The Last Coin (11 page)

He steeled himself, then bent over and kissed her on the cheek. In two minutes he was out the door, striding up the alley toward the bank. Two thousand—it was double what he’d hoped for. He might have asked for three. But if he had, and she’d laughed in his face, then the whole business of the chocolates and the French chef would have come to nothing. And besides, if she’d written a bigger check, the bank might easily have kept it for a week to clear it. They weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of Andrew’s banking. They weren’t anxious to speculate in questionable new businesses. Bankers were men of little imagination; that was the truth of it. The further truth was that the two thousand would go some distance toward paying the bills. They seemed to pile up so quickly these days. It wouldn’t be long, quite likely, before certain of their creditors would get nasty. But then their desperation might be enough to make Aunt Naomi advance them a bit more. Her will was drawn, after all. It would all belong to Rose when Naomi died. Surely it didn’t matter to the old woman whether she gave it to them now or waited until the end.

So the two thousand would have to do for the moment. If he were lucky, Rose would never hear about it until, on some future, grim day, Naomi would haul out her binder and show Rose what sort of spendthrift husband she was married to. By that time though, Rose couldn’t possibly remember what had happened to any single piece of that money. True, she’d be flabbergasted at the size of the debt they’d run up. But such was life. It would be spilled milk by then. There would be no inn without it, and certainly there’d be no restaurant—no real restaurant, anyway. Speculation was in his blood. There wasn’t a winner in the world that didn’t bet, and timidity wouldn’t buy copper pots. He’d have to work on the French chef business, though. Faking up a beard and mustache for Pickett wouldn’t answer. He’d heard of a chef’s school in Bellflower, and it would be the work of a moment to ring them up and inquire about the availability of graduates. He could hire one for a week to satisfy Naomi and Rose, then toss him out and do the cooking himself.

It was early evening when Andrew drove along the Coast Highway, listening to an odd rattle in the engine of the Metropolitan. He was entirely ignorant of mechanics, happily so. He didn’t have time in his life to meddle with it. There were better things to do, any number of them. In fact, he’d been doing some of them that very afternoon. He’d paid a visit to Polsky and Sons liquor importers and distributors on Beach Boulevard in Westminster, and come away with two cases of scotch, four dozen pint glasses, and most of the items on the list he’d made up out of
Grossman.
The trunk and back seat were full of stuff, and he still had the bulk of Aunt Naomi’s money in his wallet. He whistled tunelessly and looked out the window.

The warm weather seemed to be passing. The sky was gray out over the Pacific, and the wind had fallen off. Twilight cast long shadows across the weedy marshland ruins of boatyards and clapboard bungalows. He drove past heaps of rusted anchors and piles of painted buoys and what looked like an old concrete bridge, collapsed now and sunk into the shallows of the Bolsa Chica Salt Marsh. The Seed Beach Naval Weapons Station loomed off to the right, a broad expanse of what looked like pastureland and farmland, with here and there in the dim distances a weapons bunker sitting toad-like and ominous between grassy hillocks. There were broad wooden doors in the ends of some of the hillocks, with grass and canteloupe vines growing right in around the jambs. What lay under the grass and vines was a mystery.

He slowed the car, bumping off onto the shoulder. A knot of people stood around in front of the roadside stand that sold strawberries and corn and tomatoes in the spring and summer, and pumpkins in the fall, all of it grown on government property, which wore the fruits and vegetables as a clever disguise. Hinged sheets of plywood had been dropped across the front of the stand to close it up for the night, so the people—a couple of families with children from the look of it—weren’t buying anything. They were clearly up to something else. Another carload pulled in directly behind Andrew, and what seemed to be a half-dozen children piled out and went shouting away past his car, a large woman in a wraparound garment climbing ponderously out after them and yelling them into submission.

Andrew followed just for the adventure of it—something that Beams Pickett would approve of. There was a sign posted, advertising, of all things, a treasure hunt. It referred to a companion ad in the
Seal Beach Herald
, Pickett’s newspaper. The newspaper advertisement no doubt explained the carloads of curious people. Treasures were to be buried, the sign said, no end of them, and the public could come dig for them, on the night of Sunday the 24th, by moonlight. Penlights were allowed, nothing bigger than that, though, and the public could keep what it found. There was a diamond ring, it said, in a hermetically sealed glass box, and a glass paperweight in a wooden box, and tickets for two dinners at Sam’s Seafood, which weren’t, Andrew assumed, in any sort of box at all. There were five hundred children’s toys, and a real treasure chest full of quartz crystals and fluorite and bags of rhinestones and glass beads. No maps would be provided. The public would furnish their own spades.

Andrew recalled such a thing from the past. What was it?—almost thirty-five years ago. It had been a fairly common practice in central Orange County, when vast tracts of houses were routing out orange groves and bean fields, and driving up the price of land so that small farmers couldn’t afford to keep it. For a time it had been the fashion for farmers to let the populace spade up their acreage for them. They’d bury rolls of pennies and such, and let suburban hordes do a week’s worth of work in a night. It had always seemed an unlikely practice to Andrew, although he approved of the notion because of the mystery and romance associated with digging for spurious treasures in a weedy pasture by moonlight. It appealed to his sense of—what? He couldn’t quite define it.

He drove away mulling it over. It made a certain amount of sense two score years ago, when hundreds of farmers owned little tracts of land up and down the roads leading south toward the beaches—just a couple of acres or so—and sold roadside produce to wring out a living. But that was all gone years since, and now what farmland was left was owned by vast real estate companies that, in some indefinable way, let out bits of land for farming in order to gain some sort of nebulous tax profits. Nobody “spaded up” the land anymore.

Still, that didn’t mean that there was some sort of secret motive in this moonlight-spading business, did it? He’d have to watch that sort of jumping-to-conclusions. It was too easy to raise people’s eyebrows. He suspected, somewhere inside him, that Rose “put up with him” sometimes. In the best possible way, she was conventional. There wasn’t any more to it than that. She was conventional; he wasn’t. His antics made her tired. He knew that, and he wished it weren’t so. But they seemed to inhabit different worlds sometimes, different universes. Hers was neatly mapped out. The streets that seemed to run north and south
did
run north and south, seven days a week, and if a farmer planted pumpkins it was simply because Halloween was drawing near and he could sell them at a profit. Andrew’s world was cut with streets that angled and twisted. Fogs rolled through at inopportune moments, seeming to hide the shifting landscape. Slouching farmers planted pumpkins so that the crawling vines would cover hillocks beneath which lay unguessed weapons, cleverly hidden from the eyes of satellites sweeping past overhead, themselves veiled by distance.

And although he was certain that he understood her world easily enough, saw through it clearly, he was equally certain that she had little notion of his. She understood him to be simply frivolous, cockeyed for no apparent reason at all. His enthusiasms were a mystery to her, a closed book. At worst he was stark, staring mad, which didn’t, he thought as he drove along, particularly bother him. What was far worse was that she thought him childish, with his coffee makers and his books and his paperweights, his preoccupation with beer glasses and breakfast cereal and his odd car, which, she’d once said when she was angry, no grown man had any business driving. But he was deadly serious about it all. Those sorts of things were the threads which knitted up his world. Pulled out one by one and examined, maybe they were foolish and frivolous things, but if you pulled them all out and pitched them into the dumpster, then what was left? Nothing that was worth bothering with. A lot of airy trash fit for the junkman. That was the truth of it, and Rose didn’t quite understand it. She pretended to when he tried to explain it, but in her eyes and in her voice there was something that made him feel as if he were six years old, showing his mother his favorite toy. It made him mad just to think about it.

He drove along feeling half-sorry for himself, neglecting to turn his headlights on. He couldn’t tell Rose about Pickett’s Caretaker nonsense. It would be evidence of something. Lord knows what would have happened if she were to discover that he’d shamelessly talked two thousand dollars out of Aunt Naomi that afternoon, when what he was supposed to be doing was generally smoothing things over. Now he’d promised a French chef and spent a quarter of the money on exotic liquor, and Beams Pickett was on his way to Vancouver to load up the trunk of his Chevrolet with cartons of Weetabix, charging gas to the company credit card, which Rose had insisted he not use unless it were an absolute emergency. He hadn’t
wanted
to give Pickett the credit card, but his wallet had been empty. Now it was full, only a few hours later. That’s how life went. It was unpredictable. Just when you thought that the way was clear, that the script was written, wham! there was some new confusion, flying in at the window, overturning chairs.

A horn blared and a car swerved out of the lane in front of him. He’d drifted across the line, into oncoming traffic. He jerked the car back into his own lane, his heart hammering. Rose paid attention when she drove. He didn’t, it was true. He couldn’t argue with her when she pointed it out. The only human being on earth, she said, who drove worse than he was Uncle Arthur, who was ninety-two.

And she had her doubts about his seeing so much of Beams Pickett. Pickett had developed the reputation of believing in plots and threats, and Rose understood, although she never said it, that Andrew had been contaminated. Pickett believed in the theory that what was obvious was probably lies; the truth lay hidden, and you got at it by ignoring what passed as common sense.

Andrew’s mind wandered again as he drove along. He thought about their eventful morning, about the ‘possum trick and Pickett’s suspicions about Mrs. Gummidge. What was true about Pickett was that he was skeptical of skeptics. He had almost hit one that very morning in a cafe near the pier, after the two of them had dumped the ’possum and went fishing. They had had some luck with bonita, keeping at it until after nine in the morning. Then they’d left the fish in a gunnysack in the back of the Metropolitan and gone in for breakfast at the Potholder. A man named Johnson sat at the counter, sopping up egg yolks with a slab of white toast. They knew him from the bookstore, where they’d attended meetings of a literary society for a time.

Johnson saw through everything. There was nothing that would surprise him. He had “no regrets,” he had insisted at the literary society in a hearty, chest-slapping tone, and he’d drained his beer glass at a gulp and smacked his lips. There at the counter at the Potholder he had sat poking at egg yolks and shoving down half a slice of bread without bothering to chew it more than twice. Pickett couldn’t stand him, and Andrew could see, as soon as they had walked in through the door, that Pickett was going to go for him straightaway, although what Andrew wanted to do was to nod and sit at the opposite end of the cafe, so as to avoid starting Johnson up. Pickett, braced by four hours of sea air, had wanted to start him up very badly.

Johnson had been reading—old issues of science fiction magazines. He’d come upon an essay that made a hash of Pickett’s flying saucer enthusiasm—knocked the pins out from under it, Johnson had said, grinning. He’d nodded at Andrew and motioned down the length of the empty counter. Andrew didn’t like sitting at counters. He felt too conspicuous there. But Pickett sat down at once and fingered the menu, grinning at Johnson, who droned along about unidentified flying objects.

“The telling thing,” Johnson had said, wiping his face with a napkin, “is that when these things appear, they’re always described in the fashion of the day. Do you get me?”

“No,” said Pickett.

“I mean to say that a hundred years ago they were a common enough business, weren’t they? But they looked like hay wagons, then, with wings and propellers and paddle wheels. I was reading an account of a man in Sioux City, Iowa, who claimed to have seen an airship—this was in 1896, mind you—that was shaped like an Indian canoe with an inflated gasbag above it. It dropped a grappling hook, he said, that caught in the slack of his trousers and dragged him across a cow field.” Johnson grinned and laughed to himself, humping up and down with the force of it. He looked sharply at the remaining egg on his plate, as if seeing it for the first time, and then hacked it to bits with the corner of a piece of toast.

“A
cow
field!”

“I’m still not certain,” said Pickett, “what you mean to say. It’s an amusing story, but …”

“Isn’t it?” said Johnson, interrupting. “Concentrate, now. It’s not difficult to grasp. Really it isn’t.”

Pickett sat stony-faced.

“You see,” said Johnson, waving his toast, “that’s how it went in 1896. In 1925 it was the same business, only no canoes by then, no airbags, no propellers. They were those inflated-looking rockets that you see in the pulps. After that it was saucers, and now there’s cylindrical ships made of polished metal that go very, very fast. What next? That’s the point. It’s all fakery, imagination, humbugging. If it weren’t, there’d be some consistency to it. That was the crux of this essay, anyway.”