The Last Coin (43 page)

He had never before been so filled with premonition, with the absolute certainty that everything in the world was connected, that like Pickett’s circles and serpents, everything whirled in a vast, complex pattern—the wind, the rhythmic crashing of ocean waves, the wheeling gulls and the distant cries of parrots, the earth-muted grumbling of subterranean cataclysms—all of it was linked, and all together it was the embodiment of something bigger, something unseen, something pending.

If Andrew were called, he would go. No trickery with fishing poles, no gunnysacks full of junk. Come tomorrow, Rose would understand. She might think he was crazy, but she’d understand. It was his destiny that was blowing on the Santa Anas, sailing along on the backs of newspapers and tumbleweeds and dust and dead leaves.

He’d been to the window a half dozen times, watching the sky pale and wondering at the cool, silent morning. There was fire in the foothills, out in the San Gabriels, and the northwest horizon was sooty-black despite the rising sun. He felt weirdly enervated, as if he were light and weak, built out of Styrofoam or woven out of the ashy smoke blowing up out of the hills. With luck, he’d have got through the dishes and drained the sink before the call came. That way, when Rose looked in and found him gone, at least she’d see that he hadn’t been idle, that he hadn’t left a mess again for Mrs. Gummidge.

He was just polishing the last glass when the walkie-talkie erupted into static. Andrew pushed the talk button and said, “Yo.”

“He’s come out.” It was Pickett’s voice.

Andrew threw down the dish towel. “Is there a cab?”

“Around on your side. You can see it through the window. Don’t bother to look, though. Go out the back and around through the garden gate. I’m down on the seat. Don’t make for the car until I honk. He’ll have left. Then run like hell so we can catch him. He was carrying the bag of dimes.”

“Dimes?”

“The bag of silver dimes that was in his drawer. He’s got them.”

Andrew switched off the machine, shoved it into his coat pocket, and rummaged in the pantry for a bite of something to take along. Then, leaving the light on so that Pennyman wouldn’t see it blink off abruptly, he slipped out through the back door, leaped across Mrs. Gummidge’s weedy garden, and pushed the gate open, peering past the corner of the house at the departing taxicab. Immediately a horn honked, and there was Pickett, sitting up and gunning the engine of the Chevrolet. Andrew was off at a dead run, climbing in through the thrown-open door as Pickett sped off.

They followed him down to the Pacific Coast Highway and around onto Seal Beach Boulevard. There was little traffic, so they stayed almost two hundred yards back. Andrew tore open the top of a variety pack box of Corn Pops, shaking out a handful and eating them one at a time, cracking them like nuts with his teeth.

“What else do you have?” asked Pickett.

Andrew patted his coat. “Let’s see. Frosted Flakes and Honey Smacks.”

They crossed Westminster, Pickett driving with his left hand and shaking Honey Smacks into his mouth with his right. “Bet you ten cents I know where he’s going.”

“Of course that’s where he’s going. But what’s he up to? Is he going to dig?”

Pickett shrugged.

“Maybe we better head into Leisure World—roust Uncle Arthur. Maybe he ought to know that the game’s afoot.”

“Let’s not,” said Pickett. “Let’s just follow along. If we sidetrack now we might miss the whole business. Besides, after the other day they might be watching for us at the gate. We can’t afford trouble. Not now.”

Andrew nodded, dropping his empty carton into the sea of trash and books and jackets on the floor. The cab pulled in just then at the Leisure Market. Pickett slid past, angling up a driveway farther on and cutting the engine in front of Mrs. Chapman’s Doughnuts. “Duck,” he said.

Both of them hunkered down, and Andrew watched above the seat as Pennyman tapped his way across the lot and onto the dirt shoulder of the street, down toward the oilfields. He disappeared from sight beyond the edge of a cinderblock wall. Andrew and Pickett were out, scrambling toward the wall and peering over. Pennyman picked his way along the road, dust blown up by the wind swirling around his feet.

“Half a sec,” said Andrew, heading in after a doughnut.

“Two glazeys,” Pickett said at his back. “And leave the coffee. This might take some running.”

In minutes Andrew was back, trying to fit the edge of one of Mrs. Chapman’s puffy, angel food doughnuts into his mouth. “I got a break on a half dozen,” he said, holding out the open bag.

Pickett plucked one out. “He’s heading for the oilfield across from the steam plant, where Arthur let the turtles loose. There’s no use following him yet; he’d spot us in an instant. When he goes through the oleanders, though …”

“Right,” said Andrew, looking again over the fence. Pennyman was a good way down now, cutting across and into the field.

“There he goes,” said Pickett. “Give him to the count of ten. Now!” The two loped across the road and down, ducking around into the field and behind an oil derrick fence, then across and behind the mountain of pallets from where they’d watched Uncle Arthur launch the turtles.

Pennyman peered through the foliage into the oleanders, then bent over, ducked in, and disappeared.

Pickett thumped Andrew on the shoulder. “There he goes. Give him a moment. Let’s go!”

They were off and running again, as quietly as they could, certain that Pennyman couldn’t see them but anxious not to be heard. The wind would cover most of the noise. The oleander was dense and deep, maybe fifteen feet broad, and from three yards away it looked impenetrable. Just inside the perimeter of leafy branches, though, someone had hacked out a tunnel, and you could shove in past the outer branches and get around to the back, in against the chain-link. The oleander grew right through the links, so that over the years the old barbwire-strung fence had disappeared into the bush.

“There it is,” whispered Andrew. He could see where the fence had been cut and then hooked back together along one side with baling wire so that it was sort of hinged, the cut panel held up by oleander branches. The baling wire was clean and free of rust, very likely wound through the cut links within the last couple of months. On beyond the fence were the fields of the Naval Weapons Station, half of them up in tomatoes now, the other half fallow, waiting for autumn pumpkins. Bundled tomato stakes were the only cover in the open fields, so there was no question of their following; they’d be seen for sure. And besides, they could see Pennyman clearly, stepping through the clods of the harrowed pumpkin field. Some distance away to the west rose a cloud of dirt where a tractor cut the earth, and off to the east sat the green humps of sod-covered weapons bunkers.

Andrew could hear flies buzzing and the drone of a distant, unseen airplane. “God, it’s lonesome out here,” he whispered, polishing off a second doughnut.

Pickett was silent.

“What’s he doing, do you figure?” Andrew bit into his third Mrs. Chapman’s and knew at once that he didn’t want it. But he ate it anyway, wondering why he had such a passion for doughnuts, why he couldn’t leave them alone.

“Watch,” said Pickett.

Andrew watched, and it became clear at once what Pennyman was doing. He was sowing the field with silver dimes—handfuls of them, which he threw out in a glittering spray. Then he moved on, twenty feet farther, scattering dimes in a wide, purposeful circle that would lead him back around to the oleanders.

“What on earth? …” Andrew muttered.

“Same as the belted turtles,” Pickett said. “To attract the two coins.”

And it was just then that Pennyman found one of the turtles. They saw him bend over to pick it up, and then drop it abruptly when the thing urinated almost heroically on his pantslegs and shoes. They could hear the curse in the still air. Then he bent over again, and meddled with the creature, removing the silver belt before sowing another handful of dimes, peering closely at the ground now, alert for more turtles.

They were home by seven-thirty, after a half-dozen cups of coffee at the Potholder. The Santa Anas had kicked up, and the air was full of the rustling of tree limbs and the random banging and pounding and howling of the wind-blown seacoast. Andrew went up to visit Aunt Naomi, carrying another bowl of Weetabix and the fixings just in case. Predictably, she was sitting in front of the window again, watching the ocean over the several rooftops. Two of her cats sat with her.

Surf stormed through the pier, the wave crests licking the bottom of it and blown to foamy white by the offshore wind. The long, booming waves began to break some two hundred yards out, quartering hard in a tumble of churning ocean, re-forming quick and steep and slamming down in the shallows with a crack that must have been audible for miles. City lifeguards had cordoned off the entrance to the pier, which shuddered under the pounding surf, and every now and then a monstrous wave humped up along the horizon, drove in, and smashed straight through the pier railing, surging around the bait house and pouring off again in spindrift sheets of lacy white. The beach was almost inundated, and the tide was still rising.

Aunt Naomi’s radio murmured. The early morning earthquakes had centered in the Hollywood Hills, and there’d been damage at the zoo. Griffith Park was alive with escaped beasts—apes and peccaries that had gone to ground, some few of them escaping over the hills and into the backstreets of Chinatown. Clouds of bats had swarmed out of the canyons from previously unknown caverns and rifts, and the dry bed of the Los Angeles River had cracked like the shell of a walnut, releasing torrents of subterranean water through a dozen fissures.

“Sounds almost like the first trumpet, doesn’t it?” Andrew said, fixing up the bowl of Weetabix.

Aunt Naomi nodded. “I didn’t think I’d live to see it.” She petted one of the cats, who was looking hard at the cereal.

“Coming along to the treasure hunt tonight?”

She shook her head. “I’m too tired.”

“Maybe Dr. Garibaldi …”

“Dr. Garibaldi is off the case,” she said with a dismissing wave of her hand. “It’s cancer, I suppose, all this bleeding, and he’s too much the fool to see it.”

Andrew didn’t know what to say. Somehow he had come to like Aunt Naomi and her cats, once he’d understood what made her tick, or rather what had got in the way of her ticking. She’d become a sort of kindred spirit, what with her Weetabix enthusiasm and the joy she took in a cup of coffee. It had turned out, when he paid attention, that she wasn’t a fool after all; she no doubt understood very well what he was doing with the money she advanced him—approved of it even.

Last night, before the cafe doors opened, she had talked seriously about drinking glasses, about the differences in beer drunk out of pilsners and pint glasses and mugs, pointing out the easy to overlook virtues of paper cups. He had risked telling her about his war with the tumblers in the kitchen cupboard, and she had offered to do her part. She had been full of philosophy, and saw very clearly that all the cheerful little details of day-to-day existence, all the wonderful trifles, were, as she put it, knick-knacks of the human spirit. Andrew was almost teary-eyed now thinking about it.

“Well,” he said, “Pickett and I are going to be there, at the treasure hunt. I expect it’s going to be an adventure.”

“Probably more of an adventure than you’ll want,” said Aunt Naomi.

There was a silence. Then the radio began to chatter about a collision at sea, about a fishing boat heading in toward San Pedro, trying to beat the rising swell and colliding off the tip of Catalina Island with a vast, barnacle-encrusted whale …

Andrew puzzled over it. “Something in the wind,” he said.

“And in the ocean.” She was silent for a moment. “Why don’t you spend some time with Rose today? It’s Sunday. Take a walk. Here.” She hauled her purse out from under the night stand and fished around in it. “Have dinner somewhere nice.” She handed him four twenties and squeezed his hand, not bothering to write anything down in her book.

Darkness came early. There was hardly any dusk. The full moon rocked above the troubled ocean, throwing a silver sheen across the plowed dirt of the pumpkin field, where two or three hundred people milled about, eating late-night picnic lunches and talking in hushed voices. The apocalyptic weather had somehow leached away the carnival atmosphere that Andrew would have expected. It was almost as if the mass of people, sitting on tailgates and at suitcase tables, felt the coiled tension in the air. The occasional ringing voice of a child sounded as out of place as it would have in church, and almost made the night vibrate.

Someone had brought along oil drums full of cut-up construction lumber, which had been doused with gasoline and lit, so that here and there around the parking area little imprisoned bonfires burned, throwing shadows onto the dirt. Somehow the effect was weird, almost cataclysmic, rather than warm or cheering.

When they pulled up in the Metropolitan, Andrew felt almost as if the people ought to applaud him, as if they ought to know who he was. But they wouldn’t believe it even if they were told, and they were anxious only to dig, to find the hermetically sealed ring or the seafood dinner tickets. They’d brought spades and collapsible army shovels and clamming forks. Children carried trowels. Andrew had brought the spoon, and Pickett was empty-handed.