The Last Coin Read online

  He drove along feeling half-sorry for himself, neglecting to turn his headlights on. He couldn’t tell Rose about Pickett’s Caretaker nonsense. It would be evidence of something. Lord knows what would have happened if she were to discover that he’d shamelessly talked two thousand dollars out of Aunt Naomi that afternoon, when what he was supposed to be doing was generally smoothing things over. Now he’d promised a French chef and spent a quarter of the money on exotic liquor, and Beams Pickett was on his way to Vancouver to load up the trunk of his Chevrolet with cartons of Weetabix, charging gas to the company credit card, which Rose had insisted he not use unless it were an absolute emergency. He hadn’t wanted to give Pickett the credit card, but his wallet had been empty. Now it was full, only a few hours later. That’s how life went. It was unpredictable. Just when you thought that the way was clear, that the script was written, wham! there was some new confusion, flying in at the window, overturning chairs.

  A horn blared and a car swerved out of the lane in front of him. He’d drifted across the line, into oncoming traffic. He jerked the car back into his own lane, his heart hammering. Rose paid attention when she drove. He didn’t, it was true. He couldn’t argue with her when she pointed it out. The only human being on earth, she said, who drove worse than he was Uncle Arthur, who was ninety-two.

  And she had her doubts about his seeing so much of Beams Pickett. Pickett had developed the reputation of believing in plots and threats, and Rose understood, although she never said it, that Andrew had been contaminated. Pickett believed in the theory that what was obvious was probably lies; the truth lay hidden, and you got at it by ignoring what passed as common sense.

  Andrew’s mind wandered again as he drove along. He thought about their eventful morning, about the ‘possum trick and Pickett’s suspicions about Mrs. Gummidge. What was true about Pickett was that he was skeptical of skeptics. He had almost hit one that very morning in a cafe near the pier, after the two of them had dumped the ’possum and went fishing. They had had some luck with bonita, keeping at it until after nine in the morning. Then they’d left the fish in a gunnysack in the back of the Metropolitan and gone in for breakfast at the Potholder. A man named Johnson sat at the counter, sopping up egg yolks with a slab of white toast. They knew him from the bookstore, where they’d attended meetings of a literary society for a time.

  Johnson saw through everything. There was nothing that would surprise him. He had “no regrets,” he had insisted at the literary society in a hearty, chest-slapping tone, and he’d drained his beer glass at a gulp and smacked his lips. There at the counter at the Potholder he had sat poking at egg yolks and shoving down half a slice of bread without bothering to chew it more than twice. Pickett couldn’t stand him, and Andrew could see, as soon as they had walked in through the door, that Pickett was going to go for him straightaway, although what Andrew wanted to do was to nod and sit at the opposite end of the cafe, so as to avoid starting Johnson up. Pickett, braced by four hours of sea air, had wanted to start him up very badly.

  Johnson had been reading—old issues of science fiction magazines. He’d come upon an essay that made a hash of Pickett’s flying saucer enthusiasm—knocked the pins out from under it, Johnson had said, grinning. He’d nodded at Andrew and motioned down the length of the empty counter. Andrew didn’t like sitting at counters. He felt too conspicuous there. But Pickett sat down at once and fingered the menu, grinning at Johnson, who droned along about unidentified flying objects.

  “The telling thing,” Johnson had said, wiping his face with a napkin, “is that when these things appear, they’re always described in the fashion of the day. Do you get me?”

  “No,” said Pickett.

  “I mean to say that a hundred years ago they were a common enough business, weren’t they? But they looked like hay wagons, then, with wings and propellers and paddle wheels. I was reading an account of a man in Sioux City, Iowa, who claimed to have seen an airship—this was in 1896, mind you—that was shaped like an Indian canoe with an inflated gasbag above it. It dropped a grappling hook, he said, that caught in the slack of his trousers and dragged him across a cow field.” Johnson grinned and laughed to himself, humping up and down with the force of it. He looked sharply at the remaining egg on his plate, as if seeing it for the first time, and then hacked it to bits with the corner of a piece of toast.

  “A cow field!”

  “I’m still not certain,” said Pickett, “what you mean to say. It’s an amusing story, but …”

  “Isn’t it?” said Johnson, interrupting. “Concentrate, now. It’s not difficult to grasp. Really it isn’t.”

  Pickett sat stony-faced.

  “You see,” said Johnson, waving his toast, “that’s how it went in 1896. In 1925 it was the same business, only no canoes by then, no airbags, no propellers. They were those inflated-looking rockets that you see in the pulps. After that it was saucers, and now there’s cylindrical ships made of polished metal that go very, very fast. What next? That’s the point. It’s all fakery, imagination, humbugging. If it weren’t, there’d be some consistency to it. That was the crux of this essay, anyway.”

  “Who wrote it?” asked Pickett, sitting very still and stirring his coffee.

  “Asimov. He’s hard to argue with. Rock solid logic, from my point of view. Shreds the whole UFO business at a single swipe. What do you think?” He leaned past Pickett to put the question to Andrew.

  “Absolutely,” said Andrew. “It’s a dead issue I should think.”

  Pickett gaped at Andrew, then turned back to Johnson, heating up. Andrew could see it. Pickett was about to burst. It always happened that way with Johnson. That was why they’d given up the literary society. Pickett would be fired up to have a go at him, and then the conversation would drive him mad, and Johnson would go off grinning, having won.

  “Of course they keep showing up in different craft,” Pickett said. Their breakfasts arrived and Andrew started to eat, but Pickett ignored his. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t want to give themselves away, for God’s sake. It’s a matter of disguise, is what it is. I wouldn’t be half-surprised if the aliens who dragged your man across the cow pasture are the same crowd who appeared in the flying egg six years ago over San Francisco. Why not? If they’ve got the technology to sail in from the stars, then certainly they’ve got the technology to design any sorts of ships they please. Look at Detroit, for heaven’s sake. They can build a truck on Monday and a convertible on Tuesday, just like that. And what’s more …”

  But Pickett hadn’t gotten a chance to finish, for Johnson was suddenly ignoring him, talking to the waitress and paying his bill. He laid a quarter on the counter by way of a tip and then scratched the end of his nose. “Do you know what it was in the airship?” he asked, grinning at Pickett and Andrew.

  Pickett blinked at him. “What? What airship?”

  “In Iowa—the cow field ship. Pigs. That’s what the man said. It was pigs. And they stole his money—a rare coin. That’s what he said. I swear it. He was robbed by pigs. Of course, the whole story went to bits, didn’t it? It’s simple enough. You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to piece together the truth. The way I figure it he’d had a run-in with pigs. They were probably out on the road and knocked him into a ditch. That explains how his trousers came to be ruined. And he’d lost money of some sort, probably a silver piece or something, which he shouldn’t have had anyway because his wife needed it for groceries. He was on his way to spend it on a bottle, probably. Well, he couldn’t just up and admit it, could he? I mean pigs, after all. He’d look like a fool. So he made up the story, lock, stock, and barrel: alien pigs, hooks, draggings across cow fields, rare coins. He’s a hero, isn’t he, and not a fool at all, no longer a poor sod manhandled by pigs.” Johnson stopped and squinted at them, nodding his head knowingly. “He lost a pocketful of change in ditch water, that’s what I think, and soiled his pants. So he explained it away with the wildest lie he could invent, knowing that the public
would go for it. They always do—the wilder the better. But mark me, gentlemen, you can bet that his wife didn’t much believe him. Am I right? Yes I am. Right as rain. There isn’t a wife alive that isn’t ten times as shrewd as the public. What do you think, Andrew?”

  Andrew gawked at him, not at all knowing what to make of all this talk about pigs and rare coins. But there was no fathoming Johnson. There was nothing to fathom. Johnson wasn’t deep enough. You could see the bottom just by looking into his eyes. “I think,” said Andrew, “that if you laid the public out end to end they wouldn’t reach from here to Glendale.”

  “You’re a scholar!” shouted Johnson, standing up. “You, too, son,” he said to Pickett, and he grabbed Pickett’s hand and shook it before Pickett had a chance to snatch it away. “Got to go,” he said. “I’ve got to see a man about a horse. Do you know what I mean? Spaceships—very interesting business all the way around. We’ll take this up again.”

  Pickett started to speak, to get in the last word, to finish what he’d started. “Anyway, as I was saying, convertibles on Tuesday …”

  “Yes,” Johnson said, setting out. “That’s right. Convertibles. Maybe the aliens will be driving convertibles next. Pigs in sunglasses.” And with that he giggled and strolled away, letting the glass door slam shut behind him and waving back over his shoulder.

  Pickett had left his cold eggs on the counter, Johnson having ruined his appetite. They paid and left, forgetting entirely about the car and the fish and walking the two blocks back to the inn. Andrew tried to bring the subject around to the successful ‘possum episode, but his enthusiasm was lost on Pickett, who insisted that he was going to have Johnson killed, that he’d ridicule him in the Herald, that before he was done he’d do half a dozen things to ruin the man, to make his life a living hell. That very afternoon, while driving north, he’d compose lovelorn letters in order to publish them in the Herald under Johnson’s name. “What did you make of the pencil line down the center of his face?” Pickett asked suddenly. “Evidence of insanity, I’d call it.”

  Andrew shrugged. “Just more of his nonsense. It was best not to ask. He wanted you to ask, obviously. He’d probably have had some idiotic explanation prepared, some gag line and we’d be the butt of the joke.”

  Pickett nodded. “He must have forgotten it, though, if he’d put it there on purpose. Did you see him smear it up with the napkin?”

  “He was too fired up about his cow pasture story. You shouldn’t work him up so. It doesn’t do you any good.”

  “I’ll sell him to the apes,” said Pickett, climbing into his Chevrolet. “See you.” He started the car up with a roar and drove away toward the Coast Highway, carrying Andrew’s credit card, bound for Vancouver. He’d be gone nearly a week.

  It had been the middle of the afternoon when Andrew discovered that he’d left the Metropolitan parked at the pier. He’d jogged back down and opened the trunk. There lay the fish, stiff as papier-mâché ornaments. He had emptied the gunnysack into the dirt of the alley behind Señor Corky’s restaurant, and was immediately surrounded by half a dozen cats. He waved goodbye, driving away south to visit Polsky and Sons and feeling generous.

  Now here he was, parking the car at the curb, home at last after a hellishly long day. He hadn’t gotten around to painting the garage, as he’d intended to, but there’d be time enough tomorrow to tackle it. Haste was never any good. The street was dark, and Aunt Naomi’s window was shut against night creatures. Andrew locked up the car. It wouldn’t do to start hauling stuff in. He’d wait until Rose went out or went to bed. He’d tell her he’d been to Bellflower to interview student chefs, which wasn’t entirely a lie. He’d called the chefs’ school, after all, and had gotten the name of a likely graduate, a young Frenchman who had grown up in Long Beach but still had a trace of an accent.

  Fog blew in billows now, in between the houses and over rooftops. It would be a good night for some cat sabotage, but he’d probably worked the ’possum angle hard enough already. In fact, he’d been pressing his luck all day long. Maybe he’d go to bed early. That would make Rose happy. It would be evidence that there were traces of sanity left in him. He stepped up onto the front porch, humming, tolerably satisfied with things. Then he jumped in spite of himself to see Pennyman sitting in a rattan chair, smoking his pipe. He looked far too polished and stiff, like a waxwork dummy or a preserved corpse, and it seemed to Andrew as if he had the smell of fish about him, as if he’d been swilling cod liver oil. Pennyman pulled his pipe out of his mouth and pointed at an empty chair. “Sit down,” he said.

  FOUR

  “Similarly, a stone with little discs upon it is good to bring in such coins; and if a man found a large stone with a number of small ones under it, like a sow among her litter, he was sure that to offer a coin upon it would bring him the one pig.”

  Sir James G. Frazer

  The Golden Bough

  ANDREW STARED AT the figure of Pennyman smoking on the darkened porch. Suddenly he was filled with Pickett’s fears, with visions of blowfish and secret societies. The glowing ash in the bowl of Pennyman’s pipe burned like a hovering eye in the evening gloom. Andrew opened the door and reached into the house, flipping on the porch light. “I’m home!” he shouted, not wanting to seem to be any later than he was.

  Rose answered from somewhere within. “Oh,” she said.

  Andrew turned and shrugged at Pennyman. “Sitting in the dark, are you?”

  “Yes, indeed,” came the reply. “I find it strangely relaxing, darkness. It’s like the womb. Or the tomb. Funny business, language. Full of that sort of coincidence. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course it does.” Andrew sat down across from him, where he could see Rose through the window, angling back and forth across the kitchen. It was a comforting sight, but it made him feel vaguely guilty, and he wondered suddenly where he’d put his painting paraphernalia. He’d have a go at the garage in the morning, before the day heated up. It wouldn’t take him long.

  The day’s newspaper lay in a heap beside Pennyman’s chair. A crumpled piece lay in the shadows, half atop the pile, as if Pennyman had read something in it that he didn’t at all like, and had wadded it up in a rage. There was an odd quality to it that caught Andrew’s eye. He bent forward to have a better look and discovered that it wasn’t a crumple at all, but was an inflated origami fish, with spiny little fins, folded up out of the comic section of the Herald. The sight of it was unnerving, although Andrew couldn’t entirely say why.

  Fog wisped across the lawn, obscuring the curb trees. A soft ocean wind blew, scraping tree limbs across the eaves of the porch, sighing through the bushes and unclipped grass, swirling the fog. The pale mists were a perfect accompaniment, somehow, to Pennyman’s white suit and reeking pipe. He cast Andrew a mysterious sideways glance and said, “I’ve spent some time in the Orient.” Then he nodded at the origami fish by way of explanation. “Delicate things, aren’t they? Like flower petals. The fog will half-dissolve it in the night—like the fleeting years, like life itself.” He sighed and waved his hand tiredly, gesturing, perhaps, at life.

  Andrew nodded. He couldn’t stand Pennyman. The man acted as if he were on a stage. “I never did get the knack of folding up paper,” Andrew said. “Couldn’t even fold a paper hat.” Pennyman stared at him, as if he expected something more, something philosophic, as if the reference to paper hats couldn’t, alone, have been the point of Andrew’s utterance. Andrew’s hand shook on his knee. He grinned widely. “My sister could, though. She could fold up … well, anything.”

  With a flourish of his wrist, Pennyman opened up his hand. A quarter lay in his open palm. He widened his eyes at Andrew, as if to say, “Watch this,” and he tumbled the coin over onto the back of his hand with one smooth movement of his thumb, flip-flopping it back and forth across his knuckles. Then he rolled it around into his palm again, caught it between his thumb and forefinger, and snapped his fingers so that the coin vanished up the sleeve
of his coat.

  Andrew was at a loss. It was a neat trick, to be sure, but he couldn’t at all guess what Pennyman meant by it. He grinned, though, and produced a coin of his own, a nickel, which he balanced on end on the tip of his finger. It seemed to him that their encounter on the front porch was shaping up into a sort of contest, a test of cleverness or harmony or reason—as if they were competing students in some rare breed of martial arts school, learning to tread on rice paper without making any noise or balance on one leg like a swamp bird.

  Pennyman nodded at the upended nickel, then smiled in appreciation when Andrew drew back his forearm, allowing the nickel to roll down his tilted finger onto the edge of his palm and then down his arm and off his elbow into the air, where he snatched it up. He bowed just a little. All in all it beat Pennyman’s knuckle-rolling. And the open-sleeve trick was amateurish. Anyone could do that.

  Pennyman said nothing. He flourished his quarter again, and, looking very grave, seemed to shove it into his ear. Then with a look of sudden surprise he hauled it out of his mouth, rattled it in his cupped hands, opened them, and seemed mystified to find no quarter at all.

  That was cheap, thought Andrew, wondering what other coin tricks he remembered. Somewhere, in a shoebox tied with twine, he had a nickel with a nail welded to it. You’d pound the nail into the floor, then laugh and point at people who tried to pick it up. He made a mental note to remember it and play it on Pennyman later, when he suspected nothing. It would do him no good at the moment, though. He was at a loss for another trick. He could wedge quarters into his eyes, or dimes into his nose and ears, but the effect would be lost on Pennyman. It would be lost on anyone, for that matter—which was something in itself. There was always some profit merely in confounding people. Pennyman would at least wonder what Andrew meant by it. There was a certain indignity involved in shoving dimes into one’s nostrils, though.