Thirteen Phantasms (24 page)

Now and then he came to himself, heard the truck creaking and groaning, saw that he had made his way some few feet farther up the road, felt the seat springs burrowing against his thighs, the cramping of muscles, the pressure on his bones and his teeth. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs and his head pounded and the truck engine steamed and roared. Edna’s face appeared before him time and again now, and he was swept with her memories—the memory of a fire in a hearth on a rainy night, the two of them in easy chairs, an atmosphere of utter contentment that he squirreled away in his mind, holding fast to it, and yet at the same time crippled by the thought that she had given this memory away too, that joy might have become as great a burden to her as sorrow. …

He saw that he was nearly at Oak Street, nearly home, and he cranked the steering wheel around to the right, felt the weight of the load shift ponderously, the truck tilting up onto two wheels. For a moment he thought he was going over, and in that impossibly long moment the pennies continued to fall into Pillbody’s brass fish, and the faces whirled in the steam in wild profusion, and Jimmerson felt himself crushed like a lump of coal by a vast, earth-heavy pressure.

•

He opened his eyes when he felt the sun on his face next morning. He lay slumped on the seat in the cab of the truck, and he moved his arms and legs gingerly, testing for breaks and strains. His jaws ached, and his joints felt stiff and sore, as if he were recovering from a flu. He sat up and looked out the window. Somehow he had made it home, alive, although he had only the vaguest recollection of arriving—the truck shutting down with a metal-breaking clank, hard rain beating on the roof off and on through the night.

He opened the door and stepped down onto the street, seeing that he had driven the passenger side of the truck right up over the curb, and the wheels were sunk now in the wet lawn. Most of the paint was gone from the truck body, apparently shivered off, and the tires were flayed to pieces. The truck bed was nearly emptied, scattered with just a few odds and ends of bric-a-brac. Late yesterday evening Pillbody had finally given up counting pennies and purchases, but even so they must have come awfully close to square in the transaction if this was all that had been left unpaid for. Jimmerson climbed heavily up onto the bed and filled a crate with the leftovers, then climbed down again and hauled it into the garage where he had taken des Laumes’s three crates yesterday morning. He set about methodically smashing each object to fragments with a sledgehammer, making sure that none of them could ever be sold, not even for a penny. Peterson’s iron bear took the most work, but finally it too crumbled into a hundred chunky little fragments that Jimmerson dumped into a pickle jar and capped off. And now, with Pillbody’s stuff either consumed or broken, and des Laumes’s café cleaned out, the whole lot of it was once again a memory, a thing of the past.

He went inside where he showered and shaved and changed into fresh clothes, and then he hauled the single bed outside and threw it onto the back of the truck, replacing it in the bedroom once again with the double bed from out by the garage. Edna’s remembrances—the paperweight, the postcard, the silver spoon, and the glass Pontiac—he put into the curio cabinet in the living room. He would never know what they meant, and their presence in the house would remind him of that. He opened the windows finally, to let the air in, and then went out through the front door, climbed into the Mercury, and drove downtown.

The curiosity shop was emptied out, no longer a mystery. The old storefront, with its dusty litter, its confusing mirrors, and its nailed-shut door had been swept clean, and he could see through the window into the rear of the shop now, clear back into Pillbody’s parlor room where workmen were rolling fresh paint onto the walls. He got back into the Mercury and headed west. The Café des Laumes had collapsed on itself, the windows shattered, the walls fallen in, the roof settled over the wreck like a tilted hat. Jimmerson wondered if des Laumes himself was in there, under the rubble, whether the man had simply imploded in the end. To hell with him. It didn’t matter anymore.

He swung a U-turn, rested his arm along the top of the seat, and drove back south toward the cemetery, where he would try once again to pray.

In the west, a couple of stars still shone, but the eastern sky was full of color. Some people went their whole lives and never saw that—the color of the day when it was new. And it smelled like morning, too. That was the best thing about being up early, the way the day smelled when it was fresh, before the sun cooked it.

Walt let the car idle while he watched the sleeping neighborhood through the windshield. Sometimes the world was an end to end marvel to him, and the quiet activities of his own street seemed exotic and wonderful. Last night, late, there had been an immense possum on the lawn, and this morning, he noticed now, the wisteria blossoms in the vines over the porch were just opening up in an airy waterfall of pale purple flowers.

Amanda, his wife, loved a blooming wisteria, and she knew how to prune them in the winter so that the flower buds were left on the bare vines. One year Walt had done the job, going after the vines with a hedge clippers, and there were no blooms at all that spring.

He bent down to shove a couple of empty doughnut bags under the seat, then dusted the sugar crumbs off the floorboard carpet. Then, in no hurry at all, he pulled away from the curb and headed north. Amanda wouldn’t be up for an hour yet plenty of time to make his morning run up to Lew’s Doughnuts for a couple of sinkers. Lew’s coffee was terrible, but he was the king of doughnuts. He had made some concessions to modern notions about health—cut out the tropical oils and introduced a whole wheat and honey doughnut that was actually pretty good—but he still sold the pure product.

Amanda couldn’t see doughnuts in the noonday sun, whole wheat or no whole wheat, which was largely why Walt made his run early, while she was still asleep. He hadn’t eaten a doughnut in three days, although he had dreamed about eating them last night, and he found that he was full of anticipation now. Amanda had been controlling his diet over the weekend, chipping away at his cholesterol level, which to his mind it sure as hell wasn’t high enough for him to give up doughnuts. They were pretty much the only vice he had left.

His daily trip up to Lew’s while Amanda slept had become a pleasant, solitary ritual over the past few months, spoiled only by the shadow of a vague and ill-defined guilt over being forced to hide it from her. But whose fault was that? He didn’t want to hide it from her. And it had lately occurred to him that he was solidly comfortable only when he was within easy driving distance of a doughnut shop—something that would only alarm Amanda, so he kept the notion to himself.

He pulled into the parking lot, which was empty of cars aside from one lone junker sitting in front of the Chief Auto Parts store. Along with the doughnut shop, the parts store was open all night. Automobile breakdowns and doughnut habits—neither one of those kept regular hours.

Then he noticed that Lew’s old Packard wasn’t parked at the edge of the lot like it ought to be. That was no good. What it meant, probably, was that Lew was taking the morning off and the hired help was working the counter. Walt had wanted to
talk
doughnuts, not just eat them, but the hired help, whoever it was this month, wouldn’t know anything about the subject. Next month they’d quit and go to work for a plumber or at a bookstore, and they wouldn’t know anything about that either.

He cut the engine and coasted into a parking stall, the car rolling under the shadow of the sign on the boulevard, a big tire-sized glazed doughnut that read “Lew’s All-Niter” in illuminated letters—except that right now the sign was dark despite the early hour. Lew probably had it hooked up to some kind of photoelectric timer in order to save energy.

Sunlight on the shop window obscured the racks of doughnuts inside, but Walt didn’t need to see through the window to know which rack was which. The cake doughnuts would be lined up on the left, the raised doughnuts on the right. Crullers were segregated off to the side on a big baking tray. Lew was a little ashamed to sell the crullers at all, since they were pseudo-doughnuts at best, but they appealed to an effete crowd whose money was hard to turn down. They were a dime a throw more than any of the other doughnuts, too, even though they were mostly air and sugar. In all other doughnut matters it was art before business. Lew hadn’t given in to bran muffins and croissants like the chain shops had.

Walt climbed out of the car, lost now in the usual mental debate over the virtues of crumb doughnuts over apple fritters. Lew’s fritters weren’t big—which was all right; you didn’t want a pound of soggy dough—but they were cooked crisp around the edge and had plenty of apple and cinnamon. Walt had a passion for crumb doughnuts, though, and also for a good glazed. A plain glazed doughnut, Lew had told him once, was the true quill.

He pushed against the aluminum bar on the glass door, and then walked straight into it when the door didn’t swing open. The place was locked up. He cupped his hands against the window and peered through at the glass cases full of racks. There was a sparse display of oddball doughnuts lying in disarray, obviously day-olds. Without thinking he tapped on the window, but there was no sign of movement inside despite the light being on in the back room where the deep-fat fryers were.

“Hell,” he said out loud, and looked at the street with a sinking heart. It was empty of traffic. The car that had been parked in front of the auto parts store was gone, and for one quick moment Walt felt utterly alone in the world. Where would he get a doughnut? He hurried past his car, down the walkway to the auto parts store. Thank heaven there was someone behind the counter. It wasn’t the end of humanity after all.

“What happened to Lew?” Walt asked, pushing in through the door and nodding to the auto parts man.

He looked up from a magazine and shrugged. “What he told me is that there wasn’t any money in being open all night anymore. Nothing but bums and drunks coming in. He got fed up. Spur of the moment. Changed his hours day before yesterday, just like that.” He snapped his fingers decisively.

Walt nodded as if he understood, although bums or no bums, Lew’s decision to shut down at night was hard to justify. He had been open all night for twenty years. A man didn’t just pack it in after that long. “What time does he open now?” Walt asked, checking his watch. It was barely six.

“Eight.”

“Eight?” The word stunned him. What was the point of opening up at all? Eight was the middle of the morning.

“There’s that new French bakery up near the Safeway. They open at six. All kinds of pastries.”

“Pastries?”
Walt said, too loud and with a hollow ring to his voice that must have made him sound desperate. He realized suddenly that he had picked up a cardboard container of windshield wipers and was gesturing with them. He put them down, and the auto parts man looked vaguely relieved. He was just trying to be helpful with the French pastry suggestion. There was no point in Walt’s flying off the handle.

“Not many all-night doughnut places around anymore,” the man said, “Not in this part of town. Dying breed.”

“Yeah,” Walt said. “I guess so. It’s like the blue laws or something.” He went back out into the sunlight, which seemed abnormally bright now. There was more traffic on the street. The morning was starting up, and it filled him with a directionless urgency. He still had a little time, so after looking in at the doughnuts in the window again, he walked around to the alley behind the stores, half hoping to see Lew’s Packard back there. There was nothing but a couple of overflowing dumpsters and an old beat-up couch sitting in scattered trash. Three painted metal doors let out onto the alley from the rear of the shops.

Walt walked slowly toward the dumpsters, squinting at the stenciled-on signs on the doors. The first one was Lew’s, adjacent to a dumpster full of greasy cardboard cylinders covered with old doughnut and coffee grounds. He found himself thinking that some of the doughnuts didn’t look half bad, but immediately recoiled from the thought.

He rapped on the door with his knuckles, and then, when there was no response, he knocked harder, jiggling the knob. If it was unlocked, then someone was there. He could get their attention and buy a few of those, day-olds on the rack just to tide him over.

There was the sound of a door opening, thirty feet down the alley, and the man from the auto parts store looked out, started to say something, then apparently recognized him. “You still looking for Lew?” he asked. “I told you he ain’t there.”

Walt felt like a criminal. Thank God he’d got his hand off the doorknob. “I thought if there was anybody working I’d try to buy some day-olds. My wife sent me down after doughnuts, and I’ve got to come home with something. You know how women are.” He laughed weakly.

The man nodded very slowly. “Well, I told you his place don’t open till eight,” he said. “Why don’t you run along out of here?”

“Sure,” Walt said, trying to smile. His face was trembling, though, out of embarrassment. He turned around hurriedly and headed for the street again. Chased out of an alley by a shopkeeper! That hadn’t happened to him in thirty-odd years, not since he was a kid. He climbed into his car and backed out of the space, anxious to get out of there. In the rearview mirror he could see the auto parts man taking down his license number on a sheet of paper, and he flushed with shame.

Amanda was apparently still asleep when he got home, and the house was quiet. He found himself pacing, entirely at loose ends. He was supposed to work on Amanda’s greenhouse today. That’s why he’d gotten up so early, that and the sinkers. That’s what his father had called them—sinkers. The two of them had always stopped on Saturday mornings for coffee and glazed doughnuts on their way to fish off the pier. How long ago had that been? He didn’t like to think about it.