The Last Coin (42 page)

“For God’s sake don’t eat with it.” That’s what Uncle Arthur had said.

Mr. Pennyman was almost helpless, his strange urges uncontrollable. Pickett and Andrew launched themselves toward his table at the same time, Andrew arriving first, but when Andrew snatched up the fouled gumbo and tried to haul it away, Pennyman groped after it, mewling, and pitched out of his chair onto the floor, snatching out the spoon in one last heaving effort, just as Andrew shouted, “He’s got it!” in order to warn Pickett to stand by.

Pretending to go to Pennyman’s aid, Andrew tried to wrench the spoon away as the old man’s face shuddered and shook inches from his own, livid and vibrating.

But Pennyman was recovering. His helpless grin was turning into a calculated smile. Andrew pinched him under the armpit, hard, leaning into it, twisting his hand as if to tear out a piece of flesh, pinching him for the sake of the whole human race. “
There
now, Mr. Pennyman!” he said through his teeth. “You’ll be fine. Did you forget to take your medicine?”

“Poor man!’’ cried one of the Leisure World ladies, saddened at the very thought of Mr. Pennyman’s having neglected his medicine.

“Brain lesion,” said Andrew, just as Pennyman hooted in pain and released the spoon, half-throwing it toward the fire. Quick as a flash, one of Aunt Naomi’s cats scooped it up and was gone—out the door, into the night.

“I’ll just have a look at that soup!” Jack Dilton said to Pickett, who headed toward the door in the wake of the cat.

“Jesus! What …!” Ken-or-Ed began dancing and twisting, and Jack Dilton, giving him a wondering look, instantly did the same. The doorway was suddenly full of cats, an ambush of them, shredding pants legs, honing their claws on the legs of the two men who danced there, cursing and stomping. “Get ’em off! Hell!” Dilton yelled, and then pushed Ken-or-Ed so hard on the shoulder that he reeled, bending over to slam at the cats.

Pickett pushed through them with the soup, setting out to dump it in the alley. Aunt Naomi hobbled across, shouting “Shut the door! You’re letting in every cat in the neighborhood. This is a restaurant, not a kennel!”

The man with the camera slouched in, filming the whole thing. Rose collared him, smearing a fingerful of peanut butter over the lens of the camera as if by accident.

“Hey!” he said, as she led him outside, pushing Ken-or-Ed and Jack Dilton in front of them both. Aunt Naomi shut the door. The cats had gone. The spoon was gone. The fouled gumbo was gone. Pennyman, his face clenched like a skeletal fist, apologized very graciously to the Leisure World ladies. He was beaten and was acting the gentleman.

“I’ll just go lie down,” he forced himself to say. Andrew could see in Pennyman’s eyes the most obscene sort of pure hatred he’d ever witnessed. The sight of Pennyman’s face struck him cold. He wanted to wink, to say something that would put the old man away, but he couldn’t. He nodded and pulled off a weak sort of smile. Pennyman went out, followed by Mrs. Gummidge, whose head shook as if she were palsied. Rose came back in just then, followed by Pickett.

Andrew walked into the kitchen, rummaged in the cupboard until he came up with the kitchen bottle, and poured two inches of scotch into the bottom of a tumbler. He filled the tumbler with water and drank it down, steadying himself against the counter. Then, breathing evenly, he went back out into the hushed cafe and announced that they’d all be able to use a round on the house. He pulled down bottles of sauterne and port and sherry, and nodded at Pickett. “Where’s the spoon?” Andrew asked.

Pickett shrugged. “Trust the cats,” he said, and set out to take orders.

“Where’s Fitzpatrick?” Andrew asked Rose, as she pulled down glasses.

“I chased him off. Told him I’d call the police. He didn’t want that. You were right. The man’s stark. The other one, Dilton, wanted to fight him, right there on the street, and said something about his hundred dollars. They’re out there right now, for all I know, beating each other up. I don’t pretend to understand it.” Andrew grinned, half-thinking to go out and watch. But things were too hot for that.

Aunt Naomi, appearing to be utterly unruffled, went over to talk to the four ladies. In a moment they were shaking their heads and clucking their tongues and exchanging reminiscences about medical troubles that they’d known. Aunt Naomi moved away, toward the old couple and the young couple.

“What was that
god-awful
smell?” the old man demanded. The couple at the adjacent table, the ones who had arrived first, nodded and leaned in.

Andrew heard Aunt Naomi say, “That’s rather delicate, isn’t it?” and he stepped up, clearing his throat, to save her the embarrassment.

“Sorry, folks,” he said. “This has been a rough night. Poor Mr. Pennyman. When he’s taken with this sort of fit, he suffers total muscle relaxation. I’m afraid he’s …” And he bent over and whispered into the ears of the young man and the gentleman at the next table. Each of them whispered into the ears of their wives, and the young lady whispered to her grandmother, who said, “Oh, the
poor
man;
what
an embarrassment!” and then whispered the grim truth into the ear of the old man, who sat stock still and with a look of puzzled dissatisfaction on his face.

His mouth fell. “He
what
! Soiled his … The filthy …”

‘‘He couldn’t help it, for goodness sake. It was uncontrollable.’’

“A hanged man does that,” the old man announced out loud.

“I dare say he does,” muttered Andrew, moving off but happy enough that the old man had said it. The rest of the restaurant knew now. Or at least they thought they knew.

Rose collared him as he slipped toward the kitchen. “What on earth did you tell them about poor Mr. Pennyman?” she asked.

“Well,” said Andrew. “I told them the only thing I could think of—that he’d had a fit and lost control of his bodily functions. What else would explain it? It’s no crime. The man is old.”

Rose looked at him steadily. “What was wrong with the gumbo? What did you do to doctor it up, to stretch it?”

“Not a thing!” said Andrew, looking hurt. “Take a look in the pot.”

Rose did. In fact there wasn’t anything wrong with it. It was fine. “Well,” Rose admitted. “Don’t get a swelled head, but the woman from the
Recliner
said she’d never eaten better than this or felt so at home in a restaurant.”

“Did she?”

“Yes, and the couple across the way said the same. Your gumbo was a hit, apparently.”

Andrew wiggled his eyebrows at her. Then the street door opened and into the cafe came the cameraman and the lumberjack, having put away their equipment. Andrew’s face clouded and he headed out of the kitchen, but Rose grabbed his arm. “I’ve asked them to drink a beer. Let’s not aggravate things. I told them that we were very anxious that their program, if they aired it, would reflect well on the restaurant and hinted that if it didn’t we’d take action. But I don’t want to put too fine a point on it. I don’t want to make them mad.”

“Ah,” said Andrew, thinking hard. “Settle them down, is it? A beer, a friendly chat. Sure. You’re right. They can take a stab at the gumbo, too. What the hell. There’s some left. It’s in their blood, I guess, waving cameras like that.” He smiled at the two of them and gestured toward a table.

A half hour later the cafe was almost empty. Aside from Andrew and Rose and Pickett, only the two from KNEX were left. Aunt Naomi had gone up to her room, but had to have Rose’s help climbing the stairs. Andrew considered every word he said to the two from the cable station. He was breezy, unconcerned, nonchalant. He supposed that they were mystified by the night’s proceedings. They certainly couldn’t have imagined that they’d be witness to such a wild display.

When they left, the cafe was six beers down, but the two seemed congenial enough. It was just possible that they’d changed sides, that they’d been good men who had been caught up in Pennyman’s web without half-knowing how they’d gotten there, and had, over the course of the evening, been wooed away from the enemy by the cafe and the gumbo and the beer and the cheerful talk. Andrew almost felt friendly toward them.

Five seconds after they were out the door, the shouting began. Andrew, Pickett, and Rose headed for the street. “Trouble!” Andrew shouted, thinking that the two of them had—what?—been jumped? Maybe Ken-or-Ed had come back again, out of his head finally. But no, there the two were, arguing on the parkway. Yelling. The Chinese man was nearly out of his mind. Some damned thing had gotten at the camera, had torn all the tape out. Something with claws.

“It was the stinking cats!” shouted the lumberjack, suddenly sober and enraged.

But it hadn’t been the cats; Andrew was sure of it. An almost electric thrill of joy and mystery shot through him, and he felt suddenly like a man with friends, like a shaman who could call up the wind and the birds and send them on missions, who could make oak trees dance in the forest. The frame over the crawlspace had been pushed aside. Andrew squinted at it surreptitiously, hardly believing that it could be true, but knowing it nonetheless. It was the ‘possum that had dealt with the film, that had scuttled Pennyman’s last ship. There it was, under the house. Andrew could just barely see it in the soft glow of the streetlight, looking out at him with goggly eyes. It ducked back into the shadows.

There was a monumental amount of tape on the street, ragged and dirty and trailed nearly to the beach and back. A car or two had run over it. Andrew wouldn’t have guessed there’d be half so much tape in a video camera. Every last inch of it, apparently, had been hauled out and shredded, chewed and trampled on, heaped into the gutter, tangled in the bushes.

“Hell,” said the cameraman, standing very still. And it seemed to Andrew as if he was worried, as if he had someone to answer to. Five minutes later they were gone, the wadded-up tape nearly filling one of the trash cans in the backyard.

Within a half hour, Pickett was gone, too, and Rose had shuffled wearily upstairs to bed. Thank God, thought Andrew, they wouldn’t be open tomorrow night. Just cleaning up would kill half the day. So what? He whistled merrily despite his aching joints. Pennyman had come in smug and gone out a wreck. Ken-or-Ed was a broken man. The cafe would get a bang-up review in the
Recliner
, not to mention the
Herald
, Pickett’s newspaper. Pickett had written his review three days ago; Andrew had helped him.

He went outside for the last time that night, wearing the second chef’s hat, which he’d inflated dangerously full, and carrying with him a saucer of milk. Clicking his tongue outside the crawlspace to alert the ‘possum, he lay the milk just within the shadow, and then strolled around to the front of the house.

A light burned in the Fitzpatricks’ living room, but as Andrew drew up across the street, the light blinked out, as if they’d seen him, and wanted, perhaps, to hide behind the drapes and watch. He stood on the sidewalk, his hat billowing around his head, lit by the streetlamp and valleyed with shadowed folds, like a cumulus cloud blowing in the sea wind. After a moment he turned and headed back around, satisfied that they wouldn’t know what to make of him, that the sight of him wearing the floating hat and standing dead still on the midnight sidewalk was a vision from outside their ken. They wouldn’t be able to fathom it.

He slipped back into the house, tolerably satisfied, and climbed the stairs to bed.

Robert Louis Stevenson
“Crabbed Age and Youth”

T
HE SPOON WAS
in his pants pocket next morning when he awakened early, well before dawn. It fell out and bounced on his foot when he picked the pants up. Who had put it there? The cats? Why not, Andrew thought, tiptoeing around the bedroom. The cats were probably downstairs right now, playing gin rummy with parrots and ‘possums and toads, plotting against the Soviets.

Rose still slept, and the house was dark and quiet. Hustling downstairs, Andrew went out onto the service porch, took the brick and the lid off the toad tank, and buried the spoon in the gravel at the bottom, laying a lump of petrified wood over it.

The toad floated as ever, innocently, as if he hadn’t just last night thwarted a lunatic and hid out among eucalyptus logs until Andrew had found him and put him back. Toads, thought Andrew, were an inscrutable lot. Andrew wished there was some sort of toad treat he could give it, but nothing came to mind. The toad drifted down to the bottom of the tank and sat on the petrified wood, giving Andrew the slack-faced, deadpan look of a serious martial arts assassin, as if anyone who dared retrieve the spoon would have to deal with him first, and would regret it.

Satisfied, Andrew went off to work, and an hour later was washing dishes moodily in the cafe kitchen. The casements were open, and he could smell the Santa Anas blowing again, the warm desert and sagebrush odor mingling with the smell of popping soap bubbles. The cafe itself was cleared and swept clean and the tables arranged despite their having to sit idle until next Friday night. On the counter next to him lay a cheap walkie-talkie, silent, but with the volume turned all the way up.

It might be today that the crisis would come. The treasure hunt was that night. The moon would be full, the tale told. The dawn light radiating now above the eastern rooftops was a bloody slash, dwindling into a gray and violet sky, and the air was heavy with the sighing wind. There had been a pair of jolting little earthquakes some time after two in the morning, and then a third two hours later, a deep, rolling quake that had brought him up sharp out of a dreamless sleep. Rose had got out of bed and wandered through the house when the first of the quakes struck, convinced that she’d heard something fall downstairs. She had slept through the third, though, and that’s when Andrew had climbed wearily out of bed, thinking to get a jump on cleaning the cafe.