“‘My advice is simply to take the candy dish, Mr. Jimmerson. Tomorrow’s another day. Tomorrow’s always another day.”
Jimmerson climbed heavily to his feet, steadying himself against the counter. He took the dish and nodded his thanks, and Pillbody picked his penny up off the counter and dropped it into a slot cut into the back of the fish lamp. Jimmerson plodded heavily toward the door. He had the curious feeling that he was falling, that he was so monstrously heavy he was plummeting straight through the center of the Earth and would shoot feet first out the far side. He reached unsteadily for the doorknob, yanked the door open, and stepped into the dim hallway, where, as if from a tremendous distance, he heard the dull metallic clang of the penny finally hitting the bottom of the brass fish. There was the sound of an avalanche of tumbling coins, and then silence when the door banged shut behind him.
•
He felt the wind in his face now, the corridor stretching away in front of him like an asphalt highway, straight as an arrow, its vanishing point visible in the murky distance. Moss-hung trees rushed along on either side of him, and he knew he was on the road again, recognized the southern Louisiana landscape, the road south of New Orleans where he and Edna had found a farmhouse bed and breakfast. The memory flooded in upon him, and he gripped the candy dish, pressing it against his chest as the old Pontiac bounced along the rutted road, past chickens and low-lying swampland, weathered hovels and weedy truck patches. Edna sat silently beside him, gazing out the window. Neither of them had spoken for a half an hour.
She had bought the candy dish from an antique store along the highway—late yesterday afternoon? It seemed like a lifetime ago. It seemed as if everything he could remember had happened to him late yesterday afternoon, his entire past rolling up behind the Pontiac like a snail shell. The memory of their argument—his argument—was abruptly clear in his mind. He heard his own voice, remembered how clever it had been when he had called her a junkaholic, and talked about how she shouldn’t spend so much of their money on worthless trash. He saw the two of them in that little wooden room with the sloped ceiling, the four-poster bed: how after giving her a piece of his mind, he had knocked the candy dish onto the floor and broken it in two. She had accused him of knocking it off on purpose, which of course he said he hadn’t, and he had gotten sore, and told her to haul the rest of the junk she’d bought out of its bags and boxes—the ceramics and glassware, the thimbles and postcards and knickknacks—and he’d cheerfully fling the whole pile of it into the duck pond.
He shut his eyes, listening to the tires hum on the highway. Had he knocked the dish onto the floor on purpose? Certainly he hadn’t meant to break it, to hurt Edna. It was just that. … Damn it, he couldn’t remember what it was. All justification had vanished. His years-old anger looked nutty to him now. What damned difference did it make that Edna wanted a pink glass candy dish? He wished to God he had bought her a truckload of them. His cherished anger had been a bottomless well, but now that she was gone, now that the whole issue of candy dishes was a thing of the irretrievable past, he couldn’t summon any anger at all. It was simply empty, that well.
He glanced out the car window at a half dozen white egrets that stood stilt-legged in a marsh, and he reached across the seat and tried to pat her leg, but he couldn’t reach her. She sat too far away from him now. He accelerated, pushing the car over a low rise, the sun glaring so brightly on the highway ahead that he turned his face away. He held the dish out to her, but she ignored him, watching the landscape through the window, and the sorrow that hovered in the air around her like a shade was confused in his mind with the upholstery smell of their old pink and gray Pontiac. The car had burned oil—a quart every few days—but they driven it through forty-two states, put a lot of highway behind them, a lot of miles.
“Take it,” he whispered.
But even as he spoke it seemed to him that she was fading, slipping away from him. There was the smell of hot oil burning on the exhaust manifold, and the sun was far too bright through the windshield, and the tires hummed like a swarm of bees, and the candy dish slipped out of his hand and fell into two pieces on the gray fabric of the car seat.
When he came to himself he was outside again, standing in the wind, the door that led to the curiosity shop closed behind him. He searched the paving stones for the broken candy dish, but it was simply gone, vanished. He tried the door, but it was locked now. He banged the door knocker, hammering away, and the sound of the blows rang through the courtyard, echoing from the high brick walls.
•
The Café de Laumes lay two blocks west of the Plaza, near the old train station. It shared a wall with Tubbs Cordage Company, and across the street lay a vacant lot strewn with broken concrete from a long-ago demolished building. In the rainy evening gloom the café looked tawdry and cheerless despite the lights glowing inside. There was no sign hanging outside, just an address in brass numbers and a menu taped into the window. He watched the café door from the Mercury, not quite knowing what he wanted, what he was going to do. He opened the glove box and looked again at the .38 that lay inside, and then he gazed for a moment through the windshield, his mind adrift, the rain falling softly on the lamplit street. He shut the glove box and climbed tiredly out of the car, walking across the street and around the side of the building, its windows nearly hidden by overgrown bushes.
He was alone on the sidewalk, the cordage company closed up, the nearest headlights three blocks away on the boulevard. He ducked in among the bushes, high-stepping through a tangle of ivy and parting the branches of an elephant ear so that he could see past the edge of the window. The café was nearly empty—just an old man tiredly eating a cutlet at a corner table and two girls with bobbed hair huddled deep in conversation over a tureen of mussels. Jimmerson saw then that there was a third table occupied, a private booth near the kitchen door. It was des Laumes himself, his curled hair brushed back, a bottle of wine on the table in front of him. His plate was heaped high with immense snails, and he probed in one of them with a long-tined fork, dragging out a piece of yellow snail meat and thrusting it into his mouth, wiping dripped sauce away with a napkin. His chin whiskers worked back and forth as he chewed, and the sight of it made Jimmerson instantly furious. He thought of going back out to the car, fetching the .38 out of the glove box, and giving the sorry bastard a taste of a different sort of slug. …
But then he recalled the broken candy dish, and somehow the anger vanished like a penny down a storm drain, and when he searched his mind for it, he couldn’t find it. To hell with des Laumes. He hunched out of the bushes again and walked up the sidewalk to where an alley led along behind the café. The building was deeper than it had appeared to be, a warren of rooms that ran back behind the cordage company. It was an old building, too—hard to say how old, turn of the century, probably, perhaps an old wooden flophouse that had been converted to a café. There were a couple of windows aglow some distance along the wall, and beyond them a door with a little piece of roof over it. Jimmerson tried the door, but it was locked, bolted from the inside. He spotted a pile of wooden pallets farther up the alley, and he hurried toward them, pulling one of the pallets off the pile and dragging it along the asphalt until he stood beneath the window. He tilted it gingerly against the wall and climbed up the rungs until he could see in over the sill.
A high-ceilinged room lay beyond the window, a table in the corner, a row of beds along one long wall, a big iron safe near the door, some packing crates and excelsior piled in a heap on the floor. The beds rose one atop the other like bunks in an opium den. Each of the beds had a small shelf built at the foot end, with a tiny wineglass hanging upside down in a slot, and a small decanter of greenish liquid, possibly wine, standing on the shelf. Three of the beds were hidden by curtains, and Jimmerson wondered if there were sleepers behind them, like dope fiends on the nod. He heard a rhythmic sighing on the air of the alley around him—what sounded like heavy, regular breathing, a somnolent, lonely sound
that reminded him somehow of Edna’s deathbed. A man entered the room now, the old cutlet eater from inside the café. He moved haltingly, as if he were half asleep, and without a pause to so much as take off his shoes, he climbed into one of the bunks and pulled the curtain closed.
Another of the curtains moved, pushing out away from the bed hidden behind it, and as Jimmerson watched, a man in a wrinkled suit and stubble beard rolled out from beneath the curtain and balanced precariously on the side rail of the bunk, apparently still asleep. Jimmerson braced himself, expecting him to tumble off onto the floor, but instead he tilted slowly back and forth, as if buoyed up by whatever strange currents circulated in the room. He muttered something inaudible, and the muttering dissolved into a muffled sob. And then he tilted forward again so that he seemed to cling to the bed with a knee and an elbow. There was the sudden crash of something hitting the wooden floorboards directly beneath him, and at that instant he lofted toward the ceiling like Gladstone’s dead man. But there was a tether tied to his ankle, the other end of the tether affixed to an iron ring bolted to the bed frame, and the man leveled off and floated peacefully just below the ceiling.
The object on the floor was clearly a teddy bear, or at least the replica of a teddy bear, and from where Jimmerson stood it appeared to have been contrived with uncanny verisimilitude—apparently out of rusty cast iron. It looked worn from years of handling, its nose pushed aside, one of its eyes missing, a clump of stuffing like steel wool shoving out of a tear in its leg.
Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody’s shop—bric-a-brac mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes. Jimmerson made out what appeared to be an old letterman’s sweater, a smoking pipe, a carved seashell, a tiny abacus, a copper Jell-o mold in the shape of a child’s face, an exquisitely detailed statue of a nude woman, her face downcast, her hands crossed demurely in front of her. He saw then that there were name placards on each of the cubbyholes, hung on cup hooks as if for easy removal.
He stepped backward off his makeshift ladder, his hands trembling, and started back down the alley toward the street, although he knew straightaway that he wasn’t going anywhere. Gladstone had warned him about this, so it wasn’t any vast surprise. He had largely come to understand it, too—what Pillbody’s curiosities amounted to, what it was that Edna had sold, why she had grown more and more vacant as the months had slipped past. He thought about the odds and ends on her bedside table, the medicinal-smelling bottle with the green stain, the liqueur glass, and he wondered if one of these narrow beds had been hers, a sort of home away from home.
Retracing his steps to the pallet, he climbed back up to the lighted window and forced himself to read the names one by one, spotting Edna’s right away, the third cubbyhole from the left. He could see that there was something inside, pushed back into the shadows where it was nearly hidden from view, something that caught the light. He strained to make it out—a perfume bottle? A glass figurine? He searched his memory, but couldn’t find such an object anywhere.
The door opened at the far end of the room now, and an old woman walked in, followed by des Laumes. Her hair was a corona of white around her head, and she was wrinkled enough to be a hundred years old. The floating man had descended halfway to the floor, as if he were slowly losing buoyancy, and the old woman grabbed his shoe and a handful of his coat and steered him toward his bed again, pushing him past his curtain so that he was once again hidden from view. She bent over to pick up the thing on the floor, but des Laumes had to help her with it, as if it were incredibly heavy. Together they shoved it into a cubbyhole marked “Peterson.” She turned and left then, without a word.
Des Laumes remained behind, looking around himself as if suspicious that something was out of order. He appeared to be sniffing the air, and he held a hand up, extending his first finger as if gauging the direction of the wind. Jimmerson moved to the corner of the window, hiding himself from view. A moment later he peered carefully past the window casing again.
The Frenchman held the statue of the woman in his hand now, scrutinizing it carefully. Then he peeked inside one of the cubbyholes and retrieved a glass paperweight that appeared to Jimmerson to be packed with hundreds of tiny glass flowers. Des Laumes held it to the light, nodded heavily, and walked across to the safe, spinning the dial. He swung the door open, placed the statue and the paperweight inside, and shut the door.
•
Jimmerson climbed down again and set off up the alley. His thinking had narrowed to a tiny focus, and his hands had steadied. Within a few seconds he had the .38 out of the glove compartment. He slipped the gun into his trousers pocket, then walked straight across the street, up the flagstone path to the café. The door opened and the two girls with the bobbed hair came out, arguing heatedly now, neither one of them looking happy. Jimmerson slipped past them through the open door, face to face with des Laumes himself, who stood there playing the host now. The Frenchman reached for a menu, gestured, and moved off toward a table before realizing who Jimmerson was. He turned around halfway across the empty café, a look of theatrical surprise on his face. “What a pleasure,” he said.
“Can I have a word with you somewhere private?” Jimmerson spoke to him in the tone of an old and indebted friend.
“It’s very private here,” the man said to him. “How can I help you?” His face was bloated and veined, as if corrupted from years of unnameable abuse, and he reeked of cologne, which only half hid a ghastly odor reminiscent of the stink in Pillbody’s “parlor room.”
“Help me?” Jimmerson asked, hauling the gun out of his pocket and pointing it at the Frenchman’s chest. “Better to help yourself. I’ll follow you into the back.” He gestured with the gun.
“I’ve been shot before,” des Laumes told him, shrugging with indifference, and Jimmerson pulled the trigger, aiming high, blowing the hell out of a brass wall sconce with a glass shade. The sound of the gun was crashingly loud, and startled horror passed across des Laumes’s face as he threw his hands up.
Someone peered out of the kitchen—the chef apparently—and Jimmerson waved the pistol at him. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, and the man ducked back into the kitchen. There was the sound of a woman’s voice then, and running feet. A door slammed, and the kitchen was silent. “Let’s go,” Jimmerson said, aiming the gun with both hands at the Frenchman’s stomach now. The man turned and headed back through the café, past the kitchen door, down a hallway and into the room with the beds. Keeping the pistol aimed at des Laumes, Jimmerson reached into Edna’s cubbyhole and pulled out the trinket inside—a glass replica of what appeared to be the old Pontiac.
He hesitated for a moment before slipping it into his pocket, steeling himself for the disorienting shift into the past, into the realm of Edna’s memory. Probably he would lose des Laumes in the process. The Frenchman would simply take the pistol away from him, maybe shoot him right then and there
But nothing happened. He might as well have dropped his car keys into his pocket. “The safe,” Jimmerson said.
Des Laumes shrugged again. “What is it that you want?” he asked, turning his palms up. “Surely …”
“What I want is to shoot you to pieces,” Jimmerson told him. “I don’t know what you are—some kind of damn vampire I guess. But I don’t have one damn thing to lose by blowing the living hell out of you right now. You should know that, you … stinking overblown bearded twit.” He stepped forward, closing in with the pistol as if he would shove it up the Frenchman’s nose. The man fell back a step, putting up his hands again and shaking his head. “Now open the safe,” Jimmerson told him.
The Frenchman spun the dial and opened the safe door, then stepped aside and waved at it as if he were introducing a circus act. “Clean it out,” Jimmerson told him. “Put everything into the boxes.” He picked up a packing crate and set it on the floor in front of the safe, and des Laumes took objects out one by one and laid
them in, packing the excelsior around them.
“This is common theft,” the Frenchman said, shaking his head sadly.
“That’s right,” Jimmerson told him. “And it’ll be a common hole in the head for the good Pierre if he doesn’t hurry the hell up. That’s it, monsieur, the statue, too. Now the stuff in the cabinet. Fill those boxes.” He thought about the chef, the rest of them that had fled through the back door. Would they go to the police? He made up his mind right there on the spot: if he heard sirens, if the door flew open and des Laumes was saved, Jimmerson would shoot the man dead before he handed over the gun.
Des Laumes filled a second packing crate and then a third, until every last piece of bric-a-brac lay in the crates. Except for the glass automobile, Jimmerson hadn’t recognized any of it as Edna’s. And even if des Laumes knew the source of the things in the safe, he wouldn’t tell Jimmerson the truth about them. The man was an end-to-end lie, with nothing at all to recommend him but his idiotic beard like a runover tar brush. Jimmerson was heartily sick of the sight of it, and with the .38 he motioned des Laumes against the wall, away from the sleeping people on the beds. He easily pictured killing the man, shooting the hell out of him, leaving him dead and bloody on the ground.
But somehow the taste of it was like dust in his mouth. How would there be any satisfaction in it? He could as easily picture Gladstone shaking his, head sadly, and the idea filled him with shame. More trouble, more pain—anger like a drug, like alcohol, like lunacy, having its way with him again.
There were no sirens yet, no need to hurry.
“Sit down,” he said, and des Laumes, his face white now, slumped obediently against the wall. Holding the gun on him, Jimmerson removed one of the liqueur-filled decanters from its niche in the shelf above an empty bed. “Drink it like a good boy,” he said, handing it to him, and he held the pistol against the man’s ear. De Laumes stared at him, as if he were making up his mind. He shook his head feebly and started to speak. And then, as if suddenly changing his mind, he heaved a long sigh, shrugged, and drank off the contents of the decanter.
Thirteen Phantasms Page 17