out of those concentration camps, but I wouldn’t want to be the one who messes with anything from them.”

  Jenna nodded, looking pensive, then stood and walked to the door. Dom didn’t blame her for wanting to walk away from where this conversation was now headed. “What time do we meet downstairs?”

  “About ten to nine. We’ll go to the bank first, and then get breakfast.”

  She waved at him, a strange smile on her face. “G’night Dom. Night, Billy.”

  “Good night.” The first word came from Dom, the second from Billy. Jenna raised her eyebrows at the combination of accents and voices, then left the room.

  Dom sat for a moment, thinking about the look on her face as she had left, then shook his head, got his toiletries out and readied himself for bed. He’d lie under the covers and monkey with the puck until he was too tired to think, he knew, just to keep his mind off the fact that he’d just been flirted with.

  13

  The bedside alarm woke him at eight. The puck was sitting on the pillow beside his head. Dom slowly got himself together and then, everything packed and the puck in his pocket, took the elevator down. He was early and figured he’d have to wait awhile until Jenna came down, but she was already there, coffee in hand.

  She smiled and stood when he crossed the lobby, handed him the cup and pointed to the sugar packets and creamers sitting on the little side table. “I thought this would help you wake up a bit before heading to the bank.”

  After stirring everything in Dom took a sip, felt the caffeine shaking the numbers awake in his veins. “Ahhh,” was all he could say. He smiled and leaned back in his chair, eyes closed.

  “Billy, I have a question,” said Jenna. “I didn’t sleep much last night, I was thinking about it so much.”

  “Go ahead,” said the shadow.

  Dom opened his eyes and looked at her, curious. She seemed a little flustered, but pressed ahead without much delay. “When you were with all your other hosts, how did it feel, doing . . . personal things?”

  Billy raised Dom’s right eyebrow. Dom thought he could feel the beginning of a smile as well. “Personal things?”

  Jenna turned red, an immediate flush from neck to hairline. “Toilet stuff, sex . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she turned to face the far wall.

  Dom felt himself getting an unwanted erection, fought hard to keep it down. He started reeling off multiplication tables in his head, but the numbers remained in the distant background. Billy smiled, whether as a way of placating Jenna or at Dom’s predicament, he didn’t know. Probably both.

  “We had different ways of handling it,” said Billy. “Some of my hosts didn’t much care for sharing the space, even though it was usually their choice that I was present. Those ones usually tried to force me under whenever they were engaged in their toilette. Or, more rarely,” he added after a brief pause, “in carnal relations.”

  “Why more rarely?”

  “This is a lonely calling, the life of a numerate. Most of us, alive or dead, don’t go out of our way to interact with other people, aside from those we need to.” Here he lifted his hand and pointed to himself. “Or those we choose to, as when we end up getting involved in acquiring more mojo.”

  “Did any of your hosts sleep with someone who was aware of what they were?”

  Billy sat quiet for a long moment. Dom was up to multiplying together two sets of five digit numbers now, trying to get the part of his mind that was not paying attention to the numbers to focus on drinking coffee and fiddling with the puck. “None I can recall,” Billy finally answered. He smiled again. “Why?”

  Dom stood, downed the rest of the coffee and marched over to toss it in the garbage can. “Time to go if we’re going to make it to the bank,” he announced over his shoulder and headed out the door without looking to see if Jenna followed.

  “Time for a cold shower,” said Billy in a whisper.

  “You fucker,” responded Dom, voice equally low. “She’s a good looking girl, but—” He stopped talking as Jenna caught up. Maybe this would all be forgotten later and he wouldn’t have to talk or think about it anymore.

  Fat chance.

  They got to the car and threw their bags in the back, then climbed in, Dom behind the wheel. The bank was downtown, a short trip across the river, over a low-lying metal bridge that sat near a power plant and small but pleasant baseball park. He parked the car in front of the bank, plugged the meter, but before going in he led the way to another mailbox, performed the same routine he had in Bozeman, and soon had a new piece of ID.

  The banker didn’t immediately recognize him this time, but smiled and nodded when he saw his new driver’s license. “Mr. Donovan. Of course. Business in Florida still good, sir?”

  Dom nodded. “As good as can be e
xpected,” he said as they walked back to the room with the safe deposit boxes.

  This bank didn’t have a separate room for viewing what was in the box, so the manager unlocked Dom’s, pulled it halfway out, and then excused himself. Dom waited until the door was shut and then he pulled it the rest of the way out.

  “Big on sports, aren’t you?” said Billy as Dom pulled out the baseball.

  Dom shrugged. “You take it where you can get it.” He was going to say more when another safe deposit box jumped out from its locked and secure location and bumped hard against his hip. Jenna squealed in surprise, and Dom almost dropped the ball to the floor. He stepped back and the box slid out further, until only the smallest possible edge kept it from falling to the floor.

  “Something wants to be looked at,” said Billy.

  Dom nodded. Rubbing the ball to keep the mojo working for him, he stepped cautiously forward and opened the box, peered inside. A small box sat there, wrapped in aged brown paper covered with formulae written by at least a dozen different hands.

  “What is it?” whispered Jenna.

  Dom shook his head. “I don’t know. The numbers on the paper seem to be set there to protect the box inside.” He reached down to tear away the paper. “Maybe if I—ow!” He pulled back his hands and put his right index finger to his mouth. “Fuckin’ thing shocked me!”

  “Maybe it doesn’t want to be opened right now,” said Billy. He took control and reached down to try again, this time lifting the package out of the safe deposit box without any trouble. The drawer slid shut on its own, a gentle current of numbers flowing from the wrapper, almost invisible to them.

  Looking around to make sure he wasn’t being watched, Dom tucked the ball in one pocket and the wrapped box in another. Putting on his best innocent face, he opened the door and walked out, briefly thanking the banker on the way by.

  “Where to now?” asked Jenna as they approached the car.