The Last Coin (47 page)

The light of the rising sun shone on the back of something running toward them down the center of the pier, running with an odd, short-legged, rolling gait. It was The One Pig, and no mistaking it, its hour come ’round at last. It trotted indifferently past a company of sleepy fishermen just arriving with the dawn, and followed the course of the Uncle Arthur’s lost car, straight through the hovering birds, past Aunt Naomi and Rose, past the open-mouthed Pickett, trotting to within a foot of where Andrew sat holding the spoon in his outstretched hand.

Neat as clockwork the pig plucked it up, turned immediately around, and trotted off again. Andrew watched it grow smaller and smaller and smaller, disappearing up Main Street, bound for heaven alone knew where.

B
EAMS
P
ICKETT FELT
a little like Tom Sawyer, as if his wound were a badge, a trophy. He’d only been winged. He liked the sound of the word—“winged.” It seemed to conjure up the notion of it having been very close, his ducking away and foiling the concentrated efforts of a world-class murderer.

Georgia had announced that the inn was almost clean of mystical emanations. There was a residue, maybe in the dust under the house, like the lingering smell of aromatic cedar in a sweater just out of the chest. Ocean winds would sweep it away.

The little car he rode in jolted as it went off the curb, straight out into traffic, weaving crazily around a stalled truck and under the nose of a startled pedestrian. Pickett held on, one hand on the dashboard and another on the edge of the cardboard carton wedged behind his seat—an Exer-Genie. Apparently they were marvelous things for toning stomach muscles. Heaven knew he could use some of that. The thirty-five bucks had been well spent. Georgia had him on a new regime—diets, stylish clothes, twenty-dollar haircuts. She was going to civilize him, bring him up to date. Rose had been threatening the same ever since Andrew had made a clean sweep of things and admitted to the credit card outrage. She seemed to be softening, though. Georgia, on the other hand, had taken Pickett on as a sort of challenge.

“New battery, then?”

Uncle Arthur nodded, looping the car around an insanely wide turn and onto Main. “Corroded all to hell. Bumper all strung with kelp. They patented a machine for processing kelp. Did you know that? I sold them off the coast of Maine.”

“No, did they? Where were you these three days, anyway?”

“Out. Constitutional and all. Holiday. Ever been to Scottsdale?”

Pickett shook his head. “No, is that where you’ve been? Arizona? We thought you were drowned.”

“Not me.”

“You weren’t in Scottsdale?”

“I wasn’t drowned. What happened to your mustache?”

“My girlfriend made me shave it off.”

“She’s a good woman. Keen eye.”

“So you were in Scottsdale?”

“Once. Hell of a place. I sold rain gutters. Losing proposition in Scottsdale, you’d think. A man would go broke.” Uncle Arthur grinned at Pickett and widened his eyes, possibly to imply that he hadn’t gone broke.

Pickett was satisfied.
He
knew where Uncle Arthur had been. You could smell it in the upholstery. That the car still ran after being dumped in the ocean and swallowed by a fish was a testament to something—although whether to something mechanical or something spiritual he couldn’t quite figure. Maybe both.

Pickett had tried to make it clear to Rose and Andrew. He himself had anticipated Arthur’s return. Pickett had driven out to Leisure World on a hunch that morning. He had knocked on Arthur’s door, and when it opened, there the old man had stood, in reading glasses and a suitcoat. He had got Pickett’s name wrong and then taken him out to the garage and sold him the Exer-Genie. Just like that. Now they were on their way to the Potholder, together.

Pickett grinned and slapped his knee. The real corker was that Andrew and Rose still thought the old man was dead. In almost exactly a minute and a half—less, even, if Uncle Arthur ran another red light—Pickett and he would lurch up to the door of the Potholder, maybe take out a parking meter or slam into the curb, maybe park on the sidewalk. Andrew and Rose, sitting at the window table, would doubletake, spill their coffee. Andrew would choke and stagger out of his chair, toppling it over. They would rush outside, wild with wonder and joy, appearing to be lunatics, and Uncle Arthur, very calmly and deliberately, as if there were nothing else in the world to interest them, would talk about selling rain gutters in the desert, the red electronic car smelling of whales and kelp and the sea, like a tiny, deep-water submarine, a tangle of waterweeds still trailing from the smashed front bumper.

They couldn’t fish off the pier because of what the storm supposedly had done to it. It was cordoned off again, and from where they sat they could see the sparks of a cutting torch where three men worked on a scaffold above the ocean. Rose and Andrew, of course, knew that it hadn’t been the storm at all, that it had been a giant fish that had knocked the end of the pier to bits, but there was no profit in saying so. The less said the better.

So they fished off the rock jetty just to the south, Andrew and Rose did, drinking coffee out of a thermos. The fish weren’t biting so far, but it didn’t matter to either one of them. The sunrise had been worth getting up for. And fishing there together like that, with all the turmoil and villainy behind them, was like a holiday. In a little under an hour they were meeting Pickett at the Potholder for bacon and eggs. There was summer in the air, and the morning was warm and fine.

“So it was you,” said Andrew. “You were onto the whole business all along.”

Rose shrugged, flipping her plastic lure twenty yards out into the water. She reeled it in slowly. “It belonged to me, too, just as it belonged to Aunt Naomi when her husband died, or when Mrs. Gummidge murdered him, I guess.
That’s
something I didn’t know. I should have though.” She sat silently, thinking. “Poor Uncle Arthur,” she said at last.

“I wish, well …” He let the thought go and pressed on to more cheerful subjects. “So you were feeding the ‘possum under the house, weren’t you? Admit it. And the brick on the toad tank—you left that off on purpose. I’m astonished. I wouldn’t have thought it. Not for a minute. I bet you’re a closet Weetabix eater, too. Sometimes … Sometimes I don’t figure you very well. Sometimes I wish …” His cheerful train of thought had sidetracked again.

“Sometimes you should quit figuring. The house looks great, by the way—the paint that is. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah,” said Andrew. “You did. But you can tell me a couple more times if you want. God I hate painting.”

“Want some help?”

Andrew started to say no. Then he caught himself. Actually he wanted help very badly. “Sure,” he said. “Mounds bar?” He held one out to her.

Rose looked skeptical. “A Mounds bar? This early in the morning? Where did you get that?”

“I keep a few in the tackle box, actually. There’s nothing like them when you’re fishing.”

She slid one of the pair of candy bars out of the wrapper and ate it. A crab sidled out from under the rocks and looked at her. She tossed it a hunk of coconut and chocolate and called him Mr. Crab.

Andrew grinned at her. The crab scuttled out of sight, carrying the treat. Rose folded up the fishing knife and dropped it into the tackle box. There was only a half hour to go before they were due at the Potholder. She reeled in her line and began to dismantle her pole. “We’d better get,” she said.

Andrew nodded. “One more cast.” He was using an old spinning reel with fourteen-pound line and a one-ounce pyramid sinker. “Watch this,” he said, and he baited the bottom hook with a hunk of Mounds bar and cast it way out into the water in a long, low arc. He waited for the telltale thunk when it settled on the bottom. Rose, cheerfully skeptical, watched Andrew take the slack out of the line.

Then, almost at once, as if the universe were playing along, the line jerked, then jerked again, and Andrew set the drag down just a bit, winked at Rose, and leaning back against the heavily bent pole, began to reel in his fish.

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For Viki

And this time.

For my friend Lew Shiner.
Pen Pal and Surfing Buddy

And for the lovely Edie
and her mint brownies, raccoon houses, and coffee—

From the four of us

James P. Blaylock (1950 - )

James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1988

All rights reserved.

The right of James Blaylock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11760 0

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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