The Last Coin (17 page)

He grinned. It
must
be late, for him to start dredging up shopworn philosophies over a ’possum living under the house. Having made up his mind, he bent down again and dusted away the thing’s footprints. He wouldn’t tell Rose after all. She might have taken him seriously about what sorts of monsters ‘possums were, and demand that he trap them, get them out of there. And they were sort of an ace in the hole anyway. When push came to shove, and it was generally assumed that he was a madman, he could lead them all to the crawlspace and point. The nest of ‘possums would be vindication.

Vindication, though, wasn’t worth much to him at the moment. In fact, thinking about it made it all come flooding back in again, all of the day’s lost battles. He went inside and into the kitchen to pour that drink. Drink, fortunately, was not one of the vices he’d foresworn. He jerked open the kitchen cupboard door and surveyed the glasses, wavering between the temptation of beer out of pilsner glasses and wine out of cut-glass stemware. Both had their advantages. The right glass was almost as important as the right drink.

It would be a glass of wine, he decided, instead of beer. Beer had a deadening effect on him; wine seemed to settle him down. It filled him almost at once with a sense of proportion. It was a balancing effect, a keel-evener. Except that if he drank too much of it he overbalanced and sank.

The wine glasses were wedged in behind non-descript, dimestore quality tumblers, and when he edged the tumblers out of the way with his hand, one toppled off into the sink, shattering into fragments. He stopped dead, not even breathing, waiting for the rustling to begin. Mrs. Gummidge would scurry in, chattering like a gibbon ape, lunging after the broom and dustpan, saying, “You just leave
that
little mess to me, Mr. Vanbergen.
I’ll
see to it. Dropped a glass did you? Well, care killed the cat, as they say,” and uttering this lunacy she’d shoulder him out of the way and turn the whole business into a production, further ruining the evening.

She didn’t awaken, though. There was no rustling, no whispering, no sudden illumination. He’d have to clean the glass up himself.

He pulled out a paper sack and started fingering the larger pieces very daintily out of the sink, shoving the tip of his thumb almost immediately into a glass sliver. He blushed with heat, feeling the sliver half-buried there and not wanting to look at it. In a moment he held his thumb to the light. There it was. If he hadn’t kept his fingernails chewed short, he might have plucked it out. As it was he had to go for the tweezers. Taking care not to brush his thumb against anything, he knocked the bathroom door open with his knee. Then, holding the tweezers in his left hand, he worried the piece of glass out, a drop of blood bubbling slowly out in its wake. He squeezed his thumb against the possibility of blood poisoning, and, cursing, dropped the glass sliver into the trash, put away the tweezers, and walked back into the kitchen. He wouldn’t touch another piece of glass. There was nothing more treacherous than broken glass. He seemed to have gotten all the sizeable fragments anyway. He turned on the water, washing the last few chips down into the garbage disposer. Then he flipped it on. Immediately there was a terrible grinding and howling. He hadn’t gotten all the big pieces after all. The disposer ground to a sudden stop, locked tight against a wedge of glass.

He stood in silence, listening to the laboring of the engine, thinking vaguely that he’d let it go until it overheated and burned itself out. That would show it. He’d catch hell for it, though, and it would mean having a man in to fix it, and the man would no doubt steal a half dozen of his books on the way out. So he reached up and flipped off the switch. He’d get a pipe wrench, is what he’d do, and beat the living daylights out of the garbage disposer. That was the only sane course. Except that it would awaken the house. That wouldn’t do at all. Mrs. Gummidge would appear and, wiggling something, would have the disposer running again. Had he tried to grind up a glass? Had he this? Had he that? Didn’t it seem as if the trash bag under the sink? …

Shaking, he opened the cupboard door to confront the glasses once again. There were the tumblers standing like so many smug little swaggering fools. There was nothing at all to recommend them, not even age. They were a sort of olive green, splashed with gold glitter—a half-wit’s idea of elegance. He and Rose had gotten them as a wedding gift—from a blind man, it would seem. Andrew had always detested them. There’d been eight of them, and in the long years since only one of them had broken—the one he’d dumped into the sink. At that rate, losing one, say, every fifteen years, there would still be a set of them, four at least, when he was dead. The idea of it appalled him. And that was if he lived to be ninety. He’d die broken and gibbering, and in the cupboard, barely showing the use they’d had, these foul tumblers would wait, knowing that, barring major earthquakes, they’d see another sixty years out easily enough. He couldn’t stand it.

He
wouldn’t
stand it. He hauled two of them down—it would be madness to do for all seven of them at once—and he carried them out the back door. In the garage he found a gunnysack and an old paint-stained T-shirt. He wrapped the glasses in the rag, put the rag into the gunnysack, and, after laying it on the sidewalk just off the back porch, he wrestled a melon-sized chunk of smooth granite out of the flower bed, ascended the porch, and dropped the rock onto the glasses. There was the satisfying thunk of something smashing; not the tinkle of flying fragments, but the deadening smash of the glasses having gone flat. He felt as if he were striking a blow, literally, for—what?—art, maybe. Sensibility. General principles. He retrieved the rock and carried it up the stairs for another go, dropping it just as the porch light blinked on.

The rock thumped down again, rolling off onto the grass. Rose stood in the open door, looking puzzled. Andrew grinned at her, feeling like the prince of fools. He started to speak, but managed only to croak and shrug. He searched desperately for a plausible lie. Fish in the sack, perhaps. He’d gone fishing and caught two bonita and he wanted to kill them and clean them. No use letting that sort of job go until morning. Best get them into the freezer tonight. It wouldn’t wash, though, him killing them with a rock as big as his head.

“What are you doing?” asked Rose, utterly humorless.

“Nothing,” said Andrew. “That is to say, I’m messing with an idea I’ve had about glass—about building odds and ends out of shattered glass and melted lead. I got the idea down on the pier tonight. There was a burner for sale at the bait house, for melting lead into fishing weights. Why not cast it into shapes, I thought, mold it around scatterings of colored glass? Paperweights, bookends, doorstops—all that sort of thing.” He smiled at her and stepped off the porch, fetching up the stone again, very purposefully, and setting it back into the flowerbed.

“Pickett called,” said Rose. “He wanted to tell you about a pair of apes that escaped into San Francisco. A psychic, apparently, had a vision of them eating ravioli in a North Beach restaurant.”

“He called to tell me that? What was the point of it?”

“I’m not sure. I thought at first it was a joke—apes and psychics and ravioli and all that—only there didn’t seem to be any punch line. Maybe I’ve told it wrong. He seemed to be fascinated by it all and assumed you would be, too. Anyway, I’m going back to bed. I heard the noise and I didn’t know what it was.” She looked over the porch railing at the gunnysack. Then she yawned, shoved either hand up the opposite sleeve of her bathrobe, and walked away into the darkened house without saying anything else.

Andrew heard a cupboard door open in the kitchen, and then, a moment later, shut again. He looked down at the gunnysack. It was a sad, foolish object, lying there on the fog-damp sidewalk. Rose would know what he’d been up to, and her knowing would foil any future efforts at smashing up the glasses. If he broke one by accident now it would seem as if he’d gone mad and done it on purpose. He was as transparent as a sandwich bag. He’d have to use Aunt Naomi’s money now to buy the sinker molder at Len’s. Then he’d have to fake up some way to build something out of lead and broken glass, as he’d said. What it would be he hadn’t any earthly idea, but he
had
to do it. If he didn’t do it, he was doomed. He couldn’t be caught in a lie. He had to turn the lie inside out, to meddle with reality until things were put right. Just like he’d done with the ’possum. He could do that again with the broken glass. If there was method to his madness, then it couldn’t be madness after all, could it?

As he dumped the gunnysack onto the bench in the garage he wondered if that’s how Pickett’s Caretakers worked. If they effected vast upheavals of economies or governments or whatever they did by setting into motion, say, a trifling little calculated lie, or a wink tipped in just the right direction—some little bit of gravel, which, bouncing down a broadening hillside, would knock loose rocks and boulders, one of which, out of nowhere, would whack on the head some poor banker in a three-piece suit as he stood contemplating interest rates. Maybe he’d drop dead on the spot, and when alerted associates began to suspect that the stone out of nowhere signified something, there would begin a surreptitious movement of money in and out of vaults and through the electronic links of computer networks until the public got wind of it and undertook a fear-induced run on the bank. Just like that, an empire would sink in the dust, ruined entrepreneurs would leap out of windows, third-world governments would topple, and no one ever suspecting that the first jolly pebbles were kicked loose by a pottering old man in baggy trousers, pruning rose bushes with one hand and manipulating the lever-action works of the universe with the other.

Two weeks earlier, Uncle Arthur had bought twenty-two Exer-Genies from a door-to-door salesman. In the Leisure World retirement community door-to-door salesmen were frowned on. There was a wall around the place to keep them out. One had got in, though, past the guards, with a trunk full of these Exer-Genies, which a person would recline on in the interest of being folded up over and over again at the waist, fearfully fast, until he was healthy again. Uncle Arthur had bought the lot of them. He had become “the West Coast rep,” as the salesman had said. And now the devices were stacked in the plywood cabinet screwed to the wall of the carport.

He’d done it on the afternoon of a full moon. Rose had pointed that out. Uncle Arthur was an old man. Rose couldn’t remember a time when Uncle Arthur
hadn’t
been an old man. It had always been common knowledge in the family that his age seemed to affect him most when the moon was full. When there was no moon, or just a sliver of it, he seemed chipper and spry and canny. It was a strange business. Andrew couldn’t puzzle it out, except that it seemed to imply that the derivation of the word “lunatic” was a product of something more than mere superstition. That’s how it went sometimes; there was often some little grain of truth behind the wildest folktales.

Uncle Arthur shouldn’t live alone, Rose had said in reference to his moon-madness and to his buying the Exer-Genies. The family had shaken its head—the poor old man, swindled again. Last time it was a case of rechargeable batteries and a device to do the recharging, which had burst into flames after having been left plugged in all night and had nearly burned the house down.

Pickett knew better than the family. Senility, he said, didn’t enter in. One didn’t second-guess Uncle Arthur—not even Pickett, who suspected he knew who Uncle Arthur
really
was—
what
he was—although he said he couldn’t tell anyone yet, not even Andrew. Why the twenty-two Exer-Genies had to have been bought, Pickett couldn’t say. Where they were bound was an utter mystery. They might very well sit in their plywood cupboard until doomsday, what did it matter to you and me? They’d sit there because they
had
to sit there, because when it came to Uncle Arthur’s dealings, said Pickett,
nothing
he did or said was random and without purpose. Everything was calculated. That’s what Pickett had said about the Exer-Genies and about Uncle Arthur’s late-night sojourns in his red, electronic car. Don’t question the Exer-Genies, that had been Pickett’s advice, at least that had been his advice until the arrival of Pennyman. Then Pickett had begun to question everything.

There were simpler answers, of course. There nearly always were, but Pickett didn’t see any value in them. Uncle Arthur had been a prodigious traveling salesman in his day—going door to door, town to town, state to state, and, years past, continent to continent, wandering the earth like a tinker, peddling his wares. There was nothing he hadn’t sold, to hear Aunt Naomi tell it, no front stoop he hadn’t stood on, no bell he hadn’t rung. He had accumulated the careers of ten standard-issue salesmen stacked one on top of the other, and there was scarcely a corner of the globe, no matter how far-flung, that he hadn’t memories of.

Such instincts die hard, Andrew thought, wandering through the quiet house, carrying a glass of beer. The wine that had been in the refrigerator was gone—Mrs. Gummidge again, no doubt. It was after midnight, and he couldn’t sleep. Squaring it with Rose had become impossible, what with their confrontation on the back porch. He sat down in the library, staring up at the books. He would read something to take his mind off things. It should be something substantial, nothing unsettling. Dickens would do—some funny Dickens. Or
The Wind in the Willows
. That was the ticket. It was clover-strewn meadows that he needed, running down into babbling rivers. It was talk of firesides and Christmas and glasses of ale, of picnics and boating and jolly companions. Things were out of balance, and if he didn’t have a glass of wine to put them right, then a book would have to do.