In For a Penny (3 page)

“I guess it’s not working as good as it was,” Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.

. . .

On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod’s Liquors and bought five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina’s birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.

On the way home, he stopped at the used bookstore where he found something promising: a book called
A Field Guide to the Paranormal.
He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.

“You’re interested in the paranormal?” Bob asked him, taking his money.

“Yeah,” Art confessed. “I find it kind of fascinating.”

“My sister’s a psychic. She has a sort of organization.”

“Really? What do you think about it,” Art asked. “Just out of curiosity.” He realized that he wanted very badly to tell someone about his experiences, and it dawned on him that he was more than a little bit proud of himself. He wasn’t the same man today that he had been last week.

“I’ve got no problem with it. There’s a guy at Krystal’s meetings that bends spoons. That and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve seen it. How about you?”

“Yeah, I’m a believer. A couple of things happened to me recently …” He realized that he couldn’t think of any way to relate the possum story or the phone calls in such a way as to give them the punch they deserved, and he wished that something more grand had happened to him, like predicting an earthquake or a train wreck. “What kind of things?”

“Oh, you know, knowing in advance who’s calling on the phone, that kind of thing. And I nailed a
Jeopardy!
answer before the question was asked.”

“You mean you got the question before the answer.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant. It was Oliver Cromwell.”

“Cromwell? The host? I thought it was that other guy.”

“It
is
that other guy. I meant the answer was Oliver Cromwell.”

“I got Oliver Hardy once,” Bob told him, counting out change. “The category was silent films, I think. Or maybe it was comedians. Either way.” The transaction, just like the conversation, had run its course.

“Sure,” Art said. “I guess so. Look, what’s this thing with your sister? She has meetings or something?”

“Thursday nights, at her house. It’s a kind of support group, you know?”

“Psychics need a support group?”

“Hell,
everyone
needs a support group these days.”

“And her name’s really Crystal?”

“With a
K,”
Bob said. He wrote his sister’s name and number on the back of the sales receipt and handed it to Art, who slipped it into his wallet. When he got home he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the living room and thumbed through the book, but it turned out to be volume one of a set, mostly concerned with spontaneous human combustion and the aura phenomenon, neither of which, apparently, applied to his own situation.

He had the house to himself, and he decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet to meditate in order to foster psychic suggestion. As he sat there with his eyes shut, his thoughts spun idly, and he began to develop the notion that unwittingly he had managed to access a particular grotto inside his mind, a place where the subconscious depths lay like a hidden pool, where he might swim if only he could find it in the darkness. He pictured the pool itself, illuminated by moonlight, and he wandered toward it along shadowed corridors….

. . .

He awoke to find that Beth and Nina had gotten home from lunch. Nina had a nondescript gray feather to show him, probably from a pigeon. The thought came to him that he had wasted the entire morning chasing after psychic phantoms. It had been three days since Anthony Collier and Oliver Cromwell and the disappearing possum. Perhaps he had sailed temporarily into some sort of whimsical psychic breeze, which he would never again pick up no matter how much sail he loaded onto the masts.

The thought was disheartening, and he realized that the experiences of Thursday night were … special in some way. That they somehow made
him
special. They showed beyond all doubt that … He tried to grasp what it was they showed, exactly. They showed … that there were enormous things that were true about the universe, things that he now had a firsthand knowledge of. He recalled the derailed conversation at the bookstore, and he knew there must be a larger picture. There
had
to be. He had a handful of puzzle pieces, but he needed more if ever he were to get a clear view.

“Can we go feathering?” Nina asked him, coming out of her bedroom with the shoebox.

“Okay,” he said. “How about around the neighborhood?”

“But there was that place you said. With the birds.”

“There’s birds in the neighborhood,” he told her. “We don’t want to ignore them and go to the park, or they might feel bad.”

“I might go after groceries,” Beth said, coming out of the kitchen.

Art and Nina went out onto the sidewalk and into a perfect fall day. The wind gusted leaves along the pavement, and again there was the smell of wood smoke, perhaps someone burning tree prunings. The sky was as clear as water, inconceivably deep and blue between brush strokes of cloud drift. Art found that he was distracted though, unable to enjoy the afternoon, constantly anticipating another psychic interlude, reassessing what had been happening to him. He tried to keep his mind on the here and now, but he had to work at it. Several houses down they found a white feather lying forlornly on a clipped lawn, perhaps a seagull feather, and then, at the corner house, they discovered a dead mockingbird beneath a curb tree, torn apart by a cat.

“Yuck,” Nina said, “what
is
that?”

“It’s a mockingbird,” Art told her, picking up a long mottled feather.

“But is it guts?”

“Yep,” Art said, “it’s guts.”

“That’s yuck.”

They walked on, heading up the next block where an acorn woodpecker hammered away at the trunk of a palm tree. The bird stood upside down, defying gravity, showing off. “See his red head?” Art asked.

“Can we get a
red
feather …? Look!” Nina shouted, pointing at the sky. An airplane blew out a vapor trail off to the east, a skywriter, spelling something out. They waited for it, shading their eyes, naming the letters before the November wind bore them away. “April,” it said, and the plane circled back around and circumscribed it with a heart, although by the time the heart was completed it was blown to tatters, and the whole thing looked like an ill-drawn parallelogram containing ghostly hieroglyphics.

Art was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that it
meant
something, that it was a sign, maybe some sort of spirit writing, perhaps intended for him…

…but just as soon as he conceived the thought, he realized that he was off his rocker, lost inside his own bafflement, confusing an endearment with a ghost. He forced himself to focus on the world around him, the weathered sidewalk, the comical dog that watched them through a picket fence, the wind in his hair. He put his arm on Nina’s shoulder as they walked, and immediately he felt steadier.

“There’s one!” Nina shouted, and she ran straight to a blue feather that lay half covered with dead leaves.

“From a blue jay!” Art said. “How many is that?”

Nina counted the feathers in the shoebox, making a laborious job of it, losing track and recounting to get it right. “Five,” she said finally.

They wandered home now, having pretty much run through the neighborhood birds. Beth’s car was gone. As they stepped up onto the front porch, Art heard the phone ringing, and instantly it came to him that it was Anthony again. He sprinted into the kitchen and grabbed it just as the answering machine picked it up. He punched the star sign to kill the recording.

“Yeah,” he said breathlessly.

“Art! It’s Anthony.”

“Wow,” Art said. “I
guessed
it was you.”

“Unlucky guess, eh?” Anthony laughed.

“No, really. I was out on the front porch, and when I heard the phone ring, your name popped into my head. The same damned thing happened the other night when you called. It was kind of spooky, actually.”

“Yeah, well, you
sounded
kind of spooked the other night. You didn’t say more than about ten words.”

“I’ll tell you what, I had some weird experiences that night. If you’ve got a second…?”

Art explained about the possum, giving the story slightly amusing overtones to diminish the kook factor, then told him about the phone call and Oliver Cromwell, before starting in on the interesting difference between the various occurrences. In the middle of the explanation the call-waiting signal went off in his ear. He kept talking, but Anthony interrupted him: “If you’ve got a call, grab it.”

“To heck with it,” Art said. He hated to interrupt a long distance call, especially on Anthony’s dime. It always turned out to be Jimmy Carter butting in, selling talent show tickets. He finished telling his story, then waited for Anthony’s response.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Anthony told him.

“I wasn’t really
worrying
about it,” Art said. “I want to know what it means.”

“I think it’s one of those things you never figure out. It’s better just to put it away, you know, back in the dead letter file. Worry about it when something starts to happen, like you start cutting the heads off of dogs or something. Until then, forget about it. You can’t explain it.”

“Sure,” Art said, let down by this advice. They chatted for a while longer and then Art hung up. Anthony was probably right, but right or wrong, apparently his sailboat had tacked back into the psychic breeze.

Feeling guilty about not answering the interrupting call, he picked up the receiver and punched star-six-nine into the keypad. The phone rang six times before a woman picked it up.

“Hey,” Art said, “it’s Art Johnson, did somebody there call me?”

There was silence on the other end, and then the woman said simply, “No.”

“Sorry to bother you, then,” Art told her. He hung up, embarrassed, wondering what the hell he could have done to star-six-nine a wrong number. That didn’t seem possible to him, unless there was some kind of crossed line. Wait, he thought suddenly, figuring it out. The woman probably
had
called him, but by mistake. Probably
she’d
dialed a wrong number but didn’t know it because he hadn’t picked up her call. She had assumed simply that no one was home where she
thought
she’d called, and …

The phone rang and he snatched it up, half expecting Anthony Collier. “Hello,” he said.

“Art …?”

“Yeah,” Art said. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Nancy. Nancy Bronson.”

For a moment the name meant nothing to him. Then he knew who it was—a woman he had known at college. Bronson was her married name. She’d moved to Texas a decade ago.

“Nancy? How the heck are you doing?”

“Did you just call me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I
think
it was you. You just called my number and asked if I’d called your house, and then you hung up when I said no.”

Art’s stomach turned over. He sat down in a kitchen chair, too confused to speak.

“Art?”

“Yeah. I guess I
did
call you. What happened was that I got a call, and I couldn’t answer it, so I hit star-six-nine to call back. Apparently it was your number.”

Now it was Nancy’s turn to be silent. “But I didn’t call you,” she said after a moment. “To tell you the truth, after you called me, I called Gayle to get your number. I don’t have it in my book. I didn’t want to use the star-six-nine function, because what if it
wasn’t
you? I’d end up talking to some nut.”

“You couldn’t have called me by mistake the first time?”

“Not if I didn’t have your number. And besides, I didn’t call anyone. I was doing the dishes. Do you have
my
number? My new number? Because we moved to San Antonio last year.”

“I don’t know,” Art said, although it came to him then that he in fact didn’t have it. Not a week ago Nancy’s name had come up in conversation with a mutual friend, and Art had realized in a moment of passing nostalgia that he had lost touch with her and most of the rest of his old school friends. He flipped through the pages of his and Beth’s address book now and read off the number written down there, apparently years ago, given its position at the top of the B page.

“That’s the old one,” Nancy told him, and she filled him in on the new phone and address before chatting some more and hanging up.

Art realized that he had been holding his breath off and on, and he let it out now and walked into the living room, swamped with a strange fear and nearly reeling with vertigo. Why Nancy? Only because her name had been in his mind a week ago, fleetingly, unimportantly? And now he had connected with her in this bizarre way. …