In For a Penny (5 page)

“It’s nice to see you, Art. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Selma Vallerian. She was deeply involved in the search for Dr. Halsey.”

Art smiled and nodded, wishing he knew whether Dr. Halsey had been found or if the search was still underway.

“Dr. Halsey, of course, was related to Admiral Halsey,” Krystal said, perhaps sensing that Art hadn’t connected with any of this.

A snatch of song came into his head. “The Admiral Halsey who notified Pete?” he asked brightly. She looked at him blankly. “That song by Paul McCartney,” he said. He decided against singing it when he saw that Krystal was nodding at him in much the same way that a few moments ago he had been nodding at Roderick Gunther about the idea of drinking ocean water. She slipped away then, leaving him with Mrs. Vallerian.

“And what brings you here?” Mrs. Vallerian asked him. She had wispy blue-gray hair and was very small and laden with primitive jewelry. She had such an open and natural smile that Art immediately liked her. At last he had an opportunity to talk about himself.

“I had a few … experiences. Psychic experiences, I guess you’d say, and I guess I needed to find people who …”

“Understood,” she said, nodding seriously. “That’s a basic human need, as fundamental as food and sex. Tell me about what happened.”

He told her happily, without any of the lightheartedness that he had affected in the past, even with Beth, in an effort to lighten things up when in fact they weren’t especially light. But no one would say he was crazy here. He was free to speak his mind. “It’s the phone calls that bother me,” he said at last.

“Of course. They can’t be coincidence. That word is the world’s great shield, you know. People wear it as a mask, in order to appear very rational, but there’s nothing rational about it, because it’s merely denial.”

“That’s
exactly
my way of looking at it,” Art said.

“But what we want is validation. We sensitives see things clearly, and yet here we are, finding comfort in each other’s company, because there’s no comfort in the world.”

“I’d kind of like to know what the whole thing
means,”
Art said.

“It means that you’re special. That you have a special insight. Our culture should honor and cherish it. In past cultures we would have been revered as shamans and mystics.”

“Yes, but what’s it an insight into? I feel like I need to get a grasp of it somehow. What good is it being a shaman if you don’t have a clue? With me it’s all … possums, if you know what I mean, wrong numbers.” Art wondered suddenly what he
did
mean.
Had
he come here for some sort of personal validation? Did Mrs. Vallerian see right into his heart? It struck him that he had come partly out of fear, too. “I’m a little scared by it,” he said, coming clean.

“Of course you are. You see the problem, don’t you? You’re
taught
to be frightened by it. A person is trained to disbelieve. No ghosts, you know. No alien visitations, no out-of-body experiences, no psychic phenomena. Then it turns out that there’s something in you that’s … sensitive. Something happens to you to shake your disbelief. And instead of cherishing that sensitivity, it merely frightens you, like the boogie man. But there are no boogie men here.” She gestured at the room, taking it all in, and Art glanced around in response. He saw that Krystal had taken out a Tarot deck and was giving a reading to Cassandra, the blonde woman, who was openly weeping.

He nodded at Mrs. Vallerian, considering her insights uneasily: he was sensitive and frightened, like a child just coming to know the world. Looking for validation, he had found these fellow travelers, this haven that was free of boogie men. He was among friends—lots of them, too, if you counted up their past lives. Gunther glided passed just then, heading toward the teapots, goggling at him pleasantly. “What’s the meaning of the paper clips in Roderick’s shoe?” he asked Mrs. Vallerian.

“It’s a grounding,” she said. “He’s really quite expert in magnetization and grounding mechanisms. He helped a friend of mine, in fact, who had excess energy in her joints. It was marvelous. He made her a tiara of copper washers.”

Art was suddenly deflated. He wanted a theory if he couldn’t have an outright answer—something consistent, something that added up.

He thought suddenly about Nina, and he looked at his watch. It was nearly eight, and she’d already be in bed. It was his night to read the bedtime story, although Beth had been covering for him and of course would fill in for him again tonight. Nina’s favorite book was something called
Wacky Wednesday
, a story about a day when everything went haywire—birds wearing shoes, turtles climbing trees, headless people going nonchalantly about their business, airplanes flying backward. She was perpetually fascinated by the book, marveling at the oddball illustrations, wishing
she
could wake up to wacky things.

“Would you like a reading?” Mrs. Vallerian asked him.

“Pardon me?” He realized that he had been far away—three miles, as the crow flew, but almost infinitely distant by any other measure.

She nodded in the direction of the kitchen, and he saw that Krystal was holding the Tarot deck up, as if to offer him another avenue toward enlightenment. Art shook his head at her. “I don’t think so,” he said to Mrs. Vallerian. “I just noticed how late it is. I want to thank you for hearing me out, though. You don’t know how much you’ve helped.”

“I hope we’ll see you here again,” she said to him, and he shook her hand before moving toward the fortune-telling table to thank Krystal, who was already manipulating the deck, drawing cards for a grizzled old gentleman in suspenders who wore a ratty T-shirt that read, “I crapped out in Las Vegas.”

Roderick Gunther had disappeared, which was disappointing, because Art would have liked to have said goodbye to the man. Their planets had momentarily converged, but they were spinning away again on celestial tradewinds. Art left, closing the door softly behind him, going out into a clear and starry night. In five minutes he was home, where he slipped into Nina’s room.

“Read me one,” Nina said, still awake.

“What one?” He switched on the bedside lamp.

“You
know,”
she said, smiling at him.

. . .

The country park was abandoned on weekday afternoons, which was good, because no one would have picked up the feathers dropped by wandering peacocks. They found three big tail feathers behind the zoo, in the high oak-shaded grass. There was a big speckled brown feather, too, the size of a quill pen, from a female peacock probably, and then at the far end of the park, deep in the sycamore grove across Santiago Creek, they found what must have been a wing feather from a big raven.

As they searched, there was a rustling in the treetops and a rush of wings, and Art looked up to see a big hawk swoop down, its talons extended, and snatch up a ground squirrel that ran along through a clearing. Clutching the animal, the hawk beat its wings, trying to gain altitude, and after a moment it soared straight up through the branches and disappeared. Art looked down at Nina, who was busy watching a passing parade of ants. She hadn’t seen the hawk, thank God. There’d be time enough for that in the years to come.

They hiked back up to the zoo and paid their dollar to get in, watching the keepers feed enormous pigs whole heads of iceberg lettuce, which the pigs rolled around the barnyard with their snouts in complicated and unfathomable patterns before tiring of it finally and tearing into the lettuce, eating, literally, like pigs.

“What are they playing?” Nina asked, climbing up to the second rung of the corral fence.

“Wackyball,” Art told her. “Only pigs know the rules.”

“
Wackyball
,” Nina said.
“You’re
wacky, I think.”

f
rom their second-story bedroom window in the Berkeley hills, Ed watched strange lights flicker through the tree-tops a mile or so above the house, a two-story rental that backed up to the wooded area around Tilden Park. The October night was unseasonably warm, the window open to catch the land breeze that drifted through the screen, ruffling Ed’s hair. It hadn’t been the lights that awakened him, although they cast an eerie, moving glow on the bedroom wall opposite the window; he had been up and around anyway, disturbed by odd nighttime noises, unable to sleep, his troubles going around in his head. He and Lisa had argued late last night, and had left the argument unresolved.

Somewhere around four o’clock every small noise had conspired to awaken him: the slowly dripping faucet in the bathroom, Lisa’s rolling over in bed, the early-morning chatter of Lisa’s parakeets in their cage downstairs. And then he had heard a low, unidentifiable humming noise, like bees in an immense hive. He had gotten up and gone downstairs, draping the parakeet cage before searching for the source of the noise, going out onto the front porch, where it was quieter, the sound evidently blocked by the house itself. By the time he had gotten back upstairs he was fully awake, and it was only then that he had noticed the oddly moving lights shining in through the window.

His eyes searched the vast shadow of the eucalyptus grove now, where it merged with the darkness of the pine forest farther up, mostly piñon pines, all in all a couple of hundred densely-wooded square miles cut with trails and cleared patches of grass and wildflowers. The fall sky was clear of clouds and fog. There was no telltale sign of smoke, just thousands of stars and the moon throwing out its cold light—no fire or terrestrial tragedy to account for this display of light and sound, which made him increasingly uneasy. He watched the lights playing across the hillside, now and then shooting up into the air like beacons; mostly white light, but with red flashes spaced evenly in a circular pattern, as if they traced the perimeter of a landing pad or of a vast spherical ship.

He and Lisa had taken this house at the top of the world partly because of its proximity to Mother Nature, which was actually something Lisa appreciated more than he did. He had liked the two-bedroom flat off Telegraph Avenue just fine, where they had lived happily during the first two years of their marriage. But Lisa had wanted something farther from the scene downtown, especially because they planned to have a child. His stubborn objection to moving had been met with a resistance that still surprised him when he thought about it. That had been their first real argument as a married couple, the first time he had seen Lisa lose her temper. To use the word
lose
was to understate it, though. There had come a point when her temper had flooded over the top of the dam and he’d had to swim to safety.

He was big enough now to admit that he had contributed his small part to that one, especially since she’d been right about moving. The Berkeley flat was too small, the plumbing leaked, the heating was lousy There hadn’t really been room for Ed’s stuff, let alone for theirs, although Lisa wasn’t a
stuff
kind of person, not the way he was, which was their philosophical gulf. His HO trains filled eight big cardboard boxes—not the trains alone, but the papier-âmaché tunnels and mountains and the depot and houses and all—but during the years of their marriage the trains had been packed away, as had certain other of his collections. Out here at the edge of the wilderness they had an extra room, a piece of a basement, and forced-air heating. The monthly payment was more than they could afford, and that didn’t generate harmony, but then everything these days cost more than you could afford, so to hell with it, or at least to hell with it as regards the house and other domestic concerns ….

As for his stuff, it was still in boxes—a hell of a lot of boxes, admittedly—and the futile idea that the basement would become a train yard rather than a guest bedroom still haunted the new house like a dwindling ghost. But that was thin ice. There was nothing to be gained by skating around on it this morning.

There seemed to be some sort of
increase
in whatever was going on out in the woods, a series of blips and blaps that synchronized with the rising glow of a strangely purple light, like an old hippie nightclub. He could see movement now, too, large shadows shifting and growing and then shrinking away again. The bed creaked, and he turned around, thinking that Lisa had awakened, but she slept the sleep of the just, probably whacked out from yesterday’s work.

They had just gotten the last of the boxes from the move unpacked, putting in God knew how many hours, with the bulk of his crated-up stuff relegated indefinitely to the garage, which is what struck this off-key nostalgic chord in him. Lisa’s vast collection of films occupied an entire bedroom downstairs. She taught film classes at San Francisco State, so the films were her
work
, whereas his own stuff was useless trash. Being married meant making concessions, and of course now that she was pregnant, there would be more concessions. His simple observation that the concessions were largely
his
had spoiled their late-night dinner, that and his unfortunate mention of his bowling ball, which was one of the treasures living in the garage, and which was actually more of a sore point than any of the rest of it, his trains included.

He cocked his head, hearing a high-pitched, dog-whistle-type shriek, just barely audible, as if it were projected at an inhuman decibel. A dog immediately started howling some distance away, and the sound of the howling struck him as unnatural, as if the dog sensed the presence of something fearful out in the woods. The sound diminished, but the howling continued now that the dog was spooked.