The Last Coin (19 page)

He looked at his watch. It wouldn’t do to miss his plane. There was no use exciting suspicions among the members of his new-found family in California—Rose especially. He rather liked the look of her, and there was a certain satisfaction in using her to torment her idiot husband. Alone, Andrew was too easy a mark; there was more sport in bringing the whole family down together.

Someone was coming from up the road. It was the gas station attendant and the boy. The boy had been the only witness to the sinking of a rowboat and the drowning of an old man, whom Pennyman knew to be a bearded Caretaker named Simon Denarius. Pfennig had told him that much before they’d parted company.

There had been a trifling little article in yesterday’s
Tribune
. Pennyman would have missed it, except that Pfennig had circled it in red ink, and left the newspaper laid open on the countertop in his shop. There was damn-all Pennyman could do about it now, of course, except to make certain. A fish had been caught, according to the article, fouled in a drag net in Puget Sound. It had been enormous—the few eyewitnesses had agreed to that. It might have been a whale, they supposed, except that it was impossibly large and was coruscated with undersea life, as if it wore a thousand years of coral polyps and hydra and sea fans and blue-green algae—a deep-ocean coat of many colors.

They had towed it to Vashon Island and cut it open, only to find another fish in its vast stomach, and then another fish in
its
stomach and yet another and another, like a set of dwindling, Peruvian gourd dolls. Out of the stomach of that last fish—so the newspaper article read—they’d taken an old silver coin. Early the next morning the coin was bought for an unlikely sum by an old man with a vast beard like an Old Testament prophet, who’d come in out of the fog on the Seattle ferry. Directly afterward he’d rented a rowboat and gone fishing. That was the end of Simon Denarius.

The boy who finally stood goggling in front of Pennyman had a baseball cap cocked around sideways and pulled down over one ear. His jeans were torn out at the knees, and there were dirty, candy-stained smears around his leering mouth and down his chin. He chewed moodily on something—his tongue, maybe, or a half-dozen sticks of gum wadded together. Dull wasn’t the word for his eyes; vacant was better. Probably inbred, Pennyman thought, repelled by the boy, who might have been eight. Pennyman shivered inadvertently and a wash of acid churned up into his throat. Children in general were intolerable, but a filthy, gum-chewing urchin like this was an argument for something. A hundred and fifty years ago he might have been crippled and set to begging, but in the modern world he was merely useless, a bit of filth. Pennyman smiled at him. “So you saw the big fish, did you?”

“I ain’t saying nothing.”

“You’re not?”

“I ain’t saying I ain’t, but I ain’t saying I am, neither.”

The gas station attendant grinned stupidly. “That’s it, Jimmy,” he said, nodding and blinking his eyes. “What’d I tell you?”

The boy looked up at Pennyman, screwing his eyes half-shut, and spit between his teeth at the ground, the result landing on his own foot. “How much will you pay me? If you don’t pay, I ain’t telling you nothing.”

“Pay is it!” laughed Pennyman, pretending to be vastly amused. “This is a surprise.”

“It ain’t no damn surprise,” said the gas station man, running a greasy hand through his hair. “This is business. The boy got a living to earn, ain’t that right, Jimmy?”

“Yep,” said Jimmy, and he chewed his gum and squinted. “Maybe I see the old man go out, maybe I was asleep, maybe you can kiss my ass.”

“How much do you want?” said Pennyman flatly. He’d had enough of both of them.

“Soak him, Jimmy!” said the attendant, and he slapped Pennyman on the shoulder as he said it, as if Pennyman would especially appreciate it.

Pennyman recoiled in horror, in sudden revulsion, as if he were a slug curling away from a droplet of lye or as if he’d discovered a rat’s nest in a clothes closet. He flailed at the sleeve of his white coat, which was smeared with dirty oil from the man’s hand.

The attendant grinned at him. “Sorry, pop,” he said, wiping his hands on his pants as if to make amends. “Jumpy bastard, ain’t you?”

“Talk first,” croaked Pennyman, pulling forty dollars out of his wallet.

Jimmy stared at it with faint loathing on his little-boy face. “That ain’t shit,” he said.

Pennyman started to speak, but stopped himself. His chauffeur lounged against the newly polished fender, talking to two men in overalls, one of whom waved happily back up toward the gas station and shouted something that sounded like, “Ream ’im, Gus!” The gas station man smiled wider. “That’s me,” he said, nodding. “Gus.” He held a tire iron in his right hand and slapped it against his left.

“What do you got in your shoe?” asked Jimmy, blowing an enormous bubble that popped across his nose and chin. He plucked the gum out of his mouth, rolled it in his dirty hands, then, using it as stickum, tugged the glued-on gum off his face.

“In my shoe?” asked Pennyman, suddenly horrified.

Gus said, “He means give him all you got. And if you got any in your shoe, cough it up. We ain’t a-going to talk to the whole world. First it was the newspaper, then yesterday a guy name of ‘Fence post’ or something who come all the way up from L.A. in a beat-up Chevy. Burnt oil like a fry pan. He give Jimmy fifty bucks, and here’s a cheap-ass slick like you waving two twenties. This ain’t the Salvation Army, Holmes. Empty it out.”

“That’s right,” Jimmy said. “This ain’t the Army.”

Pennyman sighed, trying to contain himself. He couldn’t afford to be beaten with a tire iron. He couldn’t afford to miss his plane. He couldn’t afford to think that the limousine driver would do a damn thing to help him. In fact, all he could be sure of was that the two men talking to the driver were doing something more than passing the time of day. He angled his open wallet at Gus and Jimmy and pulled out all the visible money inside—almost three hundred dollars altogether.

Gus yanked it out of his hand, then snatched up the wallet itself, pulling out bank cards and papers and dropping them onto the asphalt. Pennyman let them lie there. If it had been within his power, he would have killed both of them then and there. They found a folded hundred dollar bill hidden under a flap, and Gus said, “Look-a here,” and nodded down at Jimmy, who in one swift movement kicked Pennyman in the knee, then dodged in around behind Gus, who cocked his head on the side and gave Pennyman a don’t-you-try-nothing stare.

Pennyman shook with rage, biting his tongue until it bled, thinking that he’d be back for a visit. Soon. When he was immune, when all the coins were his and he could do as he pleased. He forced a grin, trying to look as if he’d come up against better men in his life and laughed at them, too. “You’ve got it all,” he said. “Now what about the old man and the coin? What about the coin?”

“He was nuts,” said Jimmy. “Sewed that coin up in the belly of one of them fish, rented a boat down at the dock from Bill Nayler, and rowed out onto the Sound, trolling with a big old marlin rig and using the fish for bait. Set out there for half an hour burnin’ crap in a bowl. I heard him singin’ to himself. Then this thing come up out o’ the ocean and ate him up, boat too, like in Pinochio. I got that movie on video. Same fish, I suppose.”

“You think the boy’s
lyin’
to you,” said Gus flatly, making it a statement rather than a question. “Goddamn rich bastard driving down here in a stinking limo. Ain’t you a ungrateful …”

But Pennyman had turned to go, walking stiffly across the weedy asphalt toward the limousine. In fact, he didn’t disbelieve it at all. It was just the sort of thing he expected—and half-feared. He wasn’t sure what it meant. He anticipated a tap on the shoulder at any moment, Gus’s hand spinning him around, a greasy shove on the back. He wouldn’t travel again without carrying a gun. But there was nothing except wild laughter and the blubbering rip of a tremendous raspberry—probably the high-spirited work of Jimmy. Then a credit card zinged past his ear. There was the sound of small feet running. He stiffened up, ready for a blow, just as a hand shoved him on the back. It was the push of a small hand—Jimmy’s hand, no doubt.

Pennyman stumbled forward, caught himself, and strode on. He wouldn’t turn around. They wanted him to turn around. He bent into the limousine and ordered the driver to back out and go. He settled into the seat, and then, thinking for the first time about the man from L.A. with fifty dollars to spend, he bent forward to loosen his shoelaces. That was when he felt Jimmy’s wad of gum stuck onto the back of his coat, stretching away from where it had glued itself to the upholstery.

The sunlit fog was white instead of gray—as if Andrew were sitting in a house among the clouds. It seemed to be thickening, though, as the morning wore on, and there wasn’t a bit of a breeze. Everything was wet—sidewalks, tree trunks, roof shingles, the windshield of the Metropolitan. Andrew sat in his car, idly working the wipers and watching the street.

There had been dead sea gulls all over the lawn and sidewalk that morning. Andrew had kicked one, not seeing it in the fog. Then he’d kicked another, and when he had bent over to have a closer look, there was yet another, lying in the gutter. They were everywhere, fallen as if shot. Alone in the fog, he had collected sixteen of the creatures up and down the street, dropping them into a cardboard box and then lugging the box down the alley, pitching it into a dumpster. The whole business struck him as bizarre, and he wondered if there’d been a leak of some sort of poison gas in the night, maybe a screw-up at the Naval Weapons Station.

The news on the car radio had been odd too—reports of flooding back up the San Gabriel River, as if there’d been a monstrously high tide. Only there hadn’t been. It was almost as if the river had flowed backward all of a sudden, and brackish tidal water had spilled out into backyards and overflowed storm drains. Andrew wondered at it all: the odd phosphorescence in the ocean last night, the storm surf, the rain of birds, the river. It all had a biblical ring to it, as if something were “coming to pass.” The morning was peaceful now, though, and wearing on. He glanced at his watch.

It was past ten. He’d slept late—later than he’d slept in almost fifteen years. He sipped at a mug of coffee that had gone half-cold in the morning air. There was no sense in painting the garage, not in weather like this. It wasn’t at all a day for work; it was a day for thinking and reading and generally recovering from the previous day, which had been arguably the longest he could remember.

He was happy and satisfied sitting in his car, though. He had run the heater for a few minutes, taking the chance of being discovered, and now he was warm and almost sleepy. There was something in the smell of the interior of the car, something familiar and enclosing, which, when combined with the fog and the coffee and the sea air drifting through the narrow window gap, seemed altogether to conjure up a sort of feeling; he couldn’t quite describe it. It was as if he were aloft in a balloon, very comfortable and with a glass of something nice to drink and watching the crazy-quilt earth slip past below.

The fog seemed to weigh everything down gently, like a gray overcoat thrown across the shoulders of a huddled world. Water dripped from the curb tree onto the top of the car, slow enough so that until the next one came each drip seemed sure to be the last, and from somewhere, layered between the muffled noise of distant traffic and the occasional lonesome cries of wheeling gulls, came the slow rumble of waves collapsing along the shore not half a block away.

It would be a good morning for walking on the beach. The heavy surf of the past night would have tossed up seashells and polished stones, and what with the fog and cool weather, tourists wouldn’t yet have picked them over. Andrew finished his coffee and set the cup on the floor of the car. He had intended to wait for Pennyman, if for no other reason than to have something to report to Pickett when he returned from Vancouver with the Weetabix. Pennyman hadn’t come out, though, and it had begun to seem suspiciously like Andrew had missed him. Such were the risks of sleeping late.

He hunched out onto the street, shut the car door as silently as he could, and locked it. The fog was so thick that he wouldn’t be seen from the house, either by Rose or by Pennyman, and although he would have liked to wear his hat, he couldn’t risk going in after it. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked southwest toward the beach, angling down a narrow alley past where he’d given the bonita to the cats and wondering all of a sudden if they hadn’t been Aunt Naomi’s cats. That would be just like fate, wouldn’t it? Here he’d been working hard to rid the house of the fiends, unsuccessfully, and then very graciously feeding them whole fish in the alley. They’d think he was a lunatic. Everyone sooner or later would think he was a lunatic—the cats, Aunt Naomi, Rose, Pennyman—everyone except Beams Pickett, who wasn’t the sort of pot who called the kettle black. It was funny, actually, his having given the cats a treat. Even death row prisoners were given a top-notch meal before they were led away, or so the stories had it.

And the cats seemed to like him for it. Over the past couple of days it seemed as if they’d been hanging about him. One had even wandered into his bedroom early in the morning. Andrew had drowsed awake to see the beast standing there, looking as if it wanted to tell him something or as if it were standing watch while he slept.

At the edge of the beach he took his shoes and socks off, stuffed the socks down into the shoes, tied the laces together, and hung the shoes around his neck. Then he rolled his pantslegs up to his knees. The sand was damp and cold and it scrunched under his feet. He couldn’t see the ocean, but he could hear it. Momentarily he was entirely adrift on the open beach, with nothing in the gray morning but a little circular patch of sand surrounding him, and not a sound of human manufacture to be heard. He was utterly alone, and the idea of it suddenly terrified him. He was struck with the notion that
They
were out there: Pickett’s bogeymen, contriving the fog itself, perhaps, with a machine bolted to the underside of the pier.