The Last Coin

by James P. Blaylock

  Uncle Arthur stepped away toward the kitchen, and so Pickett, as if seeing his chance, slipped off down the hall. Following along, Andrew found himself in Uncle Arthur’s almost-empty bedroom. In it was an ancient pine table, tilted on wobbly legs, and an old straight-back chair that must have been almost inhumanly uncomfortable. In the center of the room lay a bed—an oversize cot. It might easily have been the room of a hermit. A third turtle peeked out at them from under the bed. There were two bits of ornament in the room: a short length of hempen rope hanging on the wall, so old and so fragile-seeming that it might have crumbled to bits at the slamming of a door. It was looped around and tied into a noose. And then over the bed, strung by more rope, were two old, earthy ploughshares, crossed and hanging from the ceiling.

  Pickett glanced around nervously, seeming to Andrew to be looking for something telling. “This is a crime,” he whispered to Andrew, who shrugged.

  “He likes it this way,” said Andrew. “He used to sleep on a gunnysack filled with coconut fiber, but Aunt Naomi made him switch to the cot. It was his only concession to comfort, as if he’s trying to expiate some monstrous guilt or sin. Part of his nuttiness if you ask me.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Pickett said. “I don’t hold with nuttiness. There’s always something more behind it.”

  The turtle came creeping out just then, angling toward Pickett’s shoe. Andrew leaned down to pet it, just as Uncle Arthur shuffled in bearing a coffee cup.

  “They’re everywhere,” said the old man, gesturing tiredly. “Don’t mind them. They won’t hurt you. Did either of you know that squids, of all creatures except pigs, have the highest degree of innate intelligence?”

  Pickett shook his head, accepting the cup of coffee—cold coffee, it turned out. The three of them went back out into the hallway.

  “Ice?” asked Uncle Arthur.

  “I don’t think so,” said Pickett. “Too early in the morning for ice. Pigs, you say?”

  “No, squids. They’ve put them in lidded jars, science has, and the squids figure out within moments how to unscrew the lids. Give the jar to a child and watch him work at it.”

  “Maybe if the child had suckers on his fingers …” said Andrew, reaching down to pet the painted tortoise, which had lumbered out into the living room proper.

  Pickett shook his head in quick little jerks at Andrew, meaning for him to keep his mouth shut, to leave off with his jokes. “What fascinates me are pigs,” Pickett said, sipping the thin, chicory-flavored coffee. It tasted like ant poison.

  Lying on an end table next to Andrew’s chair was a Xeroxed catalogue. “Gators of Miami,” it read across the top. On each page was a list of available, mail-order animals: hippos, giraffes, caiman, antelope, even elephants and wildebeests. You could pick them up COD at the air freight depot at Los Angeles airport. All you needed was a truck. Amused, Andrew thumbed through it idly until he came to a section on barnyard animals. Someone had filled in half a dozen of the blanks, as if to put in an order to outfit a farm.

  “Nothing like a pig,” said Arthur.

  Pickett slapped his knee. “That’s my feeling entirely,” he said. “I understand you can house-train them, like dogs and cats. There was a fellow over in Buena Park who taught one to count. He had a sow that would stamp on the ground, counting out numbers, and then grunt when she’d calculated a sum. It was amazing.”

  “Makes you think about the glories of the universe, doesn’t it?” asked Andrew, clicking his tongue at the painted tortoise, which had lodged under the coffee table and was attempting to paddle itself free.

  Uncle Arthur nodded sagely. “I’ve always been a friend to pigs,” he said.

  Conversation waned. Pickett seemed to be grappling with some means of opening the old man up, but the talk kept going awry.

  “Ordering animals, are you?” asked Andrew, waving the catalogue.

  Arthur shrugged. “After a fashion. Years ago I set up for a time as a wildlife biologist. Took quite an interest in the migratory habits of certain animals, especially of swine—of feral pigs. Most people have no notion what happens to farm animals that escape the confines of the barnyard. They exercise certain—functions, perhaps. There’s more of them out there than you’d guess, living their own lives, out from under the yoke.” Uncle Arthur paused, gazing at Andrew shrewdly. Then he said, “Quite a race, pigs. Let one of them out of a barnyard and there’s no telling where he’ll go. Rather like letting loose a balloon with a message inside, if you follow me. Liable to end up in the most puzzling lands, largely because of air currents, of course. Feral pigs are the same sort of phenomenon, except that they’re indifferent to air currents. It’s another sort of—what?—force, let’s say, that drives a liberated pig. I’ve written a monograph on the subject, in fact. But that was fifty-odd years ago.”

  Pickett nodded sagely and winked at Andrew. “Quite a history in pigs, isn’t there?”

  “A deep one, sir.”

  “By golly, Andrew,” said Pickett abruptly, as if he had just then remembered something. “Wasn’t it a pig that brought the spoon around to Naomi’s farm? Tall tale, I suppose?”

  “No, the gospel truth or so I’ve been told. You haven’t heard that story, have you, Uncle?”

  The old man shrugged. “It’s true enough. Old silver spoon.

  Very curious. I wouldn’t touch it with a dung fork. And neither should you boys. Don’t, for God’s sake, eat from it. Leave it alone. Pig didn’t want it, did he?”

  Pickett shook his head.

  “Does anyone want it?” asked Uncle Arthur.

  “What?” asked Andrew, thinking that the old man was speaking generally. “Want it? I don’t suppose so.”

  “Only Jules Pennyman,” said Pickett, and he looked at Andrew in such a way as to imply that he’d purposely ripped the lid off the conversation.

  “Pennyman, is it? And has he got it?” Uncle Arthur yawned suddenly, as if he were beginning to find the conversation trivial and tiring.

  Andrew shook his head. “Not at all. He …”

  “Then keep it that way.” The old man took out a pocketknife and began very slowly to pare his fingernails. He looked up suddenly at the open front door. “Damnation!” he cried, standing up. “Another one’s got out.”

  Sure enough, there was the painted turtle, having heaved itself free of the coffee table, gone out through the door, and making away across the lawn. The third turtle teetered on the threshold, inches from freedom.

  “I’ll fetch him,” cried Pickett, springing up.

  “Put him in the car,” Uncle Arthur said. “On top of the other one. I’m taking them out. For air.”

  In minutes three of the tortoises lay in a heap in the box, and the fourth sat on the passenger seat. Pickett sorted the boxed tortoises out so that the biggest was on the bottom. Together they made a little pyramid of turtles, like an icon to a pagan god.

  “Quite a load,” said Pickett. “Where are they going again?”

  Uncle Arthur buttoned his tweed coat, then hauled out his pocket handkerchief and dusted off the car fender. “Out and about. Bit of a constitutional and all. Naomi tells me you boys are coming along to the treasure hunt.” He climbed into the cab, putting on a pair of thin leather gloves with the fingertips cut out of them.

  Pickett looked baffled. “Treasure hunt … ?” he started to say, but Andrew interrupted.

  “That’s a fact. I’d forgotten all about it.” He wondered wildly how in the world Aunt Naomi knew about their going on the treasure hunt. It must have been the overheard conversation on the front porch again. But why had she thought it necessary to inform Uncle Arthur?

  “Do an old man a moderate favor, will you, boys?”

  “Absolutely,” said Pickett.

  “Carry your pig spoon along to the treasure hunt. I’d like to have a look at it. I haven’t seen it in heaven knows how long. It would bring back memories, to tell you the truth.”

  “Sure. Of course. If you’d like to
see it,” said Andrew. “I can bring it around tomorrow—later today, if you want. There’s no need to wait on something like that.”

  “No, no.” He shook his hand at Andrew, almost wildly, and his face seemed to pale. “I don’t want it. Keep it tight between now and the treasure hunt. It’s on the night of the hunt that I’ll want you to fetch it along. We might have need of it. And not a word of this to Pennyman or anyone else. You two can’t leave town for a couple of days, can you? Take it with you?”

  “Impossible. The cafe is opening tomorrow night. And we’ve got to get the chef’s hats ready. We’re being filmed by KNEX—a little promotional gag I’ve cooked up. Why?”

  “Nothing. Keep it tight, though. Don’t trust Pennyman.”

  “Not very damned likely,” Andrew said. “What do you know about him?”

  “That he’s no damned good. He and I have had our differences. But don’t tell him I said that. Don’t mention me at all. He doesn’t know that we’ve had any differences. Don’t mention turtles or pigs or anything at all. Mum’s the word.” Uncle Arthur winked in the manner of a secret conspirator and started up the humming little electric engine. There was a click, and the car navigated back out of the parking stall and weaved away down the drive. Halfway to the street, as if heeding an impulse to take a shortcut, the car shot off across the lawn, bumped over the corner of a brick flowerbed border, and banged down the curb. The car wobbled on its miniature tires, then hummed away out of sight, heading southeast.

  “Let’s go!” shouted Pickett, and immediately he was off and running toward the Metropolitan. Andrew followed, swept up by Pickett’s urgency, and the two of them flung the car doors open and slid in, Andrew firing up the engine and the car leaping into the empty street in a cloud of black exhaust.

  “Turn left at the corner, along the wall,” Pickett said. “We’ve got to follow him. Out for a constitutional! Turtles, for God’s sake!”

  Andrew banked around the corner. There was Uncle Arthur, disappearing three hundred yards down, behind a bank of parking garages. “There’s no exit gate down here,” Andrew said, shifting down into second gear as he approached the little alley that ran along the garages. “He’s not going out.”

  “Just follow him.” Pickett gripped the metal dashboard, his face hovering inches from the windshield. “Don’t lose him. This is vital.”

  Andrew peered sidewise at his friend’s livid face. “No problem,” he said. “I won’t lose him.”

  But just then they lost him. The alley behind the garages swung around in a slow arc, dead-ending against a fire hydrant which sat at the edge of a sward of grass and flowerbeds. Uncle Arthur didn’t care about grass and flowerbeds; he’d shunted between the fire hydrant and a cinderblock wall and was tearing across the lawn, straight through a shower of lawn sprinklers, the tires of the electronic car leaving little curvy ruts.

  “Back out, for the love of … Go around!” Pickett was wild with the chase.

  Andrew threw the Metropolitan into reverse and slammed away backward down the alley, weaving with the speed of it, almost out of control. He rammed the palm of his hand down onto the horn, honking his way out onto the street again as a carful of gray-haired women jerked to a stop to let him in. The Metropolitan roared off, making a false turn into a cul-de-sac, squealing to a stop, and backing out of it, too. A horn honked in the street, but Andrew didn’t bother to look back. He was fired with his driving, and he tore away, shouting with laughter, punching Pickett in the shoulder. “Relax!” he hollered. “We’ll catch him!”

  Lousy driver, was he? If only Rose could see him now, catapulting around the grounds of Leisure World, chasing a tiny automobile carrying God’s own mob of turtles and driven by an impossibly strange old man. How many people could say they’d done that? He realized all of a sudden that Uncle Arthur had disappeared, and he throttled down as they approached a corner, swinging out toward the right gutter. What did the racing man say about turns? Go in slow; come out fast—something like that. He set his teeth and jammed down on the accelerator, sliding around, tires squealing. Maybe it was best that Rose couldn’t see him.

  “There he is again!” cried Pickett, grabbing his forehead.

  “Hold on!” cried Andrew, and he bounced the left side of the car up over the curb, the right side rolling up a little concrete wheelchair ramp. They started off across the lawn as Andrew surveyed the rearview mirror for signs of pursuit. The idea of a earful of ancient Leisure World police tearing along behind appealed massively. Rose would have to bail him out of a makeshift prison on the grounds. Maybe she would bring him the clothes of a washerwoman as a disguise. She’d find him manacled to a shuffleboard pole. He laughed out loud. Stay out of the sprinklers, he told himself, angling away toward the street again. If the Metropolitan bogged down …

  “Slow up, for God’s sake!” shouted Pickett. A garage wall loomed ahead. Andrew hauled on the wheel, skidding past the edge of it, the tires skiving out a strip of wet sod. A woman carrying a golf club across the lawn ran for an open door, shouting. Andrew hooted and jammed his foot down onto the accelerator, spinning the wheels and then abruptly heading for the street again. They’d saved a hundred yards taking the lawn. He’d learned something from watching Uncle Arthur. The old man had guts; you had to give him that.

  And there Uncle Arthur was, driving on the street again, down toward the shopping center. He was going out the south exit. They were traveling too quick now; in a moment they’d be upon him, and it would be evident that they were following. Andrew spun the steering wheel and they rocketed in behind a collection of dumpsters, where he braked to a stop. “Give him a second,” Andrew said, breathing hard.

  “Don’t give him more than that,” said Pickett. “We’ve got to get out of here. If anyone calls the gate and reports us, the guards will shoot us on sight. They carry weapons, damn it. These old men can’t be expected to take the long view when it comes to ripping up lawns.”

  “Well it was you who were so hot to trail him. I was just …” Andrew suddenly put the car in reverse, backed around, and then headed out onto the street, looking back over his shoulder. He’d seen an official-looking car creeping along slow across the mouth of the alley some hundred yards distant. “They’re after us!” he said, feeling a flush of excitement again.

  “Out the gate!” cried Pickett, swiveling around to look out the rear window. “Quick, before they spot us and radio ahead.”

  Andrew hesitated. He was tempted to make a U-turn and confront the prowling search car—speed past it honking his horn, lean out of the window and gesture insanely with both hands, lead it on a wild chase through the twisting streets, clipping off fire hydrants, crunching down mailboxes, scattering pigeons on the lawns, straightaway through the fence and onto the oilfields, dragging fifty feet of chain-link with him. Motive? he’d say when they booked him. And then he’d laugh.

  He grinned at Pickett as they set out—approaching the gate. There was a car in front of them, slowing down to cross the little, bent steel fingers that thrust out of the road. A single guard lounged in the gatehouse. Andrew could hear the phone ringing as the car in front of them sped off. On a wild impulse, he tromped on the clutch and shoved the Metropolitan into first gear, gunning the engine and rolling down his window.

  “Don’t,” whispered Pickett.

  Andrew nodded with an air of utter confidence. “I’ll handle this.”

  The guard, holding the phone now, hunched down suddenly and peered out through the window at them, astonished. He hollered into the receiver. “Yes!” he shouted. “It’s them!” and he let the phone drop and lunged toward the door.

  “Go!” shouted Pickett desperately.

  There was a click and a bang, and a long wooden gate began to sweep down across the road. Andrew regarded it coolly. Pickett slammed Andrew’s shoulder and shouted. “For the love of God!” The guard fumbled in his coat—for what? A gun, a badge, a can of Mace? Andrew laughed out loud and started to speak, but then his fo
ot was kicked off the clutch and Pickett’s shoe was suddenly jammed atop his own on the accelerator. The Metropolitan shot forward, under the half-shut gate, careening toward a concrete planter, the steering wheel twisting to the left.

  Andrew jerked around and grappled with the wheel, shouting incoherently and pulling it too far to the right, the car skewing around in a fishtailing slide. “Get your damned foot … !” Andrew shouted, pulling the wheel back again. All in an instant, Pickett sailed against the door. Off balance now, he pressed down all the harder on the accelerator and on Andrew’s shoe as Andrew slammed his left foot down onto the clutch. The engine screamed, a cloud of exhaust shot out, and Andrew let up on the clutch, anticipating the sound of smashing engine steel. He heaved again at Pickett’s foot.

  “Oh!” Pickett yelled. “Damn!” and they skidded past the tail end of a parked car, spinning around into the parking lot of the Leisure Market. A shopping cart flew. Andrew pulled his foot, freed at last, off the accelerator, jammed on the brake, and then, his hands shaking on the steering wheel, he drove slowly and deliberately across the parking lot, out the exit onto Westminster Boulevard and up the street until he turned into the parking lot of the Haynes Steam Plant, pulling in among a clutch of cars and cutting the engine.

  He sat for a moment in silence and then said, “They won’t find us here.” He breathed heavily to counteract the slamming of his heart. Then he got out of the car and went around to the back to examine the hubcap that had scraped the curb. It was mashed in all the way around, as if someone had beaten it with a hammer. “Aw hell,” said Andrew. It wasn’t just anywhere that you could get a hubcap for a Metropolitan. The front bumper was dented too, where he’d hit the shopping cart. The chase had taken its toll.

  Pickett still sat in silence when Andrew climbed back in. “Sorry about the foot on the accelerator,” he said. “But what in the world did you want to tell the guard? I told you they were licensed to carry weapons.”