Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  The cotton fabric of the trousers was web-thin in places. His wife had patched the knees six different times and had resewn the inseam twice. She wasn’t happy about the idea of him wearing the pants out in public. Someday, Molly was certain of it, he would sit down on the counter stool at Norm’s and the entire rear end would rip right out of them.

  Well, that was something Wilkins would face when the time came. He was certain, in his heart, that there would always be a way to patch the pants one more time, which meant infinitely. A stitch in time. Everything was patchable.

  “Son of a bitch!” came a shout behind him. He jumped and turned around.

  It was the raggedy woman who had been mixing ketchup and crackers into her ice water. She had apparently abandoned her makeshift breakfast.

  “What if I am a whore?” she demanded of some long-gone debating partner. “Did he ever give me a dollar?”

  Moved somehow by the sunny morning, Wilkins impulsively tugged a dollar bill out of his trousers. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her.

  She flounced past him unseeing, and shouted, at no one visibly present, a word that it grieved him to hear. He waved the dollar after her halfheartedly, but she was walking purposefully toward a cluster of disadvantaged-looking people crouched around the dumpster behind the restaurant’s service door.

  He wondered for a moment about everything being, in fact, patchable. But perhaps she had some friends among them. Magic after all was like the bottles on the shelves of a dubious-neighborhood liquor store—it was available in different proofs and labels, and at different prices, for anyone who cared to walk in.

  And sometimes it helped them. Perhaps obscurely.

  He wasn’t keen on revealing any of this business about magic to anyone who wouldn’t understand; but, in his own case, when he was out in the garage working, he never felt quite right wearing anything else except his inventor’s pants.

  Somewhere he had read that Fred Astaire had worn a favorite pair of dancing shoes for years after they had worn out, going so far as to pad the interior with newspaper in between re-solings.

  Well, Bernard Wilkins had his inventor’s trousers, didn’t he? And by damn he didn’t care what the world thought about them. He scratched at a spot of egg yolk on a pocket and sucked at his teeth, clamping the toothpick against his lip.

  Wilkins is the name, he thought with self-indulgent pomposity—invention’s the game.

  What he was inventing now was a way to eliminate garden pests. There was a sub-sonic device already on the market to discourage gophers, sure, and another patented machine to chase off mosquitoes.

  Neither of them worked worth a damn, really.

  The thing that really worked on gophers was a wooden propeller nailed to a stick that was driven into the ground. The propeller whirled in the wind, sending vibrations down the stick into the dirt. He had built three of them, big ones, and as a result he had no gopher trouble.

  The tomato worms were working him over hard, though, scouring the tomato vines clean of leaves and tomatoes in the night. He sometimes found the creatures in the morning, heavy and long, glowing bright green with pirated chlorophyll and wearing a face that was far too mammalian, almost human.

  The sight of one of them bursting under a tramping shoe was too horrible for any sane person to want to do it twice.

  Usually what he did was gingerly pick them off the stems and throw them over the fence into his neighbor’s yard, but they crawled back through again in the night, further decimating the leaves of his plants. He had replanted three times this season.

  What he was working on was a scientific means to get rid of the things. He thought about the nets in his garage, and the boxes of crystal-growing kits he had bought.

  Behind him, a car motor revved. A dusty old Ford Torino shot toward him from the back of the parking lot, burning rubber from the rear tires in a cloud of white smoke, the windshield an opaque glare of reflected sunlight. In sudden panic Wilkins scuffed his shoes on the asphalt, trying to reverse his direction, to hop back out of the way before he was run down. ‘ The front tire nearly ran over his foot as he yelled and pounded on the hood, and right then the hooked post from the broken-off passenger-side mirror caught him by the key chain and yanked his legs out from under him.

  He fell heavily to the pavement and slid.

  For one instant it was a contest between his inventor’s pants and the car—then the waistband gave way and the inseam ripped out, and he was watching his popped-off shoes bounce away across the parking lot and his pants disappear as the car made a fast right onto Main.

  License number! He scrabbled to his feet, lunging substantially naked toward the parking lot exit. There the car went, zigging away through traffic, cutting off a pickup truck at the corner. He caught just the first letter of the license, a G, or maybe a Q. From the mirror support, flapping and dancing and billowing out at the end of the snagged key chain, his inventor’s pants flailed themselves to ribbons against the street, looking for all the world as if the pantlegs were running furiously, trying to keep up with the car. In a moment the car was gone, and his pants with it.

  The sight of the departing pants sent him jogging for his own car. Appallingly, the summer breeze was ruffling the hair on his bare legs, and he looked back at the restaurant in horror, wondering if he had been seen. Sure enough, a line of faces stared at him from inside Norm’s, a crowd of people leaning over the tables along the parking lot window. Nearly every recognizable human emotion seemed to play across the faces: surprise, worry, hilarity, joy, disgust, fear—everything but envy. He could hear the whoop of someone’s laughter, muffled by the window glass.

  One of his penny-loafers lay in the weeds of a flowerbed, and he paused long enough to grab it, then hurried on again in his stocking feet and baggy undershorts, realizing that the seat of his shorts had mostly been abraded away against the asphalt when he had gone down.

  Son of a bitch, he thought, unconsciously echoing the raggedy woman’s evaluation.

  His car was locked, and instinctively he reached for his key chain, which of course was to hell and gone down Seventeenth Street by now. “Shit!” he said, hearing someone stepping up behind him. He angled around toward the front of the car, so as to be at least half-hidden from the crowd in Norm’s.

  Most of the faces were laughing now. People were pointing. He was all right. He hadn’t been hurt after all. They could laugh like zoo apes and their consciences would be clear. Look at him run! A fat man in joke shorts! Look at that butt!

  It was an old man who had come up behind him. He stood there now in the parking lot, shaking his head seriously.

  “It was hit and run,” the old man said. “I saw the whole thing. I was right there in the window, and I’m prepared to go to court. Bastard didn’t even look.”

  He stood on the other side of the car, between Wilkins and the window full of staring people. Someone hooted from a car driving past on Sixteenth, and Wilkins flinched, dropping down to his hands and knees and groping for the hide-a-key under the front bumper. He pawed the dirty underside of the bumper frantically, but couldn’t find the little magnetic box. Maybe it was on the rear bumper. He damned well wasn’t going to go crawling around after it, providing an easy laugh …

  A wolf-whistle rang out from somewhere above, from an open window across Sixteenth. He stood up hurriedly.

  “Did you get the license?” the old man said.

  “What? No, I didn’t.” Wilkins took a deep breath to calm himself.

  The goddam magnetic hide-a-key. It had probably dropped off down the highway somewhere. Wouldn’t you know it! Betrayed by the very thing …

  His heart still raced, but it didn’t pound so hard. He concentrated on simmering down, clutching his chest with his hand. “Easy, boy,” he muttered to himself, his eyes nearly shut. That was better. He could take stock now.

  It was a miracle he wasn’t hurt. If he was a skinny man the physical forces of the encounter would probably have
torn him in half. As it was, his knee was scraped pretty good, but nothing worse than ten million such scrapes he had suffered as a kid. His palms were raw, and the skin on his rear end stung pretty well. He felt stiff, too.

  He flexed his leg muscles and rotated his arms. The wolf-whistle sounded again, but he ignored it.

  Miraculously, he had come through nearly unharmed. No broken bones. Nothing a bottle of Ben Gay wouldn’t fix, maybe some Bactine on the scrapes.

  He realized then that he still had the toothpick in his mouth. Unsteadily, he poked at his teeth with it, hoping that it would help restore the world to normalcy. It was soft and splintered, though, and no good for anything, so he threw it away into the juniper plants.

  “You should have got his license. That’s the first thing. But I should talk. I didn’t get it either.” The old man looked back toward the window, insulted on Wilkins’s behalf, scowling at the crowd, which had dwindled now. “Damned bunch of assholes …” A few people still stood and gaped, waiting to get another look at Wilkins, hoping for a few more details to flesh out the story they would be telling everyone they met for the next six weeks. Six months, more likely. It was probably the only story they had, the morons. They’d make it last forever. “Got your car keys, didn’t they?”

  Wilkins nodded. Suddenly he was shaking. His hands danced against the hood of his car and he sat back heavily on the high concrete curb of a planter.

  “Here now,” the old man said, visibly worried. “Wait. I got a blanket in the car. What the hell am I thinking?” He hurried away to an old, beaten Chevrolet wagon, opening the cargo door and hauling out a stadium blanket in a clear plastic case. He pulled the blanket out and draped it over Wilkins’s shoulders.

  Wilkins sat on the curb with his head sagging forward now. For a moment there he had felt faint. His heart had started to even out, though. He wanted to lie down, but he couldn’t, not there on the parking lot.

  “Shock,” the old man said to him. “Accompanies every injury, no matter what. You live around here?”

  Wilkins nodded. “Down on French Street. Few blocks.”

  “I’ll give you a ride. Your car won’t go nowhere. Might as well leave it here. You can get another key and come back down after it. They get your wallet, too?”

  His wallet gone! Of course they had got his wallet. He hadn’t thought of that. He wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Well that was just fine. What was in there? At least thirty-odd dollars and his bank card and gas card and Visa—the whole magilla was gone.

  The old man shook his head. “These punks,” he said. “This is Babylon we’re living in, stuff like this happens to a man.”

  Wilkins nodded and let the old man lead him to the Chevy wagon.

  Wilkins climbed into the passenger seat, and the man got in and fired up the engine. He backed out terrifically slowly, straight past the window where a couple of people still gaped out at them. One of the people pointed and grinned stupidly, and the old man, winding down the window, leaned out and flipped the person off vigorously with both hands.

  “Scum-sucking pig!” he shouted, then headed out down the alley toward Sixteenth, shaking his head darkly, one wheel bouncing down off the curb as he swerved out onto the street, angling up Sixteenth toward French.

  “Name’s Bob Dodge,” the man said, reaching across to shake hands.

  Wilkins felt very nearly like crying. This man redeems us all, he said to himself as he blinked at the Good Samaritan behind the wheel. “Bernard Wilkins,” he said, shaking the man’s hand. “I guess I’m lucky. No harm done. Could have been worse.” He was feeling better. Just to be out of there helped. He had stopped shaking.

  “Damn right you’re lucky. If I was you I’d take it easy, though. Sometimes you throw something out of kilter, you don’t even know it till later. Whiplash works that way.”

  Something out of kilter. Wilkins rejected the thought. “I feel … intact enough. Little bit sand-papered, that’s all. If he’d hit me …” He sighed deeply; he didn’t seem to be able to get enough air. “Take a right here. That’s it—the blue house there with the shingles.” The car pulled into the driveway, and Wilkins turned to the old man and put out his hand again. “Thanks,” he said. “You want to step in for a moment, and I’ll give you the blanket back. I could probably rustle up a cup of Java.”

  “Naw. I guess I’ll be on my way. I left a pal of mine back in the booth. Don’t want to stiff him on the check. I’ll see you down to Norm’s one of these days. Just leave the blanket in the back of your car.”

  “I will.”

  Wilkins opened the car door, got out, and stood on the driveway, realizing for the first time that the blanket he was wearing had the California Angels logo on it, the big A with a halo. He watched Bob Dodge drive off. An Angels fan! He might have known it. Had he been there when Downing wrecked the big scoreboard? Wilkins hoped so.

  Some destructions didn’t matter, like the scoreboard, and those clear plastic backboards that the basketball players were routinely exploding a few years ago, with their energetic slamdunks. There were repairmen for those things, and the repairmen probably made more money in a week than Wilkins pulled down from Social Security in a year. He thought of his pants, beating against the street at forty miles an hour. Where were they now? Reduced to atoms? Lying in a ditch?

  Hell.

  He went in through the front door, and there was Molly, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Her pleasant look turned at once to uncomprehending alarm.

  “What—?” she started to say.

  “Lost the pants up at Norm’s,” he said as breezily as he could. He grinned at her. This was what she had prophesied. It had come to pass. “A guy drove me home. No big deal!” He hurried past her, grinning and nodding, holding tight to the blanket so that she wouldn’t see where his knee was scraped. He didn’t want any fuss. “I’ll tell you in a bit!” he called back, overriding her anxious questions. “Later! I’ve got to … damn it—” He was sweating, and his heart was thudding furiously again in his chest. “Leave me alone! Just leave me alone for a while, will you?”

  There had to be something that could be salvaged. In his second-best pair of fancy-dinners pants he plodded past the washer and drier and down the back steps.

  His backyard was deep, nearly a hundred feet from the back patio to the fence, the old boards of which were almost hidden under the branches and tendrils and green leaves of the tomato plants. Sometimes he worried about having planted them that far out. Closer to the house would have been safer. But the topsoil way out there was deep and good. Avocado leaves fell year round, rotting down into a dark, twiggy mulch. When he had spaded the ground up for the first time, he had found six inches of leafy humus on the surface, and the tomatoes that grew from that rich soil could be very nearly as big as grapefruit.

  Still, it was awfully far out, way past the three big windmilling gopher repellers. He couldn’t keep an eye on things out there. As vigilant as he was, the worms seemed to take out the tomatoes, one by one. He had put out a pony-pack of Early Girls first, back in February. It had still been too cold, and the plants hadn’t taken off. A worm got five of the six one night during the first week in March, and he had gone back to the nursery in order to get more Early Girls. He had ended up buying six small Beefsteak plants too, from a flat, and another six Better Boys in four-inch pots, thinking that out of eighteen plants, plus the one the worms had missed, he ought to come up with something.

  What he had now, in mid June, were nine good plants. Most of the Early Girls had come to nothing, the worms having savaged them pretty badly. And the Beefsteaks were putting out fruit that was deformed, bulbous, and off-tasting.

  The Better Boys were coming along, though. He knelt in the dirt, patiently untangling and staking up vines, pinching off new leaves near the flower clusters, cultivating the soil around the base of the plants and mounding it up into little dikes to hold water around the roots. Soon he would need another bundle of six-foot stakes.r />
  There was a dark, round shadow way back in there among the Better Boys, nearly against the fence pickets; he could make out the yellow-orange flush against the white paint. For a moment he stared at it, adjusting his eyes to the tangled shadows. It must be a cluster of tomatoes.

  He reached his arm through the vines, feeling around, shoving his face in among them and breathing in the bitter scent of the leaves. He found the fence picket and groped around blindly until he felt them—

  No. It.

  There was only one tomato, one of the Better Boys, deep in the vines. It was enormous, and it was only half ripe. Slowly he spread his hand out, tracing with his thumb and pinky finger along the equator of the tomato.

  “Leaping Jesus,” he said out loud.

  The damned thing must have an eight-inch diameter, ten-inch, maybe. He shoved his head farther in, squinting into the tangled depths. He could see it better now. It hung there heavily, from a stem as big around as his thumb.

  Knock, knock, he thought.

  Who’s there?

  Ether.

  Ether who? Ether bunnies.

  No ball game today, he thought. No crossword puzzle.

  He backed out of the vines and strode purposefully toward the garage. He hadn’t planned on using the ether nets this year, but this was a thing that needed saving. He could imagine the worms eyeing the vast Better Boy from their—what, nests? Lairs?—and making plans for the evening. Tying metaphorical napkins around their necks and hauling out the silverware.

  He pulled open the warped garage door and looked at the big freezer in the corner and at the draped, fine-mesh nets on the wall. The crystal might or might not be mature, but he would have to use them tonight.

  He had read the works of Professor Dayton C. Miller, who had been a colleague of Edward Williams Morley, and, like Miller, Wilkins had become convinced that Einstein had been wrong—light was not in any sense particles, but consisted of waves traveling through a medium that the nineteenth-century physicists had called ether, the luminiferous ether.