The Paper Grail (10 page)

Uncle Roy opened the refrigerator door and bent over to haul something out—a pickle bottle full of severed fingers, maybe. “Mechanics. Leave it at that. What did you study in school?”

“Art history, mostly. Some literature.”

“Both worthless. Can’t earn a living with them. Don’t know anything about magnetism, do you? ‘The country that controls magnetism controls the earth.’ Who said that?”

Howard shook his head again. “I don’t know.”

“Diet Smith. I thought you read literature. Sandwich?”

“No, actually. Thanks, anyway, but I just ate breakfast.”

“Not down at the Jersey Deli?”

“No, someplace down at the harbor. Captain somebody.”

“That would be the Cap’n England. Owner’s a pal of mine. Not a bad breakfast. Skip the Jersey Deli, though. It’s last year’s grease. I got a spoiled egg in there once that nearly killed me. Location’s bad, too. They’ll be out of business inside the year, just like the last nine jackasses that opened up there. Anyone can see it. Location is paramount.” Uncle Roy slathered mayonnaise on two slices of white bread and heaped on six or eight layers of packaged cold cuts. “Pickle?” he asked, unscrewing the lid from a jar full of kosher dills.

Somehow the eyeballs were too fresh in Howard’s mind. “No thanks. You go to town, though. Do it justice.”

“It’s early for lunch, but my life doesn’t run according to schedule, if you know what I mean. No liquor before four, though. Can’t have your vices wear you down. They’ve got to be harnessed, controlled. ‘Every excess carries within it the seed of its own decay.’ Sigmund Freud said that, when he was sober. The rest of what he said was dope talking. Have you read psychology?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“Good man.” He walked back out into the living room and sat down heavily in a chair, sighing deeply, as if he’d been at it since dawn and was only now getting a rest. His jacket, which years ago might have fit him, was too tight now—a shabby tweed coat bunched tight under his arms and with the buttons in opposite hemispheres. He wore baggy cotton trousers with it and a pair of scuffed penny loafers that actually had pennies wedged in under the leather bands. He worked at his sandwich in silence.

“Hey,” Howard said, suddenly remembering. “I ran into another friend of yours down in Albion. Wait a sec.” He went out the door, hurrying to the truck. Uncle Roy’s talk of being sober had reminded him of the beer, which he had iced up down at the laundromat. He pulled the six-pack out of the cooler, locked the camper door, and went back in. “It’s a gift from Cal, at the Albion grocery. He said to tell you to stop in sometime.”

“That old horse thief,” Uncle Roy said, jiggling with laughter. “He used to tell the damned stupidest jokes.” After a moment’s thinking he said, “What do they get when they cross an ape and a mink?”

Howard shook his head.

“A hell of a coat, but the sleeves are too long.” Uncle Roy laughed twice, slapping his knee hard. Then he cut it off, nearly choking on his sandwich. “Beer?” he asked, yanking a Coors out of the six-pack. He pulled the pop top and took a long swallow.

“No thanks,” Howard said. “I’m full of coffee and pancakes.”

“Normally I don’t drink before four, like I said. But I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, either. There’s bad luck in that.”

Howard acknowledged that there was. His uncle finished the first beer, bent the can in half with his hands, then stomped it flat on the rug and opened a second can.

“It
has
been a while,” he said finally, smoothing his hair down, although it was already straight and smooth and combed flat across the crown of his head, where the hair was thin. Getting
fat had given his face a jolly and genial man-in-the-moon look, which was perfect for him.

Howard nodded. “Nearly fifteen years.”

“That long? No! Really? I always wondered about you and Sylvia. Did something happen there? Is that what’s kept you away?”

“No, nothing, really.” He blushed despite himself. He was talking to Sylvia’s father, after all, and his own uncle to boot. It didn’t matter what he told himself about Sylvia, the truth had a way of making itself known. “You know how that is,” he said. “Four or five hundred miles might as well be a million. You write, you quit writing. There’s no excuse for it really, and no reason, either.” He gestured uneasily.

Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith had come to live in Los Angeles after Howard’s father died. Howard and Sylvia had been toddlers then, and for the next eighteen years had been down-the-street neighbors. Then his uncle and aunt had moved north to Fort Bragg, where life was less expensive and where, his uncle had been fond of saying, a man could carve his niche. Uncle Roy had done that, in his way, although it was a strangely shaped niche.

“What about all of you?” Howard asked. “How’s Aunt Edie?”

“She’s well.” Uncle Roy jerked his thumb toward the door. “She’s downtown, doing the grocery shopping. Damn crust,” he said, dangling the edge of his sandwich over his plate. He pulled the two strips of crust apart and liberated a bit of lunch meat still glued to the mayonnaise, then stepped across to the front door, opened it, and threw the remains out onto the lawn. “Squirrels,” he said. “They love a crust.”

Almost at once the door opened again and Aunt Edith stood there, looking in uncertainly past a cardboard carton full of groceries. “Was that you throwing something out onto the lawn?” she asked.

Uncle Roy winked at Howard. “The boy did it,” he said, jamming the crushed beer can under his chair cushion and nodding at the half-drunk beer, then winking at Howard. Howard caught on and picked it up just as Aunt Edith pulled the door shut, looking bright-eyed at him. Surreptitiously Uncle Roy shoved the six-pack across the floor with his foot so that it sat next to Howard’s chair, and at the same time he took the carton out of his wife’s arms so that she could rush at Howard and hug him. “Look at you!” she said, thrusting Howard away and standing back in order to do just that. He set the beer down.

“You’re a long, tall drink of water, aren’t you? How tall?”

“Six three,” Howard said.

“I can remember when you were like this.” She held her hand out, waist-high, and shook her head. “You should put on a little weight, though. You were always thin.”

“If you ate my cooking you’d be thin, too,” Howard said.

Uncle Roy went into the kitchen and laid the box of groceries down on a Formica table. Then, dutifully, he set about putting things away.

“There’s more in the car,” she said to him, giving Howard another quick hug. “We’re letting Howard cook, Roy. Maybe he can thin us both down.”

“Let me get the stuff in the car,” Howard said, wanting to help. He went out into the front yard again, past where the crusts lay in the weeds now, and found the family station wagon in the driveway. There were two more cartons of groceries in the back, and he set one of them awkwardly on top of the other.

He noticed several books of food stamps slid down along the side of the carton, next to a loaf of bread. So that’s how it is, he thought sadly. He was doubly determined to help out somehow, to solicit Uncle Roy’s help in getting the sketch away from Mr. Jimmers. He would broach the subject that very afternoon. He picked up the boxes, balanced them with one arm, and slammed the cargo door of the wagon, then carried the boxes into the house. Aunt Edith was just then hurrying out the back door, carrying a sandwich on a plate. Howard was certain that she had shut the door quickly, as if in order to hide something.

Uncle Roy put away the lunch meat and bread and mayonnaise, mopped up the counter with a tea towel, and hung the towel back up from a peg on the wall. “I like to help out in the kitchen,” he said. “Some men don’t like that kind of work, but I don’t mind. Any work is good work, that’s the byword around here. We’ll get help in when things click for me.” He began uncrating more groceries, half pulling out the loaf of bread and then dropping it back down into the box. “What’s that?” he asked suddenly, peering out the window.

Howard looked out, expecting to see something going on with Aunt Edith. She was gone, though, perhaps out of sight around the side of the house. There was nothing out the window but fir trees, the forest floor overgrown with berries and lemonleaf and poison oak. The pointed leaves of wild iris grew in clumps along the edge of the trees beside a little path that ran out into the woods. For a moment Howard thought he could see his aunt’s red
jacket moving along the path, some distance through the trees. He couldn’t be sure, though.

When he turned back around, Uncle Roy was putting away the bread. The leftover food stamps were gone from the box. One of them, in fact, protruded from where it had been shoved into his uncle’s coat pocket. Howard glanced away, turning on the water in the sink as if he wanted to wash his hands, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Uncle Roy push it down farther into the pocket and then hurriedly shove the balance of the stamps into a kitchen drawer and shut it. “Just dry them on the dish towel.”

Howard nodded, pulling the towel from its peg. They talked for a time, Howard telling him about his trip north, omitting any mention of the past twenty-four hours. There was no use sounding like a paranoid nut. Uncle Roy listened, nodding his head. He took the towel and began swabbing down cupboards and mopping up spots from the floor. Then, abruptly, he shot a glance out toward the front window, as if he’d just then seen something wonderful or puzzling out there. Howard followed his gaze, not able to help himself even though he suspected he was being hoodwinked again. Uncle Roy headed into the living room, gesturing at Howard, indicating that Howard should follow him along to the door. When he opened it, though, nobody was there. There hadn’t been any knock; Howard was certain of it.

“Must have been the wind,” Uncle Roy said, and at that moment, as if to prove him right, there was the sound of a door slamming—the same that Howard had heard when he first arrived.

“Toolshed door.” Uncle Roy stepped outside and down the front-porch steps, continuing around past the side of the house, past the abandoned scaffolding. Tilted against the back side of the garage was a lean-to shed with a plywood door, which wobbled open in the sea wind. It hung there for a moment, as if deciding something, and then banged shut. “Damned latch,” Uncle Roy said, shoving the hasp shut and driving a pointed stick down through it to keep it tight. “This is my current project.” He waved at an immense pile of old weathered lumber, full of nails, as if it had all been pried off the side of dilapidated houses. “Barn lumber. There’s a fortune to be made in it if a man’s got any gumption. Gumption’s the thing, you see, out here. This is like the frontier.”

“What do you do with it?” Howard asked.

“Clean it up. Sell it. Yuppies buy it for twice the price of new lumber in order to make new houses look old. It’s all fakery,
of course. The only people they fool are each other. Still, it’s good wood. They did a study—concluded that hundred-year-old redwood planks, pulled off a house roof, hadn’t lost more than two percent tensile strength.”

“Really?” Howard reached down and pulled up the end of one of the boards. A grisly-looking spider darted out, scampering away into the weeds as the board slammed down again. “Beats bulldozing the stuff, doesn’t it?”

“That’s it,” said Uncle Roy. “Conservation is what it is.

Recycling. Pull out the nails, trim the ends, stack it up, and wait for the trucks to roll in. I’m just now getting started on it. My back’s been acting up, though, and I’ve had to take it easy.”

Howard looked at the old dry Bermuda grass, curling up through the heaped wood. Clearly no one had touched it for months, perhaps years. “Maybe I can help you with it. I can pull nails and trim ends easy enough. I’d like to do that.”

Uncle Roy hesitated, thinking it through, as if he had talked too much and gotten in too deep. “We’ll buy another six-pack and draw up plans,” he said, winking. “Tonight. After four.”

A telephone rang. “Roy!” came a shout from the kitchen.

“That’s Edith. Come on.” He hurried past the garage, up onto the back stoop, and into the service porch. There was an old washer and dryer there, vintage twenty years ago, and one of those fold-up doweled-together wooden clotheslines with underwear hanging on it. A door led into the kitchen, where Aunt Edith was just then hanging up the phone.

“What?” said Uncle Roy. “Who was it?”

“Syl.”

“Why did you shout? Did she want to talk to me?”

“No. She might have, though. I wanted you to be ready at hand.”

“What did she want? Is she all right?”

“Heavens, yes, she’s all right. Why shouldn’t she be all right?”

“Then why on earth did she call? We were just discussing the issue of the barn lumber. Howard’s got an idea for selling it down south. That’s where the housing market is. We were just starting in on it”

“Dressed like that? Howard’s just arrived. Don’t make him work until he’s had a chance to sit down for a moment. That wood’s been lying there since who knows when. Let it be until after lunch, anyway. Give the boy a breather. Sylvia’s coming
for lunch. She’s upset about something, I think.”

Aunt Edith went on about Sylvia, for a few minutes, about the store and her making things to sell in it. They were dependent on the tourist trade in Mendocino. It was easy for a shop to founder and sink. You got around it by diversifying. Tourists loved a trinket, and they were certain that the north coast was a haven of creativity. They didn’t want a shirt that they could buy in a mall down south. They wanted whales and wool and driftwood and natural foods.

“That’s her now,” Uncle Roy said. There was the sound of an engine cutting off out on the street.

Edith nodded. “She called from right down at the Safeway. She’s picked up some salmon for dinner tonight, in honor of Howard being here. I told her—”

“Good,” said Uncle Roy, interrupting her. “It’s time we had something high-toned for dinner. I’ll cook it up myself. A little dill weed, a little white wine. Have we got any wine?”

“No,” Edith said.

“We’ll remedy that. Always cook with the wine you intend to drink,” he told Howard seriously.