The Last Coin (12 page)

“Who wrote it?” asked Pickett, sitting very still and stirring his coffee.

“Asimov. He’s hard to argue with. Rock solid logic, from my point of view. Shreds the whole UFO business at a single swipe. What do you think?” He leaned past Pickett to put the question to Andrew.

“Absolutely,” said Andrew. “It’s a dead issue I should think.”

Pickett gaped at Andrew, then turned back to Johnson, heating up. Andrew could see it. Pickett was about to burst. It always happened that way with Johnson. That was why they’d given up the literary society. Pickett would be fired up to have a go at him, and then the conversation would drive him mad, and Johnson would go off grinning, having won.

“Of
course
they keep showing up in different craft,” Pickett said. Their breakfasts arrived and Andrew started to eat, but Pickett ignored his. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t
want
to give themselves away, for God’s sake. It’s a matter of disguise, is what it is. I wouldn’t be half-surprised if the aliens who dragged your man across the cow pasture are the same crowd who appeared in the flying egg six years ago over San Francisco. Why not? If they’ve got the technology to sail in from the stars, then certainly they’ve got the technology to design any sorts of ships they please. Look at Detroit, for heaven’s sake. They can build a truck on Monday and a convertible on Tuesday, just like that. And what’s more …”

But Pickett hadn’t gotten a chance to finish, for Johnson was suddenly ignoring him, talking to the waitress and paying his bill. He laid a quarter on the counter by way of a tip and then scratched the end of his nose. “Do you know what it was in the airship?” he asked, grinning at Pickett and Andrew.

Pickett blinked at him. “What? What airship?”

“In Iowa—the cow field ship. Pigs. That’s what the man said. It was pigs. And they stole his money—a rare coin. That’s what he said. I swear it. He was robbed by pigs. Of course, the whole story went to bits, didn’t it? It’s simple enough. You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to piece together the truth. The way I figure it he’d had a run-in with pigs. They were probably out on the road and knocked him into a ditch. That explains how his trousers came to be ruined. And he’d lost money of some sort, probably a silver piece or something, which he shouldn’t have had anyway because his wife needed it for groceries. He was on his way to spend it on a bottle, probably. Well, he couldn’t just up and admit it, could he? I mean
pigs
, after all. He’d look like a fool. So he made up the story, lock, stock, and barrel: alien pigs, hooks, draggings across cow fields, rare coins. He’s a hero, isn’t he, and not a fool at all, no longer a poor sod manhandled by pigs.” Johnson stopped and squinted at them, nodding his head knowingly. “He lost a pocketful of change in ditch water, that’s what I think, and soiled his pants. So he explained it away with the wildest lie he could invent, knowing that the public would go for it. They always do—the wilder the better. But mark me, gentlemen, you can bet that his wife didn’t much believe him. Am I right? Yes I am. Right as rain. There isn’t a wife alive that isn’t ten times as shrewd as the public. What do you think, Andrew?”

Andrew gawked at him, not at all knowing what to make of all this talk about pigs and rare coins. But there was no fathoming Johnson. There was nothing to fathom. Johnson wasn’t deep enough. You could see the bottom just by looking into his eyes. “I think,” said Andrew, “that if you laid the public out end to end they wouldn’t reach from here to Glendale.”

“You’re a scholar!” shouted Johnson, standing up. “You, too, son,” he said to Pickett, and he grabbed Pickett’s hand and shook it before Pickett had a chance to snatch it away. “Got to go,” he said. “I’ve got to see a man about a horse. Do you know what I mean? Spaceships—very interesting business all the way around. We’ll take this up again.”

Pickett started to speak, to get in the last word, to finish what he’d started. “Anyway, as I was saying, convertibles on Tuesday …”

“Yes,” Johnson said, setting out. “That’s right. Convertibles. Maybe the aliens will be driving convertibles next. Pigs in sunglasses.” And with that he giggled and strolled away, letting the glass door slam shut behind him and waving back over his shoulder.

Pickett had left his cold eggs on the counter, Johnson having ruined his appetite. They paid and left, forgetting entirely about the car and the fish and walking the two blocks back to the inn. Andrew tried to bring the subject around to the successful ‘possum episode, but his enthusiasm was lost on Pickett, who insisted that he was going to have Johnson killed, that he’d ridicule him in the
Herald
, that before he was done he’d do half a dozen things to ruin the man, to make his life a living hell. That very afternoon, while driving north, he’d compose lovelorn letters in order to publish them in the
Herald
under Johnson’s name. “What did you make of the pencil line down the center of his face?” Pickett asked suddenly. “Evidence of insanity, I’d call it.”

Andrew shrugged. “Just more of his nonsense. It was best not to ask. He
wanted
you to ask, obviously. He’d probably have had some idiotic explanation prepared, some gag line and we’d be the butt of the joke.”

Pickett nodded. “He must have forgotten it, though, if he’d put it there on purpose. Did you see him smear it up with the napkin?”

“He was too fired up about his cow pasture story. You shouldn’t work him up so. It doesn’t do you any good.”

“I’ll sell him to the apes,” said Pickett, climbing into his Chevrolet. “See you.” He started the car up with a roar and drove away toward the Coast Highway, carrying Andrew’s credit card, bound for Vancouver. He’d be gone nearly a week.

It had been the middle of the afternoon when Andrew discovered that he’d left the Metropolitan parked at the pier. He’d jogged back down and opened the trunk. There lay the fish, stiff as papier-mâché ornaments. He had emptied the gunnysack into the dirt of the alley behind Señor Corky’s restaurant, and was immediately surrounded by half a dozen cats. He waved goodbye, driving away south to visit Polsky and Sons and feeling generous.

Now here he was, parking the car at the curb, home at last after a hellishly long day. He hadn’t gotten around to painting the garage, as he’d intended to, but there’d be time enough tomorrow to tackle it. Haste was never any good. The street was dark, and Aunt Naomi’s window was shut against night creatures. Andrew locked up the car. It wouldn’t do to start hauling stuff in. He’d wait until Rose went out or went to bed. He’d tell her he’d been to Bellflower to interview student chefs, which wasn’t entirely a lie. He’d called the chefs’ school, after all, and had gotten the name of a likely graduate, a young Frenchman who had grown up in Long Beach but still had a trace of an accent.

Fog blew in billows now, in between the houses and over rooftops. It would be a good night for some cat sabotage, but he’d probably worked the ’possum angle hard enough already. In fact, he’d been pressing his luck all day long. Maybe he’d go to bed early. That would make Rose happy. It would be evidence that there were traces of sanity left in him. He stepped up onto the front porch, humming, tolerably satisfied with things. Then he jumped in spite of himself to see Pennyman sitting in a rattan chair, smoking his pipe. He looked far too polished and stiff, like a waxwork dummy or a preserved corpse, and it seemed to Andrew as if he had the smell of fish about him, as if he’d been swilling cod liver oil. Pennyman pulled his pipe out of his mouth and pointed at an empty chair. “Sit down,” he said.

Sir James G. Frazer
The Golden Bough

A
NDREW STARED AT
the figure of Pennyman smoking on the darkened porch. Suddenly he was filled with Pickett’s fears, with visions of blowfish and secret societies. The glowing ash in the bowl of Pennyman’s pipe burned like a hovering eye in the evening gloom. Andrew opened the door and reached into the house, flipping on the porch light. “I’m home!” he shouted, not wanting to seem to be any later than he was.

Rose answered from somewhere within. “Oh,” she said.

Andrew turned and shrugged at Pennyman. “Sitting in the dark, are you?”

“Yes, indeed,” came the reply. “I find it strangely relaxing, darkness. It’s like the womb. Or the tomb. Funny business, language. Full of that sort of coincidence. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does.” Andrew sat down across from him, where he could see Rose through the window, angling back and forth across the kitchen. It was a comforting sight, but it made him feel vaguely guilty, and he wondered suddenly where he’d put his painting paraphernalia. He’d have a go at the garage in the morning, before the day heated up. It wouldn’t take him long.

The day’s newspaper lay in a heap beside Pennyman’s chair. A crumpled piece lay in the shadows, half atop the pile, as if Pennyman had read something in it that he didn’t at all like, and had wadded it up in a rage. There was an odd quality to it that caught Andrew’s eye. He bent forward to have a better look and discovered that it wasn’t a crumple at all, but was an inflated origami fish, with spiny little fins, folded up out of the comic section of the
Herald
. The sight of it was unnerving, although Andrew couldn’t entirely say why.

Fog wisped across the lawn, obscuring the curb trees. A soft ocean wind blew, scraping tree limbs across the eaves of the porch, sighing through the bushes and unclipped grass, swirling the fog. The pale mists were a perfect accompaniment, somehow, to Pennyman’s white suit and reeking pipe. He cast Andrew a mysterious sideways glance and said, “I’ve spent some time in the Orient.” Then he nodded at the origami fish by way of explanation. “Delicate things, aren’t they? Like flower petals. The fog will half-dissolve it in the night—like the fleeting years, like life itself.” He sighed and waved his hand tiredly, gesturing, perhaps, at life.

Andrew nodded. He couldn’t stand Pennyman. The man acted as if he were on a stage. “I never did get the knack of folding up paper,” Andrew said. “Couldn’t even fold a paper hat.” Pennyman stared at him, as if he expected something more, something philosophic, as if the reference to paper hats couldn’t, alone, have been the point of Andrew’s utterance. Andrew’s hand shook on his knee. He grinned widely. “My sister could, though. She could fold up … well, anything.”

With a flourish of his wrist, Pennyman opened up his hand. A quarter lay in his open palm. He widened his eyes at Andrew, as if to say, “Watch this,” and he tumbled the coin over onto the back of his hand with one smooth movement of his thumb, flip-flopping it back and forth across his knuckles. Then he rolled it around into his palm again, caught it between his thumb and forefinger, and snapped his fingers so that the coin vanished up the sleeve of his coat.

Andrew was at a loss. It was a neat trick, to be sure, but he couldn’t at all guess what Pennyman meant by it. He grinned, though, and produced a coin of his own, a nickel, which he balanced on end on the tip of his finger. It seemed to him that their encounter on the front porch was shaping up into a sort of contest, a test of cleverness or harmony or reason—as if they were competing students in some rare breed of martial arts school, learning to tread on rice paper without making any noise or balance on one leg like a swamp bird.

Pennyman nodded at the upended nickel, then smiled in appreciation when Andrew drew back his forearm, allowing the nickel to roll down his tilted finger onto the edge of his palm and then down his arm and off his elbow into the air, where he snatched it up. He bowed just a little. All in all it beat Pennyman’s knuckle-rolling. And the open-sleeve trick was amateurish. Anyone could do that.

Pennyman said nothing. He flourished his quarter again, and, looking very grave, seemed to shove it into his ear. Then with a look of sudden surprise he hauled it out of his mouth, rattled it in his cupped hands, opened them, and seemed mystified to find no quarter at all.

That was cheap, thought Andrew, wondering what other coin tricks he remembered. Somewhere, in a shoebox tied with twine, he had a nickel with a nail welded to it. You’d pound the nail into the floor, then laugh and point at people who tried to pick it up. He made a mental note to remember it and play it on Pennyman later, when he suspected nothing. It would do him no good at the moment, though. He was at a loss for another trick. He could wedge quarters into his eyes, or dimes into his nose and ears, but the effect would be lost on Pennyman. It would be lost on anyone, for that matter—which was something in itself. There was always some profit merely in confounding people. Pennyman would at least wonder what Andrew meant by it. There was a certain indignity involved in shoving dimes into one’s nostrils, though.

His hesitation made Pennyman tired, it seemed, and he couldn’t wait any longer for Andrew to fire a shot. He produced a penny from his shirt pocket, held it up in front of Andrew’s face, canted his head at it, and dropped it neatly into the bowl of his pipe, nearly covering the glowing coal. Andrew waited, wondering what in the world the man had in mind. Pennyman winked, and just as he did the penny caught fire—flared up just for an instant, then died, then seemed to be consumed into the tobacco. The penny had disappeared. Pennyman removed his pipe and bowed, acknowledging himself the winner.