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.
Rose objected to Andrew’s aquaria. There wouldn’t be time for them. There never had been. They had been a mess half the time—a brown muddle of half-eaten waterweeds and declining fish. Andrew insisted, though. He would set up one, he said, to house a Surinam toad. It was the only aquatic creature he wanted anymore, and she could hardly object to his caring for it. A Surinam toad reminded him of Aunt Naomi, poor thing. Outside her aquarium-like room she’d dry up and wither. Without the family gathered round to conceal her, Aunt Naomi was a sort of unlikely horror, and couldn’t be expected to survive without their charity. His wife scowled at the comparison, but she understood Aunt Naomi’s plight well enough. Unlike Andrew, though, she rarely said anything ill about anyone, especially about Aunt Naomi, whose money they were almost completely dependent on.
Andrew shook his head sadly over the plight of the toad, which, in fact, he’d already bought from the aquarium shop that used to belong to poor old Moneywort, before he’d been murdered. The toad lived at that moment on the back porch, in a five-gallon bucket lidded with a copy of Life magazine. Andrew wouldn’t treat the creature shabbily. He was his brother’s keeper, after a fashion. His soul wouldn’t be worth a drilled-out penny if he abandoned the toad now. In the end he had set up the aquarium on the service porch just behind the kitchen and beside their bedroom.
He and Rose slept in a downstairs room during the first two months they lived in the bungalow. One night late, a week after the setting up of the aquarium, there’d been a fearful clatter on the porch—a scuffling and sloshing and a banging of aquarium lids, and then the odd, Lovecraftian sound of something slurping across the floor of the kitchen. Rose had awakened in a sweat. It was a burglar; she was certain of it. The noise was unnatural—the noise of a fiend. Andrew had picked up a shoe, but he was thinking of the pig, making its racket seventy-five years ago on the back porch of an Iowa farm. He dropped the shoe, certain that he wouldn’t need it. In his nightshirt he peeked out through the half-open door. There was the escaped toad, scurrying across the linoleum floor toward the front of the house, toward the living room, chirping as it ran. He confronted it on the threshold of the kitchen, scooping it up and dropping it back into its aquarium, then weighting the lid with a brick before going back to bed.
It wasn’t until dawn that it occurred to him that the toad must have had a destination. In the living room, against the far wall, sat the china cabinet in which lay the pig spoon. It seemed unlikely at first, then possible, then wildly likely that the toad had been bound for that china cabinet, that it, too, was caught up in the adventure of the spoon. Andrew lay for an hour thinking about it, and then, without waking his wife, he tiptoed out onto the service porch, scooped the toad out of the tank, and set it onto the floor. It sat there, pretending to be dead.
Of course it would with him looking on and all. He’d missed his chance—bungled it. It might have been very different: the toad, thinking itself undiscovered, making away across the floor toward the hutch, wrestling it open somehow, plucking out the spoon, going out the mail slot with the spoon gripped in one of its webbed paws. Andrew might have followed it—to the sea, to a den beneath the old pier, into the back door of one of the derelict carnival rides at the Pike. It would have demonstrated, at the very least, a symphony of mysterious activity. At best—and not at all farfetched—it hinted at the sort of veiled, underlying order that bespoke the very existence of God.
But the toad had sat mute. After long minutes had passed, Andrew plucked it up and returned it once again to its aquarium, where it sank innocently to the bottom and pretended to sleep. He hadn’t proved anything, but he was left with the uncanny suspicion that one foggy morning there would come a rattle at the door handle and a scuffling on the front porch. He would rise, wondering, and throw open the door. On the porch, giving him the glad eye, would be the pig, come round for the spoon. The toad would appear, yawning and stretching, and the two of them, the toad and the pig, would take the spoon and go.
Andrew sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by open boxes of breakfast cereal. He scowled into his coffee. It had gone stale. He would mail-order another two pounds that very morning. Coffee shouldn’t sit in the refriger
ator for more than two weeks. One week was plenty. The precious aromas were lost, somehow. He’d read about it. He’d compiled a notebook full of coffee literature and was toying with the idea of ordering a brass roasting oven from Diedrich. Rose wasn’t keen on it.
She held her coffee mug in her hand, satisfied, not understanding his passion for brewing perfect coffee. She didn’t see that it had to be done just so, or it was barely worth doing at all—they might as well boil up jimsonweed. A cup of coffee was a cup of coffee to her. Well, that was overstating it. She lacked some sort of vital instinct for it, though. “What I don’t get,” she said, peering at him over the top of the mug, “is why you smeared ashes all over your face.”
“I tell you I really was after ‘possums,” he said, putting down the coffee and gesturing. “Do you know what ‘possums would do to the wiring in the roof if they got up there and built a nest? We might as well burn the place to the ground ourselves. They’re nocturnal. You know that. I went out after them, that’s all. Traps don’t work. They’re too smart for traps.”
“Did you try traps?” She looked at him skeptically. He rolled his eyes, as if to suggest that he didn’t see the necessity of trying anything, when a man could round up a ladder and noose and just lasso the creatures. “One got in through the window, you say? In among the cats?”
“That’s right.” He nodded broadly. That was it exactly. In among the cats. He’d seen it leap in, and knew there was going to be trouble. Anyone who understood ‘possums could have seen it. It wouldn’t do for the beast to awaken Aunt Naomi. She’d think it was an enormous rat that had gotten in. So he had gone after it with the noose affair he and Pickett had put together. The beast had run across the dresser, and he’d looped the noose over the head of the statue by mistake. If Aunt Naomi’s bedroom hadn’t been so full of trash, he’d have gotten the ‘possum instead of the statue. But as it was, the thing went back out through the window—made a rush at him and nearly toppled him onto the ground. Rose had heard the racket, hadn’t she? Fat lot of thanks he’d gotten for the effort, too.
“What was all that rigamarole about a prowler on the roof, and then him running down toward the boulevard?”
He blinked at her, stared into his empty coffee cup, and then blinked at her again. “Health Department,” he said. “With neighbors looking on, I had to pretend it was something other than ‘possums. They’d report us, and the Health Department would close us down in a shot. I don’t half-trust Ken-or-Ed. Did you see him parading around out there? And then there’s Pennyman. Do you think he’d stick it here for another moment if he thought there were ‘possums around? He’d be packed and gone, and there goes two hundred a month, like clockwork. It’s the psychology of a ‘possum that you’ve got to understand. A common criminal leaves when he knows you’re onto him. A ‘possum doesn’t care. He moves in wholesale, meaning to stay, and Pennyman moves out. There goes the two hundred, like I said, in a shot. And then the cry goes round that there’s ‘possums positively haunting the place, and we don’t get a nickel’s worth of customers this summer. There’s your inn for you … ‘Possums could have the place; they’ve nearly got it already.” He shook his head darkly, as if he was surprised that he had to explain such a thing.
“Have another cup of coffee?” his wife asked, looking at him sideways and picking up the Chemex beaker. “What’s wrong with the electric drip pot?”
He shook his head at the proffered coffee. “Temperature’s not right. Too hot. Over 180 degrees the water releases all the bitter oils. Wrecks your stomach. And it shouldn’t sit and stew on the hot coil, either. All that does is make the coffee taste like turpentine.”
“Wash your face a bit,” she said. “There’s still ashes all over it. And later on this morning you might look in on poor Aunt Naomi. Explain things to her. I wouldn’t half-wonder at her packing up and leaving.”
“You wouldn’t half-wonder at her making me pack for her, and then drive her down to the train station in order for her to sit around for three hours before relenting and coming home again.”
“Just look in on her. Mrs. Gummidge is with her now, but she shouldn’t have to do all the smoothing over. Not when it was you chasing …”
“ ’Possums. I was chasing ‘possums.” He turned away and walked toward the door. “I’m going out to the restaurant and inventory supplies. Have you seen my copy of Grossman’s Guide? I can’t make another move without it.”
“There’s work that needs to be done worse than that.”
“Later. I promise I’ll do it this afternoon. Draw me up a list. Either the restaurant will open or it won’t. I don’t think you’re as keen on it opening as I am.”
“I think we need a chef, and I don’t think we can afford one.”
“That’s just it. I’m the chef, Pickett has volunteered as maître d’
until we get onto our feet. But unless I get things squared away out there, we don’t have a chance. I’ll need more money, by the way. I’m over budget now.”
“Talk to Aunt Naomi.”
“Maybe you should, what with this ’possum business and all.” He bent across and kissed her on the cheek, trying to look cheerful and matter-of-fact and swearing to himself that he would set in to paint the garage that afternoon. For certain he would, just as soon as he finished the business of shaping up the bar. Talk to Aunt Naomi—the idea of it appalled him.
“Square it with her this afternoon,” Rose said. “She doesn’t bite. Explain yourself a little bit, and she’ll see reason. And don’t carry on about ‘possums, for heaven’s sake. She thinks you’re insane. You know that, don’t you? Remember when you told her about how many baby ‘possums could sit in a teaspoon, and then tried to say that that’s how ‘possum mothers carried their babies around? In a spoon? Don’t talk that way, not in front of Aunt Naomi. You can talk nuts like that all afternoon with Pickett, but for goodness sake, leave it alone in front of people who don’t understand it.”
He nodded, as if he thought Rose had given him good advice. But she gave him a look, seeing through him again, so he winked at her and went out, trying to seem jolly. She was right, of course. He’d have to confront the old woman after lunch. He’d bring her chocolates and flowers and explain about the mythical ’possum—not terrify her with it, of course, or say anything nuts. He’d just tell her about how it was big as a dog and had threatened her cats and about how the beasts burrow under bedsheets and build nests. If he spread himself a little bit, there’d be no telling what he might convince her of.
Jules Pennyman crouched outside the kitchen door, dabbing at his shoes with a rag. The shoes were already polished—they were new, in fact—and so didn’t, maybe, need much dabbing. But he dabbed at them anyway, with the same methodical squint and tilt of the head with which he regarded himself in the mirror each morning when he trimmed his mustache and beard. His feet hurt, actually, as if his shoes were two sizes too small. There was damn-all he could do about it though, except hide the pain and wait for it to get worse.
He wore a Vandyke beard, razor-cut to a point that could have impaled a potato. His silver hair was brushed back cleanly—the sort of hair that wouldn’t allow itself to become tousled unless the situation absolutely called for it. He might have been a barber, talcumed and rose-oiled and with a mustache that curled at the ends. What he was, though, no one was certain. He was “retired” and had been in the import-export business. He wore white suits. He collected silver coins. He was a product, he said, of the “old school.” He had appeared at the doorstep some weeks back, having returned from travel in the east, and looking for a place, he said, where he could “watch the sea.” And he had the habit of paying his rent on time—even early. This last virtue alone was enough to recommend him, at least to Rose.
He was well read, too. Andrew had liked that at first, and had made a show of consulting him when it came to setting up the library. They had two dozen old stackable bookcases, which, along with the furniture, the clipper ship, a pol
e lamp and an old Chinese rug made for a tolerably comfortable room. Andrew picked through his own books, finding copies to fill the shelves. The idea of transient tourists thumbing through anything good, though—perhaps slipping volumes down their pants and into their purses—made him cautious. He took Pickett’s advice and plied Aunt Naomi with chocolate truffles and latex cat toys, and the following day he and Pickett made a serious trip to Bertram Smith’s Acres of Books and, spending Aunt Naomi’s money, brought out enough crates to half-bury the old pickup truck.
But the shelves still weren’t quite filled up. Rose suggested knickknacks, but Andrew stood firm against them. Pennyman, in a show of kindness, lent them two hundred or so volumes from his own considerable library. His books looked right—old dark spines, dusty, comfortable—but most of them had to do with faintly unsavory subjects or were written in foreign languages, mostly German. Andrew secretly doubted that Pennyman knew the languages. He was just being ostentatious. “Pennyman is a phony,” Andrew had said to Pickett, showing him an old German volume inked up with what appeared to be alchemical symbols. Pickett shook his head and studied the drawings, then asked to borrow the book. There were other books—on Masonic history, on the Illuminati, on gypsies and Mormons and suppressed Protestant ritual.
Andrew saw a clear link between Pennyman’s obsessive self-barbering and his interest in secret knowledge. There was something slimy about it. Rose didn’t see it at all. She didn’t say so, but he feared that after she would talk with Pennyman she would size Andrew up—study his old shirts, his burlap shoes torn out in the toe, his hair rumpled west in the morning and east in the afternoon. Andrew couldn’t stand Mr. Pennyman. He couldn’t, in fact, call him Mr. Pennyman. The name was idiotic.
Pennyman adjusted his collar, dusted off his hands, and stepped into the kitchen. He bowed just a little to Rose—something which had struck her from the first as being “European” and gallant. “Trouble with opossums, then? I didn’t mean to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing just a bit of your conversation.”
The Last Coin Page 3