Thirteen Phantasms (35 page)

On Sunday afternoon a wind blew, slamming Filby’s garage door until the noise grew tiresome. I peeked in, aghast. There was nothing in the heaped bits of scrap that suggested a dragon, save one dismantled wing, the silk and silver of which was covered with greasy hand prints. Two cats wandered out. I looked for some sign of Jensen’s crab, hoping, in fact, that some such rational and concrete explanation could be summoned to explain the ruin. But Filby, alas, had quite simply gone to bits along with his dragon. He’d lost whatever strange inspiration it was that propelled him. His creation lay scattered, not two pieces connected. Wires and fuses were heaped amid unidentifiable crystals, and one twisted bit of elaborate machinery had quite clearly been danced upon and lay now cold and dead, half hidden beneath the bench. Delicate thisses and thats sat mired in a puddle of oil that scummed half the floor.

Filby wandered out, adrift, his hair frazzled. He’d received a last letter. There were hints in it of extensive travel, perhaps danger. Silver’s visit to the west coast had been delayed again. Filby ran his hand backward through his hair, oblivious to the harrowed result the action effected. He had the look of a nineteenth-century Bedlam lunatic. He muttered something about having a sister in McKinleyville, and seemed almost illuminated when he added, apropos of nothing, that in his sister’s town, deeper into the heart of the north coast, stood the tallest totem pole in the world. Two days later he was gone. I locked his garage door for him and made a vow to collect his mail with an eye toward a telling exotic postmark. But nothing so far has appeared. I’ve gotten into the habit of spending the evening on the beach with Jensen and his son, Bumby, both of whom still hold out hope for the issuance of the last crab. The spring sunsets are unimaginable. Bumby is as fond of them as I am, and can see comparable whorls of color and pattern in the spiral curve of a seashell or in the peculiar green depths of a tidepool.

In fact, when my tomato worm lurched up out of his burrow and unfurled an enormous gauzy pair of mottled brown wings, I took him along to the seaside so that Bumby could watch him set sail, as it were.

The afternoon was cloudless and the ocean sighed on the beach. Perhaps the calm, insisted Jensen, would appeal to the crab. But Bumby by then was indifferent to the fabled crab. He stared into the pickle jar at the half-dozen circles of bright orange dotting the abdomen of the giant sphinx moth that had once crept among my tomato plants in a clever disguise. It was both wonderful and terrible, and held a weird fascination for Bumby, who tapped at the jar, making up and discarding names.

When I unscrewed the lid, the moth fluttered skyward some few feet and looped around in a crazy oval, Bumby charging along in its wake, then racing away in pursuit as the monster hastened south. The picture of it is as clear to me now as rainwater: Bumby running and jumping, kicking up glinting sprays of sand, outlined against the sheer rise of mossy cliffs, and the wonderful moth just out of reach overhead, luring Bumby along the afternoon beach. At last it was impossible to say just what the diminishing speck in the china-blue sky might be—a tiny, winged creature silhouetted briefly on the false horizon of our little cove, or some vast flying reptile swooping over the distant ocean where it fell away into the void, off the edge of the flat earth.

Harrison sat in the dim living room and listened to the train. All the sounds were clear—the shrill steam whistle over the bass chug of the engine, and even, faintly, the clatter of the wheels on the track.

It never rained anymore on Christmas Eve. The plastic rain gauge was probably still out on the shed roof; he used to lean over the balcony railing outside the master bedroom to check the level of the water in the thing. There had been something reassuring about the idea of rainwater rising in the gauge—nature measurably doing its work, the seasons going around, the drought held at bay. …

But he couldn’t recall any rain since last winter. He hadn’t checked, because the master bedroom was closed up now. And anyway the widow next door, Mrs. Kemp, had hung some strings of Christmas lights over her back porch, and even if he
did
get through to the balcony, he wouldn’t be able to help seeing the blinking colors, and probably even something like a Christmas wreath on her back door.

Too many cooks spoil the broth, he thought, a good wine needs no bush, a friend in need is one friend too many, leave me alone.

She’d even knocked on his door today, the widow had; with a paper plate of Christmas cookies! The plate was covered in red and green foil and the whole bundle was wrapped in a Santa Claus napkin. He had taken the plate, out of politeness; but the whole kit and caboodle, cookies and all, had gone straight into the Dumpster.

To hell with rain anyway. He was sitting in the old leather chair by the cold fireplace, watching snow. In the glass globe in his hand a little painted man and woman sat in a sleigh that was being pulled by a little frozen horse.

He took a sip of vodka and turned the globe upside down and back again, and a contained flurry of snow swirled around the figures. He and his wife had bought the thing a long time ago. The couple in the sleigh had been on their cold ride for decades now. Better to travel than to arrive, he thought, peering through the glass at their tiny blue-eyed faces; they didn’t look a day older than when they’d started out. And still together, too, after all these years.

The sound of the train engine changed, was more echoing and booming now—maybe it had gone into a tunnel.

He put the globe down on the magazine stand and had another sip of vodka. With his nose stuffed full of Vick’s Vapo-Rub, as it was tonight, his taste buds wouldn’t have known the difference if he’d been drinking V.S.O.P. brandy or paint thinner, but he could feel the warm glow in his stomach.

It was an old LP record on the turntable, one from the days when the real hi-fi enthusiasts cared more about sound quality than any kind of actual music. This one was two whole sides of locomotive racket, booming out through his monaural Klipshorn speaker. He also had old disks that were of downtown traffic, ocean waves, birds shouting in tropical forests. …

Better a train. Booming across those nighttime miles.

He was just getting well relaxed when he began to hear faint music behind the barreling train. It was a Christmas song, and before he could stop himself he recognized it—Bing Crosby singing “We Three Kings,” one of her favorites.

He’d been ready for it. He pulled two balls of cotton out of the plastic bag beside the vodka bottle and twisted them into his ears. That made it better—all he could hear now was a distant hiss that might have been rain against the windows.

Ghost rain, he thought. I should have put out a ghost gauge.

As if in response to his thought, the next sip of vodka had a taste—the full-orchestra, peaches-and-bourbon chord of Southern Comfort. He tilted his head forward and let the liquor run out of his mouth back into the glass, and then he stood up and crossed to the phonograph, lifted the arm off the record and laid it in its rest, off to the side.

When he pulled the cotton out of his ears, the house was silent. There was no creaking of floorboards, no sound of breathing or rustling. He was staring at the empty fireplace, pretty sure that if he looked around he would see that flickering rainbow glow from the dining room; the glow of lights, and the star on the top of the tree, and those weird little glass columns with bubbles wobbling up through the liquid inside. Somehow the stuff never boiled away. Some kind of perpetual motion, like those glass birds with the top hats, that bobbed back and forth, dipping their beaks into a glass of water, forever. At least with the Vick’s he wouldn’t smell pine sap.

The pages of the wall calendar had been rearranged sometime last night. He’d noticed it right away this morning when he’d come out of what used to be the guest bedroom, where he slept now on the single bed. The pink cloud of tuberous begonias above the thirty-one empty days of March was gone, replaced by the blooming poinsettia of the December page. Had he done it himself, shifted the calendar while walking in his sleep? He wasn’t normally a sleepwalker. And sometime during the night, around midnight probably, he’d thought he heard a stirring in the closed-up bedroom across the hall, the door whispering open, what sounded like bedroom slippers shuffling on the living room carpet.

Before even making coffee he had folded the calendar back to March. She’d died on St. Patrick’s Day evening, and in fact the green dress she’d laid out on the queen-size bed still lay there, gathering whatever kind of dust inhabited a closed-up room. Around the dress, on the bedspread, were still scattered the green felt shamrocks she had intended to sew onto it. She’d never even had a chance to iron the dress, and, after the paramedics had taken her away on that long-ago evening, he’d had to unplug the iron himself, at the same time that he unplugged the bedside clock.

The following day, after moving out most of his clothes, he had shut the bedroom door for the last time. This business with the calendar made him wonder if maybe the clock was plugged in again, too, but he was not going to venture in there to find out.

Through the back door, from across the yard, he heard the familiar scrape of the widow’s screen door opening, and then the sound of it slapping shut. Quickly he reached up and flipped off the lamp, then sat still in the darkened living room. Maybe she wasn’t paying him another visit, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

In a couple of minutes there came the clumping of her shoes on the front steps, and he hunkered down in the chair, glad that he’d turned off the train noise.

He watched her shadow in the porch light. He shouldn’t leave it on all the time. It probably looked like an invitation, especially at this time of year. She knocked at the door, waited a moment and then knocked again. She couldn’t take a hint if it stepped out of the bushes and bit her on the leg.

Abruptly he felt sheepish, hiding out like this, like a kid. But he was a married man, for God’s sake. He’d taken a vow. And a vow wasn’t worth taking if it wasn’t binding. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life, said Proverbs 31 about a good wife; her lamp does not go out at night.

Does not go out.

His thoughts trailed off into nothing when he realized that the woman outside was leaving, shuffling back down the steps. He caught himself wondering if she’d brought him something else to eat, maybe left a casserole outside the door. Once she’d brought around half a corned beef and a mess of potatoes and cabbage, and like the Christmas cookies, all of it had gone straight into the garbage. But the canned chili he’d microwaved earlier this evening wasn’t sitting too well with him, and the thought of corned beef …

He could definitely hear something now from the closed-up bedroom—a low whirring noise like bees in a hive—the sewing machine? He couldn’t recall if he had unplugged it too, that night. Still, it had no excuse. …

He grabbed the cotton balls, twisting them up tight and jamming them into his ears again. Had the bedroom door moved? He groped wildly for the lamp, switched it on, and with one last backward glance he went out the front door, nearly slamming it behind him in his haste.

Shakily, he sat down in one of the white plastic chairs on the porch and buttoned up his cardigan sweater. If the widow returned, she’d find him, and there was damn-all he could do about it. He looked around in case she might have left him something, but apparently she hadn’t. The chilly night air calmed him down a little bit, and he listened for a moment to the sound of crickets, wondering what he would do now. Sooner or later he’d have to go back inside. He hadn’t even brought out the vodka bottle.

Tomorrow, Christmas day, would be worse.

What would he say to her if the bedroom door should
open
, and she were to step out? If he were actually to
confront
her. … A good marriage was made in heaven, as the scriptures said, and you didn’t let a thing like that go. No matter what. Hang on with chains.

After a while he became aware that someone up the street was yelling about something, and he stood up in relief, grateful for an excuse to get off the porch, away from the house. He shuffled down the two concrete steps, breathing the cold air that was scented with jasmine even in December.

Some distance up the block, half a dozen people in robes were walking down the sidewalk toward his house, carrying one of those real estate signs that looked like a miniature hangman’s gallows. No, only one of them was carrying it, and at the bottom end of it was a metal wheel that was skirling along the dry pavement.

Then he saw that it wasn’t a real estate sign, but a cross. The guy carrying it was apparently supposed to be Jesus, and two of the men behind him wore slatted skirts like Roman soldiers, and they had rope whips that they were snapping in the chilly air.

“Get along, King of the Jews!” one of the soldiers called, obviously not for the first time, and not very angrily. Behind the soldiers three women in togas trotted along, shaking their heads and waving their hands. Harrison supposed they must be Mary or somebody. The wheel at the bottom of the cross definitely needed a squirt of oil.

Harrison took a deep breath, and then forced jocularity into his voice as he called, “You guys missed the Golgotha off-ramp. Only thing south of here is the YMCA.”

A black couple was pushing a shopping cart up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, their shadows stark under the streetlight. They were slowing down to watch Jesus. All kinds of unoiled wheels were turning tonight.