The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  “I can’t tolerate chocolate,” she said, sighing, “You can’t imagine what it does to me.”

  “Really?” Andrew shook his head, trying to imagine it, but failing. “I’ve brought truffles. All natural. I’d be wary of preservatives. I read an article about chemical preservatives in chocolates—a list of poisons half a mile long.”

  Naomi lay silent for a moment, then opened her eyes and looked at the bag of chocolates. A warm afternoon breeze billowed the window curtains. “Could you adjust an old lady’s pillows?” she asked suddenly.

  “Of course, of course,” Andrew stood up and, as Aunt Naomi bent forward, he plumped up the half-dozen pillows, arranging them into a little box canyon. She leaned back and immediately pitched forward again, as if he’d hidden a cactus among them.

  “My back,” she cried, screwing up her face. “Mound them, Andrew. I can’t stand that sort of thing.”

  “Of course!” he said, not knowing, exactly, what it was her back couldn’t stand. There was no satisfying her, no dealing with her unfathomable maladies. “Here now. There it is. Slide back just about an inch. How’s that now?”

  She settled into the pillows, as if into a too-hot bath, hunching her shoulders and souring her face. Then she shook her head, tolerably dissatisfied. She didn’t invite him to rearrange them again, though. She’d given up on him, the look on her face seemed to say. “What do you mean, natural?”

  “Cream,” he said, “and cocoa and butter. That’s it, except for flavoring. And not chemical flavoring, either—walnut extract, liqueurs, berries. All very healthful. Dr. Garibaldi particularly recommended them.”

  She gave him a look. Andrew smiled, thinking that by the time Dr. Garibaldi left the house next week he would have recommended them. Aunt Naomi would see to it. She plucked out a cocoa-covered piece and nibbled it. Then, without a word, she nodded toward the nightstand as if commanding him to set the bag down, to leave it.

  “I’ve rather brought these as a peace offering,” Andrew said, shrugging just a little. “The incident with the ’possum—I blame myself for that. If it hadn’t been for your cats …”

  She said nothing. She might have been dead, except that she was still chewing on the chocolate.

  “I’ve set traps all around the house—a sort of Maginot Line. I think I can guarantee that there won’t be any more of the creatures in at the window.” There was a silence, during which Aunt Naomi finished chewing, then sucked the chocolate from her fingers. Andrew smiled down at her. “Would you like a telephone in your room?” he asked.

  Her eyes shot open. “What on earth for?” She looked at him as if he’d uttered an obscenity. “A telephone would drive me mad, ringing all day long. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I’ve seen through you from the start, and I told Rose so when she introduced you. A telephone.”

  “I meant your own phone, of course. Not an extension. Your own number. You could ring up your friends, the drugstore. You could call downstairs. We could put a phone in Mrs. Gummidge’s room. It would be better than a bell on a rope.”

  “I have no friends.”

  “Well,” said Andrew, stopping the compulsion to merely shrug and nod. “There’s Mrs. Gummidge.”

  “Mrs. Gummidge,” said Aunt Naomi flatly—as if that was all she had to say on the subject of Mrs. Gummidge. She squinted into space, looking, perhaps, at some little piece of distant history, when she and Mrs. Gummidge had been young together.

  “What do you want, then?” asked Andrew patiently. “A television?”

  She waved the suggestion aside.

  “New glasses?”

  She pretended to sleep.

  “A subscription to a book-of-the-month club?”

  Nothing would satisfy her but that Andrew would leave her alone and send Mrs. Gummidge up. He would, said Andrew. Straightaway. It was rest she needed. He paused, trying to think up some way to ask her for the thousand dollars for the restaurant. A lie would do, and nothing less. He could hear a flock of wild parrots, out ravaging the neighborhood carob trees, probably. They’d been hanging around lately, about thirty of them, big Amazon parrots, up from Mexico. “I do have one little surprise besides the chocolate,” he said, smiling.

  She waited, breathing deeply, fanning herself with a little Japanese fold-out fan from the nightstand.

  “I’ve found a chef for the restaurant. I think you’ll approve. I had you in mind, in fact, when I talked to the man. He studied in Paris, under Girot. He ran a pastry kitchen in Pasadena. In fact, he made these truffles. That’s partly why I brought them up, to give you an inkling of the sort of man we’ll have in the kitchen.”

  She opened one eye, almost imperceptibly, like a toad regarding an unsuspecting fly. She had, somewhere along the line, developed a reputation as a gourmet, although Andrew was fairly sure that she couldn’t tell milk-fed veal from dairy cow. He’d found that she liked a drink well enough, but again, maybe just out of perversity, he’d concluded that it didn’t much matter how you defined “drink.” Mrs. Gummidge, he was fairly sure, had the same tastes, and kept Aunt Naomi well enough satisfied. Rose would have been too temperate. Dr. Garibaldi’s advice would have struck home with Rose.

  The news of the hiring of the French chef seemed to revive Aunt Naomi just a little. She nodded at Andrew in almost a “good man” sort of way. “And you say you’ve actually hired this man? When?”

  “Yesterday,” Andrew lied. There was no such man, although there might be someday soon. It was only half a lie. “He’s given notice, but he has to stick it out for two more weeks at the pastry shop. The honor of the French, you know. Then he’ll be here. I’m hustling to get the restaurant in order. They’re installing the equipment that you helped buy, in fact. But it’s still an expensive thing—hiring chefs, buying this and that, stocking the shelves. These foreign chefs want fresh materials. It’s not just a matter of hauling a truckload of canned goods back from the market. I’ve got three different suppliers on the hook—two of them importers. Pickett is drawing up a menu. We’d be grateful to you—Aunt—if you’d give it a look-over when we’ve got it roughed out.”

  “I should be glad to,” she said. “It wouldn’t be excessive to say that I’ve had some experience along those lines.”

  “I’m certain you have.” Andrew sighed. “I’m afraid the menu won’t be—what?—as nice, maybe, as you’re accustomed to.” He cleared his throat. “As I said, the expenses of a hired chef and all …”

  She squinted at him. “How much do you want?”

  “No, no. That isn’t it at all. Dr. Garibaldi tells me that you’ve got a delicate constitution. That’s all. Under the circumstances a foreign chef isn’t a luxury, is it? That’s what I said to Rose.”

  “How much do you want?”

  Andrew shook his head, half-sadly, and, hating himself, patted her on the shoulder. “Well,” he said, “not to put too fine a point on it, there’s wages for the man in advance for a month and the price of copper mixing bowls and pots and pans. He won’t have anything less. And he insists on an espresso maker. You won’t argue with that, I’d bet. Would you like a cup now, in fact?”

  “Have you already bought it? The espresso maker? I thought you were asking for money for it. Now it’s suddenly in use.”

  “No, no, no.” Andrew laughed and slapped his knee theatrically. “I’ve got a small one—one cup at a time. And a milk steamer. For the restaurant we would need something sizeable. I was just thinking that a big cup might go right along with another of these chocolates. Since you press me, though, let’s call it … two thousand. At month’s end I should have a good bit of it back. Rose says we’re almost ready for boarders—by the end of the week, she thinks. I’ve drawn up a placard, and there’s a man coming round to hang it out front, facing the boulevard.” All the talk about getting the money back was perfunctory. Aunt Naomi had never asked for it back, which made Andrew feel guilty, and so he was doubly scrupulous about offering to give it back, even if that were impos
sible.

  Aunt Naomi nodded tiredly and mechanically, and gestured Andrew out of the room.

  “I’ll just brew up that coffee,” he said, and went away whistling, down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. He loved meddling with coffee machinery—grinders, steamers, even thermometers if he were doing the job right. He poured beans into the hand grinder on the wall, cranked the setting to super fine, and smashed out nearly a half-cup of powdered coffee, which he heaped into the coffee trap in the stove-top espresso maker. In minutes, thick, black liquid, dark as sewer sludge but smelling wonderful, was bubbling up out of the depths of the pot, and his milk steamer hissed through the pressure-release hole. He steamed a third of a mug of milk, topped it off with coffee, and then, before dumping in two teaspoons of sugar, he poured the leftover coffee across the copper bottom of a pan in the sink, tilting it this way and that to cover the entire pan bottom. In twenty minutes the copper would shine like a new penny.

  Aunt Naomi handed him a check when he set the mug down next to the chocolates. He could tell that she’d been shoving the truffles down while he’d been out. The checkbook had vanished. She kept it hidden. With it she kept a little spiral binder listing all the money she’d doled out over the months. She had let him catch a glimpse of that more than once, to remind him, possibly, that he wasn’t getting away with anything.

  He steeled himself, then bent over and kissed her on the cheek. In two minutes he was out the door, striding up the alley toward the bank. Two thousand—it was double what he’d hoped for. He might have asked for three. But if he had, and she’d laughed in his face, then the whole business of the chocolates and the French chef would have come to nothing. And besides, if she’d written a bigger check, the bank might easily have kept it for a week to clear it. They weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of Andrew’s banking. They weren’t anxious to speculate in questionable new businesses. Bankers were men of little imagination; that was the truth of it. The further truth was that the two thousand would go some distance toward paying the bills. They seemed to pile up so quickly these days. It wouldn’t be long, quite likely, before certain of their creditors would get nasty. But then their desperation might be enough to make Aunt Naomi advance them a bit more. Her will was drawn, after all. It would all belong to Rose when Naomi died. Surely it didn’t matter to the old woman whether she gave it to them now or waited until the end.

  So the two thousand would have to do for the moment. If he were lucky, Rose would never hear about it until, on some future, grim day, Naomi would haul out her binder and show Rose what sort of spendthrift husband she was married to. By that time though, Rose couldn’t possibly remember what had happened to any single piece of that money. True, she’d be flabbergasted at the size of the debt they’d run up. But such was life. It would be spilled milk by then. There would be no inn without it, and certainly there’d be no restaurant—no real restaurant, anyway. Speculation was in his blood. There wasn’t a winner in the world that didn’t bet, and timidity wouldn’t buy copper pots. He’d have to work on the French chef business, though. Faking up a beard and mustache for Pickett wouldn’t answer. He’d heard of a chef’s school in Bellflower, and it would be the work of a moment to ring them up and inquire about the availability of graduates. He could hire one for a week to satisfy Naomi and Rose, then toss him out and do the cooking himself.

  It was early evening when Andrew drove along the Coast Highway, listening to an odd rattle in the engine of the Metropolitan. He was entirely ignorant of mechanics, happily so. He didn’t have time in his life to meddle with it. There were better things to do, any number of them. In fact, he’d been doing some of them that very afternoon. He’d paid a visit to Polsky and Sons liquor importers and distributors on Beach Boulevard in Westminster, and come away with two cases of scotch, four dozen pint glasses, and most of the items on the list he’d made up out of Grossman. The trunk and back seat were full of stuff, and he still had the bulk of Aunt Naomi’s money in his wallet. He whistled tunelessly and looked out the window.

  The warm weather seemed to be passing. The sky was gray out over the Pacific, and the wind had fallen off. Twilight cast long shadows across the weedy marshland ruins of boatyards and clapboard bungalows. He drove past heaps of rusted anchors and piles of painted buoys and what looked like an old concrete bridge, collapsed now and sunk into the shallows of the Bolsa Chica Salt Marsh. The Seed Beach Naval Weapons Station loomed off to the right, a broad expanse of what looked like pastureland and farmland, with here and there in the dim distances a weapons bunker sitting toad-like and ominous between grassy hillocks. There were broad wooden doors in the ends of some of the hillocks, with grass and canteloupe vines growing right in around the jambs. What lay under the grass and vines was a mystery.

  He slowed the car, bumping off onto the shoulder. A knot of people stood around in front of the roadside stand that sold strawberries and corn and tomatoes in the spring and summer, and pumpkins in the fall, all of it grown on government property, which wore the fruits and vegetables as a clever disguise. Hinged sheets of plywood had been dropped across the front of the stand to close it up for the night, so the people—a couple of families with children from the look of it—weren’t buying anything. They were clearly up to something else. Another carload pulled in directly behind Andrew, and what seemed to be a half-dozen children piled out and went shouting away past his car, a large woman in a wraparound garment climbing ponderously out after them and yelling them into submission.

  Andrew followed just for the adventure of it—something that Beams Pickett would approve of. There was a sign posted, advertising, of all things, a treasure hunt. It referred to a companion ad in the Seal Beach Herald, Pickett’s newspaper. The newspaper advertisement no doubt explained the carloads of curious people. Treasures were to be buried, the sign said, no end of them, and the public could come dig for them, on the night of Sunday the 24th, by moonlight. Penlights were allowed, nothing bigger than that, though, and the public could keep what it found. There was a diamond ring, it said, in a hermetically sealed glass box, and a glass paperweight in a wooden box, and tickets for two dinners at Sam’s Seafood, which weren’t, Andrew assumed, in any sort of box at all. There were five hundred children’s toys, and a real treasure chest full of quartz crystals and fluorite and bags of rhinestones and glass beads. No maps would be provided. The public would furnish their own spades.

  Andrew recalled such a thing from the past. What was it?—almost thirty-five years ago. It had been a fairly common practice in central Orange County, when vast tracts of houses were routing out orange groves and bean fields, and driving up the price of land so that small farmers couldn’t afford to keep it. For a time it had been the fashion for farmers to let the populace spade up their acreage for them. They’d bury rolls of pennies and such, and let suburban hordes do a week’s worth of work in a night. It had always seemed an unlikely practice to Andrew, although he approved of the notion because of the mystery and romance associated with digging for spurious treasures in a weedy pasture by moonlight. It appealed to his sense of—what? He couldn’t quite define it.

  He drove away mulling it over. It made a certain amount of sense two score years ago, when hundreds of farmers owned little tracts of land up and down the roads leading south toward the beaches—just a couple of acres or so—and sold roadside produce to wring out a living. But that was all gone years since, and now what farmland was left was owned by vast real estate companies that, in some indefinable way, let out bits of land for farming in order to gain some sort of nebulous tax profits. Nobody “spaded up” the land anymore.

  Still, that didn’t mean that there was some sort of secret motive in this moonlight-spading business, did it? He’d have to watch that sort of jumping-to-conclusions. It was too easy to raise people’s eyebrows. He suspected, somewhere inside him, that Rose “put up with him” sometimes. In the best possible way, she was conventional. There wasn’t any more to it than that. She was conven
tional; he wasn’t. His antics made her tired. He knew that, and he wished it weren’t so. But they seemed to inhabit different worlds sometimes, different universes. Hers was neatly mapped out. The streets that seemed to run north and south did run north and south, seven days a week, and if a farmer planted pumpkins it was simply because Halloween was drawing near and he could sell them at a profit. Andrew’s world was cut with streets that angled and twisted. Fogs rolled through at inopportune moments, seeming to hide the shifting landscape. Slouching farmers planted pumpkins so that the crawling vines would cover hillocks beneath which lay unguessed weapons, cleverly hidden from the eyes of satellites sweeping past overhead, themselves veiled by distance.

  And although he was certain that he understood her world easily enough, saw through it clearly, he was equally certain that she had little notion of his. She understood him to be simply frivolous, cockeyed for no apparent reason at all. His enthusiasms were a mystery to her, a closed book. At worst he was stark, staring mad, which didn’t, he thought as he drove along, particularly bother him. What was far worse was that she thought him childish, with his coffee makers and his books and his paperweights, his preoccupation with beer glasses and breakfast cereal and his odd car, which, she’d once said when she was angry, no grown man had any business driving. But he was deadly serious about it all. Those sorts of things were the threads which knitted up his world. Pulled out one by one and examined, maybe they were foolish and frivolous things, but if you pulled them all out and pitched them into the dumpster, then what was left? Nothing that was worth bothering with. A lot of airy trash fit for the junkman. That was the truth of it, and Rose didn’t quite understand it. She pretended to when he tried to explain it, but in her eyes and in her voice there was something that made him feel as if he were six years old, showing his mother his favorite toy. It made him mad just to think about it.