The Paper Grail Page 9

  “Surely two or three more weeks …” Howard said, calculating when Halloween was.

  “In two weeks Mr. Barton will be living out of the back of his automobile,” she said, interrupting him. “I pity his poor wife, but she’s brought this upon herself, marrying the likes of him.”

  The front door squeaked fully open just then, and a rubber bat as big as a pigeon dropped down into the doorway, flapping on the end of a black thread. His uncle stood hidden inside somewhere, probably manipulating a pulley. Howard could hear him stifling his laughter in the palm of his hand. The woman made a rush for the open door again, but Howard was there before her, pulling it shut, trapping the bat outdoors. It dangled in front of the closed door, its nose thumping against a panel like a rubber knocker.

  She cast Howard a faint grin and shook her head tiredly, as if the rubber bat trick had very nicely illustrated exactly what sort of man Roy Barton was. Which of course it did, to Howard’s way of thinking. “My client is willing to offer you ten cents on the dollar,” he said. “Right now. Instantly.” He pulled his checkbook out of his jacket pocket, took out a pen, and opened the book, as if ready to sign it.

  “Tell Mr. Barton he can park his car behind the Texaco station at the comer, in back along with the other wrecks. He can utilize the gas station rest room that way.” She turned around and stepped off the porch, heading for the curb. The sound of chains and recorded laughter echoed out of the upstairs window, very slow and throaty this time, as if played at a too-slow speed. Howard saw the back of her neck flush pink, but she didn’t turn around.

  He caught up with her on the street as she was climbing into her car. Keeping his back to the house, he talked through the open passenger window. She started the car right up, as if she meant to drive off. “Four hundred even?” he asked.

  She gave him an assessing squint, her eyes traveling to his checkbook, as if a little disappointed to see it. “Four hundred forty-two. It’s already three weeks late. There’s another payment due within eight days. Precisely. Or I’ll take action.”

  “Here then.” He tore off the check and handed it through the window. She hesitated for a moment, but finally she took it, as if she couldn’t stand not to.

  “You’re a very small boy,” she said. “And it’s a very big and badly designed dike that you’re trying to stopper up.” She blinked rapidly, but her voice was slow and studied now, like the voice of an aged and nearly psychotic schoolmarm delivering a standard lecture on behavior for the ten thousandth time. She suddenly changed her tone, though, looking him in the eyes. For a moment it looked to Howard as if she had gone into trance, and then she gave him a sideways look and asked, “Who are you, really?” She seemed to be seeing him clearly for the first time, and for a moment he was overwhelmed with confusion, as if he had just been caught stealing something.

  Howard fought for something to say. She obviously hadn’t swallowed the lawyer gag. “Just a friend from down south,” he said. “He’s in pretty tight straits right now, but he’ll pull out of it. He’s got a couple of irons in the fire.”

  She gazed at him, smiling faintly, as if he had said that Uncle Roy was really a Persian prince, just about to inherit the kingdom.

  “The water you’re swimming in is deeper and darker than you can imagine,” she said. “And you won’t be able to find the bottom when you tire out, which you will, very shortly. I don’t know who you are, but if you’ve come out here to challenge me, you’ve made a fatal error. I’ll see that old fraud on the street. See if J won’t. He won’t stand in my way, and neither will you.” She gave him a pitying look then, as if what she was telling him was purely for his own good. “Mark me, he’ll bleed you dry, too, if you let him. Go back home. Don’t throw good money after bad. There’s nothing for you here. You don’t understand anything.”

  She pulled away from the curb just then, and Howard had to step back quick to avoid being clipped. He ditched the checkbook in his coat, and after pulling his bags out of the truck, headed back into the house, wondering at her strange speech. It hadn’t sounded as if she were merely talking about finances.

  “What came of it?” asked Uncle Roy. “Did she react to the props?”

  “Infuriated her.”

  “Good, good. So much the better. Will she hold off until the end of the month?”

  “Yes, but I had to threaten her,” Howard said. “I guess the lawyer scam worked on her.” Howard didn’t like to lie to his uncle, except that Uncle Roy would feel good about the ruse, and that was worth something and would explain why the old woman had gone off without any money. “These landlord types want the check,” Howard said. “They don’t want to foreclose. They can’t afford it. They’re in the business of being paid, not of renovating houses. I guaranteed her the money come November. It was as simple as that.”

  “And we’ll get it, too. This haunted house business can’t fail. You’ve seen what I’ve got going here—the corpses, the ghost woman, the bats.”

  Howard nodded. “The eyeballs,” he said, finishing the list. He realized that his hands were shaking. The meeting outside had worked him over pretty thoroughly. Now he had involved himself in a lie, and in the end it would probably be impossible to hide it from Uncle Roy, who, regardless of what sort of deadbeat he was, wouldn’t put up with Howard paying his bills for him. Sylvia hadn’t made that part up.

  “Who is this woman?” Howard asked.

  “One Heloise Lamey. She owns half the coast. Part of a consortium of some sort. This man Stoat is part of it. They’re an octopus—a finger in every damned sort of pie.”

  “So she’s Sylvia’s landlady, too, down at the shop?”

  “One and the same. Stoat wasn’t a bad sort, years ago. Money is the root, though. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. Money is the stinking root.”

  “What’s their problem?”

  “They’re millionaires, aren’t they? Rough crowd, millionaires. All this talk of redevelopment … There’s oil in it for them, too—offshore. They’d pave the ocean if there was money in it. Take your man Stoat. He’s drunk my beer, dated my daughter. He was always a little slick, of course. But I don’t hold that against a man. That’s all appearances, and we know what those are worth. But then he fell in with the old woman and made a couple of bucks. That frosted it. He turned into a damned chameleon, changed the color of his scales. Started to live for his bank account.”

  Howard found the anti-Stoat talk very pleasant, and he wished that he knew more about the man so as to be able to run him down even more expansively. His mouth was dry, though—probably a nervous reaction from his bout with the landlady. “I’m going to grab a glass of water,” he said, leaving his uncle in the living room. Aunt Edith had gone back upstairs. He circled around into the kitchen, working things over in his mind. He had been there about an hour and a half and already the complications were descending on him. He might have expected it. Nobody told him it would be easy. There were never any guarantees. He drank a glass of water at the sink, staring out the window at the woods, lost in puzzled thought. The sound of a voice made him jump.

  “That’s not a friendly place, those woods.” It was Uncle Roy, who had slipped into the kitchen. He nodded at the window, at the forest beyond. His face was serious, almost fearful. “There’s bears in them. Can you believe that? Mountain lions, too. Those woods are stalked by carnivores.”

  “Really?” Howard said. “Right out there?”

  “Can’t tell by looking, can you? Trees are too dense. The creatures might be watching us right this moment, hiding in the shadows. They don’t take well to civilization. It ruins them. They develop a taste for garbage over the years. They’ll tear a man’s head clean off, too, and eat his entrails.”

  “Not often, I hope.”

  “Doesn’t have to happen to a man more than once, does it?” Uncle Roy smiled at him, having deliberately misunderstood. “Nope, those are inhospitable trees—nothing but poison oak in there. The poison vapors get into th
e lungs, finally. Throat closes up tight. Death by constriction, the medical men call it.” He shook his head darkly, not relishing the idea of a man’s throat closing up. “Cultists, too. All varieties of them, but not half as bad as the dope farmers.”

  “I hear they’re a dangerous crowd,” Howard said. “I can understand it, I guess, price of dope and all. Must be profitable.”

  “Oh, there’s money in it. Yes indeed. Money’s paramount in a backwater like this. Guns, dogs, trip cords, Claymore mines, razor wire, spike pits, bear traps—you name it; the dope farmers have the lot of it, the whole megillah. I wouldn’t go into those woods on a bet.”

  Howard shook his head, as if he wouldn’t either, for the moment anyway. Aunt Edith had gone into them quick enough, though, and carrying a sandwich, too.

  “Then there’s the logging roads. They’ll run you right down, loggers will. They’d take a man like you for an environmentalist. Nothing they hate worse. They’ll shoot you on sight. The only crowd that won’t shoot you are the cultists. They want you alive.”

  Uncle Roy seemed to have gone crazy, rattling off his catalogue of forest horrors. He peered into the refrigerator again, pushing things around, trying to find something that appealed to him. “Coke?” he asked.

  “Thanks. Shall we ask Aunt Edith?”

  “For permission? Or whether she wants one, too?” He looked angry all of a sudden, as if the question had set him off. “She’s retired, actually. Taking a nap. You won’t see her until it’s time to cook dinner.” His face softened a little then. “She’s worried about Sylvia, to tell you the truth. What she wants is more faith. Things iron themselves out. She’s got the usual motherly instincts, though, and they run her ragged. Survival is paramount in a business like Sylvia’s. If she survives the winter …” He shrugged and then grinned abruptly, as if having thought of something more cheerful. “Edith is ticked off about the rubber bat, actually. She wasn’t keen on my putting on the laugh record, either. She takes the old woman too seriously.”

  Howard couldn’t think of anything to say about taking the old woman seriously that wouldn’t irritate his uncle, so he changed the subject entirely, trying to force Uncle Roy to slip up and be a little bit candid for a change. “Tell me,” he said. “What are they, these gluers I keep hearing about? Mr. Jimmers mentioned them to me. They seem to have stolen a bunch of junk out of my glove compartment. Are they some kind of cult?”

  “Nobody knows, really. Almost nobody. Live back in among the trees. Anarchists to the last man jack of them. Won’t wear matching socks to save their mortal souls. Won’t cut their hair. Spend their days gluing stuff up, layer on top of layer, usually on their cars. Coral reef syndrome; that’s what I call it. Kids all ride skateboards—break into churches and schools. Won’t work. Some people think it’s primitivism, the decline of man. They distill a hell of a bottle of whiskey, though, just between the two of us.”

  “I can tell you that their wine isn’t worth anything at all. I tried some last night. I was forced to drink water instead.”

  “That bad?” Uncle Roy grimaced, as if finding it hard to imagine. “They don’t drink the stuff themselves, that’s why. They don’t know a lick about wine, except that all these natural-sounding fruit wines are big with the tourists, especially the teetotalers. They bring home a bottle of herb wine and offer it to company as a joke. It’s like taking the cure. The gluer elders can drink whiskey, though. They smoke the malt over fires like the Scots do, only they don’t use peat; they use green redwood skived out of root balls with an adze.”

  “Root balls?”

  “That’s right. Got to be done that way. Hand me down a couple of those glasses.”

  Howard reached into the cupboard over his head, pulling out two green tumblers. Behind them, sitting in the back corner of the cupboard, was a collection of salt and pepper shakers—ten or twelve pairs. Sitting among them, smug and leering, was a porcelain Humpty Dumpty. Howard was stricken speechless. Here, too, he thought.

  “Do you know what the oldest living thing in the world is?” asked his uncle.

  Howard shook his head, unable to guess.

  “A root ball from a stand of redwoods. They’ve got redwood trees out there that are two thousand years old if they’re a day. Where do they come from? you might ask. Not from seeds, mostly—from root balls. One tree puts down roots and then one day another tree comes up from the roots of that first one. Then along comes another, and all of these new ones putting down new roots. First tree grows old and dies, finally—falls over. Maybe it’s a thousand years old, maybe two. And this goes on for twenty thousand years through God’s own generations of trees, all of them growing and adding roots to this root ball. It doesn’t die, though. Fires don’t touch it. Bugs can’t get at it. How old is it? How big is it? You tell me. Nobody can guess. Bigger than the pyramids, older than the woolly mammoth.”

  He squinted at the unopened Coca-Cola cans. “Anyway, that’s what they use to smoke the whiskey. Older the root material, the better the spirits. That’s paramount. You’re a literary man. Have you read Morris’ essay on age?”

  It seemed to Howard as if he must have, but he couldn’t calculate it right now. The coincidence of the Humpty Dumpty still played in his mind. He reached into the cupboard again and pulled it out, waving it at his uncle. “What is this, anyway?” Howard asked. “I seem to be running into a lot of them lately.”

  His uncle eyeballed him, as if he were trying to fathom the question, or, perhaps, as if he were considering how much he could safely say on the subject. “That’s Humpty Dumpty,” he said. “One of Edith’s dust collectors. Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “Right. It’s just that they seem to mean something, don’t they? Maybe it’s the look on his face. He’s such a know-it-all.”

  “Mean something? I’m not sure … They’ve got a fascinating history, I suppose. They’re an incredibly ancient business involving fertility and reproduction. Sort of a metaphoric root ball, aren’t they? Nobody knows how long they’ve been around. That lad is one of your vegetation kings; that’s my notion. Early incarnation of the thing. Your friends the gluers are fond of him. They revere a fat man. Consider themselves to be the king’s men, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Howard said, putting the little porcelain egg back into the cupboard. “Who’s the king, then?”

  Uncle Roy hesitated for a moment before speaking. “Maybe you’re putting too fine a point on it,” he said. “Safer to think of it as a myth. It’s easy in this climate to get swept up in the wind and rain and forest, to start thinking in terms of weather. Things up here can be supernaturally green, and would be, except for the drought. People drift north talking about ‘getting back to the land.’ But they don’t know what that means. Not really. That’s what I was telling you a moment ago—that business about the woods. They’re a dangerous place. Do you follow me?”

  Howard shook his head. He didn’t follow anything except that his half-innocent question about the Humpty Dumpty had sailed the conversation straight into the realm of the mystical. What was wrong with people up here? Everyone was a puzzle waiting to be solved. First Mr. Jimmers and then the landlady. Now Uncle Roy. And what the hell was Aunt Edith doing out in the woods with a sandwich on a plate?

  “Look here,” Uncle Roy said, suddenly animated. “It’s nearly four o’clock. Forget the Cokes. Let’s make a little run down to Sammy’s. I usually drop in about this time. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill before dinner. We can work out the elements of the barn lumber scheme.”

  What scheme? Howard wondered, following his uncle out the door. Now suddenly there was a scheme, although nobody on earth could lay out the particulars of it. In his mind, Uncle Roy was probably certain that Howard had given serious thought to the barn lumber angle. He hoped the haunted house plans were less imaginary.

  “We’ll take your truck,” Uncle Roy said, climbing heavily into the passenger side and looking down furtively into
his jacket pocket.

  Howard went around opposite and fired up the engine, driving down Oak Street toward the highway, swinging south finally, and then back up Cypress. “Across the street there,” Uncle Roy said. “By the warehouse.”

  The tavern was long and almost windowless, sided in dark redwood with the name “Sammy’s” painted on it. Its roof was a shambles of different-colored composition shingles in layers—strips and pieces having broken or blown off over the years. A neon cocktail glass stood atop a rusted steel post outside, lit dimly despite it being daylight. Only a couple of cars were parked in the gravel lot when they pulled in, including what might have been an old Chevy from around 1965. Only you couldn’t quite tell now, because it was utterly covered in layers of cheap religious icons—Day of the Dead skulls and bleeding Christs and robed Virgin Marys made out of painted plastic and plaster of Paris.

  “Gluers,” Uncle Roy whispered.

  7

  “TROUBLE?” Howard asked, and almost at once he felt a little foolish, a little childish. He realized then that he was full of a vague, bulk-rate uneasiness. There was a shadow lying across the landscape, and he suspected that it had some sort of fearful shape and that he was on the verge of making it out. Here was another piece of that shadow, he had thought, seeing the car parked beneath the neon sign.

  Uncle Roy shook his head. “No,” he said. “You can relax about that. You won’t be running into any trouble from them. I’d guess just the opposite. Follow my lead, though. There might be profit in this. You do the knocking, I’ll do the talking.”

  Howard followed him into the bar, suddenly unable to see in the darkness. There were illuminated beer signs on the walls and a light over a pool table in one corner, but it was dim and cool and smelled like spilled beer. He stood for a moment just inside the door in order to let his eyes adjust. Uncle Roy moved off, negotiating the furniture easily—from long practice, probably. In a moment Howard made out the bulk of shadowy tables and chairs and the long bar against the wall.