She carried it into the bedroom and leaned it against the nightstand. Fully dressed, she lay down on top of the comforter and pulled an afghan over her. When she turned out the light, she saw a glowing red ribbon around the cane, like a band of neon. It was better than a night-light.
She slept more soundly than she had in years. Gone were the leg cramps and the jittery muscles that forced her to pace through her dark house. Gone was the insomnia that kept her playing solitaire for hours at the kitchen table.
In the morning she found the cane where she had left it. No hanky-pank, although she couldn’t imagine what that would have entailed. By now, relief on discovering that Gabe and his walking stick were gentlemen came naturally.
Sophie didn’t bother wondering if Gabe’s ghost inhabited the cane or merely kept it company. For all the human spirit’s faults and shortfalls, it was nothing if not adaptable. A wooden dragon that took midnight rambles and a spook as a roommate had become the norm. But she was curious about the cane’s neon glow. She googled auras.
Clear red indicated a powerful, energetic person, competitive, passionate, and sexual. Sexual? She didn’t have to look in the mirror to know she was blushing. Could Gabe see her cheeks turn red? For that matter, exactly what could Gabe see?
In the days that followed, Sophie took the cane to the barn when she fed the chickens and goats. She leaned it against the stall while she milked the cow. She had always sung when she worked. Now she felt as though she had an audience, and an appreciative one at that. She started talking to the cane as she did her chores around the house. She told it things she never had told anyone.
One morning she found an anthology of poetry lying open on the floor. It had fallen out of the tall bookcase next to the fireplace. When she picked it up, the English translation of a poem by Heinrich Heine caught her attention.
Your eyes’ blue depths are lifted
With love and friendship stirred.
They smile, and, lost in dreaming,
I cannot speak a word.
“I wish you could speak a word,” she whispered. “I wish you could tell me everything about youself.”
That night, she left the television off and read aloud. She chose a Travis McGee mystery. She had a feeling Gabe would find common ground with John D. MacDonald’s gangly, suntanned knight in tarnished armor. If he preferred to hear something else, he would find a way to let her know.
The next day she made her first trip into town with the cane. When Sophie’s grandparents had homesteaded this ranch, the nearby hamlet of Hardpan had been a former stage stop. It had consisted of a livery stable, general store, saloon, and an unassuming but piquant little bordello in a whitewashed clapboard cottage with a picket fence.
Traces of gold dust brought a temporary boom. When the traces didn’t amount to more than that, Hardpan teetered on the rim of ghost-town status. Even the ladies of the evening closed the shutters of their clapboard cottage and moved on. The old-timers who sat rocking on the porch of the ranch supply store started referring to Hardpan’s collection of boarded-up windows as Deadpan.
The promise of jobs in the new metropolis of Las Vegas, an hour’s drive to the south, lured away what was left of Hardpan’s youth. Sophie’s nephew, Skip, was one of them. He and his law school diploma went to work for a firm with offices in a building close enough to Las Vegas Boulevard to reflect the neon glow on its windows at night. If casinos were the primary method of getting rich quick in Las Vegas, litigation was the secondary one.
Lately, however, not even Las Vegas could contain all the people who wanted large quantities of money, and wanted it fast. Two of the three blocks that made up Hardpan’s business district each had a new minicasino with a hotel appended. At the edge of town, an eighteen-hole golf course formed a bile-green blot on the desert landscape.
Workmen had pried the plywood off most of the plate glass windows on Main Street. Many of the new shops were boutiques, or bootie-cues as the locals called them, but Sophie didn’t mind. She figured gambling and bootie-cue revenue was better than no revenue at all.
Hardpan’s only grocery store called itself a supermarket. It was mistaken about the “super” part, but its warped shelves held whatever Sophie needed. After she checked out she put the strap of her purse over her head and adjusted it at an angle across her chest.
She left the store with a brown paper grocery bag tucked in the crook of one elbow and the cane in her other hand. She stopped beside her truck and hooked the dragon’s chin over her arm. She was fumbling in the pocket of her jeans for the key when a wild-eyed individual leaped out from behind a dented Dumpster. The word addict radiated like sparks from every magenta tip of his spiked hair.
He waved a salad fork at her. A salad fork? He obviously had not thought this heist through carefully.
“Give me your purse.”
“I can’t.” Sophie glanced down at the strap across her chest. “My hands are full.”
The logistics of snatching a purse with an old lady still attached to it further befuddled her mugger, which was not a good thing. The look in his eyes grew more feral. Sophie was about to try reasoning with him when the cane leaped straight up off her arm. Had it decided to flee, to abandon her? Sophie dropped the bag of groceries and made a grab for it, but flight was not its plan.
Sophie held on with both hands while it whacked her attacker on the head and shoulders. Gabe must have been in good shape when he died. The speed, force, and solid thunks of the blows made Sophie wince. They would have knocked out anyone not stoked by angel dust, but they didn’t faze this boy. He took off running.
The cane chased him across the parking lot and pulled Sophie along much faster than she ever had moved as the star of her high school track team. The cane went horizontal, as though to hit a line drive. It yanked Sophie’s arms back, then landed one final clout across the saggy seat of the lad’s filthy chinos.
The force of it whirled Sophie around. It sent her attacker flying off the edge of the asphalt and onto a shaggy carpet of cholla, prickly pear, and a sprinkling of horse-crippler cacti that had escaped the ranchers’ wrath and backhoes. Horse-cripplers were aptly named. Their thorns could puncture a truck tire without half trying. The boy picked himself up and hightailed it through them as though they were dandelions.
The cane came to rest at a jaunty shoulder-arms position. Dazed and panting, Sophie headed for the truck. Over the rasp of her own breath she heard someone whistling the “Colonel Bogey March” in the sounding box of her skull.
She didn’t remember gathering up the groceries, turning the key in the ignition, or putting the Chevy into gear. She must have done it, though, because fifteen minutes later she pulled into the shed that served as the truck’s garage.
With a wrenched shoulder, a skinful of ache, and the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai still resonating in her braincase, she put the groceries away. She had to admit that the situation with the cane had gone beyond a little harmless telekinesis. Was she harboring some psychopath’s ectoplasm? She needed more information about Grandpa.
She booted up her laptop and looked for the eBay posting about the ghost for sale. It had been removed. She consulted the online white pages for the daughter’s phone number, but without a last name she had no success. She found Deer Isle, Maine, in her atlas. It seemed small enough for people to know one another by their first names, but when she called the library and the post office, nobody had heard of anyone selling a spook. They told her that even if they knew who the person was, they couldn’t release personal information.
She pulled the cardboard box out of the closet and rustled through the paper excelsior in search of information about her knight in shiny ebony. She found the brown envelope with a letter and a faded black-and-white photo inside. The photo must have been the original. One corner was creased, and the edges were worn.
Sophie stared for a long time at the young man in the uniform with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve. His was not the face o
f a psychopath. He had kind eyes, a square jaw, and a carefree smile on his generous mouth. He looked like just the sort to sport a Corvette-red aura.
She touched the smile with the tips of her fingers and felt them tingle. She realized then that this particular electricity was far from static. Its arc formed a bridge between the past and the present. It connected the living and the dead, a man and a woman.
“You’re a handsome one, soldier.” Tears stung Sophie’s eyes. “Where have you been all my life?”
She had never been one to waste time on regrets, but she could not help wishing his path had crossed hers while he was still alive. How cruel of Fate to introduce them to each other now, when it was too late. A life together was tricky enough, but a life and a death together? Impossible.
Maybe Fate knew what it was doing. Maybe the handsome young sergeant would have been less appealing alive than he was dead. After all, defunct guys could do no wrong, whereas living ones screwed up all the time. Sophie stared into those smiling eyes and knew that Gabe would not have been perfect. No one was. But he would have been close enough to ideal to suit her.
She rooted through the stack of old picture frames in the closet until she found one that fit the photo. She set it on the mantel and sat in the recliner to read the letter.
It started with a thank-you to the ghost’s new owner for helping to ease a young boy’s fears. It promised anonimity for the transaction, and assured Sophie that the cane did not have a voodoo curse on it.
A voodoo curse? The description online had said nothing about a curse.
The daughter went on to summarize her father’s life, without divulging enough information to track down herself or any other kin. Gabriel was born in Maine in 1933, which made him Sophie’s age. As a sergeant in the U.S. Army he had earned the Silver Cross for “valor in the face of the enemy.”
When the Korean War ended, he became his family’s fifth generation of lobstermen off Maine’s rocky coast. Fifteen years ago Gabe’s wife had died. His daughter went on to say that when her own marriage broke up five years ago, her father invited her and her ten-month-old son to live with him.
“Dad was a reader and a thinker,” the daughter wrote. “A regular philosopher in a lobsterman’s galoshes. When I asked him why he would surrender the tranquility of his home to a smelly, squalling baby, he quoted some dead poet, ‘There is too much beauty upon this earth for lonely men to bear.’
“As for the cane, Dad said that a dragon eating its own tail is called Ouroboros. It represents the cycle of birth and death. It’s an ancient symbol for eternity.”
Eternity. Sophie had never spared much thought for mortality, and even less for eternity. Now she was sharing her home with someone who had finished with the former and was facing the latter. That raised a host of questions, not the least of which was: what did he want of her?
That night she changed into her cotton nightshirt, then she fetched the photo and cane from the living room. She set the photo on the nightstand and laid the cane on the other side of the double bed with the dragon’s head on the spare pillow. She pulled the covers over her and turned off the lamp. The strip of light around the cane radiated a shimmery red halo onto the white cotton pillow case. Sophie floated into the deepest, most tranquil sleep she had ever experienced.
She was washing the breakfast dishes the next day when the phone rang. The caller ID flashed UNKNOWN NAME, UNKNOWN NUMBER. Sophie went on guard. A person who refused to say who or where he was had something to hide.
A woman’s crisp voice instructed her to “please hold for Mr. Smith.” While Sophie waited, she was sure she heard in the background the faint chime of slot machines ringing the changes. She didn’t like strangers telling her what to do anyway, and when Mr. Smith had kept her on hold a few seconds too long, she hung up.
The phone rang again. “Mrs. Swensen?” This time Mr. Smith had managed to dial the number for himself. Sophie would have congratulated him on his initiative and manual dexterity, but she wasn’t in a good enough mood for sarcasm.
“There’s no Mrs. Swensen living here.” Sophie returned the phone to the cradle with more force than necessary.
The phone rang again. Sophie glared at it before she picked it up.
“Am I speaking to Sophie Swensen?”
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“My name is John Smith. I’m a collector of oddities. It’s a hobby of mine.”
“That answers my first question.”
“I want to buy the cane from you.”
So much for the promise of anonymity. Sophie wondered how much Mr. Smith had paid Gabe’s daughter for her name.
“What cane?” She wanted to ask how he knew about it, but that would tip him off to the fact that she had it.
Sophie could tell from Mr. Smith’s tone that he usually got what he wanted. His voice was warm maple syrup poured over chunks of concrete.
“The cane would make an interesting addition to my little collection, Ms. Swensen. I’ll give you . . . three hundred dollars for it.”
Sophie was a horse trader and a poker player. She heard the almost imperceptible hesitation between “you” and “three hundred dollars.” She figured that if he knew she had bought the cane, he also knew what she had paid.
She could guess his train of thought. He had assumed he would be dealing with a local yokel, a hick who’d be tickled to unload the trinket for the princely sum of a couple of hundred dollars. Instead, she had flipped him a verbal bird, so he had upped the offer to three hundred.
“No, thank you. Good day, Mr. Smith.” She heard, “Four hundred dollars . . .” emanating from the receiver on its way back to its base.
John Smith called the next day and each day after that. Their conversations were cordial, but they became a game for Sophie. She was curious to see how much Mr. Smith would pay to own her oddity. When the amount jumped from five thousand to fifty thousand dollars, he mistook her stunned silence for another rejection of his offer.
“One hundred thousand.” For the first time, his voice revealed the concrete under the maple syrup. “That’s my final offer. I suggest you take it, Ms. Swensen.”
“If that’s your final offer, then I can count on you not calling here again, Mr. Smith.” Sophie laid a little concrete herself, and laced it with gravel. “If that much money is burning a hole in your pocket, why don’t you consider donating it to charity?”
Her hand shook as she hung up. She had come to assume that the cane would protect her. Now she had the feeling that she must protect it. She took her grandfather’s old six-shooter and holster from the bottom of her sock drawer and cleaned it. She buckled it on when she went to the barn to do her chores. At night, she loaded her father’s sawed-off shotgun and stood it next to the bed.
Her mental state of seige went on for most of a week. For five days she jumped whenever the phone rang, but Mr. Smith must have decided to pursue other oddities. Even so, she didn’t want to risk someone snatching the cane on the street. Before she drove into town for groceries she leaned it, with apologies, between the broom and the mop in the kitchen closet. She even locked the front door after her, something she’d never bothered to do in the daytime.
She returned home to find the lock jimmied and the house a shambles. The cane was gone, but it had put up a fight. The disarray indicated combatants, and not mere burglars in search of jewelry and spare change. Furniture had been upended, pictures knocked off the wall, and a mirror shattered; but the television, stereo, and computer were still in place.
Sophie called to report the break-in. A slim-hipped young policeman arrived with his hat under his arm, a clipboard in hand, and military creases in his uniform. Sophie didn’t recognize him, which proved that Hardpan was indeed growing. Time was when she knew everyone in town.
He surveyed the damage and asked what had been stolen.
“A wooden cane carved in the shape of a dragon.”
“What else?”
“That’s
all.”
“Are you sure, ma’am?”
“I’m sure.”
“Was the cane valuable?”
“It was to me.”
“What would you estimate it was worth, ma’am?”
Sophie wanted to say a hundred thousand dollars, but he wouldn’t have believed her. What had made her think she could send the police on a goose chase, searching all the casinos in Nevada for a haunted cane?
“I paid seventy-three dollars for it.” She sounded foolish even to herself.
He was polite in that big-sky-eyed “yes, ma’am” way western policeman have. He advised her to file an insurance claim. He told her to call 911 if she saw or heard anything suspicious. He helped her right the furniture. He said “yes, ma’am” a few more times, tipped his hat as he put it on, and left.
Sophie sat in her recliner, stared at the dark television screen, and considered her next move. There certainly would be a next move. Mr. Smith had not seen the hind end of her.
He had sounded too big-time, too wise-guy to be connected with Hardpan’s penny-ante casinos. But where in Las Vegas should she begin to search for a collector of oddities named Smith? That would be like looking for one specific sequin in the Old Elvis’s entire wardrobe of jumpsuits.
In desperation she called her nephew, Skip. Eyes the pale blue of a Nordic fiord were the only things he had in common with her. He was always nice to her, but she suspected his motives. As her only living relative, he expected to inherit her house, outbuildings, and the eighty acres of desert on which they sat. The house didn’t merit the two or three sticks of dynamite required to blow it up, but at the rate Hardpan was expanding, the land would be worth tens of millions one day.
Skip had what was politely called a gambling problem. When he wasn’t in his Las Vegas law office or chasing ambulances, his secretary knew to page him in a casino. He might have some idea about Mr. Smith’s identity.
Sophie didn’t have to spend as much time explaining the situation as she’d expected.
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 18
