Thirteen Phantasms (17 page)

He fetched a lawn chair and sat down in it, very glad to take a load off his feet. He studied the plants. There was no wind, not even an occasional breeze. The heavy-bodied tomato worms would make the branches dip and sway as they came along, cutting through the still night. Wilkins would have to remain vigilant. There would be no sleep for him. He was certain that he could trust the ether bunnies to do their work, to trap the worms and propel them away into the depths of space, but it was a thing that he had to see, as an astronomer had to wait out a solar eclipse.

He was suddenly hungry again. That’s what had come of thinking about the pork chops. He was reminded of the tomato, nearly invisible down in the depths of the vines. How many people could that Better Boy feed, Wilkins wondered, and all at once it struck him that he himself was hardly worthy to eat such a tomato as this. He would find Bob Dodge, maybe, and give it to him. “Here,” he would say, surprising the old man in his booth at Norm’s. “Eat it well.” And he would hand Dodge the tomato, and Dodge would understand, and would take it from him.

He got up out of his chair and peered into the vines. The ice was still solid. The night air hadn’t started it melting yet. But the worms hadn’t come yet either. It was too soon. He found a little cluster of Early Girls, tiny things that didn’t amount to anything and weren’t quite ripe yet. Carefully, he pulled a few of them loose and then went back to his chair, sucking the insides out of one of the tomatoes as if it were a Concord grape. He threw the peel away, tasting the still-bitter fruit.

“Green,” he said out loud, surprised at the sound of his own voice and wishing he had some salt. And then, to himself, he said, “It’s nourishing, though. Vitamin C.” He felt a little like a hunter, eating his kill in the depths of a forest, or a fisherman at sea, lunching off his catch.

•

He could hear them coming. Faintly on the still air he could hear the rustle of leaves bending against vines, even, he’d swear, the munch-munch of tiny jaws grinding vegetation into nasty green pulp in the speckled moonlight. It was a steady sussuration—there must have been hundreds of them out there. Clearly the full moon and the incredible prize had drawn the creatures out in an unprecedented way. Perhaps every tomato worm in Orange County was here tonight to sate itself.

And the ice wasn’t melting fast enough. He had miscalculated.

He forced himself up out of the lawn chair and plodded across the grass to the plants. He couldn’t see them—their markings were perfect camouflage, letting them blend into the shifting patches of moonlight and shadow—but he could hear them moving in among the Early Girls.

Crouched against the vines, he blew softly on the ice blocks at the outside corners of the net. If only he could hurry them along. When they warmed up just a couple of degrees, the night air would really go to work on them. They’d melt quickly once they started. Abruptly he thought of heading into the garage for a propane torch, but he couldn’t leave the tomato alone with the worms now, not even for a moment. He kept blowing. Little rivulets of water were running down the edges of the ice. Cheered at the sight of this, he blew harder.

Dimly, he realized that he had fallen to his knees.

Maybe he had hyper-ventilated, or else had been bent over so long that blood had rushed to his head. He felt heavy, though, and he pulled at the collar of his shirt to loosen it across his chest. He heard them again, close to him now.

“The worms!” he said out loud, and he reached out and took hold of the nearest piece of string-bound ice in both hands to melt it. He didn’t let go of it even when he overbalanced and thudded heavily to the ground on his shoulder, but the ice still wasn’t melting fast enough, and his hands were getting numb and beginning to ache.

The sound of the feasting worms was a hissing in his ears that mingled with the sound of rushing blood, like two rivers of noise flowing together into one deep stream. The air seemed to have turned cold, chilling the sweat running down his forehead. His heart was pounding in his chest like a pickaxe chopping hard into dirt.

He struggled up onto his hands and knees and lunged his way toward the Better Boy.

He could see them.

One of the worms was halfway up the narrow trunk, and two more were noodling in along the vines from the side. A cramp in his chest helped him to lean in closer, although he gasped at the pain and clutched at his shirt pocket. Now he could not see anything human or even mammalian in the faces of the worms, any more than he had been able to see the driver of the hit-and-run Torino behind the sun-glare on the windshield.

He made his hand stretch out and take hold of one of the worms. It held on to the vine until he really tugged, and then after tearing loose it curled in a muscular way in his palm before he could fling it away. In his fright and revulsion he grabbed the next one too hard, and it burst in his fist-somehow, horribly, still squirming against his fingers even after its insides had jetted out and greased Wilkins’ thumb.

He spared a glance toward the nearest chunk of ice, but he couldn’t see it; perhaps they were melting at last.

Just a little longer,
he told himself, his breath coming quick and shallow. His hands were numb, but he seized everything that might have been a worm and threw it behind him. He was panting loud enough to drown out the racket of the feasting worms, and the sweat stung in his eyes, but he didn’t let himself stop.

•

His left arm exploded in pain when he took hold of another one of the creatures, and he half believed the thing had somehow struck back at him, and then at that moment his chest was crushed between the earth and the sky.

He tried to stand, but toppled over backward.

Against the enormous weight he managed to lift his head—and he was smiling when he let it fall back onto the grass, for he was sure he had seen the edges of the nets fluttering upward as the ether bunnies, freed at last from the ice, struggled to take hold of the fabric of space—struggled inadequately, he had to concede, against the weight of the nets and the plants and the worms and the sky, but bravely nevertheless, keeping on tugging until it was obvious that their best efforts weren’t enough, and then keeping on tugging even after that.

•

He didn’t lose consciousness. He was simply unable to move. But the chill had gone away and the warm air had taken its place, and he was content to lie on the grass and stare up at the stars and listen to his heart.

He knew that it had probably been a heart attack that had happened to him—but he had heard of people mistaking for a heart attack what had merely been a seizure from too much caffeine. It might have been the big mug of coffee. He’d have to cut down on that stuff. Thinking of the coffee made him think of Molly asleep upstairs. He was glad that she didn’t know he was down here, lying all alone on the dewy grass.

In and out with the summer night air. Breathing was the thing. He focused on it. Nothing else mattered to him. If you could still breathe you were all right, and he felt like he could do it forever.

•

When the top leaves of his neighbor’s olive tree lit gold with the dawn sun he found that he could move. He sat up slowly, carefully, but nothing bad happened. The morning breeze was pleasantly cool, and crows were calling to each other across the rooftops.

He parted the vines and looked into the shadowy depths of the tomato plants.

The Better Boy was gone. All that was left of it was a long shred of orange skin dangling like a deflated balloon from its now foolish-looking stout stem. The ether bunnies, perhaps warped out of the effective shape by the night of strain, lay inert along the edges of the nets, which were soiled with garden dirt now and with a couple of crushed worms and a scattering of avocado leaves.

He was all alone in the yard—Molly wouldn’t wake up for an hour yet—so he let himself cry as he sat there on the grass. The sobs shook him like hiccups, and tears ran down his face as the sweat had done hours earlier, and the tears made dark spots on the lap of his dinner pants.

Then he got up onto his feet and, still moving carefully because he felt so frail and weak, walked around to the front of the house.

•

The newspaper lay on the driveway. He nearly picked it up, thinking to take a look at the sports page. He had been so busy yesterday evening that he had missed the tail end of the ballgame. Perhaps the Angels had slugged their way into first place. They had been on a streak, and Wilkins wanted to think that their luck had held.

He turned and went into the silent house. He didn’t want to make coffee, so he just walked slowly from room to room, noticing things, paying attention to trifles, from the bright morning sun shining straight in horizontally through the windows to the familiar titles of books on shelves.

He felt a remote surprise at seeing his inventor’s pants on the top of the dirty clothes in the hamper in the bathroom, and he picked them up.

No wonder it had been late when Molly had finally turned out the bedroom light. She had sewn up or patched every one of the outrageous tears and lesions in the old pants, and now clearly intended to wash them. Impulsively he wanted to put them on right then and there … but he wouldn’t. He would let Molly have her way with them, let her return the pants in her own good time. He would wear them again tomorrow, or the day after.

There was still a subtle magic in the morning.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Samoa.

He let the pants fall back onto the pile, and then he walked slowly, carefully, into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He would make breakfast for her.

There has been a good deal of dark weather here lately, although I’m not at all sure whether it is actual dark weather or simply the absence of something or other. I sometimes suspect the latter. But it is dark. Clouds overhead thick enough to be invisible. Just a dim gray and a mist of fog floating over the bay and now and then stealing ashore.

There was moss or perhaps fungus on my shoes again this morning. It appeared to be a moist gray-green fuzz but brushed away like dust. It means, I suppose, that the colors are fading—a thing I have long suspected. Away to the north beyond the tower is what appears to be, is in fact, a market. An arabesque of letters, part gone, shines in bright neon pink like a mythological flamingo that glows through the gray days, an impossible swamp bird that can stand all day on a single leg. The sign itself is inane but throws that roseate glow over the stilt legs of the tower—a water tower, they say, which sprang up in two evenings, three great legs with a cone atop, and has sat there since, for the most part, with dandelions and fuchsias sprouting about the base.

And leering beyond, half hidden behind a fence once red but now gray and dark and falling, day by day, to bits, squats an elongated metal sphere, toadlike in the weeds. Little windows hung with the tatters of curtains and neat rows of rivets in the steel skin make it appear terrestrial. But a quaint sign—a puff of wind below altogether alien lowercase letters which spell out the word “airstream” in frightful clarity—makes it appear something else altogether. The implications startled me at first—they should startle anyone—and I was curious that no passersby on the sidewalk below were similarly startled.

There was a time, in fact (not a long time to be sure; I’m a clever sort of chap), that the thing in the weeds seemed nothing but a tow-along home which, when attached to the rear of an automobile, would pursue it along the highway. But the thing appeared one evening sailing bubblelike—I glimpsed it passing across the mouth of an alley on Second Street—with nothing resembling an automobile attached to either end. I’ll condescend to swear to it. A swirl of fog from the bay, wet with the smell of seaweed and tar, whirled along in its wake as if the thing itself were a leaking container of mists from some vast and lonely sea.

And speaking of weather, it occurs to me, when I recall my youth, that coupling sunshine and childhood in our minds is not, as the psychologists tell us, a symbolic confusion of objects and ideas about objects in our subconscious. It is actuality itself. The weather was more pronounced then, rain or shine, it hadn’t this gray mediocrity about it.

I’ve heard and read, and it doesn’t surprise me a bit, that the armadillos have turned back. After eons of slow northward creeping from the plains of Central America, through the jungles and swamps and deserts of Mexico while woolly mammoths and cave bears crashed through the chaparral and still, ages later, while Aztec and Toltec tribes lived in fear of loathsome toad-infested pits of skeletons in rainwater, on came the armadillos. On the march for twenty million years and culminating in unimaginable pairs of shoes and ridiculous scaled and tailed caps. All of that has reversed in an instant. Up and down the flatlands of Oklahoma, say the scientists, armadillos pause and listen and sniff the air and turn calmly about—on the march, south now, once again.

But as I say, it surprises me not at all. I read about it in a journal of scientific discovery and it fit, and fit well, like a pair of shoes. My own shoes—simulated alligator—could barely be seen this morning for the moss on them. They appeared amphibian. Anyway, I hadn’t gotten beyond the first paragraph—the armadillos having barely conceived of the plan for the tremendous northern push into, over eons, civilization—when there came a knock at the door.