In For a Penny (14 page)

“Well, it was that damn penny.”

“You’re
that
worried about a penny?” She grinned at him, pulling a lock of hair away from her face. It fell in front of her eyes again, and she looked up at it, her eyes crossing, and blew at it, letting it fall again.

He found himself smiling. Peggy had some goofy mannerisms, and he loved her for it. But her
thinking
wasn’t usually goofy, and right now he wanted counsel. “I guess there’s no
good
reason to be worried about it,” he said. “It’s just been bugging me, like a song in your head that you can’t get rid of.”

“Great. If there’s no reason to worry, then quit worrying. Case closed.”

“Well…Okay, I
am
worried. I took the woman’s penny. That’s the…case.”

“But you say you left the penny with her. You didn’t really take the penny?”

“No, but that means I took the purse.”

“Exactly. But the purse, according to its owner, is only
worth
a penny. So one way or another the whole issue
is
over a penny.”

“Yeah, now that you put it that way.”

“Then you’ve got an Abraham Lincoln complex.”

“I guess so. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Abraham Lincoln walked ten miles through the snow to return a penny that he borrowed.”

“Why would Abraham Lincoln borrow a penny in the first place? I mean … a
penny?”

“Maybe he needed to buy a coin purse.” She smiled at him. “Let me have a look at it.”

He took the purse out of his pocket and handed it to her.

She gazed at the painting, still grinning. “Wow,” she said. “This is really … something. I think she saw you coming.”

“For a penny it’s a bargain.”

“Well, for the kind of penny
you
paid, it’s a bargain.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. That’s the hardest penny I ever spent. It’s been eating me up for the last hour.”

“Okay. I can settle this. Ask yourself a question: of the various choices open to you, which one’s the hardest?”

“Going back down there and confessing.”

“Then that’s what you should do. When it comes to moral issues, the hard choice is always the right one. In this case it’s easy. Just bring the woman another penny. Then your conscience can take a rest.”

. . .

No doubt it was good advice, but when he passed Mrs. Fortunato’s house, driving his car this time, he was relieved to see that her garage door was shut and the sign was no longer tacked to the mailbox. She had closed up early. He noted the glow of a lamp through the drawn curtains in the front window, and he actually started to pull over to the curb with the idea of knocking on the door. But then, as if drawn back out onto the street by a magnetic force, he headed instead for the county park.

What he would do was finish his walk in peace. Mrs. Fortunato could wait. As for his conscience, it could wait with her. She owned it right now anyway.

. . .

He walked uphill at the park toward the trees above the picnic grounds, loafing along with the vague idea that he was still looking for something, something in particular. He had told Peggy that he was going down to the bookstore, which wasn’t a lie yet. Maybe he
would
go to the bookstore. Maybe he would do this, and maybe he would do that. He was living in a land of uncertainties. He must have been susceptible as hell this morning to have gotten so worked up over a damned penny. Somehow it had made him feel very small, that penny had, but he felt considerably larger now, and he had no intention of confronting Mrs. Fortunato. Neither did he have any intention of
not
confronting her. He had moved into neutral territory, wait-and-see territory.

The afternoon was empty and quiet, and it seemed to him that there was a strangely suggestive quality on the wind, although what it suggested he couldn’t quite say. He cut across toward the deserted baseball diamond to get a drink out of the fountain before heading uphill again, in among a stand of sycamores. There was a pile of fallen leaves twenty feet ahead of him, as if someone had made a half-hearted attempt to rake them up, and on impulse he jogged toward it, giving the pile a tremendous kick so that dry leaves flew into the air, the wind carrying them away across the grass. He watched the flying leaves, caught up in the lonesome atmosphere of the deserted park, and when he turned to walk back downhill, his eye was drawn to an immense leaf, dry and curled and looking uncannily like a severed human hand.

He bent over and picked it up; beneath it lay a twenty dollar bill, crisp and flat as if newly minted—very like a leaf itself.

He stood for a moment, filled with both wonder and fear. The bill was utterly incongruous, lying there on the grass, and the idea came into his head that it belonged to Mrs. Fortunato, and that this was some kind of trick or test. He picked it up gingerly—a garden-variety twenty and nothing more. “Finders keepers,” he muttered, turning it over in his hand. Almost immediately the glow of the found money began to cast the morning in a new light, and he was struck with a new way of seeing things. …

Perhaps he had been dead wrong about the coin purse incident. Perhaps finding the purse and being given the means to buy it were nothing less than the launching of his lucky day. And this twenty dollar bill, he saw now, was Karma paying him back for a morning’s worth of rough usage, balancing the scales, realigning his universe by lining his wallet. Happy with this fresh insight, he hurried toward the car, folding the twenty and slipping it into the coin purse, which, despite its tiny size, had begun to feel like the golden goose.

. . .

At the bookstore, it didn’t take him five minutes of browsing before a volume caught his eye, a heavy old collection of stories by Ambrose Bierce. He had always wanted to read Ambrose Bierce, one of the more mysterious and misanthropic literary figures, who had disappeared into Mexico under uncertain circumstances. He opened the book to a random page and looked at the top paragraph, reading the first full sentence: “One evening the devil put it into my head to be an unspeakable idiot.” He slammed the book shut and started to put it back on the shelf, his hand trembling, although it hadn’t been trembling a second ago.

But then he stopped himself. Talk about unspeakable idiots, he was apparently turning into one, reacting to every damned thing as if he had learned nothing at the park. He headed straight for the checkout counter now, where he set the book down, paying for it with the newfound twenty dollar bill, which covered the price with money to spare. He put the change into the purse and went out into the sunlight, superficially satisfied, but all the time, in the back of his mind, wondering if the book
had
in fact spoken to him. The idea was preposterous: a message from what?—the good angel? He stopped where he stood and let the book fall open in his hand, giving it a chance to speak to him a second time if it wanted to.

“You’ve got my whole attention,” he said under his breath, although when he said it he knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t give a damn, really, for what the book had to say, because no book had anything to say that was half as useful as a twenty dollar bill. But he pointed with his finger anyway and read the indicated line: “Architecturally and in the point of ‘furnishing’ the Snakery had a severe simplicity befitting the humble circumstances of its occupants …” and so forth. Nothing. Nonsense. The Snakery!

He shut the book. What luck demanded was vigilance and a willing mind. Doubt would kill it. He turned his attention instead to the parking lot pavement, watching for something more. The twenty dollar bill, he told himself, was nothing but a precursor. If there was twenty dollars to be found, then there was forty. It stood to reason. But there was nothing on the ground except the usual litter, and so he got into his car and started for the grocery store two blocks away. He would buy Peggy’s eggs, do his good deed for the day, which would take care of any restless angels.

It was at the edge of the lot, while turning onto the street, that he saw a Coke bottle half hidden by overgrown ivy in a flowerbed. Struck with a sudden compelling hunch, he pulled over and cut the engine, climbing out to take a closer look. It was one of the traditional ten ounce bottles, the glass laced with the rainbow discoloration of years of sunlight and weather. When he picked it out from among the ivy vines he saw that it was full of silver dimes.

He stared at it in disbelief, then shook one of the dimes out into his hand. It was an old Liberty dime.
Yes
, he thought. Real silver! How many in the bottle? A couple of hundred? This wasn’t luck; it was something else, something that … something that he couldn’t put into words. But he realized one thing for certain: that for the first time since early morning he felt sure of himself; he
believed in himself
. He was his own man at last, calling his own shots, with faith in his own, his own …

But his thought evaporated when he spotted a Taco Bell wrapper in the gutter. He hurried to it, unwadding it carefully and looking inside—nothing but cheese shreds and taco sauce. He got into the car and drove toward the grocery store, stopping a half dozen more times to investigate castaway trash, but with no result, and by the time he parked outside Albertson’s it seemed to him that every single object that he saw must hide some valuable thing.
Project
, he told himself, trying to think a treasure into existence.
Concentrate, damn it
. Nothing happened: there were no hundred dollar bills within the pages of the advertising pamphlet lying in the shopping cart, no gold nuggets rattling around in the empty Dr Pepper can that he drop-kicked toward the wall of the market.

But when the can stopped spinning he saw that it lay next to what looked like a small round fishbowl sitting beneath the downspout that drained the roof, and he knew at once, with the certainty of an epiphany, that he had once again struck pay dirt. Breathless with anticipation he hurried toward it, looking around to make sure that no one else had seen it, and he actually got down onto his knees to peer at the bowl: a quart-sized globe with a fluted rim, the glass encrusted with tiny barnacle-like calcifications, as if it had sat for years on the ocean bottom. It was rim-full of water, and within the water, magnified by the curve of the glass, were scores of pearls, nearly invisible against the white-painted concrete of the wall behind them.

. . .

On the way home his head spun with the problem of Peggy — what a man owed his wife by way of explanation; and it struck him that this was a clear case of what-you-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-you. He was quite certain of that. Entirely certain. Obviously it wouldn’t be
fair
to Peggy to involve her in the mystery at this point.
Something
was going on here, he told himself. He would be a creep to include her before he knew what the dangers were.

It dawned on him that in his excitement he had never gone into Albertson’s after the eggs. “Let them eat cake,” he said, laughing out loud, then remembering immediately that Marie Antoinette’s head had been cut off for expressing that same sentiment.

When he turned up his own street, he realized that Mrs. Fortunato’s house was drawing near on his starboard side, and for a moment he was awash with indecision. The light still shone behind her curtains, and he took his foot off the accelerator and let it hover above the brake for the few seconds that it took him roll past her property and on toward home.

Of course the idea of stopping was ludicrous now. He saw quite clearly that it had always been ludicrous—more than ludicrous, unwise. And right then all thoughts of Mrs. Fortunato were swept away by something even more worrisome: that the pearls might easily be paste. What he knew about pearls he could put in his hat.

But then the
dimes
certainly weren’t paste, he thought, as he cut the engine. Or whatever it was they made fake dimes out of—if in fact anyone would go to the trouble of counterfeiting dimes, which would be lunacy. And why, on a fortunate day like this, on the day of all days, would he chance upon
paste
pearls? He looked at the luminous little orbs in their fishbowl, glowing in the sunshine through the windshield, and his mood brightened again.

Getting out and easing the car door shut, he slipped the Coke bottle into his pocket, cinching up his belt when the weight of the silver threatened to haul his pants down. He headed silently up the driveway and into the garage, carrying the fish bowl so that it was hidden from sight, just in case Peggy spotted him through the window. Without bothering to turn on the light, he hid the bottle and bowl in a drawer in the bench and then hurried back out, down the driveway again and in through the front door, where he stood listening to the sound of Peggy’s sewing machine whirring away upstairs. In the study he shelved Ambrose Bierce and then stood for another minute looking at a history of ancient Egypt, which he opened to the index in order to find the chapter on the life of Cleopatra, who, legend had it, had been famous for dissolving a pearl in red wine and then drinking it in order to make a show of despising riches.

He found the passage and read it as he walked into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of cabernet from the cupboard, setting it on the counter and then retrieving the corkscrew from its drawer. Excited with the apparently failsafe test, he hastily shoved the corkscrew into the cork, screwing it down hard and fast. …