In For a Penny Read online

  “Hey,” Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.

  “Wow,” she said. “That was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony.”

  “Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum.”

  “I think feathers,” Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.

  . . .

  For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the meaning of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of … other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessed—ghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.

  During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn’t guessed. The information had come from outside of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.

  He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn’t been there, but she’d heard him come up with Anthony’s name out of the blue.

  He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn’t answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina’s room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.

  “Five of spades,” he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from Jeopardy! start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.

  “Read me one,” Nina whispered, pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.

  “You already had a story,” Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. “This is a good collection,” he said.

  “It’s only one. Mom says one’s not a collection.”

  “Maybe we should go feather collecting.”

  “Do you know where?” she asked.

  But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind’s eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the road—the angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows. …

  Something struck him then, something he hadn’t thought of before.

  “Do I know where what?” he asked, finally reacting to Nina’s question.

  “Where there’s feathers?”

  “Sure. I know a place. We’ll go looking.” He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching Jeopardy! He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren’t up his alley. “Listen to this,” he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. “The two incidents aren’t the same thing.”

  “Okay,” she said, her eyes on the television screen.

  “With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the same time.”

  “I still say it’s coincidence.”

  “That’s all right. It might be. But listen to what I’m telling you. With the possum it was different. I predicted the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared.”

  “I do see the difference. I don’t know what it means, but I see what you’re saying. The possum is kind of … psychic.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Actually they’re both kind of psychic, aren’t they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence.”

  “I don’t know what I think. What’s the Santa Maria?”

  “What?” he asked, utterly baffled by this.

  “The name of Columbus’s ship,” she said. “Explorers for six hundred.”

  “Oh.” He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. “You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make two weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence.”

  “The Final Jeopardy subject is British History,” Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.

  “Oliver Cromwell,” Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn’t guessed. He hadn’t had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. “That’s it again,” he said. “At least I think it is.” Instantly he had come to doubt himself. Was this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?

  There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: “This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and …”

  Art didn’t hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. “Now you’re giving me the creeps,” she said.

  . . .

  On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn’t make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn’t speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight o’clock he shouted “Jimmy Carter!” but it was the Fireman’s Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.

  “I guess it’s not working as good as it was,” Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.

  . . .

  On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod’s Liquors and bought five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina’s birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.

  On the way home, he stopped at the used bookstore where he found something promising: a book called A Field Guide to the Paranormal. He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.

  “You’re interested in the paranormal?” Bob asked him, taking his money.

  “Yeah,” Art confessed. “I find it kind of fascinating.”

  “My sister’s a psychic. She has a sort of organization.”

  “Really? What do you think about it,” Art asked. “Just out of curiosity.” He realized that he wanted very badly to tell someone about his experiences, and it dawned on him that he was more than a little bit proud of himself. He wasn’t the same man today that he had been last week.

  “I’ve got no problem with it. There’s a guy at Krystal’s meetings that bends spoons. That and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve seen it. How about you?”

  “Yeah, I’m a believer. A couple of things happened to me recently …” He realized that he couldn’t think of any way to relate the possum story or the phone calls in such a way as to give them the punch they deserved, and he wished that something more grand had happened to him, like predicting an earthquake or a train wreck. “What kind of things?”

  “Oh, you know, knowing in advance who’s calling on the phone, that kind of thing. And I nailed a Jeopardy! answer before the question was asked.”

  “You mean you got the question before the answer.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant. It was Oliver Cromwell.”

  “Cromwell? The host? I thought it was that other guy.”

  “It is that other guy. I meant the answer was Oliver Cromwell.”

  “I got Oliver Hardy once,” Bob told him, counting out change. “The category was silent films, I think. Or maybe it was comedians. Either way.” The transact
ion, just like the conversation, had run its course.

  “Sure,” Art said. “I guess so. Look, what’s this thing with your sister? She has meetings or something?”

  “Thursday nights, at her house. It’s a kind of support group, you know?”

  “Psychics need a support group?”

  “Hell, everyone needs a support group these days.”

  “And her name’s really Crystal?”

  “With a K,” Bob said. He wrote his sister’s name and number on the back of the sales receipt and handed it to Art, who slipped it into his wallet. When he got home he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the living room and thumbed through the book, but it turned out to be volume one of a set, mostly concerned with spontaneous human combustion and the aura phenomenon, neither of which, apparently, applied to his own situation.

  He had the house to himself, and he decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet to meditate in order to foster psychic suggestion. As he sat there with his eyes shut, his thoughts spun idly, and he began to develop the notion that unwittingly he had managed to access a particular grotto inside his mind, a place where the subconscious depths lay like a hidden pool, where he might swim if only he could find it in the darkness. He pictured the pool itself, illuminated by moonlight, and he wandered toward it along shadowed corridors….

  . . .

  He awoke to find that Beth and Nina had gotten home from lunch. Nina had a nondescript gray feather to show him, probably from a pigeon. The thought came to him that he had wasted the entire morning chasing after psychic phantoms. It had been three days since Anthony Collier and Oliver Cromwell and the disappearing possum. Perhaps he had sailed temporarily into some sort of whimsical psychic breeze, which he would never again pick up no matter how much sail he loaded onto the masts.

  The thought was disheartening, and he realized that the experiences of Thursday night were … special in some way. That they somehow made him special. They showed beyond all doubt that … He tried to grasp what it was they showed, exactly. They showed … that there were enormous things that were true about the universe, things that he now had a firsthand knowledge of. He recalled the derailed conversation at the bookstore, and he knew there must be a larger picture. There had to be. He had a handful of puzzle pieces, but he needed more if ever he were to get a clear view.

  “Can we go feathering?” Nina asked him, coming out of her bedroom with the shoebox.

  “Okay,” he said. “How about around the neighborhood?”

  “But there was that place you said. With the birds.”

  “There’s birds in the neighborhood,” he told her. “We don’t want to ignore them and go to the park, or they might feel bad.”

  “I might go after groceries,” Beth said, coming out of the kitchen.

  Art and Nina went out onto the sidewalk and into a perfect fall day. The wind gusted leaves along the pavement, and again there was the smell of wood smoke, perhaps someone burning tree prunings. The sky was as clear as water, inconceivably deep and blue between brush strokes of cloud drift. Art found that he was distracted though, unable to enjoy the afternoon, constantly anticipating another psychic interlude, reassessing what had been happening to him. He tried to keep his mind on the here and now, but he had to work at it. Several houses down they found a white feather lying forlornly on a clipped lawn, perhaps a seagull feather, and then, at the corner house, they discovered a dead mockingbird beneath a curb tree, torn apart by a cat.

  “Yuck,” Nina said, “what is that?”

  “It’s a mockingbird,” Art told her, picking up a long mottled feather.

  “But is it guts?”

  “Yep,” Art said, “it’s guts.”

  “That’s yuck.”

  They walked on, heading up the next block where an acorn woodpecker hammered away at the trunk of a palm tree. The bird stood upside down, defying gravity, showing off. “See his red head?” Art asked.

  “Can we get a red feather …? Look!” Nina shouted, pointing at the sky. An airplane blew out a vapor trail off to the east, a skywriter, spelling something out. They waited for it, shading their eyes, naming the letters before the November wind bore them away. “April,” it said, and the plane circled back around and circumscribed it with a heart, although by the time the heart was completed it was blown to tatters, and the whole thing looked like an ill-drawn parallelogram containing ghostly hieroglyphics.

  Art was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that it meant something, that it was a sign, maybe some sort of spirit writing, perhaps intended for him…

  …but just as soon as he conceived the thought, he realized that he was off his rocker, lost inside his own bafflement, confusing an endearment with a ghost. He forced himself to focus on the world around him, the weathered sidewalk, the comical dog that watched them through a picket fence, the wind in his hair. He put his arm on Nina’s shoulder as they walked, and immediately he felt steadier.

  “There’s one!” Nina shouted, and she ran straight to a blue feather that lay half covered with dead leaves.

  “From a blue jay!” Art said. “How many is that?”

  Nina counted the feathers in the shoebox, making a laborious job of it, losing track and recounting to get it right. “Five,” she said finally.

  They wandered home now, having pretty much run through the neighborhood birds. Beth’s car was gone. As they stepped up onto the front porch, Art heard the phone ringing, and instantly it came to him that it was Anthony again. He sprinted into the kitchen and grabbed it just as the answering machine picked it up. He punched the star sign to kill the recording.

  “Yeah,” he said breathlessly.

  “Art! It’s Anthony.”

  “Wow,” Art said. “I guessed it was you.”

  “Unlucky guess, eh?” Anthony laughed.

  “No, really. I was out on the front porch, and when I heard the phone ring, your name popped into my head. The same damned thing happened the other night when you called. It was kind of spooky, actually.”

  “Yeah, well, you sounded kind of spooked the other night. You didn’t say more than about ten words.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I had some weird experiences that night. If you’ve got a second…?”

  Art explained about the possum, giving the story slightly amusing overtones to diminish the kook factor, then told him about the phone call and Oliver Cromwell, before starting in on the interesting difference between the various occurrences. In the middle of the explanation the call-waiting signal went off in his ear. He kept talking, but Anthony interrupted him: “If you’ve got a call, grab it.”

  “To heck with it,” Art said. He hated to interrupt a long distance call, especially on Anthony’s dime. It always turned out to be Jimmy Carter butting in, selling talent show tickets. He finished telling his story, then waited for Anthony’s response.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Anthony told him.

  “I wasn’t really worrying about it,” Art said. “I want to know what it means.”

  “I think it’s one of those things you never figure out. It’s better just to put it away, you know, back in the dead letter file. Worry about it when something starts to happen, like you start cutting the heads off of dogs or something. Until then, forget about it. You can’t explain it.”

  “Sure,” Art said, let down by this advice. They chatted for a while longer and then Art hung up. Anthony was probably right, but right or wrong, apparently his sailboat had tacked back into the psychic breeze.

  Feeling guilty about not answering the interrupting call, he picked up the receiver and punched star-six-nine into the keypad. The phone rang six times before a woman picked it up.

  “Hey,” Art said, “it’s Art Johnson, did somebody there call me?”

  There was silence on the other end, and then the woman said simply, “No.”

  “Sorry to bother you, then,” Art told her. He hung up, embarrassed, wondering what the hell he could have done to star-six-nine a wrong number. That didn’t seem possible to him, unless there was some kind of crossed line. Wait, he thought suddenly, figuring it out. The woman probably had called him, but by mistake. Probably she’d dialed a wrong number but didn’t know it because he hadn’t picked up her call. She had assumed simply that no one was home where she thought she’d called, and …