The Last Coin Read online

  The idea now was to snatch up a cat, hoist it into the flour sack, and tie the sack off with a slipknot, then go in after another cat. One of them stared at him through the open attic window. It seemed to find his sudden appearance boring and tiresome. He smiled at it and touched two fingers to his forehead, as if tipping his hat. Civility in all things, he muttered, peering in at the window, past the cat. Thank God there wasn’t a window screen to remove.

  He listened—to the snoring, to the sounds of distant, muted traffic, to the faint music coming from a tavern somewhere down the Pacific Coast Highway, probably the Glide ’er Inn. It drifted past him on the warm night, reminding him of the world, stealing away his nerve, his resolve. The moon was just rising over the rooftops. He’d have to hurry.

  “Nice kitty,” he whispered, making smacking noises at the cat. They liked that, or seemed to. He’d decided that he wouldn’t throw the cats into the salt marsh after all. A half hour ago, when he was crazy with being kept awake, it had seemed like the only prudent course. Now that he was up and about, though, and had put things in perspective, he realized that he had nothing against cats, not really, as long as they lived somewhere else. He couldn’t bear even to take them to the pound. He knew that. Cruelty wasn’t in him.

  He hadn’t, in fact, entirely worked out what he would do with them. Give them away in front of the supermarket, perhaps. He could claim that they’d belonged to a celebrity—the grandmother of a movie star, maybe; that would fetch it. People would clamor for them. Or else he could give them to the neighborhood children and offer them a dollar-fifty reward for every cat they took away and didn’t come back with, and another dollar apiece if the kids hadn’t ratted on him by the end of the month. That would be dangerous, though; children were a mysterious, unpredictable race—almost as bad as cats. Pulling a smelt out of his shirt pocket, he dangled it in front of the open flour sack. The cat inside the window wrinkled up its nose.

  He smiled at it and nodded, winking good-naturedly. “Good kitty-pup. Here’s a fishy.”

  The cat turned away and licked itself. He edged up a rung on the ladder and laid the fish on a shingle, but the cat didn’t care about it; it might as well have been an old shoe. Andrew’s shadow bent away across the shingles, long and angular in the moonlight, looking almost like a caricature of Don Quixote. He turned his head to catch his profile, liking that better, and thinking that as he got older he looked just a little bit more like Basil Rathbone every year, if only he could stay thin enough. He squinted just a little, as if something had been revealed to him, something that was hidden to the rest of mortal men. But the shadow, of course, didn’t reveal the knowing squint, and his nose needed more hook to it, and the cat on the sill sat as ever, seeming to know far more than he did about hidden things.

  He reached for the pole, jumping it up through his right hand until he could tilt it in through the open window. The pole wasn’t any good for close work. The cat in the window would have to wait. He peered into the darkened room, waiting for his eyes to adjust, listening to the snoring. It was frightful. There was nothing else like it on earth: snorts and groans and noises that reminded him of an octopus.

  He had been tempted at first, when he was seething, to poke the pole against her ear and shout into the other end. But such a thing would finish her. She’d been ill for ten years—or so she’d let on—and an invalid for most of them. A voice shouting into her ear at midnight through a fifteen-foot pole would simply kill her. The autopsy would reveal that she’d turned into a human pudding. They’d jail him for it. His shouting would awaken the house. They’d haul him down from the ladder and gape into his ash-smeared face. Why had he shouted at Aunt Naomi through a tube? She owned cats? She’d been snoring, had she? And he’d—what?—got himself up in jewel-thief clothes and crept up a pruning ladder to the attic window, hoping to undo her by shouting down a fiberglass tube?

  Moonlight slanted past him through the tree branches, suddenly illuminating the room. There was another cat, curled up on the bed. He would never get the noose over its head. There was another, atop the bureau. It stood there staring into the moonlight, its eyes glowing red. The room was full of cats. It stank like a kennel, the room did, the floorboards gritty with spilled kitty litter. An acre of ocean winds blowing through two-dozen open windows wouldn’t scour out the reek. He grimaced and played out line, waving the loop across the top of the bed toward the dresser. The cat stood there defiantly, staring him down. He felt almost ashamed. He’d have to be quick—jerk it off the dresser without slamming the pole down onto the bed and awakening Aunt Naomi, if that were possible. A little noise wouldn’t hurt; her snoring would mask it.

  He had practiced in the backyard when the family was gone. His friend Beams Pickett had helped him, playing the part of a surprised cat. Then they’d pieced up a false cat out of a pillow, a jar, and a gunnysack and snatched it off tree limbs and out of bushes and off fences until Andrew had it refined down to one swift thrust and yank. The trick now was to balance the pole atop the windowsill in order to take up some of the weight. Another arm would help, of course, if only to hold open the sack. He’d asked Pickett to come along, but Pickett wouldn’t. He was an “idea man” he had said, not a man of action.

  Andrew let the pole rest on the sill for a moment, watching the strangely unmoving cat out of one eye, the cat inside the window out of the other eye. He picked up the flour sack, shoving the hem of the open end into his mouth and letting it dangle there against the shingles. He was ready. Aunt Naomi snorted and rolled over. He froze, his heart pounding, a chill running through him despite the heat. Moments passed. He worked the pole forward, wondering at the foolish cat that stood there as still as ever. It was a sitting duck. He giggled, suppressing laughter. What would Darwin say? It served the beast right to be snatched away like this. Natural selection is what it was. He’d get the cats, then pluck up the corners of Aunt Naomi’s bed sheet and tie them off, too. It would be a simple thing to lock her into the trunk of the Metropolitan and fling her, still trussed up in the sheet, into the marsh in Gum Grove Park.

  It was easy to believe, when you looked at the wash of stars in the heavens, that something was happening in the night sky and in the darkened city stretched along the coast. The whole random shape of things—the people roundabout, their seemingly petty business, the day-to-day machinations of governments and empires—all of it spun slowly, like the stars, into patterns invisible to the man on the street, but, especially late at night, clear as bottle glass to him. Or at least they all would become so. Clearing the house of cats would be the first step toward clearing his mind of murk, toward ordering the mess that his life seemed sometimes to be spiraling into. He and Pickett had set up Pickett’s telescope in the unplastered attic cubbyhole adjacent to Aunt Naomi’s bedroom, but the smell of the cats had pretty much kept them out of it—a pity, really. There was something—a cosmic order, maybe—in the starry heavens that relaxed him, that made things all right after all. He couldn’t get enough of them and stayed up late sometimes just to get a midnight glimpse of the sky after the lights of the city had dimmed.

  All this talk of unusual weather and earthquakes on the news over the past weeks was unsettling, although it seemed to be evidence of something; it seemed to bear out his suspicions that something was afoot. The business of the Jordan River flowing backward out of the Dead Sea was the corker. It sounded overmuch like an Old Testament miracle, although as far as the newspapers knew, there hadn’t been any Moses orchestrating the phenomenon. It would no doubt have excited less comment if it weren’t for the dying birds and the rain of mud. The newspapers in their euphemistic way spoke of solar disturbances and tidal deviations, but that was pretty obvious hogwash. Andrew wondered whether anyone knew for sure, whether there were some few chosen people out there who understood, who nodded at such occurrences and winked at each other.

  The city of Seal Beach was full of oddballs these days, too: men from secret societies, palm readers, psychic
s of indeterminate powers. There had been a convention of mystics in South Long Beach just last week. Even Beams Pickett had taken up with one, a woman who didn’t at all have the appearance of a spiritualist, but who had announced that Andrew’s house was full of “emanations.” He hated that kind of talk.

  He shook his head. He’d been daydreaming, so to speak. His mind had wandered, and that wasn’t good. That was his problem all along. Rose, his wife, had told him so on more than one occasion. He grinned in at the cat on the dresser, trying to mesmerize it. “Keep still,” he whispered, slowly dangling the noose in over its head. He held his breath, stopped dead for a slice of a moment, then jerked on the line and yanked back on the pole at the same instant. The line went taut and pulled the cat off the dresser. The pole whumped down across the sill, overbalanced, and whammed onto the bed just as the weirdly heavy cat hit the floorboards with a crash that made it sound as if the thing had smashed into fragments. The cat inside the window howled into his ear and leaped out onto the roof. The half-dozen cats left inside ran mad, leaping and yowling and hissing. He jerked at his pole, but the noose was caught on something—the edge of the bed, probably.

  A light blinked on, and there was Aunt Naomi, her hair papered into tight little curls, her face twisted into something resembling a fish. She clutched the bedclothes to her chest and screamed, then snatched up the lamp beside her bed and pitched it toward the window. The room winked into darkness, and the flying lamp banged against the wall a foot from his head.

  The pole wrenched loose just then with a suddenness that propelled him backward. He dropped it and grappled for the rain gutter as the ladder slid sideways toward the camphor tree in a rush that tore his hands loose. He smashed in among the branches, hollering, hooking his left leg around the drainpipe and ripping it away, crashing up against a limb and holding on, his legs dangling fourteen feet above the ground. Hauling himself onto the limb, trembling, he listened to doors slamming and people shouting below. Aunt Naomi shrieked. Cats scoured across the rooftops, alerting the neighborhood. Dogs howled.

  His pole and ladder lay on the ground. His flour sack had entangled itself in the foliage. He could climb back up onto the roof if he had to, scramble over to the other side, shinny down a drainpipe into the backyard. They’d know by now that he wasn’t in bed, of course, but he’d claim to have gone out after the marauder. He’d claim to have chased him off, to have hit him, perhaps, with a rock. The prowler wouldn’t come fooling around there any more, not after that. Aunt Naomi couldn’t have known who it was that had menaced her. The moment of light wouldn’t have given her eyes enough time to adjust. She wouldn’t cut him out of her will. She would thank him for the part he’d played. She’d …

  A light shone up into the tree. People gathered on the lawn below: his wife, Mrs. Gummidge, Pennyman. All of them were there. And the neighbor, too—old what’s his name, Ken-or-Ed, as his wife called him. My God he was fat without a shirt on—out half-naked, minding everybody’s business but his own. He was almost a cephalopod in the silver moonlight. His bald head shone with sweat.

  There was a silence below. Then, hesitantly, Rose’s voice: “Is that you, Andrew? Why are you in the tree, dear?”

  “There’s been some sort of funny business. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it. I couldn’t sleep, because of the heat, so I came downstairs and out onto the porch …”

  “You did what?” His wife shouted up to him, cupping a hand to her ear. “Come down. We can’t hear you. Why have you got the ladder out?”

  “I don’t!” he shouted. “A prowler …” but then Aunt Naomi’s head thrust out through the open window, her eyes screwed down to the size of dimes. She gasped and pointed at him, signaling to those below on the lawn.

  “I’ll go to her,” said Mrs. Gummidge, starting into the house.

  Andrew had always hated that phrase—”go to her.” It drove him nearly crazy, and now particularly. Mrs. Gummidge had a stock of such phrases. She was always ‘ ‘reaching out’’ and.’ ‘taking ill” and “lending a hand” and “proving useful.” He watched the top of her head disappear under the porch gable. At least she paid her rent on time—thanks to Aunt Naomi’s money. But Aunt Naomi held the money over her head, too, just like she did with the rest of them, and Andrew knew that Mrs. Gummidge loathed the idea of it; it ate her up. She was sly, though, and didn’t let on. The wife couldn’t see it. Rose was convinced that Mrs. Gummidge was a saint—bringing cups of tea up to the attic at all hours, playing Scrabble in the afternoon as long as Aunt Naomi let her win.

  “Of course she lets her win,” Andrew had said. “She feels sorry for the woman.”

  Rose hadn’t thought so. She said it was generosity on Aunt Naomi’s part that explained it—natural charity. But it wasn’t. Andrew was certain it was something loathsome. It would almost be worth it to have Aunt Naomi gone, and her money with her. They’d get by somehow. If they could just hold on a couple of weeks, until tourists began to flock through, until he could get the cafe into shape and open up for dinners. They’d see their way clear then.

  He shivered. It had gotten suddenly colder. An onshore wind had blown up, ruffling the leaves on the tree, cutting through his cotton shirt. At forty-two he wasn’t the hand at climbing trees that he’d been at ten. There was no way he was going onto the roof of the house. He was trapped there. He’d stick it, though, at least until Pennyman left—Pennyman and Ken-or-Ed. The man’s head was a disgrace. He looked like a bearded pumpkin.

  There he was, down on the grass, peering at the looped end of the rope attached to the pole. Tied into it was the head and shoulders of the plaster statue of a cat, its red glass eyes glowing in the moonlight. Andrew Vanbergen had risked his life and reputation to snatch a painted plaster cat off a dresser at one in the morning. He shrugged. Such was fate. The gods got a laugh out of it anyway. Pickett would see the humor in it. So would Uncle Arthur. Ken-or-Ed pitched the cat head into the bushes and leaned the pole against a branch of the camphor tree, shaking his head again as if the whole business were beyond him, as if it beat all.

  Murmuring voices wafted up toward Andrew from the lawn. “Are you coming down, dear?” his wife asked suddenly, shading her eyes and peering up into the branches.

  He waited for a moment, then said, “No, not for a bit. I’m going to wait. This man might return. He could be lurking in the neighborhood right now. Wait! What’s that! Off toward the highway!”

  Ken-or-Ed loped away, looking around wildly, alert for prowlers. Pennyman watched as if unconvinced, then muttered something and strode off into the house. When he found nothing at all to confront, Ken-or-Ed slouched back up the street and onto the lawn. He explained loudly to Andrew’s wife just what it was a prowler was likely to have done under the circumstances. He had done some police work when he was younger, he said, and it paid off in situations like this. Andrew rolled his eyes and listened from up in the tree, shivering again in the breeze off the ocean. He could just see the top of his wife’s head.

  “I’m certain it does,” Rose said diplomatically, and then she excused herself and said “Don’t be long” to Andrew, up into the branches of the tree. “And don’t tackle him alone! Just shout. There’s enough of us here to help you, so forget any stupid heroics.” Andrew loved her for that. She saw through him as if he were a sheet of glass. He knew that. She hadn’t swallowed any of it, but here she was letting him off.

  She deserved better than him. He made up his mind to turn over a leaf. He’d start tomorrow. Maybe he’d paint the garage. It needed it, certainly. Thinking about it depressed him. He’d do something, though. He watched as Rose followed along in Pennyman’s wake, shutting the front door after her. Finding himself alone on the lawn, Ken-or-Ed went home, squinting back up toward the tree as if he only half-believed there was anyone in it. Aunt Naomi’s window slammed shut just then, and Andrew sat by himself in the filtered moonlight, sheltered by the canopy of leaves, listening to the lonely chirping of night birds and the quiet
splash of seawaves.

  Andrew’s family had come from Iowa, all of them Dutch with remarkable last names. There’d been dozens of them: aunts and uncles and cousins and far-flung this and thats who had never been entirely explained.

  Rose’s family was the same way, but Dutch with Scottish mixed in. They’d grown up in Alton, he and Rose, and had married out of love. There’d been farms and corn and shiftings west, to Colorado and California. The family had scattered. Like old home movies, elements of it had been grand, but you had to have been there. There were bits and pieces of it, though—largely uninteresting even to those who had been there—that meant something. Andrew was pretty sure of it. Beams Pickett would be positive. They kept swimming into focus through the murky waters of passing time, refusing to be submerged and swept away into the gray sea of lost memories. That’s the way things went: the crumbling of empires, the front-page news, the blather yodeling out of the television; all of that was nothing, a blind, a red herring.

  It was the trifles that signified: the cut of a man’s beard, the too-convenient discovery of forgotten money in a disused wallet, the overheard conversation between two fishermen early in the fog-shrouded morning as one of them hauls out of the ocean a crab trap with an ink-stained note in it. There was a secret order to things.

  In Iowa, in 1910, almost forty years before she was born, Rose’s family had lived on a farm. There were a dozen of them in all, including the vast grandmother, who was so wide that her voluminous skirts wedged tight in doorways. There were aunts and uncles, too—Rose’s Aunt Naomi, for one. Uncle Arthur lived nearby. He wasn’t exactly an uncle, but was an old and trusted friend, and now he lived some two miles down Seal Beach Boulevard at the Leisure World retirement community.