The Paper Grail Page 7

  Opening the nearly empty glove compartment, he pulled out the Sunberry brownie, unwrapped it, and bit the corner off, unprepared for the dirt-and-ground-weeds taste of the thing. There was nothing at all in the flavor that suggested food. Even the pelican wouldn’t eat such a brownie. He bundled it back up in plastic wrap and dropped it onto the floorboards. This was it—the last insult he would take. He had half a mind to drive back into town and throw the brownie at Stoat, take him straight out of the contest.

  He had a pretty good picture all of a sudden of the way things had fallen out in Mendocino. A week ago Michael Graham had heard Howard’s engine start up, way down in Orange County. “Let’s move,” he had said to Jimmers. “Break out the Humpty Dumptys.” He had tottered to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane, and as one last arcane joke, he had made his way out to the garage, climbed into the old Studebaker, released the hand brake, and rolled straight off the cliff into the sea. Like the faithful subject he was, Jimmers had waited Howard out, watching through the window, giggling over the idea of giving the high sign to the gluer boys and then locking Howard into the attic, feeding him on old bananas and on wine fermented out of root mulch by the selfsame lunatics who had robbed him, finally staging the rescue by Sylvia at precisely the moment that Howard, slumped into his attic chair, had begun to drool and snore. But that hadn’t been the end of it. Howard had driven off happily enough despite it all, and what had Jimmers done? He had called Stoat, probably on a car phone. “Here he comes,” Jimmers had said. “Comb your hair, for God’s sake, and get out there onto the sidewalk.”

  There was something deep going on. Howard could see that much even if he couldn’t yet make out the shape of it. He watched the smoke billowing like overweight ghosts out of the Georgia-Pacific mills on the edge of Fort Bragg and realized that he was hungry. Maybe that’s the trouble, he said to himself. He would attempt the patented pancake cure.

  Right then, flapping its big, fateful wings, a pelican flew overhead, perpendicular to the highway, and Howard immediately turned down Harbor Drive, in order to follow it, admitting out loud that he was a born sucker.

  He pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant called the Cap’n England, stopping alongside an old stake-bed truck and climbing out, noticing with a start that a waxwork dummy with a staved-in head sat on the truck bed, leaning tiredly against a half dozen cinder blocks. “Me, too,” its face seemed to be saying to him as it looked sadly out at Howard from between the slats, its hair clotted with fake blood and one of its eyeballs dangling from tendrils of stretched putty. Howard gaped at it for a moment, surprised to discover that he wasn’t at all surprised. Of course, he said to himself. It was the sort of thing you came to expect after a day on the coast. Locking the door of his truck, he went inside to eat.

  5

  UNCLE Roy’s house lay at the end of Barnett Street, backing up against a fir grove that seemed to run on forever, up into the hills. It was a tumbledown Victorian that needed paint. Pieces of its gingerbread trim had cracked and fallen apart over the years, and here and there bits of it were broken off or hanging by rusted nails. Someone had started to patch the place up, sanding and repairing the wooden fretwork, but the work was sketchily done, a long time ago by the look of it, and the rickety two-by-four scaffolding nailed to the west side of the house where some-one had once been scraping eaves had turned gray in the weather. The yard was brown and overgrown, with old yellowed newspapers, still in their rubber bands, lying discarded in the weeds.

  Howard shut the motor off and sat there. He was still full of pancakes and bacon, and he had managed that morning to wash and dry a load of clothes. All his errands were finished. He had arrived at his destination, ready to knock on Uncle Roy’s door and introduce himself—the long-lost nephew from down south. He felt relieved at last. He was among family again, and as run-down as the house was, there was something comfortable in the very notion that it was a shelter from the crazy hailstorm that had been pounding him since yesterday afternoon.

  He eyed the house a moment longer, slowly changing his mind about it. It didn’t just look run-down, he decided—it looked haunted. Uncle Roy could have opened it up as a spirit museum and no one would have scoffed. Ragged lace curtains blew out of an open upstairs window, and on the front porch a willow rocker tilted slowly backward, then slowly forward. Somewhere, around in back maybe, a door slammed shut in the wind. The neighborhood was quiet otherwise—empty of people.

  Howard climbed out of the truck, leaving his suitcase for the moment, and stepped up the front walk to the wooden porch, where the paint in front of the door had long since been trodden away. He knocked hard. There was no use being timid about it. The door creaked open slowly on its own; there was no one there. Inside lay a dark room of heavy, shadowy furniture. Beyond the entryway stood a turned newel post at the bottom of a stairs. There was a brass lamp fixed to the top of the post—the head of a dog with illuminated glass eyes.

  Howard waited, wondering who had opened the door. No one appeared. He knocked again on the casing. Maybe the door hadn’t been latched, and he’d knocked it open himself. It hadn’t felt like that, though; the door was too heavy. Beside him, the rocking chair creaked in the breeze. “Hello,” he said, although not too loud. There was something hushed and still about the place, as if it were abandoned. It wasn’t a place for shouting.

  The first notes of somber organ music drifted down from upstairs somewhere, and there was a sudden banshee wail, distant and tormented like the sound of something muffled in a locked closet. A faint patch of gauzy brightness lit the stairs, and for a moment someone seemed to be standing there, halfway up. It was a woman in a lacy dress or shroud, her hands held out in supplication, her eyes wide with a sort of horrified passion.

  Howard found himself backpedaling into the yard. His heart chugged like an engine. The door of the house slammed shut, and laughter echoed out of an upstairs window—the deep and throaty stage laughter common to ghosts with a sardonic sense of humor. Heavy chains rattled and the laughter turned to a tormented moaning. Then there was the amplified scratch of a needle scraping across a phonograph record, followed by a curse. “Damn it!” a voice said.

  A head appeared through the lace curtains of the window just then. It was Uncle Roy, with a face like a melon. Howard hadn’t remembered him as being fat. “Nephew!” he shouted, then knocked the top of his head on the window frame. “Damn it!” he said again. “Don’t stand in the yard. Come in!”

  He disappeared, and Howard climbed the porch stairs again, happy and puzzled. Clearly Uncle Roy had been expecting him. Home at last, he said to himself, and nearly laughed out loud. Again the door opened, but it was his uncle this time, rubbing his head. He pumped Howard’s hand, dragging him into the house and turning on a light, cheering the place up considerably.

  “What did you think of it?” Uncle Roy asked.

  “Very impressive,” Howard said. “The woman on the stairs did the trick. Knocked me right back onto the lawn.”

  “Cheesecloth. You drape a few single layers of it across the stairs and then play a bit of film across it from a projector. You don’t get much of an image, but then you don’t want much of an image, do you?”

  “Not for a ghost, no. That one was about right.”

  “It’s the effect that’s paramount here. You either have it or you don’t—effect or nothing. I’ve learned that from studying business. I’ve got rubber bats, too, on pulleys, and a skeleton from the university in Sonoma. And look at this.” Howard followed him into the kitchen. Uncle Roy climbed onto a step stool and pulled open a high cupboard, hauling down ajar. “Eyeballs,” he said. “Honest-to-God eyeballs in alcohol.”

  “Really?” Howard looked at the bizarre things. They were eyeballs, all right, of various sizes, clearly not all taken from the same sorts of creatures. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Game of marbles between corpses. I’ve got a couple of waxwork dummies on their hands and knees. They’re ob
vious corpses—hair all grown out and stringy, skin like a burn victim, ragged old suits of clothes …”

  “Really?” Howard said. “I think I met one of them this morning.”

  His uncle nodded at him, apparently not finding the idea crazy in any way. “The trick is to have them shooting eyeballs into a ring drawn in blood. Very nice effect again. Repellent, too. Makes the public veer off, I can tell you, when they see the eyeballs. They’ll pay you for it, though, and come back again and pay you some more. There’s nothing the public won’t pay for if you trick it out in the right kind of hat.” He put the jar back into the cupboard and shut the door.

  Howard reconsidered the notion of the spirit museum as a “study in the paranormal.” He had been led to believe that his uncle was serious about the ghost business, that the museum had failed because he refused to ham it up with waxwork corpses and projected dead women. He had stuck by the Studebaker because it was true and right. Now here was Uncle Roy, loaded with tomfoolery and with a jar full of eyeballs in the cupboard.

  “My boy,” Uncle Roy said, turning to him suddenly and grabbing his hand again. Howard felt like the prodigal son, guilty for having stayed away so long. “How is your poor mother?”

  “Very well, actually. She’s feeling absolutely fine. Happy, I think.”

  Uncle Roy shook his head, as if Howard had said she was living in the street—on a grate, maybe, with her possessions in a bag. “I’m certain she never recovered from your father’s death. None of us did. He was my brother, after all. He had his faults, but …” He looked at Howard suddenly, as if reading his face. “In a way it was lucky you were so young. I don’t mean it’s easy growing up without a father, but sometimes it’s harder on an older child, one who’s come to know his father. I tried in my way to make up for it, at least until we moved up here. Can you ever do enough, though?”

  Howard nodded, surprised at his uncle talking like this. Uncle Roy was obviously sincere, and Howard was moved by it. He hadn’t expected this. “I know you did,” he said. It was true, too. It was Uncle Roy that had taken him to ball games and driven him to the beach and told him jokes and winked at him covertly on serious occasions. Now he sensed that his uncle doubted all that. He had clearly been worrying, maybe for years, that he ought to have done more for Howard. On impulse, Howard put his arms around his uncle’s shoulders and hugged him, and after an awkward moment Uncle Roy hugged him back, wiping at his eyes afterward and sighing heavily. “Time passes,” he said.

  “That’s the truth.” Howard sat down in a stuffed chair. “You don’t look much different, though.”

  “I’m a fat man now,” Uncle Roy said. “I used to be fit. There was a time when I could work like a pig in the sun, all day long, and then get up the next morning and start in again. You remember those days.”

  Howard nodded.

  “About your mother, though? How is she? Her letters sound melancholy sometimes—between the lines, if you follow me.”

  “No, really,” Howard said. “She’s doing well—working at the library, actually, putting together stock for the new bookmobile.” Uncle Roy put his hand on Howard’s arm, to console him, perhaps. Conversation fell flat. “Sorry just to stop past early like this,” Howard said, changing the subject after a moment’s silence. “I didn’t mean to surprise anybody, but—”

  “Not at all. We got your letter and all. This is no surprise. Sylvia called up this morning and said she’d found you in Jimmers’ attic, tied into a chair. That damned Jimmers … It gave me plenty of time to set up the woman on the stairs, though. How long can you stay?”

  Howard shrugged. “My plans aren’t definite yet. I don’t want to put you out …”

  Uncle Roy waved the idea into oblivion.

  “Do you know this Mr. Jimmers?” Howard asked, anxious to get on to new subjects. “I’m not sure I understand him. Tied into a chair, did she say?”

  “Jimmers is a case. Completely sideways, if you know what I mean. He’ll be coming when the rest of the world is going. Did he tell you about his tin shed?”

  “A little,” Howard said uncertainly.

  “What did you think of the door opening all by itself?” Uncle Roy broke into another grin.

  Howard tried to fathom it, to recall one of Jimmers’ doors opening all by itself. Did he mean the door of the shed?

  “Sorry …” he started to say. Then he caught on—he meant the front door of Uncle Roy’s house, just five minutes ago. “I give. How did you do it?”

  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 stompe
d 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.