The Paper Grail (43 page)

“You two shouldn’t fret,” Uncle Roy said to Sylvia. “Let me worry about it. Lou here wanted to beat them to a pulp right out here on the lawn. They got Mrs. Deventer this evening, coming back down from Willits.”

“What?” Howard asked, shocked. Somehow he hadn’t anticipated anything like that.

“What do you mean?” Sylvia said. “Is she …?”

“No, she’s not dead. Dead drunk, actually. That’s what saved
her. Crash tossed her around the floorboards like a rag doll. If she’d have been sober, and tensed up, there’s no telling what would have happened. They took her up to the hospital and set her arm and then drove her back down to her house not a half hour before you called.”

“How do you know it was them?” Howard asked.

“Someone loosened the lug nuts on the right front wheel,” Bennet said. “Must have done it while she was in at her sister’s, up in Willits. Road up that way is nothing but curves.” He ran his hand through his hair and then shook his head darkly. “I put new pads on the brakes a week ago, and I tightened them lugs down. I know I did. Now the blame falls to me. I’d be in it deep if she was hurt bad. They towed the car back down to her house.”

“There was trouble over at your place tonight, too,” Howard said to Bennet. “They kicked your flower beds apart and tried to break down the Humpty Dumpty. I did what I could to Stop it.”

“The creeps,” Uncle Roy said, heading for the station wagon. “Let’s get over there.”

Bennet shrugged. “Not much lost if all they did was kick wooden flowers around. Nothing that can’t be patched up.”

“If you boys don’t need me,” Lou Gibb said, “I’m out of here. I got three or four hours’ work left.”

“Take some of this dough, damn it,” Uncle Roy said to him, turning around and pulling out the money again. “Enough to pay for that Sunberry whiskey, anyway.”

Gibb hesitated, then took what Uncle Roy offered him, shoving it down into his pocket. “Give the rest to Mrs. Deventer, though.”

“Sure I will.” Uncle Roy nodded a goodbye to him as Gibb climbed into his own car and started it up. “Hell of a good man, isn’t he?” Roy asked. They watched Gibb pull away from the curb. “There was a book I read once: one guy kept asking people what was the most surprising thing—that people could treat each other so good or so damned nasty. I think about that a lot. Then I run into people like Gibb, or Mrs. Moynihan here, and I see that they treat people square and friendly and it doesn’t take any kind of effort at all. It’s like breathing to them. Nothing to it. What does that mean?”

“That some of us have a long way to go,” Howard said, yawning. “It doesn’t answer your man’s question, though.”

“I guess not,” Uncle Roy said. “Let’s roll.” He and Bennet climbed into Roy’s station wagon and drove off up Pine, swinging around toward Main.

Howard and Sylvia followed in Sylvia’s car. It was midnight, and the streets and houses were dark. Trees swayed in the sea wind, and there was a winter chill in the air that made Howard think of the three men who would very shortly be walking home up the Coast Highway in their fashionable sweaters and shoes. For a moment he half hoped that they’d catch a ride with some late-night traveler, but then he thought of Mrs. Deventer and her smashed-up Pontiac and the moment passed. Before they’d driven the four or five blocks to Bennet’s house Howard was asleep.

The sound of a car door slamming woke him up, but he decided not to get out. There hadn’t been all that much damage done, except to the whirligig cow. The others could deal with it. Howard felt as if he hadn’t gotten any sleep in about six weeks. Tomorrow morning—this morning, that is—he would sleep till noon. He watched groggily as they moved around on the lawn. Uncle Roy was fired up, letting loose the energy now that he’d kept bottled up back at Mrs. Moynihan’s house. Howard heard him shout something, and then saw him stride toward the street, in the direction of Mrs. Lamey’s. Sylvia and Bennet chased him down, pushing him back toward the station wagon, but he broke away from them and hurried across to pound on her door.

Wearily Howard tried to climb out of the car. His knee joint felt packed with sand, and his leg was so stiff that he had to pick it up with his hands in order to shift it. It wouldn’t do for Uncle Roy to start harassing Mrs. Lamey at midnight. There were probably laws to protect landlords from wild tenants. He stood up in the weedy gutter, nearly falling down, and hung on to the car roof for support. He pulled the cane out and leaned on it. At once he felt lighter, and some of the pain and stiffness seemed to leak away into the vegetation beneath his feet.

Uncle Roy beat on Mrs. Lamey’s door again, kicking it finally with the toe of his boot. “Wake the hell up, you old pig!” he shouted, cupping his hands and yelling toward the second story. The banging reverberated through the darkness. Sylvia and Bennet both pulled him away again, but it was like trying to shift a piano. Uncle Roy leaned past Sylvia and kicked furiously at the already broken front window. What was left of the pane shattered to pieces, tinkling to the floor inside.

“I know that’s you, Roy Barton!” Mrs. Lamey’s voice called down from upstairs. Howard could see her face outlined in the dark, half-open window. “The whole street knows it’s you! I’ll have you jailed for assault!”

“Try me!” Uncle Roy shouted back. “Come down here and I’ll shove your damned rent money down your throat!” Wrenching furiously loose again, he picked up the bowl still half full of fish blood and splashed it over the front door as if to mark the house in some grisly, Old Testament manner. He allowed himself to be pulled away toward the street then, still cursing, as Mrs. Lamey slammed the upstairs window. Lights blinked on then.

“She’s calling the cops,” Bennet said.

Uncle Roy breathed hard, nearly flattened by the exertion. “Shit” he said, hauling the wad of bills out of his pocket again. “Ditch this in your house.”

“Sit down somewhere,” Sylvia said to Howard when she saw him limping across toward them.

Bennet nodded at him. “Come up on my porch and sit in the rocker.”

The four of them stepped onto Bennet’s lawn, and it was then that Howard saw that the Humpty Dumpty had been wrecked. It lay crazily in the flower bed, smashing down wooden tulips. Someone had pried its arms and legs off and thrown them here and there around the yard, and its spring mechanism had been wrenched back and forth until it hung from half-torn-out screws, twisted and bent. The plywood head and body of the thing were cracked in half, and long splinters of fragmented plywood had torn away so that the painted face was mostly obliterated by what looked like jagged, grass-blade shadows.

“It’s a wreck,” Bennet said. “There’s no fixing it, not busted in half like that.”

“Dirty, rotten sons of bitches … Did you see them do this, Howard?” Uncle Roy looked at him, not angrily now, but as if suddenly worried.

“Not this, no. They kicked the flowers around a little when I was here. That’s all. I broke it up and then sneaked back into Mrs. Lamey’s house and blew up her clothes dryer.”

“Did you!” Uncle Roy said, as if hearing good news at last. “Why?”

“Well, they’d stolen Graham’s cane, and I decided to get it back. So I blew up the dryer and when they all ran downstairs, I went up and got it. Then they chased me down to Mrs. Moynihan’s.”

“You were here, though, for some of this?” Uncle Roy gestured at the lawn.

“At first, yes.”

“How about the old lady? Was Mrs. Lamey out here, too, raising hell?”

“No,” Howard said. “She stayed home.”

“Of course she did. When you were gone she and whoever was left over came back out here and finished the job.” Uncle Roy stood thinking for a moment. “Sylvia,” he said, “get Howard out of here. Quick. We’ll handle this. If Howard sticks around, she’ll finger him, too—say she saw him with the other hooligans out breaking up Bennet’s stuff. She’ll get us all if we don’t look sharp. We’ll skin through, though, as long as that damned Stoat doesn’t make it back down the hill while the cops are here.” He thought for a moment, squinting his eyes. “Yes, that’s it. You and Howard vamoose. Get home and put Howard to bed. He’s earned his pay.”

Bennet stepped back out of the house just then. “Coffee’s on,” he said.

“Did you ditch the money?” Uncle Roy asked him.

“Under the floor.”

“Get four hundred back out, will you?”

“
Now
you tell me,” Bennet said. “You aren’t going to give me change, are you?”

Uncle Roy shook his head. “There isn’t going to be any change.” He waved decisively at Howard and Sylvia, gesturing toward the road. “Get going,” he said.

Howard climbed gratefully back into Sylvia’s Toyota, and together they drove down to Main Street and swung left toward the highway, cruising past Sylvia’s darkened store. In his mind he didn’t want to abandon his uncle. The rest of him, though—his muscles and joints and bones—was happy to. Anyway, Uncle Roy was good at this sort of thing. Howard couldn’t teach him any tricks. And there was no doubt at all that Mrs. Lamey
would
implicate Howard in something if she had half a chance to—the clothes dryer atrocity at the very least. She had invited him over with the most friendly and hospitable intentions, and he had blown her service porch up with a homemade bomb …

“Go to sleep,” Sylvia said. “He’ll be all right. Here.” She pulled a parka out of the back and handed it to him, and he stuffed it against the seat and door as a pillow, settling himself against it. “What the heck happened to your neck?” She touched him on the spot where Ms. Bundy had raked him with her fingernails, and he winced at the raw streak of pain.

“I had a little fracas with another woman tonight,” he said sleepily.

“Another woman?”

“I’m afraid so. She was a feisty one, too.”

“
Another
woman?” Who’s the first one? You can’t have another one without having one to start with.”

She was being playful, but Howard was too tired to carry on in that vein. “Maybe you are,” he said, watching her face out of half-shut eyes.

She smirked at him, as if to say that she knew he was being silly, as usual. At least she hadn’t denied it. But was she being agreeable or putting him off? This was no time to work through it. She looked worried and doubtful and tired, Howard realized. She was single-handedly keeping the whole family afloat, working overtime to sell her strange wares to the Mrs. Moynihans of the world and trying to save Howard and Uncle Roy from themselves with what little time she had left over.

“You’re a brick,” he said to her. “Will you help me break into Jimmers’ place tomorrow afternoon?”

“Enough!” she said. “Give it a rest.”

“No time for that now. The merry-go-round’s spinning too fast. We can’t crawl off anymore.” She sighed, shrugging her shoulders as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything. Howard squeezed her arm again. “He
will
be all right, you know. It would be better for you to believe it.” She cast him a little smile and then winked, as if recalling just what sort of a man her father was.

Up on the highway they passed a patrol car turning down onto Lansing Street.

T
HE
whine of the power saw woke him next morning. It was eleven o’clock, and sunlight streamed through the window. Uncle Roy hadn’t spent the night in jail, then. Howard had slept dreamlessly through the night and morning, and he could easily turn over now and drift off again.

There was too much to do, though. He bent his lame knee, and it was stiff and sore, although far better than it had been last night. He wrapped the bandage around it again, then grabbed the cane and hobbled to the window. Uncle Roy was bent over the saw, cutting up the rest of the lumber. He tossed a couple of pieces of scrap into the weeds and laid a clean piece on the pile, then stopped to drink from a coffee mug.

Fueled by the idea of coffee, Howard dressed and went out into the kitchen, taking the cane with him. He was determined
not to let it out of his sight again, although he didn’t know quite why. His knee loosened up when he moved, and he felt like the Tin Man, creaking back to life after rusting stiff in the rain.

Aunt Edith appeared, carrying a feather duster. She had the look on her face of someone longing for past, simpler times. “Good morning,” she said. “Coffee’s probably cold by now.”

“Hot enough,” Howard said, pouring milk and sugar into the cup she handed him. She was looking steadily at him, as if taking his measure. He wondered what she knew about yesterday’s shenanigans, and suddenly he felt as if he were twelve or thirteen and had been caught throwing eggs at houses. “Uncle Roy all right?”

“He’ll always be all right. He doesn’t know how to doubt himself. He just rides along on his enthusiasms.”

“He got home late last night.”

“After two. He said that Bennet and him closed down the Tip Top Lounge, but he hadn’t been drinking.”

“No,” Howard said. “It wasn’t that. There was a little bit of trouble down in Mendocino, and he bailed me out.”

“I know what kind of trouble, or can imagine it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes, pinning it up so that half of it fell back down again. There was no hint of a smile on her face. “He’s one of the lilies of the field,” she said. “He’s blessed, I think. I’m worried about you, though. You haven’t been here a week, and you’re in trouble. I can feel it. It’s deep, too. I know it’s nothing of your doing. It was waiting for you up here, in the weather. You drove into it like a boat into a storm. You could probably leave—sail right back out of it.”

Howard was silenced by the abrupt finality of this last statement. He knew she wasn’t being rude, that she wasn’t ordering him out of the house.

“Talk Sylvia into going back down south with you. This is no place for her. She could make a go of it down there. I’ve thought about it, and if she opened a little store, in one of those big malls, there’s nothing she couldn’t accomplish. She could establish a chain of them. I was reading about someone who did that, a woman who sold cookies and made her fortune at it. It’s too small for her up here. She hasn’t got a chance. She’s staying for us. We’d get by, though.”

“Maybe she thinks you’re worth staying for.”