Mr. Cables (Novella #9)

by Ronald Malfi

  “Until you showed up, Mr. Paventeau, we never knew this book existed. We never knew there was more of our boy out there. And now we’ve got his words, don’t we?”

  “We’ve got another piece of him,” added Gloria. “So thank you. Thank you.”

  “There’s also a sizable amount of money.”

  “How’s that?” Arnold and Gloria said at the same time.

  “Your son’s book was a bestseller. It’s earned quite a bit of money over the years. It was optioned for a movie twice.”

  “A movie?” Gloria said, her eyes going wide.

  “It’s a lot of money,” I said, digging a cashier’s check out of my coat pocket. “Your son earned it. It should go to you.”

  “Oh, we don’t need for nothing,” Gloria said as I handed the check to her husband. “We’re really getting along just—”

  “Jesus, boy,” Arnold said, looking at the check. “This can’t be real.” He looked up at me. “Is this some kind of come-on?”

  “No, sir.”

  Gloria took the check from him. Her eyes lit up. “Dear God,” she uttered.

  “There’s more,” I told them. “I’ll have my agent send you the royalties from here on out, too.”

  “We can’t take this, Mr. Paventeau,” Gloria said, holding the check out to me. I saw her husband’s eyes shift in her direction, a clear signal that he perhaps did not share his wife’s sentiment.

  “What about that little girl?” I asked. “Is she your granddaughter?”

  “One of nine!” Gloria said proudly. “We’ve got nine grandchildren, Mr. Paventeau. Anthony had three siblings, did you know that?”

  I’d read something about siblings in Tony’s obituary—his real ­obituary—all those years ago, but I couldn’t remember the details.

  “Listen,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t have a writing career if it wasn’t for that first book—your son’s book—so maybe I owe you everything I have. I don’t know. I’m…I’m confused…”

  “Son,” Arnold said, leaning closer to me from his armchair. “There’s no need to be confused, okay? There’s no need to be confused.”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “Okay. But please take the money. Give it to your grandkids. It’s Tony’s money and it should stay in your family.”

  “All right, son,” said Arnold. He took the check from his wife and made it disappear inside the breast pocket of his chambray shirt.

  Gloria stood. She touched her husband on the shoulder but her eyes remained on me. “It was so good of you to come out this way, especially in this weather, Mr. Paventeau.”

  “I’m not sure I had a choice,” I said.

  “Will you stay for supper?”

  “Oh, no. I really can’t.”

  “Look at all that snow,” Gloria said, migrating toward the front windows. It was really coming down now.

  “I’ll be okay,” I assured her. I set the water glass on an end table, gathered Mr. Cables from the love seat, and stood. “I should probably get back on the road.”

  “You’ve gotta come see the airbrush work Anthony did on the bike first,” Arnold said. He grunted as he hoisted himself out of the armchair.

  “All right,” I said. Then something occurred to me. “Have either of you ever heard of anyone called Mr. Cables?”

  A look of utter stupefaction fell upon both their faces. They exchanged a glance, and for the first time since my arrival, Arnold Meeks’s gaze turned suspicious. “Mr. Cables,” he said. “How’d you…”

  “How do you know about Mr. Cables?” Gloria said.

  Because I didn’t want these people to think I was crazy, I said, “Tony wrote about him in class. In one of his stories.”

  “Mr. Cables was Tony’s nickname when he was younger,” Gloria said. “I haven’t heard that name in…oh, Lord, in such a long time. I’d nearly forgotten.”

  Arnold put an arm around his wife’s shoulders. She still held the paperback copy of The Body Fields to her breast.

  “A nickname,” I said. I glanced down at the book in my own hands.

  “I’d all but forgotten,” Gloria said. Her eyes were glassy now, threatening tears.

  “When he was just a kid, he was hit by a car,” Arnold said. “He spent weeks in traction, his leg all busted up and in a cast. They had him in the hospital room with his leg suspended by these cables to keep the swelling down. He was so scared. We called him Mr. Cables, and he liked that. The name stuck for—”

  “For years,” Gloria cut in. Her eyes were distant now, lost in a memory. “We called him that for years.”

  “Until he grew up,” Arnold said. “Then there was no more Mr. Cables.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I told them, but they weren’t listening to me now. They were lost in reverie, somewhere with their dead son.

  13

  Before leaving, I went out to the garage with Arnold Meeks, who showed me the airbrush work his son had done on an old Harley. It was a beautiful piece of artwork, reminiscent of Picasso’s Starry Night, only this was a depiction of a row of houses with lampposts between them, the sky above ablaze with stars as weighty and prominent as planets. A figure stood beside one of the houses, partially obscured by a lamppost—a figure in a trench coat and fedora. The figure’s face was a dark, smudgy shadow. As I examined it, I felt a bit of Tony Meeks right there with me, as he had been nearly two decades earlier in my creative writing class.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said.

  Arnold stood there, a single tear forging a path down his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “For what happened.”

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  “I’m sorry for what I did. I wanted to be a writer so badly I guess I’d do anything.”

  He smiled at me. “All honest writers are dangerous writers,” he said.

  His words jarred me.

  “Just something Anthony had once said to me. It was right before he died. I asked him where he’d heard that and he said he made it up.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The whole thing was bizarre. Once I regained some measure of composure, I said, “He got that from me. I said that in class. He…he stole my words.”

  “Well,” Arnold Meeks said, and he clapped me on the back. “There you go, then.”

  Yes.

  There I go.

  14

  My car broke down maybe two miles from the interstate. I managed to usher it to the curb before it died, all the emergency lights coming on in the dashboard and the smell of burning oil permeating the interior. I got out, shivering in the cold, and looked up and down the street. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a gas station.

  “Damn it,” I said, popping the hood and peering at the smoking engine. But what the hell did I know about cars? I slammed the hood back down and buttoned my coat. I stepped up on the curb as snow fell all around me. The road was already becoming impassive.

  I took out my cell phone but found that, while it had a full set of bars, I could not make a phone call on it.

  “Great.”

  I tucked the cell phone back in my coat pocket. When I looked down, I saw I was holding Mr. Cables in one hand.

  Hello, the book seemed to say to me.

  “Hello,” I said, the words shivering out of me on a cloud of vapor.

  When I heard the metallic keening of brakes, I looked up. A pair of headlights approached through the snowstorm. It was a bus. I took a step backward onto the snow-covered sidewalk and watched as the bus slowly rolled to a stop beside my broken-down car.

  I looked up at the windows. They were all empty except for one, very close to the back. I felt my body go rigid. A figure sat there, staring out at me beneath a wide-brimmed fedora. His face was nothing but shadow, though two dim lights burned where his eyes should have been.

  The bus’s hydraulic doors wheezed open.

  Tucking the book under one arm, I got on the bus and headed toward the back, where the figure in the fedora
and trench coat sat waiting for me.