The Last Coin (3 page)

The city of Seal Beach was full of oddballs these days, too: men from secret societies, palm readers, psychics 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.

Family legend told how, one autumn morning, back on the farm, there had been a furious clatter on the back porch. It was as if a portable earthquake were rattling the windows. It was hot and muggy outside, and somehow the banging and shaking didn’t surprise anyone, not even the children. Jars toppled off the pantry shelf and broke; the porch railing groaned; the house shuddered as if some fearful Providence waited impatiently outside, tapping its foot and frowning, checking its pocket watch.

The grandmother, clutching a fireplace poker, cast the door open. A half-score of children peered past her skirts.

There on the stoop had stood a pig, broad as a buggy, with a silver spoon in its mouth. It waited, watching the family gaping there, until the grandmother, very calmly and solemnly, took the spoon from between its teeth. The pig turned and ran away on idiotic legs, lumbering around the side of the chicken coop, out of their lives. The thin spoon was dented on the edge from the pig’s teeth, and there was an almost rubbed-off profile on the concave surface of it. If you held it in moonlight, and tilted it just so, it seemed to be the bearded face of a pharaoh, perhaps, or an Old Testament king with a stiffened beard and an unlikely hat. There was a moon on the other side, or maybe a curled up fish, or both, one inside the other; it was too dim and rubbed to tell.

It created a stir in Alton for a week. Conversations sprang up around it, as if one of the grandmother’s ten children had been born with the same article between
its
teeth. By week’s end, though, the business of the spoon dwindled until nobody, in the family or out of it, cared any more. But Rose’s grandmother polished and kept it, and it fell out, years later, that the spoon was given to Naomi, who met her husband because of it—or so the story went—and that the husband had considered it some sort of talisman. The spoon disappeared when he died—or was murdered, as some thought. Rose had heard that years later his young widow had had his corpse exhumed and cut open, and the spoon was found in his stomach and recovered.

Even more years later—almost seventy-five years after the arrival of the pig at the family farm in Iowa—Andrew and his wife had moved from Eagle Rock to Seal Beach, and bought, at least partly with Aunt Naomi’s money, a thirteen-room craftsman bungalow with the idea of renovating it and opening up an inn and a restaurant. They would rent out rooms, by the day, week, or month. They’d take in boarders and feed them breakfast. There would be a cafe with a price-fixed menu and a bar, open on weekends. Aunt Naomi would live upstairs.

Her spoon came west with her and sat now in a mahogany china hutch, along with a collection of old Delft pottery and the last cracked pieces of a porcelain chocolate set.

There was something about the spoon. Andrew couldn’t define it. It was vaguely loathsome, like an enormous snail, maybe, or the wrong sort of toad, with an almost visible trail behind it leading through a dusty old Iowa graveyard and into antiquity. Maybe it was the idea of the thing’s having been cut out of the stomach of a dead man. It all signified, somehow.

It meant something, but what it meant he wasn’t sure. Rose was indifferent to it. It was just another bit of family history—probably lies. She hadn’t yet been born, after all, when the fabled pig had arrived on the back porch. It sounded suspiciously like one of Uncle Arthur’s tales, Andrew had to admit. It sounded
just
like one of Uncle Arthur’s tales—which made it all the more curious.

They’d moved into the bungalow and rolled up their sleeves, uncrating boxes for weeks. They painted. They crept around in the cool cellar replacing galvanized pipes. They ran electrical conduit to replace the old single line and insulator wiring that rats had chewed into rubble. Andrew converted one of the rooms into a library, with a couch and easy chairs and footstools and a painting of a clipper ship on the wall. He hauled out his aquaria with an eye toward setting up half a dozen.